The Semantic Puzzle

Jana Herwig

LinkedData Vision Competition

Vision CompetitionTell us your vision and win a full conference pass for LinkedData Planet 2008, worth $1095! 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 is an Association and Analyst Partner of this year’s LinkedData Planet conference, taking place on June 17-18, 2008 in New York. Keynote speaker include Sir Tim Berners-LeeSir Timothy John 'Tim' Berners-Lee, OM, KBE, FRS, FREng, FRSA (born 8 June 1955), also known as 'TimBL', is a British physicist, computer scientist and MIT professor, credited for his invention of the World Wide Web, (not the internet) making the first proposal for it in March 1989. On 25 ..., Kingsley Idehen, Ian Davis, Anant Jhingran and Atanas Kiryakov will be among the Keynote speakers.

Here is what you need to do to enter the competition:

Send us a brief description of your vision of the impact that linking Open DataLinked Open Data (LOD) stands for freely available data on the World Wide Web, which can be identified via Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and can be accessed and retrieved directly via HTTP. Finally link your data to other data to provide context. will have on business, politics and culture. Share with us your ideas how linking open data will change the world – with all the pros and cons involved.

We welcome ideas in the following categories:

  • mashups
  • search applications
  • ontologies & schemas
  • scenarios for lifestyles
  • policies for the practice of linking Open Data

Submissions will be assessed based on the following criteria:

  • Feasibility: Can it be achieved or carried out easily?
  • Innovation potential: Does it introduce new perspectives or facets?
  • Sustainability: Does it open up further uses and exploitations?
  • Practicality: What are its practical uses and impact?
  • Legibility: Is it concise and easy to read?

You can use text, images and video to express your ideas. Please submit your text as a comment in response to this blog entry and provide links to images and videos you would like to include.*) To qualify for the competition, your vision must be posted by May 20, 2008, 12 p.m. (noon, Central European time).

In addition to your vision, please leave your name, a valid email address and information about your affiliation. If identical (or very similar) submissions are made, the submission that was entered first will be given a higher ranking. The author of the top-rated submission in our LinkedData Vision Competition will receive a full LinkedData Planet conference pass, to be collected on site.

Conference Venue:
Roosevelt Hotel
45 E 45th St
New York, New York 10017
Co-chairs: Bob DuCharme, Ken North

Conference producer: Jupitermedia Corporation

*) By submitting your texts and and providing links to related content in support of your vision, you are granting us the right to use and distribute both text and related content. You are also confirming that you are either the copyright holder or that you have the copyright owner’s permission to grant us the rights to distribute and use the content in question. This blog entry – and automatically all comments posted at this entry – are published under a Creative Commons Licence: by attributionLet others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but only if they give credit the way you request. – no commercial uses – share alikeLet others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.. Travel and accomodation expenses are not included in the prize.

The competition is closed.

Creative Commons License

9 thoughts on “LinkedData Vision Competition

  1. Along with the rapid development of internet, we will form a tele-community
    based on semantic web. This tele-community is composed of enterprises,
    individuals, homes, schools, hospitals, retail shops, and everything possible.
    These are all the nodes of a huge web of this tele-community.
    For each node, we will have the corresponding Information systems, say,
    Enterprise information systems, Individual Information systems, Home
    Information systems, School information systems, hospital information
    systems, retailer information systems, and more. because every nodes are
    dealing with data from distributed sources over the web, these information
    systems are all distributed by themselves. all of these distributed
    information systems are all supporting to each other. So every member of
    this tele-community are very well served, and the whole society is running
    at very high efficiency. This tele-community is based on semantic web, and
    it is open to the infinite applications possible happening in the future.

  2. Relating data from different sources: Company website and many Internet sources for Lead generation and Sales.

    LEADSExplorer: Identify B2B website visitors by company name and qualify these companies as leads by analyzing the website data on company level (search terms used, originating webpage, pages visited, time on pages, click path, returning visitors, geographical location, language, …) combined with Internet Data Mining on the company for information and possible contacts.
    Using the built-in CRM for further follow-up: lead qualification and funnel
    The seamless integration between website analytic data and CRM allows for analyzing visually the communications and the induced website visits for better nurturing.

  3. semantic web is the only way of interconnecting and interrelating the information universe of data by means of tagging through ontologies. This interrelation primarily enables information agents such as search engines not only retrieving the desired data but also inferring knowledge and patterns the users may not have thought about them. Hence, linking through tagging the heterogeneous data semantically from diverse information systems will certainly enable the society to achieve high impact on its developments.

  4. Pingback: The Semantic Puzzle | Vision Competition: First Entries

  5. The current gigantic network of web documents could be realized by enabling any user to publish any document and link to other documents. If we want to see the network of Linked Open Data explode on a similar scale, we need to enable general users to publish “data” directly on the web and link to other “data”. We need to move the paradigm of web page publishing and hyperlinking towards data publishing and data linking. We should enable people to post structured data about anything rather than just unstructured text. We need the active participation and contribution of the billions of worldwide internet users. Recently, the web has seen enormous user participation with the rise of easy-to-use social software. We should exploit this trend of social web applications, however, for enabling people to create, share and link “data” on the global Linked Data Web.

    With this vision, I am working on a social Semantic Web application called StYLiD (an acronym for Structure Your own Linked Data), now available at http://www.stylid.org. A basic demo video is also available at http://www.stylid.org/quickstart.php#video

    It enables people to share a wide variety of structured data with the freedom to define their own structured concepts on the fly. Concepts with attributes can be used to model any data. We can also consolidate such multiple small schemas defined by many people to have emerging and evolving concepts. Any user would be able to share structured data simply by filling up system generated forms for such concepts. The system supports creating linked data right from the time of data entry. While submitting new data instances, we can directly input other data instances, as attribute values. It supports the users to simply pick up data from a suggested range of concepts. We may also input any resource URI as the attribute value directly. It enables the user to link to existing vast resources like Wikipedia too. Transparently, the Wikipedia URLs get converted into URIs in the DBpedia linked data repository. Wikipedia is better known and understood by general people. So they would be motivated to link to Wikipedia to make their data more informative and interesting. Thus, while people would still be using simple web interfaces, they would be creating a web of data which machines can crawl and process.

    We have already witnessed how the current web of documents has transformed our lives. The Giant Global Graph of open Linked Data will be the next big thing. Linking data will shrink the exploding information space into a small world where any data can be easily reached from anywhere. This will open up a new range of possibilities. Businesses will foster in healthy competition by tapping in this common wealth. The open linked data will truly reflect global interests and drive world politics towards the welfare of everyone. Machines will feed upon the linked data and do useful things for people. This will transform our lives once again. We cannot predict all outcomes of such enormous power. However, we need not be afraid when the entire world is watching and working for the benefit of mankind.

    Aman Shakya,
    National Institute of Informatics,
    Tokyo, Japan

  6. Pingback: Planeta Web Semántica » Blog Archive » Win a Full Conference Pass for LinkedData Planet 2008

  7. A Vision About Linked Open Data Planet: Telecommunity and Distributed Individual Information Systems

    Authors: James Yue Gee, Max Huang

    1. Introduction
    In creating the modern generation of enterprise and web applications, we typically integrate information from multiple sources. Relating data from disparate sources presents a challenge of deriving information. However, semantic tools and technologies are evolving that enable us to understand information derived by linking data from different sources, including data from applications, databases, ontologies and content management systems. Semantic technologies and tools support techniques such as tagging online information to make it more readily accessible for data integration. This makes it easier to understand data in relation to other data, even if some of this data is inside your firewall, some is in a business partner’s system, and some is part of the growing collection of useful publicly available data on the web.
    LinkedData Planet provides insights into those technologies that enableus to: a) connect data contained in silos within organizations in a meaningful way. b) extract and correlate data from web sites and databases for purposes such as analyzing trends and decision support, customer and vendor relationship management, and social networking
    Furthermore, if we put all the service objects, including individuals, communities, organizations, even the whole society (Figure 1) within the framework of telecommunity (Figure 2), we will have a better way to look at and think about “Data Portability”, “Linked Data Planet” and “Semantic Technology”.

    2. Telecommunity Based on Semantic Web
    Telecommunity is a new social, economic, and technological paradigm which is emerging from
    “Semantic Technology” (Figure 3).

    The vision of a global, linked data web is a political, and social concept of very great importance — maybe the most important new political development in recent history. This is because such a web structure would be the first fully democratic global knowledge engine. N.J. Slabbert has stated that “civil society is now becoming identical with technological society as defined by Internet use” and that the future of urbanization lies in the creation of “a global urban net”, while Karl Popper has stated that the truly democratic society must be “an open society”. A global, linked data web will unite the concepts of these two thinkers into a new force for democracy. In different parts of the world there are different understandings of what democracy is, and the differences between these understandings is a cause of much of the political strife in the world. A global, linked semantic / data web can help to bring a new era of peace to the world, in which the open access sharing of knowledge is recognized as the most important priority for nations. Thus such a web would make the 21st century truly the Knowledge Economy century. Without such a web the Knowledge Economy is just a phrase but with such a web it will be reality.

    Along with the rapid development of internet, we will form a telecommunity based on semantic web. This telecommunity is composed of enterprises, individuals, homes, schools, hospitals, retail shops, and everything possible. These are all the nodes of a huge web of this telecommunity.
    For each node, we will have the corresponding Information systems, say, enterprise information systems, individual information systems, home information systems, school information systems, hospital information systems, retailer information systems, and more. Because every nodes are
    dealing with data from distributed sources over the web, these information systems are all distributed by themselves. All of these distributed information systems are all connecting, communicating, interoperating, and supporting to each other. So every member of this telecommunity are very well served, and the whole telecommunity is running in very highly efficient and effective manner . This telecommunity is based on semantic web, and it is open to the infinite applications possible happening in the future.

    3. Distributed Individual Information Systems
    Individuals are the most constituent of a society. His or her activities need sufficient support from Information Technology. Semantic Technology, which is also related to human being’s cognition, will play an important role for this purpose.

    In the whole life of any people, he or she needs to interact with a lot of different organizations. For example, one person needs to stay with the family, go to school, see doctor in the hospital, shopping in the store, work for a company, be active in a community, among many others. In one sentence, every people wants to live, study, and work. In this process, each person needs to deal with so much different information which is very useful to both oneself and organizations.

    All of these useful information should be collected and stored in a so-called “Distributed Individual Information System”, which is technically based on “Semantic Web”. These all information can be easily accessible to the corresponding responsible entities, no matter it is a person, or it is an organization (Figure 4).

    “Distributed Individual Information System” can be used to help individuals to better reflect and summarize the past, do and perform the present, and formulate and plan the future. Thus it is a very important part of telecommunity (Figure 5).

    4. Conclusion
    Our agenda for research and development on “Telecommunity” can be mentioned as follows:
    a. On Demand Business, which is the model of social ecosystems,
    b. Service Oriented Enterprise, based on Service Oriented Architecture, which is the technological infrastructure,
    c. Individual Information System, which is an important part of industrial movement of “Data Portability”,
    d. User Centric Web, which is the user interface of Internet, developing along the line of Web1.0, Web2.0, Web3.0, and more.

    5. Reference
    a. Mills Davis “Semantic Wave 2008: Industry Roadmap to Web 3.0 Summary & Prospectus” 2007.
    b. Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything” 2006.
    c. N. J. Slabbert “The Future of Urbanization” 2006
    d. L. Cherbakov etc. “Impact of Service Orientation at the Business Level” 2005.
    e. David Britton “Computer Users’ Needs” 1982
    f. David Gelernter “Machine Beauty” 1998

    Acknowledgement
    Many thanks to Mr.Xin-yi Li, Mr.Jing-sheng Zou, Mr.Jian Huang, Mr.Zhi-yuan Xu, Mr.Dan Gutierrez, and Dr.Carl Bereiter for their answering to our questions in various ways.

    Date: 5/1/2008

  8. Signal: The Long Tail

    The central problem of the internet today is the relative lack of organization of the massive store of information which already exists, and is continually being generated at rapid rates. With the diversity of personal interests, one persons signal is another ones noise, so finding and keeping track of what you’re interested in becomes an ongoing, repetitive, manual task. The semantic web holds the promise to build a to a living, input-output, web scale topology composed of a hierarchy of topics and relations interwoven through the current silo based system of sites, portals, and files, which have non-uniform systems of organization. This will allow users to easily and finely tune in to the long tail of knowledge and find content with low friction and high precision.

    Delivery: From Pull to Push

    The current pull model of actively surfing for content using parse-centric search engines will be heavily displaced by a push model in which users passively receive key descriptive metadata about and links to content tightly based on a users subscribed topics of interest, including people, places, events, products, etc. These personalized semantic streams (somewhat like Facebook’s Newsfeed) will aggregate from all over the web, and will become the primary mode of finding and sharing content.

    Trust: Patterns of Agreement

    Semantic systems will work best when closely paired with intelligent (and ideally, distributed) trust systems, which will accumulate the votes of users with real, cross-vetted identities, about the accuracy and relevance of links between units of data in the semantic topology, in order to derive areas of consensus. These votes will allow for a dynamic recommendation system, effectively turning users into automatic content filters for each other by measuring their aggregate patterns of agreement (or lack thereof). Such systems are already becoming feasible with the emergence of social platforms (ie: Facebook, Open Social, Plaxo, Ning) and open authentication standards (ie: OpenID, OAuth), which can serve as identity hubs to be layered on top of.

    Impact: The Feedback Loop

    Good information allows for good decisions. Semantic metadata will increasingly create a focused, directed, and personalized flow of information gathered from a distributed network of minds. As this happens, information can be found more quickly and with less friction by more people, and so, allow them to respond faster, more effectively, and in new ways, both individually or collectively. This tightening of the feedback loop will accelerate change (or at least the potential for change) much in the same way that the mainstreaming of the internet itself had on society by opening up new venues and channels for information and interaction. The semantic web represents another such quantum leap, and its impact will be global, multifaceted, and powerful.

    Cross posted @ http://veytsel.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/a-semantic-vision/