Done a bit of semantic web work in the last couple of weeks, which gave me a chance to explore better the current web-scenario around this topic. I’m working on some example applications myself, but in the meanwhile I thought I’d share here a couple of quite useful links I ran into.
Development Tools:
Quick and Dirty RDF browser. It does just what is says: you pass it an rdf file and it helps you making sense of it. For example, check out the rdf graph describing the city of Southampton on DbPedia: http://dbpedia.org/resource/Southampton. Minimal, fast and useful!
Namespace lookup service for RDF developers. The intention of this service is to simplify a common task in the work of RDF developers: remembering and looking up URI prefixes.You can look up prefixes from the search box on the homepage, or directly by typing URLs into your browser bar, such as http://prefix.cc/foaf or http://prefix.cc/foaf,dc,owl.ttl.
Knoodl Knoodl is an online tool for creating, managing, and analyzing RDF/OWL descriptions. It has several features that support collaboration in all stages of these activities (eg it lets you create quite easily discussion forums around ontological modeling decisions). It’s hosted in the Amazon EC2 cloud and can be used for free.
Rdf Goole chrome extensions. Just a list of extensions for Google Chrome that make working with rdf much simpler, for example by detecting rdf annotations embedded in HTML.
Get the data. Ask and answer questions about getting, using and sharing data! A StackOverflow clone that crowd-sources the task of finding out whether the data you need are available, and where.
Articles / Tutorials
Linked Data Guide for Newbies. It’s primarily aimed at “people who’re tasked with creating RDF and don’t have time to faff around.” It’s a brief and practical introduction to some of the concepts and technical issues behind Linked Data – simple and effective, although it obviously hides all the most difficult aspects.
What you need to know about RDF+XML. Again, another gentle and practical intro.
Linked Data: design issues. One of the original articles by Berners Lee. It goes a little deeper into the theoretical issues involved with the Linked Data approach.
Linked Data: Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space. Large and thorough resource: this book is freely available online and contains all that you need to become a Linked Data expert – whatever that means!
Linked Data/RDF/SPARQL Documentation Challenge. A recent initiative aimed at pushing people to document the ‘path to rdf’ with as many languages and environments as possible. The idea is to move away from some kind of academic-circles-only culture and create something “closer to the Django introduction tutorial or the MongoDB quick start guide than an academic white paper“. This blog post is definitely worth checking out imho, especially because of the wealth of responses it has elicited!
Introducing SPARQL: Querying the Semantic Web. An in-depth article at XML.com that introduces SPARQL – the query language and data access protocol for the Semantic Web.
A beginner’s guide to SPARQLing linked data. A more hands-on description of what SPARQL can do for you.
Linked Data: how to get your dataset in the diagram. So you’ve noticed the Linked Data bubbles growing bigger and bigger. Next step is – how to contribute and get in there? This article gives you all the info you need to know.
Semantic Overflow Answers.semanticweb.com. If you run out of ideas, this is the place where to ask for help!
