Category Archives: foaf4lib

Subject classification and Statistics

Subject classification and statistics share some common problems. This post takes a small example discussed at this week’s ODaF event on “Semantic Statistics” in Tilberg, and explores its expression coded in the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC). UDC supports faceted description, providing an abstract grammar allowing sentence-like subject descriptions to be composed from the “raw materials” defined [...]

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Skosdex progress: basic lucene search

I now have a crude Lucene index derrived from SKOS data. It is more or less a toy example, but somehow promising also.
Example below is a test against FAO’s AGROVOC. Each concept becomes a “document”, with a “word” field containing the prefLabel, and a “uri” field for the concept URI. I don’t index anything else [...]

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Skosdex: SKOS utilities via jruby

I just announced this on the public-esw-thes and public-rdf-ruby lists. I started to make a Ruby API for SKOS.
Example code snippet from the readme.txt (see that link for the corresponding output):

require “src/jena_skos”
s1 = SKOS.new(“http://norman.walsh.name/knows/taxonomy”)
s1.read(“http://www.wasab.dk/morten/blog/archives/author/mortenf/skos.rdf” )
s1.read(“file:samples/archives.rdf”)
s1.concepts.each_pair do |url,c|
puts “SKOS: #{url} label: #{c.prefLabel}”
end

c1 = s1.concepts["http://www.ukat.org.uk/thesaurus/concept/1366"] # Agronomy
puts “test concept is “+ c1 + ” ” [...]

Also posted in Project ideas, SKOS, SPARQL, Semantic Web, Technology, coding, ggg, ruby, swig | Leave a comment

Family trees, Gedcom::FOAF in CPAN, and provenance

Every wondered who the mother(s) of Adam and Eve’s grand-children were? Me too. But don’t expect SPARQL or the Semantic Web to answer that one! Meanwhile, …

You might nevetheless care to try the Gedcom::FOAF CPAN module from Brian Cassidy. It can read Gedcom, a popular ‘family history’ file format, and turn it into RDF (using [...]

Also posted in Essays, FOAF, History, Politics, Semantic Web, Technology, ggg | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Cross-browsing and RDF

Cross-browsing and RDF
While cross-searching has been described and demonstrated through this paper and associated work, the problem of cross-browsing a selection of subject gateways has not been addressed. Many gateway users prefer to browse, rather than search. Though browsing usually takes longer than searching, it can be more thorough, as it is not dependent on [...]

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SKOS deployment stats from Sindice

This cropped up in yesterday’s W3C Semantic Web Coordination Group telecon, as we discussed the various measures of SKOS deployment success.
I suggested drawing a distinction between the use of SKOS to publish thesauri (ie. SKOS schemes), and the use of SKOS in RDFS/OWL schemas, for example subclassing of skos:Concept or defining properties whose range or [...]

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