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In a recent post, I outlined a kind of layman's test for the Semantic Web . I wrote that the tipping point for the Semantic Web may be when anyone can query a set of data about a historical figure and get a long list of structured results in return. I called this 'The Modigliani Test,' after my favorite artist Amedeo Modigliani. To pass this test, you must deliver - using Linked Data - a comprehensive list of locations of original Modigliani art works around the world. A developer named Atanas Kiryakov gave the test a good crack. In doing so, he illustrated the core issues facing the Semantic Web currently. Sponsor The challenge of this test is that there isn't currently enough linked data on the Web about Modigliani. Also the key data in this test is the locations of art works, which probably isn't one of the main data fields for art data when it's uploaded to the Web (artist name and art work title would be the two key data fields). Kiryakov wasn't the only person who attempted to pass the test; and in fact his results mirror what can be found already on the popular open database Freebase . However Kiryakov, who is the Executive Director of Bulgarian Semantic Technology company Ontotext AD , did a great job of explaining his methodology and noting the issues he faced. The Current State of Linked Data Queries The result of Kiryakov's attempt is a relatively short list of locations of Modigliani paintings around the world. He admits that the list isn't long enough, but says that it's the closest he could get - not just because of the limited amount of data in the Linked Data Web, but because it's "hard to query and use today." Essentially Kiryakov created code to query a few known Linked Data sets, with custom manipulations to output location data. This is what he came up with: PREFIX fb: PREFIX dbpedia: PREFIX dbp-prop: PREFIX dbp-ont: PREFIX umbel-sc: PREFIX rdf: PREFIX ot: SELECT DISTINCT ?painting_l ?owner_l ?city_fb_con ?city_db_loc ?city_db_cit WHERE ?p fb:visual_art.artwork.artist dbpedia:Amedeo_Modigliani ; fb:visual_art.artwork.owners [ fb:visual_art.artwork_owner_relationship.owner ?ow ] ; ot:preferredLabel ?painting_l. ?ow ot:preferredLabel ?owner_l . OPTIONAL { ?ow fb:location.location.containedby [ ot:preferredLabel ?city_fb_con ] . OPTIONAL ?ow dbp-prop:location ?loc. ?loc rdf:type umbel-sc:City ; ot:preferredLabel ?city_db_loc OPTIONAL ?ow dbp-ont:city [ ot:preferredLabel ?city_db_cit ] } That query was executed in a tool called LDSR , a "Linked Data Semantic Repository" created by Kiryakov's company Ontotext. He calls LDSR a "search engine for part of the linked data web." Ontotext's LDSR includes data from existing Linked Data repositories such as DBPedia, Freebase, Geonames, UMBEL and Wordnet. Here is a screenshot of Atanas Kiryakov's attempt to pass the Modigliani Test. He spent over an hour formulating the code used to generate this result. As you can see, the resulting list was just 8 items long and most of the locations are in major U.S. cities. This falls well short of a comprehensive list of Modigliani art work locations. For example, there's no data about Modigliani paintings in Europe - where Modigliani lived all his life. Other Sources of Modiglidata Kiryakov wrote that most of the data returned in the Modigliani example came from Freebase . Indeed, as RWW commenter Brian Karlak pointed out in our original post, you can get much the same result within Freebase itself . Another commenter, Michael, pointed to a non-technical results page . Kiryakov's result has a little more data, but not much more. However the point of Kiryakov's attempt and blog post was to point out the difficulty of passing the Modigliani Test right now. He noted that "getting useful information from LOD [Linked Open Data] quite often requires a lot of efforts to analyze and post-process them in order to get reasonable answers to structured queries." In other words, it's much more than just inputting a natural language query (note that the Freebase example was provided by a user there named masouras , so it's not something an average user could do). I should also mention that in the comments to the previous post, Bruce Wayne pointed to his company Factoetum's effort to pass the test - which had 7 results, including some different ones to Ontotext/Freebase. Like Kiryakov, Wayne noted that it's "nearly impossible" for non technical people to use the current solutions. Finally, to address an issue that some commenters raised in the previous post: yes it would be possible to pass the Modigliani Test with some manual human effort to track down location data. But that's cheating - we want to see this done using Linked Data. And not just for Modigliani works, but for any other artist. Much Work to Be Done Atanas Kiryakov concluded that "there is still a lot of work to be done, because we cannot expect wide usage and interest in the Semantic Web if writing such a query takes more than an hour and a lot of technical knowledge." While that's true, I thank Atanas for giving the Modigliani Test a crack. At least now I know to visit the Museum of Modern Art when I next go to New York! Let us know your thoughts on the Modigliani Test in the comments. Or perhaps you're a developer willing to take on this challenge? Discuss
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The Modigliani Test for Linked Data: Results
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Viadeo , the social network for business, has added five applications built on Google's OpenSocial platform. These apps are Twitter, YouTube, PollDaddy, a doc sharer called Ayos iShare and Google Presentation. iShare will allow users to upload any file up to 100 MB and post it for download on their account. The Twitter app will allow a user to post their Tweet automatically on their Viadeo page. The Google Presentation function will allow them to convert Powerpoint presentations to Google and share them. Sponsor Viadeo is down in the ranks. Compete.com gives LinkedIn over 14 million visitors a month compared to 157,000 for Xing and 96,000 for Viadeo. Certainly, the ability of users to branch out and back with these apps should make it more appealing. The question remains, however, not which business-focused social networks have the most features, or the most users, but the most utility. In that respect, I fear they are neck and neck. After years on the service, and over a year on unemployment, all I got, even with an old supervisor firing me job ads via LinkedIn, was a quick phone interview that went nowhere. That's a guy with some experience, at some high-profile companies, actively searching, with friends on the look-out. ReadWriteWeb has theorized before that part of the limitations of LinkedIn, in particular, is the fact that it's a walled system. If its API opened up, it would benefit the social web as a whole, perhaps. But would it help the job seeker? The hiring manager? The sales or biz dev person looking for contacts? I am not sure. But one person's experience could be anomalous. So let me ask you, the ReadWriteWeb reader: What difference has your membership in a business-oriented social network like LinkedIn, Xing or Viadeo made in your career in the last year? Discuss
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Business Networking Service Viadeo Adds 5 Open Social Apps
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Yesterday we summarized some of the main developments in the Linked Data world over the past year. Linked Data is a W3C-backed movement that is all about connecting data sets across the Web. It can be viewed as a subset of the wider Semantic Web movement, which is about adding meaning to the Web. However, there is some confusion in the Semantic Web community about the crossover . To add to the confusion, there is a term called 'Open Data' that is being bandied around too. This commonly describes data that has been uploaded to the Web and is accessible to all, but isn't necessarily "linked" to other data sets. So what's the beef with all of these terms? In this post we seek clarity! Sponsor The Difference Between Open Data and Linked Data In the discussion over yesterday's post, a few people tweeted that the U.K. government's public data website Data.gov.uk is mostly populated with 'Open Data' and not 'Linked Data.' But what does that mean? It means that much of the data on the site is available to the public, but it doesn't link to other data sources on the Web. It could be data that has been uploaded in CSV format (i.e. spreadsheet data), which Sir Tim Berners-Lee said in an interview with me last year is a common occurrence with government departments. Or it could be data in another non-Web format. Screen from a Tim Berners-Lee presentation on Linked Data , circa 2008 Titti Cimmino put it nicely : Open Data is simply 'data on the web,' whereas Linked Data is a 'web of data.' However, the idea of Open Data is to turn it into Linked Data. As John S. Erickson pointed out , the first priority of Data.gov.uk (and its U.S. counterpart) is to publish lots of Open Data. The next step is to work towards linking it all up. This is already starting to happen. Answering a question I posed on Twitter, Kingsley Idehen confirmed that Data.gov.uk is currently a combination of Open Data and Linked Data. Linked Data and The Semantic Web So may we then suggest that the idea of Linked Data is to turn it into a Semantic Web? Or are they the same thing already? Lorna Campbell from the University of Strathclyde in Scotland tackled those and other questions in an excellent post earlier this month. She started by warning of the potential for another "holy war" about terminology. I won't delve into that in this post, however this excerpt from Campbell's post gives you a flavor of the terminology angst: "Some argue that RDF is integral to Linked Data, other suggest that while it may be desirable, use of RDF is optional rather than mandatory. Some reserve the capitalized term Linked Data for data that is based on RDF and SPARQL, preferring lower case "linked data", or "linkable data", for data that uses other technologies." Even Wikipedia can't define Semantic Web... Campbell quotes from a number of other articles, in trying to come to a conclusion about how Linked Data and the Semantic Web relate. Perhaps the best definition she found was this one by Paul Walk : data can be open , while not being linked data can be linked , while not being open data which is both open and linked is increasingly viable the Semantic Web can only function with data which is both open and linked " Why This Matters So there you have it, Linked Data is NOT the same as the Semantic Web. It's also not necessarily open, in other words accessible to developers. Whatever the definitions, the key points about all of Open Data, Linked Data and the Semantic Web, are: data is being uploaded to the Web that wasn't online before (e.g. much of the data on Data.gov.uk). structure is being added to the data using Linked Data and/or Semantic Web technologies. The bottom line is that the more data we have on the Web that is linked and has defined meaning, the smarter our web applications will be. This is why these activities are so exciting, despite the terminology confusion! Image credit: Semantic Web Rubik's Cube, dullhunk Discuss
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It's All Semantics: Open Data, Linked Data & The Semantic Web
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In May last year we wrote about the state of Linked Data , an official W3C project that aims to connect separate data sets on the Web. Linked Data is a subset of the wider Semantic Web movement, in which data on the Web is encoded with meaning using technologies such as RDF and OWL. The ultimate vision is that the Web will become much more structured, which opens up many possibilities for "smarter" web applications. At this stage last year, we noted that Linked Data was ramping up fast - evidenced by the increasing number of data sets on the Web as at March 2009. Fast forward a year and the Linked Data 'cloud' has continued to expand. In this post we look at some of the developments in Linked Data over the past year. Sponsor Governments Get on Board The most high profile usage of Linked Data over the past year has come from two governments: the United States and United Kingdom. The U.S. was first to open up some of its non-personal data for use by developers, with the May 2009 launch of Data.gov . In January 2010, the U.K. government announced Data.gov.uk - with the help of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. At launch, Data.gov.uk had nearly 3,000 data sets available for developers to build mashups with. At the time it was more than three times as much data than the U.S. site offered. Following on from the launch of Data.gov.uk, U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced a new British Institute for Web Science along with $45 million in government backing. The Institute will be led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and prominent researcher Nigel Shadbolt. This was great news for Linked Data, because according to Prime Minister Brown, the Institute "will help place the U.K. at the cutting edge of research on the Semantic Web and other emerging web and internet technologies." Commercial Applications There have been commercial success stories too, such as OpenCalais for media, MusicBrainz for music and GoodRelations for e-commerce. There are also many commercial sites tapping into the general knowledge data store at dbpedia.org . However it's relatively early days for commercial applications of Linked Data. We're beginning to see smart people explore potential use cases, such as this list for news organizations , but much of the early implementation is being done by publicly funded entities such as the U.K.'s BBC. The latest version of the Linking Open Data dataset cloud , as at July 2009, maintained by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch. Just Get The Data Up There To reiterate, Linked Data is data that has been marked up using Semantic Web technologies such as RDF (Resource Description Framework) or RDFa (a simpler variation). Minus the acronyms, Linked Data is simply structured data . However one of the reasons the Semantic Web hasn't yet been widely adopted, at least commercially, is that it's often difficult or time consuming to mark up data semantically. RDF in particular has a reputation for being painful to code. With that in mind, the past year has been as much about prompting governments and organizations to put their data up on the Web in whatever form they can . Indeed when I interviewed Sir Tim Berners-Lee last July , he told me that he'd be happy if governments "just put data up in whatever form it's available." He mentioned that "Comma separated values (CSV) files are remarkably popular." He'd be much more happier if it was semantically marked up data, using the likes of RDF, but conversion can happen after it's been uploaded to the Web. So overall, Linked Data is still early in its adoption curve. However it's undeniably become a solid on-ramp to the wider Semantic Web and world of structured data. For a good technical overview of the current state of Linked Data and the Semantic Web, see this presentation by Davide Palmisano. Discuss
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The State of Linked Data in 2010
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