Monthly Archives: April 2009

Marion Fuglewicz-Bren

Ethics – the new killer-app?

by , Category: Politics, Privacy & Information Ethics

Sometimes I hate marketing. Most often you can feel it in your heart whether issues are authentic or not. Whatever medium you are consuming these days – the web, the newspapers or your mailbox – anyone seems to discover a new killer-application called ethics. This seems to be everyone´s cure – be it a seminar, a conference or a book: Ethics is hype.

That´s more than annoying for me who´s been trying for years to establish ethical aspects in my work as a journalist, as a pr-person (believe it or not!) – as a human-being. Being sensitive for the special challenges connected with discussing ethical issues in a diverse global economy I´ve always been trying to publish and talk about the philosophical approach to these matters.

Therefore I ´m happy to come across Tim Berners Lee´s request at the current International World Wide Web Conference in Madrid: Clean the web! He – which is not at all surprising – is claiming a clean web. The user has to know which data he can trust and may pass on. Also privacy must be protected he postulates one more time. All these arguments deal authentically with ethics. But not only. They concern the future. The future of us all.

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Tassilo Pellegrini

Keynotes @ I-SEMANTICS / I-KNOW 2009

by , Category: Conferences & Events, Miscellaneous

This year’s keynotes at the I-SEMANTICS / I-KNOW conference taking place from September 2 – 4, 2009 in Graz / Austria have been fixed.

The scientific keynotes will be provided by Paolo Traverso, Director of the Center for Information Technology – IRST, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy, and Professor Eric Tsui, Associate Director of the Knowledge Management Research Centre, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China.

The industry keynote will be held by Peter Kropsch, CEO of the Austrian Press Agency.

Further details will follow.

Thomas Schandl

One more week of SIOC wishes

by , Category: Calls & Competitions, Ontology Engineering

The SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities) team recently solicited feedback about what the semantic web community wants or needs in regards to the SIOC ontology and project.

This brainstorming phase is still going on for one more week, so you can chip in with ideas about
– new applications you would like to see
– new ontology terms or integration with other ontologies
– features / bugfixes are you looking for in existing applications
– better explanations of SIOC terms or answers to puzzling questions needed

View the wishes on this wiki page and add your own.

Christoph Wieser

Tim Berners-Lee: “We need data on the Web to work better together”

by , Category: Conferences & Events, Linked Data & Open Data

Today, the 18th WWW conference started in Madrid, Spain. In his opening talk, Tim Berners-Lee outlined the status quo of the current Web and focused on areas for ongoing research.

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According to Tim Berners-Lee the Web is still static and consists mostly of archived HTML and PDF documents. There is still a need for a read/write Web and the standards are still not used to a sufficient extend. Changes in the Web are the ‘move to mobile’ and the climb up of ‘advertizing to being a science’.

Beside the still existing challenges of the current Web, additional ones arrived. Web Applications as well as Open Social Networking and Open Linked Data count to the area of current interest.

Web Applications are supposed to become new computing platforms and need a serious clean trust system. In the future Web Applications could offer a decentralized modular installation like a webized Debian.

Open Social Networking has become a great application in the Web. Currently it suffers from the ‘Social Silo Problem’. Users have often accounts in several platforms like Facebook or MySpace. The platforms, however, are separated from each other like in a field of silos. The challenge of the Semantic Web Community is now to interconnect the silos via RDF, OWL, HTTP, and SPARQL. A further requirement of Tim Berners-Lee are to focus on a Secure Web id.

Open Linked Data attracted the attention of Tim Berners-Lee most of all. Being one of the chairs of the co-located workshop ‘Linked Data on the Web’ he stressed that “we need data on the Web to work better together” in government, enterprise, and science. Open Linked Data could be a wizard for users of existing relational database systems. As query language he proposed a federated/delegated SPARQL.

Finally, Tim Berners-Lee described the role of researchers in those challenges. Researchers should ‘build a platform for others that follow’. Thereby, one should not assume what people will use the platform for.

(Report by Christoph Wieser / Salzburg Research)