Planet Semantico

Along with a number of my colleagues, I’m currently attending the ISWC 2008 conference in Karlsruhe, Germany. Yesterday I attended the INSEMTIVE workshop (”Incentives for the Semantic Web”) which aimed to explore incentives for the creation of semantic web content, i.e. encourage the creation of more structured metadata. The workshop papers are available to browse online or you can download the complete proceedings. There were a real mix of papers, covering specific issues such as extraction of semantics from tagging, and identifying information needs of a community by analysing search patterns, through to position papers that attempted to highlight shortcomings in current semantic web applications that deter people from creating metadata.

I found the position papers most interesting if only because they provided confirmation of something that I’ve been thinking for a while now: that people will (and do) create metadata when there are obvious and immediate benefits in them doing so. No-one really consciously sits down to share or create metadata: they sit down to do a specific task and metadata drops out as a side-effect. For me this makes much of the problem highlighted by the workshop one of interaction design: how do we build good task-oriented user interfaces that encourage the creation of semantic web metadata, and how can we illustrate the benefits of semantic web technologies in an incremental fashion? In my opinion solving this will require close collaboration between semantic web researchers and developers, and interaction designers.

The end of the workshop was a discussion session chaired by Jim Hendler. Hendler chose to do a retrospective of some older presentations to explore how thinking has evolved (or not!) with respect to drivers towards the development of the semantic web.

Starting in 1999, Hendler showed some slides from DAML strategy talks that emphasised the need for a number of different areas to align before a real marketplace can be created for semantic web content and applications. These areas were tools, users, and languages (e.g. OWL, etc). Hendler noted that the Semantic Web community had mistakenly focused too heavily on languages and not enough on the other areas. He also thought that “Web 2.0″ had focused primarily on the users, to a lesser extent on the tools, and very little on the language aspects. Hendler thought that this alignment was now taking place.

Moving forward in time to show some slides from 2001-2002, Hendler introduced the idea that the development of the web itself will “force” the evolution of the semantic web, i.e. that internal pressures, such as the need to better manage and extract value from the massive amounts of online information, will require the semantic web to solve specific problems. Hendler observed that the web has demonstrated that people will do more work to share information with others than they will do to help themselves; i.e. people are lazy. When people want to, need to, or are rewarded for sharing information and content then they will work much harder than they would do to manage and organize information purely for their own uses. Hendler noted that there is a tendency to say “we’ll solve the data creation problem at the individual level, as solving it at a group level is harder to manage”, but a look at web history illustrates that the opposite is in fact the case.

Hendler also shared what he thought was the best piece of advice he’d been given by Tim Berners-Lee: start small but viral and you can change many things. Hendler’s slides characterized this as: “My friend sees it, wants one; My competitor sees it, needs one”.

Looking at slides from 2002, Hendler introduced the “Value proposition” supporting the creation of semantic web data & content, i.e. that there has to be some immediate return on the investment in creating metadata.

Hendler finished his retrospective with a slide from a 2008 talk that showed the range of commercial companies, government projects and vertical sectors that were now heavily engaged in the Semantic Web (I was happy to see Talis mentioned in the list!). In Hendler’s opinion there is a growing excitement, that the “next big thing” is going to come from the Semantic Web; not a “Google Killer”, but the next big revolutionary idea or service. The incentives here being the obvious one: money.

Hendler noted that there is a huge amount of data out there and that finding anything in the mess can be a win. So even a little semantics can make a difference here and could provide some competitive advantages. We don’t need perfect answers or solutions, just incremental improvements on what we have now.

I was also happy to see Hendler encourage researchers to “compete in the real world”, noting that they have to work within the context of a real world that is moving very fast, that they can’t really compete with the resources of commercial firms in creating semantic web applications and demonstrators and should instead try and work within that context to demonstrate real value from the technology. Hendler encouraged them to focus on issues of scalability. Does the fundamental technology scale? Do the concepts and ideas scale to a real user base? As an illustration Hendler noted that he was working with a number of companies that were using some simple OWL constructs in order to add semantics to applications, but that none of them were using a formal reasoner just “little pieces of procedural code that scale really well”.

Overall, an interesting workshop!

Paul Miller did a podcast with Jim Hendler back in March if you want to hear more about his thoughts on the Semantic Web.

English fundamental technology scale, Germany, Google, Jim Hendler, Karlsruhe, Online Information, Paul Miller, search patterns, Semantic Web, semantic web applications, semantic web content, semantic web data, semantic web metadata, semantic web researchers, Semantic Web technologies, Tim Berners-Lee, Web community, web history

Springer has released the ISWC2008 Proceedings on their site.

The Semantic Web - ISWC 2008, Proceedings of the Seventh International Semantic Web Conference, A.P. Sheth, S. Staab, M. Dean, M. Paolucci, D. Maynard, T. Finin, and K. Thirunarayan (Eds.), Karlsruhe, Germany, 26-30 October 2008, LNCS Volume 5318, Springer Berlin/Heidelberg.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2008, held in Karlsruhe, Germany, during October 26-30, 2008.

The volume contains 43 revised full research papers selected from a total of 261 submissions, of which an additional 3 papers were referred to the semantic Web in-use track; 11 papers out of 26 submissions to the semantic Web in-use track, and 7 papers and 12 posters accepted out of 39 submissions to the doctoral consortium.

The topics covered in the research track are ontology engineering; data management; software and service engineering; non-standard reasoning with ontologies; semantic retrieval; OWL; ontology alignment; description logics; user interfaces; Web data and knowledge; semantic Web services; semantic social networks; and rules and relatedness. The semantic Web in-use track covers knowledge management; business applications; applications from home to space; and services and infrastructure.

English Germany, Karlsruhe, Knowledge Management, semantic social networks, Semantic Web, Semantic Web Services, Web Conference, Web data

The Web of Data Practitioners Days concluded with the session on Multimedia in the Web of Data, the first part of which was led by Ansgar Scherp (University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany).

Multimedia content, as Ansgar pointed out, is hardly annotated, badly organized, and hardly ever looked at again - just think of the 300 something pics you might take on an average week-end getaway, and which you never touch again. Annotating multimedia content requires a lot of work and dedication - but most of the time, these pictures eventually dissappear in the “digital shoe box” that is your photo management software.

The most obvious remedy is to annotate content as early as possible, ideally when creating the content, ideally already on your portable camera (formerly known as: mobile phone:) Ansgar suggested to provide incentives for people to encourage picture annotation - professionals could for instance receive a higher financial reward if the deliver already annotated pictures. And of course there are ‘Games with a purpose’ such as Google Image Labeler, where players tag images in pairs, with and against each other, and are rewarded with the entertainment factor of the game.

The slide below shows what has happened (or will happen) to the process of creating photo books in the digital age and the age of mashups:

After all, this is the age of the social semantic web, so why not try and (re-)use the content, structure and contexts that other users have already created on the web? Content augmentation, for the scope that Ansgar is concerned with, consists in the reuse of content and structures (e.g. from sources such as Flickr and Wikipedia, Geonames) made possible through the definition of rules, e.g.:

• If there are two or less pictures on a page*
• then automatically augment the page with additional photos using location information.

* Page here means a page in the album you are currently working on - you probably took a picture of yourself and your friend in Paris, and even though you went to the Centre Pompidou, you forgot to actually take a pic of the building itself - well, let the web be your library!

So the goal is clear: develop a procedure for applying automatic content augmentation in the creation of good photo books.

But what makes a ‘good’ photo book anyway? Here are some of the results of a structural analysis of real, human-created photobooks conducted at CeWe Color:

• % of photos with faces: 36%
• Number of album pages: 16.96
• Photos per page: 6.69
• Text fields per page: 1.45
• % of pages with text: 87%

There are many rules that can be established from the structural analysis, which can be applied in turn in the creation of photoboooks, e.g. rules like this one,

• If the text located in the upper third of a page
• if the font size is equal or larger that 16 points
• if the number of words is less than 10
• if there is no caption on the page that has a bigger font size
• then this page is the title

Ansgar recommended xSmart, which he described as a “context-driven authoring tool for page-based multimedia presentations.”

Ansgar’s presentation was followed by two more: one by Yves Raimond on Interlinking Music on the Web of Data, and one on Interlinking Multimedia - in spite of better intentions, I did not manage to cover these two in detail, but at least I gathered the links to relevant resources from all three sessions…

Links for Ansgar Scherp’s session

• Continuous Media Markup Language (CMML) (see also: CMML on Wikipedia)
• COMM - A Core Ontology for Multimedia
• Caliph and Emir - Java & MPEG-7 based tools for annotation and retrieval of digital photos and images
• X- COSIM - a framework for Cross(X)-COntext Semantic Information Management

Links for Yves Raimond’s session

• Music Ontology Specification
• The Timeline Ontology
• The Event Ontology
• Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records
• www.SonicVisualiser.org - a program for viewing and analysing the contents of music audio files
• www.dbtune.org - music-related RDF
• Yves Raimond, Christopher Sutton and Mark Sandler 2008: Automatic Interlinking of Music Datasets on the Semantic Web. (PDF, 467 KB)
• Interview with Yves Raimond: Finding vegetarian music: What B.B. King and the Beastie Boys have in common
• DB-Tune Facet Demo
• Henry 1 and 2 - a SWI-Prolog N3 parser/reasoner, and DSP-driving SPARQL end point

Links for Michael Hausenblas’ session

• InterlinkingMultimedia.info - a wiki dedicated to Interlinking multimedia (iM), “a light-weight bottom-up approach to interlink multimedia content on the Web of Data”.
• Rammx - RDFa-deployed Multimedia Metadata
• CaMiCatzee - multimedia interlinking concept demonstrator.

Last not least: Ansgar Scherp allowed us a sneak peek of SemaPlorer, a Large-scale Semantic Faceted Browsing Application for Multimedia Data that is going to be revealed on Dec 2, 2008, at the BOEMIE Bootstrapping Ontology Evolution with Multimedia Information Extraction) workshop in Koblenz. Here is an abstract:

Navigating large media repositories is a tedious task, because it requires frequent search for the `right’ keywords, as searching and browsing do not consider the semantics of multimedia data. To resolve this issue, we have developed the SemaPlorer application. SemaPlorer facilitates easy usage of Flickr data by allowing for faceted browsing taking into account semantic background knowledge harvested from sources such as DBpedia, GeoNames, WordNet and personal FOAF files. The inclusion of such background knowledge, however, puts a heavy load on the repository infrastructure that cannot be handled by off-the-shelf software. Therefore, we have developed SemaPlorer’s storage infrastructure based on Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service. We apply NetworkedGraphs as additional layer on top of EC2, performing as a large, federated data infrastructure for semantically heterogeneous data sources from within and outside of the cloud. Therefore, SemaPlorer is scalable with respect to the amount of distributed components working together as well as the number of triples managed overall.
Steffen Staab, Information Systems and Semantic Web (ISWeb), University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany

Thank you, thank you, thank you, it was a lovely event with an unusually high amount of processable input!

English Ansgar Scherp, B.B. King, cellular telephone, Centre Pompidou, Christopher Sutton, context-driven authoring tool, DSP, frequent search, Germany, Google, Interlinking Music, Java, large media repositories, Mark Sandler, Michael Hausenblas, MPEG, Paris, photo management software, repository infrastructure, social semantic web, storage infrastructure, University of Koblenz-Landau, www.dbtune.org, www.SonicVisualiser.org, Yves Raimond

The third session at WOD-PD was dedicated to “Bringing (Legacy) Data on the Web“, and led by Sören Auer (University of Leipzig, Germany) and Orri Erling (OpenLink Software) .

Sören Auer described the difference between the Web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 as follows: On the Web 1.0, you had many websites that provided unstructured, mainly textual content. On the Web 2.0, you have a few large websites that are specialised on specific content types. And, finally, on the Web 3.0, there are many websites which contain, and are able to semantically syndicate, arbitrarily structured content.

So why would we need another web? What you cannot do with the current web is finding answers to seemingly complex, yet in reality pretty mundane question such as: Where in Leipzig do I find an apartment that is close to bilingual, German-French child care facilities? Are there any ERP service providers which have offices in Vienna and Berlin? Who are the researchers in South-East Asia currently working on database related topics?

Sören further discussed three of the present means of bringing relation data to the web: Triplify (a web application plugin that exposes data from relational databases in RDF), D2RQ (a declarative language to describe mappings between relational database schemata and OWL/RDFS ontologies, developed at Free University Berlin), and Virtuoso Universal Server (a middleware and database engine hybrid delivering for instance data integration for SQL, RDF, XML, Web Services). With respect to Triplify, Sören - who is Triplify’s founder and main developer at AKSW Uni Leipzig - showed and discussed the configuration for Wordpress 2.1., which can be found here (click here for more configurations, e.g. for Joomla, OpenConf and Drupal). The next aim for Triplify is to become an integral part in enduser web app distibutions.

And important question raised by Sören was: How do next generation search engines know that something has changed on the web of data? He suggested three approaches:

1. Always try to crawl everything (this may sound silly - but that’s actually what is happening on the current web)
2. Ping a central update notification service - e.g. PingTheSemanticWeb.com - which works as a showcase, but will probably not scale if the data web gets really deployed.
3. Each linked data endpoint publishes an update log - e.g. with Triplify, as a special folder inside the Triplify namespace, e.g. http://example.com/Triplify/update

Also discussed by Sören and worth checking out is Reuters’ Semantic proxy - the demo went live in late September.

Orri Erling, as the lead developer of the Virtuoso Team, addressed the issue of mapping relational databases to RDF with OpenLink Virtuoso. In his talk, he addressed the pros and cons of RDF data warehouse:

Pros

• Even query performance across all data
• Possibility of forward-chaining inference
• Some SPARQL features may be better supported, e.g. Unspecified predicates

Cons

• Keeping data up-to-date
• Complex set up, needs dedicated servers: you don’t build them on a whim

What Virtuoso delivers is mapping of SPARQL to SQL against any existing schema (whether stored in Virtuoso or elsewhere); a physical quad-store (quad as in quadruple; not as in quad-bike:); and Federated/local Relational Data Base Management Systems (RDBMS).

A more detailed discussion of the requirements for Relational-to-RDF Mapping is available on Orri’s blog, where he discusses it in the light of his own experience. A power point presentation of a previous talk he gave to the W3C RDB2RDF Incubator Group can be downloaded here: Mapping Relational Databases to RDF with OpenLink Virtuoso (PPT, 115KB). His summary of the group discussions around the same topic, Requirements for Relational to RDF Mapping, can be found here.

Orri also showed the Virtuoso billion triples demo which, according to the corresponding blogpost, “is being worked on at the time of submission and may be shown online by appointment.” The demo was a submission to the Billion Triples Challenge.

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• Linking Open Data Triplification Challenge at I-Semantics 2008
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English Berlin, data warehouse, data web, enduser web app distibutions, Free University Berlin, Germany, Leipzig, OpenLink Software, RDF, RDF data warehouse, Relational Data Base Management Systems, Relational Database, Reuters, Sören Auer, search engines, University of Leipzig, Vienna, W3C RDB2RDF Incubator Group, web application plugin, Web Services

The next session at WOD-PD was given by Leo Sauermann (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence DFKI, Germany), and Brian Davis (DERI Galway, Ireland). Leo introduced the idea of the Semantic Desktop, and more specifically, the Nepomuk Social Semantic Desktop. There’s good article about Nepomuk on Linux.com, written by Bruce Byfield on August 26, 2008, from which I quote the following, enlightening passages:

Ansgar Bernardi, deputy head of the Knowledge Management Department at Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI, or the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence) and Nepomuk’s coordinator, explains, “The basic problem that we all face nowadays is how to handle vast amounts of information at a sensible rate.” [...] “The point is, you have a vast amount of information on your desktop, hidden in files, hidden in emails, hidden in the names and structures of your folders. Nepomuk gives a standard way to handle such information.”

At a high level of generalization, Nepomuk has three main aspects, according to Bernardi. First, there is a standard framework for annotating pieces of information so that connections can be made between them. Second, there are ontologies, the sets of “documented shared understanding” or common concepts that can be defined for particular types of information, such as bio-science or computer desktop use. Finally, there are the tools for making or using the annotations and ontologies, what Bernardi calls the “workspaces that connect to other workspaces and help you in your day to day activities of collecting information, structuring it, making sense of it, and creating new information and communicating it.”

Leo has provided the relevant download links for those who “want to get their hands dirty” with Nepomuk (as he put it) on his blog. Leo Sauermann and Ansgar Bernardi also contributed an article about the Semantic Desktop to the recently published Social Semantic Web volume - a preview of the article is available here (in German - I’m sorry!).

Brian Davis‘ part of the talk focused on Lifting and Human Language Technology (HLT) for the Semantic Desktop - Semantic Lifting means to capture semantics and translate them into ontologies. Human language technology (HLT), in its broadest sense, can be described as computational methods for processing and manipulating language (for instance text analysis).

One of the goals of the Semantic Desktop is speech act detection for email - speech act here as defined by John Searle. At its most basic definition, a speech act is simply an utterance, but is also often understood more specifically as an illocutionary act (which is a term introduced by John L. Austin in How to do things with words), or a ‘performative utterance’, meaning that by saying something, one actually does something. For instance, the sentence “Please have the document ready for Workshop 1.” contains an instruction: It informs the reader about the requirements for a particular event, and asks him or her to meet these requirements.

Brian also introduced Roundtrip Ontology Authoring (ROA), which is a process that allows non-expert users to author or amend an ontology by using simple, easy to learn, controlled natural language. The process is a combination of Controlled Language for Information Extraction (CLIE) and Text Generation which is developed on top of GATE. ROA is documented on the the Nepomuk website; for further information about CLIE, read this article by Valentin Tablan, Tamara Polajnar, Hamish Cunningham and Kalina Bontcheva: User-friendly ontology authoring using a controlled language (PDF, 64 KB).

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• On Speech Based Interfaces to Search - and Beyond

English Ansgar Bernardi, artificial intelligence, Austin, Brian Davis, Bruce Byfield, German Research Center, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence DFKI, Germany, Hamish Cunningham, Human Language Technology, Ireland, John Searle, Kalina Bontcheva, Knowledge Management, Leo Sauermann, Tamara Polajnar, Valentin Tablan, Web volume

The ISWC2008 Poster and Demo proceedings is now available as

Proceedings of the Poster and Demonstration Session of the Seventh International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2008), Christian Bizer and Anupam Joshi (Eds.), CEUR volume 401, Karlsruhe, Germany, October 28, 2008.

The ISWC 2008 poster and demonstration page has also been updated to link to the two page papers for each poster and demo.

English Anupam Joshi, Christian Bizer, Germany, Karlsruhe, Web Conference

An implementation of Semantic MediaWiki in public administration reiceved a jury award yesterday in the final ceremony of the highly coveted multimedia state award (Staatspreis Multimedia) 2008 in Vienna: Administration Research Center KDZ’s platform for the cooperation of administrations (Plattform Verwaltungskooperation) in Austria, Germany, Italy and Switzerland received praise for its use of open, semantic technologies in their effort to further the collaboration between administrations and administrative staff. Those of you who can read German: read the response from Bernhard Krabina, KDZ, here or contact him here, if you’d like to learn more. The top state award itself went to HPC Dual, a combination of electronic and physical mail delivery.

Also published yesterday was an interview with Matthias Schindler, former member of board of Wikimedia Germany, at the occasion of the publication of a physical Wikipedia, i.e. a one-volume encyclopedia in print (publisher: Wissen Media, a Bertelsmann division). According to the English Wikipedia, “the volume is planned to include abbreviated entries for the 50,000 most commonly used search terms of the prior two years. The book is to be priced at 19.95 euros, with one euro from every sale going to the German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation.”

The interviewers also asked Schindler for his “encyclopedic Wikipedia dream” - I hope his response will catch on in the Wikimedia chapters worldwide:

I would one day like to see a large edition of Wikipedia (including a German language edition), which makes use of the Semantic MediaWiki extension. The dream in a nutshell, without consideration of the current state of research and development: A wikipedia that can be read not only by humans, but also by computers, a Wikipedia that can offer concrete answers to concrete questions and that creates content individually for users, something that they can make use of; great if Wikipedia played the role of the first, mainstream Semantic Web application. While this is still in the process of coming together, there are enough other things for us to do.

(btw, my translation).

Concrete answers to concrete questions, a personalized Wikipedia - I am not even aiming that high at the moment.

Just consider the absurd amount of lists in Wikipedia, all of which are maintained manually. Take for instance the list of hardcore punk bands, the list of fictional countries (to be distinguished from the list of European fictional countries) or the list of military operations.

How often do you think these need an update? And if a new hardcore punk band is added - will the creators of the new article think about adding it to the list? What about articles which make make a reference to or mention things that are or should be on a particular list?

As a list has the inherent claim of being complete, it shouldn’t be left to humans to create and maintain them - leave that to the machines! Vote Semantic MediaWiki for Wikipedia!

Author: Jana Herwig

English Austria, Bernhard Krabina, EUR, Germany, Italy, Jana Herwig, Matthias Schindler, open, search terms, semantic technologies, Switzerland, Vienna, web application, Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia Germany

Here is a quick update on Calais developer events as well as new discounts on conferences where the Calais team will be presenting in the weeks ahead.  We hope to see you there, so let us know if you can make it! 

NOTE: The MIT EmTech '08 conference is next week, so act now to get your discounted OpenCalais community rate.

1. MIT's EmTech '08 - September 23 - 25, Cambridge, MA (with Calais developer luncheon on 9/25)
2. The European Semantic Technology Conference (ESTC2008) - September 24-26, Vienna, Austria
3. The Web 3.0 Conference - October 16-17, Santa Clara, CA
4. 7th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2008) - October 26-30, Karlsruhe, Germany
5. The Defrag Conference - November 5-6, Denver, CO
6. Mashup Camp - November 17-19, Mountain View, CA

DETAILS AND DISCOUNTS:

MIT's EmTech '08 - September 23 - 25, Cambridge, MA

The Calais team will be out in force at the Emerging Technologies Conference @ MIT, with a booth, a developer luncheon and discounted pricing for members of the OpenCalais community.

The luncheon takes place Thursday, September 25th from 12:30 - 1:50 p.m. ET.  Tom will share "Five Easy Ways to Add Value with Calais" to provide developers with helpful tips and ideas to kick-start their efforts.

Visit the OpenCalais community discounts page from MIT to register.  Discounted options include attending the entire conference, coming for one day, or coming for just the Calais developer luncheon. 

The European Semantic Technology Conference (ESTC2008) - September 24-26, Vienna, Austria

Barak Pridor, CEO, ClearForest, a Thomson Reuters company and creator of the Calais Web service, speaks at EXTC2008 in Vienna on Thursday, September 25th.

Barak co-presents the keynote address that day, Extraction and resolution capabilities for entities, events and facts, along with Peter Jackson, Chief Scientist for the Thomson Reuters Professional division.

The Web 3.0 Conference - October 16-17, Santa Clara, CA

Calais lead Tom Tague will be speaking on the Semantic Startup 101 - Successes, challenges and strategic decisions panel along with Powerset's Mark Johnson and others.

The Web 3.0 conference organizers has offered a $100 discount to Calais fans and OpenCalais community members, which you can secure by using the code SPKGF08 when you register.

7th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2008) - October 26-30, Karlsruhe, Germany

Michal Findkelstein-Landau, Calais' Director of Content Strategy, will provide an overview of the Calais Web service, including technical elements, current applications and insight on how to add value with Calais today.

The Defrag Conference - November 5-6, Denver, CO

Calais is a Defrag silver sponsor and Tom Tague is also speaking alongside Yahoo! Search's Amit Kumar and Siderean's Bradley Allen in the Next Level Discovery panel on Tuesday the 4th.

Mashup Camp - November 17-19, Mountain View, CA 

Calais is a sponsor of Mashup Camp and will be hosting a speed geeking table.  We will be competing in the 'Best Solution Provider Tool' competition, and are working on a Calais mashup developer contest of our own (stay tuned for details).

Registration for Mashup Camp is free if you don't mind sharing your email with sponsors, or you can pay a nominal fee to avoid doing so.  Either way, save your space in advance.

English Amit Kumar, Austria, Barak Pridor, Bradley Allen, Calais, Cambridge, ClearForest, Denver, Emerging Technologies, European Semantic Technology, Germany, Karlsruhe, Mark Johnson, Mashup Camp, Massachusetts, Michal Findkelstein-Landau, MIT, Mountain View, Peter Jackson, Santa Clara, Thomson Reuters, Tom Tague, USD, Vienna, Web Conference, web service, Yahoo

Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2008-09-08, all weeks. Also available in RDF as linked data or via GRDDL.

A day later than planned, and somewhat shorter than usual (blame Chrome and Ubiquity!), but hopefully there’ll be something to catch your eye.

In the Media

• Slides+Audio: Building Secure, Open and Distributed Social Network Applications

Docs

• Powdering logos (again)
• Enabling Semantic Infrastructure for Collaborative Systems
• dooit - a live Getting Real experiment
• Writing Functional Code with RDFa
• semantic search thoughts
• Exploding DBpedia’s Domain using UMBEL
• Epistemology of the Sponger, or How Virtuoso Drives a Web Query
• Transitivity and Graphs for SQL
• Requirements for Relational to RDF Mapping
• TRIPLE-I 2008: First Day Filled by Commonsense Knowledge
• TRIPLE-I 2008: The Wild vs The Orderly: Folksonomies and Semantics
• TRIPLE-I 2008: Triplification Challenge Winners - Linked Movie Data Base, DBTune, Semantic Web Pipes Demo
• TRIPLE-I 2008: ends with a bang, not a whimper
• TRIPLE-I 2008: Measuring the size of a fact, not of a fiction
• Call for Review: RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing Proposed Recommendation

Software News

• LDAP 2 SPARQL - “Accessing RDF Knowledge Bases via LDAP Clients”
• OpenID ID selector
• UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository
• oEmbed - ” is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites”

Events etc.

• Social Data on the Web (SDoW2008), Karlsruhe, Germany
• See also : Presentations of W3C Team, Office Staff, and Working Group Participants

Miscellany

• The 3 Laws of Platform Adoption: Why Developers Choose Platforms and What it Means to You
• The SOA world begins considering Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA) in earnest
• History of the browser user-agent string
• OpenSocial Overview
• Programming the Universe - book review
• I Am Trying To Believe (that Rock Stars aren’t Dead)

~

Sources include Planet RDF, various other blogs, Semantic Web Interest Group IRC Chatlogs & Scratchpad, ESW Wiki, SemWebCentral, Sweet Tools, W3C Semantic Web Activity, mailing lists, personal emails etc etc. If you see anything suitable this coming week, please mail me or use the del.icio.us tag “TWSW” - thanks!

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English Collaborative Systems, Germany, Karlsruhe, Machine Learning, RDF, semantic search thoughts, Semantic Web Interest Group, SOA, Web query, Web-Oriented Architecture

OWLED is a community event, to be sure; but we’ve always felt a special kinship with it, since Bijan Parsia was one of the founders and all that happened while many of us were at UMD’s Mindlab. In some sense, it’s our “home conference”—which is a bit weird for a startup, granted, but our biz model is commercializing early-stage research, so that suggests having at least a few toes of one foot firmly in academia.

We’ve sponsored OWLED corporately over the past few years, and I helped organized (with Peter Patel-Schneider) the previous OWLED this past April in Washington, DC.

That said, OWLED 2008 EU is in Karlsruhe, Germany, colocated with ISWC 2008, and that’s a long and expensive (thanks to the dollar’s weakness in the EuroZone) trip. But we’ve got a lot planned for OWLED, so while we’re not yet sure who will be there representing C&P, someone will be. We’re busy now writing papers about:

1. Pellint, our ontology lint tool for Pellet
2. extending OWL2 with Integrity Constraint semantics
3. ontology change management server (think SVN for OWL)
4. Owlgres, our OWL2 RL (i.e., DL-Lite) reasoner
5. extending OWL2 with quantitative units for equational reasoning

I don’t know how many of these will be accepted, but we’ll post PDFs for all them once they’re submitted.

Uncategorized Bijan Parsia, DC, European Union, Germany, Karlsruhe, ontology change management server, ontology lint tool, Peter Patel-Schneider, Washington

Deadlines for submitting papers, Doctoral Consortium applications and tutorial proposals for the Seventh International Semantic Web Conference are fast approaching. ISWC ‘08 will be held 26-30 October 2008 in Karlsruhe, Germany. Key upcoming dates include:

• Research papers: due 16 May
• Semantic Web in Use papers: due 16 May
• Tutorial proposals: due 16 May
• Doctoral Consortium applications: due 16 May
• Posters & Demo proposals: due 25 July
• Workshops papers (13 workshops): varies
• Semantic Web & Billion Triples challenge: due 1 Oct
• ISWC 2008 CONFERENCE: 26-30 October

See the ISWC 2008 site for CFPs and other details. Inquires about specific tracks should be sent to the appropriate chairs. Send general questions and suggestions for panel topics, invited speakers, birds of a feather meetings, etc. to iswc08@gmail.com.

Uncategorized Germany, Karlsruhe, Web Conference

It's nearly time to return to London for a pause and a stretch. Since I quit my job at the BBC almost exactly a year ago, I've spent 4 months snowboarding, attended 6 conferences and spoken at 3 (LIFT06, ETech, SXSW, XTech, Railsconf and Foocamp), worked on at least 5 freelance contracts, lived in 3 different countries (France, Holland and the USA) and spent time in at least 5 others (Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Finland). I've travelled more than 40,000 miles by air, taken a flight every 2 weeks on average, and probably met more people in one year than in all the previous years of my life put together.

Although it's no substitute for simply avoiding wasteful airtravel, after doing the calculations for this post I paid for a 15,000 lbs CO2 carbon offset from TerraPass.

My final stop on the current journey is the Near Field Interactions workshop at NordiCHI in Oslo. I'll be representing Thinglink along with Ulla-Maaria Mutanen.

On October 17th I'll be back in my own flat in Hackney, East London and considering my next steps. 2007 has a lot to live up to. Of course, the planning for XTech 2007 has already begun and I've just submitted my talk proposal for next year's ETech.

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Uncategorized Austria, BBC, Finland, France, Germany, London, Oslo, Spain, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Ulla-Maaria Mutanen, United States