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.

Earlier this month the first ever Linked Data Camp took place in Vienna at the Quartier für Digitale Kunst. This two day event attracted about 35 people to discuss and to jointly work on novel applications for the Web of Data.

The first day started off with a keynote by Richard Cyganiak form DERI Galway’s Linked Data Research Center. He talked about the technical challenges that have to be overcome to allow for more Linked Data applications over heterogenous RDF data. These challenges revolve around discovery of and access to Linked Data, identifier and schema reconciliation, data fusion, quality assessment, aggregation, analytics and mining.
As Richard pointed out, the good news is “that linked data makes it possible that different people do the different steps, e.g., the publisher can help doing the identifier reconciliation by publishing sameAs links, and 3rd parties can help with access by providing a single SPARQL store over multiple related but independent datasets.” Check out the transcript
or slides for Richard’s talk.

After this keynote participants presented their topics of interest in Lightning Talks and working groups formed, some of their outcomes can be found online:
One group worked on the topic of “Dataset Dynamics”. As data in Linked Data sets change, clients having some dependency on data need to be notified about these changes. You can read about their proposed solutions here.
Another group had a go at “Expert search and profiling on the Semantic Web”, their discussions are summarized in this blog post.
Andreas Langegger demonstrated XLWrap, which is a versatile RDF wrapper for spreadsheets. A lot of feature request from participants came up (see here), so he and others worked on this handy application.

On day 2 Leigh Dodds from Talis talked about “Rights Statements on the Web of Data” (slides and transcript). Leigh raised awareness for the issue that the majority of LOD sources do not have licensing information associated with their data. This of course conflicts with the proposed openness of Linked “Open” Data, as it is doubtful whether these sources can be used for commercial puropses.

The organizers from the universities of Linz and Vienna, Joanneum Research, Gnowsis, DERI Galway, STI Innsbruck and the Semantic Web Company would like to thank all participants for making the camp a success! As with VoCamps anyone can organize a Linked Data Camp, so we hope for more camps in 2010!

Yesterday´s Vienna Semantic Web Meetup was quite a big success. Around 55 attendees came around and enjoyed great atmosphere at “Museumsquartier” / “Quartier for Digital Culture”.

The event took place  just after the first day of the “Linked Data Camp Vienna“, where quite a lot of important questions around linked data were tackled, e.g.: Which role will linked data consolidators play in the future?

After a day full of “insider”-discussions it was also a pleasure to meet people from “outside” the linked data community to re-check if the semantic puzzle is still something worth to be solved.

The European Semantic Technology Conference 2009 will take place in Vienna at the beginning of December 2009. Andreas Blumauer (Semantic Web Company) talked with Lyndon Nixon who is the program advisor of this conference:

SWC: In its own saying the European Semantic Technology Conference brings together the smartest minds in Semantic Technologies. What will be the highlights of this year’s conference?

There are many highlights this year! We have a full program of presentations, workshops, panels and a keynote by Susie Stephens from Johnson&Johnson. On top of this, the first day will see the first ever ESTC Innovation Seed Camp, where enterpreneurs and young start ups are invited to pitch their ideas to a panel of venture capitalists and there will be cash prizes! Besides the main program, an open demo space will continually offer new showcases of semantic technologies and products, while a networking zone gives attendees a relaxed space to make business away from the conference hectic. We will also be holding matchmaking sessions, where attendees can schedule one-to-one meetings with other attendees organized by a handy online tool. Finally, in line with ESTC’s focus on semantics and innovation – during the two days we will give participants the chance to check out two innovative conference tools: an electronic vCard exchange and the “Web Comparator”. So, too much to explain, but you can get full information on every aspect of the conference at its webpage www.estc2009.com.

SWC: How would you describe the state of the art in semantic technology business especially in Europe?

We are at a very exciting period in the enterprise uptake of semantic technologies, which can be seen in the growth in attendance at events such as ESTC. Semantic technologies are finally maturing and can be used away from toy examples in real, critical business processes. Technologies are being standardized and tools aligned to those standards, while progress in being made in supporting the sorts of extensions that businesses need (see OWL 2, or SPARQL 1.1). This year, the case studies and the business applications that will be presented are going to reflect that. We are still inside the early adopter phase in semantic uptake, with the critical mass of companies still checking out semantics at a research and prototyping level. However, the balance is shifting and enabling the technology transfer to real business projects is key; ESTC’s focus on direct contact between the technology vendors and the business clients – the networking zone, the open demo space, or the matchmaking sessions – is a reflection of the importance of an event such as ESTC to bring these two groups together.

SWC: One of the big issues at the moment is Linking Open Data. How do you perceive this development and how can you start?

Yes, Linked Open Data is an interesting development, making a significant amount of semantic data about a broad subject range available to everyone. I think it has real value in the research community where large data sources have been needed. For industry, I would say its value is less straight-forward: the data is not always so clean and care needs to be taken before building business applications on top of it. Clear guidelines on how to best make use of Linked Open Data by enterprises is needed. ESTC picks up on this in its program this year: we will have an expert panel precisely on this subject! Of course, leveraging the Linked Data Cloud in the enterprise is already a topic for many organisations – one of our paper sessions is on Linked Data and I am sure there will be plenty mentions of it elsewhere during the conference!

SWC: In recent years large IT-companies and system integrators have rather been playing around with semantic web technologies than identifying the semantic web
 as a market opportunity. Do you think that this situation has changed already?

I think a lot of these companies are being cautious – the Semantic Web was so hyped to industry in its first years that a certain level of cynicism grew. Now, that we have in my opinion very real and valuable tools and technologies built on semantics, the companies are being careful in how to present this to the market. There are already many very encouraging examples of semantics making inroads in key markets where data heterogeneity, integration, and management have become key issues: I think Health Care and Life Sciences is simply the market which is being most open about it (the ESTC keynote speaker Susie Stephens will also report on semantic technologies in this market). There are further examples we just don’t know about, because companies don’t want to let their competitors know, or mention that it is semantics which is being used.

SWC: Please add another statement which is important for you!

ESTC 2009 will be *the* meeting place in Europe this year for semantic technology vendors and users – don’t miss it!

From November 11 – 13, 2009 this will be one of the big issues at the 5th International Conference on Topic Maps taking place in Leipzig/Germany. When asked about the relationship between TM and SemWeb conference organizer Lutz Maicher says:

With the vision of the web of data Topic Maps and the Semantic Web move closer over time. Anywhere URIs represent subjects, structured statements are gathered around them. In this context I see subj3ct.com as an interesting ventures. This recently launched service provides URIs for 15 million subjects to be used in structured data. Naturally, linked data hubs like dbpedia or geonames.org are part of it. The crowd is invited to contribute to this collection, also the Topic Maps Lab provides several feeds to register new URIs. Subj3ct.com turns out to be an infrastructure technology for Web 3.0 applications, regardless whether they are based on Topic Maps or other Semantic Web technologies.

Through this convergence the uniqueness of each technology sharpens. Reasoning is the strong point of the Semantic Web. But the strength of Topic Maps are semantic portals and the global federation of facts around subjects. Bringing together all and even contradictory information about each subject – and not building reasoning-ready consistent models of the world – is built into the genes of Topic Maps.

Read the full interview here.

On accasion of the upcoming 4th International Conference on Semantic and Digital Media Technologies (SAMT ‘09) from December 2 – 4, 2009 in Graz/Austria, Werner Bailer from Joanneum Research gave us a short interview about state of the art in multimedia semantics.  When asked about the Multimedia and the Semantic Web he says:

There have been a number of proposals for multimedia ontologies and mappings of multimedia vocabularies (cf. the excellent report from the W3C MM Semantics XG), differing in complexity and expressivity. Thus the W3C has chartered a working group to develop an ontology and API for multimedia content on the Web. The group is developing a lightweight core set of metadata properties and an API specification for accessing these properties, which may come from metadata documents in different standards. Thus mappings to many relevant standards have also been specified. The set of metadata properties will be formalized for interoperability with the Semantic Web. A W3C recommendation is expected in 2010.

Read the full interview 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).

There will be a series of events around the Semantic Web & Linked Data in Vienna and Graz at the end of this year. This is a comprehensive list of all of these events, which might help you to make a decision to come to Austria:

Linked Data Camp

• Linked Data Camp (Vienna, November 30 – December 1) with keynotes from Leigh Dodds (Talis) and Michael Hausenblas (DERI Galway) – Register here!
• Vienna Semantic Web Meetup (Vienna, November 30) as evening event of the Linked Data Camp
• SAMT 2009 – 4 th International Conference on Semantic and Digital Media Technologies (Graz, December 2-4) with keynote from Ricardo Baeza-Yates (Yahoo!)
• ESTC 2009 – 3 rd European Semantic Technology Conference (Vienna, December 2-3) with keynote from Susie Stephens (Johnson&Johnson)

The Jackson tribute might have been a flop for Vienna, but this is history! So, what are you waiting for – come & join the party!

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• Linked Data Meetup in London (cloudofdata.com)

Last Friday, September 4, 2009 I-Semantics, the 5th International Conference on Semantic Systems, ended. I am extremely happy about the positive response from so many people I got in the last few days. It was a lot of work and I am glad everything worked out fine.

I-Semantics, which started on Wednesday, September 2, and was colocated with I-Know, the International Conference on Knowledge Management, for the third time now, attracted 450 participants. As inteded by our original idea – bringing the Semantic Web out of the echo chamber – this colocation has proven to be absolutely fertile as the semantic systems community and the knowledge management community really fit well together and complement each other. So we had a rich program consisting of 64 scientific talks (30 I-Semantics / 34 I-Know), a poster session, an industry track and numerous mini tracks and discussion panels. Read a review of the first, second and third conference day on Harald Sack’s blog (with whom I enjoyed pondering about Net Neutrality and IPV6.)

For the first time we had the Pragmatic Web Community on board, which held a special track bringing in lots of new ideas and views on computational semantics. Beside that I recognized that in this track we had quite large amount of people from the social sciences and humanities among the audience, which is a promising signal and hopefully leads to new research and human-oriented technologies.

Another highlight was this year’s matchmaking event which aims at initiating business contacts between industry and academia. According to the organizers the Styrian Research Agency and the Enterprise Europe Network,  120 bilateral meetings took place. Astonishingly 56 of the 71 registered participants had a company background.

And finally we hosted the second Triplification Challenge where Chris Bizer gave a keynote and introduced quite a bunch of people to the idea of Linked Data. Unfortunatelly Michael Hausenblas who chaired this year’s challenge could not attend so I did the moderation during the award ceremony and Chris assisited me handing over the awards to the winners. For the results of the challenge go to Soeren Auer’s blog.

Wrapping up, all this would not have been possible without the great support of Prof. Klaus Tochtermann and his team from Know Center. Year after year they do a great job and it is a great opportunity and pleasure to work together with them. Big thanks also go to Adrian Paschke from Corporate Semantic Web of Free University of Berlin, Hans Weigand from Tilburg University and the guys from Salzburg New Media Lab, who helped to set up the I-Semantics conference this year.

The next I-Semantics will take place from September 1 – 3, 2010. Hope to see you next year in Graz!

** 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!