Pragmatic Approaches to the Semantic Web

Pragmatic Approaches to the Semantic Web
or, Why Aren’t We in Hyperland Yet?

Michael K. Bergman

Outline
 Intro to SD and Me
 Summary of Main Thesis
 A Wee Bit of History
 What is Not Working?
 Problems with Linked Data
 What is Working?
 Some Pragmatic Lessons
 SD’s Pragmatic Approach
 Conclusion and Q & A

2

Structured Dynamics
 Founded 2008; predecessor Zitgist LLC; two
principals
 Privately held, revenue funded
 Boutique semantic technology shop
 Services and consulting:
 Semantic enterprise adoption
 Ontology development and mapping
 Tech transfer and training
 Development and software:
 Open source OSF stack
 Data conversion and migration
 Client-specific development

3

Current Products and OSF Stack
the pivotal product; Web services middleware that
provides distributed data access and federation

Drupal-based structured data linkage to structWSF

spreadsheet, JSON and XML authoring and
conversion framework

reference set of linking subjects and basis for domain
vocabularies

an ontology- and entity-driven information extraction
and tagging system

4

Main Arguments
 Not against linked data
 Proponent and explicator since 2006
 But, linked data burdensome, not pivotal to
interoperability
 Interoperability requires:
 Structured data (from any source)
 Canonical data model (RDF)
 (Relatively simple) ontologies for world views, schema
 Curation

8

Key Historical Milestones
 1945: Memex
 1963: Hypertext
 1990: Hyperland
 2001: Semantic Web
 Lack of uptake
 2006: Linked Data
 2010: Revisionist Linked Data

10

Linked Data

“Linked Data is a set of best practices for publishing
and deploying instance and class data using the RDF
data model, naming the data objects using uniform
resource identifiers (URIs), thereby exposing the data
for access via the HTTP protocol, while emphasizing
data interconnections, interrelationships and context
useful to both humans and machine agents.”

12

Some Disappointments to Date
 Full semantic Web vision
 Widescale adoption of the semantic Web, linked data
 Lack of intelligent agents
 Many aspects of the practice of linked data

14

Problems with Linked Data
 Burdensome on publishers
 Naïve linkages:
 Overuse of sameAs
 Lack of accurate alignments
 (Often) poor data quality
 Wrong focus

16

Some Conditions for Interoperability

<Interoperability> <needsMapping> <Predicates>

<Interoperability> <needsReference> <Nouns>

17

Many Mappings Should be Approximate
 skos:broadMatch
 skos:related
 ore:similarTo
 umbel:isAbout
 vmf:isInVocabulary
 skos:closeMatch
 lvont:nearlySameAs
 umbel:isLike
 umbel:hasCharacteristic
 lvont:somewhatSameAs
 rdfs:seeAlso
 ore:describes
 map:narrowerThan
 skos:narrower
 map:broaderThan
 skos:broader
 dc:subject
 link:uri
 foaf:isPrimaryTopicOf
18

Successes
 Siri
 Bing (Powerset)
 Google + schema.org
 (Some) linked data

20

Google
 Statistical NLP
 Structured results
 Initial schema (Metaweb)
 schema.org (with Yahoo, Bing and Yandex)

23

Some Linked Data
 Some selected knowledge bases:
 DBpedia
 GeoNames
 Freebase (Google)
 Biomedical community
 LOD-LAM community

24

Some Lessons Learned
 Structure is good in any form
 Keep semantic technology in the background
 Open Web (FYN) likely to be disappointing
 Ontologies essential for alignments
 NLP an essential contributor to structure
 Metadata an essential contributor to characterization,
use
 Linked data is a burden to publishers, places
semantic emphasis on wrong part of chain

26

Preserving Existing Assets
 Relational databases (RDBMs)
 Distributed structured assets
 spreadsheets
 lightweight datastores
 Web pages and Web sites
 Existing documents and text
 Web databases and APIs
 Other databases (RDF, OO, etc.)

28

irON Dataset Exchange Framework
 Simple authoring and dataset creation
 irON includes an abstract notation and vocabulary for
instance records
 Notations for:
 Instance records
 Schema
 Datasets and metadata
 Linkages to other schema
 Serializations available for:
 XML (irXML)
 JSON (irJSON)
 CSV/spreadsheets (commON)

29

Three irON Serializations
irXML irJSON

commON
30

Spreadsheet Correspondence to Triples

31

More-or-less Interchangeable Formats

32

A Layered Approach

34

Summary
 If you can, do linked data; it is a GOOD THING
 In any event, expose your data:
 Structured (use NLP for unstructured)
 Metadata
 Definitions
 Relations (simple)
 “Semsets” (synonyms, acronyms, spelling variants)
 Build vocabulary and ontology consortia
 Build trust and curation communities
 Semantics essential at the interoperability level, not
necessarily publication or data transfer

37

Take Aways
 James Hendler:
“A little bit of semantics goes a long way”
 Leverage linked data, but broaden focus
 Consider adopting the semantic enterprise as the
broader focus

38

More Info and Links
 Open Semantic Framework (OSF) stack:
 http://openstructs.org
 TechWiki (400 detailed OSF how-to articles):
 http://techwiki.openstructs.org
 Key ontologies:
 UMBEL: http://umbel.org
 BIBO: http://bibliontology.org
 Blogs:
 Mike Bergman: http://mkbergman.com
 Fred Giasson: http://fgiasson.com/blog
 Structured Dynamics:
 http://structureddynamics.com
 http://citizen-dan.org (community indicator systems)

40

Pragmatic Approaches to the Semantic Web

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