Towards a killer app for the Semantic Web

Killer apps are highly transformative technologies that create new markets and widespread patterns of behaviour. IT generally, and the Web in particular, has benefited from killer apps to create new networks of users and increase its value. The Semantic Web community on the other hand is still awaiting a killer app that proves the superiority of its technologies. There are certain features that distinguish killer apps from other ordinary applications. This paper examines those features in the context of the Semantic Web, in the hope that a better understanding of the characteristics of killer apps might encourage their consideration when developing Semantic Web applications

Ontologies on the semantic web

As an informational technology, the World Wide Web has enjoyed spectacular success. In just ten years it has transformed the way information is produced, stored, and shared in arenas as diverse as shopping, family photo albums, and high-level academic research. The “Semantic Web” was touted by its developers as equally revolutionary but has not yet achieved anything like the Web’s exponential uptake. This 17 000 word survey article explores why this might be so, from a perspective that bridges both philosophy and IT

Relational Identities and Other-Than-Human Agency in Archaeology

Relational Identities and Other-than-Human Agency in Archaeology explores the benefits and consequences of archaeological theorizing on and interpretation of the social agency of nonhumans as relational beings capable of producing change in the world. The volume cross-examines traditional understanding of agency and personhood, presenting a globally diverse set of case studies that cover a range of cultural, geographical, and historical contexts. Agency (the ability to act) and personhood (the reciprocal qualities of relational beings) have traditionally been strictly assigned to humans. In case studies from Ghana to Australia to the British Isles and Mesoamerica, contributors to this volume demonstrate that objects, animals, locations, and other nonhuman actors also potentially share this ontological status and are capable of instigating events and enacting change. This kind of other-than-human agency is not a one-way transaction of cause to effect but requires an appropriate form of reciprocal engagement indicative of relational personhood, which in these cases, left material traces detectable in the archaeological record. Modern dualist ontologies separating objects from subjects and the animate from the inanimate obscure our understanding of the roles that other-than-human agents played in past societies. Relational Identities and Other-than-Human Agency in Archaeology challenges this essentialist binary perspective. Contributors in this volume show that intersubjective (inherently social) ways of being are a fundamental and indispensable condition of all personhood and move the debate in posthumanist scholarship beyond the polarizing dichotomies of relational versus bounded types of persons. In this way, the book makes a significant contribution to theory and interpretation of personhood and other-than-human agency in archaeology.https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/books/1141/thumbnail.jp

Features for Killer Apps from a Semantic Web Perspective

There are certain features that that distinguish killer apps from other ordinary applications. This chapter examines those features in the context of the semantic web, in the hope that a better understanding of the characteristics of killer apps might encourage their consideration when developing semantic web applications. Killer apps are highly tranformative technologies that create new e-commerce venues and widespread patterns of behaviour. Information technology, generally, and the Web, in particular, have benefited from killer apps to create new networks of users and increase its value. The semantic web community on the other hand is still awaiting a killer app that proves the superiority of its technologies. The authors hope that this chapter will help to highlight some of the common ingredients of killer apps in e-commerce, and discuss how such applications might emerge in the semantic web

RDF, the semantic web, Jordan, Jordan and Jordan

This collection is addressed to archivists and library professionals, and so has a slight focus on implications implications for them. This chapter is nonetheless intended to be a more-or-less generic introduction to the Semantic Web and RDF, which isn't specific to that domain

Manuscriptorium Digital Library and ENRICH Project: Means for Dealing with Digital Codicology and Palaeography

Codicology and palaeography in the digital age can be developed both through adapting existing methods and using information and communication technologies. This can be achieved e.g by projects focusing on the integration of individual resources under a single user interface. This is the aim of the Manuscriptorium digital library as well as the ENRICH project. The integration is based on the centralisation of metadata from various resources and on the distributed storage of data, mainly digital images. This is implemented through a distributed complex digital document, containing the so-called identification record and more data types. The construction of the integrated Manuscriptorium digital library within the ENRICH project is being done in four basic ways: automatically, or semi-automatically respectively manually, and those both online and offline. This has made it possible to amass more than 5,000 documents. For Manuscriptorium, a search is important, which allows information to be gathered through special fields and the differences in graphics to be harmonised. The aim of the ENRICH project is also the creation of tools for the compilation of virtual collections and documents. In its method of integrating resources, the Manuscriptorium endeavours to be an instrument of codicological and palaeographic research

Semantic learning webs

By 2020, microprocessors will likely be as cheap and plentiful as scrap paper,scattered by the millions into the environment, allowing us to place intelligent systems everywhere. This will change everything around us, including the nature of commerce, the wealth of nations, and the way we communicate, work, play, and live. This will give us smart homes, cars, TVs , jewellery, and money. We will speak to our appliances, and they will speak back. Scientists also expect the Internet will wire up the entire planet and evolve into a membrane consisting of millions of computer networks, creating an “intelligent planet.” The Internet will eventually become a “Magic Mirror” that appears in fairy tales, able to speak with the wisdom of the human race. Michio Kaku, Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the Twenty - First Century, 1998 If the semantic web needed a symbol, a good one to use would be a Navaho dream-catcher: a small web, lovingly hand-crafted, [easy] to look at, and rumored to catch dreams; but really more of a symbol than a reality. Pat Hayes, Catching the Dreams, 2002 Though it is almost impossible to envisage what the Web will be like by the end of the next decade, we can say with some certainty that it will have continued its seemingly unstoppable growth. Given the investment of time and money in the Semantic Web (Berners-Lee et al., 2001), we can also be sure that some form of semanticization will have taken place. This might be superficial - accomplished simply through the addition of loose forms of meta-data mark-up, or more principled – grounded in ontologies and formalised by means of emerging semantic web standards, such as RDF (Lassila and Swick, 1999) or OWL (Mc Guinness and van Harmelen, 2003). Whatever the case, the addition of semantic mark-up will make at least part of the Web more readily accessible to humans and their software agents and will facilitate agent interoperability. If current research is successful there will also be a plethora of e-learning platforms making use of a varied menu of reusable educational material or learning objects. For the learner, the semanticized Web will, in addition, offer rich seams of diverse learning resources over and above the course materials (or learning objects) specified by course designers. For instance, the annotation registries, which provide access to marked up resources, will enable more focussed, ontologically-guided (or semantic) search. This much is already in development. But we can go much further. Semantic technologies make it possible not only to reason about the Web as if it is one extended knowledge base but also to provide a range of additional educational semantic web services such as summarization, interpretation or sense-making, structure-visualization, and support for argumentation