>I’ve just downloaded all 18 podcasts from The Semantic Web Gang. They’re all about an hour long so that should keep me entertained on the ride to work.
I also found the Catalogablog (which just sounds cool) also has a podcast.
I’ll try and post anything outstanding here on the blog.
>In chapter two we finally get to talk about Objects and Relationships although not using any formal notation. It seems like my problem of an Author being known by multiple names is actually very easily solved by using object hierarchies. Very similar to how objects work in object oriented programming languages, semantic objects form a layerd hierarchy using inheritance. So objects higher up the chain represent the common or shared elements, and as you traverse the tree more detail is added. What seems to be one of the more obvious differences between this and some OOP laguages is that multiple inheritance (i.e. taking on the properties of many ‘parent’ objects) is highly prevalent. This is very exciting, but does mean that we’re highly likely to end up with an extremely complicated diagram representing all the different objects and relationships.
The next chapter is all about RDF which is the simplest of the 4 languages that can be used to actually describe objects.
>So I finished chapter one of Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist, and thought I’d share what I’d learned.
I think the most important thing was the concept of Nonunique Naming. This is the notion that people won’t necessarily coordinate their naming efforts when describing objects, which will lead to the same entity being known by more than one name. The example given was the dwarf planet UB313 also being known as Xena, but I can see how this becomes especially relevant in the bibliographic arena when authors write under pseudonyms. For example the data we have about Mr Iain Banks must be the same data we have about Mr Iain M. Banks. Quite importantly however, while large portions of the data will be shared (for example age, gender and height) there may be subsets of data that are specific to either one; for example the list of books they have written will be different. I wonder how we deal with this situation… perhaps chapter two will shed some light.
>BibDib aims to become the definitive source of all bibliographic data on the web… not just for books – but for any works created anywhere by anybody in any format. This means over the coming months we’ll be developing some really cool tools that will allow anybody and everybody to interact and get involved with this amazing dataset.
We’re just at the beginning now, and have quite a task ahead of us, but everything has to start somewhere – and I’ve starting by reading this: Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist: Effective Modeling in RDFS and OWL. My initial thoughts are that the semantic web is a perfect fit for this project, so I’m hoping that this book will give me a good grounding in the basic concepts – and maybe even a few bright ideas to get me started.
>…and welcome to the BibDib technical blog. We’ve just kicked off the project and this blog will be used to chronicle the ideas, developments, challenges and of course feedback we receive as things progress.
Don’t forget you can follow us on Twitter too: http://twitter.com/bibdib
The semantic web is the idea of a web capable of understanding the meanings behind data, a concept proposed by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee.
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