Towards NITF 4.0 - Experimental Support for "Foreign" Namespaces

One of the critiques that has been leveled against NITF for many years is that it cannot be customized by including "other" XML namespaces [1]. In NITF 3.5, we completed the step taken towards opening up the NITF 3.4 schema by fixing a bug in namespace support in enriched text [2].

However, we decided that full support for foreign namespaces was such a big change, that this would constitute one of the major pieces of work for NITF 4.0 [3]. I've created an *experimental* NITF XSD with foreign namespace support. It can be downloaded from

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nitf/files/schema/

I've performed a number of tests with this schema and it seems to me to be going in the right direction. I've also discovered a problem with the NITF 3.5 namespace support, which I've fixed in this experimental XSD [4]. I promise to write a future note about the choices I made in adding foreign namespace support. However, I wanted to get the current version out there, to give people a chance to download and try it out [5].

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[1] See for example, the excellent discussion of schemas and extensibility by Bob DuCharme and how NITF is too closed http://snee.com/xml/xml2005/industryschemas.html#d50e406

[2] Get the NITF schema at http://www.iptc.org/std/NITF/3.5/specification/

[3] Discussion of the plans for NITF 4.0 (amongst other things) can be reviewed in http://www.slideshare.net/smyles/nitf-2010-spring-working-group

[4] A special prize for the first person to figure out what the bug was

[5] Note that the NITF 4.0 experimental schema contains the documentation I copied over from the NITF 3.5 DTD. I'm still keen to get feedback on this too!

SKOS and Protoge HOWTO

In the IPTC, we are doing some work to figure out how to represent the IPTC Controlled Vocabularies as Linked Data.  We've decided to use SKOS as the RDF Vocabulary.  One of the things we wanted to do was to use a tool that "understands" SKOS.  We decided to look at Protoge for this.  Here are the steps we figured out to make it work (for some values of work):

Download version 4.0.2 from http://protege.stanford.edu/download/registered.html
-          Install it in your PC
-          Add the SKOSed plugin (use Check for plugins... item under File)
-          Add the Pellet Reasoner plugin
-          (you have to restart Protege before the new plugins are active)
-          Add Views to the Individuals tab: SKOSed view -> Inferred Concept Hierarchy + SKOS Usage
-          Then you may load a SKOS vocabulary – but only with narrower and broader relationships, does not work with the ...Transitive variants.
-          Then you should run the Pellet Reasoner against this vocabulary
-          Only then you should see the hierarchy in the Inferred Concept Hierarchy frame.
(JPE later adds "I have declared the narrower and broader properties as "transitive" using protégé and it  works.")

Posting them here, to make it easier for me to find (and maybe to help others).

Recently, I was asked for pointers to introductory material on the Semantic Web, specifically for such topics as N3 and Turtle.  I found "The Semantic Web 1-2-3" the most helpful in starting to get to grips with the mysteries of the SemWeb.  Note, however, that it is somewhat outdated now (it refers to DAML+OIL for example).  But it is still a good foundation and it has more links to great semwebby material than you can shake a stick at, if that's your idea of fun.  A couple of extra links that might be of help are

• timbl's primer on N3
• the Rough Guide to N3
• a six page short (!) introduction to RDF, plus a longer thirty page introduction
• W3C's best practices for publishing RDF vocabularies
• the SKOS primer 

I can't really find anything good that explains Turtle, other than the formal spec.  But my twitter-length explanation is that Turtle is N3 minus the reasoning extensions but plus internationalization (i.e. it is a more exact rendition of RDF than N3 is).

Other great links out there?