Planet Semantico

Thursday Oct 30

9.00-10.00	Keynote 3: Message in a Bottle or: How can the Semantic Web Community be more convincing? (Johannes Brahms hall) Stefan Decker, DERI
10.00-10.30	Coffee Break
10.30-12.30	Research 1: Web Data and Knowledge (Johannes Brahms hall) Chair: Luciano Serafini RDFS Reasoning and Query Answering on top of DHTs Zoi Kaoudi, Iris Miliaraki, and Manolis Koubarakis An Interface-based Ontology Modularization Framework for Knowledge Encapsulation Faezeh Ensan and Weichang Du On the Semantics of Trust and Caching in the Semantic Web Simon Schenk
10.30-12.30	Research 2: Semantic Web Services (Johann Peter Hebel hall) Chair: Vasant Honavar Semantic Web Service Choreography: Contracting and Enactment Dumitru Roman and Michael Kifer Formal Model for Semantic-Driven Service Execution Tomas Vitvar, Maciej Zaremba, and Adrian Mocan Efficient Semantic Web Service Discovery in Centralized and P2P Environments Dimitrios Skoutas, Dimitris Sacharidis, Verena Kantere, and Timos Sellis
10.30-12.30	In Use: Knowledge Management (Alfred Mombert hall) Chair: Mike Dean Thesaurus-based search in large heterogeneous collections Jan Wielemaker, Michiel Hildebrand, Jacco van Ossenbruggen, and Guus Schreiber Deploying semantic web technologies for work integrated learning in industry. A comparison: SME vs. large sized company Conny Christl, Chiara Ghidini, Joanna Guss, Viktoria Pammer, Stefanie Lindstaedt, Peter Scheir, Luciano Serafini, and Marco Rospocher Creating and Using Organisational Semantic Webs in Large Networked Organisations Ravish Bhagdev, Ajay Chakravarthy, Sam Chapman, Fabio Ciravegna, and Vitaveska Lanfranchi An architecture for semantic navigation and reasoning with patient data - experiences of the Health-e-Child project Tamás Hauer, Dmitry Rogulin, Sonja Zillner, Andrew Branson, Jetendr Shamdasani, Alexey Tsymbal, Martin Huber, Tony Solomonides and Richard McClatchey
12.30-14.00	Lunch break
14.00-15.30	Research 1: Semantic Social Networks (Johannes Brahms hall) Chair: Fausto Giunchiglia Exploring Semantic Social Networks using Virtual Reality Harry Halpin, David Zielinski, Rachael Brady, and Glenda Kelly Semantic Grounding of Tag Relatedness in Social Bookmarking Systems Ciro Cattuto, Dominik Benz, Andreas Hotho, and Gerd Stumme Semantic Modelling of User Interests based on Cross-Folksonomy Analysis Martin Szomszor, Harith Alani, Ivan Cantador, Kieron O’Hara and Nigel Shadbolt
14.00-15.30	Research 2: Rules and Relatedness (Johann Peter Hebel hall) Chair: Michael Kifer ELP: Tractable Rules for OWL 2 Markus Krötzsch, Sebastian Rudolph, and Pascal Hitzler Term Dependence on the Semantic Web Gong Cheng and Yuzhong Qu Semantic relatedness measure using object properties in an ontology Laurent Mazuel and Nicolas Sabouret
14:00	Lightning Talks (Alfred Mombert hall)
15.30-16.00	Coffee break
16.00-17.30	Closing Ceremony and Best Paper Awards (Johannes Brahms hall) Outlook on ISWC2009

English Adrian Mocan, Ajay Chakravarthy, Alexey Tsymbal, Alfred Mombert hall, Andreas Hotho, Andrew Branson, caching, Chiara Ghidini, Ciro Cattuto, David Zielinski, Deploying semantic web technologies, Dimitrios Skoutas, Dimitris Sacharidis, Dmitry Rogulin, Dominik Benz, Dumitru Roman, Exploring Semantic Social Networks, Fabio Ciravegna, Gerd Stumme, Glenda Kelly, Guus Schreiber, Hara Shadbolt, Harith Alani, Harry Halpin, Hebel hall, Iris Miliaraki, Ivan Cantador, Jacco van Ossenbruggen, Jan Wielemaker, Jetendr Shamdasani, Joanna Guss, Johann Peter, Johannes Brahms hall, Kieron O'Hara, Knowledge Management, Laurent Mazuel, Luciano Serafini, Maciej Zaremba, Manolis Koubarakis, Marco Rospocher, Markus Krötzsch, Martin Huber, Martin Szomszor, Michael Kifer, Michiel Hildebrand, Mike Dean, Nicolas Sabouret, Nigel Shadbolt, P2P, Pascal Hitzler, Peter Scheir, Rachael Brady, Ravish Bhagdev, Richard McClatchey, Sam Chapman, Sebastian Rudolph, semantic social networks, Semantic Web technologies, Simon Schenk, Social Bookmarking Systems, Sonja Zillner, Stefan Decker, Stefanie Lindstaedt, Thesaurus-based search, Timos Sellis, Tomas Vitvar, Tony Solomonides, Verena Kantere, Viktoria Pammer, Virtual Reality, Vitaveska Lanfranchi, Web community, Web Service Choreography, Web Service Discovery, Web Services, Zoi Kaoudi

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 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

The “Social Semantic Web” is here - yay! The book of the same name, edited by Andreas Blumauer (right) and Tassilo Pellegrini, is now available in stores. Another contributor from SWC is Matthias Samwald (left), who, together with Holger Stenzhorn, discussed the relevance of the Semantic Web for biomedial research in their article for the book.

The publication (in German, with the exception of one article by Narayanan Kulathuramaiyer and Hermann Maurer addressing issues of Data Mining) has four sections:

• a low-threshold introduction to Web 2.0 and social software, covering technological, cultural and social aspects,
• an overview of core technologies and methods, covering e.g. knowledge discovery, expert finders, tag recommendation, etc,
• an overview and discussion of existing applications and their perspectives within the Social Semantic Web, e.g. the Semantic Desktop, Bibsonomy or the perspectives for biomedical research,
• a discussion of phenomena of the Social Semantic Web from the perspective of communication studies and social sciences, e.g. privacy on the social semantic web, or the role of user-generated content for individual empowerment.

We have also created a wiki for the book (using Semantic Media Wiki) which is available at social.semantic-web.at. You can, for instance, browse it by article, by author, or by organisation. Tom Schandl made a few changes to available templates, which he is soon going to blog about.

Image by leobard via FlickrAuthor copies were shipped last week - some of the contributors have already blogged about the book, for instance Leo Sauermann, who, together with Malte Kiesel, Kinga Schumacher and Ansgar Bernardi, contributed an article about the Semantic Desktop and personal knowledge management (image also provided by Leo Sauermann). Jan Schmidt a.k.a “Schmidt with Dee Tee”, in an article he wrote together with Tassilo Pellegrini, approached the Semantic Web from the perspective of Communication Studies; Jan has posted the abstract (in German) and offered a bit of commentary on his blog. Michael Nagenborg, who authored the article about privacy on the Social Semantic Web, announced the book on his website.

Please let us know if you’ve also written a blog post about the book or have resources on Flickr, Slideshare, elsewhere; and/or tag it with “socsemweb08″ so that we can find it. Of course you can also immediately add them to the wiki yourself (page Resonanz).

English Andreas Blumauer, Data mining, Hermann Maurer, Holger Stenzhorn, Jan Schmidt, Knowledge Management, Leo Sauermann, Matthias Samwald, Michael Nagenborg, Narayanan Kulathuramaiyer, social semantic web, social software, social.semantic-web.at, Tom Schandl

In recent debates within the KiWi - Knowledge in a Wiki project, the need arose to further refine and find a common understanding of the type of knowledge that is (ideally) managed and processed using (semantic) wikis. One of the proposals evolved around a conceptualization of knowledge put forward by Gabi Reinmann-Rothmeier, also dubbed the “Munich Modell” (Münchner Modell).

In the Munich Modell, knowledge comes in three states of matter: solid (like ice), liquid (like water) and gas (like water vapor).

“Frozen” knowledge is knowledge in its most tangible, manageable form, for instance the type of verified, expert-endorsed information you would find in an encyclopedia like the Encylopedia Britannica.

“Gaseous” knowledge, on the other hand, is knowledge in its least consolidated form: think for instance of the type of heated debate you might have with folks in a pub, which is arguably the least structured, most uncontrollable, but also the most engaging type of knowledge!

And the “liquid” form of knowledge, eventually, is the common knowledge of day-to-day-life. It’s probably fair to say that it becomes obvious mostly when in the process of changing its state of matter: When it is calibrated against “frozen” or informational knowledge or when it is debated, becomes “gaseous” knowledge that informs action. (If you’d like to know more about the Munich model and are able to read German, you might want to download the original article here - PDF, 365 KB).

When talking about knowledge that is managed, used or, respectively, that evolves online, I think it also makes sense to pay some attention to the type of community that is preferred by particular online tools or environments. The particular flavour of knowledge, in this sense, is simultaneously characterized and shaped by the state of matter of knowledge and the form of the community that applies.

N.B. The following is not an immediate translation of the “Munich model”, but rather a reconceptualization which tries to also consider that different community models (and their implementation through IT) also play a role for the whole spectrum of knowledge management on and with the web (e.g. for online communication and interaction, online publishing and documentation and maintenance of web infrastructures).

Web-Flavour 1: The Blogosphere - gas, gas, gas!

Hmm… sniff it! This is the flavour I like best because it is my flavour. On the blogosphere (and twittersphere), knowledge is exchanged, developed further and evolves almost like in a pub debate… it does have the extra advantage though that you can add links, cite resources and that you get to keep your blog posts (or tweets or equivalents thereof) for later reference or debate. Different people approach blogging differently - the approach I would favour in the context of this definition is a form of blogging that invites dialog in that it allows others to comment and react, and where contributors aren’t anonymous, distant institutions, but are addressable using their personas/identities on the web. As such, contributions are often marked or tinted by the views and personality of that real-life person behind a persona/identity. As a short cut, think of this flavour as the flavour of the social media tag cloud.

Web-Flavour 2: Wikipedia - evolving slowly with the flow

Wouldn’t you agree that Wikipedia is like a sea of knowledge? It is fed by brooks and rivers (in this analogy: for instance the article and contributions that are invited on the Wikipeda Community portal) that make it rise and swell like tidal waves would, but mostly by millions, billions and trillions of tiny drops that trickle in on a daily basis. In comparison to the blogosphere, the world inside wikipedia is a rather neat and orderly one: Titles of pages are unique, and were they aren’t, there are disambiguation pages (like this one) in place. Even though articles are written by real humans (I assume), there is no visible author attached to an article (unless you start developing an interest for Discussion Pages, e.g. this one; most people don’t). Wikipedia is the sea of knowledge we bathe in on a day-to-day-basis without even noticing - just try to remember how many and which Wikipedia pages you have looked at today or this week - can you? Most probably not. It’s the result of a community effort, but it’s not about views and opinions of individuals, but about what we all know together or would know together if we could wire our brains to one another (tired of the Wikipedia examples? Check out Factolex instead, a collaborative, micro-content encyclopedia that allows you to extract and conceptualize bite-sized pieces of knowledge as you go).

This is the flavour I like to have around me every day, because it makes things easier without asking for a huge effort. It’s also the flavour of thesauri and metadata schemata.

Web-Flavour 3: The unfinished structure of ontologies

Flavor three is NOT (as one might expect) the flavour of the Encyclopedia Britannica Online (which is one huge data silo and therefore not relevant for my scope of interests) … instead, I would argue that it’s the flavour of the web’s infrastructures and of knowledge infrastructures like ontologies. Think of the geometry of snow flakes: they all follow rules but none of them is like another. The open world assumption of ontologies also applies to snow flakes - just because you haven’t seen a particular shape doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist! Nobody has the patent for building snowflakes - Wilson Bentley in his famous snowflake shots just captured an expression of rules that are out there, in the world, belonging to the world. Ontologies capture the structure of what, to the best of knowledge and belief, can be said about the world. Anyone can build an ontology, but we prefer to have experts do that job: members of the scientific community which has its own ranking and weeding mechanisms in place.

Flavour three is the flavour of things we wish to be able to rely on on the web, and where we can invest a trust that is much greater than the trust we invest in people. More like the trust we invest in, say, the laws of nature.

So what is the flavour of a Semantic Wiki?

A good mix of flavour two and three, I would argue. A Semantic Wiki is a vessel for the sea of relevant knowledge (relevant for instance for the members of a particular team), but enhances it with the structure of the domain knowledge that applies.

Having said that: A semantic wiki would be much spicier if it also had a bit of the flavour of the blogosphere and social media, as there are tasks where a bit of a debate, a bit of a controversial exchange and the ability to respond to people directly is highly valuable! Just as water, knowledge goes through a cycle of different states of matter, and knowledge is not processed by segregated individuals, but in communities and through networks of people.

Before publishing this, I wanted to get some feedback in particular from KiWi members working on enabling technologies - here is Peter Dolog’s take; Peter is an Assistant Professor in the Information Systems Unit at the Dept. of Computer Science Aalborg University:

I like the distinction and comparison of knowledge to some natural elements like gas, liquids, solids or snowflakes. These give a good metaphor for understanding when talking about different flavours of knowledge. It is also fascinating to see how humans move between these three categories by participating in different social processes or simply by studying these things.

It is, however, a bit more difficult to see how this can be done or supported in the most suitable form on the web or in the intranets of companies. At the same time it seems to me, from the discussions we have had in the KiWi project, that semantic wiki platforms could indeed facilitate this. Wikis naturally provide the social contexts for contributions. Semantic wikis with tags and ontology management seem to be a first step towards a flexible knowledge consolidation infrastructure where one can move easily between these categories; and other technologies such as natural language processing and automated reasoning can help further. Personalization can further provide and adjust views on the knowledge according to preferences.

I am happy that we can study these phenomena in the KiWi project at least to a certain extent and perhaps contribute to this as well. I am confident that this is relevant also for the industry and especially for large distributed companies where externalization of knowledge is a must.

So there is a lesson to be had: When building a knowledge management system using the web, think of the three states of knowledge, but most importantly, also think of the form of community and community processes that are required or preferable to allow future users to really put that knowledge to work - melt it, share it, heat it, debate it, freeze it, keep it, let it evolve!

Image sources on Wikicommons:
Water vapour by Markus Schweiss
Wake at Boelge Stor by Malene Thyssen
Ice Crystals by Petr Dlouhý

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English Aalborg University, Information Systems Unit, KiWi, knowledge consolidation infrastructure, Knowledge Management, knowledge management system, Malene Thyssen, Markus Schweiss, Munich, Natural Language Processing, New Brunswick, online communication, online publishing, particular online tools, Peter Dolog, Petr Dlouhý, social media, web infrastructures, Web-Flavour, Wilson Bentley

Sebastian Schaffert, coordinator of the KiWi project, just pointed readers of his blog to the video of his ESWC-Lecture
“Semantic Wikis - IkeWiki - A Semantic Wiki for Collaborative Knowledge Management”, also discussing knowledge management and why it should not be informed by quality management approach. Also published now is Peter Dolog’s talk about Semantic Wikis in general.

Semantic Wikis - IkeWiki - A Semantic Wiki for Collaborative Knowledge Management

Semantic Wikis - Introduction to semantic wikis

Here is an example of an implementation of IkeWiki, an open source semantic wiki developed mainly by Sebastian Schaffert.

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English Aalborg University, KIWI Project Partners, Knowledge Management, Peter Dolog, Sebastian Schaffert

(by Matthias Samwald)

The first VoCamp ever was successfully completed this week at Oxford University. Tom Heath (Talis) and Jun Zhao (Oxford University) led us through two days devoted to creating new vocabularies, schemas and ontologies. The first day was mainly spent on finding common interests, getting to know each other, and identifying the vocabularies that needed to be created. The second day was spent on creating the vocabularies, first on paper, then on the computer.

Fabien Gandon introduced me to his interesting work around corporate ontologies, which I will explore in further detail for the KiWi project. We also made significant progress on developing a basic, common ontology for the representation of agreement, disagreement and discourse, based on SIOC, SCOT, FOAF and the bibliographic ontology. Such an ontology can be of great utility in many knowledge domains, such as biomedical research or the representation of bug/issue reports in software development knowledge management (something that needs to be adressed for adapting the KiWi system for a use-case at Sun Microsystems). I will elaborate on these developments in separate blog posts next week.

In a very short timespan, the participants of the VoCamp created several new vocabularies, such as:

IRC Vocabulary

Participation Ontologies

UDO (Unified Discourse Ontology)

VotePost

Evidence ontology

Whisky Ontology (yes, it’s an ontology about whiskey)

Journey Ontology

Data publishing, sharing, visualisation ontology

On the second day of the VoCamp I also held a short session called „Do OpenCyc and UMBEL know it?“, where I asked for classes and properties that others wanted to create in their developing vocabularies. It turned out that OpenCyc and UMBEL had a relatively good coverage of the terms that others were creating, including whiskey, evidence, or the relation that one person is the boss of another person (relevant for the corporate Semantic Web). I tried to emphasize that linking and re-using such existing entities was vital for the success of new vocabularies, and of the Semantic Web as a whole. Others objected that re-using such existing resources might not be possible given the often very specific requirements and short time-frames of some projects. Still, I think that linking to existing, large resources on the Semantic Web should have a very high priority when developing new vocabularies.

If you are interested in getting new vocabularies out, but did not get the chance to attend VoCamp Oxford: don’t worry, there are many VoCamps planned for the near future. The next VoCamp will already happen in November, and will be located at DERI Galway. The Semantic Web Company will host a VoCamp in Vienna next year.

English Jun Zhao, Knowledge Management, Matthias Samwald, Oxford University, Semantic Web Company, software development knowledge management, Tom Heath (Talis), Vienna

Sorry for still writing about last week, but the TRIPLE-I conference had far too many interesting topics to offer for me to be already through with them - promise, this blog post about wikis will be the last TRIPLE-I post.

An interesting use of wikis was introduced with the Moki plugin for Semantic Media Wiki, developed as a side product of the APOSDLE project. APOSDLE (EU-project leaders love their acronyms;-) aims to develop an Advanced Process-Oriented Self-Directed Learning Environment, which in plain language is a platform to support the process of learning at work. In the course of this project, a model of the enterprise knowledge had to be developed that was to be the collaborative result of domain experts within the enterprise and external knowledge engineers. The APOSDLE image video below conveys a sense of the complexity of the knowledge to be represented.

But on to Moki: As wikis are an ideal, readily available tool for collaboration, the simple solution was to build a plugin (Moki) for Semantic Media Wiki that allow to structure and engineer the domain knowledge. Moki is a hierarchy builder that supports drag and drop so that categories and relations can easily be fitted in place - the special benefit of using Semantic Media Wiki was that the structure of the generated knowledge can be exported in Semantic Web compliant formats. Apart from the browser, no further software is required.

The APOSDLE website doesn’t yet offer any information about Moki, but a description can be found in the conference proceedings: Collaborative Knowledge Engineering via Semantic MediaWiki, by Chiara Ghidini, Marco Rospocher (who gave the presentation), Luciano Serafini, Viktoria Pammer, Barbara Kump, Andreas Faatz, Andreas Zinnen, Joanna Guss, Stefanie Lindstaedt.

For those looking for good arguments for setting up a wiki in a global business environment: Peter Kemper’s keynote was the perfect primer for that. Peter, a Knowledge Management portfolio manager at Shell’s IT-Department, gave some insights into the process of their conversion to wikis. Before there were wikis at Shell, they had global discussion forums, connecting 20,000 people around topics and questions, which were intensively used - the question whether wikis should be adopted or not alone generated 800 responses in these forums.

Instead of going for team wikis, Shell opted for the encyclopedic approach and a wiki that would be accessible to anyone at Shell, and for using MediaWiki - which was, interestingly, the first open source software ever used at Shell. Peter Kemper named scalability and the lean architecture as prime arguments for MediaWiki, and they have indeed not had any technical hiccups so far. It was also an asset that people, being used to Wikipedia, know how to use the MediaWiki interface.

Examples of uses case with which the feasibility of wikis within Shell were tested were: Drilling salt, Geology of the Atlantic Margin, and Production Chemistry. Before that, the main media for maintaining and passing on knowledge had been emails and Powerpoint - not exactly because these were considered appropriate for knowledge management, but because of the effects these media had had on the communication within Shell:

With the advent of email, People wrote less and less memos. Less and less reports were sent to the archive, because people kept powerpoint presentations. If that same information, previously locked in emails and powerpoint, went now into wiki, it would finally be accessible to everyone in the company.

Peter Kemper allowed us a glimpse of the information their wiki held, for instance, about the Atlantic Margin - as geological structures are described, most of the information relies on images. It would be a nightmare to maintain this kind of information in Powerpoint! No offense meant: Powerpoint is good for presentations but not for creating and maintaining a knowledge base. According to Peter, with wikis Shell achieved six times the productivity in comparison to using Powerpoint, in particular due to the linkability of content.

Wikis also turned out to be the superior solution for the integration of curricula from an internal learning environment, as wikis support the modular structure of a learning curriculum. Furthermore, they are also a good means to sustain communication in the time between workshops or team meetings.

At shell, they even use wiki for instance for the translation of contracts into the requirements of day to day procedures - a typical contract in the business that Shell is in has around 400 pages, and it is probably not very likely that a single person is going to read (and immediately understand) the entire contract. In this regard, the wiki also serves as a tool to translate lawyer-readable prose into transparent instructions (and there are probably many more ways in which wikis can be used to support business processes, a statement also put forward by Rolf Sint from Salzburg Research; see his 12 seconds statement below).

Rolf Sint talks about workflows in wikis on 12seconds.tv

A noteworthy detail about the integration of wikis in Shell’s IT architecture: If a user logs onto the wiki for the first time and goes beyond the disclaimer, a new wiki account is automatically created that is identical with his or her windows account - this is not about checking on people, Peter Kemper said, but about creating organisational transparency.

On the one hand, this reveals whether there are organisational units within Shell where the wiki is not as intensively used as elsewhere, meaning that these units probably have specific needs which need to be addressed first. On the other hand, people can (and do) also contact each other via the wiki, e.g. one can contact the person who created an article if one is on need of further information.

About stimulating content production: 60% of Shell’s employees will go into retirement over the next eight years, and with them knowledge that is needed in the company. They even asked and paid former employees to come out of retirement to work on the wiki - that’s what I call commitment to content creation and knowledge preservation.

The Shell wiki already has more than 40,000 registered users (with 150,000 employees in the company, plus contract staff). What is interesting regarding user activation is that the number of active users stays relatively the same, even if the number of users in total increases. Peter Kemper’s account for this was that content comes in waves, meaning that users are activated in those areas where fresh knowledge is generated.

Kemper distinguished three types of users: content owners who create content from scratch; content editors who often just correct syntax or make things ‘look nicer’; and information consumers. Kemper rejected the term ‘lurkers’ for information consumers as looking for information is an activity in itself.

All in all, Peter Kemper’s talk confirmed many of the assumptions which have informed our own KiWi - Knowledge in a Wiki project, the aim of which is to merge the wiki philosophy with knowledge management, enhanced by semantic (web) technologies. Sebastian Schaffert (Salzburg Research) puts it in a nutshell in the video below. Featured in a cameo appearance: the KiWI!

Sebastian Schaffert about KiWi - Knowledge in a Wiki on 12seconds.tv

Uncategorized Andreas Faatz, Andreas Zinnen, Barbara Kump, Chiara Ghidini, European Union, hierarchy builder, Joanna Guss, Knowledge Management, Luciano Serafini, main media, Marco Rospocher, Moki, open source software, Peter Kemper, Rolf Sint, Sebastian Schaffert, Stefanie Lindstaedt

The TRIPLE-I conference in Graz today started with a keynote by Henry Lieberman, research scientist at the MIT Media Laboratory. Given that, nominally, at least a third of the conference is dedicated to knowledge managemen, Lieberman introduced an important, often overseen aspect of knowledge management right at the beginning: Managing knowledge that everybody knows already.

Knowledge management typically aims at knowledge that people do not know yet, e.g. (tacit) knowledge that people have acquired in a project and that is suppose to be made explicit and accessible to other people who don’t yet have this knowledge.

But what about the knowledge that everybody knows without them knowing they need to know it? Such as that an apple is a type of fruit, and is green and is red? Common sense knowledge?

I boldly asked Henry Lieberman for a 12 seconds definition of Common Sense Knowledge, a challenge he accomplished with perfect precision:

Henry Lieberman defines Common Sense Knowledge on 12seconds.tv

An intriguing MIT project I hadn’t yet heard about which Henry Lieberman introduced is the Common sense knowledge base Open Mind Common Sense - anyone can sign up to it and contribute. A total of 203 knowledge facts have, for instance, been accumulated about the concept “apple”, including facts such as these:

→ An apple is red
→ An apple is green
→ Apples grow in trees
→ an apple are food.
→ An apple has a core
→ An apple can fall from a tree
→ An apple is a type of fruit

Offered similar concepts are “egg, potato, steak, bread, spinach, frozen food, butter, appl [sic], leftover, grape”. The process of adding knowledge is guided by a list of questions that allow to conceptualize and structure the knowledge, e.g.

MadeOf
What is it made of?
IsA
What kind of thing is it?
UsedFor
What do you use it for?
CapableOf
What can it do?
PartOf
What is it part of?
DefinedAs
How do you define it?

But what are the roles that common sense knowledge can play in interactive applications? Henry Lieberman suggested using common sense knowledge, a system can e.g. anticipate what a user is most likely to do, or it can at least make most likely things easiest to do, e.g. by providing a map from goals to concrete actions in the interface, or by integrating appropriate applications.

Lieberman furthermore introduced a couple of tools which illustrated these benefits, e.g. the prototype for an Event Minder for improved scheduling driven by common sense knowledge. Entering a statement such as “Lunch with Charlie at Miracle next Friday” would for instance calculate the date of ‘next Friday’, call up a calendar application and also a web service to get directions for getting to Miracle.

Regarding the difference between CYC (the common sense knowledge ontology) and the MIT’s common knowledge base Open Mind Common Sense: CYC is an ontology organized by experts with a broader and deeper knowledge - the common knowledge base grants access to anyone and has, for instance, also information about kitten that might not be that relevant to experts. At this stage, there is no mapping to CYC.

Henry Lieberman’s keynote tied in nicely with a presentation by Andrew S. Gordon about “Envisioning with Weblogs”. According to Andrew Gordon, there have been three waves in the 50 year history of common sense knowledge in artifical intelligence:

First wave: Logical formalizations of commons sense knowledge (e.g. CYC)
Second wave: volunteer contributions from web communities (e.g. Open Mind Common Sense)
3rd wave: Knowledge acquisition from the social web (e.g. Envisioning with Weblogs)

First off, what is envisioning? Andrew Gordon described it as a form of reasoning about states and events in time and space, generating answers to questions such as “What’s happening in the world right now?”, or “What is going on in the audience’s mind right now?”, or “How did this person get into the room?”, or “What am I going to have for dinner tonight?”

At the Institute for Creative Technologies (University of Southern California), Andrew is involved in a project called Story Representation and Management, which among other things, is doing research on story interpretation, i.e. “techniques for integrating automated commonsense inference into the processing of narrative text documents, and methodologies for creating very large scale commonsense knowledge bases.”

One of the paths towards the creation of this knowledge base is gathering up stories on weblogs. But can we really gather up all stories ever written in a weblog? In the research conducted and cited by Andrew (Gordon 2007), 4,5 million stories, made up of 66,6 million sentences and 1,06 billion words were extracted from weblogs.

In Gordon’s recipe for envisioning with weblogs, the retrieval of the closest situation provides the best results. Take for instance the quest of formalizing this particular problem in common sense physical reasoning: cracking an egg into a bowl (as described by Morgenstern 1998, Lifschitz 1998, Shanahan 1998).

There are so many things to be considered: Is the bowl big enough? What if the bowl is made of cardboard? What of the egg is hardboiled? Common sense knowledge in stories on weblogs does offer many answers, for instance this story from Amit Asaravala - which also generates further knowledge as to what would happen to a person who does this:

Seeing the little weirdo reminded me of one Saturday morning, a year or so ago, when I cracked an egg into a bowl and found three yolks inside. After tossing the triplets, I cracked another egg from the batch and found yet another three yolks jiggling up at me. Another egg, another trio of blondes.

This continued through all twelve eggs — I kid you not.

Though the episode had me thoroughly creeped out, I must say that I am somewhat intrigued by the thought that, on some farm somewhere, there is a crotchety old hen that consistently lays triple-yolkers.

In the following discussion, some people wondered if weblogs aren’t an unreliable source for a common sense knowledge database. Andrew however doubted that the difference true/false or the difference true/fictitious did really matter. Instead he suggested that in 99% of the cases the same physical reasoning applies in, say, the Star Wars Universe as does apply in the real world.

Common sense knowledge is not about the velocity of spacecrafts crossing the milky way, it’s about what happens if Leia punches Han.

Which is yet another point sustaining that common sense knowledge is so obvious that most of the time we don’t even know we know it. And that’s a challenge to knowledge management.

Oh, and something very nice happened to me today: While I sat in our booth preparing this blog post, someone approached me very politely saying that he had read my name somewhere before, on some blog. Turns out this person - Stefano Bertolo, Project Officer at the Information Society Directorate of the European Commission - has in the past also left a comment on the Flickr page of our “Escape from the Data Silo” logo (which can be used freely by anyone on a CC license). It’s a small world, thanks to Social Media:-) We had a nice conversation at our booth, during which he also recommended the NeON project: Lifecyle Support for Networked Ontologies: a recommendation which I herewith pass on to you, reader of this blog:-)

P.S. There were many more interesting talks and sessions, but the scope of this blogpost is, sadly, limited by the rules of physics: I could only attend one talk at a time.

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• Lecture series on Knowledge Representation

Uncategorized Amit Asaravala, Andrew S. Gordon, appropriate applications, California, Data Silo, European Commission, food, frozen food, Henry Lieberman, Information Society Directorate, Institute for Creative Technologies, Knowledge Management, MIT, MIT Media Laboratory, social Web, the Star, University of Southern California, web communities, web service

I do admit that I am probably a bit picky here but I whole-heartedly HATE the process of having to read my way through conference schedules, in particular through the ones that have four or more parallel tracks running. Me and my colleagues have been looking forward to the TRIPLE-I for quite a while, and my adhoc resolution for the NEXT i-Semantics (which is one of the three parts of the TRIPLE-I) is to initiate the development of an end-user oriented conference planning tool supported by faceted browsing: something that would allow me to sift through the pile of conference events quickly, changing perspectives as I wish, fading in and out not only tracks, but also topics, institutions and people.

Perspectives I’d apply would be for instance:

• What are talks or presentations that discuss visualization in an industry-applied context?
• The same thing in a scientific context?
• Which talks are addressing knowledge management and web 2.0 at the same time?
• Which talks are in English?
• Which presenters are Austrian/from the University of Trier/ from Overseas?
• Which are relevant for the Linked Data scope?
• etc. pp.

Such a tool would be a nice showcase for the conference itself, and - using Exhibit - shouldn’t be that difficult to put together (I think). In the meantime, I’ll have to keep studying the three pages Excel to PDF export of the detailed conference schedule (and yes, I am probably underestimating the cognitive value and more sustainable side-effects that studying such finely printed pages has:-). At first glance, these are the top three talks on each day that interest me most - for now, and disregarding German language presentation (results might change if I study the program again on Tuesday, which I will, so don’t be offended if you’re not on it:-)

Wednesday, 3rd of September:
- Semantic Search and Visualization of Time-Series Data
- Community Rating Service and User Buddy Supporting Advices in Community Portals
- Harnessing Wikipedia for Smart Tags Clustering

Thursday, 4th of September
- Seeding, Weeding, Fertilizing - Different Tag Gardening Activities for Folksonomy Maintenance and Enrichment
- A Model for Document Processing in Semantic Desktop Systems
- Non-linear Story-telling in a Mobile World
Friday, 5th of September
- Collaborative Knowledge Engineering via Semantic MediaWiki
- Building Ontology Networks: How to Obtain a Particular Ontology Network Life Cycle
- Improving Recommendations by Using Personality Traits in User Profiles

For more about the conference, go to the conference website.

And anyone who is planning to attend TRIPLE-I: I have just registered Semantic Web Company account on 12seconds, a platform for micro movies and I am looking for interview partners - it won’t take more than 12 seconds:-)

Uncategorized Building Ontology Networks, Community Rating Service, conference planning tool, Knowledge Management, Semantic Desktop Systems, Semantic Web Company

I got an email from Dolors Reig about his Semantic Web planet-type site, Planeta Web Semántica, an aggregator of Semantic Web news in Spanish. The site indexes feeds in both Spanish and English to make up for the shortage of Spanish-language Semantic Web activity in the blogosphere. I doubt this will be so in the near future as Semantic Web concepts continue to gain traction with people around the world. The site sports a clean layout and I like that you're given the ability to comment on each news item. This is an excellent resource for those whose primary language is Spanish. Got something to say? Leave a comment!

English, Spanish Aggregator, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Representation, Metadata, planet-type site, Resource, Semantic Web, site sports, Technical Services, Web activity, Web concepts, Web news, Web News Aggregator, Web Semántica, World Wide Web

When constructing the Semantic Web, we are actually building two varied aspects simultaneously. One aspect is the Web that includes things such as the communication protocols, the Web data presentation formats, and so on. In particular, we have invented new technologies such as RDF, OWL, SPARQL, and other W3C recommended Semantic Web standards. The other aspect is the semantics that represent the meanings of Web data. Building semantics is, however, different from building the Web. Building the Web is a professional activity. Ordinary users do not have the knowledge nor do they have the interest to design efficient network transmission protocols or data presentation formats. Hence to the end, these Web-construction issues can only be solved by few well-trained professionals. As long as the eventual results (i.e. the constructed Web) works well, ordinary users do not care what has been implemented technically. Building semantics is, however, a different story. "Semantics" is a subjective term by contrast to "the Web" which is an objective term. For instance, to the same name Tony Blair George W. Bush will label and assign it the semantics such as ally and friend while Osama bin Laden will label and assign it the semantics such as enemy. So is Tony Blair a friend or an enemy? It very much depends on who answers or who searches the answers. Because of this reason, building semantics cannot be restricted to the hands of few professionals. By contrast, it must engage the participation of all Web users. In a recent blog post, Nova Spivack emphasized that only the companies that have adopted Semantic Web technologies such as RDF and OWL in their infrastructure might be titled the "Semantic Web companies." Though this argument makes sense, it is not the precise declaration in my point of view. As we just discussed, adopting technologies such as RDF and OWL helps build a web that can be enhanced by explicit semantic specifications. These technologies themselves do not mean semantics. No single company can substitute billions of Web users and to specify semantics for them since assigning semantics is a subjective issue. Only Web users can specify semantics by themselves and for themselves. So what Nova's argument suggested is actually the companies dedicated to building a web in contrast to building semantics. The companies dedicated to building semantics are the ones that focus on providing users facilities for declaring their own semantics. Of course, however, Twine seems to match both categories by using Semantic Web technologies and encouraging user-specified semantics. Hence we can determine that Radar Networks is a Semantic Web company. By contrast, Digg is not a Semantic Web company yet even when it has tried to store data in RDF because it hardly encourages user-specified semantics. Got something to say? Leave a comment!

English Blair George, communication protocols, constructed Web, George W. Bush, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Representation, network transmission protocols, Nova Spivack, Osama bin Laden, OWL, Radar Networks, RDF, Semantic Web, Semantic Web technologies, SPARQL, Tony Blair, Web, Web data, Web data presentation formats, web standards, Web technologies, Web users, Web When, World Wide Web

Today finally I logged in to Twine the first time. I was reading yesterday about some shortcomings of the system, so I was keen on trying out the system by myself to get my own impression.

It's true that the system isn't as easy to understand as del.icio.us or other bookmarking tools. It takes a while until you get used to all those additional ways you can navigate through the system. Remember: "Twine looks at content and parses it automatically for the names of people, places, organizations and other subject tags. Users are then able to navigate between related content, view recommended content and connect with recommended people with related interests."

The "shortcoming" mentioned by Marshall Kirkpatrick that "... it's hard to keep track of all the levels and types of information available" I can't agree with: This has only to do with a general problem, which arises whenever semantic technologies should enhance the user experience. Either you stay with "simple" user-interfaces like Google or del.icio.us or you spend 5 minutes or so to learn a new piece of software which will help you to save time in the future and which helps you to find related information automatically.

On the other hand I was very surprised, that the automatic recommendations Twine makes on how to annotate or describe a new resource is really unsatisfying. Users will only spend time to tag their bookmarks if the machine comes up with some intelligent suggestions. And it's true, as Marshall says, "most of the web is made up of ugly, non-standard pages."

So hopefully Twine will add that feature before it will open up to the public (isn't there a plan to integrate OpenCalais or something similar?), otherwise there will be no "first mainstream semantic web application" but only another prototype of a yet another semweb-app.

Got something to say? Leave a comment!

English Google, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Representation, mainstream semantic web application, Marshall Kirkpatrick, semantic technologies, Semantic Web, Tag, User interface, whenever semantic technologies, World Wide Web

Unlike traditional search engines, which crawl the Web gathering Web pages, Semantic Web search engines index RDF data stored on the Web and provide an interface to search through the crawled data. Below is a list of Semantic Web search engines that are currently under development.

Semantic Web Search Engine (SWSE)

SWSE is a search engine for the RDF Web on the Web, and provides the equivalent services a search engine currently provides for the HTML Web. The system explores and indexes the Semantic Web and provides an easy-to-use interface through which users can find the information they are looking for. Because of the inherent semantics of RDF and other Semantic Web languages, the search and information retrieval capabilities of SWSE are potentially much more powerful than those of current search engines. SWSE indexes RDF data from many sources, including OWL, RDF and RSS files. RSS2 is converted to RDF and they will be adding GRDDL sources soon. Developed by DERI Ireland.

Sindice

Sindice is a lookup index for Semantic Web documents built on data intensive cluster computing techniques. Sindice indexes the Semantic Web and can tell you which sources mention a resource URI, IFP, or keyword, but it does not answer triple queries. Sindice currently indexes over 20 million RDF documents. Developed by DERI Ireland.

Watson

Allows you to search through ontologies and semantic documents using keywords. At the moment, you can enter a set of keywords (e.g. "cat dog old_lady"), and obtain a list of URIs of semantic documents in which the keywords appear as identifiers or in literals of classes, properties, and individuals. You can also use wildcards in the keywords (e.g., "ca? dog*"). Developed by KMi, UK.

Yahoo! Microsearch

Microsearch is Yahoo!'s stab at Semantic Web search and provides a richer search experience by combining traditional search results with metadata extracted from Web pages. Indexes RDF, RDFa and Microformats crawled from the Web. Microsearch will soon be adding support for GRDDL.

Falcons

Falcons is a keyword-based search engine for the Semantic Web, equipped with browsing capability. Falcons provides keyword-based search for URIs identifying objects and concepts (classes and properties) on the Semantic Web. Falcons also provides a summarization for each entity (object, class, property) for rapid understanding. Falcons currently indexes 7 million RDF documents and allows you to search through 34,566,728 objects. Developed by IWS China.

Swoogle

Searches through over 10,000 ontologies. 2.3 million RDF documents indexed, currently including those written in RDF/XML, N-Triples, N3(RDF) and some documents that embed RDF/XML fragments. Currently, it allows you to search through ontologies, instance data, and terms (i.e., URIs that have been defined as classes and properties). Not only that, it provides metadata for Semantic Web documents and supports browsing the Semantic Web. Swoogle also archives different versions of Semantic Web documents. Developed by the Ebiquity Group of UMBC.

Semantic Web Search

Powered by RDF Gateway, Intellidimension's proprietary platform for Semantic Web applications and agents. Developed by Intellidimension Inc.

Zitgist Search

The Zitgist Query Service simplifies the Semantic Data Web Query construction process with an end-user friendly interface. The user need not conceive of all relevant characteristics - appropriate options are presented based on the current shape of the query. Search results are displayed through an interface that enables further discovery of additional related data, information, and knowledge. Users describe characteristics of their search target, instead of relying entirely on content keywords.

Got something to say? Leave a comment!

English data intensive cluster computing techniques, equivalent services, HTML, Intellidimension Inc, keyword-based search, keyword-based search engine, KMi, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Representation, Metadata, RDF, RDF/XML, Resource Description Framework, richer search experience, search engine, search engines, search results, search target, Semantic Web, Technical Services, United Kingdom, Web applications, Web documents, Web gathering Web pages, Web languages, Web Query construction process, web search, Web Search Engine, Web Search Engine Roundup, Web search engines, XML, Yahoo, Zitgist Query Service

True Knowledge is a natural language search engine and question answering site, but to leave it at that would not do the site justice. What makes it stand out from similar sounding services like Powerset and Freebase? True Knowledge tackles natural language search and question answering (much like Powerset and Hakia), and it also maintains a knowledge base of facts about the world (similar to DBpedia and Freebase). However, what makes True Knowledge stand out is that they've combined these features and encourage their userbase to contribute facts and add new knowledge.

A brief overview of True Knowledge

True Knowledge has combined their technologies to create something that doesn't easily fall into any one category. In fact, you can categorize it as all of the following:

Question-Answering site

You c