Simile and the Semantic Web Draft Presentation for the W3C Technical Plenary Cannes, March 1-5, 2004

Draft, 2/12/2004Simile at CannesSlide 2 Questions about Talk Are we on the program? What session? Who is the audience? How long is the talk? Contents of talk? –Additional topics to cover, details? –Adding pizzaz?

Draft, 2/12/2004Simile at CannesSlide 3 Simile Goals Make the Semantic Web a reality –For libraries and their users –Support heterogeneous, multi-community metadata –End-user tools for viewing, browsing, searching Assess current state of Semantic Web –Demonstrate utility of standards (RDF, RDFS, OWL) –Exercise tool stack –Identify issues, gaps, opportunities, best practices

Draft, 2/12/2004Simile at CannesSlide 4 Outline of Talk Library metadata –Current situation –Desired improvements The Simile project –Participants –A motivating scenario –Progress

Draft, 2/12/2004Simile at CannesSlide 5 Research Libraries Current Situation Library perspective –Large amounts of metadata in catalogs –Different ontologies (DC, VRA, site specific) –Varying amount, quality of metadata User perspective –Multitude of site specific tools –Hard to switch from one domain to another –Hard to search across domains

Draft, 2/12/2004Simile at CannesSlide 6 Desired Improvements Reduced user effort, time spent Contextual views of data Serendipitous discovery Recombinant metadata Value added by incremental metadata

Draft, 2/12/2004Simile at CannesSlide 7 Simile Participants MIT Libraries –DSpace, DSpace Federation W3C –Semantic Web Activity Hewlett-Packard –RDF technologies MIT CSAIL –Haystack Project

Draft, 2/12/2004Simile at CannesSlide 8 Motivating Simile Scenario Creating an Art Course Exploring course outlines on the Web –E.g., in MIT OCW –Leverage thought, work invested by others Tracking down resources –E.g., images in Artstor database –Shape, flesh out course –Find alternative resources

Draft, 2/12/2004Simile at CannesSlide 9 Goals for Simile in Scenaria Easy access to multiple schemas Tools to view data –Default views with no configuration –Easily customized views Faceted browsing, searching across schemas Inference based on schema mapping rules

Draft, 2/12/2004Simile at CannesSlide 10 Enabling Components in Simile Semantic bindings: person, place, thing Local data access: Jena Distributed data access: Joseki Multiple browsers: Haystack, Longwell

Draft, 2/12/2004Simile at CannesSlide 11 Live Demo Script needed

Draft, 2/12/2004Simile at CannesSlide 12 Behind the Demo Data Conversion Problems –Cleansing data –Correlating ontologies Solution: XSLT transformation Lessons learned

Draft, 2/12/2004Simile at CannesSlide 13 Behind the Demo: Data Access Haystack (personalized info repository) –Display of objects from different schemas –Associative navigation, search across schemas –Ontology browser Longwell (customized Simile browser) –Inference Lessons learned –What RDF provides vs. whats needed –Scalability, performance issues

Draft, 2/12/2004Simile at CannesSlide 14 Wrap Up Conclusions? Availability of prototype tools? For more information, see? Invitation to collaborate?