Author Archives: Tassilo Pellegrini

Tassilo Pellegrini

About Tassilo Pellegrini

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Prof. (FH) Dr. Tassilo Pellegrini (born 1974) studied International Trade, Communication Science and Political Science at the University of Salzburg and University of Málaga. Since end of 2007 he is running the New Media Division at the University of Applied Sciences in St. Pölten. He obtained his master degree in 1999 from the University of Salzburg on the topic of telecommunications policy in the European Union, which was followed by a PhD in 2010 on the topic of bounded policy-learning in the European Union with a focus on intellectual property policies. His current research encompasses economic effects of internet regulation with respect to market structure and basic civil rights. He is member of the International Network for Information Ethics (INIE), the African Network of Information Ethics (ANIE) and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Publizistik und Kommunikationswissenschaft (DGPUK). Beside his specialisation in policy research and media economics Tassilo Pellegrini has worked on semantic technologies and the Semantic Web. He is co-founder and Head of Division Research and Development of the Semantic Web Company in Vienna, co-editor of the first German textbook on Semantic Web and Conference Chair of the annual I-SEMANTICS conference series founded in 2005.
Tassilo Pellegrini

I-SEMANTICS 2011 — Call for Papers

by , Category: Calls & Competitions, Conferences & Events

I-SEMANTICS 2011 (www.i-semantics.at) is the 7th conference in the I-SEMANTICS series and takes place from September 7 – 9, 2011 in Graz / Austria. I-SEMANTICS brings together both researchers and practitioners in the areas of Linked Data, Social Software and the Semantic Web in order to present and develop innovative ideas that help realising the “Social Semantic Web” and the “Corporate Semantic Web”.

I-SEMANTICS 2011 will be the host of the 6th AIS SigPrag International Conference on Pragmatic Web as well as the 4th edition of the TRIPLIFICATION Challenge. Further on I-SEMANTICS will be complemented by I-KNOW (www.i-know.at), the 11th International Conference on Knowledge Management. This setup is aiming to reflect the increasing importance and convergence of knowledge management and semantic systems.

The scientific track invites long and short papers along the main topics “Linked Data and Web of Data” to “Semantic Web Applications and Application Building Blocks, Studies, Metrics & Benchmarks”. The papers will be published in the ACM ICPS series. The detailed CfP containing all scientific tracks can be found here: http://i-semantics.tugraz.at/scientific-track/call-for-papers

To address the needs and interests of industry the i-Praxis track invites enterprises and public organisations to present industry relevant solutions in the field of semantic technologies. Presenters will be granted free access to the conference and will have sufficient time to present their applications. The presentations will be published on the conference website. Please find more information here: http://i-semantics.tugraz.at/industry-track/call-for-papers

Important Dates:

  • Submission Deadline: April 30, 2011
  • Notification of Acceptance: May 30, 2011
  • Camera-Ready Paper: June 30, 2011
  • I-SEMANTICS 2011: September 7 – 9, 2011
Tassilo Pellegrini

Marrying ARML with Linked Data

by , Category: Augmented Reality, Semantic Web Applications, Tools & Software

First of all, since ARML (augmented reality markup language) is based on KML and KML uses „Placemarks“ (which all have corresponding identifiers) as basic entities, these could be identified quite easily via URIs within the W3C Resource Description Framework (RDF).

Another basic concept of KML is „Point“. Geo RDF provides properties like „geo:long“ or „geo:lat“ which express longitude and latitude of a POI and thus makes it possible to uniquely identify certain points on a map using RDF standards.

Thus it is possible to map the geo conventions of ARML to the geo conventions of the Semantic Web which are mainly based on Geo RDF.

As soon as a placemark has received a URI it is also possible to expose it as linked data and interlink it with repositories like Geonames, DBpedia or LinkedGeoData (which is based on Open Street Map) to generate Linked Geodata.

ARML makes it possible to link / make a  relation between a „Provider“ and a „Placemark“. Thus it is also possible to use a URI to describe a provider and link it to a placemark using the typical triple-struture imminent to RDF.

OpenARML/Wikitude uses tags to describe certain things. These tags are currently represented as literals (strings), seperated by commas. This poses that obstacle that these tags can hardly be processed by machines. With RDF each tag would be assigned a URI, thus changing it from a literal to a resource, which further can be represented in SKOS/RDF, another Semantic Web specification of the W3C.

ARML/Wikitude also offers attributes to describe POIs like phone, URL, email, attachment etc. which all of them could be represented by Semantic Web defacto standards like FOAF, SIOC etc.

Summing up, ARML/Wikitude documents could relatively easily be transformed in valid RDF / Linked Data Graphs. This could help to enrich AR-applications with data from the LOD (Linked Open Data) cloud. Vice versa data generated by ARML applications could be exposed as Linked Data.

As a pragmatic approach we recommend  to generate on top of existing Wikipedia URLs the corresponding DBpedia URIs which would directly transform ARML placemarks into a resource as part of the existing LOD cloud.

As soon as placemarks are mapped to DBpedia additional metadata could be added to a placemark which opens up totally new perspectives on content enrichment in ARML environments enabling new and exciting AR-applications.

We want to thank Martin Lechner from Salzburg based Mobilizy for a fruitful discussion we had so far on this topic.

BTW: check out the paper by Reynolds et al. (2010) from DERI on “Exploiting Linked Open Data for Mobile Augmented Reality“

Tassilo Pellegrini

LOD2 Kick Off Meeting in Leipzig

by , Category: Linked Data & Open Data

From September 6 – 8, 2010 we kicked off the LOD2 project in Leipzig / Germany. LOD2 is funded by the European Commission within the 7th Framework Programme (Grant Agreement No. 257943) consisting of 10 partners from 7 countries. Its main aim is to integrate and syndicate linked data with large-scale, existing applications and showcase the benefits in three application scenarios: 1) Media & Publishing, 2) Enterprise Data Management and 3) Open Government Data. The resulting tools, methods and data sets have the potential to change the Web as we know it today. (You can download the project flyer here.)

The first day was dedicated to the general introduction of the project partners which are Universität Leipzig (Germany), Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (Netherlands), National University of Ireland in Galway (Ireland), Freie Universität Berlin (Germany), OpenLink Software (United Kingdom), Semantic Web Company (Austria), TenForce (Belgium), Exalead (France), Wolters Kluwer Deutschland (Germany) and Open Knowledge Foundation (United Kingdom). Below you see a picture of the kick off team.

During the morning of the second day a first introduction to the technical components took place. The picture below shows an abstraction of the LOD2 high level architecture.

Orri Erling and Hugh Williams from OpenLink introduced Virtuoso, which will be used as one of the storage technologies in the LOD2 stack. The second knowledge store technology will be MonetDB introduced by Peter Boncz from CWI. Both systems will also be used as a kind of benchmark laboratory for hosting and querying linked data.

Christian Bizer from FU Berlin talked about Silk and D2R. In combination they will be used to discover relationship and similarities between entities within different linked data sources – generally called identity resolution.

Giovanni Tummarello from DERI introduced Sindice and Sig.ma under the aspect of how to update, validate and reuse data that is available on the web and support the production of professional, collaboratively governed linked data especially for enterprise use. Beside that an important aspect will be how to handle the high amounts of generated data. So according to Giovanni scaling the infrastructure and the use of appropriate hardware will be central in bringing the Sindice index into enterprise stacks i.e. as an approach for lightweight data consolidation purposes.

Norman Heino from AKSW University of Leipzig introduced OntoWiki and Semantic Pingback. Ontowiki will be used at the interface layer for producing, annotating, browsing and querying linked data and presenting it to the enduser in various GUIs. Semantic Pingback’s aim is to interlink the Web 2.0 with the Semantic Web by backwards compatible RPCs (remote procedure calls). It detects new typed or untyped external links, manages the GET and POST commands and it takes care of server autodiscovery.

Andreas Blumauer from Semantic Web Company demonstrated PoolParty as a smart editor for metadata in enterprise stacks. Like Ontowiki PoolParty also addresses the interface level of LOD2 especially when it comes to generate, edit and link metadata to documents primarily based on SKOS. PoolParty deliberatelly uses Thesauri as a mapping layer to discover similarities of documents, generate tag recommendations for their annotation and publish used vocabularies as Linked Data.

In the afternoon we continued with individual breakout sessions to discuss work package interdependencies and start profiling the use cases and requirements eingineering in more detail.

The third day started with an introduction by Stefano Bertolo – the responsible scientific project officer from the EC side for the LOD2 project – who pointed out that the LOD2 project is an important one for the European Web of Data and the EC among others specially is interested in the Open Government Data use case of LOD2.

After this introduction talks of the 3 Use Cases were presented by A) Jonathan Gray (OKFN) about the Open Gov Data use case followd by B) Amar-Djalil MEZAOUR (Exalead) speaking about the Linked Business Data use case and C) Christian Dirschl (Wolters Kluwer) having a talk about the LOD in the publishing & media industry use case.

Central to the success of LOD2 will be a smart handling of all the integration issues which will come up in the course of the project. Here Tenforce, an integration specialist from Belgium, will have the lead. CEO Bastiaan Deblieck gave a detailed outlook on the methodologies  and he presented a nice and comprehensive overview how the integration issues will be approached from a SCRUM perspective.

After a presentation about LOD2 project dissemination, training and community building activities by Martin Kaltenböck (Semantic Web Company) there were serveral discussions going on until the successful kick off meeting was closed by project lead Sören Auer (Universität Leipzig) at 04.00pm of 08 September 2010.

Updated news information can be accessed on the LOD2 project website as well as on the LOD2project twitter stream (and on twitter using #lod2)…

Stay tuned!