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Linked Data Solution for Exposing OpenLink Product Portfolio

At OpenLink Software, we've had an immense problem explaining the depth and breadth of our product porfolio via traditional Document Web pages. Thanks to SPARQL and Linked Data, we are now able to use Web Data Object IDs (HTTP based URIs) to produce super SKUs for every item in our product portfolio. Even better, we are able to handle the additional challenge of exposing features and benefits which by their very nature are mercurial across an array of fronts (products releases, product formats, and supported platforms etc).

Now I can simply state the following using Linked Data (hyperdata) links:

OpenLink Software's product porfolio is comprised of the following product families:
  1. Universal Data Access Drivers Suite (UDA) for ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET, OLE-DB, and XMLA
  2. OpenLink Data Spaces
  3. Virtuoso

We no longer have to explain (repeatedly) why our drivers exist in Express, Lite, and Multi-Tier Edition formats, or why you ultimately need Multi-Tier Drivers over Single Tier Drivers (Express or Lite Editions) since you ultimately heed high-performance, data encryption, and policy based security across each of the data access driver formats.

04:08 PM |

Contd: Why we need Linked Data

Increasingly, I am encountering commentary from the ReadWriteWeb data space that highlights critical problems solved by a Linked Data Web. Unfortunately, most of the time, there is a disconnect between the problem and the solution. By this I mean: technology in the Semantic Web realm isn't seen as the solution.

A while back, I wrote a post titled:Why we need Linked Data. The aim of the post was to bring attention to the implications of exponential growth of User Generated Content (typically, semi-structured and unstructured data) on the Web. The growth in question is occurring within a fixed data & information processing timeframe (i.e. there will always be 24hrs in a day), which sets the stage for Information Overload as expressed in a recent post from ReadWriteWeb titled: Visualizing Social Media Fatigue.

The emerging "Web of Linked Data" augments the current "Web of Linked Documents", by providing a structured data corpus partitioned by containers I prefer to call: Data Spaces. These spaces enable Linked Data aware solutions to deliver immense value such as, complex data graph traversal, starting from document beachheads, that expose relevant data within a faction of the time it would take to achieve the same thing using traditional document web methods such as full text search patterns, scraping, and mashing etc.

Remember, our DNA based data & information system far exceeds that of any inorganic system when it comes to reasoning, but it remains immensely incapable of accurately and efficiently processing huge volumes of data & information -- irrespective of data model.

The Idea behind the Semantic Web has always been about an evolution of the Web into a structured data collective comprised of interlinked Data items and Data Containers (Data Spaces). Of course we can argue forever about the Semantics of the solution (ironically), but we can't shirk away from the impending challenges that "Information Overload" is about to unleash on our limited processing time and capabilities.

For those looking for a so called "killer application" for the Semantic Web, I would urge you to align this quest with the "Killer Problem" of our times, because when you do so you will that all routes lead to: Linked Data that leverages existing Web Architecture.

Once you understand the problem, you will hopefully understand that we all need some kind of "Data Junction Box" that provides a "Data Access Focal Point" for all of the data we splatter across the net as we sign up for the next greatest and latest Web X.X hosted service, or as we work on a daily basis with a variety of tools within enterprise Intranets.

BTW - these "Data Junction Boxes" will also need to be unobtrusively bound to our individual Identities.

02:19 PM |

Additional OpenLink Data Spaces Features

Daniel Lewis has published another post about OpenLink Data Spaces (ODS) functionality titled:A few new features in OpenLink Data Spaces, that exposes additional features (some hot out the oven).

OpenLink Data Spaces (ODS) now officially supports:

Which means that OpenLink Data Spaces support all of the main standards being discussed in the DataPortability Interest Group!

APML Example:

All users of ODS automatically get a dynamically created APML file, for example: APML profile for Kingsley Idehen

The URI for an APML profile is: http://myopenlink.net/dataspace/<ods-username>/apml.xml

Meaning of a Tag Example:

All users of ODS automatically have tag cloud information embedded inside their SIOC file, for example: SIOC for Kingsley Idehen on the Myopenlink.net installation of ODS.

But even better, MOAT has been implemented in the ODS Tagging System. This has been demonstrated in a recent test blog post by my colleague Mitko Iliev, the blog post comes up on the tag search: http://myopenlink.net/dataspace/imitko/weblog/Mitko%27s%20Weblog/tag/paris

Which can be put through the OpenLink Data Browser:

OAuth Example:

OAuth Tokens and Secrets can be created for any ODS application. To do this:

  1. you can log in to MyOpenlink.net beta service, the Live Demo ODS installation, an EC2 instance, or your local installation
  2. then go to ‘Settings’
  3. and then you will see ‘OAuth Keys’
  4. you will then be able to choose the applications that you have instantiated and generate the token and secret for that app.

Related Document (Human) Links

Remember (as per my most recent post about ODS), ODS is about unobtrusive fusion of Web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0+ usage and interaction patterns. Thanks to a lot of recent standardization in the Semantic Web realm (e.g SPARQL), we are now employ the MOAT, SKOS, and SCOT ontologies as vehicles for Structured Tagging.

Structured Tagging?

This is how we take a key Web 2.0 feature (think 2D in a sense), bend it over, to create a Linked Data Web (Web 3.0) experience unobtrusively (see earlier posts re. Dimensions of Web). Thus, nobody has to change how they tag or where they tag, just expose ODS to the URLs of your Web 2.0 tagged content and it will produce URIs (Structured Data Object Identifiers) and a lnked data graph for your Tags Data Space (nee. Tag Cloud). ODS will construct a graph which exposes tag subject association, tag concept alignment / intended meaning, and tag frequencies, that ultimately deliver "relative disambiguation" of intended Tag Meaning (i.e. you can easily discern the taggers meaning via the Tags actual Data Space which is associated with the tagger). In a nutshell, the dynamics of relevance matching, ranking, and the like, change immensely without futile timeless debates about matters such as:

    What's the Linked Data value proposition?
    What's the Linked Data business model?
    What's the Semantic Web Killer application?

We can just get on with demonstrating Linked Data value using what exists on the Web today. This is the approach we are deliberately taking with ODS.

Related Items

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Tip: This post is best viewed via an RDF aware User Agent (e.g. a Browser or Data Viewer). I say this because the permalink of this post is a URI in a Linked Data Space (My Blog) comprised of more data than meets the eye (i.e. what you see when you read this post via a Document Web Browser) :-)

12:54 PM |

10 Reasons to use OpenLink Data Spaces (ODS)

Via post by Daniel Lewis, titled:10 Reasons to use OpenLink Data Spaces

There are quite a few reasons to use OpenLink Data Spaces (ODS). Here are 10 of the reasons why I use ODS:

  1. Its native support of DataPortability Recommendations such as RSS, Atom, APML, Yadis, OPML, Microformats, FOAF, SIOC, OpenID and OAuth.
  2. Its native support of Semantic Web Technologies such as: RDF and SPARQL/SPARUL for querying.
  3. Everything in ODS is an Object with its own URI, this is due to the underlying Object-Relational Architecture provided by Virtuoso.
  4. It has all the social media components that you could need, including: blogs, wikis, social networks, feed readers, CRM and a calendar.
  5. It is expandable by installing pre-configured components (called VADs), or by re-configuring a LAMP application to use Virtuoso. Some examples of current VADs include: MediaWiki, Wordpress and Drupal.
  6. It works with external webservices such as: Facebook, del.icio.us and Flickr.
  7. Everything within OpenLink Data Spaces is Linked Data, which provides more meaningful information than just plain structural information. This meaningful information could be used for complex inferencing systems, as ODS can be seen as a Knowledge Base.
  8. ODS builds bridges between the existing static-document based web (aka ‘Web 1.0‘), the more dynamic,  services-oriented, social and/or user-orientated webs (aka ‘Web 2.0‘) and the web which we are just going into, which is more data-orientated (aka ‘Web 3.0’ or ‘Linked Data Web’).
  9. It is fully supportive of Cloud Computing, and can be installed on Amazon EC2.
  10. Its released free under the GNU General Public License (GPL). [note]However, it is technically dual licensed as it lays on top of the Virtuoso Universal Server which has both Commercial and GPL licensing[/note]

The features above collectively provide users with a Linked Data Junction Box that may reside with corporate intranets or "out in the clouds" (Internet). You can consume, share, and publish data in a myriad of formats using a plethora of protocols, without any programming. ODS is simply about exposing the data from your Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 application interactions in structured from, with Linking, Sharing, and ultimately Meshing (not Mashing) in mind.

Note: Although ODS is equipped with a broad array of Web 2.0 style Applications, you do not need to use native ODS apps in order to exploit it's power. It binds to anything that supports the relevant protocols and data formats.

12:33 PM |

Data Spaces, User Identity, and Data Portability

If your Data Space was a Solar System, your personal Identity would be the Sun. I say this because your Identity is the conduit (access mechanism) to your data graph; the data you generate from various application interaction activities such as: Blogging, Bookmarking, Photo Sharing, Feed Aggregation etc.

Daniel Lewis has just published a nice blog post titled: The Data Space Philosophy, that puts the underlying Data Space concept in perspective.

The Linked Data Web is a Giant Global Graph of Data Spaces (meshes of data and identity exposed by graphs connecting data and identity)

Data Portability ultimately depends on platforms that provide unobtrusive generation of Linked Data (for data referencing) alongside support for a plethora of industry standard data formats -- which is what OpenLink Data Spaces has been about for a very long time :-)

Related

09:54 AM |

Virtuoso Universal Server 5.0.4 Release Details

We've just released version 5.0.4 of the Virtuoso Universal Server platform for SQL, XML, and RDF. The new release includes the following enhancements:

Web Server:

    - HTTP 1.1 compliant Transparent content-negotiation in URL-rewrite rules for Linked Data Deployment.

RDF Data Management:

    - New providers for the Jena, Sesame and Redland frameworks
    - support for SPARQL INSERT and UPDATE via HTTP POST
    - New SPARQL-BI extenstions that make Business Intelligence feasible via SPARQL
    - new "rdf_sink" folder for handling HTTP PUTs into WebDAV that automatically sync with Quad Store.
    - There are new Sponger (RDFizer) cartridges that map Amazon book-search results to the Biliographic Ontology, supports production of Linked Data from OAI, XBRL, and Yahoo finance data sources.
    - HTTPS protocol support added to Sponger
    - performance optimizations for SPARQL `DESCRIBE' and `CONSTRUCT', alongside general performance enhancements for RDF data set loading.

Core DBMS Engine:

    - PHP hosting a module re-implemented as a Virtuoso plugin inline with otherlanguage hosting modules
    - improved deadlock condtion management
    - enhanced POP and FTP server side protocol implementations that allow larger data transfers.

Additional Information

09:25 AM |

Linked Data -- Summing Up The Last 12 Months

Mike Bergman has just penned a post titled: Linked Data Comes of Age, that provides a nice 12 month summation of Linked Data and the Linking Open Data Community project's efforts to date.

Like most of us in the Linked Data community, he sees the upcoming Linked Data Conference by Jupiter as a watershed moment.

05:02 PM |