Monthly Archives: December 2008

Thomas Schandl

OntoWiki Workshop

by , Category: Software Development, Tools & Software

Days 3 and 4 of the OntoWiki KickOff Meeting in Leipzig were comprised of semantic technologies and OntoWiki development workshops.

Just like the overall organization of the project meeting was very good, so Sebastian Dietzold, Sebastian Hellmann, Michael Martin and Jörg Unbehauen did a real good job at putting the ideas behind key concepts of the semantic web across in several introductory SemWeb presentations. Their talks about various technologies from the semantic web stack like URIs, RDF and its serialisations, RDFS, SPARQL and some related tools were well suited to bring people who are relatively new to the semantic web up to speed. Links to the presentation slides can be found at the project page in the coming days.

Later Jens Lehmann outlined the new things OWL 2 brings, e. g. profiles, which are subsets of OWL 2 and which provide different degrees of expressivity and reasoning efficiency.

The last day started with Sören Auer’s presentation of their semantic wiki OpenResearch, a site where information on conferences, journals and scientists is pooled. OpenResearch is built with Semantic MediaWiki (SMW), just like our Social Semantic Web wiki.

While SMW is a very useful tool as it lowers the entry barriers for using semantic wikis, Sören also pointed out  that in comparison OntoWiki provides some important features that SMW doesn’t have:

  • SMW doesn’t use SPARQL for its queries, but a less powerful custom query language, whereas OntoWiki has full SPARQL support.
  • OntoWiki’s UI has many widgets that support the user when entering data or new properties on a page (e. g. there is an autocomplete feature for suggesting properties)
  • With SMW changes to the wiki’s semantic structure often entail manual changes to many, many pages. With OntoWiki it is easy to e.g. change poperties at any time.

For the new version of OntoWiki Sören and his team use the Zend framework and develop the Erfurt API to store and access RDF data. The Erfurt API supports SPARQL, versioning, caching and RDF based authentification/access control. It abstracts different stores using the adapter pattern, so it can be used with Virtuoso and any other store which has an interface provided by Zend_Db (MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, etc.) plus they are working on an interface for Redland. Find the slides for Philipp Frischmuth’s Erfurt API presentation here, the API documentation here and Norman Heino’s Zend & OntoWiki Application Framework presentation here.

Julian Jöris demonstrated how Selenium is used for acceptance testing. This is a very promising testing framework for web applications, where one can e.g. record interactions with different browsers and automatically run them as tests. Selenium has a Firefox extension to record macros and is integrated with PHPUnit.

Finally we had a very good discussion about our conX-OntoWiki integration use case and application ideas, so we left Leipzig with a pleasant anticipation of the coming co-operation in the project.

Andreas Blumauer

Semantic Web Meetup Berlin is alive

by , Category: Conferences & Events

Inspired by one of the most successful Semantic Web Meetups in the States, the NYC Semantic Web Meetup, just recently the Berlin Semantic Web Meetup started.

Meetups aren´t that popular in Europe as they are in the US, but the format of the event is quite suitable for bringing together academic staff and people from the industry. It is quite similar to barcamps but maybe not as informal.

Organizers are Adrian Paschke and Markus Luczak-Rösch from the Corporate Semantic Web project in Berlin. I´ve introduced them with Marco Neumann who has strongly encouraged me to start a semweb meetup in Europe.

Berlin is now the first European member of the Semantic Web Meetup Alliance which currently consists of 8 groups worldwide and over 3.600 members. The first meeting in Berlin will be held on March 20th, 2009 – details will be outlined soon.

In New York just recently a meetup was organised together with the New York Times which presented their NYT Annotated Corpus. Marco Neumann says: “We aim for a professional, business and R&D audience in casual attire. We now have about 500 members in New York and attract up to 50-100 people per
session. The corporate sponsors that we will have in the next couple of weeks: the New York Times, Morgan Stanley, Thomson Reuters, Dow Jones …”

We´ll see how Europe will embrace such new communication channels since the semantic web community here is used to either academic conferences or rather formal business talk, I guess.

Tassilo Pellegrini

I-Semantics 2009 — Call for Papers

by , Category: Calls & Competitions, Conferences & Events
From September 2 – 4, 2009 the 5th edition of I-SEMANTICS, the International Conference on Semantic Systems, will take place in Graz / Austria. I-SEMANTICS 2009 will be the host of this year`s regional Pragmatic Web Conference as well as the second edition of the TRIPLIFICATION Challenge. Further on I-SEMANTICS will be complemented by I-KNOW, the International Conference on Knowledge Management. This setup is aiming to reflect the increasing importance and convergence of knowledge management and semantic systems. The special focus of I-SEMANTICS 2009 is „Semantic Web & Semantic Social Software – Pragmatic Aspects for Corporations, Communities and Individuals”.

A detailed Call for Papers can be found on the Conference Website.

Important Dates:
• Paper Submission Deadline: 9 March 2009
• Acceptance of Notification: to be announced
• Submission of Camera-Ready Paper: to be announced
• Conference: 2 – 4 September 2009

All accepted papers will appear in the printed conference proceedings published by the Journal of Universal Computer Science (JUCS). Selected papers will also be invited for an extension to be published as journal publication in a special issue of Elsevier DKE (Data & Knowledge Engineering).

A cordial welcome to the Program Chairs of I-SEMANTICS!

Wernher Behrendt (Salzburg Research), Adrian Paschke (Free University of Berlin), Klaus Tochtermann (Know Center Graz) and Hans Weigand (Tilburg University) will be in charge of the scientific track. Andreas Blumauer (Semantic Web Company) will govern the industry track. This year`s TRIPLIFICATION Challenge will be chaired by Michael Hausenblas (Joanneum Research / DERI Galway).

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Andreas Blumauer

The Semantic Web becomes mainstream, again.

by , Category: Enterprise 2.0, Literature & Publications

The roll-out of semantic web technologies seems to enter the next stage. And it will be a quiet (r)evolution like the open source movement was. Two examples: Next year´s JAX in Mainz/Germany will have its first Semantic Web track. Organisers say that “the Semantic Web is going to conquer the business market soon” – we will see if it will be that martial.

Another example: One of the biggest Open Source Magazines in Germany, t3n, has recently published its new magazine with many stories around the Semantic Web. Editor in chief, Jan Christe says: “We have constantly stumbled upon semantic web related stuff  when we scanned the news, so we decided to set a focus on this topic.”

The Semantic Web is tangible now – Christe says: “Applications like OpenCalais, Zemanta or Tagaroo show the end-users what´s really in for them.” And it is also nice to see, that the semantic web won´t be reduced down to “search” anymore: t3n´s new issue has also interesting articles about Linked Data, for instance Sören Auer´s “How to develop Semantic Web Applications”.

So, as a conclusion: Paul Miller´s waiting for the “Semantic Web in Business” (a great blog post!) has an end. It won´t be found in heavy books, rather in the open source community and sometimes in light-weight magazines.

Yes, we can!