DBpedia: a nucleus for a web of open data, By S. Auer, C. Bizer, G. Kobilarov, J. Lehmann, R. Cyganiak and Z. Ives, The 6th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2007) Busan, Korea, November 2007, in LNCS 4825, pp.722-735
The last 30 years have seen a number of attempts by computer scientists with an interest in information integration research and proceeded alongside efforts in Semantic Web with associated technology developments. However, the current Web is still challenged by these tasks. Auer et al. (2007) in this article attempt to integrate information from across various web systems and make Wikipedia information a machine-readable representation both in structural formats and semantic data sets.
The authors provide a relatively comprehensive overview of existing problems and challenges such as:
(1) Web information has not been fully accessible to a general audience
(2) inconsistency, ambiguity, uncertainty, and data provenance of grass-roots data
(3) the need of using collaborative sharing of dynamic data approaches to build the Semantic Web in grass-roots-style
(4) the need of a new model of structured information representation and management
Extending concepts and approaches from the W3C Linking Open Data community project and extract structured information from Wikipedia, the authors argue in favor of a triple model of Resource Description Framework (RDF) that provides a flexible data model for representing and publishing information on the Web. RDF is a basic foundation to give one or more types to a resource set in triples: (subject, predicate, object) or (subject, property, property value) . RDF triples extracted from data sets, in this DBpedia model, are basic components that can be shared, exchanged, and processed queries in a variety of Semantic Web applications.
Several of the most valuable datasets including articles described with concepts, Infoboxes (data attributed for concepts), categories or article categories using SKOS, Yago Types (instances using YAGO classification), internal page links, as well as RDF links, are provided for download as a set of RDF files which are identified by their own URI reference.
The pragmatic web: a manifesto, By Mareike Schoop, Aldo de Moor, and Jan L.G. Dietz, Communications of the ACM, May 2006 Vol.49, No.5This article is composed of 7 paragraphs. From a context driven perspective, the authors support some preliminary thoughts of Pragmatic Web of Munindar Singh (2002). A similar sense of pragmatics in essential issues of context-based, community as well as collaboration structure has advanced two International Conferences on the Pragmatic Web with this Manifesto in 2006 and 2007, and is supposed to be further advanced at the 3rd Conference in Uppsala, Sweden, 2008.In the first place, the article starts with existing Semantic Web problems such as complex format of RDF and ontology, as well as the insufficient context-free assumption which may not satisfy Web functions in communication, consensus building, and cooperatively modifying ontologies. It then shifts towards the crucial challenge of how to build a socio-technical infrastructure to leverage the Web from Semantics to Pragmatics. In particular, authors are devoted to the concept which ontologies co-evolve with their communities of use, and within conversation between communities in practice. Thus, the aim of Pragmatic Web is to increase human collaboration effectively by proper technologies. Some proposals for the implementation of this Pragmatic Vision has been drawn on, for instance, building systems :(1) for ontology negotiation (2) for ontology-based business interaction(3) for pragmatic ontology building efforts in communities of practice, in other words, for goal-oriented discourses in communities.This is maybe the strongest part of the article, and it was later then the most cited Pragmatic Vision for scholars of interests. It is somewhat, however, not clear that the conclusion part brought out a theoretical foundation in the language-action perspective as an analysis approach for the Pragmatic Web. By contrast, Singh (2002) did go back to the original pragmatic scholarship for its foundations of the theory of Signs by Charles Morris. However, it is not possible to do justice to whether the importance of Sign theory (Semiotics) should be or should not be in the Pragmatic Web research agenda in only one sentence or one paragraph. Instead, the pragmatic research should draw attentions to questions such as: how the Semiotic School find a place for the Web Science, and how the Web Science Community re-negotiate and collaborate with the Semiotic communities to work out the definition of Pragmatic Web in practice.
