W3C’s Semantic Web Activity Folds Into New Data Activity by Jennifer Zaino.
From the post:
The World Wide Web Consortium has headline news today: The Semantic Web, as well as eGovernment, Activities are being merged and superseded by the Data Activity, where Phil Archer serves as Lead. Two new workgroups also have been chartered: CSV on the Web and Data on the Web Best Practices.
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The new CSV on the Web Working Group is an important step in that direction, following on the heels of efforts such as R2RML. It’s about providing metadata about CSV files, such as column headings, data types, and annotations, and, with it, making it easily possible to convert CSV into RDF (or other formats), easing data integration. “The working group will define a metadata vocabulary and then a protocol for how to link data to metadata (presumably using HTTP Link headers) or embed the metadata directly. Since the links between data and metadata can work in either direction, the data can come from an API that returns tabular data just as easily as it can a static file,” says Archer. “It doesn’t take much imagination to string together a tool chain that allows you to run SPARQL queries against ’5 Star Data’ that’s actually published as a CSV exported from a spreadsheet.”
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The Data on the Web Best Practices working group, he explains, will not define any new technologies but will guide data publishers (government, research scientists, cultural heritage organizations) to better use the Web as a data platform. Additionally, the Data Activity, as well as the new Digital Publishing Activity that will be lead by former Semantic Web Activity Lead Ivan Herman, are now in a new domain called the Information and Knowledge Domain (INK), led by Ralph Swick.
I will spare you all the tedious justification by Phil Archer of the Semantic Web venture.
The W3C is also the home of XSLT, XPath, XQuery, and other standards that require no defense or justification.
Maybe we will all get lucky and the CSV on the Web and Data on the Web Best Practices activities will be successful activities at the W3C.
From the “CSV on the Web” page: ” the group will define mechanisms for interpreting a set of CSVs as relational data”
Based on the earlier discussion with Aki about the Wandora tool, it sounds like an opportunity for topic map constructs considering how well the most common semantics of spreadsheets mapped to the relationships defined in the topic map standard.
Comment by clemp — December 11, 2013 @ 10:43 pm
Carl,
Very true. The relationships are “present” in CSV data but not made explicit. With roles and role players as topics, it is possible to decorate them with additional relationships and other semantic information.
Comment by Patrick Durusau — December 12, 2013 @ 10:06 am
[…] a data point, consider the recent W3C interest in CSV. At the other end of the spectrum from SWRL, wouldn’t you […]
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