The Semantic Web: Visions, Applications, and an Ontology for Higher Education
Patrick Gosetti-Murrayjohn, University of Mary Washington
pgosetti@umw.edu
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to follow along on your laptop.
Some slides are interactive (but fail in IE -- use Firefox if you have it)
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How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Silos
"No time to discuss with the committee!"
Think of Silos as a Technological Problem
(I'd rather solve a technological problem than a social/managerial one any day)
The Semantic Web Solution
An open standard for data integration
- RDF
- Resource Description Framework
- OWL
- Web Ontology Language
The Secret Ingredient: URIs
Graphs, Graphs, Everywhere
Graphs, Graphs, Everywhere
Source of data is irrelevant--all that matters is the URIs
Who's going to put all their data into RDF?
Who's going to scrape / RDFize the data that's there?
- If the HTML is clean enough, and the presentation is consistent enough, the RDF
can be derived from any silo's output.
Example: DBPedia
-
DBPedia
a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make
this information available on the Web. DBpedia allows you to ask sophisticated
queries against Wikipedia and to link other datasets on the Web to Wikipedia
data.
Scrapes RDF data from Wikipedia infoboxes
~218 MILLION Triples
Turning Existing Data Into RDF
- HTML structures can be used to generate RDF
- microformats/RDFa
-
-
Solvent
- A plug-in for Firefox that helps you write screen-scrapers to generate
RDF from HTML
-
GRDDL
- uses XSL transformations to produce RDF
Solvent, meet Banner
Solvent, meet the faculty
Banner, meet the faculty; faculty, meet Banner
(With a little help from geonames.org and Exhibit)
The demo below is from an older version of the data. It will probably fail in IE
To Use an Ontology or Not To Use an Ontology?
An ontology provides a structured description of a domain of data.
Says, "Here's types of things, and relationships between them."
Classes (of subjects and objects) and Properties (predicates)
DBpedia doesn't use an ontology
A Few of My Favorite Ontologies
-
FOAF (Friend Of A
Friend). Information about people and groups.
Example Triples:
- Patrick is a Person
- Patrick knows Chip
-
Bibliographic Ontology
Bibliographic information about resources
Example Triples:
- "The Semantic Web: Visions, Applications, and an Ontology for Higher
Education" is a Paper
- "The Semantic Web. . . " was presented at ACCS 2008
-
Dublin Core Information about basic metadata (creator, title, follow link for more)
Example Triples:
- "The Semantic Web . . . " references FOAF
- "The Semantic Web. . . " was written by Patrick
-
SIOC (Semantically
Interlinked Online Communities). Information about online communities
(blogs, social bookmarking sites, wikis, etc)
Example Triples:
- patrickgmj is an online account
- Patrick is the owner of patrickgmj
- patrickgmj is the creator of such-and-such blog post
- Geonames Information about
geographical and administrative regions.
Example Triples:
- Combs Hall is a Building
- Combs Hall is in the City of Fredericksburg
- Combs Hall is at lattitude 38.2995726
-
FRBR (Functional Requirements of
Bibliographic Records) Information about artistic works and their
physical manifestations.
Example Triples:
- "Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus" is a Work
- ISBN 0393964582 contains "Frankenstein, or the Modern
Prometheus"
-
SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) Information about
concepts and their relationships
Example Triples:
- "love" is a concept
- "emotion" is a broader concept than love
Introducing an Ontology for Universities
Core classes: Courses and Course Instances
- Course
- A course on the books, like English 101, Physics 543, etc. This is primarily an
abstraction used for administrative purposes. I.e., it has no connection with
the real people doing real study
- CourseInstance
- A group of real-live people engaged in study. This is the section of a Course,
meeting during a particular semester, at a particular time and place. So English
101, Fall 2009, section 05 is a CourseInstance (a subclass of foaf Group).
This separates the administrative information from the boots-on-the-ground
information
UnivOnt: 'What' Properties
- studies
- General catch-all for what a CourseInstance studies
- studiesObject
- A physical object studied, like the Sphinx, Empire State Building, flux
capacitors, etc.
- studiesWork
- An artistic work (frbr Work) studied, like
"Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus", "Beethoven's 5th (the music)",
"Beethoven's 5th (the movie)", etc.
UnivOnt: 'What' Properties (cont'd)
- studiesAgent
- A person, organization, or group (foaf Agent) studied, like Abraham Lincoln,
ENRON, United States Congress, etc.
- studiesPlace
- A geographic region (geonames Feature) studied, like Paris (France), Paris
(Texas), Africa, North Pole, Mount Everest, Rappahanock River, etc.
Questions: Do we need studiesCulture? studiesEra? studiesMovement? studies X?
UnivOnt: 'How' Properties
- studiesWith
- General catch-all for what a CourseInstance uses in their study
- studiesWithText
- The text (biblio Document) used in the study, generally what is reported to the bookstore. Can
include CD's DVD's, books, Wikipedia articles, etc.
- studiesWithDevice
- A physical object used as part of the course of study, like GPS devices, mass
spectrometers, scalpels, shovels, etc.
UnivOnt: 'How' Properties (cont'd)
- studiesWithSoftware
- A locally installed software application used in the course of study, like SPSS,
Mathematica, ARCGIS, Rational Rose, etc.
- studiesWithSpace
- An online space (sioc Space) used in the course of study. This covers blog URIs,
Moodle installations, Drupal installations, ArtStor, Blackboard installations,
etc.
Questions: studiesWithIDE? studiesWithTextFormat? studiesWith X?
Browse the Full Ontology & Questions / Discussion
