Saturday, November 9, 2013

Congrats to Franz again on GRUFF!  If I were more emotional I would weep with joy over the perfection of the reification display!  

I haven't seen another graph display that gets statement reification right, so I consider this a big moment in the semantic community.

I've met lots of reification haters out there and this will go along ways toward healing their notions.   Using Prolog instead of SPARQL will, of course, do much.  Then they just need to understand that it doesn't have to be slow.   At my last position with our home-brewed architecture,  we were running queries of 70 BGP's and each one of the BGPs was reified with provenance.  Our customer required that we query using the provenance on every statement/BGP.  We had compact quads.  We loaded bloated non-compact reification - in the name of W3C compliance.  Which seems silly when we could have used statement-ID-based nquads like I'm trying to do now.

Franz is working now on loading compact quints (<s> <p> <o> <g> <tid>) from files, but it is presently very doable using proceedural code.


Superbness!  Great reification display!

Please see my attachment.  It is meant to encode "This morning, Jim planned on running to Costco before 6:00."



Monday, November 4, 2013


The Semanic Effort



Basic Information:

The Semanic effort is an attempt to create a small experimental semantic web featuring formal semantic modeling and integration of genealogical data. It employs some ambitious/radical temporal reasoning techniques and high expressivity. In particular, it boldly reifies all times as a shared library of time interval instances to boost the expressivity of temporal reasoning. The name is meant to be a sticky/memorable pun that suggests a somewhat manic ambition in combining many difficult-to-reconcile design goals and the hated single ontology.
The most recent ontology is to be found at http://semanic.org/OntDef/08-26-12/SemanticGEDCOM.owl.
The time instance data is found at "http://semanic.org/RefDat/09-26-12/Time/TimeWeb.owl". This is a large file. You may want to individually load the 100-year files.
To submit a SPARQL or Prolog query against the genealogical data, go to this link.
  • Peterson, E., Reified Literals: A Best Practice Candidate Design Pattern for Increased Expressivity in the Intelligence Community, Semantic Technology for Intelligence, Defense, and Security, Fairfax, VA, 2010