Monthly Archives: February 2009

Andreas Blumauer

Have you ever read “privacy policy” of your preferred social media?

by , Category: Privacy & Information Ethics

newtonToday we had an interview date with Markus Mooslechner from ORF (Austrian Broadcasting). The TV-Show “Newton” will discuss next Saturday how social media affects our lives, especially how one can make sure that private data won´t be used improperly, e.g. by certain internet providers.

My colleague Tassilo Pellegrini gave some nice examples how some providers like Facebook explicitly state in their privacy policy that they are allowed to hand over all personal data to any other third party (“…our service providers may have access to your personal information for use for a limited time in connection with these business activities”).

It´s a shame that some fundamental rights regarding privacy have dissipated in just a few years.

Also today, I asked Chris Bizer, doubtlessly one of the key-players in the semantic web community, some questions for an interview. Among other things I was also wondering if he thinks that the Semantic Web could solve some privacy issues or if Linked Data will rather become a synonym for “transparent user” (Gläserner Mensch).


Pascal Hitzler

New Semantic Web Book Series Launched

by , Category: Literature & Publications

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IOS Press Amsterdam – in cooperation with AKA Verlag Heidelberg – has just launched a new book series called Studies on the Semantic Web. Publications within the series will be all kinds of Semantic Web related edited or authored volumes, and also excellent dissertations. The first three volumes are already in preparation.

The Editorial Board comprises some of the most prominent Semantic Web researchers word-wide and consists of Fausto Giunchiglia, Carole Goble, Asuncion Gomez-Perez, Frank van Harmelen, Pascal Hitzler (as Editor-in-Chief), Riichiro Mizoguchi, Mark Musen, Daniel Schwabe, Steffen Staab, and Rudi Studer.

If you are interested in publishing a book in the series, contact the Editor-in-Chief.

Thomas Thurner

Enterprise Search goes Open Source

by , Category: Corporate Semantic Web, Enterprise 2.0, Knowledge Management, Tools & Software

management_lenz_webIn his recent interview Andreas Blumauer (SWC) asked Mario Lenz, from german-based knowledge management solution provider EMPOLIS, about their OS-Initative SMILA. As Lenz explained, SMILA acts within a domain of various approaches and already established solutions re. Enterprise Resource Planning Systems. So, he sees SMILA’s USP in: “a standardized way of representing, accessing and managing those unstructured data which not exist today. Rather, each vendor ships his own, proprietary solution. SMILA’s goals are to define and implement such a standard infrastructure framework and to establish a community bringing it forward.”

Besides an insight in many aspects of the initiative, the interview provides thoughts on how connected business-models, in providing services, could look like.

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Andreas Blumauer

Linked Data in Enterprises – some ideas for business models

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

Today in the morning, I wrote a short blog philosophizing about linked data and the value for enterprises. I asked a couple of questions and in its core I was wondering: “Which services and keyplayers will drive the web of data in the next few months?”

In the meantime I had the pleasure to listen to Talis´ Semantic Web Gang Podcast (January 2009 with Tom Tague from Calais) and some answers came into my mind:

  1. Some service providers will provide the highest accuracy regarding the links or tags (and the “things behind them) they provide for a given ressource or document (like Open Calais does). Tom Tague mentioned in the podcast quite often how important disambiguation is to provide the highest quality.
  2. Some will provide end-points to a given “thing” like a company, a person etc. in addition to free ones like DBpedia, but they always will try to refer to established URIs like the ones in DBpedia or Open Calais URIs, e.g. IBM´s URI @ Calais). Those companies will provide more facts, for example about a person, as those which are available now for free. They will build on the LOD infrastructure and will live in symbiosis with group number 3. They will control to whom additional facts will be given to but they will build exactly on the same interoperable framework as the “Linking Open Data” community does.
  3. Some companies will build applications on top of the linked data infrastructure. They have two kinds of knowledge: Who has the best end-points to a complex “thing” which consists of a couple of other atomic things (which necessarily exist in the web of data)? Who is interested in such a mashup?

My prediction: One possible business model will be pretty much the same as iTunes is built upon at the moment: You can listen to a song for free – but only a couple of seconds , if you want more, you pay 99 cents.

If you want to know a little bit about Werner Faymann (who is Austria´s prime minister) you go to an application which makes use from DBpedia (or the like) starting at http://dbpedia.org/page/Werner_Faymann.

If you pay 99 cents (or a bit more…) you get even more facts about Mr. Faymann, nicely mash-uped with other facts from the LOD cloud and together with special content from some other linked data sources, produced with relatively low costs due the high interoperability the Semantic Web provides – thanks to W3C and the whole community.