Semantic Web Company

From September 1 – 3, 2010 I-SEMANTICS, the 6th international conference on semantic systems, will take place in Graz / Austria. This year’s focus is „Towards a Web of Linked Data”. As a conference aiming to bring together science and industry, I-SEMANTICS encourages both, scientific (research/application) and industrial contributions.

Additionally I-SEMANTICS will host the 2nd Pragmatic Web Track and the 3rd Triplification Challenge.

The combined CfP for I-SEMANTICS, Pragmatic Web Track & Triplification Challenge is available here.

I will give a talk about the relevance of Semantic Web and Linked Data for news publishers at this year’s IFRA summit in Vienna on October 15, 2009. IFRA is the World Association of Newspapers and News publishers and within their Technical Group Publishing they are starting to deal with Semantic Web. Further invited speakers are Michael Steidl (IPTC) and Robert Schmidt-Nia (dpa mediatechnology).

** 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!

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!

During the closing session of ESWC 2009 which was held in Crete, KiWi was awarded as Best Demo of the Year amongst 23 other participants. See the showcase here and let the KiWi consortium know what you think!

If you have just a minute, see what KiWi can do for you and how it can break boundaries, as a system following the Linked (Open) Data principles. Enjoy!

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.

The yearly organized Linking Open Data Triplification Challenge awards prizes to the most promising triplifications of existing Web applications, Websites and data sets. Chaired by Michael Hausenblas (DERI) and patroned by Tim Berners-Lee the challenge is open to anyone interested in applying Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies. This might include students, developers, researchers, and people from industry. Individual or group submissions are both acceptable.

The call is still open till the end of May 2009. For more information please visit http://triplify.org/challenge

Recently the SWC took a thorough look at Triplify, a tool for mapping the contents of a relational DB to RDF, in the course of which we could convince ourselves of Triplify’s ease of use and its potent capabilities.
We take this opportunity to given an account of the philosophy behind Triplify, how it is used and also had the chance to interview the creator Sören Auer.

A common objection from critics of the semantic web is that regular users or webmasters won’t go to the trouble of marking up their content or whole web sites with RDF.
While it is obvious that nobody is going to decorate their web pages with hand-carved RDF triples, it is also apparent that a lot of the current web’s pages are generated by transforming information from relational databases to HTML pages, which are perfectly suited for human consumption, but which suffer from a big loss of machine-readable semantics.

As the information in the relational databases is highly structured and contains rich semantics, it is only natural to also use the already existing structured data to generate RDF representations of the same information.

Triplify is all about this approach of bootstrapping data for the semantic web. It does this for web applications which are built on PHP and MySQL.
Triplify consists of a lightweight PHP script and a configuration file. The latter is used to do the mapping of the columns of an application’s relational database to appropriate RDF classes and properties.

In many cases a site administrator who wants to export her site’s content as RDF, only has to save Triplify with a premade configuration file for her site’s application into the right folder, as for many popular applications like Wordpress, Joomla! or phpBB all the work has already been done.
Once installed, Triplify can be used to generate a dump of the site’s complete RDF graph, or to generate Linked Data, as each of the site’s main concepts’ RDF graph is provided under its own URL, e.g. the semantic description of a user with the ID 123 can be accessed under http://yoursite.com/triplify/user/123.

If no configuration for an application exits, it is fairly easy to create one by yourself.
All one has to do is to look at the app’s database schema, find appropriate classes and properties from well known ontologies and create MySQL queries that grab the data from the relational database and map them to RDF classes or properties.
An example for a query that takes the data from a table describing the user of a CMS:
"SELECT id, name AS 'foaf:name', url AS 'foaf:homepage', short_description AS 'dc:abstract' FROM user_table",

Triplify’s creator Sören Auer kindly gave us the opportunity for an interview:

Triplify is very easy to configure for web developers. For which scenarios would you recommend to use Triplify, and in which situations other approaches of semantifying your data might be more suitable?

As you already mentioned Triplify was primarily developed for Web applications developed in PHP. These usually have a relatively small and simple set of tables. Triplify creates complete RDF exports, Linked Data or JSON, but does not include SPARQL endpoint functionality. When SPARQL is required you are better off with D2R Server or Virtuosos RDF views.

Triplify creates semantic representations of the data in relational databases. Do you think there would also be benefit in the inverse approach i. e. creating an application that parses triples and writes it to a relational DB according to a mapping file?

In certain scenarios this might make sense, but for the most cases I think the database schema has to be developed separately. Database schemata contain more storage and retrieval oriented information, such as for example about data indexing. Vocabularies and ontologies on the other hand represent information on a conceptually higher level and are more flexible with regard to evolution of the information structures than databases.

Are there plans for further development of Triplify?

Sure. We want to add SPARQL support and possibly port Triplify to other scripting languages such as Ruby and Python.

Thank you Sören, we will stay tuned about the news from your great application and look forward to the Triplification Challenge 2009!

The Annual (German) AI Conference goes semantic: In 2009 there’s an “Ontologies & Semantic Web” track, Franz Baader and Frank van Harmelen are invited speakers, and there’s a tutorial on OWL 2 and Rules.

As a special treat, there’s also going to be a Mashup Challenge – which promises to be a fun event.

• Dates: September 15 – 18, 2009
• Location: Paderborn, Germany
• Paper submission: April 26, 2009
• Mashup Challenge Deadline: July 15, 2009

[Pascal Hitzler]