W3C Semantic Web Activity

Choice www.cro3.org doi: 10.5860/CHOICE.45-6841 CHOICE August 2008 vol. 45 no. 12 45-6841

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W3C Semantic Web Activity. http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ [Visited May'08] The World Wide Web Consortium's W3C Semantic Web Activity site "groups together all the working and interest groups whose goals are to improve the current Semantic Web technologies or to contribute to their wider adoption." The twofold vision for the Semantic Web is the separation of data from page formatting/display and the machine-readable encoding of relationships among data. The Semantic Web specifications include the Resource Description Framework (RDF), where pieces of information and their connections are encoded using triples of Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs); Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages (GRDDL), which standardizes the translation of data from traditional formats like HTML into RDF; the SPARQL Query Language for RDF, which is a query language for data extraction from RDF; and the Web Ontology Language (OWL), which is a semantic markup language for sharing definitions of terms, data, and their relationships among disparate communities. These specifications are fully available here, as are best practices, use cases, and case studies for the specifications. Interviews, publications, and presentations by W3C staff, many by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a lead proponent of the Semantic Web, are offered to "help explain the goals and objectives of the Semantic Web." Useful lists are provided for Semantic Web development/programming environments, editors, specialized browsers and visualization tools, RDF triple store systems, OWL reasoners, RDF generators, OWL and RDF online validators, SPARQL endpoints ("a URI with a SPARQL service that can be accessed using the SPARQL Protocol, and return XML and/or JSON"), search engines, vocabularies, tagging, books for reference and guidance, and logos with usage policies. The well-developed FAQ section is a good place to begin exploring the richness of the W3C Semantic Web Activity site. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals.

--M. Mounts, Dartmouth College Copyright 2008 American Library Association

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