Planet Semantico

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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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

boards.ie won the “Best Discussion Forum” award category and the “Best Website in Ireland” grand prix at the Moviestar.ie Irish Web Awards this evening…

I just wanted to express my sincere thanks to all of our readers, posters and moderators for supporting us!

English Ireland, Web Awards

No, these aren’t the necessary precursors for a conspiracy theory about the moon landings, but three of the topics touched upon at the first VoCamp, which took place recently in Oxford. VoCamps are events where motivated individuals can come together and spend some dedicated time creating vocabularies/ontologies for describing data on the Web.

You may have heard of these vocabulary things before. Two popular examples that have been around for some time and are in widespread usage are FOAF (as in Friend of a Friend), for describing people and who they know, and SIOC, for describing the contents of ’social media’ sites such as blogs and discussion fora. But why do we need more vocabularies, and why do we need VoCamps?

We need more vocabularies because people are increasingly motivated to share their data online, and need some way of describing the data itself in a structured fashion. If people use the same vocabularies when describing data of the same type, or at least some of the same terms, it makes sharing and integrating those data sets much easier. For example, imagine you and I both run online shops selling sports equipment, and we want to describe the stock we hold, if we use the same vocabulary to describe that stock data then anyone wanting to cross search our two shops will benefit by not having to map my data structure to yours — we’ll have saved them the job by converging on the same vocabulary from day one.

At this point in time there just aren’t enough vocabularies around to describe the wealth of data in the world. Left to their own devices people will simply create ad-hoc vocabularies which do little to aid data sharing. It’s for these reasons that we need VoCamps, where people can put day-to-day distractions to one side and concentrate on creating technically sound vocabularies in domains that interest them, according to some of the best practices in the field.

VoCampOxford2008 was the start of this process. I used the time to work with Ian and others on a vocabulary/ontology for describing Whisky. Leigh created his Space Flight vocabulary — not just a flippant bit of fun, but a crucial component in his desire to make NASA data more widely accessible and easily archived. Other groups at VoCampOxford2008 worked on a vocabularies for describing IRC discussions, evidence, discourse, participation, votes, journeys and scientific data. See this page for more information on the vocabs we created.

Now, while some people would no doubt argue that whisky and space flight constitute the two most important topics around, there’s still some way to go in creating the rich ecosystem of vocabularies required for a Web of data. That’s why the second VoCamp will take place in Galway, Ireland in late November. Anyone interested in getting their hands (metaphorically) dirty and creating some vocabs should register now before the event fills up — it’s free. Given the location I’ll have to spend a little time in Galway refining the Whisky ontology, but no doubt there’ll be plenty of scope for creating vocabularies in other areas. I may even attempt a vocabulary for describing conspiracy theories, but I imagine that no-one would be able to agree on the details!

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English Galway, Ireland, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Oxford, social media sites, sports equipment

You are invited to ISWC 2008, the major international forum for the Semantic Web. The conference serves introductory tutorials, cutting-edge research presentation, exhibitions of the latest business products, and many social activities. It also offers great social networking opportunities for meeting academic leaders, industrial practitioners, researchers, developers, and students.

==Attending Conference==
ISWC 2008 will be held in Karlsruhe Germany, October 26-30, 2008.
conference website

Please register online by October 9 to save 100 eu and take advantage of special hotel offers which are good if made four weeks in advance.
online registration

==Highlights of the Conference Program==
* 11 tutorials on, e.g., Introduction to Semantic Web, Ontology, RDFa, Multimedia, Business Intelligence, Health Care, Applications, Linked Data.

* 13 workshops on, e.g., e-science, reasoning, software engineering, web service, information extraction, scalability, and social network.

* one doctor consortium

* 10 keynotes and invited industrial talks
- Multimedia Semantic Web, Ramesh Jain (UCI)
- Freebase: An Open, Writable, John Giannandre (Metaweb Technologies)
- How can the Semantic Web Community be more convincing, Stefan Decker, (DERI Galway, Ireland)
- Semantic Wikis: Fusing the two strands of the Semantic Web, Mark Greaves (Vulcan Inc.)
- Internet of Services, York Sure (SAP Research)
- Semantic Web @ BBN, Mike Dean (BBN)
- Data Intelligence, Evelyne Viegas (Microsoft Research)
- Semantic Web in Asia: Example Use Cases, Tony Lee (SaltLux)
- Making the Web searchable, Peter Mika (Yahoo Inc),
- Semantic Web from an industry perspective, Jürgen Angele (Ontoprise)

* 57 paper presentations, including 14 in Semantic Web in-use track, 87 posters and demonstrations, a panel on OWL2, and lightning talks

* social events , social networking, reception, banquet and dancing.

* co-located events: RR2008 and OWLED2008

The complete conference program is available at this link.

English Asia, Business Intelligence, business products, Data Intelligence, DERI Galway, e-science, Evelyne Viegas, Ireland, John Giannandre, Jurgen Angele, Mark Greaves, Metaweb Technologies, Microsoft, Mike Dean, online registration, Peter Mika, Ramesh Jain, Social network, social networking, social networking opportunities, software engineering, Stefan Decker, Tony Lee, Vulcan Inc, Web community, web service, Yahoo Inc, York

The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at NUI Galway is running a unique competition from 1st August to 30th September 2008 in conjunction with boards.ie, Ireland’s largest discussion forum site. The competition is an open contest in which entrants can win over €4000 in Amazon.com vouchers by submitting an interesting creation based on a data set of discussion posts from boards.ie over the past ten years:

• The first prize is an Amazon voucher for $4000 (~€2500)
• The second prize is a voucher for $2000 (~€1250)
• The third prize is a voucher for $1000 (~€625)

Read the rules and find out more information on the contest at:

• data.sioc-project.org

The data set (approximately 9 million documents) has been represented in the Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC) open data format developed by DERI, NUI Galway for expressing the information contained in social websites (forums, mailing lists, blogs, etc.). Entrants may create whatever they feel is interesting based on this data: it could be a novel web application that makes use of the data set, a report on analyses performed on the data, a tool that allows one to visualise or browse the semantic structure, or whatever else the imagination can come up with!

The data reflects ten years of Irish online life, collected between 1998 and 2008 from boards.ie. boards.ie is one of Ireland’s busiest websites, with over a million unique visitors a month. The most popular discussion areas are ‘after hours’, soccer, motors, poker, and computers. Popular topic threads include one about a virtual pub (over 4000 pages), member discussions (2800 pages), poker stories (1800 pages), Liverpool rumours (1250 pages), recruitment in the Gardaí (800 pages long), and a freebie list (250 pages).

To enter the competition, go to data.sioc-project.org to access the data sets and view the guidelines. There will be three prizes for the top entries, as judged by an independent panel of three experts. The contest is open to anyone except current / former researchers with DERI and employees of boards.ie Ltd. One person may make multiple entry submissions. The closing date is the 30th September 2008.

The purpose of this contest is to generate interesting applications or creations that make use of community data represented in the SIOC Semantic Web format. All rights to these creations will remain with the contest participants (not including the underlying data, whose copyright remains with the creators). Neither DERI nor boards.ie Ltd. will acquire any commercial rights to these applications or creations as submitted through this contest. Up until now, this data has been publicly viewable, but it was difficult to leverage it without any added semantics due to the fact that it was embedded in heavily-styled HTML pages.

[DERI is a Centre for Science, Engineering and Technology (CSET) established at NUI Galway in 2003 with funding from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI). After five years of operation, DERI has become an internationally-recognised institute in Semantic Web research, education and technology transfer.]

English Centre for Science, Digital Enterprise Research Institute, discussion forum site, Engineering and Technology, EUR, HTML, Ireland, Liverpool, Online Communities, online life, Science Foundation Ireland, technology transfer, USD, web application, Web format, Web research

From Galway First:

Star Trek fans are called Trekkies, but watch out for the Losti-es. Fans of the inexplicable and never-ending TV series are planning to come to Galway this week to honour the conferring of the star of several episodes of the series, who is receiving an honorary degree at NUI, Galway.

Fionnula Flanagan is an Emmy Award-winning and Tony Award-nominated Irish actress. She trained in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin and has appeared in numerous films, including The Others with Nicole Kidman, Transamerica and Waking Ned Devine, as well as television series and stage productions. She came to prominence in Ireland in 1965 as a result of her role as Máire in the Teilifís Éireann production of the Irish Language play, An Triail. Ms Flanagan established herself as one of the foremost interpreters of James Joyce in the 1967 film version of Ulysses.

But as far as fans of Lost are concerned, she will forever be that mysterious white-haired woman Ms Hawking who appeared in the “Flashes Before Your Eyes” of Lost. Message boards online pertaining to the series have revealed that dozens of Irish Lost fans are to come to Galway to congratulate her on her conferring.

So, if you see any black smoke, polar bears or see Mutton Island being moved mysteriously this Friday, don’t panic. It’s just all in a day’s happenings on Lost.

The honorary conferrings are on tomorrow here in NUI Galway. Funnily enough, I think the first thing I saw Fionnula Flanagan in was actually Star Trek (The Next Generation). But I loved her best in Paddywhackery on TG4 in her role as Peig Sayers!

In other news, it was announced yesterday that the 2008 Galway Film Fleadh will play host to some international stars including Peter O’Toole, Jessica Lange, (President!) Bill Pullman, and Alex Gibney, the 2008 Oscar winner for Best International Documentary.

English Alex Gibney, Bill Pullman, Dallas Stars, Dublin, Hawking, Ireland, James Joyce, Jessica Lange, Mutton Island, Ned Devine, Nicole Kidman, online pertaining, Peter O Toole

Via Damien, I tried out Google Trends for boards.ie in comparison to the two main Irish newspaper sites.

Here are the stats for Ireland only from Google Trends (blue = boards.ie; red = ireland.com; yellow = independent.ie):

Here are the stats for all regions from Google Trends:

Here is the worldwide graph from Compete:

And finally, here is the worldwide graph from Alexa:

There are a lot of variations! Although ComScore also do rankings, I am not sure is the service publicly available, and Quantcast’s analysis seems more US-focussed. While some people are not so sure about the figures (1, 2), it is an indicator of sorts - even if it’s just to see if you are in the same league…

English Google, Ireland

Conn has published his video interview with Salim Ismail (formerly of Yahoo! Brickhouse) on Intruders.TV Ireland. This was recorded at the BlogTalk 2008 conference in March, where Salim was one of our keynote speakers. Thanks to Conn and Salim!

English Conn, Connecticut, Ireland, Salim Ismail, Yahoo

On May 26-28th, the RIF WG met in Galway, Ireland for its 10th face to face meeting. The three-day meeting hosted by DERI, Galway set a record with 40 resolutions passed, including decisions to publish the RIF-BLD (Basic Logic Dialect) and the RIF SWC (RDF&OWL Compatibility) specs as last call. With a little editorial work remaining after the meeting, the group plans to publish BLD and SWC on June 23, as well as moving all the other current drafts to the next public WD stage.

The RIF F2F10 page can be found here.

English Galway, Ireland, RDF

A mixed-up blog post, but I haven’t the energy to write three separate posts, so here’s a three-in-one:

• On Wednesday, I gave a talk at CELT, NUI Galway about “Learning via the Social Web”, which was a slightly-revised version of the one I gave in February. Again, there was an amazing turnout, and there will be a webcast made available via the CELT website at a later date. For now, you can access the PowerPoint slides here.
• Yesterday, Damien Mulley and I were interviewed by Richard Downes on RTÉ R1 Morning Ireland about the 15th anniversary of CERN releasing the World Wide Web code for free (podcast available here; alternatively there’s an extracted clip here). I talked a little bit about the WWW versus UMn’s Gopher, and how the Web has expanded beyond the initial target audience of academics and researchers. I gave a slightly-tangential answer to a question I was asked about the importance of the Web to Ireland’s future and economy (FYI: CSO 2007 ICT stats), saying how dependent we are on the Web to do many tasks today, and describing how our work at DERI in NUI Galway will help us to deal with the current over-abundance of websites, by adding more structure to web pages so that computers can help us in finding the right information. “Are you telling me that the future of the Web […] is being designed in Galway?”, Richard asked at one point. Yes!!! Finally, I mentioned how the problems with online video gridlock may have larger consequences as the Web is increasingly moving from the desktop to mobile devices where bandwidth is even more important, so smarter ways are needed to reduce exactly what will be sent to your phone (FYI: Opera Mini is a nice example, a tiny Java browser that works on most phones where the content is pre-filtered server-side before it gets to you).
• Last night, I went along with friend Conrad to see Ulrich Schnauss at Stress in DeBurgo’s here in Galway. Although I missed the encore (it had been a long day, with a nine-hour session at work), I really enjoyed the night and the support acts: Beatpoet was great playing on his mono-something device, and Airiel were pretty good too

English Conrad, Damien Mulley, energy, Ireland, Java, mono-something device, Richard Downes, the 15th anniversary of CERN, Ulrich Schnauss, Web code

Here are the PowerPoint slides from our tutorial on “Interlinking Online Communities and Enriching Social Software with the Semantic Web” at the World Wide Web Conference in Beijing - you can also download them from here:

| View | Upload your own

The tutorial went well, it was hot in the room and we were a bit jetlagged, but we had some good feedback afterwards and about 30 people attended in all.

I had a nice few days in Beijing, participating in the W3C advisory commitee meeting on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, giving our SIOC tutorial with Alex and Uldis on Monday afternoon, popping along to our paper at the Linked Data on the Web workshop on Tuesday, attending some sessions on Wednesday (Kai-Fu Lee’s plenary keynote on Cloud Computing, the discussion panel with Lada Adamic et al. on the Future of Online Social Interactions, the W3C Open Your Data! track, and a packed session on Social Networks: Discovery and Evolution of Communities). On Thursday, I gave a talk about DERI at Tsinghua University to Cemon Yang and his team at the Digital Government / Web and Software Research Centre. Thursday evening we had the banquet in the Great Hall of the People, and I headed back to Ireland on Friday.

Unfortunately I saw little of Beijing outside of travelling between venues in taxis and buses, so I have a good reason to return and see / do more next time…

English Beijing, Digital Government, Enriching Social Software, Great Hall, Ireland, Kai-Fu Lee, Lada Adamic, Online Communities, Online Social Interactions, Tsinghua University, Web and Software Research Centre, Web Conference