The best paper award went to Pablo N. Mendes, Max Jakob, Andrés García-Silva and Christian Bizer for their contribution “DBpedia Spotlight: Shedding Light on the Web of Documents“.

Abstract: The paper impressively shows how Linked Open Data can be utilized  as background knowledge within document-oriented applications such as search and faceted browsing. As a step towards interconnecting the Web of Documents with the Web of Data, the authors developed DBpedia Spotlight, a system for automatically annotating text documents with DBpedia URIs. DBpedia Spotlight allows users to configure the annotations to their specific needs through the DBpedia Ontology and quality measures such as prominence, topical pertinence, contextual ambiguity and disambiguation confidence. They compare their approach with the state of the art in disambiguation, and evaluate their results in light of three baselines and six publicly available annotation systems, demonstrating the competitiveness of the system. DBpedia Spotlight is shared as open source and deployed as a Web Service freely available for public use.

For the 4th time I-SEMANTICS hosted the Triplification Challenge, an event aiming at stimulating the availability of large quantities of RDF data and showcasing practical applications built on top of them. The Challenge consisted of an unspecific “open data track” and a dedicated “open government data track” for which one winner was selected. The prize money of 1000 Euro each was sponsored by Wolters Kluwer Germany.

The “open data track” award went to Daniel Garijo, Boris Villazón and Oscar Corcho for their contribution “A Provenance-Aware Linked Data Application for Trip Management and Organization“.

Abstract: The authors present El Viajero, an application for exploiting, managing and organizing Linked Data in the domain of news and blogs about travelling. El Viajero makes use of several heterogeneous datasets to help users to plan future trips, and relies on the Open Provenance Model for modeling the provenance information of the resources.

The “open government data track” award went to John Erickson, Yongmei Shi, Li Ding, Eric Rozell, Jin Zheng and Jim Hendler for their contribution “TWC International Open Government Dataset Catalog“.

Abstract: The TWC International Open Government Dataset Catalog (IOGDC) integrates a diverse selection of more than 70 government dataset catalogs from around the world. IOGDC demonstrates a practical dataset catalog metadata model for integrating diverse dataset catalogs collected from the real world and linking those catalogs into Linked Data Cloud. IOGDC’s faceted browsing and search interface provides a scalable and reconfigurable solution for finding and browsing open government datasets which also offers a compelling demonstration of the value of a common metadata model for open government dataset catalogs. We believe that the vocabulary choices demonstrated by IOGDC highlight the potential for useful Linked Data applications to be created from open government catalogs and will encourage the adoption of such a standard worldwide.

All papers are available in the ACM Digital Library.

We thank all participants for their contributions and wish the winners all the best for their future work!

The new dates are:
Extended Submision Deadline: May 30, 2011
Notification of Acceptance: June 27, 2011
Camera Ready Paper: July 18, 2011

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 generous time slots 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

So far 143 people whose organization already make use of controlled vocabularies answered the question “Which kind of controlled vocabulary do you use or plan to use in your applications?”.
The results so far show that lightweight models like taxonomies and thesauri are somewhat preferred over ontologies:

Taxonomies are the favorite, as 73.6% of participants use or plan to use them, followed by thesauri (62%) and ontologies (61.2%), while simple glossaries lag considerably behind with a usage of 31.4%.

This survey will close in about a week, so please take this chance to make your opinions on this topic count! You can find the questions here, it will take 5-10 minutes to answer them.

All participants will gain access to a report with the results within the following month. The most interesting results will be made public on this blog.

A bit surprising is the intermediate result, that it´s not “Semantic Search” or “Support of multilingual applications” which was considered to be the most important application. Instead of this it turned out that “Data Integration” is king:

The bar graph shows the weighed value of each application candidate (1.0 would be a 100% acceptance that this is an important application area of controlled vocabularies). Regarding the top candidate “data integration”

• 57,4% said “very important”
• 29,8% “relevant”
• 7,4% “somewhat relevant”
• 2,1% “not relevant”
• 3,2% “Don´t know”

If you don´t think this should be the final result, please help to get a better overview of what´s going on in the controlled vocabulary community. The survey is open until May 18th, 2011 – all participants will gain access to a report with the results within the following month. Most interesting results will be made public on this blog.

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 generous time slots 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

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

This is an important step to collect initiatives worldwide so we can follow our objective to build a network of OpenGov initiatives around the world in the course of building a focal point for the LOD topic – many thanks for your support!

(This initiative is part of the LOD2 project which was recently started in Leipzig.)

In total we received 28 submissions from which 15 nominees have been selected by the organizing committee. In a second round an international reviewing team of scientific and industrial experts elected the 3 equal winners and 3 honorary mentions. The winners were each granted a prize money of 1000.- Euro which was sponsored by Wolters Kluwer Germany, Semantic Universe and Semantic Web Company.

In the Open Governement Data Track the awards went to:

Winner:

Self-Service Linked Government Data with dcat and Gridworks
Richard Cyganiak, Fadi Maali and Vassilios Peristeras

Honorary Mention:

Linking Open Government Data: What Journalists Wish They Had Known
Christoph Boehm, Felix Naumann, Markus Freitag, Stefan George, Norman Höfler, Martin Köppelmann, Claudia Lehmann, Andrina Mascher and Tobias Schmidt

Honorary Mention:

Geographical Linked Data: a Spanish Use Case
Alexander De Leon, Victor Saquicela, Luis M. Vilches-Blázquez, Boris Villazón-Terrazas, Freddy Priyatna, Oscar Corcho, Carlos Buil, Jose Mora and Jean Paul Calbimonte

In the Open Track the awards went to:

Winner:

Live Open Linked Sensor Database
Danh Le Phuoc, Josiane Xavier Parreira, Michael Hausenblas, Yuanbo Han, Manfred Hauswirth

Winner:

Twarql: Tapping Into the Wisdom of the Crowd
Pablo Mendes, Pavan Kapanipathi and Alexandre Passant

Honorary Mention:

BibBase Triplified – http://data.bibbase.org
Christian Fritz, Oktie Hassanzadeh, Yang Yang, Reynold Xin and Renée J. Miller

The  winners f.l.t.r. Christian Dirschl (Sponsor Wolters Kluwer), Alex Passant, Richard Cyganiak, Danh LePhuoc and Pablo N. Mendes

Cordial congratulations from the organizing team & look out for the 4th Triplification Challenge in 2011, which will again take place at the I-SEMANTICS conference, September 7 – 9, 2011 in Graz / Austria.

I-Semantics will take place for the 6th time this year in September and it will be co-located again with I-Know in Graz/Austria. This year´s programme shows that Semantic Web and semantic technologies in general are increasingly relevant for all kind of industries:

• Biomedicine
• Public administration & Public transport
• Information technology
• Libraries
• Media & Content Industry
• E-commerce
• Education etc.

I-Semantics “Industry Track” with its 3-days programme full of demos is one of the highlights of the congress. With 28 submissions this year´s Triplification Challenge tells a lot about the significance of Linked Data in areas like librarianship, public administration or GIS & environmental planning. Take a look at the 15 nominees – and if you consider to come to I-Semantics 2010 follow the link for registration.

Linked Data itself has grabbed a lot of attention inside the Semantic Web community recently. But what about the outside perspective? Could linked data be called the killer app for the Semantic Web?

I foresee two things happening with Linked Data. One is from the web development perspective (the so-called Web 2.0 developers) and the other is from the enterprise perspective. The web development community will sooner than later realize that Linked Data will enable easy integration of data and therefore will ease the pain of consuming data from different data sources. Thanks to big organizations such as BBC, New York Times, Reuters, Best Buy, etc. web developers will start paying attention to this “new thing” called Linked Data.

What we need is that the inside Semantic Web community starts to create applications on top of current Linked Data so when the outside web development community starts to pay attention, they have something to chew on. We (the semantic web community) needs to start speaking the web development language. There is still a big gap. I have had personal experiences with people in the web development community who think that RDF is XML and because they hate XML, they will never consider it. This is false and this is something that we need to change.

From the enterprise perspective, Linked Data is another data integration solution. Data integration has been a problem since day one of relational databases. I believe enterprises will be open to consider new solutions with new technologies. I’m hoping to see new startups tackling the enterprise domain. Imagine being able to query “get all my clients from cities whose population is greater than 1 million” even though I don’t have the data about population of cities in my database.

Is Linked Data the killer app for the Semantic Web? Before I answer that, I would like to ask, what was the killer app of the Web? Was it the browser? Was it e-commerce? Was it search? Was it Amazon or Ebay or Google? I believe Linked Data will enable new killer apps, apps that are only possible thanks to Linked Data. The browser was only possible because of HTML. So let’s ask ourselves what is possible because of Linked Data, and there we will find our killer app.

One of the core deficiencies of the young open data cloud is the little amount of interlinks between datasets. Is it just a matter of time to overcome this or are there other measures needed to turn the existing datasets into a true giant global graph?

I like to remind myself that this new wave of semantic web technologies is an extension of the current web. Therefore we should analyze how the web evolved in the beginning. Initially, everything were a bunch of documents on the web in which people manually created links to other documents. When Google started, it created an incentive to offer quality links between documents. This also created data hubs. If you write a blog post about a book, most probably you will link to the web document of that book either on Amazon and/or Wikipedia. I believe that this will happen with Linked Data. Once there is an incentive to create quality links, these links will start to show up. And then users will start linking to the data hubs of their interest.

Open Governmental Data is a big issue at the moment. The US and UK government have started to apply Linked Data principles to turn this vision into reality. Lots of other countries are following. What do you expect from this trend?

I believe that Linked Data will take off thanks to the initiative of governments. We always talk about the chicken and egg problem of the semantic web. Once we have organizations that don’t even think about it and are just interested in putting their data on the web, the semantic web will start to grow. If Bookstore ABC puts their data on the web, it may not be so meaningful. But if the US and UK government puts their data on the web, following the Linked Data principles, then people can wake up and say “ok, so this is for real. Let me start paying attention to this”.

You are one of the chairs of the Triplification Challenge 2010. Can you give us a brief insight what to expect from this year’s challenge? What are the conditions to participate?

The Triplification Challenge this year has grown and is very exciting. For the first time, it is offering two different tracks.

The first track, the Open Track will accept submissions on three areas 1) new datasets that are published following the Linked Data principles and that show potential benefit, 2) generic methods, mechanisms and approaches of creating Linked Data from legacy datasets and 3) applications that make use of Linked Data.

The second track is the New York Times track which will accept submissions of applications that make use of the New York Times Linked Data and one or more government dataset. The objective is to create an application powered by Linked Data that would be of interest to any constituent of that government.

I personally believe that the year 2010 is the year of creating Linked Data applications and the Triplification Challenge is the way to be part of it.