Sindice Blog

Sindice is really meant to be used by your project, and for us it could’t be any nicer than seeing this happening more and more :-).

Thanks to Sergio Fernández, the SWAML project (which converts mailing list archives to RDF using SIOC and friends) now uses Sindice to find the URIs for email authors, using our IFP lookup on their email addresses.Also, Alexandre Passant developed a Drupal plugin that uses Sindice to find an appropriate URIs for each of your post tags.

To interact with Sindice, there is now a small Python library, and even a Sindice module for SWI Prolog.More developers-related information can now be found in our http://www.sindice.com/dev, including the new RPC ping API.

Works on Sindice are proceeding at full speed and so is the indexing of the Semantic Web.

Sindice now indexes over 20+ millions Semantic Web documents (21,5 m as i type) and will index your submitted RDFs in usually less than 30 minutes. This great result is entirely due to the dedication of the Sindice development team.

Some of the geeky bits :-). We have now the version 2 of the indexing pipeline up and running (Renaud, Eyal, Michele).

The Sindice indexing pipeline does a job which is all but trivial. And does it at an amazing speed.

Basically each document is integrated by recursively resolving the URIs of the properties and classes in use, thus calculating a “Web closure” of the explicitly or implicitly imported ontologies. Once this is performed, reasoning happens using RDFS and some OWL ( e.g. FunctionalProperty, TransitiveProperty, sameAs, inverseOf, InverseFunctionalProperty, SymmetricProperty). Sindice has done this for each of the 22 million source independently,in less than 3 weeks (plus the actual indexing and all sort of other processes) on a relatively small cluster (4-6 xeon cores). Not bad?

Thanks to this processing, we can be as precise and complete as possible in solving tasks such computing the IFP index, composing human legible descriptions of documents and powering at best the forthcoming entity based APIs.

Notably, all large datasets (e.g. the huge UniProt) are now proudly processed using our brand new Hadoop based Semantic Sitemap processor, specific courtesy of Holger Stenzhorn who has joined the team last month.

Sindice is Hiring!

In the context of the EU project OKKAM, to start Jan 2008, we are now looking for candidates who’re interested in developing highly scalable and innovative Semantic Web infrastructures and applications. Positions include Interns, Masters, Ph.D, and Postdocs and Scientific Developers.

While we of course highly value academic brilliance, we’re expecially looking for candidates who, like us, believe that it is through clever but hard core software engineering and development that we can make the difference on the Semantic Web.

Successful candidates will be rewarded with top salaries and working conditions.

We received a couple of requests for this so here it is: an OpenSearch plugin is now available for Sindice.

To start using the plugin, you can either install it directly in your browser or download the plugin xml file and install it manually. As a result, you’ll be able to use Sindice Search (text mode) directly from the browser toolbar.

We are extremely proud to announce today the first beta version of Sindice, a Semantic Web Search Engine centered on indexing and ranking online RDF data sources.

Sindice is focused on scalability: most of the Semantic Web, to the best of our knowledge, is already indexed (currently 11M documents). Sindice includes big datasets like DBLP in RDF, DBPedia, Geonames, Uniprot, plenty of FOAF and more.

Lots of data to index?

Sindice manages big datasets the smart way. You can easily create a Sitemap using the Semantic Sitemap Extension [1] which Sindice then accepts to process huge databases quickly and without overloading your server.

Data changes frequently?

Sindice is live! Ping us and see your Semantic Web source indexed within 15 minutes.

Ontology Import and Reasoning at Web Scale!

Sindice does Web scale, online reasoning: for each source, it will recursively resolve, compose and reason on top of all the related ontologies. Because of this we can accurately index things like document labels, Inverse Functional Properties and others independently for each RDF file published on the Semantic Web.

Applications:

* As an application developer, you can use our scalable API to serendipitously find data on the Semantic Web: find sources and automatically ping us with your data to make sure that it is found by others!

* As a Semantic Web user, it is already pretty useful to find appropriate URIs around. Please read well: no excuses now for minting yet more URIs for SW people:)

Credits:The results are achieved thanks to the ideas and dedication of the Sindice Beta 0 team Eyal Oren, Renaud Delbru, Michele Catasta and Giovanni Tummarello.

Sindice is made possible thanks to the investment from the DERI Galway, supported by the Science Foundation Ireland (www.sfi.ie).

Sindice is available at http://www.sindice.com

[1] http://sw.deri.org/2007/07/sitemapextension/

We’re happy to announce the launch of this official Sindice weblog. We’ll be updating this space regularly with information about Sindice, our goals, our status, and our progress in indexing Semantic Web resources. Stay tuned…