Abstract
Semantic Web researchers at the École des Mines de Saint-Étienne, FR, are
interested in making the Semantic Web formalisms and technologies more
accessible to the companies and the web of things. This presentation will
overview three of our recent contributions that all target this goal.
1) MINES Saint-Étienne leads a Specialist Task Force (STF) financed by the
European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), with the goal to
consolidate the Smart Anything REFerence (SAREF) standard ontology and its
community of industrial users, based on the experience of the the EUREKA
ITEA 12004 SEAS project (3 years, 15 M€, 35 partners). The SEAS ontology
is modular and versioned, and is built on top of core reference ontology
patterns that can be instantiated to create the SEAS ontology itself with a
homogeneous and predictable structure for the modelling and the description
of any kind of engineering-related data/information/systems. Ontology
patterns are like design patterns in object oriented programming. They
describe structural, logical, or naming, best practices that one can
consider when building an ontology. https://ci.mines-stetienne.fr/seas/
2) SPARQL-Generate is an extension of SPARQL 1.1 for querying not only RDF
datasets but also documents in arbitrary formats. It offers a simple
template-based option to generate RDF Graphs from documents, and presents
the following advantages: a) anyone familiar with SPARQL can easily learn
SPARQL-Generate; b) SPARQL-Generate leverages the expressivity of SPARQL
1.1: Aggregates, Solution Sequences and Modifiers, SPARQL functions and
their extension mechanism; c) it integrates seamlessly with existing
standards for consuming Semantic Web data, such as SPARQL or Semantic Web
programming frameworks. One can use its Apache 2.0 implementation to
generate RDF from web documents in XML, JSON, CSV, HTML, CBOR, and plain
text with regular expressions.
https://ci.mines-stetienne.fr/sparql-generate/
3) The Linked Datatypes initative (LINDT) aims at enabling lightweight
descriptions of useful knowledge on the Web of Data, using simple RDF
literals empowered by RDF Datatypes. The flagship Datatype is cdt:ucum that
can be used to describe measurements with any unit defined in The Unified
Code for Units of Measure: a code system intended to include all units of
measures being contemporarily used in international science, engineering,
and business. Different from using existing vocabularies for quantities and
units of measures (schema.org, QUDT, OM, ...), SPARQL queries can leverage
the native SPARQL operators (=, <, etc.) to compare UCUM literals, and
arithmetic functions (+, -, *, /) to manipulate quantity value literals.
https://ci.mines-stetienne.fr/lindt/
#### Auteurs/Autrices
**Maxime Lefrançois** is Associate Professor in the Connected-Intelligence team
at the École des Mines de Saint-Étienne, France, since 2017. He prepared
his Ph.D. at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis on knowledge representation for the
Meaning-Text linguistic theory. Between 2014 and 2017, he was a
post-doctoral researcher at École des Mines de Saint-Étienne, and was
involved in several bilateral, national, and European projects, including
the ITEA2 SEAS project in the context of which he organized a 3 days
knowledge engineering workshop with 45 participants, that initiated the
development of the SEAS ontology: a modular and versioned ontology built on
top of the OGC&W3C SOSA/SSN standard, that consists of simple ontology
patterns that can be instantiated for different engineering-related
verticals. Maxime is a co-editor of the SOSA/SSN standard, and currently
works on injecting the SEAS proposals in the ETSI SmartM2M SAREF European
standard ontology. He is the initiator and main developer of the
SPARQL-Generate language and the Linked Datatype initiative. He has
experience in organizing workshops and tutorials in international events:
co-organizer of a ESWC 2018 tutorial "from heterogeneous data to RDF graphs
and back", co-chair of a ISWC 2018 workshop on Semantic Sensor Networks,
and co-chair of the Workshops and Tutorials at IOT 2018.