Sesame 2 Windows Client - or is that SPARQL Windows/Linux Client?

I've just released a new version of the Sesame 2 Windows Client. Thanks to a new co-developer, Anton Andreev (of OntoText), the SWC tool is now a full-fledged SPARQL client: it can connect to any SPARQL endpoint, not just Sesame servers.

Apart from this new feature, the tool also has a couple of other improvements:

• context information fetching can now be disabled when connecting to large repositories;
• namespace clauses can now be automatically generated, based on the prefixes used in the query.

The only problem with this new release is that the name of the tool is now even more of a mismatch. Not only is the Sesame 2 Windows Client not just for Windows (it also runs on Linux under Mono), but now it is also not just for Sesame. A free drink to whoever suggests a good new name!

As always, the new release can be found on the  project homepage on Sourceforge. The source code can from now on be found in the Sourceforge SVN repository.

Moving to New Zealand

Karen and I are taking the plunge together. Well, another plunge: we are emigrating to New Zealand at the end of this year.

This is not, of course, something you decide on a whim. We've both long felt that we might like to make a "big change" for the better, and a long holiday spent getting to know New Zealand and its people convinced us that it is everything we were hoping it would be. New Zealand is an absolutely breathtakingly beautiful place, its people are friendly and easy-going, and for what is basically a predominantly Anglosaxon culture they actually make very good coffee as well.

The plan is quite simple. We have both obtained our permanent residence visa, and will move to New Zealand, to the Wellington area, in December. Although neither of us has secured a job yet, I am actively on the lookout, and confident that something suitable will turn up. NZ and especially Wellington is full of smaller and larger IT firms, and every job vacancy site I check literally posts 2 to 6 positions for (Java) developers a day, at least. However, what I've not been able to find much of yet, is companies or institutes who work in Semantic Web/Ontologies, or who have a need for expertise in that area. If any of you have tips for me (or a job offer ;-)), it would be much appreciated!

I will post updates on developments now and then on this weblog. Oh and yes: we will of course be giving a farewell party later this year ;-)

wurvoc.org - linked open data for Quality of Life

I am proud to announce the official launch of wurvoc.org. Built by the Intelligent Systems Group at Wageningen UR Food & Biobased Research, the goal of wurvoc.org is to serve as a hub for various vocabularies and semantic web services we have developed and are still developing. Many of these vocabularies (modeled in RDF and OWL) have been built using public funding and we feel it important that this information is also publicly available in a way that is open and reusable.

Vocabularies

Currently, wurvoc.org publishes 4 vocabularies:

• The Ontology of Units of Measure models concepts and relations important to quantitative scientific research. It has a strong focus on units and quantities, measurements, and dimensions.
• The Food Additives vocabulary describes substances added to food to improve the flavour, taste, shelf-life, stability et cetera of the food product. Food additives that are approved by EFSA, the European Food Safety Authority are labelled with an E-number.
• The Dairy ontology contains a hierarchy of types of dairy products and provides general information about these products.
• The Drinks vocabulary contains a classification hierarchy of various types of beverages.

Our aim is both to publish more vocabularies and data in the near future, and to extend and improve the current vocabularies: although the data is Open, it is not yet truly Linked in the sense that it has very few relations with external datasets.

Software

We've developed the wurvoc publication platform, a set of REST services on top of the Sesame framework. In line with linked data principles, the platform publishes each vocabulary and each vocabulary term on its own URI. For example, an ontology on food additives is available at http://www.wurvoc.org/vocabularies/food-additives/, and the food additive Pectin is reprsented by http://www.wurvoc.org/vocabularies/food-additives/Pectin.

The platform uses HTTP content negotation to determine the representation format, currently supporting XHTML, RDF/XML, Turtle, N3, NTriples, and TriG (with JSON on the ToDo list).

OUM Web Services

Apart from a vocabulary publication platform, wurvoc.org also offers a number of SOAP-based web services on top of the Ontology of Units of Measure (OUM). These web services provide a number of useful functions, including lookup and matching functions as well as more advanced stuff, such as unit conversion or formulaic consistency checking.

Future plans

We are aiming to publish the publication platform software as open source as soon as possible. Various improvements are also planned, including a SPARQL endpoint and support for JSON.

I'd very much like to hear your comments on what we've brewed sofar, what you think is good and what you think could be better. I encourage you to reuse our linked data (and would appreciate it if you could let us know if you do).
I also plan to keep you up to date on our findings regarding use, performance, and general lessons that we learn after the launch of this project. Watch this space :)