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The following is a list of SIMILE projects.
The SIMILE tools assist in the storage, querying, transformation and mapping of very large collections of RDF data. The tools developed within SIMILE are meant to allow people who are not Semantic Web developers to create ontologies which describe their specialized metadata, create RDF and convert other types of metadata into RDF. These open source tools are designed to be scalable and provide for cross-community sharing of metadata at low cost.
Longwell is a faceted browser which enables the user to visualize and browse any RDF data set, allowing the user to quickly build a user-friendly web site out of the RDF data without requiring the user to write any RDF code. Facets are metadata fields considered important for a given data set. In its default configuration, the collection of facets is returned along the right-hand side of the page, and clicking on any facet causes the refinement of facets in relation to the data retrieved. Longwell then displays only the subset of the data which meet those restrictions. This appears on the left-hand side of the page. Previously selected restrictions can be removed, which causes a broadening of the subset of items displayed.
Piggy Bank is a Firefox extension which enables the user to collect information from the Web, save it for future use, tag it with keywords, search and browse information collected, retrieve saved information, share collected information and install screen scrapers. Piggy Bank gathers RDF data where it is available, and where it is not available, it generates it from HTML by using screen scrapers. This incremental approach to the realization of the Semantic Web vision allows the user to save and tag information gathered from web pages without having to cut, paste and label the various products of their browsing. By clicking on the keyword they have used to tag particular types of item, the user can view all of those items together within her browser, without having to open other applications. Users can also deposit saved data in the Semantic Bank, where other users can browse it and add their own contributions. This pooling of keywords underlies services such as Flickr and del.icio.us, where communities can collaborate to build a taxonomy for shared data. These taxonomies, which emerge as information is accumulated, are known as folksonomies.
Solvent is a Firefox extension that enables the user to write screen scrapers for Piggy Bank.
Gadget is an XML inspector which enables the user to condense large amounts of well-formed XML data.
Welkin is a graph-based RDF visualizer. It graphs RDF data sets, allowing the user to visualize the global shape and clustering characteristics of the data, which can aid them in mentally modeling it, seeing how it connects and identifying mappings between the set and possible ontologies. A particular data cluster which stands out when graphed might well be missed when browsed at closer range.
Fresnel is a vocabulary for specifying how RDF graphs are presented. Fresnel addresses the problem that currently, each RDF browser and visualization tool decides, on an ad hoc basis, what information in an RDF graph is presented and how to present it. Fresnel uses the concepts of lenses and formats. Lenses determine which properties are displayed and how they are ordered. Formats control how resources and properties are presented.
Timeline is a tool for visualizing events over time. It can be populated by pointing it at an XML file
Exhibit is technology that enables developers to provide browsing of faceted classifications in a web browser.
Referee is a program that crawls the links that point to its user's pages. It extracts metadata from those pages and the text around the links that pointed to its user's pages, converting it, if need be, into RDF format. Referee discriminates between the pages that refer to the user's pages and the comments, meaning the text immediately surrounding the link. It generates a data graph, allowing it to display the fact that, for example, exactly the same comment in relation to its user's pages appears on more than one page, which is the container of the comment. A page can have more than one comment, and a comment can appear on more than one page. This can be illustrated in a data graph, but would not be possible with a data tree, such as is generated by the XML data model.
The RDFizer project is a directory of tools for converting various data formats into RDF. MIT Libraries provides a home for some of these tools. RDFizers are a group of tools that allows the transformation of existing data into an RDF representation. Given a database of interest, these tools can often - when the data formats are highly structured -convert the data into an RDF representation without human intervention, first determining what ontology to use to express the information. Where semantic relationships are implicit, the RDFizers will not be as successful without human input. The SIMILE project has built RDFizers that convert from the following formats:
Crowbar is a web scraping environment based on the use of a server-side headless Mozilla-based browser. It is used as a research prototype to investigate how to enable the running of Piggy Bank JavaScript scrapers from the command line and thus automate web site scraping.
The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable.
The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard originally designed as a data model for metadata. It has come to be used as a general method for description and exchange of graph data. RDF provides a variety of syntax notations and data serialization formats, with Turtle currently being the most widely used notation.
The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies. Ontologies are a formal way to describe taxonomies and classification networks, essentially defining the structure of knowledge for various domains: the nouns representing classes of objects and the verbs representing relations between the objects.
SPARQL is an RDF query language—that is, a semantic query language for databases—able to retrieve and manipulate data stored in Resource Description Framework (RDF) format. It was made a standard by the RDF Data Access Working Group (DAWG) of the World Wide Web Consortium, and is recognized as one of the key technologies of the semantic web. On 15 January 2008, SPARQL 1.0 was acknowledged by W3C as an official recommendation, and SPARQL 1.1 in March, 2013.
FOAF is a machine-readable ontology describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects. Anyone can use FOAF to describe themselves. FOAF allows groups of people to describe social networks without the need for a centralised database.
A semantic wiki is a wiki that has an underlying model of the knowledge described in its pages. Regular, or syntactic, wikis have structured text and untyped hyperlinks. Semantic wikis, on the other hand, provide the ability to capture or identify information about the data within pages, and the relationships between pages, in ways that can be queried or exported like a database through semantic queries.
RDFa or Resource Description Framework in Attributes is a W3C Recommendation that adds a set of attribute-level extensions to HTML, XHTML and various XML-based document types for embedding rich metadata within Web documents. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) data-model mapping enables its use for embedding RDF subject-predicate-object expressions within XHTML documents. It also enables the extraction of RDF model triples by compliant user agents.
The ultimate goal of semantic technology is to help machines understand data. To enable the encoding of semantics with the data, well-known technologies are RDF and OWL. These technologies formally represent the meaning involved in information. For example, ontology can describe concepts, relationships between things, and categories of things. These embedded semantics with the data offer significant advantages such as reasoning over data and dealing with heterogeneous data sources.
Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) is a W3C recommendation designed for representation of thesauri, classification schemes, taxonomies, subject-heading systems, or any other type of structured controlled vocabulary. SKOS is part of the Semantic Web family of standards built upon RDF and RDFS, and its main objective is to enable easy publication and use of such vocabularies as linked data.
Haystack is a project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to research and develop several applications around personal information management and the Semantic Web. The most notable of those applications is the Haystack client, a research personal information manager (PIM) and one of the first to be based on semantic desktop technologies. The Haystack client is published as open source software under the BSD license.
Oracle Spatial and Graph, formerly Oracle Spatial, is a free option component of the Oracle Database. The spatial features in Oracle Spatial and Graph aid users in managing geographic and location-data in a native type within an Oracle database, potentially supporting a wide range of applications — from automated mapping, facilities management, and geographic information systems (AM/FM/GIS), to wireless location services and location-enabled e-business. The graph features in Oracle Spatial and Graph include Oracle Network Data Model (NDM) graphs used in traditional network applications in major transportation, telcos, utilities and energy organizations and RDF semantic graphs used in social networks and social interactions and in linking disparate data sets to address requirements from the research, health sciences, finance, media and intelligence communities.
Semantic publishing on the Web, or semantic web publishing, refers to publishing information on the web as documents accompanied by semantic markup. Semantic publication provides a way for computers to understand the structure and even the meaning of the published information, making information search and data integration more efficient.
Semantically Interlinked Online Communities Project is a Semantic Web technology. SIOC provides methods for interconnecting discussion methods such as blogs, forums and mailing lists to each other. It consists of the SIOC ontology, an open-standard machine-readable format for expressing the information contained both explicitly and implicitly in Internet discussion methods, of SIOC metadata producers for a number of popular blogging platforms and content management systems, and of storage and browsing/searching systems for leveraging this SIOC data.
In computer science, the semantic desktop is a collective term for ideas related to changing a computer's user interface and data handling capabilities so that data are more easily shared between different applications or tasks and so that data that once could not be automatically processed by a computer could be. It also encompasses some ideas about being able to share information automatically between different people. This concept is very much related to the Semantic Web, but is distinct insofar as its main concern is the personal use of information.
SIMILE was a joint research project run by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries and MIT CSAIL and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project ran from 2003 to August 2008. It focused on developing tools to increase the interoperability of disparate digital collections. Much of SIMILE's technical focus is oriented towards Semantic Web technology and standards such as Resource Description Framework (RDF).
Hyperdata are data objects linked to other data objects in other places, as hypertext indicates text linked to other text in other places. Hyperdata enables the formation of a web of data, evolving from the "data on the Web" that is not inter-related.
The Semantic Web Stack, also known as Semantic Web Cake or Semantic Web Layer Cake, illustrates the architecture of the Semantic Web.
Knowledge extraction is the creation of knowledge from structured and unstructured sources. The resulting knowledge needs to be in a machine-readable and machine-interpretable format and must represent knowledge in a manner that facilitates inferencing. Although it is methodically similar to information extraction (NLP) and ETL, the main criterion is that the extraction result goes beyond the creation of structured information or the transformation into a relational schema. It requires either the reuse of existing formal knowledge or the generation of a schema based on the source data.
The Open Semantic Framework (OSF) is an integrated software stack using semantic technologies for knowledge management. It has a layered architecture that combines existing open source software with additional open source components developed specifically to provide a complete Web application framework. OSF is made available under the Apache 2 license.
In natural language processing, linguistics, and neighboring fields, Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) describes a method and an interdisciplinary community concerned with creating, sharing, and (re-)using language resources in accordance with Linked Data principles. The Linguistic Linked Open Data Cloud was conceived and is being maintained by the Open Linguistics Working Group (OWLG) of the Open Knowledge Foundation, but has been a point of focal activity for several W3C community groups, research projects, and infrastructure efforts since then.