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Susie M. Stephens, principal research scientist at global pharmaceuticals company Eli Lilly & Co., has just wrapped up her role as chair of the Semantic Web Education and Outreach Interest (SWEO) Group. The group's charter expired at the end of last month.

During its 18-month run, the group spearheaded a variety of projects, including: gathering and maintaining semantic web use cases and case studies; the Linking Open Data Project (whose goal was and continues to be extending the Web with a data commons by publishing various open datasets as RDF [Resource Description Framework] on the Web and by setting RDF links between data items from different data sources); and publishing the last working draft of the Cool URIs for the Semantic Web document.

The impetus for Stephens joining the group as chair, back when she was at Oracle assigned the role of supporting RDF inside its database, was the lack of understanding of the semantic web by the world at large.

"It sseemed at that time that there was lots of interest -- materials and resources available that talked about the semantic web -- but a lot of the collateral was quite technical and not a lot of material was easily available to people who wanted to quickly get a feel for what the semantic web is and what it could offer their organization," she says. "It wasn't much aimed at companies at all, and certainly not much targeted toward very quickly briefing a CIO as to what the semantic web is and why they should care."

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The use cases and case studies it championed (and which continue to accept submissions) are helping move that dialogue along, with some 10 use cases and 17 case studies now available. But a couple of efforts that weren't on the original charter have turned into huge successes for SWEO, and for helping to establish the semantic web's legitimacy to a wider audience. That includes the Linking Open Data Project, which as of October boasted datasets consisting of more than two billion RDF triples, which are interlinked by around 3 million RDF links.

"I think it's impressive how many different data sources the community have taken and made available as RDF and linked together," Stephens says. "Now you can begin to ask interesting questions, and it's also impressive that we started off with one data set, then included another and another and kept plowing ahead in terms of adding new data sources and it grows and grows."

Among the datasets in the Linking Open Data dataset cloud are DBpedia, the FOAF project, Musicbrainz, and Flickr Wrapper and Flickr Exporter.

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