How to model divergent views on one concept?

Such a central model is not only much harder to manage, but there is also the general problem that differerent departments like marketing, quality assurance, R&D, etc. will have divergent views on the model and its concepts. These different perspectives on one and the same concept are hard to unify in a single model.

Think of a company that sells mobile phones and wants to create a model of its line of products. It wants to utilize this model in the context of its online shop as well as in the context of its user support forum. While the structure of the model (i.e. the relationships between the products) might be very similar or the same in both contexts, there will be differences in which properties of the products are actually relevant in the respective contexts.

In the model of the marketing department there might be a concept for a “Phantastax StamiMaxx” cell phone with a definiton “The StamiMaxx has a powerful battery and is great for professionals who travel a lot”. They might relate it to manufacturer “ACME Corporation” and to several concepts representing different features like “Android OS”, “Multi-touch touchscreen”, etc.
The very same phone has different properties that are interesting from the Quality Assurance departement’s perspective. They might call it by a more specific name like “Phantastax i3000 StamiMaxx S”, have a different definition for it like “3G cell phone implementing the new WTF3000 protocol, …” and relate it to concepts representing known problems and their solutions.

Now they face the task to integrate these different models, as it is not desirable to use a bunch of isolated models within one company.

Support of collaborative work on distributed models

To support this kind of collaborative work on distributed knowledge models, we would like to link the concepts of the models, just as is we link documents in the World Wide Web. Fortunately the Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS) offers mapping properties that can be used to define relationships between concepts from different knowledge models.

E.g. when we want to say that concept “Phantastax StamiMaxx” in the product line thesaurus refers to the same real world entity as concept “Phantastax i3000 StamiMaxx S” in the Quality Assurance thesaurus, then we can use skos:exactMatch to express that. If we want to express that the concepts are merly similar, skos:closeMatch could be used.

The other SKOS mapping properties express a hierarchical (narrowMatch, broadMatch) or an associative (relatedMatch) mapping relation between concepts from different concept schemes. With those we can say that my Samsung Galaxy concept has a skos:broadMatch “Smartphone” in the product line vocabulary and a skos:relatedMatch “ACME Corporation” in a controlled vocabulary about Tech companies.

Modularisation of knowledge models

In this way SKOS thesaurus management systems like PoolParty make it possible to modularise knowledge models, represent concepts in their different contexts and consequently enable collaborative work on those models: The marketing guy can work on his model with the concept properties focused on sales without disrupting the work of the quality assurance expert on her own thesaurus. Later one or both of them can create the skos:exactMatch link between the concepts that are the same, like seen in the “Exact Matching Concepts” box in screenshot of PoolParty below.

Enrich your knowledge: Get connected with the LOD Cloud

Going a step further the models could be connected to external knowledge, e.g. a source from the Linked Open Data (LOD) Cloud. Once we establish links to LOD hubs like DBpedia, we can import additional information for their concepts or use it to establish whether similar concepts from different models really refer to the same real world resource.

Digital Identity on the Semantic Web
Thursday, April 7, 2011

While recent developments in ICT make it easier for companies and consumers to reach each other, they can also scatter your personal information more widely, making life easier for criminals. On the other hand public institutions and government agencies are collecting personal data too. So personal data is processed without the consensus (or even the knowledge) of the respective citizen. As we know, leaks in this field may unleash sensible personal data as well. The misuse of personal data can be restricted – this is a challenge to both, the technological and the juridical domain. This meetup takes a look on how Semantic Web Technologies can take over its responsibility in this emerging field.

• Christof Tschohl (BIM)
  Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Human Rights
• Mischa Tuffield (Garlik)
  A Standards-based, Open and Privacy-aware Social Web (W3C)

>> read more, and register for free



Portals, Apps and Visualizations for Open Government Data
Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Picking up Keith Andrews suggestion, this is a MeetUp focusing on tools, services and projects dealing with Visualization, Apps-creation and Portals/Catalogs for Open [Government] Data. As this MeetUp is on the eve of Austrians first Open Government Data – Conference (OGD2011) we expect to meet experts ans enthusiasts from Austria and abroad.

• Keith Andrews (IICM)
  Institute for Information Processing and Computer Supported New Media at Graz University of Technology
• Andreas Blumauer (SWC)
  Storing, searching, serving Open Government Data – getting an overview on the growing market for open data solutions

>> read more, and register for free





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.

The survey results also show considerable variation by sector, both of policy and technology implementation. With respect to technologies, ICT companies are also the most willing to consider semantic approaches. The ICT sector has an unusually high interest in all ST components, with 20% or more being willing to consider all of them, and over half of IT respondents looking at Web 2.0 (social computing). [...]  The use of tagging technologies – which overall is the least mature approach in the survey – is most advanced in Life Sciences. The Life Sciences, Media & Entertainment, and ICT sectors all have a reasonably strong interest in Natural Language Processing (roughly 25% on average). Ontologies and RDF/OWL are the technologies least often considered, though the interest in these Semantic Technologies is not insignificant. Taxonomies are slightly more popular, perhaps indicating that companies are taking the first step to prepare for a more semantic approach to IT solutions. The ICT, Energy & Utilities, and Media & Entertainment sectors all have a reasonably strong interest in using taxonomies.

The 190 pages report gives an actual overview of the status quo on European Semantic Technology Market and is now available for download: Final demand driven mapping Report

The interview covers questions like:

• How can Linked Data help to make companies more productive?
• Do you think that the Linked Data Initiative can build upon a stable architecture or will it face more and more problems the bigger the “cloud” will grow?
• What´s the ultimate argument for an Enterprise Architect to use languages like SPARQL at least in addition to SQL?
• How will a “Real Time Semantic Web” change the whole game?
• How will the “Semantic Web” be called in 10 years? Will there still be a “Semantic Web”?

Read the full version of the interview here. ]]> http://blog.semantic-web.at/2010/06/16/kingsley-idehen-i-only-think-in-terms-of-a-web-of-linked-data/feed/ 0 http://blog.semantic-web.at/2010/02/16/linking-open-data-to-thesaurus-management/ http://blog.semantic-web.at/2010/02/16/linking-open-data-to-thesaurus-management/#comments Tue, 16 Feb 2010 16:23:11 +0000 Tassilo Pellegrini http://blog.semantic-web.at/?p=1430 Continue reading →]]> The Vienna-based company punkt. netServices is just about to release a demo version of their PoolParty service, a SKOS-based thesaurus management tool with linked data capabilities. I had the chance to pre-read a white paper and test their service. Here is a brief overview. You can also try a demo.

Purpose

Poolparty was conceived to facilitate various applications like

• Semantic search engines
• Recommender systems (similarity search)
• Corporate bookmarking
• Annotation- & tag recommender systems
• Autocomplete services and facetted browsing.

These use cases can be either achieved by using PoolParty stand-alone or by integrating it with existing Enterprise Search Engines and Document Management Systems or Enterprise Wikis.

Thesaurus Management

PoolParty is aiming to be easy to use for people without a strong Semantic Web background or special technical skills. The GUI is entirely web-based and utilizes AJAX so the user can e.g. quickly merge two concepts via drag & drop. An overview over the thesaurus can be gained with a tree or a graph view on the concepts.

PoolParty also helps to semi-automatically add concepts to a thesaurus as it can be used to analyse documents (e.g. web pages or PDF files) relevant to a thesaurus’ domain in order to glean candidate terms. This is done by the key-phrase extractor of KEA. The extracted terms can be selected by the user, thereby becoming “free concepts” which later can be integrated into the thesaurus, turning them into “approved concepts”.

Documents can be searched in various ways – either by keyword search in the full text, by searching for their tags or by semantic search and similarity search. The latter takes not only a concept’s preferred label into account, but also its synonyms and the labels of its related concepts are considered in the search. The user might manually remove query terms used in semantic search. Boost values for the various relations considered in semantic search may also be adjusted. In the same way the recommendation mechanism for document similarity calculation works.

PoolParty by default also publishes a Semantic Wiki version of its thesauri, which provides an alternative way to browse and edit concepts. Through this feature anyone can get read access to a thesaurus, and optionally also edit, add or delete labels of concepts. Search and autocomplete functions are available here as well. The Wiki’s XHTML source is also enriched with RDFa, thereby exposing all RDF metadata associated with a concept to be picked up by RDF search engines and crawlers. (See two examples: Cocktail thesaurus &  Standard Thesaurus for Economics)

PoolParty also supports the import of thesauri in SKOS (including several consistency checks) or Zthes format. Those functionalities can also be consumed as stand-alone web services via PoolParty SKOS Services. Additionaly, lists of concepts and their labels can also be imported via CSV files.

Linked (Open) Data

PoolParty not only publishes its thesauri as Linked Open Data (in addition to a SPARQL endpoint), but it also consumes LOD in order to expand thesauri with information from LOD sources.

Concepts in the thesaurus can be linked to e.g. DBpedia  via a service like Georgi Kobilarov‘s DBpedia lookup service, which takes the label of a concept and returns possible matching candidates. The system suggests relevant resources from DBpedia and the user can select the one that matches the concept from his thesaurus, thereby creating a skos:exactMatch relation between the concept URI in PoolParty and the DBpedia URI. The same approach can be used to link to other SKOS thesauri available as Linked Data.

Other triples can also be retrieved from the target data source, e.g. the DBpedia abstract can become a skos:definition and geographical coordinates can be imported and be used to display the location of a concept on the map, where appropriate. The DBpedia category information may also be used to retrieve additional concepts of that category as siblings of the concept in focus, in order to populate the thesaurus.

PoolParty is capable of importing a SKOS thesaurus from a Linked Data server, and may also receive updates to thesauri imported this way. This feature has been implemented in the course of the KiWi  project funded by the European Commission. KiWi also contains SKOS thesauri and exposes them as LOD. Both systems can read a thesaurus via the other’s LOD interfaces and may write it to their own store. This is facilitated by special Linked Data URIs that return e.g. all the top-concepts of a thesaurus, with pointers to the URIs of their narrower concepts, which allow other systems to retrieve a complete thesaurus through iterative dereferencing of concept URIs.

Additionally KiWi and PoolParty publish lists of concepts created, modified, merged or deleted within user specified time-frames. With this information the systems can learn about updates to one of their thesauri in an external system. They then can compare the versions of concepts in both stores and may write according updates to their own store.

This means each system decides autonomously which data it accepts and there is no risk of a system pushing data that might lead to inconsistencies into an external store. Data transfer and communication are achieved using REST/HTTP, no other protocols or middleware are necessary. Also no rights management for each external systems is needed, which otherwise would have to be configured separately for each source.

Technology

The software is written in Java and utilizes the SAIL API, so it can be used with various triple stores. The thesaurus management itself (viewing, creating and editing SKOS concepts and their relationships) can be done in an AJAX Frontend based on Yahoo User Interface (YUI). Editing of labels can alternatively be done in a Wiki style HTML frontend. For key-phrase extraction from documents PoolParty uses a modified version of the KEA 5 API, which is extended for the use of controlled vocabularies stored in a SAIL Repository (this module is available under GNU GPL). The analysed documents can be stored and indexed in Lucene/Solr or any other (enterprise) search system along with extracted and semantically related concepts.

A lot of activities around Linking Open Data (“LOD”) and the associated data sets which are nicely visualised as a “cloud” are going on for quite a while now. It is exciting to see how the rather academic “Semantic Web” and all the work which is associated with this disruptive technology can be transformed now into real business use cases.

What I have observed in the last few months, especially in business communities, is the following:

• “Linked Data” sounds interesting for the business people because the phrase creates a lot of associations in a second or two; also the database crowd seems to be attracted by this web-based approach of data integration
• “Web of Data” is somehow misleading because many people think that this will be a new web which replaces something else. Same story with the “Semantic Web”
• “Linking Open Data” sounds dangerous and not trustworthy to many companies

For insiders it is clear, that the “openness” of data, especially in commercial settings, can be controlled and has to be controlled in many cases i.e. by defining the right licensing models. But here we are still at the beginning as a workshop at ISWC 2009 has illustrated.

Anyway, looking at the characteristics of Linked Data Flows, they can be one-way or mutual. In some cases data from companies will be put into the cloud, and can be opened up for many purposes, in other use cases it will stay inside the boundaries. In other scenarios only (open) data from the web will be consumed and linked with corporate data, but no data will be exposed to the world (except the fact, that data was consumed by an entity).

And of course: On many other occasions datasets and repositories will be opened up partly depending on the CCs (or similar, not yet defined attributes) and the underlying privacy regulations one wants to use.

This makes clear that LOD / Linking Open Data is just one detail of a bigger picture. Since companies (and governments) play a crucial role to develop the whole infrastructure, we need to draw a new picture that illustrates the various Linked Data Flows in a better way:

Concluding from this the best thing would be to talk about Linked Data in general and just refer to Linking Open Data in the right context. Despite better knowledge for business people the term  “open” is still associated with “free” and “dubious provenance”. And given the fact that hardly anybody has given hard evidence on the ROI of open business models the “open argument” does count little in a time of decreasing economic prosperity.

So what would be critical to get the Linked Data thing running is to provide the corresponding business and licensing models for your Linked Data strategy. But this includes having a good understanding of the assets you want to capitalize. Given the fact that metada assets are still a novel and vastly unexplored business field which so far lack a regulated supply and demand structure there are still lots of structural obstacles that hinder the uptake of Linked Data. Providing more of the same in a laissez faire mode – like TimBL critisized at this year’s Web 2.0 Summit – might be inspiring for the in-crowd, but it might not be sufficient to build a linked data business.

In order to allow for a high level of interaction, the attendance is limited to ten participants and ample time for questions and discussion with our experts is designated. Each webinar works as a stand-alone module, so you can pick and choose some of them or book the whole series of 6 webinars.

We’ll kick off with a session about Semantic Wikis on Thursday 22nd of October. A German language version will be held at 9 a.m., alternatively you can atted an English version at 6 p.m. CET.

Each Thursday we cover a different topic such as Semantic Search, Corporate Thesaurus Management, Text Mining on the Corporate Semantic Web, Linking Open Data and Semantic Advertising.

In order to participate you only need broadband access to the internet, Windows or a Mac and a fairly up-to-date browser. For detailed system requirement see the webinar overview.

We hope to talk to you in one or more of these sessions!

Before the Meetup from 09:30 till 17:30 the Corporate Semantic Web Working Group of FU Berlin and the Semantic Web Company will hold a training workshop about the application of Semantic Web technologies in corporate settings. The workshop will be held in german.

Further details about place, time and the program can be found behind this link.