Semantic Web Company

A new journal was launched yesterday, called “Semantic Web – Interoperability, Usability, Applicability.” The publisher is IOS Press, who is already active in the Semantic Web area, e.g. by means of their journal “Applied Ontology,” their book series “Studies on the Semantic Web,” and a considerable number of Semantic Web publications in their series “Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications” (and, not to forget, a frequent physical presence at major Semantic Web conferences).

Since I am one of the editors-in-chief (the other one is Krzysztof Janowicz), I prefer to refrain from discussing the rationale behind launching (yet another) Semantic Web journal. Let’s just say that a growing community requires a growing communication infrastructure, and let history deal with the rest …

But I’d like to point out that we have made a very conscious decision to run the journal under an open and transparent review process: with non-anomyous reviews which are made publicly available on the journal homepage.  And any researcher – not only those explicitly asked to review – can add reviews to submitted papers and thus influence the transparent decision process. We’ve already received a lot of positive feedback about this set-up, and we’re looking forward to seeing it in motion.

Besides the types of papers one usually finds in journals, such as traditional research papers and surveys, the journal will also sport short papers on ontologies, tools, and applications.

We’re looking forward to your contributions to this new and exciting endeavour!

Pascal Hitzler

That’s the title of my diploma thesis and first of all, thanks to SWC for the possibility to say some words about it. My interest in knowledge management reaches back some time now and I decided to make it the subject of my diploma thesis in my first attempt to write one back in 2001. The semantic web “came to me” in the last one or two years and the TRIPLE-I conference last year was somehow the trigger for me to connect the two topics.

My basic idea was very simple. When you read about the Semantic Web you are confronted right away with connections to creating knowledge and knowledge management. But in my understanding the Semantic Web is a technical thing and knowledge management is primarily a cultural and organisational thing. So the research questions for my thesis where:

• What relevance do knowledge management and semantic technologies have in the daily work of people working in knowledge intensive domains?
• Which possibilities lie in the adoption of knowledge management and semantic technologies?
• Are semantic technologies already fit for practical use?

The basis of the empirical part of my thesis are group discussions held in different organisations. As a result I developed starting points for an understanding of the topics “Knowledge Management” and “Semantic Web” and their relevance in organisations. The empirical results, in short, provide the following answers to the research questions:

• The “theoretical relevance” of both topics is high, the “practical relevance” on the other hand is rather low. Neither do structured concepts for knowledge management exist in the studied organisations, nor are there attempts at using semantic technologies
• Most of the participants have not heard of the “semantic web” prior to the discussions. After having been introduced to the topic, the relevance of the semantic web and of semantic technologies is rated high
• Possibilities are seen in a better management of information or knowledge in organisations and, especially for semantic technologies, in the improvement of search functionality’s and search results
• Semantic technologies are not yet seen as fit for practical use
• The connection between knowledge management and semantic web is taken as a fact without giving any justification for it.

In my conclusion I tried to match my results with the results of the Semantic Web Barometer 2009 and it was very interesting for me, that there were several similarities. I also found that talking to the people that have to work with technologies that are developed for them can be quite interesting and that group discussion are a great way to do that.

I wrote most parts of my diploma thesis in a wiki (and the rest is available as PDF) so you can find it on my wiki.

Your comments and annotations are very welcome!

Thanks for reading as far as this, Helmut

Related articles by Zemanta

• ISWC Workshop on Semantic Web Applications in Scientific Discourse (w3.org)
• Leo Sauermann – gnowsis: Weak memory remedy @ webinale (tiburon-tv.com)

Between November 1, 2008 and January 22, 2009 the Semantic Web Company in cooperation with the Know Center Graz and the Corporate Semantic Web Working Group of Freie Universität Berlin conducted an online survey on experiences with and expectations towards Semantic Web technologies. The data analysed in this survey was primarily collected among Semantic Web specialists from science and industry.

We recommend to read this report as a snapshot on the development of the Semantic Web. It shall give the reader a brief overview over current trends and possible future topics. It shall provide orientation at a broader scale that helps the reader to compare his/her personal notion of the current development with the aggregated views from other specialists. Beside that, the results of this survey can be used to formulate further hypotheses for testing under more advanced empirical circumstances.

For better orientation we grouped the respondents by their approach to the topic into Research-oriented and Application-oriented. While the first category consists mainly of stakeholders from the academic or industrial scientific sector, the latter category consists of interested users and decision makers with an industrial background.

The results in brief:

Social Software

• There exist slightly differing application and usage patterns of Social Software between the two groups, but the general trend says: Wikis are king! Social Bookmarking stays behind.
• There exists broad consent about the benefits of Social Software. Both groups say that quick access to information and knowledge is the biggest benefit generated by Social Software, followed by social networking functionalities and ubiquitous access to documents and data.
• There are differring notions about the barriers to Social Software, but consent exists that the amount of time necessary to use and maintain Social Software applications is the biggest obstacle.

Semantic Web

• The overall Semantic Web familiarity is already rather high.
• Most participants, especially from the research-domain, have dealt with the topic for more than three years. Application-oriented users catch up.
• When it comes to Semantic Web education self-study is the general pattern among both groups.
• More than 80 percent of application-oriented and research-oriented participants think that Semantic Web technologies are at least relevant to be used for corporate and business purposes.
• Search is the killer app! Integration costs & data control might be important aspects.
• There exist differring notions about the importance of certain barriers to the Semantic Web. Application-oriented participants believe that the organisational culture, the complexity of the technology, a general lack of experts and a lack of success stories are the biggest obstacles to the application of Semantic Web technologies. On the contrary research-oriented participants believe that the lack of success stories, a gerenal lack of experts, a lack in quality of available software and the problem to quantify the benefits will hinder the broad adoption.
• While just a small minority believes that there won’t be any changes at all, most participatns expect changes in regard to competencies of the knowledge worker and new forms of collaboration either between or within companies.
• The expected time to market is 2 – 5 years.
• The readiness to implement Semantic Web technologies is relatively high among both groups although the application-oriented participants seem to be a bit more reluctant.
• The last question of the survey reveals that expectations towards the Semantic Web are very high! Especially the application-oriented participants believe that the relevance of Semantic Web technologies in times of crisis is growing.

Do your own analysis – Download the report and the data set!

Due to the small sample size there has been no hard statistical testing on the data. For further testing interested parties can download the report and data set from right below or  www.know-center.at and www.corporate-semantic-web.de. The data set is provided in SPSSformat and available under a CC license.

Report: SemWeb Awareness Barometer 2009

Data Set: SemWeb Awareness Barometer 2009

First results from our last online survey “Semantic Web Awareness Barometer” are now available. We conducted the survey togetehr with the Corporate Semantic Web Initiative from the FU Berlin and the Know Center in Graz. We got 256 valid cases (from 561 responses) which reveal some intertesting results concerning the experience , expectations and readiness for Social Software and the Semantic Web. In short:

Just recently Springer came up with AuthorMapper, a great new tool to explore the scientific world, see trends on a map and find related articles etc.:

AuthorMapper, an online tool for visualizing scientific research, enables document discovery based on author locations and geographic maps. Integrating content and mapping technology, AuthorMapper provides an easy-to-use, dynamic interface that allows you to:

• Explore patterns in scientific research
• Identify new and historic literature trends
• Discover wider relationships
• Locate other experts in your field

Let´s have a look on the global map of the “Semantic Web World” (at least the scientific part of it):

IOS Press Amsterdam – in cooperation with AKA Verlag Heidelberg – has just launched a new book series called Studies on the Semantic Web. Publications within the series will be all kinds of Semantic Web related edited or authored volumes, and also excellent dissertations. The first three volumes are already in preparation.

The Editorial Board comprises some of the most prominent Semantic Web researchers word-wide and consists of Fausto Giunchiglia, Carole Goble, Asuncion Gomez-Perez, Frank van Harmelen, Pascal Hitzler (as Editor-in-Chief), Riichiro Mizoguchi, Mark Musen, Daniel Schwabe, Steffen Staab, and Rudi Studer.

If you are interested in publishing a book in the series, contact the Editor-in-Chief.

The roll-out of semantic web technologies seems to enter the next stage. And it will be a quiet (r)evolution like the open source movement was. Two examples: Next year´s JAX in Mainz/Germany will have its first Semantic Web track. Organisers say that “the Semantic Web is going to conquer the business market soon” – we will see if it will be that martial.

Another example: One of the biggest Open Source Magazines in Germany, t3n, has recently published its new magazine with many stories around the Semantic Web. Editor in chief, Jan Christe says: “We have constantly stumbled upon semantic web related stuff  when we scanned the news, so we decided to set a focus on this topic.”

The Semantic Web is tangible now – Christe says: “Applications like OpenCalais, Zemanta or Tagaroo show the end-users what´s really in for them.” And it is also nice to see, that the semantic web won´t be reduced down to “search” anymore: t3n´s new issue has also interesting articles about Linked Data, for instance Sören Auer´s “How to develop Semantic Web Applications”.

So, as a conclusion: Paul Miller´s waiting for the “Semantic Web in Business” (a great blog post!) has an end. It won´t be found in heavy books, rather in the open source community and sometimes in light-weight magazines.

Yes, we can!

Semantic MediaWiki is being featured in issue 12/2008 of the German popular computer magazine iX in an article about wiki engines. It’s the only semantic wiki among those presented, and although it is an extension of MediaWiki (which underlies Wikipedia) – which is also in the article – it is discussed separately and thus receives quite some emphasis in the article. iX has featured Semantic MediaWiki before, more precisely in an article dedicated to it in 11/2007. It’s well-deserved, I think, considering the many sites which use Semantic MediaWiki.

It’s good to see that the visibility of Semantic Web is also growing outside academia and involved industry.

Author: Pascal Hitzler

You have probably already heard about GoodRelations, “the web ontology for e-commerce”. Martin Hepp from Bundeswehr University in Munich recently created a webcast, giving a short introduction to semantic web-based E-Commerce and to the GoodRelations vocabulary – I want to see more of such introductions which aim at a wider audience in terms of style and intellectual accessibility!

Last week I had an an encounter with a social scientist (within an academic setting) who argued that discussing the Semantic web would not make sense for him (as a social scientist), because of the present lack of social practices in that field… (*jaw-dropping*) I could not persuade him with the argument that the Linked data cloud itself was the result of a social practice – the view he had of the semantic web (which I assume was not an uneducated one) even led him to denounce that developments like Dbpedia, Twine, Revyu, or the use of metadata in general had anything to do with the Semantic Web.

And this is a big challenge.

On the one hand, it is a good thing that there are social scientists who at least have a certain notion of the Semantic Web – on the other, it seems as if all the exciting ideas and developments that have taken place in the last few years have failed to reach those who have been sensitized for the SemWeb project when the idea was first conceived. I am not meaning to make a statement about social scientists here, but rather about the need to communicate what has further happened to the original idea outside also outside of one’s own community.

Btw: In its current issue, quarterly (German-language) magazine t3n is featuring a Web 3.0 and Applied Semantic Web topic as its opener. And that is a good sign, too!

Jennifer Golbeck, Matthew Rothstein. Linking Social Networks on the Web with FOAF: A Semantic Web Case Study. Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI’08).
Download (PDF, 320 KB).

ABSTRACT
One of the core goals of the Semantic Web is to store data in distributed locations, and use ontologies and reasoning to aggregate it. Social networking is a large movement on the web, and social networking data using the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) vocabulary makes up a significant portion of all data on the Semantic Web. Many traditional webbased social networks share their members’ information in FOAF format. While this is by far the largest source of FOAF online, there is no information about whether the social network models from each network overlap to create a larger unified social network model, or whether they are simply isolated components. In this paper, we present a study of the intersection of FOAF data found in many online social networks. Using the semantics of the FOAF ontology and applying Semantic Web reasoning techniques, we show that a significant percentage of profiles can be merged from
multiple networks. We present results on how this affects network structure and what it says about relationships and individual behavior. Finally, we discuss the implications this has for using web-based social networking data to create intelligent user interfaces and social software.