RDF/OWL presentation on Friday
Please join us on Friday, November 18 from 2-4pm in Clemons 407 for a presentation by Brian Sletten on Semantic Web technologies. Brian is a SemWeb expert and provided the following abstract for his presentation:
Just as the world is feeling comfortable with the Web, Tim Berners-Lee et al inform us that what we have seen so far is just the beginning. His original plans at CERN were larger and grander. The Semantic Web is the new vision of machine-processable documents and metadata to improve software development, search, knowledge discovery and data integration and management.
We will discuss the notorious Semantic Web “layer cake” which builds on the successes of the past and attempts to plan a road for this future. RDF allows us to say things about things. RDFS allows us to classify things. OWL extends RDF allowing us increasingly expressive (and consequently computationally intensive) modeling tools to capture shared understandings of specific domains. We will also discuss the Kowari project, an open source triplestore designed to facilitate the storage, management and basic inference of RDF and OWL documents and some of the other tools and technologies available today.
While there are many “layer haters” chiding such grand visions and complex technologies, there are also pragmatic and useful approaches emerging that can be applied to today’s data and systems.
