SKUA – retrofitting semantics

The Semantic Web promises much for software developers, but because its claimed benefits are rather abstract, there is little obvious incentive to master its unfamiliar technology. In contrast, many ‘Social Web’ applications seem rather trivial, and not obviously useful for astronomy. The SKUA project (Semantic Knowledge Underpinning Astronomy) is implementing a service which will realise the benefits of both these web technologies. This RESTful web service gives application authors ready access to simple persistence, simple (social) sharing, and lightweight semantics, at a low software-engineering cost. The SKUA service allows applications to persist assertions (such as bookmarks and ratings), and share them between users. On top of this, it provides lightweight, astronomy-specific, semantics to enhance the usefulness and retrieval of the users’ data.