Solely for the reader community of the AKSW blog we have a technology preview, which we hope will increase the amount of semantics on the Web and maybe even provide the missing spark for a large scale deployment of semantic technologies on the Web. Triplify is a minimalistic technique to “semantify” Web applications by exposing information from their relational database backends as RDF, JSON and Linked Data. The required effort to do so is minimal - just some SQL queries selecting the information to be made available have to added to the Triplify configuration. Triplify cares about everything else.

The Triplify implementation and further information is available from the still preliminary web site at: http://triplify.org

The xOperator Project is moved to Google Code which is much faster (the tracker, not the subversion repository) and has some nice features (e.g. the customizable grid view).

Traditionally we use SourceForge.net for our open source project management. SF is a great side and I’m member of 9 projects there but it was time to move. Basically its a matter of speed. I work every day on tracker items like bug reports, feature requests and tasks for one of our projects and the sf-page is very slow in comparison to google code and also in comparison to our tracker for commercial projects (we use mantis for that).

Project resources of xOperator are now Issue Tracker, Downloads and Mailinglist (moved to google groups). Our homepage @ aksw.org does not move.

When & Where?

Next week (27.02.2008) we arrange the first OntoWiki Plugin Developer Workshop (OPDW-ONE ) at the IfI / University of Leipzig (room 5-10 3-36).

Group of Participants

• OntoWiki Core Team: Christoph Riess, Michael Haschke, Norman Heino, Philipp Frischmuth, Sebastian Dietzold
• Plugin Developer: Ceriel Jacobs (vakantieland.nl), Deniz Dalli (Interactive Systems), Martin Peklo, Maria Moritz, Michael Martin, Leszek Kotas, Thomas Kappel, Rolland Brunec

Program

• 10:00 Welcome (Seebi)
• 10:15 Introduction to proposed plugins:
  SoftWiki (Lesz), DL-Learner GUI (Maria), Flash Visualization (Deniz), vakantieland.nl Backend (Micha), Social Network Integration (Thomas), OntoBuilder 3 (Seebi)
• 11:30 Introduction to the Zend framework (Norm)
• 12:00 Introduction to the plugin and CSS framework (Haschek)
• 13:00 Lunch
• 14:00 Extraction of common plugin requirements and discussion of solutions for them (all)
• 15:00 Team programming of a plugin from the scratch (Phil + all)

Deliverables after the Workshop

• Plugin development cookbook for common plugin problems
• Example plugin which uses most tricks of the plugin development cookbook
• Screencast of the team programming session (maybe)

The workshop language is german. If you are interested in participation or want your own OntoWiki workshop drop a note to me.

xOperator combines advantages of social network websites with instant messaging. It tries to be a semantic agent for xmpp / jabber network which finds and shares content about resources (using RDF/SPARQL) for you and your jabber friends.

The first public version of xOperator is now available for dowload. It includes the following features:

• basic xmpp account management (user account, proxy account)
• management of query templates, datastores and namespaces directly with your jabber client
• simple query templates for easy starting with xOperator
• query scripts in groovy for advanced queries and post processing

Links: Homepage, Changelog, Mailing list

Hereby, we announce the availability of DL-Learner Build 2008-02-18, the second DL-Learner release. DL-Learner is a tool for learning complex classes from examples and background knowledge. It extends Inductive Logic Programming to Description Logics and the Semantic Web.

Downloads are available at the sf.net project page. For a list of the most important changes since the last release (Build 2007-08-31), see the Changelog. Most notably, DL-Learner now has a flexible component based design, which allows to extend it easily with new learning algorithms, learning problems, reasoners, and supported background knowledge sources. A new type of supported knowledge sources are SPARQL endpoints, from which DL-Learner can extract knowledge fragments, which enables learning classes even on large knowledge sources like DBpedia. Furthermore, DL-Learner now supports learning from positive examples only, inclusion axiom learning, the usage of N-Triple files as background knowledge, the OWL API reasoner interface, and has a more powerful web service interface. I’d like to thank Sebastian Hellmann, Sebastian Knappe, and Tilo Hielscher for their support.