Semantic Web Company

The journal “Semantic Web – Interoperability, Usability, Applicability” – in short: the Semantic Web journal – was launched 7 months ago, sporting a transparent open review process. Pascal Hitzler is one of the Editors-in-Chief (the other one is Krzysztof Janowicz). He answers some questions on the motivation, setup, and future plans of the journal. (Pascal also wrote the questions and this intro, so it’s really a fake interview. But it seemed an appropriate literary form …)

Question: Why did you launch yet another journal on Semantic Web?

Hitzler: Because the community is growing and the need for publication outlets grows with it. I heard the objection that there weren’t enough quality papers for all the journals, but I don’t think so. It’s just that most of the quality papers still end up in journals which are not dedicated to the Semantic Web as such.

Personally, my desire to start a new journal began when I wanted to do a special issue on Semantic Web reasoning in some other, established, journal, and the Editors-in-Chief basically replied with a lapidary “Is there anything to report?” I didn’t push the case back then (though I probably should have). But this and similar experiences made me think about scientific publishing from a different angle, a normative one: What should scientific publishing in our field look like? The journal gives me a possibility to realize some of my answers – or at least to go a few steps into the right direction. So when the opportunity arose to set up this journal with a well-known publishing house (IOS Press) and with a co-Editor-in-Chief (Krzysztof Janowicz, a strong proponent of open and transparent reviewing) who I knew would also put a maximum of energy into the venture, it was simply too good an opportunity to let it pass. However I also realize that the reality of scientific publishing can change only slowly, and that it needs time and gradual improvements. We can’t do it all at once.

Question: Your journal uses an open review process. What is that and why?

Hitzler: Open reviewing, in the sense we use it for the Semantic Web journal, is all about transparency. Submitted papers are made publicly available. Solicited reviews are made publicly available. Anybody else can additionally contribute a public review. Reviewers are publicly known by name. Discussions between reviewers and authors can (and should) happen in public. Reviewers and editors are acknowledged by name in the published versions of the papers.

The obvious reason for setting up an open review process is to improve the quality of the decision-making process. We have to realize that some persisting habits about reviewing have their origin in times when scientific publishing was made for a small expert audience, and had to be conducted by sending manuscripts and letters by conventional mail. Today, however, reviewing and publishing is inflationary, which substantially reduces the quality of the typical paper – and of the typical review. While we cannot simply reverse this trend, we can take advantage of the World Wide Web to counteract these developments and improve quality by bringing the review process out into the public space. Reviewers will put more effort into providing constructive reviews if they publicly sign their reviews. Open and public discussions on controversial submissions minimize errors in the decision making.

Personally, I also hope that the ensuing discussions will help to bring back a scientific tradition which has long been on the decline in our field: controversial but constructive discussion. Regretfully, these days we somehow tend to mainly present incremental results, bash opposing opinions, and sugarcoat our own …

Question: Past attempts to set up open reviewing for journals have failed …

Hitzler: Yes, I remember seeing some of these early attempts many years ago when I was a PhD student. Even back then I was doubtful if the sometimes rather radical setups had a chance. In the meantime, there is growing experience in other fields that open reviews can work out if set up carefully. In our case, we mix old-style with open, by still soliciting reviews, and by giving solicited reviewers the option to stay anonymous, if they see a need for this protection. We Editors-in-Chief also “steer” the journal in the sense that we have rather clear strategic targets, e.g. in terms of scope and quality, which we’re trying to meet. In short: rather than experimenting with radical changes, we mildly introduce a new but essential component – open reviewing – in a traditional scientific publishing process. That way, it will work.

Question: But isn’t anonymous reviewing necessary to protect the reviewers and in order to get objectively critical reviews?

Hitzler: Sometimes. That’s why it’s good that solicited reviewers can opt to stay anonymous. Open reviewing – like any form of assessment in science – isn’t perfect, and has its drawbacks. However, the current reality in Computer Science is that reviewing processes are often extremely poor and decision processes are not very transparent. For conferences, reviewer discussions and rebuttal phases were introduced some time ago to improve the decision making. Open reviews simply go a step further.

Question: Aren’t potential authors afraid of getting a public bashing in the review process?

Hitzler: Reviewers typically won’t bash if they sign with their name. And in fact, we monitor the reviews in order to make sure that they adhere to a certain minimal scientific standard. At the same time, it’s probably just as well if our public process makes people more reluctant to submit papers which are not yet mature enough for publication. We wouldn’t want to publish them anyway. And in order to protect authors of rejected submissions, we actually remove the corresponding papers and reviews from the website after some time.

While I understand that some people may be more reluctant to put their work out in the open before it’s been accepted through a review process, we have to be aware that many quality journal publications, like the ones we’re striving for, are extended versions of high-quality conference publications: so they have indeed already been through a review process. Furthermore, submitting to our journal gives added visibility for the work, since it’s up for public review on our website.

Question: Your journal also publishes papers which are not standard research papers. Aren’t you compromising scientific rigor by doing this?

Hitzler: Times are changing. The prime purpose of a scientific journal is to disseminate results to other researchers, and to do so through a quality filter. Traditionally, this dissemination was restricted to focused research contributions, targeted at other researchers working in the same narrow area as the author(s). Semantic Web as a field, however, is extremely diverse and comprises researchers and practitioners from many other communities. Consequently, high-quality tools, systems, ontologies, introductory surveys and application reports are very much needed for the dissemination of advances in our field to all interested parties. As for research papers, the role of the journal for these other types of papers is primarily quality assurance. And consequently, we have clearly formulated the evaluation criteria for different types of papers. A report on a high impact tool, for example, is thus not a direct research contribution in the traditional sense. But if the tool enables further developments in the field, then it is worth reporting, and it indirectly makes a contribution to scientific progress.

Question: Why are you still publishing through a commercial publishing house?

Hitzler: Because it helps. A lot. It’s easy to underestimate the amount of work which needs to be put into running a journal, and going with a commercial publisher rids the Editors-in-Chief and the Editorial Board from a lot of tasks which are not directly related with quality assurance. Open review does not mean that this kind of professional support is no longer needed. And we are glad that we have found a publishing house which is very accommodating to our ideas.

Question: What are plans for the immediate future?

Hitzler: We currently have more than 30 papers up for review, most of them responses to two recent calls, one on tools and systems papers, and one on applications of OWL – and some of the submissions seem rather prominent. We also have several special issues lined up, most of them have not been announced yet. The first issue will appear towards the end of the year and contain vision statements by the EB members – we do not normally publish vision statements, but this seemed an appropriate way to introduce the journal. Considering that the journal has been launched only 7 months ago, this means that we are already very well under way in pursuing our goal of establishing a high-quality scientific outlet in the field.

[author: Pascal Hitzler]

The present state of development, future trends and expected market scenarios for Semantic Technologies are shown in the just published “Demand driven Mapping Report”. The report is part of the EU-funded project Value It, which is about bringing together the various stakeholders within the sector: Industry, Research and Government. VALUE-IT preliminary findings show that the STE potential market in Europe will size up to €1.44B for 2014. Scanning furthermore the executive summary of the report, some findings attract attention:

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

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

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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