Semantic Web Company

** About 250 participants have already registered. Please note that the deadline for early registration will end tomorrow, July 31. **

From September 2 – 4, 2009 I-SEMANTICS brings together LOD aficionados in Graz/Austria. Chris Bizer (FU Berlin) will give an invited talk on “The Emerging Web of Linked Data” and the winners of the Triplification Challenge ‘09 will be honoured.

Submissions to the Triplification Challenge ‘09 are still possible till August 9, 2009. The descriptions should be submitted electronically via email to Michael Hausenblas with the subject Triplification Challenge.

Further highlights of the conference will be …

Keynote presentations from

• Paolo Traverso (FBK, Italy)
• Eric Tsui (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China)
• Peter Kropsch (Austrian Press Agency, Austria)

Pragmatic Web Track

We are delighted to host the 4th AIS SigPrag International Pragmatic Web Conference Track at I-SEMANTICS. The special track  is centered around the study of “pragmatics” in the Semantic Web. It draws attention to how communicative actions with a pragmatic context are performed via Web media and illuminates how mutual understanding and commitments to actions can evolve in conversations. For additional information see http://www.pragmaticweb.info/

International Cooperation Event

Due to the huge success in the last two years the Styrian Economy Funding Agency (SFG) in cooperation with the Enterprise Europe Network (EEN) again decided to organize an International Cooperation Event. You can sign up for the International Cooperation Event free of charge by registering on the official cooperation event website.

I-KNOW ‘09 – International Conference on Knowledge Management and Knowledge Technologies

I-SEMANTICS ‘09 will be held concurrently with I-KNOW ‘09. This special concept aims at bridging the gaps between the various communities and their technology fields. The overall program includes about 90 scientific presentations from all over the world. A German-speaking industry track offers about 30 industry presentations and an exhibition.

We look forward to welcoming you to Graz in September 2009!

That’s the title of my diploma thesis and first of all, thanks to SWC for the possibility to say some words about it. My interest in knowledge management reaches back some time now and I decided to make it the subject of my diploma thesis in my first attempt to write one back in 2001. The semantic web “came to me” in the last one or two years and the TRIPLE-I conference last year was somehow the trigger for me to connect the two topics.

My basic idea was very simple. When you read about the Semantic Web you are confronted right away with connections to creating knowledge and knowledge management. But in my understanding the Semantic Web is a technical thing and knowledge management is primarily a cultural and organisational thing. So the research questions for my thesis where:

• What relevance do knowledge management and semantic technologies have in the daily work of people working in knowledge intensive domains?
• Which possibilities lie in the adoption of knowledge management and semantic technologies?
• Are semantic technologies already fit for practical use?

The basis of the empirical part of my thesis are group discussions held in different organisations. As a result I developed starting points for an understanding of the topics “Knowledge Management” and “Semantic Web” and their relevance in organisations. The empirical results, in short, provide the following answers to the research questions:

• The “theoretical relevance” of both topics is high, the “practical relevance” on the other hand is rather low. Neither do structured concepts for knowledge management exist in the studied organisations, nor are there attempts at using semantic technologies
• Most of the participants have not heard of the “semantic web” prior to the discussions. After having been introduced to the topic, the relevance of the semantic web and of semantic technologies is rated high
• Possibilities are seen in a better management of information or knowledge in organisations and, especially for semantic technologies, in the improvement of search functionality’s and search results
• Semantic technologies are not yet seen as fit for practical use
• The connection between knowledge management and semantic web is taken as a fact without giving any justification for it.

In my conclusion I tried to match my results with the results of the Semantic Web Barometer 2009 and it was very interesting for me, that there were several similarities. I also found that talking to the people that have to work with technologies that are developed for them can be quite interesting and that group discussion are a great way to do that.

I wrote most parts of my diploma thesis in a wiki (and the rest is available as PDF) so you can find it on my wiki.

Your comments and annotations are very welcome!

Thanks for reading as far as this, Helmut

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• ISWC Workshop on Semantic Web Applications in Scientific Discourse (w3.org)
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The W3C Working Group working on W3C Rule Interchange Format (RIF) has recently launched a new standard for the interchange of rules. Some guys from the Coporate Semantic Web Working Group of Freie Universität Berlin have been heavily involved. An interview on the practical aspects of RIF will follow in August.

Yesterdays first “semantic web meetup” attracted 55 attendees to join in for presenting, talking and socialising. Approximately one year after the series of semantic web meetups started in NYC, there is now also a vital community gathering in vienna. Beside an inside view on brandnew ideas and developments of austrias semweb-labs in presenations and lightning talks, Steve Sandhouse of New York Times joined in via webmeeing to give an insight on NY-Times’s Semantic Web – efforts, which have a back-history of about 100 years now – as he explained.

In conclusion: A good start for the First Vienna Semantic Web Meetup, which may paved the way for a next meeting in the very next future. In the meanwhile some pictures of the venue to amuse those which were there and to inspire new people to join: www.meetup.com

Over the past few months we have seen an impressive increase in Semantic Web Meetups all over the world. More and more afficionados enjoy this informal and decentralized way of networking with the local community, gaining new inputs and impressions for projects and business ideas . On July 16, 2009 the first Semantic Web Meetup in Vienna takes place at headquarter of the Austrian Press Agency.

Join the community! It’s fun and free of charge!

Beside W3C´s Linked Data Initiative, it were semantic services like Calais, Zemanta or textwise which have made the advantages of the Semantic Web visible for a broader community in the last few months.

Each of those services follow a slightly different approach, but in a nutshell: They all offer an API to provide “similarity search” around social media or also to enhance enterprise information management.

Like a magic bullet those services offer a relief from information overflow and seem to become kind of a “semantic web killer application“.

If you´re familiar with one or many of those services, drop a comment and let us know, what you´ve been experienced so far, or also if you can think of any applications or further developments you would like to see around these kind of services.

If you are not familiar with this stuff, for a quick demo go to

• Zemanta´s Demo zone,
• Calais Viewer or see the
• textwise widget below.

The widget uses text from this blog to calculate similar stuff from the web.

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