Thyago Duque

In the past weeks, we talked about the question of Why Semantics (here) and how to build scientific ontologies (here). Now it is time to start building our own ontologies using Protégé.

Protégé is an open source tool to build OWL ontologies and it can be found here, under downloads (here) . The version 3.4 is the last stable version, and it recomended by several specialists. Version 4.0 is a release candidate and is quite stable.

Finally,  a tutorial that teaches how to use Protégé and introduces some concepts of OWL can be found here.

Genetic Algorithms are actually my primary research interest (not semantic web) but I have been in the field for quite long time and I haven’t looked on basic/interesting stuff for a while. My plan is to start blogging more about GAs in the near future but for now I have a bunch of semantic web topics in my queue.

However, today I came across this video that performs the strange crossover between GAs and Semantic Web and, although the results are bad, I think it is strange enough to deserve a post.

This video (here) is a presentation on the IWSC08 of the paper Anytime Query Answering in RDF through Evolutionary Algorithms, by Eyal Oren and colleagues, which can be found here.

Note that I do not recommend using this method for your RDF queries, but still found the paper strange, if not interesting.

Continuing the series of videos about semantic technologies, a good suggestion is this video (here) . In this video Barry Smith walks through some basic concepts of ontology engineering and scientific ontology. The Basic Formal Ontology and the RCT Trial bank are used as a base for a Clinical Trial ontology.

Message in a Bottle or: How can the Semantic Web Community be more convincing?
http://videolectures.net/iswc08_decker_mib/
Stefan Decker, DERI Galway

Description

Enormous resources are poured into projects like the Large Hadron Collider, the Hubble space telescope, or the Iter fusion reactor. Computer science resources pale in comparison – the European Semantic Web effort is tiny compared to those projects. Why is this the case? In this talk Stefan Decker will argue that the Physicists are much better in formulating an engaging mission and message. Especially the Semantic Web community has not been very good in coming up with a convincing mission directed to the public. We need to and we can do better.

Zotero (here) is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself. This video (here) shows some of the features. It seems very promising.

Zots (here) is another Firefox add-on that allows you to publish your citations from Zotero in one step using the Exhibit Widget.
The Exhibit (here) is javascript library that provides faceted browsing without the needing to use server-side programming like PHP.

Exhibit and Zots are part of the Simile project: Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments (here).

I recently got introduced to technologies and concepts related to the Semantic Web and to Ontology Engineering, two areas that are much more interesting than I believed they could be. As a consequence, Semantic Web became one of my areas of interest and I decided to start bloging about it. As a start, this video (here) talks about the question: “Why Semantics?”. Learn and Enjoy =D.