Planet Semantico

My colleague Tassilo Pellegrini recently did an interview with Bo Hu, a researcher and former fellow at the Intelligence, Agent, Multimedia Group (IAM), University of Southampton: At present, Bo is working at the SAP Research Center CEC Belfast where his research focuses on the application of Semantic Web and Web 2.0 technologies in e-learning and e-healthcare. In the interview, he talks about the potential of Semantic Web and intelligent agent technologies in medicine and life sciences, which he sees as a discipline particularly suited for semantic technologies as “many sub-domains of medicine are subject to controlled nomenclatures providing solid ground upon which semantically enriched applications can be built.” About the potential of intelligent agents:

[...] in distributed environments, it is difficult to exploit the available data from different sources, especially data that is normally projected onto the body of a patient to reach diagnostic and prognostic decisions. Many of the available data are interrelated, calling for paradigms that facilitate knowledge discovery by intelligently integrating data sources.

An agent-based framework is particularly useful in this case where individual agents are equipped with “memory” and “reasoning/thinking” capabilities to constantly acquire new knowledge and solve allocated tasks. Communication among agents, prescribed by a common vocabulary/ontology, ensures the entire community works towards a common goal.

On the other hand, frameworks with agents encapsulating special functions deliver better customised and personalised healthcare. As a result, we will be witnessing more patient power and better adherence to treatment regimens.

Read the whole interview on the SWC website.

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English 2.0 technologies, Bo Hu, e-healthcare, e-learning, enriched applications, intelligent agent technologies, Multimedia Group, personalised healthcare, SAP Research Center, semantic technologies, University of Southampton

Project10X has published the first comprehensive industry study of the next stage of internet evolution — Web 3.0. This landmark 720-page, highly illustrated report is written for executives, developers, designers, entrepreneurs, investors, and others who want to better understand semantic technologies, the business and market opportunities they present, and the ways Web 3.0 will change how we use and experience the internet. In the coming decade, semantic technologies will drive trillion dollar global economic expansions, transforming industries as well as our experience of the internet. This is business intelligence you can’t afford to be without. Thrive in the new business landscape

delicious Business Intelligence, internet evolution, semantic technologies, USD, ways Web

In our latest podcast I talk to Brooke Aker, CEO of Expert System in the United States. We talk about Expert System and Brooke’s views on the utility of semantic technologies.

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

• Autonomy
• Cogito Semantic Advertiser
• European Semantic Technology Conference (ESTC) panel
• Expert System
• Open Calais
• Semantic Exchange

This conversation was conducted using Skype on Thursday 2 October, recorded with Ecamm Network’s Call Recorder for Skype, and edited on a Mac with Garageband.

For other Talis podcasts in this Nodalities series, see here. To subscribe to updates from all of Talis’ podcast series, see here.

English Brooke Aker, European Semantic Technology, Expert System, semantic technologies, United States

In our latest podcast I talk to Scott Brinker of ion interactive. We discuss the application of semantic technologies to Marketing, and explore Scott’s notion of Semantic Marketing.

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

• Alta Vista
• Scott Brinker’s blog, and his original Semantic Marketing post
• The Cluetrain Manifesto
• Dell
• Digg
• Dublin Core
• ion interactive
• Alex Iskold, his post on ‘Top Down’ and ‘Bottom Up,’ and my response
• LinkedIn
• MIT
• Procter and Gamble
• Salesforce
• StumbleUpon
• W3C
• Yahoo! SearchMonkey
• Yelp

This conversation was conducted using Skype on Thursday 2 October, recorded with Ecamm Network’s Call Recorder for Skype, and edited on a Mac with Garageband.

For other Talis podcasts in this Nodalities series, see here. To subscribe to updates from all of Talis’ podcast series, see here.

English Alex Iskold, Dell, Scott Brinker, semantic technologies, Yahoo

Well, no. Or maybe not quite. But an innocent reader might have gathered this from the title of David Provost’s recent publication which promisingly read “On the Cusp. Global Review of the Semantic Web Industry.”

Provost’s review is a nice and readable attempt at evangelizing semantic technologies and their adoption by the industry. Its seeks to spread the news outside of the echo chambers and avoids any community jargon and cryptic acronyms irrelevant to strategic decision makers. He really derserves great credits here.

But in the end Provost’s description of a “Semantic Web Industry” is reductionist. By just analysing the commercial availabilty of technology provided by vendors, the bigger picture of the industry gets blurred. He misses the point when it comes to analysing the actual demands for semantic applications. But they could be easily identified e.g. enabling cost-efficient interoperability and reusability of data. So Provost gets stuck in a supply-driven view of the semantic web industry. And as we have learned from history, supply driven markets - technology markets in special - are extremely vulnerable. Hence concluding that the Semantic Web Industry is on the cusp might seem a little “misworded”.

What might be a nice addition for a follow up study is to look at the commercialization strategies of semantic web technologies and its capitalization logic as a network good. Further on, it might be worth it looking at the value chain of a semantic industry in which vendors just play one (but nontheless important) role and the regulatory aspects involved in rolling out semantic web based business models, i.e. concept advertising. Here you might be easily confronted with antitrust and competition issues very soon, taking into account recent decisions of the German High Court about the bidding on key words in Google AdSense.

Imagine what it would mean if you could bid on concepts and secure them for your private purposes?

(Cordial thanks to Jana Herwig who edited this post for me!)

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• Report: Semantic Web Companies Are, or Will Soon Begin, Making Money
• The Semantic Technology Value Chain

English David Provost, German High Court, Google, i.e. concept advertising, Jana Herwig, semantic applications, semantic technologies, Semantic Web, semantic web industry, Semantic Web technologies, technology markets, value chain, Web Companies Are, Web industry, Web industry On

In our latest podcast I talk to David Provost about his recent report on the Semantic Web industry, On the cusp: a global review of the Semantic Web industry I reviewed this report for ZDNet when it was published at the end of last month.

We discuss the report and its findings, before turning to consider the engagement of ‘mainstream’ analysts with semantic technologies.

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

• Sir Tim Berners-Lee
• ESTC panel session
• Forrester
• Gartner
• Gomez
• Hurdles in the Business Case for the Semantic Web (PDF), David’s thesis
• MIT
• Mondeca
• On the cusp: a global review of the Semantic Web industry (PDF), David’s report
• ontoprise
• Open Calais
• Semantic Business, David’s blog
• Semantic Wave report
• Sloan Business School
• Nova Spivack
• Thomson Reuters
• Top Quadrant
• Twine
• Yahoo! Searchmonkey

This conversation was conducted using Skype on Tuesday 7 October, recorded with Ecamm Network’s Call Recorder for Skype, and edited on a Mac with Garageband.

For other Talis podcasts in this Nodalities series, see here. To subscribe to updates from all of Talis’ podcast series, see here.

English David Provost, Nova Spivack, semantic technologies, Sloan Business School, Thomson Reuters, Tim Berners-Lee, Web industry, Yahoo

Special Edition : SIOC Update

I had a man cold when I should have been doing my duty, but with no apologies (fairly safely assuming John has a CC-with-attribution kind of policy) here’s a good proxy :

It’s time for another installment from the world of SIOC!

• After the news in May that Digg were incorporating RDFa in their pages, Digital Bazaar CEO Manu Sporny (in Blacksburg, where I lived for some time in 1996 and 2000) has written an excellent three-part guide on the public-rdfa list about how more semantic information can be incorporated into Digg pages using SIOC RDFa (parts 1, 2 and 3). You can view the result (as validating XHTML) here. See also this interesting related blog post on RDFa by Manu.
• As part of their data portability drive, the mobile phonebook service ZYB (recently acquired by Vodafone) announced on their blog in June that their latest release introduced FOAF and SIOC exports from user’s profile pages (with the full export only available to the users themselves at zyb.com/profilename.foaf and zyb.com/profilename.sioc respectively). SIOC is being used to describe actions performed by ZYB users such as shouting, writing comments or updating status messages on Facebook. You can also read more about their new public feeds API for ZYB.
• The SemanticEngine.NET class library has just been released by Mads Kristensen, which supports various different formats ready to use in .NET (currently APML, FOAF, XFN, and soon SIOC and microformats).
• Gautier Poupeau has written an Operator user script that checks if a SIOC-enabled post is referenced in del.icio.us.
• Martynas Jusevičius talks about how technologies including SIOC can enable semantic social networks.
• Brad Fallon gives SIOC a namecheck in his Freeline Report video podcast. Thanks Brad!
• On the IBM Developer Works site, Rob Crowther mentions SIOC in his description of how to plan a Semantic Web site.
• Ben O’Steen describes how he plans to ditch his database-based blog for a semantic one, using terms from SIOC.
• Triplify 0.4 has been released which uses SIOC and other vocabularies to expose instance data as RDF from a variety of web applications.
• Kingsley Idehen describes how WordPress blogs can be incorporated into the Linked Data Web using Virtuoso.
• Daniel Lewis talks about a Universe of Discourse / Discussion and SIOC. He has also developed a WordPress theme called StraightWalker that links into the SIOC vocabulary.
• I mentioned last time that the Sindice group would soon release the SWPop widget for WordPress. It’s now available as the SIOC Widget and it allows you to view posts, comments, topics, etc. made by any blog commenter across the SIOC-o-sphere (as indexed by Sindice). They’ve also created a SIOC API for Sindice.
• Alex Passant has led work on a prototype system called SMOB (Semantic Microblogging) for distributed / decentralised microblogging, that uses FOAF and SIOC to model microbloggers, services and microblog posts. You can read more in my blog post about SMOB or in Alex’s blog post. You can also try the anonymous client and see a server view.
• From IRC (1, 2), we found out about a French wiki system called WikiNi that has been adapted by Charles Nepote to allow publishing to SMOB. You can get the client here.
• This SMOB post from Gautier Poupeau links to his Drupal 5 widget that shows the latest SIOC postings on a given SMOB server.
• Steve Flinter has written a blog post entitled “Tangler versus SIOC“, referring to the ProgrammableWeb announcement about Tangler, an API for discussion forums. I think it’d be great if SIOC could be used by Tangler, and I’m glad to see that others think so too.
• TCD student Dave Langley has created the Online Semantic Community Framework (OSCF), a platform for managing online communities based on semantic technologies including SIOC. It uses a SPARQL endpoint as its data source.
• David Peterson has been discussing on the public-rdf-in-html-tf list about which vocabularies should be used in Drupal core, and Manu Sporny replies with some reasons for using FOAF and SIOC independently or together.
• Deirdre Lee, Vassilios Peristeras et al. have been working on a very nice enterprise application for SIOC, where it is being used in collaborative work environments (CWEs) as an interoperable format to share workspaces and documents between different CWE systems (e.g. BSCW and Business Collaborator). This work was carried out as part of the ECOSPACE integrated project, and you can find out more from their newsletter wiki, our IEEE IS publication or attend the presentation at ODBASE 2008 in November.
• The Semantic MediaWiki Plus User Group has been set up, and they are investigating how SMW templates can support FOAF and SIOC.
• I’m very pleased to announce that our SIOC “partner-in-crime” Alex Passant has joined DERI. Alex recently gave an interesting presentation at the Centre for Digital Music (repeated here in DERI) about where “Social Music Meets the Semantic Web“.
• Mike Alexrod has blogged about joining the SIOC-o-sphere, along with the unexpected SEO benefits that he experienced as a result!
• Over 60 competitors have signed up for the boards.ie SIOC Data Competition and there’s still one month left…
• Finally, the 1st Social Data on the Web Workshop (or what we like to call the “SIOC Workshop”!) will be held at the 7th International Semantic Web Conference in Karlsruhe this October. The list of accepted papers is now available; it’s going to be a very interesting event. We hope that you can attend!

Previous SIOC-o-sphere articles:

#7 http://sioc-project.org/node/328
#6 http://sioc-project.org/node/310
#5 http://sioc-project.org/node/294
#4 http://sioc-project.org/node/272
#3 http://sioc-project.org/node/271

#2 http://sioc-project.org/node/138
#1 http://sioc-project.org/node/79

If you wish to contribute to the next article, join the SIOC Twine and use the tag “siocosphere9” when you add items.

English Alex Passant, API, Ben O Steen, Brad Fallon, Centre for Digital Music, Charles Nepote, Daniel Lewis, Dave Langley, David Peterson, Deirdre Lee, Digital Music, HTML, IBM, Manu Sporny, Mike Alexrod, Online Communities, Online Semantic Community Framework, RDF, Rob Crowther, Semantic MediaWiki Plus User Group, semantic social networks, semantic technologies, SemanticEngine.NET, Steve Flinter, Vodafone, Web applications, Web Conference, Web using Virtuoso, Web Workshop

It’s time for another installment from the world of SIOC!

• After the news in May that Digg were incorporating RDFa in their pages, Digital Bazaar CEO Manu Sporny (in Blacksburg, where I lived for some time in 1996 and 2000) has written an excellent three-part guide on the public-rdfa list about how more semantic information can be incorporated into Digg pages using SIOC RDFa (parts 1, 2 and 3). You can view the result (as validating XHTML) here. See also this interesting related blog post on RDFa by Manu.
• As part of their data portability drive, the mobile phonebook service ZYB (recently acquired by Vodafone) announced on their blog in June that their latest release introduced FOAF and SIOC exports from user’s profile pages (with the full export only available to the users themselves at zyb.com/profilename.foaf and zyb.com/profilename.sioc respectively). SIOC is being used to describe actions performed by ZYB users such as shouting, writing comments or updating status messages on Facebook. You can also read more about their new public feeds API for ZYB.
• The SemanticEngine.NET class library has just been released by Mads Kristensen, which supports various different formats ready to use in .NET (currently APML, FOAF, XFN, and soon SIOC and microformats).
• Gautier Poupeau has written an Operator user script that checks if a SIOC-enabled post is referenced in del.icio.us.
• Martynas Jusevičius talks about how technologies including SIOC can enable semantic social networks.
• Brad Fallon gives SIOC a namecheck in his Freeline Report video podcast. Thanks Brad!
• On the IBM Developer Works site, Rob Crowther mentions SIOC in his description of how to plan a Semantic Web site.
• Ben O’Steen describes how he plans to ditch his database-based blog for a semantic one, using terms from SIOC.
• Triplify 0.4 has been released which uses SIOC and other vocabularies to expose instance data as RDF from a variety of web applications.
• Kingsley Idehen describes how WordPress blogs can be incorporated into the Linked Data Web using Virtuoso.
• Daniel Lewis talks about Universe of Discourse / Discussion and SIOC. He has also developed a WordPress theme called StraightWalker that links into the SIOC vocabulary.
• I mentioned last time that the Sindice group would soon release the SWPop widget for WordPress. It’s now available as the SIOC Widget and it allows you to view posts, comments, topics, etc. made by any blog commenter across the SIOC-o-sphere (as indexed by Sindice). They’ve also created a SIOC API for Sindice.
• Alex Passant has led work on a prototype system called SMOB (Semantic Microblogging) for distributed / decentralised microblogging, that uses FOAF and SIOC to model microbloggers, services and microblog posts. You can read more in my blog post about SMOB or in Alex’s blog post. You can also try the anonymous client and see a server view.
• From IRC (1, 2), we found out about a French wiki system called WikiNi that has been adapted by Charles Nepote to allow publishing to SMOB. You can get the client here.
• This SMOB post from Gautier Poupeau links to his Drupal 5 widget that shows the latest SIOC postings on a given SMOB server.
• Steve Flinter has written a blog post entitled “Tangler versus SIOC“, referring to the ProgrammableWeb announcement about Tangler, an API for discussion forums. I think it’d be great if SIOC could be used by Tangler, and I’m glad to see that others think so too.
• TCD student Dave Langley has created the Online Semantic Community Framework (OSCF), a platform for managing online communities based on semantic technologies including SIOC. It uses a SPARQL endpoint as its data source.
• David Peterson has been discussing on the public-rdf-in-html-tf list about which vocabularies should be used in Drupal core, and Manu Sporny replies with some reasons for using FOAF and SIOC independently or together.
• Deirdre Lee, Vassilios Peristeras et al. have been working on a very nice enterprise application for SIOC, where it is being used in collaborative work environments (CWEs) as an interoperable format to share workspaces and documents between different CWE systems (e.g. BSCW and Business Collaborator). This work was carried out as part of the ECOSPACE integrated project, and you can find out more from their newsletter wiki, our IEEE IS publication or attend the presentation at ODBASE 2008 in November.
• The Semantic MediaWiki Plus User Group has been set up, and they are investigating how SMW templates can support FOAF and SIOC.
• I’m very pleased to announce that our SIOC “partner-in-crime” Alex Passant has joined DERI. Alex recently gave an interesting presentation at the Centre for Digital Music (repeated here in DERI) about where “Social Music Meets the Semantic Web“.
• Mike Alexrod has blogged about joining the SIOC-o-sphere, along with the unexpected SEO benefits that he experienced as a result!
• Over 60 competitors have signed up for the boards.ie SIOC Data Competition and there’s still one month left…
• Finally, the 1st Social Data on the Web Workshop (or what we like to call the “SIOC Workshop”!) will be held at the 7th International Semantic Web Conference in Karlsruhe this October. The list of accepted papers is now available; it’s going to be a very interesting event. We hope that you can attend!

Previous SIOC-o-sphere articles:

#7 http://sioc-project.org/node/328
#6 http://sioc-project.org/node/310
#5 http://sioc-project.org/node/294
#4 http://sioc-project.org/node/272
#3 http://sioc-project.org/node/271
#2 http://sioc-project.org/node/138
#1 http://sioc-project.org/node/79

If you wish to contribute to the next article, join the SIOC Twine and use the tag “siocosphere9” to add items.

English Alex Passant, API, Ben O Steen, Brad Fallon, Centre for Digital Music, Charles Nepote, Daniel Lewis, Dave Langley, David Peterson, Deirdre Lee, Digital Music, HTML, IBM, Manu Sporny, Mike Alexrod, Online Communities, Online Semantic Community Framework, RDF, Rob Crowther, Semantic MediaWiki Plus User Group, semantic social networks, semantic technologies, SemanticEngine.NET, Steve Flinter, Vodafone, Web applications, Web Conference, Web using Virtuoso, Web Workshop

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

Applications based on semantic technologies offer new ways to discover, browse and explore information - this is an established fact in the SemWeb community. But how can we (as semantic web “insiders”) communicate these potential benefits to a typical end-user who has never heard about “faceted search” before - which doesn’t mean that he or she wouldn’t love intelligent user interfaces if they were in place?

One answer lies in using mockups, which are, on the one hand, an indispensable instrument for prototyping user interfaces, but also valuable when it comes to explaining the workings of an application to an end-user, an audience of interested researchers or a client.

And when it comes to explaining a search engine or search widget, mockups are even more important, as we all and in particular end-users are often unable to think of search interfaces other than in terms of Google.

We have become so googlified that hardly anyone can think of different ways of searching for information than Google has offered for many years now: Put a couple of words in a text box, click a button and scroll through a list of titles and summaries. Repeat until you’re done, or try a new search and repeat. Wow!

Although even Google has started recently to implement a little bit of semantics by offering an auto-complete functionality on google.com (on some local versions like Google Austria this feature is still not available), even the most basic concepts for an intelligent search interface are still not part of common sense thinking.

Admittedly, there are people who get irritated instantly by complex user interfaces like David Huynh´s Freebase Parallax. “This is only for experts!” is their response. But in a corporate setting, complex queries are part of our daily business - they are just not supported by common search engines (only exception being data mining solutions). But that doesn’t mean that we don’t need it.

Where is the way out of this dilemma?

• Don’t tell, but SHOW the end-users how semantic technologies can enhance search & browse experiences
• Do not use terms like SPARQL or RDF
• Create a simple mockup that illustrates the points you want to make
• You’re not a designer? Use tools like Balsamiq - Try it now!

Here is an example for a mockup of a semantically enhanced expert finder:

These kind of mockups are essential for any requirements engineering phase in any project where search is a bit more than a text box, a button and a bunch of documents.

English Data mining, data mining solutions, David Huynh´s Freebase, faceted search, Google, Google Austria, how semantic technologies, intelligent search interface, little bit, RDF, search engine, search engines, search widget, semantic applications, semantic technologies, semantic web insiders

On turning complex semantic technologies into simple products that people love, use and pay for

delicious semantic technologies, Web Idea On

Last week I was at the Semantic tech conference in San Jose. It was an exciting event that exceeded my expectations in many ways. First of all, the conference had a really great vibe. People from different parts of the planet converged to talk about their work and passion - Semantic Web.

From the conversations during lunch to keynotes there was a fluid exchange of intelligent ideas; people genuinely interested in the space and focusing on understanding how semantic technologies benefit us today and where they are headed. There was a consensus that many technologies are nearly ready or ready for prime time and that 2008 is the first year when semantic web is coming out of the stealth mode.

To get a flavor of the conversations and topics covered during this conference, I suggest that you review the 4 posts that I’ve written on ReadWriteWeb:

• Taking Semantic Technology to the Masses
• Investor Opportunities and Pitfalls
• The Story of SearchMonkey
• Freebase: An overview

In addition to these 4 posts, I’ve also written a post on Semantic Search. I highly recommend this post to you as well, it is a result of a lot struggle to crystallize in my mind what is going on in that space.

Finally, as with any great conference, it was a pleasure to meet up people that you work with remotely. I had a great pleasure of talking to Paul Miller, Tom Tague and Greg Boutin from Semantic Web Gang. We’ve done several podcasts together and it was great to see people behind voices and avatars :)

I also had an opportunity to speak on the Rising Stars of Semantic Web panel along with Barney Pell, CEO/CTO Powerset, Nova Spivack CEO of Radar Networks, Ian David CTO of Talis and Tom Grueber from stealth company. Both during the panel and the press conference that followed up, I kept on thinking about incredible amount of energy and brain power and enthusiasm that these folks bring to the space. In my book passion is the #1 recipe for success, so I was excited about the prospects of the space at large and what each of these individual companies is going to contribute.

For additional coverage of the conference, please see excellent round up by Daniela Barbosa.

English Barney Pell, Daniela Barbosa, energy, Greg Boutin, how semantic technologies, Ian David, Nova Spivack, Paul Miller, Radar Networks, San Jose, semantic technologies, Semantic Web, Taking Semantic Technology, Talis, Tom Grueber, Tom Tague, Web Gang, Web Panel

The call for the ISWC 2008 Sixth Semantic Web Challenge and Billion Triples tracks is out.

“We invite submissions to the sixth annual Semantic Web Challenge, the premiere event for demonstrating practical progress towards achieving the vision of the Semantic Web. The central idea of the Semantic Web is to extend the current human-readable web by encoding some of the semantics of resources in a machine-processable form. Moving beyond syntax opens the door to more advanced applications and functionality on the Web. Computers will be better able to search, process, integrate and present the content of these resources in a meaningful, intelligent manner.

As the core technological building blocks are now in place, the next challenge is to show off the benefits of semantic technologies by developing integrated, easy to use applications that can provide new levels of Web functionality for end users on the Web or within enterprise settings. Applications submitted should demonstrate clear practical value that goes above and beyond what is possible with conventional web technologies alone.

Unlike in previous years, the Semantic Web Challenge of 2008 will consist of two tracks: the Open Track and the Billion Triples Track. The key difference between the two tracks is that the Billion Triples Track requires the participants to make use of the data set –a billion triples– provided by the organizers. The Open Track has no such restrictions.

As before, the Challenge is open to everyone from academia and industry. The authors of the best applications will be awarded prizes and featured prominently at special sessions during the conference.

”

Uncategorized conventional web technologies, human-readable web, semantic technologies, Web challenge, Web functionality

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