Semantic Web Development in China

This article is mainly taken from the 17th International World Wide Web Conference, which have been held at BeiJing International Convention Center from 21 to 25 April in 2008.
　　
　　1. Semantic Web Communities：There are two major google groups: 
　　（1）AI and Web: http://groups.google.com/group/ai-and-web-in-china
　　（2）Central community of Semantic Web in China： http://groups.google.com/group/ChinaSemanticWeb
　　Annual China Semantic Web Symposium started last year. The first Asian semantic web conference was hold in Beijing in 2006.
　　（3）One major student-developer-oriented community: W3China.org 
　　 It was created in 2003 by many students. Its original intention was actually to provide an open forum for Semantic Web technology. As of April, 2008, the total number of registered user is nearly 180,000. The number of active members in semantic-web-related bbs/blog is over 3,000, mainly consisting of students and developers from over 100 institutions or universities.
　　
　　2. Major achievement
　　（1）Increase in SW publications in major SW events
　　 （2）One best paper award in the in-use track at ISWC2006 and one best student paper nominee at ISWC2007.
　　（3）First places in several ontology matching and mapping contests
　　
　　3. Semantic Web Projects Toolkit Development and Applications
　　3.1 IODT from IBM Research China
　　 (1) The main focus：
　　 Semantic Web based modeling
　　 Semantic Web data management including high-performance；semantic data storage, reasoning, query.
　　 Meta-data management for enterprise applications.
　　 (2) Main toolkits developed: ( http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/semanticstk )
　　 IODT（Integrated Ontology Development Toolkit）：IODT is an ontology toolkit for storage, manipulation, query, and inference of ontologies and corresponding instances.
　　 SOR(Scalable Ontology Repository )：
　　 a) One of the major component of IODT is an OWL ontology repository, named Scalable Ontology Repository (SOR),
　　 b) It is a high-performance OWL storage, inference, and query system based on RDBMS.
　　 c) It supports DLP (Description Logic Program), a subset of OWL DL, and the SPARQL language.
　　 d) Also it supports datalog rule inference in its new version which will be released at IBM alphaworks soon.
　　 (3)Applications:IBM is using IODT in several products and projects, and a government project with different specific application purposes.
　　
　　
　　3.2 Falcon from Southeast University
　　(1) Main focus:
　　 Ontology matching and ontology alignment.
　　 Semantic search engine.
　　(2) Major tools developed:
　　 (a) Falcon-AO: a practical ontology matching system( http://iws.seu.edu.cn/projects/matching/ )
　　 Falcon-AO is an automatic ontology matching system for matching ontologies written in RDF(S) and OWL. Contains a set of novel matcher: V-Doc, GMO, PBM. Has won first place in major ontology matching contest, and recognized by the community as one of the best ontology matching systems
　　 (b) Falcons: a semantic web search engine( http://iws.seu.edu.cn/services/falcons/ )
　　 As of today, Falcons has discovered more than 7 million well-formed RDF documents containing 250 million RDF statements. 4400 ontologies have been identified. 30 million semantic web entities have been indexed, in which 2 million are concepts.
　　
　　3.3 APEX from Shanghai Jiaotong University
　　(1) Main focus:
　　 Ontology exaction
　　 Semantic search
　　 Semantic web user interaction
　　(2) Semantic tools developed:
　　 EachWiki, Orient, PORE, HS Explorer, E2, Semplore, Q2Semantic, PANTO, RelSE, CE2Pedia
　　 Referenced URL: http://relse.apexlab.org/ ………… http://q2semantic.apexlab.org
　　
　　3.4 KEG from Tsinghua University
　　(1) Main Focus
　　 Semantic search
　　 Semantic annotation
　　 Ontology matching
　　(2) Semantic Tools developed:
　　 ArnetMiner: Academic Researcher Social Network ( http://www.arnetminer.org/ )
　　 Meta Data Editor and Annotator
　　 RiMOM: Ontology matching tool
　　(3) Semantic Annotation
　　 Develop three different approaches in automatic semantic annotation: Rule induction、Unbalanced classifier、Sequence labeling
　　
　　3.5 DartGrid from Zhejiang University
　　(1) Main focus:
　　 Bridging the gap between relational database and semantic web
　　 Data mining over web of data.
　　 Focus on life science application domain, particularly for traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) 
　　(2) Semantic tools developed:
　　 (a) DartMapper: visulized SQL2RDF mapping tool：Visualized mapper for defining mappings from relational schema to RDF ontology. A new browser-host mapper provides online mapping manipulation supporting XMLP. Provides fast linked data publishing and deployment for both manually defining the mapping and direct D2R transformation.
　　 (b) DartQuery: Form-based interactive SPARQL query builder.
　　 Ontology-based Query and Search：Query form for user to construct SPARQL queries. Ontology-based automatically generating query form. Ontology-enabled semantic navigation.
　　 (c) Semantic Graph Mining: Enable relational mining over web of data
　　 (d) DartSearch: Semantic search and navigation based on ontology
　　(3) Application: Health Care and Life Science
　　 Make a connection between TCM and modern medicine
　　 TCM Ontology Effort
　　 (a) Collaborative on line ontology engineering toolkit
　　 (b) Has supported around 200 people from 17 institutes to develop the TCM ontology and language systems together.
　　 (c) The ontology has reached around 20,000 class descriptions and 100,000 instances.
　　
　　In a word, a lot of energetic players on the ground, a bunch of fancy semantic toolkits at disposal, a variety of several real-life applications. And a lot of promise when we look into the future...


Oh，Tim Berners-Lee