The Semantic Puzzle

Andreas Blumauer

Linked Open Data: The Essentials – A quick start guide for decision makers

by , Category: Linked Data & Open Data, Literature & Publications

Together with REEEP (Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership) the Semantic Web CompanyThe Semantic Web Company (SWC), based in Vienna, provides companies, institutions and organizations with professional services related to the Semantic Web, semantic technologies and Social Software (SWCThe Semantic Web Company (SWC), based in Vienna, provides companies, institutions and organizations with professional services related to the Semantic Web, semantic technologies and Social Software) has composed a fundamental publication on the topic of Linked Open Data.

Linked Open Data: The Essentials provides answers to the following key questions:

  • What do the terms Open Data, Open Government Data and Linked Open Data actually mean, and what are the differences between them?
  • What do I need to take into account in developing a LOD strategy?
  • What does my organisation need to do technically in order to open up and publish its datasets?
  • How can I make sure the data is accessible and digestible for others?
  • How can I add value to my own data sets by consuming LOD from others?
  • What can be learned existing best practices?
  • What are the key potentials of sharing and consuming open datasets?

Read more about this publication and find out how to obtain a copy.

Thomas Thurner

SKOSsy-Lottery: Free Pass to Semantic Tech & Business Conference, Berlin

by , Category: Tools & Software, Vocabularies & Languages

As PoolPartyWeb based ontology manager which can serve as a central hub for your knowledge organization. With PoolParty you can organize and maintain knowledge models based on widely accepted specifications like RDF, SPARQL and SKOS. Team is present at SemTechBiz Berlin 2012 (February 6-7), we want you to join us.  This is why we have issued a little lottery to give away a full conference pass (€795) plus our unique PoolParty Cocktail Shaker in a set

How to enter the SKOSsy-lottery:

  • Enter a comment in this post. One comment per person. Describing which type of thesaurusA thesaurus is a book that lists words grouped together according to similarity of meaning, in contrast to a dictionary, which contains definitions and pronunciations. The largest thesaurus in the world is the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, which contains more than ... you are interested in.
  • All comments must be submitted before Jan 25, 2012.
  • The winners will be selected at random.

Together with our PoolParty Suite, we are ready to present SKOSsy on our booth at SemTechBiz Berlin 2012 Exhibition area.  SKOSsy is a handsome tool, which generates SKOS based seed-thesauri in German or in English by extracting data from DBpediaDBpedia is a project aiming to extract structured information from the information created as part of the Wikipedia project. This structured information is then made available on the World Wide Web. DBpedia allows users to query relationships and properties associated with Wikipedia resources, .... See our finger exercise on a thesaurus describing the world of Alan Turing – done with SKOSsy.

Let us know, which knowledge realm you are interested in and join the lottery now. Good luck, and see you in BerlinBerlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union. Located in northeastern Germany, it ....

 

Helmut Nagy

The ESA vocabulary site – Making Publishing and Reusing Vocabularies Easier

by , Category: Ontology Engineering, Open Government Data, Vocabularies & Languages

Reviewing the interview we made with Les Kneebone (project manager of the vocabulary projects at Education Services Australia) in November 2010 we can see that ESA has been one of the early adopters of SKOS as a standard for thesaurusA thesaurus is a book that lists words grouped together according to similarity of meaning, in contrast to a dictionary, which contains definitions and pronunciations. The largest thesaurus in the world is the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, which contains more than ... development. Les said then: “We had already identified SKOSSimple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) is a family of formal languages designed for representation of thesauri, classification schemes, taxonomies, subject-heading systems, or any other type of structured controlled vocabulary. SKOS is built upon RDF and RDFS, and its main objective is to ... as an important standard for ScOT so it was natural to select PoolParty as our new thesaurus management tool”. Around a year later ESA´s vocabulary site went online with PoolPartyWeb based ontology manager which can serve as a central hub for your knowledge organization. With PoolParty you can organize and maintain knowledge models based on widely accepted specifications like RDF, SPARQL and SKOS. as its basis.

We asked Les to comment on his statement from last year and he confirmed that SKOS continues to be central to the ESA vocabulary business model and that it has also been important for ESA that PoolParty has been flexible enough to support continued publication of non-RDF formats, especially IMS VDEX.

In the course of this project it became more and more obvious that SKOS cannot only be used as yet another format for publishing thesauri but rather as a unified model to build thesauri in general. This approach made possible several improvements to the vocabulary development model and the maintenance process of ESA. Since all data is stored as RDF in a triple store, and SKOS and RDF are flexible formats supporting interoperability and interchangeability of data, many manual transformations that had to be done before are not needed anymore and all other systems using the vocabularies are dynamically fed by PoolParty offering the data in its needed formats (see image below).

Changes in ESA’s vocabulary development model

Les states that while some manual processes still exist to support legacy systems, PoolParty ensures the integrity and richness of ESA data. Support and customizations for legacy systems can be achieved in the confidence that the linked-data capabilities are centrally managed and stored in the PoolParty triple store.

From the publishing perspective, the previous vocabulary publishing site has been replaced by the PoolParty Linked Data Frontend (LD-Frontend) that has been customized especially for this project to offer more flexibility in the display and the layout of the data. Similar to the frontend for the Austrian Geological Survey mentioned in a previous blog post , the LD-Frontend has been adapted to the ESA styleguide and the display of the data in the HTML view of the frontend has been adapted to be more user-friendly (see screenshot below).

From ESA’s perspective Les commented here that for the vocabulary manager, edits to the frontend styles and templates are intuitive and can be tested in staging environments. But he also stated that for publishing support is important, and that SWCThe Semantic Web Company (SWC), based in Vienna, provides companies, institutions and organizations with professional services related to the Semantic Web, semantic technologies and Social Software was very responsive.

Example ESA linked data frontend

Of course we asked Les to give a preview of the next steps for ESA. He stated that they include language translation projects so that its vocabularies, especially Schools Online Thesaurus (ScOTThe Schools Online Thesaurus (ScOT) provides a controlled vocabulary of terms used in Australian and New Zealand schools. It encompasses all subject areas as well as terms describing educational and administrative processes. The thesaurus links non-preferred terms to curriculum terms. It also ...), can be accessed by wider markets and by students of other languages. He also stated that PoolParty handles multi-lingual thesauri very well.

We here at SWC are glad to see PoolParty used in more and more applications and usage scenarios. We are looking forward to the next steps that will be done in this project and also to see how the data offered by the ESA vocabulary site is used in other applications.

Thanks to Les Kneebone from ESA for his contribution to his blog post.

Andreas Blumauer

Going to SEMTECHBIZ Berlin 2012

by , Category: Conferences & Events

I went to LondonLondon is the capital city of England and the United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its founding by the Romans, who ... last September to visit SemTechBiz UK to represent the Semantic Web CompanyThe Semantic Web Company (SWC), based in Vienna, provides companies, institutions and organizations with professional services related to the Semantic Web, semantic technologies and Social Software and PoolPartyWeb based ontology manager which can serve as a central hub for your knowledge organization. With PoolParty you can organize and maintain knowledge models based on widely accepted specifications like RDF, SPARQL and SKOS. technologies in the exhibition area of this excellent conference. I had tons of interesting talks at our booth and – although I never found time to visit any talk – I have learned again a lot about customer´s needs.

Compared to ISWC or ESWCYearly conference situated in Heraclion (Krete) targeting researchers and practitioners dealing with different aspects of semantic technologies., two other major conferences in the area of semantic web, SemTechBiz is clearly the place to go if you´re interested in semantic web applications. Especially in the last three years we have observed a continuous growth of acceptance and demand for semantic web technologies in various industries. For many information professionals and IT managers it has become clearer than ever before that semantic web applications can solve several well-known problems in the areas of enterprise search, data integration, business intelligence and knowledge management.

Thus it was great news for us to have another SemTechBiz conference in place – this time in BerlinBerlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union. Located in northeastern Germany, it ..., which is one of the most vibrant cities in the world when it comes to innovative web technologies like linked data or open data. And again we will “explore how semantic solutions and linked data are being embraced throughout companiesA company is a form of business organization. In the United States, a company is a corporation—or, less commonly, an association, partnership, or union—that carries on an industrial enterprise. " Generally, a company may be a "corporation, partnership, association, joint-stock ... across a diverse range of disciplines and business categories”.

We hope to meet you at SemTechBiz Berlin 2012 (February 6-7) – PoolParty Team is present as Gold Sponsor and is looking forward to meeting you in the exhibition area to talk with you about your semantic web applications.

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