The Tetherless World Weblog

We’re pleased to announce the OWL 2 Reference Card [1]. The Card is meant to be a “cheat sheet” of OWL 2 features printable on a single piece of paper (on both sides). It is based on the OWL 2 Quick Reference Guide [1], which is now a Proposed Recommendation [2] in the OWL 2 Web Ontology Language document set.

Background: OWL 2 [4] is an extension to OWL 1 with a few new functionalities. Some of the new features are syntactic sugar (e.g., disjoint union of classes) while others offer new expressivity, including:

* keys;
* property chains;
* richer datatypes, data ranges;
* qualified cardinality restrictions;
* asymmetric, reflexive, and disjoint properties; and
* enhanced annotation capabilities

Comments and suggestions to the Card are welcome (please send to public-owl-comments@w3.org)

[1] http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/refcard

[2] http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/wiki/Quick_Reference_Guide

[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/PR-owl2-quick-reference-20090922/

[4] http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-overview/

Jie Bao

For those interested, I kept a twitter log of my daughter’s graduation — but did it in haiku to make it more interesting — slightly edited and cleaned up - here’s what I’ve got.

Graduation in Haiku

Parents wait and wait
Students anxious in the hall
Commencement is nigh

Pomp and Circumstance
Way too many caps and gowns
precess slowly by

Chairman of trustees
welcomes all to the event
when will he be done?

President makes jokes
then he gets more serious
“we need your money!”

Now they proceed to
honorary doctorates
lots of famous folks

(someone sends a text
it’s a message from my kid:
“Get me out of here!”)

juris causus doc
no one has heard of this guy
must be a donor

Commencement address
starts with funny anecdote
so what else is new?

Speaker’s really good!
Words of hope and cheer - too bad:
grads are all asleep

Cannot see my kid
the talks all go on too long
will it ever end?

A problem with this:
seeing your kid get her degree
means watching the rest

The Prez says the words
the crowd stands up, cheers real loud
kids now have B.A.s

Alma mater sung
speeches made, degrees conferred
graduation’s done

For whatever reason, I’ve recently been asked several time about my quote “A little semantics goes a long way” - I sent a long email answer to one of these, and then realized I could make it into a web page to point people at should this come up again — so for those of you looking for a little light background reading, and interested, enjoy.  http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~hendler/LittleSemanticsWeb.html

During some random Web surfing (something I don’t get nearly enough time to do these days), I ran into the Science blogging Challenge (aka “get a senior scientist blogging”) and it got me thinking about how I got blogging, and more recently how I got twittering (which seems to fit my insane life style better). I sent the following entry to the competition, nominating a few people who were instrumental in getting me blogging and more recently getting me to tweet.

Here’s what I said:

My motivation to start blogging actually came because of a different senior scientist starting his blog — In Jan 06, one of my colleagues started a blog - and it got some big notice — since the blogger was Tim Berners-Lee that made some sense, My first real blog (I had contributed blog comments and done an occasional “guest shot” on other peoples blogs) was called “Time to get a blog” and mentions the influence of Tim’s bloggin. I cannot tell you who convinced Tim to blog, but I know that Danny Weitzner, whose blog is at http://people.w3.org/~djweitzner/blog/, was one of the influences.
However, Tim’s starting to blog is the thing that got me to finally do it, but the person who really got me blogging is Jennifer Golbeck, (who blogs in a bunch of different places) who is the one who convinced me to get my act together and walk the walk if I was going to claim to be a Professor of All Things Web, as I now try to be - she’s also the one who got me signed up on orkut, facebook (beta) and a bunch of other social networking sites long before it became popular - and if I’m not mistaken she’s probably the person who got me my gmail invitation way back when - so Jen should definitely be someone considered in the “I got a senior scientist to blog” category.
Meanwhile, the propagation continues - Peter Fox, who attended this past Sci Foo, and is an occasional blogger has joined my lab, and he and I are trying to convince several of our colleagues, esp. Deborah McGuinness, to get blogging.
I’d also like to point out that while blogging continues to be interesting to look at as a mechanism for propagating science, I’m finding these days that microblogging (i’m jahendler on twitter) has been gaining popularity, especially among the Social Scientists - and it may be an even better way for some of the busy senior scientists you’re trying to reach out to (if they can just learn to use the messaging on their cell phones). I credit “eingang” (Michelle Hoyle - http://einiverse.eingang.org/) for getting me twittering, and I notice that a quick message from my phone during a lecture or seminar is a good way to share a thought or a pointer (although I find it also is fun to add personal observations and such - so it humanizes the scientists who use it)
So anyway - there are three entries for the contest
Danny Weitzner for helping to get Tim Berners-Lee blogging
Jen Golbeck for getting me blogging
Michele Hoyle for getting me micro-blogging
cheers
Jim H.

The Tetherless World invites users of Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch to try out our new ontology browser, OWL Mobile.

OWL Mobile is powered by Jena and Pellet, operating remotely, to provide speed and battery performance mobile devices users expect from their applications. Load one or more ontologies through the Load Ontologies tab. Supply a URL to a custom ontology or use the list of past ontologies. Once you’ve loaded an ontology, use the “Classes”, “Properties”, and “Individuals” tabs to browse through the ontology. Clicking on an item will expand it and give additional information about that particular object. Links which point to other members of the ontology will switch to the appropriate URI when clicked. External links such as web pages, email address, and phone numbers will open the appropriate application on iPhone (phone numbers won’t work on the iTouch) when activated.

Point Safari to http://onto.rpi.edu/demo/owlmobile2/ to try the application. Feel free to bookmark it or add it to the home screen for easy access.

Evan Patton