Opening Up Magpie via Semantic Services

Abstract

Abstract. Magpie is a suite of tools supporting a 'zero-cost' approach to semantic web browsing: it avoids the need for manual annotation by automatically associating an ontology-based semantic layer to web resources. An important aspect of Magpie, which differentiates it from superficially similar hypermedia systems, is that the association between items on a web page and semantic concepts is not merely a mechanism for dynamic linking, but it is the enabling condition for locating services and making them available to a user. These services can be manually activated by a user (pull services), or opportunistically triggered when the appropriate web entities are encountered during a browsing session (push services). In this paper we analyze Magpie from the perspective of building semantic web applications and we note that earlier implementations did not fulfill the criterion of "open as to services", which is a key aspect of the emerging semantic web. For this reason, in the past twelve months we have carried out a radical redesign of Magpie, resulting in a novel architecture, which is open both with respect to ontologies and semantic web services. This new architecture goes beyond the idea of merely providing support for semantic web browsing and can be seen as a software framework for designing and implementing semantic web applications.

Next Generation Semantic Web Applications

“…In particular, platforms such as TAP [5] and PiggyBank [9] provide facilities for integrating data acquisition mechanisms in their architecture, to facilitate the extraction of data from arbitrary sources on the Web. Analogously, automatic annotation systems such as KIM [7] and Magpie [6] can work on any Web page, although of course the quality of the annotation may degrade if the page in question does not reflect the current ontology used by these systems to drive automatic annotation.…”

“…For instance, both TAP [5] and PiggyBank [9] seamlessly integrate scraping services into their data acquisition architectures. Another good example of the use of services is Magpie [6], which integrates services into its annotation mechanisms, by dynamically associating a highlighted item with all the services which are relevant to the type of the item in question. For example, when highlighting an instance of class 'researcher', Magpie could automatically retrieve all services it knows about, which make sense for a researcher.…”

“…The availability of semantic markup opens up novel possibilities to develop smart, web-based functionalities. For instance, in the brief history of the Semantic Web we have already seen Semantic Web applications that support intelligent data aggregation and presentation [3,4], semantic search [5], automatic annotation [6,7], question answering [8], and Semantic Web browsing [9]. However, if we look closely at the way these applications make use of web-based semantic and non-semantic resources, we can highlight a clear distinction between those applications which truly embrace the Semantic Web paradigm, and those which are more akin to conventional knowledge-based systems.…”

Automatic document-level semantic metadata annotation using folksonomies and domain ontologies

“…researchers' ontologies). DZBOR et al, 2004), is one example of these tools. The tool produces an annotation-like service on demand for users browsing un-annotated web page.…”

SEMANTIC TURKEY - A New Web Experience in between Ontology Editing and Semantic Annotation

“…Magpie also allows for collaborative semantic web browsing, in that different persons may gather information from the same web resource and exchange it on the basis of a common ontology. Recent work on Magpie (Dzbor, Motta, & Domingue, 2004) extended the platform more and more towards the vision of the Semantic Web as "an open web of interoperable applications" (Berners-Lee, Hendler, & Lassila, 2001), by allowing bi-directional exchange of information among users and services, which can be opportunistically located and composed, either manually (web services) or automatically (semantic web services).…”