Abstract
Semantic Web researchers at the École des Mines de Saint-Étienne, FR, are interested in making the Semantic Web formalisms and technologies more accessible to the companies and the web of things. This presentation will overview three of our recent contributions that all target this goal.
1) MINES Saint-Étienne leads a Specialist Task Force (STF) financed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), with the goal to consolidate the Smart Anything REFerence (SAREF) standard ontology and its community of industrial users, based on the experience of the the EUREKA ITEA 12004 SEAS project (3 years, 15 M€, 35 partners). The SEAS ontology is modular and versioned, and is built on top of core reference ontology patterns that can be instantiated to create the SEAS ontology itself with a homogeneous and predictable structure for the modelling and the description of any kind of engineering-related data/information/systems. Ontology patterns are like design patterns in object oriented programming. They describe structural, logical, or naming, best practices that one can consider when building an ontology. https://ci.mines-stetienne.fr/seas/
2) SPARQL-Generate is an extension of SPARQL 1.1 for querying not only RDF datasets but also documents in arbitrary formats. It offers a simple template-based option to generate RDF Graphs from documents, and presents the following advantages: a) anyone familiar with SPARQL can easily learn SPARQL-Generate; b) SPARQL-Generate leverages the expressivity of SPARQL 1.1: Aggregates, Solution Sequences and Modifiers, SPARQL functions and their extension mechanism; c) it integrates seamlessly with existing standards for consuming Semantic Web data, such as SPARQL or Semantic Web programming frameworks. One can use its Apache 2.0 implementation to generate RDF from web documents in XML, JSON, CSV, HTML, CBOR, and plain text with regular expressions. https://ci.mines-stetienne.fr/sparql-generate/
3) The Linked Datatypes initative (LINDT) aims at enabling lightweight descriptions of useful knowledge on the Web of Data, using simple RDF literals empowered by RDF Datatypes. The flagship Datatype is cdt:ucum that can be used to describe measurements with any unit defined in The Unified Code for Units of Measure: a code system intended to include all units of measures being contemporarily used in international science, engineering, and business. Different from using existing vocabularies for quantities and units of measures (schema.org, QUDT, OM, ...), SPARQL queries can leverage the native SPARQL operators (=, <, etc.) to compare UCUM literals, and arithmetic functions (+, -, *, /) to manipulate quantity value literals. https://ci.mines-stetienne.fr/lindt/