Semantic Web Company

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!

Michael Hausenblas & Chris Bizer

ESWC 2009 is not over yet – but I am happy to announce: The Semantic Web Community is more alive than ever before! We had four days of brilliant talks, vibrant meetings, and great atmosphere so far. Some highlights:

• Chris Bizer presentation of Berlin SPARQL Benchmark (BSBM) or Enrico Minacks´s talk about benchmarking RDF stores showed that base technologies of the semantic web are mature enough for real-world applications.
• Use cases from many domains like biodiversity, astronomy or multi-media showed clearly the trend that the semantic web becomes “ubiquitous” and has left the labs.
• The idea of Linking (Open) Data became pre-dominant in the community, many projects are built around this infrastructure already. But there is a clear demand for improved ontology matching or brokering services like the recently released <sameAs>
• Martin Hepp´s lightning talk about “What makes for a good ontology?” and emotional reactions from the audience on that showed, that grass-root approaches and top-down approaches for ontology building still haven´t grown together, but they are getting closer
• Weather and food here in Crete is great!

This year’s keynotes at the I-SEMANTICS / I-KNOW conference taking place from September 2 – 4, 2009 in Graz / Austria have been fixed.

The scientific keynotes will be provided by Paolo Traverso, Director of the Center for Information Technology – IRST, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy, and Professor Eric Tsui, Associate Director of the Knowledge Management Research Centre, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China.

The industry keynote will be held by Peter Kropsch, CEO of the Austrian Press Agency.

Further details will follow.

Today, the 18th WWW conference started in Madrid, Spain. In his opening talk, Tim Berners-Lee outlined the status quo of the current Web and focused on areas for ongoing research.

According to Tim Berners-Lee the Web is still static and consists mostly of archived HTML and PDF documents. There is still a need for a read/write Web and the standards are still not used to a sufficient extend. Changes in the Web are the ‘move to mobile’ and the climb up of ‘advertizing to being a science’.

Beside the still existing challenges of the current Web, additional ones arrived. Web Applications as well as Open Social Networking and Open Linked Data count to the area of current interest.

Web Applications are supposed to become new computing platforms and need a serious clean trust system. In the future Web Applications could offer a decentralized modular installation like a webized Debian.

Open Social Networking has become a great application in the Web. Currently it suffers from the ‘Social Silo Problem’. Users have often accounts in several platforms like Facebook or MySpace. The platforms, however, are separated from each other like in a field of silos. The challenge of the Semantic Web Community is now to interconnect the silos via RDF, OWL, HTTP, and SPARQL. A further requirement of Tim Berners-Lee are to focus on a Secure Web id.

Open Linked Data attracted the attention of Tim Berners-Lee most of all. Being one of the chairs of the co-located workshop ‘Linked Data on the Web’ he stressed that “we need data on the Web to work better together” in government, enterprise, and science. Open Linked Data could be a wizard for users of existing relational database systems. As query language he proposed a federated/delegated SPARQL.

Finally, Tim Berners-Lee described the role of researchers in those challenges. Researchers should ‘build a platform for others that follow’. Thereby, one should not assume what people will use the platform for.

(Report by Christoph Wieser / Salzburg Research)

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]

The yearly organized Linking Open Data Triplification Challenge (as part of this year´s I-Semantics conference, 2 – 4 September 2009, Graz/Austria) awards prizes to the most promising triplifications of existing Web applications, Websites and data sets.

The challenge (Patron: Sir Tim Berners-Lee) is open to anyone interested in applying Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies. We envision submissions such as following:

• Applications of Linked Data tools and techniques such as for example Triplify, Virtuoso or D2RQ on custom Web applications and data sets exposing a large quantity and variety of content.
• Implementations of exporters and mappers from existing content repository formats (such as mbox mailing list archives, Bib Te X, XML-Schemes etc.) into RDF and Linked Data.
• Adoptions / configurations of Triplify for standard Web applications, such as for example Wikis, Weblogs, Webshops, Forums, Web-Gallery, ERP/CRM systems and Web-calendar software. You can find popular Web applications for example at Source Forge.
• Portings of the Triplify script into other Web application programming languages such as Python, Ruby, Perl, ASP. The Triplify script is very small (<300 lines of code) however, the port should be as compatible as possible with the current reference implementation but integrate well with the environment given by the programming language.
• Applications showcasing the benefits of Linked Data to end-users such as for information syndication, specialized search, browsing or augmentation of content.

Submissions should consist of a two page description in JUCS format of the application, accompanied by (a link to) the software source code and a link to an online demo. The descriptions should be submitted electronically via email to Michael Hausenblas with the subject Triplification Challenge Submission by May 30th, 2009.

Last week the partners of the KiWi (Knowledge In a Wiki) project met in Salzburg for the 2009 Annual Meeting.

Sebastian Schaffert and his team demonstrated the latest version of this semantic based framework based on wiki principles and built on JBoss Seam.
You can take a look at the online showcase and download the one click installer of the pre-release.
Sebastian emphasised that KiWi will follow Linus Torvald’s maxim of releasing early and releasing often.
In June 2009 KiWi 1.0 should be ready, followed by 1.5 in December 2009, at which time Enabling Technologies and a first implementation of the uses cases will be included in the system.

After hearing talks about the KiWi User experience, data model and transaction management, we learned about the status of reasoning, querying, information extraction and personalisation of the Enabling Technologies groups (online slides forthcoming here).

Peter Reiser presented the Sun use case, in which the focus now is on realising an expert finder mechanism based on the “Community Equity” concept found in Sun Spaces (their highly popular, heavily customized version of Confluence).

In short Community Equity is a system for analysing the social activities in a community and measuring the value of the contributions to the community. Social activities are anything from creating content to simply viewing it. These activities are used to calculate the Community Equity (which is simply a number) of content, tags and people.
Consider this example for a content page: The more people view, download, reuse, comment on or rated the page positively, the higher the page’s Information Equity will be.
In turn the community members acquire Contribution Equity through the content items they create, i. e. the Information Equity of a content item “spills over” to its creator.
The same goes for Tag Equity: Each tag obtains the Equity from all the pages it is applied to. E.g. if there are 3 pages with the tag “JBoss” with Information equity of 10, 5 and 20, then the Tag Equity of JBoss is 35.
These things alone is very helpful for motivating people to contribute to the community and for judging the quality of content and ranking it accordingly.

On top of that, the Equity system allows for a expert finder system. People are related to all the tags that are used on the content items they created. Imagine a contributor has created several documents that were tagged with java and the sum of information equity of those pages is 550, then the person also has
That way a search for “Java” doesn’t only bring documents tagged with java, but also people with expertise in Java.
In KiWi this Community Equity system will be implemented and extended. For one, instead of flat tags KiWi will use concepts coming from SKOS thesauri, which will be managed using PoolParty.
These thesauri act as a shared knowledge model. In this way synonyms, parent/child concept relationships, etc. can be considered for Equity calculation, therby taking personalization, querying and expert finding to a whole new level.
Research will engage with questions like how should the Equity disperse through the graph: Imagine a community member with high Equity in “JBoss”. This means she probably has good expertise in Java too. As this subconcept relationship is expressed in the thesaurus, it is possible to transfer Equity from JBoss to Java, but one has to consider what percentage the equity will be transferred, if Equity only can only spread upwards from subconcept to parent concept or whether other kinds of relationships also warrant the transfer of some Equity.

Due to several requests we have extended the submission deadline till April 6, 2009. Further important dates are:

• Notification of Acceptance: Mid of May 2009
• Submission of Camera-Ready Paper: Mid of June 2009
• I-SEMANTICS ‘09 Conference: 2-4 September 2009

For details please visit the conference site.

Prof. Adrian Paschke, head of the Corporate Semantic Web Working Group at the Free University of Berlin, gave an extensive interview on promises and challenges of the Corporate Semantic Web addressing methodological, technological and economic aspects. He says:

Corporate Semantic Web addresses both the consumer and the produce side, where consumers and producers might be humans as well as automated services, e.g. in business processes and enterprise service networks. This also includes the adequate engineering, modelling, negotiation and controlling of the use of the (meta)data and meaning representations in a (collaborating) community of users or services in enterprise settings where the individual meanings as elements of the internal cognitive structures of the members become attuned to each others’ view in a communicative process. This allows dealing with issues like ambiguity of information and semantic choices, relevance of information, information overload, information hiding and strategic information selection, as well as positive and negative consequences of actions (e.g. in a decision making process).

But, CSW does not only address the technological aspect but also the pragmatic aspect of actually using Semantic Web technologies in enterprises, which includes learning and training aspects as well as economical considerations. Incentives need to be provided to encourage in-house adoption and integration of these new Corporate Semantic Web technologies into the existing IT infrastructures, services and business processes. Decision makers on the operation, tactical and strategic IT management level need to understand the impact of this new technological approach and its adoption costs and return on investment. Therefore, companies will have in mind the economical justifiability of the deployment of new technologies.

I think he addresses some really crucial aspects of this emerging application field. Read the full interview here.

Corporate Semantic Web will also be a major topic at this year’s I-Semantics Conference from Sept. 2 – 4, 2009 in Graz/Austria. Also check out the forthcoming Semantic Web Meetup in Berlin on March 20, 2009, which is organized by Adrian Paschke’s team and the Semantic Web Company.

Our open workshops on basics and practices in semantic web technologies are free to book in single or combined. Focused on the question how synergies between web2.0, semantic web and text mining can lead us to new approches at search engines, experts search, knowledge management, recommendation systems and e-business within a corporate framework .

• Day 1: Social web, semantic web and the web2.0
• Day 2: Social semantic web for companies

All cources are held in german. English speaking groups ask for extra arrangements.

Book today. Limited attendance.