Computer books are becoming obsolete at a faster and faster rate. The web made programming language reference books pretty obsolete at least 10 or 15 years ago, because instead of paying money for a thousand-page volume that explains every possible parameter of every function call in a given programming language, you could find the explanations online for free. These explanations often came from the sponsors of the language itself, who updated this documentation each time they updated the…
What do 1960s LISP programs for natural language understanding, 1980s Prolog programs for expert systems, and today’s use of large language models have in common? Nothing, really, except they’ve all been referred to as Artificial Intelligence.
“Semantic web technology” refers to technology designed to create something that never got created. That’s OK. Lots of great things were and continue to be created.
O’Reilly books such as Learning SPARQL have an errata page where anyone can submit corrections for the book, and I appreciate all entries. Some are just basic typo misspellings, which is embarrassing. Some are examples that no longer work because a certain SPARQL endpoint is no longer up or, in several cases, because DBpedia entries got revised to describe resources using different properties than they did when the book was published.
I asked ChatGPT and Copilot to parse my two favorite home-grown OWL examples, do the appropriate inferencing, and show me the results, and I was impressed.
(This may look like a long blog entry, but it’s mostly sample schemas, data, and shapes. It should be a quick read.)
It’s easy enough for a SPARQL query to specify that you only want literal values that are tagged with a particular spoken language such as English or French. I had a more complex condition to express recently that has happened to me fairly often: how do I retrieve all the data for a particular resource except the literals tagged in a foreign language? I want all the triples with object property values, and I want all the ones with literal values, regardless of type, unless they are tagged…
