W3C Semantic Web

SPARQL Query Language for RDF second Working Draft released : 2005-02-17, The RDF Data Access Working Group has released the second Working Draft of the SPARQL Query Language for RDF. SPARQL offers developers and end users a way to write and to consume search results across a wide range of information such as personal data, social networks and metadata about digital artifacts like music and images. SPARQL also provides a means of integration over disparate sources.

Call for Participation: W3C Workshop on Rule Languages for Interoperability 2005-02-12 : Position papers are due 18 March for the W3C Workshop on Rule Languages for Interoperability to be held 27-28 April in Washington, DC, USA. This workshop will bring together rule system vendors, rule users with a need for interoperability, and others to work toward developing a standard rule language, a key next step in promoting data exchange on the Web.

W3C Workshop on Frameworks for Semantics in Web Services : 2005-02-10, Position papers are due 22 April for the W3C Workshop on Frameworks for Semantics in Web Services to be held 9-10 June in Innsbruck, Austria. Participants will discuss possible future W3C work on a comprehensive and expressive framework for describing all aspects of Web services leveraging Semantic Web standards.

SPARQL Variable Binding Results XML Format Working Draft released : 2004-12-21, The RDF Data Access Working Group has released the First Public Working Draft of the SPARQL Variable Binding Results XML Format. The SPARQL query language offers developers and end users a way to write and to consume search results across a wide range of information such as personal data, social networks and metadata about digital artifacts like music and images. SPARQL also provides a means of integration over disparate sources.

Workshop on Semantic Web for Life Sciences: Summary : 2004-12-15, The summary and position papers have been published from the W3C Workshop on Semantic Web for Life Sciences held in Cambridge, MA, USA on 27-28 October. The workshop concluded that work is needed in core vocabularies and integration of life science identifiers (LSID) and Web resources, and that an implementers Interest Group will be beneficial.

OWL-S: Semantic Markup for Web Services Note Published 2004-11-22, OWL-S: Semantic Markup for Web Services defines an OWL ontology of services that enables users and software agents helps automate the process of discovering, invoking, composing, and monitoring Web resources that offer particular services and have particular properties. The W3C Member Submission describes the overall structure of the ontology and its three main parts: the service profile for advertising and discovering services; the process model, which gives a detailed description of a service's operation; and the grounding, which provides details on how to interoperate with a service, via messages.

Workshop on Semantic Web for Life Sciences Explores Scientific Data Networks : 2004-10-26 , The W3C Workshop on Semantic Web for Life Sciences is being held in Cambridge, MA, USA on 27-28 October. Data networks allow biology to progress from the mapping of one-dimensional DNA to understanding multi-dimensional organisms and their diseases. Semantic Web technologies such as RDF and OWL enable the rapid creation of rich information networks and can assist in the generation of hypotheses across massive data sets. Workshop participants will address the publication, sharing and management of data networks, and will develop use cases and prototypes. More information about this workshop can be found in the press release.

SIMLE Release of Longwell RDF Browser v1.0 : 2004-10-22 , The SIMILE project, a joint project conducted by the W3C, HP, MIT Libraries, and MIT CSAIL to promote semantic inteoperability of metadata between digital libraries, is happy to announce the release of their web-based general RDF browser, Longwell. Longwell is a Java web application written on top of Jena, Apache Velocity and Apache Lucene, providing the ability to browse and search any kind of RDF dataset, both thru both facetted browsing and free-text search.

Introduction

Facilities to put machine-understandable data on the Web are becoming a high priority for many communities. The Web can reach its full potential only if it becomes a place where data can be shared and processed by automated tools as well as by people. For the Web to scale, tomorrow's programs must be able to share and process data even when these programs have been designed totally independently. The Semantic Web is a vision: the idea of having data on the web defined and linked in a way that it can be used by machines not just for display purposes, but for automation, integration and reuse of data across various applications.

W3C Semantic Web Activity Statement

If you are a member of the public coming to this site you can read about what W3C is doing in this area in our Semantic Web Activity statement. Accompanied by a page of explanatory material to bring you up to speed, the Activity statement sums up W3C's present involvement in this area.

Specifications

In Feb 2004, The World Wide Web Consortium released the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the OWL Web Ontology Language (OWL) as W3C Recommendations. RDF is used to represent information and to exchange knowledge in the Web. OWL is used to publish and share sets of terms called ontologies, supporting advanced Web search, software agents and knowledge management. Read the press release and testimonials to see how organizations are using these technologies today.

Publications

Presentations

Interest and Working Groups

Semantic Web Interest Group

The Semantic Web Interest Group is a forum for W3C Members and non-Members to discuss innovative applications of the Semantic Web. The Interest Group also initiates discussion on potential future work items related to enabling technologies that support the Semantic Web, and the relationship of that work to other activities of W3C and to the broader social and legal context in which the Web is situated.

Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group

The focus of this Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment (SWBPD) Working Group is to provide hands-on support for developers of Semantic Web applications.

RDF Data Access Working Group

The focus of the RDF Data Access Working Group will be to evaluate the requirements for an query language and network protocol for RDF and defined formal specifications and test cases for supporting such requirements.

Past Groups

RDF Core Working Group

The RDF Core Working Group is chartered to consider update to the RDF Model and Syntax Recommendation, and to a few revisions to the RDF Schema specification. A further objective of this group is to respond to the Candidate Recommendation feedback and produced a revised RDF Schema document.

Web Ontology Working Group

The Web Ontology Working Group is chartered to build upon the RDF Core work a language for defining structured web based ontologies which will provide richer integration and interoperability of data among descriptive communities.

Additional support for this activity has been provided by DARPA under the DAML program.

Semantic Web

News and Events

Past Groups