[Inpycon] Weekend meeting

Fri Oct 9 19:53:44 CEST 2009

Hello All,

My name is Sundar and I am Senior Python programming language user [?]
(I mean 3+ years). I like Python programming. Well, I haven't
registered for PyCon early enough but I attended Mayavi, Algorithms
and Semantic Web talk. Wanted to attend many other interesting talks
as well but time didn't permit me. So following some of the online
material now.

I also have very much interest in Semantic Web but I some how don't
agree with the Anand's post. No offence Anand. I am following Semantic
Web since 2005 onwards (soon after the SPARQL draft was out) and have
been active member in online Semantic Web groups. Open Calais is a Web
service which stores data/information with Semantics. When we access
Open Calais store by its APIs, what we get in return is JSON format
(may be others as well, I haven't explored much its API) results with
entity and value etc. But that is something like taking data out from
your database after sending a query. If somebody follows WordNet and
NLP can figure it out with document classification algorithms that the
particular text you are sending to Open Calais has what semantics
associated (associated Nouns, Verbs e.g. Person, place, actions, class
of the text i.e. sports, politics, history etc).

Arranging this information on our webpage or blog is not the Semantic
Web. I would call it as fetching data from a Semantic Data store and
arranging it on our webpages so that Search engines can find it in
better manner or we can have quality or enriched information on our
webpages (one can use RDFa). Semantic Web is what happening inside
Open Calais along with other Linguistics based features for extracting
meaning of the data we send or ask through API. And no way anybody can
call this as ONTOLOGY. Ontologies are like domain modelling, a hard
thing). Ontologies are inside thing of Open Calais. What we get out
from their data store is not an Ontology. Its simply the data with
semantics we are getting (just the relationships without actually
knowing the domain model built inside). We no way have any knowledge
of how the data inside Open Calais is stored and what their ontology
for a particular domain is (Something similar to getting results out
from a database without knowing what the internal schema is).

Semantic Web basic concept has RDF (which is in turn an XML based
standard). What that guy in PyCon showed in his presentation was a
direction to think about Semantic Web if you yourself is building some
Semantic Web based system (eg. if your company wants to launch some
online system with Semantic Web features then you can have your domain
vocabulary defined and accessible using a URL, also how the RDF
statements can be made, what are the best practices for making such
statements etc). His talk was more of focused on large Enterprise
systems and integrations compared to using Semantic Web for Web page
based data annotation. (Micro formats is not the part of W3C based
Semantic Web protocol stack).

Based on my limited knowledge, RDFa and GRDDL are the two standards
from W3C that can be used for Web content annotation and the RDFLib
(that guy used this library in his practical Python examples if you
remember) can generate RDFa documents from the triples you have in
your datastore (see his last 3 or 4 slides). RDF based XML documents
can be generated from a Web application or an enterprise application
for semantic based data exchange.

Well, my thoughts here are not to argue on any thing but to give a
picture of Semantic Web from my acquired knowledge in last 4or so
years. (and also the perspective of that guy as I observed).

I guess it would have been more interesting if that guy would have
given few examples of using Description Logic to describe data
relationship and how OWL fits into that model and also about
Stanford's Semantic Web Protege editor or some other editors for
designing Ontologies. I guess it requires more than 45 min.

Nevertheless, his talk was satisfying for me, may be because I already
had background knowledge of this subject.

Regards,

Sundar

On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 4:48 PM, Arvind Jamuna Dixit <ardsrk at
gmail.com <http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/inpycon>>wrote:

>* Semantic web and python. Pretty cool stuff. I am interested.*

 Cool. Here is a brief of what I want to present.

 Anyone who attended the talk on Semantic web in Pycon would have
 understood something about the "theorotical" semantic web as
 visualized by W3C.

 This is however a top-down approach which requires annotating
 web-pages with metadata such as RDF, microformats etc.

 However a more practical approach is extracting
 semantic content namely ontologies and relationships from existing
 web content. Such services are already becoming available.

 I will be demonstrating such a web-service namely "OpenCalais"
 by Reuters and how to use it in Python to develop some applications
 using the rich semantic data returned by the service.

 The whole session will be interactive and about showing running
 Python code, and will last from 45min - 1 hour.

>**>**>* On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 3:28 PM, Anand Balachandran Pillai <*>* abpillai at gmail.com <http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/inpycon>> wrote:*>**>>**>>**>>* On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 3:17 PM, Noufal Ibrahim <noufal at gmail.com <http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/inpycon>> wrote:*>>**>>>* On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 2:33 PM, Arvind Jamuna Dixit <ardsrk at gmail.com <http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/inpycon>>*>>>* wrote:*>>>* > I will come too. Is it a casual meeting or does it have some agenda?*>>>**>>>* Some cleanup regarding the conference. Anand had some stuff on open*>>>* calais that he was planning to present*>>>**>>**>>* Good idea, even I did not think about it. How many would be interested in*>>* some hands on demo of a bottom up approach to semantic web using Python ?*>>**>>**>>>**>>>**>>>* --*>>>* ~noufal*>>>* http://nibrahim.net.in*>>>* _______________________________________________*>>>* Inpycon mailing list*>>>* Inpycon at python.org <http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/inpycon>*>>>* http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/inpycon*>>>**>>**>>**>>**>>* --*>>* --Anand*>>**>>**>>**>>**>>* _______________________________________________*>>* Inpycon mailing list*>>* Inpycon at python.org <http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/inpycon>*>>* http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/inpycon*>>**>>**>**>* _______________________________________________*>* Inpycon mailing list*>* Inpycon at python.org <http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/inpycon>*>* http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/inpycon*>**>**

-- 
--Anand
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