Examples of using semantic web technologies in real world applications

Question

Are you working on a (probably commercial) product which uses RDF/OWL/SPARQL technologies? If so, can you please describe your product?

Answer 1

O'Reilly's Practical RDF has a chatper titled Commercial Uses of RDF/XML. The table at the left lists the subsections: Chandler, RDF Gateway, Seamark, and Adobe's XMP stuff.

Answer 2

Have a look at the Calais Viewer for a real world application.

Answer 3

Microsoft Interactive Media Manager is a metadata management system developed on the Microsoft SharePoint platform that heavily leverages RDF, OWL, and SPARQL. It has some big customers in the broadcast space and is an excellent example of enterprise use of these technologies.

Answer 4

Three of Garlik's (www.garlik.com) services, DataPatrol, QDOS and a FOAF viewer all use RDF and SPARQL extensively.

DataPatrol in particular and has tens of thousands of users in the UK. The dataset size is around ten billion RDF triples.

Answer 5

Ontology-aware search engines:

• GoPubMed (http://gopubmed.com)
• Anatomy Lens (http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/anatomylens/)

Mobile applications:

• IYOUIT (http://www.iyouit.eu) does OWL reasoning

Answer 6

You can find a lot of good use case examples at the w3c's Semantic Web Use case site [1] which has links to many write-ups by companies who built actual systems using semantic web technologies.

Cheers,

Michael

[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/sweo/public/UseCases/

Answer 7

At Yahoo! Search we use RDF to crawl for semantic data and power our Rich Results. Check out searches for "thai chili" and "paul tarjan facebook".

If you want to see all the semantic data we pull out of pages, install the "Structured Data Display" SearchMonkey plugin and under every result you will see an inforbar full of the RDF serialized as RDFa. (I can't post links since I'm new here).

Answer 8

Metatomix uses semantic technologies (RDF, ontologies, etc) in a few of their applications: www.metatomix.com

Answer 9

The fedora commons digital repository project uses Dublin Core as a central part of describing the individual objects in the repository. Additionally, they have created a rdfs ontology of the internal relationsships between the objects, called RELS-EXT. All this information is accessible through sparql or itql queries, both programmatically and through a web interface.

Answer 10

We are serving up rdf at biodiversity.org.au, and are planning to put a SPARQL engine over it. The bioinformatics community is very interested in RDF in general.

See: http://biodiversity.org.au/name/Dodonaea%20viscosa.rdf

The html search interface is at http://biodiversity.org.au/name/

Also see http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/TaxonConcept

Note that what you see in the web browser is OWL run through a stylesheet. Do a "view source" to see the OWL.

Answer 11

The flexibility of the semantic web data model enables lots of applications that are difficult to deliver using traditional, relational technologies. The responses so far on this list tend to focus on Web-centered applications, rather than those in the enterprise, probably for the reason that one can actually link to them, but semantic web technology is quietly taking off behind the firewall as well. My employer, Cambridge Semantics, produces a semantic web platform for enterprise application development, with customers including:

• Johnson & Johnson
• Merck
• GroupM
• Chevron
• Biogen Idec