Samuel's Tech Blog

I found a nice introduction to the use of RDF in Prolog (SWI-Prolog). It contains short primers for both RDF and Prolog, so it should be accessible to anyone with a minimal programming background:

• An Introduction to Prolog and RDF

Egon pointed me to an interesting blog post on RIF and OWL. The post highlights a situation very relevant for my project: The apparent existence of two main approaches in the field of "knowledge representation and reasoning" (maybe it should be called simply handling?) on the Semantic Web.

I Just read this paper on using thea for OWL (Web Ontology Language) reasoning from within Prolog.

Talking about BLIPKIT, the Thea library - for reading OWL2 ontologies directly from within SWI-Prolog - seems relevant for this project, as a complement to BLIPKIT. It's written (partly) by the author of BLIPKIT.

Some features I noted:

• SWRL support (SWRL - Semantic Web Rule Language . is a proposed W3C standard for exchange between rule languages on the web)
• Bridge to the java OWL API
• translation of ontologies to Description Logic programs

I finally found a summary that contrasts RDF, RDF Schema, OWL, and rule languages (SWRL in this case) in a few sentences:

http://syntheticbiology.org/Semantic_web_ontology/Semantic_Web.html

Reading the paper on the Bio2RDF database.

It contains something that I need, an overview of different techniques, databases and formats that are common in the semantic web community, but of which I know to few still.

Some useful abbreviations just learned (some I knew somewhat, but was not sure):

Formats / Languages

• RDF - Resource Description Framework
• OWL - Web Ontology Language
• LSID - Life Sciences ID
• Dublin core

Databases

• Bio2RDF
• KEGG - Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes