It is exactly one year since SchemaWeb was born and unleashed upon an unsuspecting world. We are pleased to report that baby is doing fine and has grown to almost three times her birth size.

Like all proud parents, Derek (my developer) and I will be taking a short break from our relentless monitoring of semspace and cracking open a few bottles of (ginger) beer to celebrate this special day.

Many thanks to all SchemaWeb contributors and users for your interest, feedback and support over the last year. Special thanks to John McHugh and the team at Qmediastream who have provided excellent hosting.

And if by chance you have a new RDF schema or OWL ontology lurking somewhere on your hard disk then all we can say is... bring it on - make a one year old happy!

Many great photos from the historic 1st FOAF Workshop are now published and perusable online.

This photo of Chief FOAFster Dan Brickley however has caused Derek and I some slight concern. We can only think of only three explanations.

1. Somebody shrunk Dan.

2. There has been an almighty cockup at the printers with a specification misunderstanding comparable to the Spinal Tap 'Stonehenge' fiasco.

3. Just a business card specially designed to fit Dan's wallet!

[ Dan photo by Libby (slightly modified) ]

Bob DuCharme, whose excellent XSLT column for XML.com has been essential reading at SchemaWeb for many years, has grabbed a piece of semspace and launched rdfdata.org as a portal for direct access to large amounts of the golden stuff.

Bob, pictured above chilling with a Theremin, is also encouraging content producers to provide an RSS interface for all their content and not just the latest 10 or so offerings. Hear hear, after all HTML is so last year!

A request at the recent FOAF Workshop at Galway was for a guide to vocabularies available for use with personal profile documents expressed in FOAF. Until such a definitive list has been prepared and published, SchemaWeb may provide some pointers. The query page at SchemaWeb now opens with an example query which returns all properties that declare foaf:Person as the domain.

At present these properties belong to the following schemas:
Bio
Speaks, Reads and Writes
trust
Reading List Schema
Relationship
Pet Profile Ontology
Psychometric Profile Vocabulary
Trust Ontology
visit
Kissology
Uranai

Of course this is not the complete picture as this is only a list of schemas that explicitly declare a property / domain linkage to foaf:Person. Others that spring to mind are:
Geo
vCard
SWAP Personal Information Markup
Airport Ontology
Vegetarian Ontology
Blogger Code
Who's Who Description Vocabulary
MeNow
Music Vocabulary
Quaffing

Most of the above are used in the following FOAF files:
http://kasei.us/about/foaf.xrdf
http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=network&op=foafrdf&uid=1
http://xml.mfd-consult.dk/foaf/morten.rdf
http://xml.mfd-consult.dk/foaf/morten-history.rdf
http://dannyayers.com/misc/foaf/foaf.rdf

Are you just getting into the Semantic Web and want to take a quick shortcut to that penny dropping moment? Derek and I think you can do no better than check out the 'Business Model for the Semantic Web' by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Published in 2001, this beautifully constructed piece of fourteen paragraphs explains not only why XML over HTTP has revolutionised computer networking and systems interop but also defines this next great challenge in a way that even your (slightly webby) granny would understand.

If this produces a slight tingle then we recommend moving on to the 'Semantic Web Road Map' from 1998. This only shows its age in that all the alluded to RDF core specs (along with the mighty OWL) are now done and dusted and ready to rock.

And if by chance the tingle turns to an itch then I'm afraid the only cure is to visit the definitive RDF resource guide, pick up some tools (a parser and maybe a triples data store) and go do it.

Top semster Leo Sauermann, hot foot from FOAF Camp, has published the Kissology schema. This risqué masterpiece is already the talk of semspace and some very interesting instance data is eagerly anticipated by all.

Snapped at the camp, we see Leo (right) and Dan Brickley, pater of the popular person vocabulary, no doubt putting the finishing touches to this new FOAF extension.

A glittering selection of tee-shirts can be seen throughout the great pics from the camp. Dan and Leo above are modelling the FOAF Camp shirt and below we have Morten (right) and Dave, both looking rather dapper - Dave in the classic SWAD Europe and Morten in a foafnaut limited edition. Are they compiling the next Redland release or shopping on-line for some 'cool' threads? Who knows?

Word is that a World and Olympic record for beer per lines of code was set at FOAF Camp with a staggering 17.76 litres / 1000 lines. A performance we are sure that participants at the FOAF Workshop in Galway next week will be determined to beat.

[ Photos by Jip ]

Similar to the tradition of fine old British pubs who feature 'guest' ales to complement the standard fare, it seems SchemaWeb is becoming a haven for new XML alternatives to RDF/XML syntax. Joining TriX and the homegrown TriplesML, we now feature feeds in the Regular XML RDF (RXR) format on each and every schema details page.

RXR was unveiled by sem supremo Dave Beckett recently at XML Europe during his talk 'Modernising Semantic Web Markup'.

Hopefully work in this area will result in a single open standard format soon before we run out of menu space!

The Semantic Web hit prime time yesterday when BBC Radio 4 programme 'The Material World' devoted half a show to things semmy. Helping out presenter Quentin Cooper were eminent semsperts, Wendy Hall from the University of Southampton and Jim Hendler from the University of Maryland. These two gave a lucid and interesting explanation of this er... difficult subject.

Topics included software agents, ontologies (dear to our hearts at SchemaWeb) and trust. A big plug for FOAF too. Top stuff.

Wendy closed the show with the prediction that the Semantic Web would be a reality within ten years. Crikey - we better get a move on!

Hear it again (and again) on the BBC archive.

XML Europe gets underway next week in Amsterdam and once again top sem warriors will be in action on and off the podium.

Semantic highlights include:

Ontology-Driven Topic Maps by Bernard Vatant
Modernising Semantic Web Markup by Dave Beckett
Crawling the Semantic Web by Matt Biddulph
Semantic Blogging: Spreading the Semantic Web Meme by Stephen A Cayzer
Treehugger: The RDF Model Meets XPath by Damian Steer
RDF, XForms, and the Law - Staying Out of Gaol by Charles McCathieNevile
RDF/XHTML: A New RDF Syntax by Steven Pemberton

And not to forget the closing keynote, The State of XML by Edd Dumbill where I suspect RDF and FOAF might get a wee mention.

If you are as crazy about RDF and OWL schemas as we are, you might like to point your RSS readers at Last Updated Schemas, a brand new feed at SchemaWeb which reports schemas which have recently been upgraded to new versions.

This joins the original Latest Schemas feed for new schemas published in the directory to provide complete coverage of all recent SchemaWeb activity and timely information for those who just 'have to know'.

Semwebbers planning this year's hectic conference season might also like to subscribe to Semantic Web Events, a calendar hosted at SemaView's excellent eventSherpa server.

All SchemaWeb's machine readable offerings can be viewed on the Web Services page.

Top semsters will be packing their swimming togs, sun lotion and scuba gear as well as their laptops this weekend and traveling to the Semantic Web Interest Group (SWIG) meeting in Cannes in the beautiful South of France next Monday and Tuesday. The SWIG bash is part of the W3C Technical Plenary Meeting which continues for the rest of the week.

Chaired by the 'Father of FOAF' Dan Brickley, the meeting has a packed agenda with contributions from, amongst many others, Libby Miller who talks about RDF Calendar and also the interesting work in progress on RDF image annotation and 'our man on the Med' Danny Ayers who travels over the border from his home in Italy to talk about using XHTML Outlines and XSLT to extract RDF from web pages and his own implementation XOW.

Rumour has it however that the real action will be at the beach bar where the detailed planning for the recently announced Semantic Web Activity Phase 2 will be taking place between other strenuous activities such as the traditional beach tennis match between the 'URI is an identifier' and the 'URI is a physical resource' camps.

Phase 2 will see the creation of two new Working Groups, the Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment WG and the RDF Data Access WG. SchemaWeb users will be pleased to see that the Best Practices and Deployment WG charter contains the following fragment:

We are honoured!