Evan Sandhaus (f.l.t.r) busy preparing his talk in the kitchen of SWC, together with Andreas Blumauer (SWC) and Leo Sauermann (Gnowsis).

Mr. Sandhaus in action.

rNews is a RDFa vocabulary, which is basically a carefully selected subset of the very rich IPTC vocabulary and some additional elements that came up during the standardization process. It is now available in version 1.0 and – according to Evan – actively supported by schema.org.

As showed above the data model of rNews is really simple and centered around two classes: the NewsItem and the Concept. This deliberate simplicity is a major advancement compared to standards like NewsML (whose complexity probably prohibited its critical uptake among the news industry). But due to the functional extensions attributed to RDFa, rNews might also be considered more complex than hNews, the microformat equivalent issued by the IPTC in 2009.

Evan mentioned three scenarios that might drive the uptake of rNews for the benefit of news publishers:

1) Better news search

rNews allows you to explicate and differentiate various documents elements like, title, author, text body, picture etc., thus giving the publisher better control of what to expose for indexers and web crawlers. This might not just improve the display of rich snippets in the search results of Google and other search engines, but also allow automated population of faceted search and metadata based similarity search.

2) Better ad placement

As rNews can be applied to any kind of news-relevant media irrespective of its format (grafics, audio, video, etc.) the metadata can be used to avoid “unfortunate juxtapositions” between editorial content and ads. Hence, media agencies could profit from this additional data by fuelling their matching algorithms and gain better insight into the context specificities of content items.

3) Better analytics

By improving the semantic granularity of a news item this additional information can be used to carry the web analytics beyond the page level and provide a better insight into usage patterns. The additional data can be applied for visualization and exploration purposes i.e. for search engine optimization, sentiment detection and many more.

This is just a small fraction of things rNews could be used for. All in all it is exciting to see that IPTC has finally started to provide publishers with a standard that is relatively easy to implement and help them to overcome the obstacles of existing technologies without disrupting existing publishing workflows. In multi-sided markets like the news industry this might be a crucial success factor!

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





Open Data, Open Government, Open Source, Open Innovation – “Open” everywhere. Today I want to talk about another “Open something”: The “Open Intranet”. This might sound a bit radical but it will also help to reflect a little bit on the term “open” in general.

“Open Intranet” – isn´t this a contradiction by definition? What is understood by “Intranet”? It means a network of computers and users “within” some organisational boundaries. But boundaries don´t necessarily have to be closed as nature teaches us: Organisms aren´t closed systems. A watch would be an example for a closed system but living organisms tend to be open – to survive. Of course they aren´t totally open, in systems theory we are talking about systems which are structurally coupled with their medium when we refer to this special kind of openness. As an example, an immune system, having learned to recognise a class of virus it will remain sensitive to that and similar viruses in future. In contrast to this, imagine a fly walking over a painting of Rembrandt: Since the fly isn´t structurally coupled to the cultural space of human aesthetics it is not “open” to the beauty of Rembrandt´s work.

When we think of today´s intranets, we can see that they tend to be isolated from the world wide web, they don´t seem to perceive the internet as their medium. From a user perspective, those two systems aren´t connected to each other. Typically, when working on the intranet we jump from time to time to be in the “internet mode” and start to Google something, we copy it, jump back and paste it into the intranet. It´s the user who is the only part of the whole system connecting the internet with the intranet. Isn´t this exhausting for us?

And now I start with the good news: Intranets all over the world start to open up, slowly – but they do. It seems like the “pressure” from “the outside” just became too huge. In the first instance it seems that it´s not the data and the information which will “break” in, it´s rather the “cool functions” which web apps offer and which we (as digital natives) would like to have in our intranets too. We want:

• better search,
• more possibilities to interact with information,
• integrated views instead of jumping around,
• and we want more possibilities to self-serve our extensive hunger for more and well structured information.

On the information level intranets are still rather conservative: Typical pieces of information already “injected” from the web into an average intranet would be:

• weather forecasts,
• stock exchange rates,
• time zones and
• jokes.

How could companies use the web to inspire their employees (without opening up totally), how could the web “inject” the right amount of information into an intranet to make an enterprise portal as vivid as the web is being perceived by today´s typical end-user. How could this tremendous amount of data and knowledge on the web be “structurally” coupled with intranet repositories and workflows? What are the advantages a company could gain from publishing (at least some) data on the web?

Let me give you a few examples for intranet apps which have started to consume other information than jokes from the web:

• Enterprise Mashups: Combine CRM systems with social networks like LinkedIn
• Open innovation: Let´s bring the knowledge of consumers and producers together and improve certain products and services. As an example, just recently after BP´s oil spill more than 40.000 people came up with ideas on how to clean up  the oil, more than two dozen were deployed to help clean up the oil
• Content Augmentation: Enrich content which is being edited, let´s say in an enterprise wiki, automatically with some background knowledge from Wikipedia or with news from a news company

Finally I will also give you two examples for use cases where companies expose and publish internal data on the web (without violating privacy) and benefit from it.

• Wisdom of the crowd: The Canadian gold mining group Goldcorp made 400 megabytes of geological survey data available to the public over the Internet. They offered over $500,000 to anyone who could analyze the data and suggest places where gold could be found. The company claims that the contest produced 110 targets, 8 million ounces of gold, worth more than $3 billion.
• Prize economics: Netflix, a movie rental service in the US has published data for a contest to improve their recommender engine. One team out of 50.000 contestants after nearly 3 years has improved the existing recommender engine by more than 10% and won 1 Million dollar

To end with a conclusion: What Tim Berners-Lee has demanded in one of his famous TED talks was “raw data now!”. It has started to become reality. Just think of all the “Open Government Data Initiatives” around the globe which were initiated since then. Now companies with a “Web DNA” have started to understand the value of open data and to contribute their “5 cents” to the global “open data cloud”. I think this will not only be of value for many companies but also will increase tremendously the chances to resolve some global problems in the near future.

KiWi, the Open Source development platform for building Semantic Social Media Applications, offers features required for Social Media applications such as versioning, (semantic) tagging, rich text editing, easy linking, rating and commenting, as well as advanced “smart” services such as recommendations, rule-based reasoning, information extraction, intelligent search and querying, a sophisticated social reputation system, vocabulary management, and rich visualisation.

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.

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

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?

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.