The goal of the Semantic Web initiative is as broad as that of the Web: to create a universal medium for the exchange of data. It is envisaged to smoothly interconnect personal information management, enterprise application integration, and the global sharing of commercial, scientific and cultural data. Facilities to put machine-understandable data on the Web are quickly becoming a high priority for many organizations, individuals and 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 Activity is an initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) designed to provide a leadership role in defining this Web. The Activity develops open specifications for those technologies that are ready for large scale deployment, and identifies, through open source advanced development, the infrastructure components that will be necessary to scale in the Web in the future.
The principal technologies of the Semantic Web fit into a set of layered specifications. The current components are the Resource Description Framework (RDF) Core Model, the RDF Schema language, the Web Ontology language (OWL), and the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS). Building on these core components is a standardized query language, SPARQL (pronounced "sparkle"), enabling querying decentralized collections of RDF data. The POWDER recommendations provide technologies to find resource descriptions for specific resources on the Web; descriptions which can be ‘joined’ to other RDF data. The GRDDL and RDFa Recommendations aim at creating bridges between the RDF model and various XML formats, like XHTML. RDFa also plays an important role as a format to add Structured Data to HTML, i.e., as a means to help using Linked Data in Web Applications. Finally, the goal of the R2RML language (under development) is to provide standard language to map relational data and relational database schemas to RDF and OWL.
As a result of a successful Activity Renewal request the new RDF Working Group has begun its work in February 2011. The The mission of the group is to update the 2004 version of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) Recommendation. The group held its first F2F meeting in April 2011, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and has published two First Public Working Drafts: “Turtle Terse RDF Triple Language” and “RDF 1.1 Concepts and Abstract Syntax”.
The RDF Working Group was also chartered to consider a JSON
based serialization of RDF, as a means to bring these two
communities further. After internal discussions it was decided
that the RDF Working Group may not have the right expertise (due
to the fact that it does not have Javascript and JSON developers
in its midst); the JSON related work has now been spun off into
a separate “JSON
for Linking Data” Community Group, whose work is based on
the upcoming JSON-LD
specification.
Although the plan for the SPARQL Working Group was to issue a
Last Call Working Draft in December 2010, the technical issues
arising did not make this possible. It was also important to
settle some outstanding coordination issue with the RDF Working
Group, which also added to the delays. There was also a request
from the community to add the JSON return format to the list of
Recommendations the group plans to produce; this lead to a
necessary rechartering of the Group. This chartering process started
in June, and the new charter was approved
in July. The plan is to issue a Last Call Working Draft
in September.
The RDB2RDF Working Group has publishes a Last Call Working Draft for its two main documents, i.e., the R2RML Language and the Direct Mapping to RDF on the 20th of September, 2011.
The RDFWA Working Group (formerly known as RDFa Working Group) is operating under a new charter to also develop an RDF API Recommendation. The group published a new version of the RDFa API document in April, and a First Public Working Draft for the RDF Interfaces in May. On the RDFa side, the group published a 2nd Last Call for RDFa 1.1 Core in March. Although no major comments came back from the community on that document, the subsequent announcement, in June, of the schema.org organization and the related discussions on the usage of RDFa and/or microdata and the mutual relationships of the two documents created a new situation. A number of issues came up that were raised by a more general demand of a better relationships between these two formats, and which may lead to technical adjustment in RDFa 1.1.
Related to the schema.org discussions, the Semantic Web Interest Group has started two task forces: the Web Schemas Task Force, that looks at the vocabulary evolution, and the HTML Data Task Force, whose goal is to provide a technical analysis on the relationship of microdata, microformats, and RDFa, with possible change proposals on the W3C specifications.
As a result of a successful Activity Renewal request the new Provenance Working Group has begun its work in April 2011. The mission of the Provenance Working Group is to support the widespread publication and use of provenance information of Web documents, data, and resources.
The Semantic Web
Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group (HCLSIG) has
had a charter renewal, started
in August 2011, which ended successfully in September
2011. Since early September the group operates under its new charter.
Both the OWL Working Group and the Rule Interchange Format (RIF) is kept in a “dormant” state. The reason is that both the OWL2 and the RIF Recommendation will have to be re-issued when the XSD 1.1 document becomes a standard; the documents can then normatively refer to the XSD 1.1 datatypes (which is not the case today). No substantial change on OWL2 and RIF are planned, though.
The Activity has to actively participate in
the discussions surrounding the announcement of schema.org, the
further evolution of that vocabulary, its relationships to other
vocabularies, etc. The issue of the exact syntax used for
Structured Data on the Web (microformats, microdata, or RDFa)
has also gained lots of attentions since the last AC meeting,
involving various communities, the W3C TAG, and the Activity has
to continue playing an active role in this area.
The Activity plans a Workshop on “Linked
Data Patterns for Implementation Applications on the World
Wide Web”, in December 2011, hosted by IBM. The goal of
the Workshop is to understand what requirements and challenges
Linked Data technologies have when using them in an enterprise
environment, what are the areas that might require W3C’s
attention for future work in that area.
| Group | Chair | Team Contact | Charter |
|---|---|---|---|
| OWL Working Group (participants) | Ian Horrocks, Alan Ruttenberg | Sandro Hawke, Ivan Herman | Chartered until 31 December 2012 |
| SPARQL Working Group (participants) | Lee Feigenbaum, Axel Polleres | Sandro Hawke | Chartered until 30 June 2012 |
| Rule Interchange Format Working Group (participants) | Christian de Sainte Marie, Christopher Welty | Sandro Hawke | Chartered until 31 December 2012 |
| RDF Web Applications Working Group (participants) | Ben Adida, Manu Sporny | Ivan Herman | Chartered until 1 October 2012 |
| Semantic Web Coordination Group (participants) | Ivan Herman | Ivan Herman | Chartered until 28 February 2013 |
| Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group | Michel Dumontier, Charles Mead, Vijay Bulusu | Eric Prud'hommeaux | Chartered until 31 August 2014 |
| Semantic Web Interest Group | Dan Brickley | Ivan Herman | Chartered until 28 February 2013 |
| RDB2RDF Working Group (participants) | Ashok Malhotra, Michael Hausenblas | Ivan Herman, Eric Prud'hommeaux | Chartered until 30 September 2012 |
| RDF Working Group (participants) | David Wood, Guus Schreiber | Sandro Hawke, Ivan Herman | Chartered until 31 January 2013 |
| Provenance Working Group (participants) | Luc Moreau, Paul Groth | Sandro Hawke | Chartered until 1 October 2012 |
This Activity Statement was prepared for TPAC 2011 per section 5 of the W3C Process Document. Generated from group data.
Ivan Herman, Semantic Web Activity Lead$Id: Activity.html,v 1.414
2011/09/09 01:35:33 ijacobs Exp $