Linked Data and RDF events at DrupalCon Austin

The video of the Linked Data case study was posted on the session page. If you forgot to evaluate the session, you can still do so by clicking on the link at the top of the session page, it takes less than 2 mins and it's useful to improve future events. Any feedback is appreciated :)

Here are some notes of the Bird of a Feather we had the next day (thanks Adam for taking notes, which I've adapted below).

How to discover vocabularies

Check schema.org first! It was designed to cover the majority of the content published on the web. If you can't find your type in the Type hierarchy, send an email to the schema.org mailing list (public-vocabs) and ask, there might a relevant type in the schema.org hierarchy but it's just named differently. If there isn't one, then you might find others who are interested in working with you to draft a proposal. Check out the list of accepted and pending proposal to schema.org and see if one matches your needs. One successful example was the TV and Radio schema which was added last year. Other examples are Health/Medical, and Schema Bib Extend Community Group which is still on going. If your idea is too specific and too niche for schema.org, you will be told so, but on the up side, you might find one or two people interested in collaborating with you on a new vocabulary (make sure to also ask on the semantic-web mailing list).

If your search on schema.org was unfruitful, check the Linked Open Vocabularies (LOV) project to search through hundreds of RDF vocabularies.

If you plan to develop and publish your own vocabulary, you can use Neologism, a Drupal distribution for building RDF Vocabularies:
- might need patches to make stable on D7. are you interested?
- example of Neologism-powered vocab: VoID - http://vocab.deri.ie/void

Tools for entity extraction

• Word Link (https://drupal.org/project/word_link) - not sure if its semantic out of the box?
• Stanbol - Drupal Stanbol module
• Zemanta: suggests images and links as you type your content.
• Open Calais: created by phase2technology, but unsure on the current status. similar to Zemanta, but uses different index.

Knowledge bases useful to reference topics

• New York Times SKOS (http://data.nytimes.com/): URI for locations, news topics, people. Not as broad as some other knowledge bases, but the advantage is that they link to NYT news articles.
• Freebase (https://www.freebase.com/): Google's public knowledge base, a subset of Google's Knowledge Graph. Freebase's community curates data from Wikipedia. Available as RDF download. The knowledge graph is what powers a lot of the feature on Google Search such as the entity summary on the right (e.g. search for Lady Gaga) and the rich snippets (e.g. search for Multiple Sclerosis forum events).
• WikiData (https://www.wikidata.org/)