Planet Semantico

We are happy to report that we have resolved the bug that we identified in the initial 4.3 release, and that the new and improved OpenCalais 4.3 is up and running on all servers.
 
As a quick reminder, here are the new features and expanded capabilitites of the OpenCalais service.  As always, please let us know if you run into any issues or have any questions.
 
New in OpenCalais 4.3
 
Improved ‘Social Tags’: We are expanding on our popular Social Tags categorization technique by adding more generalized, aggregate tags.
 
For example, if a blogger is comparing the racing performance of sports cars like the Ferrari 308 GTB and Porsche 959, OpenCalais 4.3 will suggest auto racing and motorsport as Social Tags, in addition to the more obvious sports cars.
 
NEW! ‘News Names’: We are instituting a process of name normalization that represents a first step toward our more robust vision for person disambiguation. Whenever a partial or extended name appears in content, OpenCalais 4.3 will return the names it finds as usual, but will now also suggest the most commonly used form of that same name.
 
For example, for articles containing Barack Obama, Obama or Barack Hussein Obama, OpenCalais will suggest not only the partial or extended name it found, but also the more frequently used Barack Obama.
 
New Entities, Facts and Events in English, including:
 

• New Natural and Manmade Disaster attributes that reveal these disasters’ effects
• Supporting data for upcoming events that will enable OpenCalais to recognize new Movies, Music Albums, etc., as well as anticipated Medical Treatments
• More Political Events and new items such as Diplomatic Relations, Political Endorsements, Poll Results and Voting Results
• Enhanced Person Career extraction that includes political party affiliations where those are included in the text.

 
The 4.3 release also features improved Simple Format and Microformat outputs, as well as several extraction bug fixes. For technical details, please see the full release notes here.

English, Official Blog

Filtrado, Valoración, Intermediación crítica del conocimiento, hablábamos hace poco del concepto de Content Curator. Su tarea os recuerda seguro a la de los blogueros/as que  trabajamos en la línea de ofrecer lo que podríamos denominar “insights” o “highlights” (prefiero lo primer), visiones rápidas y generativas (que inspiren ideas o actuaciones) sobre lo más relevante en la actualidad tecnológica.

Con la etiqueta “3.0 insights” (“inspiraciones”) iré dejando lo que voy considerando que debemos saber durante esta tercera década de la web.

Estoy en algunos proyectos (en educación, gestión del conocimiento y social media) para los cuales realizo este tipo de actualización, de cura de los últimos contenidos sobre tendencias aparecidos en las principales publicaciones anglosajonas,  adaptados a contextos concretos.

Creo, de hecho, que a pesar de que se utilice tan a menudo la falacia de que la tecnología no es importante, su evolución determina también los usos que hacemos de ella, en una cada vez más interesante y compleja interacción entre querer (lo que proyectamos desde lo social) y poder (lo que va permitiendo hacer lo tecnológico).  Así que “here we go”, en un nuevo formato, sobre los que considero algunos de los últimos temas o tendencias relevantes:

• Actualmente podemos ver Hulu ocultando desde fuera de los US nuestra localización. Pero eso no deja de ser un truco “geek” que no todos/as quieren o pueden llevar a cabo. Por ello, TVGorge lanzaba recientemente un site agregador de otros pero sin ese tipo de restricciones.  Existen dudas sobre si es legal, cuestión que creo que solucionan informando de que respetan los derechos de propiedad de terceros (Hulu, CBS, Tv.com, TVDuck, TVGuide, etc…)

   

  Sea como sea y dure lo que dure, la cantidad y calidad de los contenidos que agrega este mashup es impresionante: todos o casi todos los episodios de series de éxito internacional, como Californication, 30 Rock, Heroes, Lost, CSI, Mad Men, Anatomía de Grey, The Simpsons, y hasta 128 shows de TV.

(Via Download Squad)

 

• Windows Phone 7 (con Windows 7 para dispositivos móviles), será presentado en el Mobile World Congres (antes conocido como 3GSM World Congres). Será en Barcelona, del 15 al 18 de febrero y constituye una de las ferias internacionales más importantes de la industria de la telefonía móvil.

   

  Aplicaciones más interactivas, participativas, potenciación del contenido móvil generado por el usuario, sinergias con la televisión, podrían ser, con los nuevos dispositivos como el nuevo teléfono de Microsoft – Windows, las novedades más destacadas. Un giro de los fabricantes de software hacia el hardware, debido probablemente a la tendencia a los servicios, más que a aplicaciones móviles. Empieza a ser importante, como destaca Vinton Cerf, la vieja lucha, la vieja utopía de los datos y APIs abiertos y la interoperabilidad entre plataformas (podemos verlo también en Ipad y Iprop y la web generativa)

  Pueden interesaros, por último, los vídeos de la edición de 2009 en el canal Mobile World Live. Tenéis un resumen en este vídeo:

 

Feliz domingo.

3.0 insights, Net-art, curiosidades en la red, Planeta educativo, Spanish, congresos, content curator, innovación, lifestreaming, móviles, realida aumentada, telefonía móvil, video-documentales, web3.0

Stefan Schumacher has published a German translation of the RDFa Primer.

English, Translations

Volvemos a hablar de Telefonía móvil, un ámbito que genera noticias constantemente desde hace unos meses.

En cuanto a las Aplicaciones que que trabajan con geolocalización, hablamos ya según datos recientes de 6,000 para iPhone, 900 para Android y 300 para BlackBerry (solamente 43 de estas son “cross-platform”, pueden correr en cualquier plataforma).

También se habla de tendencia a los servicios, a los mashups que aprovechan recursos de fuentes diversas. En este caso, además, hablamos de Inteligencia artificial:

Siri, que está generando bastante revuelo mediático en el mercado anglosajón, funciona por voz, traduciendo a texto y buscando los recursos que le solicitamos desde dispositivos móviles.

En este sentido, es parte del proyecto de inteligencia artificial CALO (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes, Asistente cognitivo que aprende y organiza),

Lo describen como “la madre de todos los mashups”, trabajando con las APIs de servicios como OpenTable, TaxiMagic, MovieTikets.com, Rotten Tomatoes, WeatherBug, Yahoo Local, Yahoo Boss, StubHub, Bing, Eventful Freebase, Citysearch, AllMenus.com, Gayot, y Wolfram Alpha.

Funciona bien en iPhone 3GS (iTunes link) pero ya anuncian próximas versiones para Android y Blackberry. No está prevista aún versión en castellano.

Gratuito para el usuario, devuelve información contextual y la posibilidad de realizar reservas en las empresas que se afilien al servicio. El modelo de negocio por afiliación parece interesante para la web móbil geolocalizada, aunque podría excluir servicios de calidad, simplemente, porque no pagan a Siri.

Una última curiosidad, que desvelan en Techcrunch: su último inversionista es el millonario Li Ka-shing,  conocido por haber invertido también en Facebook…

Podemos observar esta interesante experiencia de usabilidad (comentan que el sistema de reconocimiento de voz es excepcional), de acercamiento a las necesidades del usuario específico de telefonía móvil en la imagen y el vídeo:

2010, Marketing, Mashups, Planeta educativo, Spanish, Vídeos, dispositivos, geolocalizacion, inteligencia artificial, mobile web, móviles, siri, software, telefonía móvil, video-publicidad, web3.0

Leía en GigaOm la siguiente cita de Arthur C. Clarke, que creo que resume bien la fascinación que sentimos por la Realidad aumentada:

“Cualquier tecnología lo suficientemente avanzada es indistinguible de la magia”.

Vamos hacia un mundo, sin duda, más mágico, a juzgar por las ocasiones en que intento controlarme para no dejaros todo lo que va surgiendo acerca del tema de la Realidad Aumentada.

Quería presentaros Zugara, que trabaja en una webcam compartida y aumentada y un nuevo prototipo con apariencia de ejemplificar el cambio, más allá del  márketing, hacia técnicas de aprendizaje sincrónico, asincrónico y el e-learning en general, que puede suponer la RA como tendencia.

Aprender de lo que otros han creado como complemento a la realidad, crear conexiones, vincular ideas son algunas de las cosas que se nos ocurren como docentes, poder interactuar con la realidad a través de nuevas capas digitales, creo que el potencial de la Realidad aumentada, como parte de la pedagogía de la imaginación es mayor y será mucho más inmediato de lo que podemos suponer.

En la sociedad de la abundancia digital, la Realidad aumentada, la sofisticación tecnológica que representa serán valores diferenciales importantes, muy a tener en cuenta en la revalorización del papel de los contenidos (y su capa aumentada) como disparadores de una atención cada vez más escasa.

Estaremos en Expoelearning 2010 en breve (dedicaremos post al respecto), así que es probable que revise la ampliación de los valores generativos que realizábamos hace un tiempo (E-learning excelente en la sociedad de la abundancia de conocimiento) para otorgar a la AR el papel del que se va haciendo merecedora:

Juzgadlo vosotros mismos:

2010, Aprendizaje, Planeta educativo, Spanish, Vídeos, ar, comunidades, curiosidades, e-learning2.0, educacion, educación 2.0, elearning, futurismo, innovación, móviles, pedagogía de la imaginación, pedagogía imaginación, prospectiva, ra, realidad aumentada, valores excelencia, valores generativos, video-documentales, video-publicidad, web3.0

Value-IT

Javier Martínez Elicegui

Of course, day after day the number of applications of semantics in the enterprise is continually growthing. This post shows a case of application of these technologies on BSS/OSS systems.

BSS/OSS systems are usually very complex systems, with lot of interfaces, lot of different users, lot of applications related… Besides this, in the last years there has been a constant competitive preusure on these systems requiring them more functions and less cost to be managed. This fact has marked a quick evolution in this kind of systems:

BSS, English, OSS, Spanish, semantic technologies, tariff systems

We released Empire 0.6 on Monday. For those of you who didn’t hear yet, Empire is JPA for RDF. We think it’s the best Object Triples Mapper available; but let us know. A bit more detail: Empire is an implementation of a large chunk of the core Java Persistence API to provide an interface to RDF databases using SPARQL or SeRQL. It provides a small annotation framework for tying Java beans to RDF.

Empire 0.6 will generate Java interfaces for classes described in an OWL ontology automatically based on domain & range constraints, cardinality restrictions, and usage of the classes in data (when there is ABox, i.e., assertional, data in your ontology). Implementations of these interfaces are generated at runtime. This is a key part of our semantic application platform move, which we sum up simply as: If ontology, then application. More about that in weeks to come.

Eventually, Empire will be a drop-in replacement for non-RDF JPA systems such as Hibernate and Toplink. We’re not quite there yet, but Empire can be used alongside a library like Hibernate to help ease the transition to SemWeb-based architecture or to supplement an existing JPA application with, say, Pelorus, our faceted navigation browser.

Empire 0.6 uses Guice to provide support for the JPA SPI framework; we can inject our implementations of EntityManager and EntityManagerFactory into Empire-managed contexts. We also use Guice to register the data base plugins; Empire currently supports 4Store, Sesame 2.3.0, and Jena. Which means it supports just about every conceivable RDF triple store.

Enjoy.

Empire, English, OWL 2, RDF, RDF Databases, SPARQL

Kaggle is a site for data-related competitions in machine learning, statistics and econometrics. Companies, researchers, government and other organizations will be able to post their modeling problems and invite researchers to compete to produce the best solutions. The Kaggle demo site currently has three example competitions to illustrate how it will work and expects to host the first real one in March. Kaggle’s competition hosting service will be free, but the site says that it plans to “offer paid-for services in addition to its free competition hosting.”

English, Machine Learning, Semantic Web, datamining, social media

W3C launched today the RDFa Working Group, whose mission is to support the use of RDFa, a format for embedding structured data in Web documents. The Working Group's goals include making it easier to author RDFa, promoting continued adoption of the technology in HTML, XHTML, and XML, and helping developers create RDFa applications. The group is chartered to extend and enhance RDFa 1.0, including the specification of an API. The Working Group will also support the HTML Working Group in its work on incorporating RDFa in HTML5 and XHTML5 (as a followup on the the currently published Working Draft for RDFa 1.0 in HTML5).

Activity news, English

Semantic Technologies are gaining momentum and month after month we have reiterative evidence of that. The number of companies that are getting funding for new Semantic projects, and the number of services that use semantics continued during this 2010 first month the pace of the last months.

Other thing that we observe is that the areas where Semantics are strong (search, ad, health…) continue betting on these technologies. Among these areas undoubtedly “Search is king”. During an interview and a preceding presentation, Scott Prevost, principal development manager for Bing search technology at Microsoft, touted developments in search, as well as possibilities during the Web 3.0 conference in Santa Clara, Calif. Microsoft confidence on those technologies moved this company to acquire Powerset two years ago. Now they think that Semantics will be paramount in the evolution of search and that Social Networks will be the key driver:
“When the revolution is happening in Iran and people are using Twitter as the only form of communication, ideally, the search engine should understand what that is, understand from the social network what are the important communications and help to organize that”, said Scott Prevost, principal development manager for Bing.

The other big players in this field have very similar ideas to Microsoft ones. This is the case of Google, and other little engines like T2 that have seen Semantic Technologies as an opportunity to enter in this competitive market, as it is reported by Techcrunch.

This vision of Microsoft about Social networks as a big driver of semantic technologies is widely echoed by lots of articles on technology. Catching the meaning of unstructured information from conversations can enhance many applications, for instance FunnelScope’s hotel search engine takes this, quantifying user hotel reviews into ratings that can be quickly and easily understood. FunnelScope’s unique semantic technology was used in scoring the reviews.

Other little companies are struggling to offer innovative solutions to tap the network, I-nable Solutions (one of the hottest Indian companies) has launched a consumer web offering www.kreeo.com to provide contextual access to right information and people in real time while addressing the issues of information overload, redundancy, reducing attention span, irrelevance and spam.

Very related to this feature of extracting the sense of one text, some companies are trying to improve the rates of advertisement performance. As in previous months this trend is getting consolidated as it offers a clear funding source.  In this area Peer39, one leading online semantic advertising company,announced the general availability of SemanticProtect, a solution that leverages semantic targeting to protect brands in real time. It is based on an analysis of the sites text to detect when the sense is not adequate to insert one brand ads. A good post diving in this business niche is this.

Other similar service has been launched by PinPoint, that is based on the semantic web platform OpenAmplify, and identifies the most pertinent keywords on a web page via semantic analysis.

Though SaaS model can take advantage of Semantic Technologies too, usually we are scarce of news about movements related to semantic technologies in this area. Nevertheless, this month we find that Ohio-based Rescentris has just announced that it is releasing its Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) for the life sciences and pharmaceutical research industries as a SaaS. This is a Collaborative Electronic Research Framework (CERF), available immediately, providing researchers with a means to securely share information across the web, as well as secure record keeping. This tool uses semantic technologies to maximize access to data.

Perhaps this is the final idea in Salesforce.com movement, company which has declared the adquisition of GroupSwim, a provider of on-demand social software for businesses. GroupSwim was developing a Web 2.0-based user interface that captures collaborative work in multiple formats using semantic technology

The synergies between of speech recognition and semantic technologies have been considered by Resolvity, Inc, that has declared its On-Demand Speech Application Platform. This platform incorporates many advanced features like intelligent dialog management, semantic understanding, knowledge modeling, and problem solving.

Very similar is Attensity Announcement of New Mobile Features for Attensity Analyze for Voice of the Customer V5.2. “This new release of mobile functionality for our text analytics application provides a great leap forward in our ability to enable business users, customer analysts and marketers to harness massive amounts of customer information found inside and outside the firewall, even when they are on the road”, said Ian Hersey, CTO of Attensity Group

About applications of semantics to news area, it is interesting  to mention the  Semantic  News Robots used by LaInformacion to list thousands of news stories in real time, cutting resources costs. The concept of linked data value to journalism is considered in this article from the Guardian.

The UK Government announcement to free vast quantities of data has been one of the hottest news of the month.  Users will able to take the data, re-use it, mash it up, create apps, weave it in with other data and in general, engender semantic web practices.

We can also measure the success of semantic technologies by funding obtained, for example Modus Operandi, a Melbourne software and information technology company, won a $1.2 million Small Business Innovation Research project from the U.S. Marine Corps Systems Command to develop a system to help analysts rapidly sort through large amounts of information and find critical patterns using semantic intelligence technologies, investments in systems related to semantic technologies, and personnel expansions.

English, Spanish, january 2010, monthly review, semantic technologies

The Open World Assumption got you down? While OWA is crucial to using OWL ontologies to draw new inferences from data, it’s also a challenge for another very basic use case that the OWL specs have never really embraced: using OWL as a schema or validation language for RDF. Plainly, that’s a use case that some people want and expect from OWL; but until now it hasn’t really been available.

We’re happy to release Pellet Integrity Constraint Validator version 0.3, a prototype system that uses OWL ontologies as integrity constraints for RDF data. ICV automatically translates OWL axioms into SPARQL queries (while still doing OWL inference, by the way!), so that an OWL ontology can be used to validate RDF data integrity automatically.

This offers the best of at least three worlds: the logical rigor and expressiveness of OWL; the “loose typing” of RDF and Linked Open Data; and the performance and scalability of SPARQL engines.

What’s new in Pellet ICV 0.3? Glad you asked:

1. explanations of violations
2. choice of validator implementation: Jena or Pellet will execute auto-generated SPARQL queries
3. option to check all IC violations
4. more efficient auto-generated SPARQL queries (using NOT EXISTS statement instead of LET in ARQ queries)

As always, comments, questions, and feedback are welcomed.

English, Integrity Constraints, Pellet 2

In the latest Perceptions survey, the most popular library management system is from a relatively new supplier to libraries and is available exclusively on a Software as a Service basis. The survey also reveals that interest in open source library management systems is weak outside the community of libraries that has already adopted one.

The Perceptions series of surveys is three years old now, and is part of Marshall Breeding’s armoury of library technology commentaries, the most well-used of which is Library Technology Guides. Meanwhile, Perceptions 2009: An international survey of library automation,  like its predecessors, aims to ascertain levels of satisfaction within libraries with their library management system and suppliers thereof. Despite disruption in the library software arena, the library management system (LMS), or integrated library system (ILS) as it’s known to Marshall Breeding in the US, remains important:

The integrated library system (ILS) for most libraries represents the most critical component of its technology infrastructure and can do the most to help or hinder a library in fulfilling its mission to serve its patrons and in operating efficiently.

Interest may be waning in open source

One of Marshall’s central aims this year is to gauge interest in open source ILS products, which he describes as “one of the major issues brewing in the industry”.

A key overall finding was that companies supporting proprietary library management systems tend to receive higher satisfaction scores than companies involved with open source library management systems. Marshall notes explicitly that LIbLime received particularly low marks in customer satisfaction, whilst libraries that undertook to implement Koha without external support were highly satisfied with this arrangement.

Respondents who had made use of other support firms such as PTFS, Nusoft and ByWater Solutions (it should be noted that support companies servicing open source products are still not prevalent in the UK) were not sufficiently numerous to be included in the report’s summary tables. Likewise, Talis only had 14 respondents and therefore does not figure in the main tables, although as a UK supplier, we are happy to be positioned in 10^th place in terms of satisfaction with LMS in an international survey.

As Marshall told the audience at the SCONUL conference here in the UK in June 2009, there are low levels of interest registered in open source library management systems apart from the community of libraries already using one. Even those libraries that are dissatisfied with their current proprietary system fail to demonstrate interest in open source.

But Software as a Service is top of the pops

Biblionix, described by Marshall as a relatively new company, gained the top satisfaction scores in the following categories – ILS product, company, and support for its product, Apollo. This is interesting not just because it’s a relatively new entrant in the library software marketplace, but because the product is offered exclusively through Software as a Service. As Marshall comments:

The responses for Apollo were overwhelmingly positive, the only product to receive 9 as either the mode or median response. The comments offered gave effusive praise for the company, the product, the ease of migration and for support.

It should be noted that takeup of Apollo is currently limited to small public libraries in the US.

Although UK suppliers don’t feature strongly in this international survey, it remains an important source in terms of looking at the key trends in our world.

English, Systems and technologies, open source

I just released version 1.4.21 of my Raptor RDF parsing / serialising library to the world. This release is just bug fixes:

• RDFa parser buffer management problems were fixed.
• The Turtle parser and serializers now use QNames correctly as required by the specification.
• The RDF/XML parser now resets correctly to detect duplicate rdf:IDs when a parser object is reused.
• A few other minor bug and build fixes with made.
• Fixed reported issues: 0000318, 0000319, 0000326, 0000331, 0000332 and 0000337

This is the first release since switching to GIT as the source control for the Redland libraries. The above release is on branch ‘raptor1′ in the new Redland GIT.

In parallel to this is the ongoing Raptor 2 ABI/API updating which is cleaning up 10 years of API and internal cruft. GIT is really helping speed up the ease of this work with the branching, staging/index and stash concepts it supports allowing false paths to be managed. The results can be seen on branch ‘master’ of raptor.

The updating is going well in the sense that make distcheck test suite passes, but there are still things to decide including:

• Rename all raptor_CLASS_copy copy constructors to something else: either raptor_new_CLASS_from_CLASS (also used in raptor – Doh!) or to raptor_CLASS_addref which signifies better that it just adds a reference to the object, it’s a shallow copy, not a deep one.
• Unify raptor_world, rasqal_world and librdf_world – which might help share classes between the libraries. Not sure if this is a good idea yet.
• Add a graph term to the (subject, predicate, object) triple returned from parsing. I am probably going to do this.
• Turn the raptor_locator object into a more of a log (like librdf_log) or exception object, with inner log/exceptions.
• Improve the callback interface that passes error, warning etc. messages to user code.

I need to decide at what point to roll out an alpha release of Raptor 2, which will probably be numbered 1.9.0. Some of the above possibilities might be worth putting in a later alpha release.

This can all be seen in the GIT repository which includes instructions for checkout at git.librdf.org.

English, comment

Via Marc Olano: The Global Game Jam is into its second day at UMBC with 41 registered participants working on seven games. Keep up from home with our live video feed and games list.

English, GAIM, Games, UMBC, social media

The BBC has provided a W3C Semantic Web Use Case on how Semantic Web Technologies are used on some of the BBC’s Web Sites. The main characteristics of the BBC’s approach is to use the Web as a Content Management System. Sites like the BBC Music, BBC Programmes, or the BBC Wildlife Finder rely on external, publicly available datasets like Musicbrainz or Wikipedia; the BBC sites themselves show an aggregated view of this information, put in a BBC context. Furthermore, the BBC also creates Web identifiers for every item it has interest in; RDF representations of these Web identifiers allow developers to use the BBC’s data to build applications.

Activity news, English

UMBC will be the Baltimore site for the Global Game Jam. This is a 48 hour event, where teams from around the globe will work to each develop a complete game over one weekend. Last year, the UMBC site fielded five teams as one of 54 sites in 23 countries. This year promises to be even bigger, with 124 sites in 34 countries.

The Baltimore site and open to participants at all skill levels. It is not necessary to be a UMBC student to register. Thanks to generous support by Next Century , there is no registration fee for the Baltimore site, but you must register for this site in advance at www.globalgamejam.org. The jam will start at 5PM on Friday, January 29th in the UMBC GAIM lab, room 005a in the ITE building. At that time, the theme for this year’s games will be announced, and we’ll brainstorm game ideas and form into teams. Teams will have until 3pm on Sunday, January 31st to develop their games. We’ll have demos of each game and selection of local awards, wrapping up by 5pm Sunday.

Last year’s theme was “As long as we’re together there will always be problems”, and we had games developed using a combination of XNA, Flash, Maya, Photoshop, and the Unity Engine.

For more information, visit http://gaim.umbc.edu/jam/.

English, GAIM, General, UMBC, social media

The W3C SPARQL Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of SPARQL 1.1 Property Paths, which defines a more succinct way to write parts of basic graph patterns and also extend matching of triple pattern to arbitrary length paths. The group also published six updates, namely:

• SPARQL 1.1 Query adds support for aggregates, subqueries, projected expressions, and negation to the SPARQL query language.
• SPARQL 1.1 Update defines an update language for RDF graphs.
• SPARQL 1.1 Protocol for RDF defines an abstract interface and HTTP bindings for a protocol to issue SPARQL Query and SPARQL Update statements against a SPARQL endpoint.
• SPARQL 1.1 Service Description defines a vocabulary and discovery mechanism for describing the capabilities of a SPARQL endpoint.
• SPARQL 1.1 Uniform HTTP Protocol for Managing RDF Graphs describes the use of the HTTP protocol for managing named RDF graphs on an HTTP server.
• SPARQL 1.1 Entailment Regimes defines conditions under which SPARQL queries can be used with entailment regimes such as RDF, RDF Schema, OWL, or RIF.

Activity news, English

In the latest posts we have reviewed the present situation of Semantic Technologies for enterprises from several points of view: providers, technologies, demand.

Undoubtedly we can claim that these technologies are mature enough to go to market, there is a big number of providers with interesting solutions, and there is demand for these technologies in lots of sectors. Sometimes companies don’t know that semantic technologies can be the solution to some of their problems, but they know that something must be done to manage the increasing amount of data, and of course STE will have a say in that.

Then, if all the ingredients of a successful future for STE are there, why we don’t see it?. Perhaps because some IT managers are not able to understand the ROI of these kind of investments. Because it is not easy to measure the costs to implement these solutions and it is much more difficult to measure the revenues of them.

Because measuring the improvements of STE is not as measuring the benefits or other systems like CRM, ERP… It is difficult to find metrics and to transform them in money savings.

Telefonica is trying to demonstrate that it is worth investing in semantic technologies, the cost reductions if you select a adequate project are large and the investment payback is less than four years. We have carried out an in-depth analysis in one implementation of these technologies in real systems on Telefónica and we have obtained very interesting results. For us, this is important because it says us that we are in the correct direction and we must continue with new implementations and new measures of profitability.

The next presentation was showed in Online Conference in London on December 2009. I think it can be considered as a model of how we must sell STE from now on to  IT managers who has the key to invest the money.

English, Spanish, Uncategorized

We had the official book launch of "The Social Semantic Web" last month in the President’s Drawing Room at NUI Galway. The book was officially launched by Dr. James J. Browne, President of NUI Galway. The book was authored by myself, Dr. Alexandre Passant and Prof. Stefan Decker from the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at NUI Galway (sponsored by SFI). Here is a short blurb:

read more

DERI, Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Education, English, FOAF, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Representation, NUI Galway, National University of Ireland Galway, SIOC, Semantic Web, data, social media, social networks, social software, web 2.0

We had the official book launch of "The Social Semantic Web" last month in the President’s Drawing Room at NUI Galway. The book was officially launched by Dr. James J. Browne, President of NUI Galway. The book was authored by myself, Dr. Alexandre Passant and Prof. Stefan Decker from the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at NUI Galway (sponsored by SFI). Here is a short blurb:

read more

DERI, Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Education, English, FOAF, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Representation, NUI Galway, National University of Ireland Galway, SIOC, Semantic Web, data, social media, social networks, social software, web 2.0

We had the official book launch of “The Social Semantic Web” last month in the President’s Drawing Room at NUI Galway. The book was officially launched by Dr. James J. Browne, President of NUI Galway. The book was authored by myself, Dr. Alexandre Passant and Prof. Stefan Decker from the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at NUI Galway (sponsored by SFI). Here is a short blurb:

Web 2.0, a platform where people are connecting through their shared objects of interest, is encountering boundaries in the areas of information integration, portability, search, and demanding tasks like querying. The Semantic Web is an ideal platform for interlinking and performing operations on the diverse data available from Web 2.0, and has produced a variety of approaches to overcome limitations with Web 2.0. In this book, Breslin et al. describe some of the applications of Semantic Web technologies to Web 2.0. The book is intended for professionals, researchers, graduates, practitioners and developers.

Some photographs from the launch event are below.

DERI, Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Education, English, FOAF, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Representation, NUI Galway, National University of Ireland Galway, SIOC, Semantic Web, data, social media, social networks, social software, web 2.0

I’ve been diligently ignoring the RDF 2.0 threads on the semantic-web interest list, especially on Syntax since I’ve been there before (Modernising Semantic Web Markup). Firstly I’d endorse what Jeremy Carroll says about the features.

I think I’m qualified as an expert on RDF graph serializations / syntax since:

• I edited the RDF/XML (2004)
• I co-created and co-edited N-Triples
• I created Turtle
• played with making an atom-triples (Atom Triples Internet Draft from 2008)

and I implemented all of the above plus GRDDL, RDFa (via librdfa), Atom and RSS*es, RDF/JSON, … in Raptor

People moan about RDF/XML and have for years. I even wrote down in great detail the flaws in Modernising Semantic Web Markup. Over all that time nobody has come up with a credible and complete XML syntax alternative that stuck, even myself. Let me summarize the ones I know:

• TriX: had little takeup
• RXR: ditto
• GRIT: new, but flawed since it can only represent trees (no named bnodes)

The fundamental problem I think with using XML to write down graphs is:

People looking at XML expect they are looking at a hierarchical Tree.

So writing a Graph in an XML Tree is just going to always fail the simplicity test. This might come from using the XML DOM or looking at HTML, XHTML, but it’s pretty embedded in the mind.

Right now I’d dismiss any XML format for any “simple” or “obvious” way to write down RDF graphs that will be accepted by new users.

(Aside: There’s also a technical argument that no XML format can ever represent all RDF graphs since RDF allows Unicode codepoints that are not allowed in XML).

Now this isn’t a problem just with XML, it’s also true of other non-XML formats that are serial hierarchical documents. That means formats like JSON, which cannot even out-of-the-box represent anything that is not a tree, since it has no ID/REF mechanism.

Of course, apart having dealt with the RDF/XML I also invented Turtle (based on the N3 syntax, simplified) and although it’s a non-XML syntax, does seem to be in the sweet spot for users understanding it, without having the hierarchical document expectation. Yes, Turtle is close to JSON/python in syntax design space but this doesn’t seem to have been a problem.

So I’m happy with how Turtle turned out and that should be the focus of RDF syntax formats for users. It does need an update and I’ll probably work on that whether or not a new syntax is part of some future working group – I have a pile of fixes to go in. Adding named graphs (TRIG) might be the next step for this if it was a standard.

It may be there is a need for a better machine format, but please don’t mix them. Also, machines can read Turtle RDF :)

Consider this stream of conciousness RDF syntax thoughts as the basis of my position paper for the W3C RDF Next Steps workshop.

English, RDF, comment, grddl, raptor, syntax, turtle

Ha sido una de las noticias, en mi opinión, más significativas de la semana. Bruce Sterling, renombrado escritor cyberpunk y bloguero de Wired (su blog es Beyond the Beyond)  presentará la primera conferencia comercial sobre la Realidad aumentada de la esfera web.

El Augmented Reality Event, signo de que las predicciones que conceden importancia al fenómeno de la RA en 2010 son del todo acertadas, será el 2 y 3 de junio en Santa Clara.

Dejo como muestra de todo ello la ficción que nos recomendaba hace un par de días Bruce en Wired, con las palabras que su autor, un estudiante de arquitectura, le dedicaba. ¿Es hora de crear al fenómeno una historia, un lenguaje, una cultura ya? Parece que sí…

“La última mitad del siglo XX vio como el entorno físico y el de los medios se mezclaba, con la arquitectura adoptando nuevos roles entorno al consumismo, la imagen, el branding. La realidad aumentada podría recontextualizar consumismo, arquitectura y la forma en que interactuamos con todo ello…”.

Mucho de Hyper-realidad aumentada posible con un matiz de parodia, de clara prevención ante lo excesivamente comercial en que puede derivar el tema que hoy nos resulta tan atractivo:

Feliz fin de semana.

2010, Planeta educativo, Spanish, Web 3.0, ra, realidad aumentada, video-arte, video-documentales, web3.0

Si la evolución de la web es, como hemos visto en muchas ocasiones aquí, fundamentalmente, hacia la personalización, si aparecen contínuamente herramientas o mejoras que se pensaron con el objetivo de ofrecernos una experiencia de usuario más personalizada, si se va demostrando un entorno ideal (y único) para el aprendizaje informal, autónomo y permanente, en un contexto en el que la Inteligencia competitiva es un elemento esencial para la mejora y supervivencia de empresas y organizaciones (la transparencia favorece la excelencia, hemos expresado en otras ocasiones), creo que va llegando el momento de proponer cosas como los Entornos Profesionales de Aprendizaje, planificados o gestionados por Content Curators (Intermediarios críticos del conocimiento).

Veréis reflejados en la presentación que os dejo los PLN (Redes personales de Aprendizaje) de Guadalinfo, las nuevas abundancias, algunas ideas nuevas y viejas acerca del aprendizaje informal, propuestas innovadoras que datan de 1971 , justificaciones teóricas muy recientes acerca de la naturaleza del conocimiento y cómo determina todo lo que planteamos, además de propuestas concretas sobre posibles herramientas de manejo de todo ello.

De la misma abundancia de opciones de abordaje de las cuestiones que ofrece la www, parte también una idea relevante:  la de la necesaria interdisciplinariedad de los enfoques de la formación en organizaciones (Business Intelligence y teorías sobre Entornos de Aprendizaje personalizado, social y abierto en la web que derivan del mundo de la educación).

Trabajaremos en ello, con Jesús Martínez (algunas de las ideas en la presentación, de esta nueva perspectiva aún en curso,  han surgido de conversaciones con Jesús y entorno al programa) y el motivado equipo de e-moderadores del programa Compartim (programa de CoPs del CEJFE – Dpt. de Justicia de la Generalitat de Catalunya),  el próximo martes 26 en Barcelona.

Creo que en el enfoque abierto a la interdisciplinariedad, consciente de la complejidad y las posibilidades del nuevo entorno, acompañado del valor y el esfuerzo de los participantes (y seguidores, como yo misma), del Compartim se basa, en gran medida, su avance contínuo y sin las típicas excusas hacia la Sociedad del Conocimiento.

Se trata, en este caso, de una sesión interna, pero que será la primera de una serie de actuaciones en este sentido durante 2010.

Continuaremos, de hecho, hablando de ello, con otros expertos y en sesión abierta al público en el próximo seminario de Gestió del Coneixement, Coneixement en Acció el próximo 22 de febrero.

2010, Business Intelligence, Knowledge Management, PLEs, Planeta educativo, Spanish, Videotutoriales, Web 3.0, colaboraciones, comunidades, conectivismo, content curator, content curators, e-learning2.0, empresa, empresa 2.0, entornos personales, entornos personales de aprendizaje, entornos personalizados, filtrado de contenidos, innovación, inteligencia competitiva, ple, pln, web 2.0, web personal, web3.0

The Journal of Web Semantics has announced two new special issues. Heiner Stuckenschmidt and Jeff Heflin are editing a special issue on web-scale semantic information processing with a deadline of 1 July 2010 for submissions. Grigoris Antoniou, Mathieu d’Aquin and Jeff Z. Pan are editing a special issue on semantic web dynamics with submissions due 31 May 2010.

AI, English, KR, Semantic Web

Value-it “Demand Driven Report”  is very rich in data, conclusions, results, undoubtedly a reference document for people who want to know about Semantic Technologies possibilities. But a one hundred pages document is perhaps too much document for people who only want to have a high level picture.

For this reason it is worth to highlight the most relevant key findings:

• Semantic Technologies for the Enterprise can facilitate business recovery: On the present situation this fact must be taken into account for some companies.
• Many IT decision-makers have little knowledge of STE: It is clear that STE suppliers have not done a good job disseminating semantics, this is a “must change” for the future.
• IT managers want to know more about STE: Though semantic has not been well sold, IT managers know that something to manage the data overflow must be done, for this reason they want to know more about STE possibilities.
• Information-driven industries will benefit first and most from STE: Of course, in that places where information has a high value, semantic technologies will gain momentum soon.
• Approaches taken will vary by sector requirements: Depending in the need of the sectors, the STE solutions could be different
• Consumer-focused functionality will raise awareness: Speech recognition, new interfaces…, could be fundamental factors to bring STE closer to consumers
• Suppliers must work harder to make the case clear: Again, there is a consensus about the utility of these technologies but there is a sensation that something has not be done well by supplies
• Growing markets in speech recognition can anchor growth for STE: Speech recognition can be the open door to STE for lot of applications.

In short, there is a clear opinion that STE can be useful but there is a impression that something is not well done, mainly by STE vendors. All these findings must move us to a reflection about how we must continue to make more attractive these technologies from now on.

English, Spanish, Uncategorized, demand, semantic technologies

We released OpenCalais 4.3 a day or so ago - and we’ve run into a few issues as we’ve rolled it out into production. We think we have a handle on the fixes needed – but to play it safe we’re going to roll back to Release 4.2 for at least the weekend.
 
Sorry for any inconvenience – but we’d rather play it safe and take a day or two to get things totally in shape.
 
Tom

English, Official Blog

Of course, the main important point when you try to sell something is the existence of “Demand“. It doesn’t matter we are speaking about a product, a service, or why not, a technology.

For this reason I think that “Demand driven report” is a fundamental document for those who are interested in semantic technologies. Lots of posts and articles have been written about Semantic Technologies but not too much of them are centered in the main question for any business: Who is going to be interested on these technologies?. In this document Value-it team has been working hard on analyzing different sectors, diving in each one to pinpoint in which areas the Semantic Technologies could fit.

For each sector this document offers a deep analysis of the present situation, most relevant challenges (of course the crisis is the dominant point in most of them), IT responses, points where STE can help to overcome the problems…

To use a common criterium about the STE convenience for all the situations the next two axes, “Importance of concepts” and “Diversity of business contexts”, figure has been utilized.

The sectors considered are:

• Manufacturing
• Financial Services
• Entertainment & Media
• Information & Communication Technologies
• Healthcare & Life Sciences
• Energy & Utilities

Undoubtedly this document must be considered a reference guide for all those people who need to have a big picture about where STE can fit better. The document is based on the knowledge of a well know company  in the IT strategy area such as OVUM, but it is not a laboratory reflection, on the contrary, 50 interviews have been done to personnel of outstanding companies. For this reason, I think that this study is different to others done with commercial goals. I hope you will enjoy it.

English, Spanish, Value-it project, demand report, sematic tehcnologies

W3C is organizing a Workshop on the Next Steps for RDF around June 2010; we will announce the exact dates and location as soon as possible.

Since its publication in 2004, the Resource Description Framework (RDF) has become the core architectural block of the Semantic Web. The standard is now widely deployed in terms of tools and applications. Due to this wide deployment, additional R&D activities, and the publication of newer standards (e.g., SPARQL, OWL, POWDER, and SKOS), a number of issues regarding RDF have come to the fore. Workshop articipants will discuss these issues and help determine whether it is time for a new version of RDF. W3C Membership is not required to participate in the Workshop, but each participant must be associated with an accepted position paper. The deadline for position papers is 29 March 2010; see the Call for Participation for more information.

Updates (including the exact date and location of the Workshop) will be added to the Call for Participation and will be announced on the Semantic Web Activity News Blog.

Activity news, English

Comentábamos hace un tiempo la participación de Tim Berners-Lee, el inventor de la World Wide Web en sendas iniciativas, norteamericana y británica, de apertura, puesta a disposición del ciudadano (también, mediante APIs abiertas, de desarrolladores de aplicaciones, investigadores, etc…) de determinados datos no privados (accidentes de tráfico, pasajeros de aviación, agricultura, resultados escolares, etc…) que podrían ser de interés.

Se trata de una derivación de la Web semántica, la Web de los datos enlazados, que hemos analizado en varias ocasiones durante los últimos tiempos:

Data.gov.uk es el sitio británico, con 3 veces más volumen de datos de los que el sitio de US, más antiguo, ofrece hoy. Concretamente, The Data.gov.uk contiene acerca de 3,000 “data sets” (conjunto de datos), en contraste con los 1,000 data sets de US.

No me ha extrañado el compromiso británico con la innovación, que comenta Kirkpatrick. UK ha sido uno de los primeros países en recomendar desde el gobierno, en legislar hace poco más de un año, sobre cosas como el uso de twitter en educación.

Volviendo al tema, el gobierno de UK tiene una legislación tradicionalmente más adecuada a compartir este tipo de datos (The Freedom of Information Act). Además, se ha demostrado claramente entusiasta de las posibilidades de innovación que ofrece el trabajo con este tipo de datos públicos. Prueba de ello es que esponsoreaban hace poco un concurso, Show Us a Better Way, remunerando las mejores ideas sobre posibles mashups para aplicaciones o visualización de datos, en caso de tener acceso a los datos gubernamentales adecuados.

De aplicación más restringida en el caso de US, el sitio de UK incluye data sets militares cuyo carácter público puede resultar polémico o extraño. Los datos sobre  Suicidios en las fuerzas armadas son un buen ejemplo de ello.

Se aplica también a esta Nube de los Datos Enlazados el problema que Vinton Cerf, co-creador de los protocolos TCP-IP destacaría hace unos meses sobre los sistemas de Cloud Computing en general: que los proveedores de servicios en la nube más importantes, como Amazon, Google o IBM no se están preocupando por la interoperabilidad, generando una situación en la que empresas o organizaciones pierden la capacidad de migrar libremente de uno a otro proveedor.

No existen estándares “inter-cloud”, derivándose una situación similar a la de falta de comunicación y familiaridad entre redes de computadoras que vivimos en 1973.  Según Vint Cerf, los usuarios pronto querrán tener múltiples clouds que interactúen entre sí para sacar partido de la capacidad de computación que pueden ofrecer tales entornos combinados. “Hay mucho trabajo de investigación por hacer y muchos protocolos por diseñar y estándares por adoptar para permitir a los usuarios gestionar sus activos en la nube”.

Aunque  Cerf,  vinculado a Google (empresa tradicionalmente ajena a la evolución de la Semweb), no apunte en esta dirección, la Web semántica, la estructuración de los datos bajo sus formatos es una buena solución, como estándar independiente de marcas proveedoras de servicios en la nube.

Es algo que sabían en UK cuando contrataban a Berners Lee para la tarea, pero que parece que no arraiga con tanta fuerza en US. Si bien la administración Obama se muestra afín a utilizar técnicas de computación en la nube para conseguir mayores niveles de eficacia y de comunicación interdepartamental, no lo hace tanto a la hora de adoptar estándares semánticos.

2010, Google, Linked Data, Planeta educativo, Resource Description Framework, Semantic Web, Spanish, Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Web 3.0, Web Semántica, cloud computing, cloud computing-web 4.0, data cloud, e-goverment, gov, herramientas semánticas, linked data cloud, talleres, vinton cerf, web3.0