Semantic Web Company

From June 9 – 11, 2010 the EuroITV Conference discusses latest advances and research of media technology, HCI, media studies, and the content creation community. Tassilo Pellegrini talked to Lyndon Nixon, STI International, about the future role of semantic technologies in the television industry and how a Social Semantic Web might influence the traditional television experience.

At this year’s EuroITV conference you will hold a workshop on the EU project NoTube. Can you give us a brief insight what this project is about?

NoTube is all about the future of television! We are seeing a significant shift in viewing patterns driven by the Web, which breaks the linear programming model and makes TV or video on demand a reality, whether it is being provided directly by the broadcasters or via a third party like Hulu or YouTube. The Web-based model taken up by viewers using their PC is being transferred back to the TV set in the lounge by IPTV applications running on Set Top Boxes or Internet TVs which come with Web access built into them. The strong interaction between the desires of users and technology has had its impact on the Web and as the gap between the Web and TV experience grows, we aim to translate features of the Web to TV, such as the personalised and community aspects. The NoTube European project puts the TV user back in the driver’s seat by generating user profiles from data the user creates on the Social Web, and in this way facilitating a personalised TV experience without an intrusive user profiling process.

What promises does the Social Semantic Web hold with respect to innovate the television experience? What is the vision?

With the hundreds of channels available via modern TV providers, content selection and dealing with the vast amount of TV-related information become significant challenges for users. TV metadata is created and distributed by a small group of people, as a result of the closed-source information exchange protocols that are the standard for providing electronic programme guide (EPG) data to users. Yet people often have several clusters of personal data on the Web, such as their profiles on social networks, or ratings of videos on YouTube and IMDB.

Analogously, there are many isolated clusters of broadcast data on the Web, such as broadcast data on EPGs and background information on Wikipedia. Within the NoTube vision context, we speculate that the conjunction of all these bits and pieces of data provide accurate information on someone’s interests, which is suitable for generating relevant recommendations on TV broadcasts. We see progress on opening up this data with open standards and APIs such as Google’s OpenSocial, Facebook’s OpenGraph, DBPedia, the BBC ontologies and FOAF. Further, we assume that Semantic Web technologies provide important building blocks for realizing this vision, as they enable the global identification mechanism of URIs and the means to define relations between data anywhere on the Web. By integrating these different pockets of data, we can provide TV viewers with personalised recommendations for their viewing.

What economic effects on the value chain do you expect from semantically empowered television? Will there be new revenue opportunities with respect to advertising or Pay TV models?

Our primary focus is on open source and open standards, so for example we are extending the open source MythTV media centre to develop first scenarios of personalised EPGs. However, down the road there are clearly commercialisation opportunities.

Another scenario in the project looks at personalised advertising, which is clearly somewhere where there are revenue opportunities. However, we take user privacy very seriously, and one aspect we need to tackle in NoTube is the fine line between analysing user activity (in order to personalise their TV experience) and using that analysis commercially.

The third NoTube scenario involves pushing personalised news streams to TV viewers. Here, one could imagine that such a service could be packaged within a Pay TV offer, and used to give competitive advantage or justify a higher fee.

Despite many attempts experience has shown that television is a rather conservative and innovation-averse medium. What can be done to stimulate the uptake of semantic technologies in the television sector?

That’s true; in the traditional broadcasting sector the larger companies are extremely slow to adopt new technologies. However, I think Web video and TV has really shook up the sector – traditional broadcasters are seeing that they lose viewer share to Web-based offers and have been quick to take their video material to the Web. There is a clear demand for this, look at the viewing numbers for BBC’s iPlayer in the UK for example.

IPTV also means that new applications and services can be built on top of traditional TV. I think once the broadcasters see the added value of offering applications and services tied into the content of their programming – such as through semantic analysis of the program metadata, which NoTube is doing – they will be encouraged to support better these efforts. The BBC is really taking a lead in this, publishing a lot of their data already in RDF.

Workshop Information

The NoTube workshop on Future Television: integrating the Social and
Semantic Web will take place at the EuroITV 2010 conference in Tampere, Finland on June 9, 2010.
For more information please see

http://www.euroitv2010.org

and

http://www.notube.tv/news/73-futuretv-2010

For more information about NoTube, please see

http://notube.tv and follow our blog, at http://blog.notu.be

About Lyndon Nixon

Dr. Lyndon Nixon joined STI International as senior postdoctoral researcher in November 2008. Previously he was a researcher at the FU Berlin, where he acted as Industry Area Co-Manager of the EU Network of Excellence KnowledgeWeb and double Workpackage Leader in the EU project TripCom. In KnowledgeWeb, Dr. Nixon organized and led activities promoting the transfer of semantic technology to industry. He received his PhD in January 2007 with the topic ‘Semantic Web enabled Multimedia Presentation system’. His research focus is Web-based TV/video and the semantically guided integration of Web-based content, and he has several publications and has organized a number of workshops around related themes.

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).

Luckily, times have come, where semantic search techniques have found their way to enhance knowledge providing theme portals. Nearly once a week a new knowledge portal with built-in semantic search pops up. They deal with environmental issues, health care, economy etc. These sites are good examples how the vision of a knowledge web is fostered by semantic technologies. Such focused approaches are great showcases for “a” semantic web (even if they are not based on “the” RDF semantic web) in the next few months besides general knowledge portals like Wolfram Alpha.

But the potential of these semantic theme portals is often reduced essentially by their bad usability. You get lost in categories and flags – you get puzzled by pulldowns, mouseovers and embedded hierachies – it’s sometimes a mess out off 1001 functions. You need to understand the underpinning semantic concept to get oriented within these applications – and this is not the goal of the exercise. Search has to be easy.

To show the potential of semantic technologies, we need good examples, which offer good usability. This is a call to everyone to provide such examples.

See my favorites:

• NextBio, a platform that enables life science researchers to search, discover, and share knowledge locked within public and proprietary data
• reegle, the Search Engine for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency
• CultureSampo, a Finnish cultural heritage platform for institutional organizations as well as private citizens

Just recently Google launched another interesting service called “In Quotes”. It delivers quotes from stories linked to from Google News and users can compare opinions of e.g. politicians in a very comfortable way.

If  a closer look is taken at the system, one can see that any person whose quotes are listed has got a URI: Barack Obama has got the uniform “qsid” tPjE5CDNzMicmM.

It seems like “qsid” stands for “Quad Store ID” which would perfectly support such a URI based system.

Does Google slowly approximate to the Semantic Web?

Prof. Rafael Capurro, one of the world’s most renowned experts of Information Ethics, together with his colleagues Max Senges (Ex-Google Researcher) and Michael Nagenborg (Robotics & Privacy Expert) has set up a collaborative project to “explore and discuss the values of netizens”. Please participate by contributing to their survey! (See below, I simply copied the email text.)

Dear all

It is my pleasure to introduce you to Rafael Capurro and Michael Nagenborg both experts in Informationethics. Following a podcast interview i held with Rafael (available @ archive.org ), we pursued his suggestion to initiate a dialogue about what underlying values users care about in their online lifes?

We have developed a short questionnaire which we invite you to fill out and spread amongst your network @ http://internetrightsandprinciples.org/node/63

This survey is meant as first step to gather some empirical data so we can (a) deliberate and discuss these themes further in the forum (where we have setup a dedicated discussion thread @ http://internetrightsandprinciples.org/node/64 and (b) strategize & formulate our project (and funding) proposals based on empirical evidence.

Again, please invite your friends and peers to contribute to this exploration of what user really care about when online.

Looking forward to discuss with you
Rafael, Michael and Max

One of the many ways that the election of Barack Obama as president has echoed that of John F. Kennedy is his use of a new medium that will forever change politics. For Mr. Kennedy, it was television. For Mr. Obama, it is the Internet. Obama´s Internet Campaign Changed Politics. “Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president. Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not have been the nominee,” said Arianna Huffington, editor in chief of The Huffington Post.

America´s new president Barack Obama didn’t go out and recruit on facebook, they came to him at first. Did the internet make Obama’s natural “viralness” quicker and more transparent? Obama’s huge victory on Tuesday night was celebrated in Austria and Germany, as it was around the world: German Press on Obama Victory: “The Dream is Alive“. Der Spiegel’s Gabor Steingart – who for months dismissed the notion that Obama had a real chance for the White House – writes about the Resurrection of the American Dream: “His base note is conciliatory, his overtone is exalted and the harmony is finely balanced. If anyone out there still doubted that the American dream was alive, he called out to his supporters in Chicago, “tonight is your answer.”

However things will happen or not and however the „Change has come to America“: The president´s new official website is online www.whitehouse.gov. And here users are really being involved. We all are involved. Obama means change. Let´s see in what ways this will concern the future of the internet.

The Web of Data Practitioners Days concluded with the session on Multimedia in the Web of Data, the first part of which was led by Ansgar Scherp (University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany).

Multimedia content, as Ansgar pointed out, is hardly annotated, badly organized, and hardly ever looked at again – just think of the 300 something pics you might take on an average week-end getaway, and which you never touch again. Annotating multimedia content requires a lot of work and dedication – but most of the time, these pictures eventually dissappear in the “digital shoe box” that is your photo management software.

The most obvious remedy is to annotate content as early as possible, ideally when creating the content, ideally already on your portable camera (formerly known as: mobile phone:) Ansgar suggested to provide incentives for people to encourage picture annotation – professionals could for instance receive a higher financial reward if the deliver already annotated pictures. And of course there are ‘Games with a purpose’ such as Google Image Labeler, where players tag images in pairs, with and against each other, and are rewarded with the entertainment factor of the game.

The slide below shows what has happened (or will happen) to the process of creating photo books in the digital age and the age of mashups:

After all, this is the age of the social semantic web, so why not try and (re-)use the content, structure and contexts that other users have already created on the web? Content augmentation, for the scope that Ansgar is concerned with, consists in the reuse of content and structures (e.g. from sources such as Flickr and Wikipedia, Geonames) made possible through the definition of rules, e.g.:

• If there are two or less pictures on a page*
• then automatically augment the page with additional photos using location information.

* Page here means a page in the album you are currently working on – you probably took a picture of yourself and your friend in Paris, and even though you went to the Centre Pompidou, you forgot to actually take a pic of the building itself – well, let the web be your library!

So the goal is clear: develop a procedure for applying automatic content augmentation in the creation of good photo books.

But what makes a ‘good’ photo book anyway? Here are some of the results of a structural analysis of real, human-created photobooks conducted at CeWe Color:

• % of photos with faces: 36%
• Number of album pages: 16.96
• Photos per page: 6.69
• Text fields per page: 1.45
• % of pages with text: 87%

There are many rules that can be established from the structural analysis, which can be applied in turn in the creation of photoboooks, e.g. rules like this one,

• If the text located in the upper third of a page
• if the font size is equal or larger that 16 points
• if the number of words is less than 10
• if there is no caption on the page that has a bigger font size
• then this page is the title

Ansgar recommended xSmart, which he described as a “context-driven authoring tool for page-based multimedia presentations.”

Ansgar’s presentation was followed by two more: one by Yves Raimond on Interlinking Music on the Web of Data, and one on Interlinking Multimedia – in spite of better intentions, I did not manage to cover these two in detail, but at least I gathered the links to relevant resources from all three sessions… (more…)

When I read in the news that one of the most influential contemporary literary critics of German literature, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, had just refused a German TV-Award – on stage, as part of his acceptance speech – I was somewhat amazed. I’ve always enjoyed his salty sarcastic remarks in the literary talk show (Literarisches Quartett) which Reich-Ranicki had hosted from 1988 to 2002.

Only when I clicked through to the Youtube-Video I got a clue of what had really happened. The 88-year old connoisseur of qualities – in all philosophical characteristics – didn’t want to find himself in a setting of poor quality, such as the TV/stage program he had witnessed that evening. Applaudable and worth admiring I may say.

And this led me to the perception that – from a media viewpoint – the internet has a viable, if yet hardly exploited chance of putting „old media“ into perspective: Apart from all the other perspectives opening up at the moment, the web, as a pull medium where the user is in charge, is really offering new media aspects. And then a saying came to my mind that I was told many years ago by a charismatic IBM-Manager and that impressed my constructivist heart: “Wanderer, there is no road. The road is made by walking.“ Being part of (or at least tagging along with;-) a pace making community such as the Semantic Web community is a nice feeling.

Author: Marion Fugléwicz-Bren,

In a recent study the authors Aleecia McDonald and Lorrie Faith Cranor of Carnegie Mellon University found out that the time allocated for reading online privacy policies on the websites you regularly visit would produce a total loss in productivity and time equalling $365 billion a year.

These findings are based on empirical data estimating that an average internet user invests approximatly USD 3000.- per year getting to grips with the various privacy policies of their service providers.

But – bluntly speaking – as “noone” reads privacy statements anyway, this is not a real economic loss. So you might say it is an academic problem. But still it raises the interesting question what it would cost if you as an internet end-user wanted to make use of your civil rights and gain some souvereignty towards your service providers.

So here the question arises how semantic web technologies, especially the Policy Aware Web, can be a viable solution to this economic problem. But the answer to the question is a political one, which means it will be up to the politicians to recognise this problem and support a (technological?) solution … which from my point means that there are interesting times ahead for a Policy Aware Web.

Read a more detailed coverage of the study at out-law.com.

Author: Tassilo Pellegrini

An implementation of Semantic MediaWiki in public administration reiceved a jury award yesterday in the final ceremony of the highly coveted multimedia state award (Staatspreis Multimedia) 2008 in Vienna: Centre for Public Administration KDZ’s platform for the cooperation of administrations (Plattform Verwaltungskooperation) in Austria, Germany, Italy and Switzerland received praise for its use of open, semantic technologies in their effort to further the collaboration between administrations and administrative staff. Those of you who can read German: read the response from Bernhard Krabina, KDZ, here or contact him here, if you’d like to learn more. The top state award itself went to HPC Dual, a combination of electronic and physical mail delivery.

Also published yesterday was an interview with Matthias Schindler, former member of board of Wikimedia Germany, at the occasion of the publication of a physical Wikipedia, i.e. a one-volume encyclopedia in print (publisher: Wissen Media, a Bertelsmann division). According to the English Wikipedia, “the volume is planned to include abbreviated entries for the 50,000 most commonly used search terms of the prior two years. The book is to be priced at 19.95 euros, with one euro from every sale going to the German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation.”

The interviewers also asked Schindler for his “encyclopedic Wikipedia dream” – I hope his response will catch on in the Wikimedia chapters worldwide:

I would one day like to see a large edition of Wikipedia (including a German language edition), which makes use of the Semantic MediaWiki extension. The dream in a nutshell, without consideration of the current state of research and development: A wikipedia that can be read not only by humans, but also by computers, a Wikipedia that can offer concrete answers to concrete questions and that creates content individually for users, something that they can make use of; great if Wikipedia played the role of the first, mainstream Semantic Web application. While this is still in the process of coming together, there are enough other things for us to do.

(btw, my translation).

Concrete answers to concrete questions, a personalized Wikipedia – I am not even aiming that high at the moment.

Just consider the absurd amount of lists in Wikipedia, all of which are maintained manually. Take for instance the list of hardcore punk bands, the list of fictional countries (to be distinguished from the list of European fictional countries) or the list of military operations.

How often do you think these need an update? And if a new hardcore punk band is added – will the creators of the new article think about adding it to the list? What about articles which make make a reference to or mention things that are or should be on a particular list?

As a list has the inherent claim of being complete, it shouldn’t be left to humans to create and maintain them – leave that to the machines! Vote Semantic MediaWiki for Wikipedia!

Author: Jana Herwig

Related articles by Zemanta

• 10 Millionth Article Written on Wikipedia
• Jimmy Wales and the Church of Latter-Day Wikipedians [The Sum Of All Human Knowledge]