Semantic Mediawiki Conference (SMWCon) Fall 2010

I just came back from an exhausting but highly inspirational 2 days of talks and demos about Semantic Mediawiki and various extensions and use cases: SMWCon Fall 2010 (hosted at the Open University in Amsterdam).

Some of my personal highlights (in no particular order):

• Semantic Maps as presented by Jeroen de Dauw. This was a bit of an eye-opener, as I had previously briefly thought about using something like this, but decided it wouldn't be worth the bother if it involved having to type in a lot of coordinates.
  Well guess what, you don't have to: it provides full geocoding functionality, effectively allowing you just to type in a street address. It ties in with Google maps as well as Open StreetMaps, Yahoo maps and OpenLayers. Overall it looks just massively useful.
• WikiTags by Jesse Wang: a very impressive demo on how to link the world of (semantic) wikis to the world of MS Office. Automated annotation of terms in MS Word, live links between Outlook and the wiki, quick and easy adding of e-mail messages to the wiki, etc. etc. The thought behind this effort appeals to me: don't rage against the machine but accept that MS Office tools are the daily working environment for many people and organisations, and cater to that.
• The Suite of Halo extensions presented by Daniel Hansch: although I was already aware of the Halo extensions I had not yet completely grokked the full range of features and improvements it encompasses. In particular its support for fine-grained access control is something that captured my attention. On the ToDo list to take for a test drive.
• SparqlExtension by Alfredas Chmieliauskas and Chris Davis: particularly impressive about this demo was the way in which this extension enables integration of (RDF) data from many different sources and creating all sorts of reportings on that data. Can't wait to tweak this one to talk to a Sesame server and start testing it on our internal group wiki.
• Rudi van Bavel and Michael Cariaso both showed very interesting stuff involving the creation, maintenance and use of SNPedia, a wiki containing huge amounts of human genetic data.

To be honest, though, I found all presentations and demos, not just the ones mentioned above, interesting and engaging. The atmosphere throughout the two days was positive and pragmatic, with lots of interesting group discussion going on. It was great to see people from so many different background coming together to share experiences and show new and innovative ways in which the SMW platform can be used and extended.

SWC 0.9 released: out-of-the box triplestore and SPARQL query library

Hot on the heels of the previous SWC release comes another major update of the Sesame Windows Client. Version 0.9 has a whole range of useful new features and improvements: 

• You can now create and use local repositories (many thanks to the IKVM developers and Enrico Minack for making this possible);
• "My Query Book" allows you to save and reuse your favorite SPARQL queries;
• You can now open the result of a SPARQL SELECT query in a new (paged) window;
• You can now directly save the result of a SPARQL SELECT query as comma-separated values, XML, or JSON;
• Your most recently used server URLs are now remembered;
• Autocompletion when typing in a server URL.

The use of local repositories means that you can use the SWC as a quick and easy RDF triplestore. Create a new store, add your RDF data, and start querying. No need to install a separate triplestore server.

Query Book screenshot (click to enlarge)

The Query Book allows you to not only save your queries, but also to document them. This way, you can quickly create a library of useful SPARQL queries and document not only what they do, but also on which repository or SPARQL endpoint the query is most likely to give a useful result. The Query Book's search feature makes sure that even in a large library you can still easily find back any query.

Another new feature is the opening of a SPARQL SELECT query result in a new (paged) window. What is especially useful about this is that you can now execute one query, keep the result in a separate window, and then execute another query and compare its result with the previous one.

If you want to save the result of a SPARQL query, you can now do so, in a choice of three formats: comma-separated values (CSV), which is useful for import in e.g. Excel, is the default choice, but the official SPARQL Query Results XML format and the SPARQL JSON format are also suppported.

Both Anton and I are quite happy with this new release, and hope you find it useful as well. As always, the new release can be found on the  project homepage on Sourceforge.

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.