The KiWi meeting is drawing to an end. Marek Schmidt and Pavel Smrz from Brno University of Technology have just given a really exciting presentation of their results in the area of information extraction – and it seems I have developed a case of tendonitis (a.k.a. “mouse hand”) and for the sake of my health will stop blogging for today. Instead of the usual comprehensive coverage, this photo must suffice as a proof of the magic Marek and Pavel’s system is already able to do – please marvel the complex tags that are the product of their information extraction (IE) module. The roles of IE as an enabling technology within KiWi will be in: automatic recognition of (new) terms, entity recognition, text classification and relation extraction.

KiWi team! In particular Klara Weiand who is about to start her presentation on Tags and Queries, please accept my apology! Thank you, good bye, and have a save trip home!

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KiWi – Knowledge in a Wiki, Day 2 – Josef Holy from Sun Microsystems Prague led the first part of today’s use case presentation. With the KiWi semantic wiki system (or: wiki on steroids, as Josef Holy put it), they want to be able to increase the productivity of knowledge workers. Sun Microsystems have extensive experience with online and community collaboration and they want Kiwi to become a social wiki platform that is deployable in various contexts, i.e. that ties in with other platforms such as Netbeans or Zembly.

One of Sun’s further assumptions is that users will migrate to KiWi neither immediately nor completely – and that’s an insight anyone developing yet another social platform should take to their heart. What was true in Field of Dreams – “If you build it, they will come” – does not quite apply here. The network effect works in favour of existing communities, and instead of striving to replace an existing platform, one might be better off with mashable contents and services.

The particular benefit of a semantic wiki is that it allows moving from unstructured to structured information (relatively) easily. For KiWi @ Sun (and in favour of mashed information), this means that what is relevant will be structured, both by people and by machines – a process that is going to extend beyond company boundaries. People will bring in structure by creating links from KiWi documents to external systems as well as by writing new facts (which the KiWi system will represent as triples) about external information. What is not relevant, won’t be structured – and will be forgotten. After all, it’s forgetting that makes you remember the important stuff.

One note about the users of KiWi at Sun: Since this use case focuses on knowledge management for software development, it can be taken for granted that users will have an above-average level of web savvyness. Primary users will be software designers (i.e. the people who design for the users of the final product) and developers – learn more about the different roles in a software development project at Sun here.

Consequently, the User Interface (UI) concept Josef introduced also comprises a social networking unit – things such as a ‘My Contacts’, ‘My Pages’ list, but most importantly an activity feed, which will help users to collaborate, participate, discover activities that others are currently working, develop a mental ‘social map’ of the community. Such an activity stream (similar to Facebook’s News Stream) would contain items such as:

• Szaby wrote a blog post
• Josef rated document XUI specs: five stars
• Peter created document ToDoList KiWi-UI
• Stephanie is now a contact of Marek
• Klara shared a document with Sebastian

Considering the target group, it is also planned that the UI will be extensible through widgets that users are able to write themselves.

*coffee break*

Above: The KiWi-Team, hailing (officially) from Austria, the Czech republic, Denmark and Germany

After the break, Andreas Blumauer (Semantic Web Company, Vienna) followed up with a talk entitled “Open Ontology Management & Linked Data” which explored the uses of the Web of Data for the Sun usecase.

His argument was that content and topic-centred, open communities should have mechanisms at their disposal for relating content and activities to particular parts of a shared concept model, e.g. of an ontology. In particular in projects like NetBeans, where contents and related processes evolve over time, different NetBeans groups utilizing the KIWI system should be allowed to maintain and share their own concept models. The combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches would, for instance, come as the combination of free tagging (where people often use different labels to refer to the same, or the same label to refer to different things) and concept tagging.

Free concepts can be turned into controlled ones, too, by being inserted into an existing controlled vocabulary, as either a narrower or related concept of any existing controlled concept. Open Ontology Management done this way is a Learning system: Through the combination of a Free Extraction Model (FEM) and a Controlled Extraction Model (CEM), text extraction improves over time.

Andreas also revealed a first glimpse of a project currently in stealth mode, code name ‘PoolParty’, which is an Open Ontology Management System that can be used to enrich local knowledge with data from the web. PoolParty consumes Linked Data and provides Linked Data; in the context of the current use case, it will be able to communicate with the KiWi System. Please contact Andreas if you would like to be notified about the further development of PoolParty.

KiWi – Knowledge in a Wiki session, pt. 2: This afternoon, we turned to the Logica use case, which is dedicated to the development and optimization of KiWi as a knowledge management tool specifically tailored to the needs of project management.

Regarding the use case requirements: As Daniel Grolin, a process expert and business architect at Logica (formerly WM Data), pointed out, what is most required at the moment is an application for designing processes, i.e. for designing the ways that people do things. This can be a painful process, in particular if one group of people (consisting of process designers) thinks about the ways that another group of people (e.g. the project managers) are going to do certain things – a collaborative approach should be able to

1) alleviate this challenge
2) generate commitment among the involved parties.

The primary users will be on the one hand the process engineers, and on the other hand the project managers who are the recipients and users of these processes.

In his presentation, Daniel Grolin chose one of four scenarios in which KiWi would ideally be employed: the risk analysis process – which is a vital process for Logica, as the outcomes of this analysis influence the decision whether or not a project will be accepted. From an architectural point of view, KiWi is going to mediate between the process guidance column – which consists of process and workflow features – and the final work product, i.e the result of a process, in this case the report of the risk analysis.

In practice this means that if, for instance, a user has selected the risk analysis process, the Kiwi core system and enabling technologies will provide concepts related to risk analysis, supporting the user in the tagging process. Wiki technology is already being used in the industry, said Daniel, but what is lacking at the moment is the integration of structure, and this is also where he sees the potential of KiWi as a knowledge management tool, and as a means to move easily from unstructured to structured information (by the way, if you are interested in using wikis in the enterprise, I also recommend this article: Wikis for Knowledge Engineering, and in Global Businesses).

Karsten Jahn (Aalborg University) then gave us a preview of a possible user interface (i.e. not of the screen design, but the functionalities) which seeks to address one particular problem: Many companies use many different, sophisticated tools which operate fine on their own, but are not integrated (i.e. there is no communication or exchange of data between them). With KiWi, the aim is to develop a tool that is going to be able to cover all features and processes currently being taken care of by individual tools, to allow for an optimum of data integration.

To conclude, Rolf Sint (Salzburg Research) showed us screens of the current configuration of KiWi for Logica’s needs – the example below is related to the risk analysis process outlined by Daniel Grolin above.

It’s been five months since the last Joint Work Package (WP) meeting in the KiWi – Knowledge in a Wiki – project. This morning, we gathered in Vienna for the next round – focus this time around will be on the core system (architecture developed by the WP3 team, handing over and paving the way for WP 4 team) and the use cases (Logica, Sun Microsystems) where it is of particular importance that everyone involved in the project understands the requirements of the use cases.

In the first presentation today, Sebastian Schaffert from Salzburg Research gave us a tour of two different configurations of the KiWi system. The KiWi core system is oriented towards content versatility, meaning that content items can be displayed and used in various contexts and configurations. As a service to the user, KiWi uses Javascript-based WYSIWYG Editor TinyMCE enhanced with a few home-grown plug-ins which, for instance, make it easier to set links to other wiki pages. Memorizing wiki shorthand is sometimes a challenge, so this feature helps getting things done.

Using a different skin and interface, KiWi can take various forms and shapes – even shapes where you might not spot the wiki in it at first glance. TagIT is such an example of an adaptation of the KiWi core system: a geotagging platform targeting youth in Salzburg who can locate, tag and comment on places that matter to them.

Vice versa, KiWi in its wiki incarnation displays a little map, provided a content item is enhanced with geoinformation; technically, the map on the wiki page is an interpretation of a georelated tag (learn more about complex, structured tags proposed by the KiWi Enabling Technologies Work Package in this article: Usage Data Model Day in the KiWi Project).

Take a look at the screenshots below:

It is the same article that is being displayed, in the first example using the classic KiWi interface, in the second example using the TagIT interface with the article appearing as an info page.

This afternoon, we expect to see another configuration of the system, in a presentation about how the system is specifically tailored to the needs of Logica’s “Knowledge Management for Project Management” usecase.

N.B. The system is not yet publicly available, if you have questions, please contact Sebastian Schaffert.

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You have probably already heard about GoodRelations, “the web ontology for e-commerce”. Martin Hepp from Bundeswehr University in Munich recently created a webcast, giving a short introduction to semantic web-based E-Commerce and to the GoodRelations vocabulary – I want to see more of such introductions which aim at a wider audience in terms of style and intellectual accessibility!

Last week I had an an encounter with a social scientist (within an academic setting) who argued that discussing the Semantic web would not make sense for him (as a social scientist), because of the present lack of social practices in that field… (*jaw-dropping*) I could not persuade him with the argument that the Linked data cloud itself was the result of a social practice – the view he had of the semantic web (which I assume was not an uneducated one) even led him to denounce that developments like Dbpedia, Twine, Revyu, or the use of metadata in general had anything to do with the Semantic Web.

And this is a big challenge.

On the one hand, it is a good thing that there are social scientists who at least have a certain notion of the Semantic Web – on the other, it seems as if all the exciting ideas and developments that have taken place in the last few years have failed to reach those who have been sensitized for the SemWeb project when the idea was first conceived. I am not meaning to make a statement about social scientists here, but rather about the need to communicate what has further happened to the original idea outside also outside of one’s own community.

Btw: In its current issue, quarterly (German-language) magazine t3n is featuring a Web 3.0 and Applied Semantic Web topic as its opener. And that is a good sign, too!

Time for a bit of over-the-top web 2.0 adulation… at yesterday’s Digitalks event (organized once again wonderfully by Meral Akin-Hecke), Luca Hammer was there and filmed throughout the presentations and discussions – using two cameras at a time AND live-editing and live-streaming it on Make.tv. What is Make.tv? The most incredible web 2.0 application I’ve seen so far – it’s a TV-Studion in your browser! And it’s free! (Although I doubt I will stay free forever)

You can live-edit the input from several cameras – this can also be achieved by logging in on different computers at a time, thus using the input from several built-in webcams at a time. You can drag and drop the video input channels into your scene, make the embedded videos smaller to achieve a screen-in-screen effect, create your own TV design and virtual studio from graphics…. wow, wow, wow.

I played with it today, not being quite as adventurous as Luca, in that I used only one camera (see what he achieved yesterday with multiple screens), nor did I interrupt and restart the recording (which I could have), but even though, I find the visual result, i.e. the ’studio’ I built from the book cover, impressive enough.

So here is it: My introduction of the Social Semantic Web publication (which is in German, which is why the audio is in German, too, but you don’t need to understand what I am saying to be impressed by Make.tv). Jump to seconds 3:30 to 4:30 to see how you can switch between different screens while doing the web cast.

P.S. That’s an image below – you can embed the video, but you cannot (yet) deactivate that it starts automatically if you embed it, so I’ve decided to use an image on the blog instead. Click here, or the image, to launch the webcast on the Make.tv website.

Btw, I am not sure whether I said XML or XHTML in the webcast, but of course I meant XHTML when talking about the benefits of RDFa.

Just stumbled upon this observation in a blog post by Daniel Tunkelang where he compares Yahoo’s and Google’s latest key word tools, and chuckled. The occasion was Yahoo’s release of a new BOSS features called Key Terms, and Google’s announcement of the release of a new tool that tells you which keyterms you’re missing (i.e. should potentially buy):

I imagine that the technology behind both tools isn’t all that different–or at least doesn’t have to be. But, while Yahoo makes friends in the technology community (especially among researchers), Google makes friends in the advertising community–and makes itself oodles of money.

Nice analogy, Daniel!

This year, which is already beginning to draw to a close, has seen many exciting developments on the Semantic Web, in particular in the area of Linked Data. But, as past technological evolutions have shown: many innovations that researchers and experts get excited about today, won’t even have entered the market the day after tomorrow.

This is why we would like to know how you feel about the state of the Semantic Web in 2008 – which ever position on the web you are hailing from: semantic web practitioner, researcher, or ‘regular’ user.

Please participate in our survey:

Web Awareness Barometer 2008

This is not only an excellent opportunity to give feedback to resarch, development and the industry, but also your chance to win a set of two tickets for the i-Know / i-Semantics conference which is going to take place in Graz in September 2009, worth about € 700. Also, we are giving away three of our Emergency Exit – RDF t-shirts.

The survey is conducted by the Semantic Web Company (i.e. us) in cooperation with Know-Center Graz and the work group Corporate Semantic Web at the Dept. of Computer Science at Freie Universität Berlin.

Please take the survey – your participation contributes to gaining a better understanding of the potentials and barriers for the application of new web technologies, in particular of Semantic Web technologies.

The survey will close on Dec 22 – results are going to be published in February 2009. Thank you for your help and cooperation!

Jennifer Golbeck, Matthew Rothstein. Linking Social Networks on the Web with FOAF: A Semantic Web Case Study. Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI’08).
Download (PDF, 320 KB).

ABSTRACT
One of the core goals of the Semantic Web is to store data in distributed locations, and use ontologies and reasoning to aggregate it. Social networking is a large movement on the web, and social networking data using the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) vocabulary makes up a significant portion of all data on the Semantic Web. Many traditional webbased social networks share their members’ information in FOAF format. While this is by far the largest source of FOAF online, there is no information about whether the social network models from each network overlap to create a larger unified social network model, or whether they are simply isolated components. In this paper, we present a study of the intersection of FOAF data found in many online social networks. Using the semantics of the FOAF ontology and applying Semantic Web reasoning techniques, we show that a significant percentage of profiles can be merged from
multiple networks. We present results on how this affects network structure and what it says about relationships and individual behavior. Finally, we discuss the implications this has for using web-based social networking data to create intelligent user interfaces and social software.

The Austrian Ministry of Finance participated in a usecase within the DYONIPOS (DYnamic ONtology based Integrated Process OptimiSation) project – my colleague Tassilo Pellegrini spoke to members of the use case project team: Josef Makolm from the Ministry of Finance, Michael Granitzer from KnowCenter Graz, and Doris Ipsmiller, consulting and development firm m2n. The DYONIPOS specs in short:

• DYONIPOS uses an ontology based, semantic layer for providing a single-point-of-access to all information sources like e-mails, document repositories, yellow pages etc., thereby disambiguating existing information.
• Knowledge discovery technologies map unstructured artifacts into the ontology and expand the semantic layer by identifying relevant relationships.
• DYONIPOS interprets the current task of the user, deduces and delivers the information needed – the user does not have to search explicitly, nor does he have to know in which repository some piece of information may be found.
• RDFS is used to harmonize the different repositories and integrate all kinds of different information sources for providing one single view on a company’s repository.
• DYONIPOS uses graph-based principles not only for harmonizing data, but also for the definition of workflows and processes: workflows can be modelled using RDFS; there is no need to pre-compile workflows as they are interpreted on the fly and can be changed easily.

The use case project was awarded with the Science Award for the Most Innovative E-Government Application which was part of the 8th e-Government competition under the patronage of the German Ministry of Internal Affairs; a competition that was open to federal, state and local administration in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Congratulations! Learn more about the project in the interview, or on the project website.