Monthly Archives: September 2008

Tassilo Pellegrini

EU Commission’s (short sighted) Definition of Web 3.0

by , Category: Companies & Institutions, Politics

An interesting article for all those who are interested in technology discourse. In a recent VNU.net post the EU Commission made a statement about their understanding of Web 3.0:

While Web 2.0 described the trend towards online collaborative working, including the evolution of social networking sites, wikis and blogs, Web 3.0 will rely on high-performance broadband infrastructure.

According to Viviane Reding, Commissioner for Information Society and Media, Web 3.0

means seamless, anytime, anywhere business, entertainment and social networking over fast reliable and secure networks. [...] It means the end of the divide between mobile and fixed lines. We must make sure that Web 3.0 is made and used in Europe.

This sounds to me like selling old wine in new bottles, revitalising the Commission’s infrastructure policies. And altough broadband is a crucial factor in the evolution of the web, the Commission totally misses the point about the semantics-related innovation paths rolling out in a Web 3.0-scenario.

If anyone has the opportunity, please give Mrs. Reding a briefing!

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Matthias Samwald

Looking back at a successful VoCamp Oxford

by , Category: Conferences & Events, Life Sciences, Vocabularies & Languages

Thinking... about new vocabularies for the Semantic Web

(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.

Jana Herwig

Why Faviki is able to suggest tags in 13 languages

by , Category: Linked Data & Open Data, Mashups & Web services, Tools & Software

Just got in touch with Vuk Miličić from Faviki recently – Faviki has been selected as a featured project on Google code, and in that context, Vuk describes the process of how Faviki retrieves its suggestions in a little more detail. It’s really interesting! It also sheds more light on the way that DBpedia is used in Faviki: Not immediately for the retrieval of tags, but for the translation of tags – long live the smartness of linked data!

  1. Faviki fetches a web page and extracts a core text (without HTML and non-relevant content).
  2. Then it tries to figure out if a content is in English. If it isn’t, it is sent to Google language API, which detects the original language automatically, translates it into English and returns the translation.
  3. The content is then sent to and analyzed by Zemanta API, which then finds relevant links. Faviki uses links from English Wikipedia – titles are used as semantic tags.
  4. If users language is not English, we must translate them. Using DBpedia datasets “Links to Wikipedia Article” , we can find names of Wikipedia’s titles in one of 13 languages. These datasets actually contain the connections between English Wikipedia articles and articles from Wikipedia in other languages.
  5. Finally, suggested tags are offered to a user.

Read the whole blog post on Vuk’s Faviki blog

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Jana Herwig

Jury Award for Semantic Wikis in eGovernment, and: Semantic MediaWiki for Wikipedia?

by , Category: Collective Intelligence, Internet & Media

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: Centre for Public Administration 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

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