Applications make the Semantic Web happen

Ruben Verborgh, Davy Van Deursen, Peter Lambert

Multimedia Lab – IBBT / ELIS, Ghent University

Watch on GitHub pages.
Fork on GitHub.

Semantic Web application domains

• Mashups

  Use Linked Data sets.

• Smart queries

  Semantic sources can outsmart Google.

• The big players

  Google and Facebook use semantics, too.

Mashups

Integrating and visualizing different data sets

• Opening up machine-readable government data

• Classic mashups driven by Semantic Web technologies

Opening up machine-readable government data

• open

  free for anyone to use, re-use and re-distribute

• government

  commissioned or produced by a government

• machine-readable

  data can be interpreted by machines

Government data applications

• Crime Finder

• Achieve DC

• Where does my money go?

Classic mashups driven by Semantic Web technologies

• 

  BBC Music combines

  • radio program playlists (BBC Radio data)
  • music metadata: related artists and reviews (MusicBrainz)
  • introductory text for artists' biographies (DBPedia)

Classic mashups driven by Semantic Web technologies

• 

  Sig.ma

  • on the fly, interactive information visualization
  • up to hundreds of sources at the same time
  • powered by Sindice, the Semantic Web index

Smart queries

• How would you ask Google…

  • …movies by Peter Jackson?
  • …featuring Orlando Bloom?
  • …with release date?

• How can we ask Freebase…

  • …movies by Peter Jackson?
  • …featuring Orlando Bloom?
  • …with release date?

Smart queries work with Linked Data

• All data items consist of 3 parts

  • subject
  • predicate (verb)
  • object

• Every part has a URI

  • http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/en.orlando_bloom

• Every URI can have links

  • they are typed links: http://rdf.freebase.com/ns/film.film.starring

The big players

• Search engines

• Social networks

Search engines launch schema.org

• Who?

  A joint effort by Google, Bing, and Yahoo!

• What?

  A schema describing what webpages are about

• Why?

  To express the meaning of your content

• How?

  Using HTML microdata.

Schema.org enhances search results

with varying degrees of intelligence

• Yahoo! SearchMonkey

• Google Rich Snippets

• Bing Tiles

Schema.org powers search engines

currently mostly domain-specific

• recipes

• products

• video

Google's Knowledge Graph

• “Google gives search a refresh”

  • queries will match entities

    • people
    • places
    • things
    • …

  • response contains attributes

    • birthdate
    • location
    • altitude
    • …

  • provides answers and pages

• Example: search for Taj Mahal

Google's Knowledge Graph (cont.)

• Sources

  • own datasets

    • Freebase
    • Google Maps
    • Google Books

  • freely available datasets

    • Wikipedia
    • World CIA Factbook
    • online event listings
    • ...

  commercial datasets

Build your Semantic Web app today

• Start with mashups

  • Freebase apps

• Create real-world apps

  • JavaScript (browser and node.js)
  • Java
  • Ruby