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<title>Semantic Web Advanced Development for Europe
(SWAD-Europe)</title>
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<div id="leftcontent" valign="top">
<div align="center" valign="top">
<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe">
<img alt="SWAD-Europe"
src="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/images/swade100.gif"
height="75" border="0" /></a>
<a href="http://www.cordis.lu/ist/">
<img src="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/images/istlogo-thumb.gif"
alt="EU IST logo" height="75" border="0" /></a>
</div>

<div id="mainMenu">
<ul id="menuList">
<li class="nonexpandingmenubar">
<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/" id="introMenu"
name="introMenu">Introduction</a>
</li>
<li class="menubar">
<a id="demosMenuActuator" class="actuator" accesskey="d"
name="demosMenuActuator">Demonstrators</a>
<ul id="demosMenu" class="menu">
<li>
<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/showcase/sem-blog.html">
Semantic Blogging</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/showcase/sem-portal.html">
Semantic Portals</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/showcase/sem-thes.html">
Thesaurus Browser</a>
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<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/showcase/sem-large.html">
Scale Demonstrator</a>
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<a id="themesMenuActuator" class="actuator" accesskey="t"
name="themesMenuActuator">Themes</a>
<ul id="themesMenu" class="menu">
<li>
<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/showcase/gs.html">Getting
Started</a>
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<li>
<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/tools/">Tools</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/showcase/digital-libraries.html">
Digital Libraries</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/showcase/business-integration.html">
Business Integration</a>
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<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/showcase/images.html">
Image Description</a>
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<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/community/">
Community Building</a>
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<li>
<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/showcase/history.html">
Project History</a>
</li>
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<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/showcase/future.html">
Future Directions</a>
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Life Science</a>
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Librarian</a>
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Coder</a>
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Business Integration</a>
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Heritage</a>
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<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/intro.html">
Reports</a>
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<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/showcase/presentations.html">
Presentations</a>
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<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/showcase/contact.html"
id="contactMenu" name="contactMenu">Contact</a>
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<h1>Themes: Project History</h1>
<p>SWAD-Europe originated within W3C's Semantic Web Activity,
extending the approach taken in previous SWAD work at MIT to focus
on collaborative work undertaken alongside the World Wide Web
Consortium's RDF (now <em>Semantic Web</em>) Interest Group. While
the project is <em>about</em> and <em>in support of</em> W3C's
Semantic Web Activity, it is managed independently. The project was
created to complement and feed into 'standards track' work within
the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). SWAD-Europe is a collaboration
between the World Wide Web Consortium in Europe, hosted by ERCIM,
research institutions at the Central Laboratory of the Research
Councils (CLRC) and the University of Bristol (ILRT), and the
companies Stilo International Plc and Hewlett-Packard Ltd.</p>
<h3>The original idea</h3>
<p>SWAD-Europe was designed to support W3C's Semantic Web
initiative in Europe, providing targeted research, demonstrations
and outreach. The aim was to support the development and deployment
of W3C Semantic Web specifications through implementation, research
and testing activities. This involved finding and maintaining a
balance between "in-house" Open Source tool development, community
building, outreach and evangelism, combined with research and
analysis to support and field-test Semantic Web standards. In
practice, this meant that more time was spent working with members
of the Semantic Web Interest Group community than on in-house
development work, since this approach helped establish a broader
base for Semantic Web development than could be accomplished within
a single European project. The Interest Group provided a forum that
connected SWAD-Europe (and other SemWeb-themed projects, from
Europe and elsewhere) to the more formal standardisation activities
of the W3C.</p>
<p>SWAD-Europe's work is best understood in the context of the
challenges facing the RDF project in the 1997-2001 period prior to
the creation of the Semantic Web Activity at W3C. In RDF's early
years, a number of difficulties needed addressing. At that time,
RDF technology was perceived by some as complex and overambitious,
with poorly formalised specifications. Software tools were
relatively immature, with toolkit-specific APIs and query
languages, which meant that application code was often tightly
bound to a specific RDF toolkit. The relationship between RDF and
XML in terms of both tools and standards was unclear. Despite the
difficulties faced by RDF in this period, there was nevertheless a
lot of enthusiasm from early adopters of RDF which emerged in the
Interest Group. The design of the project was an attempt to find a
way to use the structure of a European project to support both
formal standardisation work at W3C, and the community fora
(Interest Groups) which can provide a home for users of Web
technology to share their experiences.</p>
<p>The project's initial workplan included work on reviewing and
developing tools to access, store, search Semantic Web data, with
the goal of motivating and informing future work on RDF query
languages and APIs. Practical case studies and demos were proposed,
especially in "near term" areas such as thesaurus systems and
next-generation blogging tools. A fair number of workshops were
included, to foster developer discussion on critical "seed
applications", e.g. image annotation, calendaring, social
networking and geo/mapping work. In addition to these efforts, the
project tried to emphasise the importance not only of
standards-based technology, but on technology integration. We
undertook work on linking XML to RDF, on schema languages, SVG,
query, XForms and Web Services. In each case, there was the same
underlying intent: to enter into dialogue with users of W3C
technology and understand how their practical problems might be
addressed through combing RDF approaches with other, perhaps better
understood, standards-based methods. The goal, in effect, was to
help demonstrate the basics of Semantic Web as a fast-maturing
technology platform. Reports from each of these activity areas are
available from the project Web site [RESULTS].</p>
<h3>Before, During and After</h3>
<p>Throughout SWAD-Europe, we sought to build on pre-existing work,
in particular work which was conducted in public fora and was
supported by freely available opensource implementations. The
diagram in [fig.1] shows a few example work items, emphasising the
way in which previous collaborative efforts (by the project
partners and members of the broader community) were supported
through SWAD-Europe and subsequently fed into more formal
activities within W3C. This illustrates the project's general
approach, which is to utilize W3C's Interest Group mechanism to
bring collaborators together, test their ideas, and present the
results of those collaborations in a form that can have a good
prospect of adoption within the Working Group mechanisms of
W3C.</p>
<p>[fig.1. - example workflow]</p>
<p><img alt="diagram of work before, during and after swad-europe"
src="swad-flow.png" width="100%" /></p>
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