“Let’s expose Rome” with a Cloud Cult Platform: a conversation with Camelia Boban and Simone Pulcini about semantic web (15th December 2014)

Posted by Agatino Grillo on Monday, 15 December 2014

(This post is part of a serie on GDG Rome DevFest 2014)

Agatino Grillo: Hi Camelia, hi Simone. Could you introduce yourselves?

Camelia Boban: My name is Camelia. I come from Romania where I graduated in Economics from Craiova University. I have been living in Italy since 1992. I am a freelance software developer, member of Google Developer Group L-Ab Lazio Abruzzo, contributor of Wikipedia, the collaborative and online free encyclopedia, affiliate with Wikimedia, the movement behind Wikipedia and promoter of “Wiki Loves Monuments” the international photo contest, organised by Wikipedia.

Simone Pulcini: Hi! My name is Simone. I’m engaged in software development for more than a decade. I specialized myself in enterprise architectures and modelling. I covered several business tasks for private firms as well as for public administration. I’m a certified UML developer (OCUP) and I'm obtaining the Java Enterprise Architect (OCMJEA 6) certification. I’m the Google Developers Group Rome chapter co-organizer together with Antonella Blasetti. I have a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from “La Sapienza” Rome University.

Agatino Grillo: You were speakers to the Google Developer Group (GDG) Fest on 8th November in Rome in the code-lab dedicated to semantic web using Google technologies. What about it?

Camelia & Simone: The code-lab was titled «Roma non è mai stata così “Esposta”»: the title is a pun, a joke, that you can translate in English like “Let’s expose Rome” in the sense of permitting to explore Rome’s monuments and to run a risk. You can find the slides here http://www.slideshare.net/cameliaboban/cloud-cult-platform-roma-non-mai-stata-cos-esposta or here in pdf format or pptx format

Agatino Grillo: Why a code lab about semantic web?

Camelia & Simone: Nowadays there are a lot of semantic data available in the Web. Their potential is enormous but often it is very difficult to explore them. Using semantic Web technologies help users to easily explore large amounts of data and interact with them.

Agatino Grillo: Could you explain in a nutshell what is “semantic web”?

Camelia & Simone: Using Wikipedia’s definition, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web, dominated by unstructured and semi-structured documents into a “web of data”.
Semantic Web technology lets you push the web from a web of documents to a web of data using open and free “Linked Data” technologies like RFD, SPARQL, DBPedia which permit to access to information without creating a lot of custom code. In our codelab we also use Google’s solutions like “Google Cloud Endpoint” and “Google App Engine” to realize our application.

Agatino Grillo: What did you propose in your lab?

Camelia & Simone: We used data produced by DBpedia, a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make the information available on the web by exposing it with RDF a public standard for “linked data”.

Agatino Grillo: And what about Google Cloud Endpoints?

Camelia & Simone: “Google Cloud Endpoints” consists of tools, libraries and capabilities that allow easier to create a web backend for web clients and mobile clients such as Android or Apple’s iOS. For backend we use “App Engine app” to be freed from system admin work, load balancing, scaling, and server maintenance.

Agatino Grillo: Thanks Camelia, thanks Simone.

Camelia & Simone: Thanks to you