Semantics & Philosophy |The Semantic Puzzle

Social Semantic Web – New Publication Out

October 16, 2008 by Jana Herwig, Category: Literature & Publications, Semantics & Philosophy, Social Software

The “Social Semantic Web” is here – yay! The book of the same name, edited by Andreas Blumauer (right) and Tassilo Pellegrini, is now available in stores. Another contributor from SWC is Matthias Samwald (left), who, together with Holger Stenzhorn, discussed the relevance of the Semantic Web for biomedial research in their article for the book.

The publication (in German, with the exception of one article by Narayanan Kulathuramaiyer and Hermann Maurer addressing issues of Data Mining) has four sections:

a low-threshold introduction to Web 2.0 and social software, covering technological, cultural and social aspects,
an overview of core technologies and methods, covering e.g. knowledge discovery, expert finders, tag recommendation, etc,
an overview and discussion of existing applications and their perspectives within the Social Semantic Web, e.g. the Semantic Desktop, Bibsonomy or the perspectives for biomedical research,
a discussion of phenomena of the Social Semantic Web from the perspective of communication studies and social sciences, e.g. privacy on the social semantic web, or the role of user-generated content for individual empowerment.

We have also created a wiki for the book (using Semantic Media Wiki) which is available at social.semantic-web.at. You can, for instance, browse it by article, by author, or by organisation. Tom Schandl made a few changes to available templates, which he is soon going to blog about.

Image by leobard via FlickrAuthor copies were shipped last week – some of the contributors have already blogged about the book, for instance Leo Sauermann, who, together with Malte Kiesel, Kinga Schumacher and Ansgar Bernardi, contributed an article about the Semantic Desktop and personal knowledge management (image also provided by Leo Sauermann). Jan Schmidt a.k.a “Schmidt with Dee Tee”, in an article he wrote together with Tassilo Pellegrini, approached the Semantic Web from the perspective of Communication Studies; Jan has posted the abstract (in German) and offered a bit of commentary on his blog. Michael Nagenborg, who authored the article about privacy on the Social Semantic Web, announced the book on his website.

Please let us know if you’ve also written a blog post about the book or have resources on Flickr, Slideshare, elsewhere; and/or tag it with “socsemweb08″ so that we can find it. Of course you can also immediately add them to the wiki yourself (page Resonanz).

Complete list of contributors (in order of appearance in the book): Continue reading →

A plea for quality – a chance for the Web?

October 15, 2008 by Marion Fuglewicz-Bren, Category: Internet & Media, Semantics & Philosophy

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,

ESWC – Video Lectures about Semantic Wikis

October 3, 2008 by Jana Herwig, Category: Conferences & Events, Semantics & Philosophy, Social Software

Sebastian Schaffert, coordinator of the KiWi project, just pointed readers of his blog to the video of his ESWC-Lecture
“Semantic Wikis – IkeWiki – A Semantic Wiki for Collaborative Knowledge Management”, also discussing knowledge management and why it should not be informed by quality management approach. Also published now is Peter Dolog’s talk about Semantic Wikis in general.

Semantic Wikis – IkeWiki – A Semantic Wiki for Collaborative Knowledge Management

Semantic Wikis – Introduction to semantic wikis

Here is an example of an implementation of IkeWiki, an open source semantic wiki developed mainly by Sebastian Schaffert.

What the Semantic Web can learn from Open Hypermedia

September 17, 2008 by Jana Herwig, Category: Semantics & Philosophy, Vocabularies & Languages

I didn’t know about the Open Hypermedia protocol (OHP) until I read a blog post today by Dave Millard, a Lecturer of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK. The OHP proposal was written in the 1996 by Hugh Davis, Andy Lewis and Antoine Rizk, and it was intended for the “communication between applications and hypermedia link services.”

OHP had inspired Dave Millard while he was pursuing his PhD studies, which he completed in 2001, but his recent involvement in a project called Synote – Annotating Media Resources gave him the opportunity to “return to some of those lost OH principles in the age of Web 2.0.”

Please read the account of this journey back on his blog – I would like to highlight in particular the conclusion, because he thinks that the failure of OHP offers some valuable lessons for the Semantic Web:

There’s a lesson here for the Semantic Web, another grand idea from the Hypertext and Web community that I have commented on before. The Semantic Web is a set of standards for representing and exchanging knowledge (as sets of RDF triples constrained by ontologies), like Open Hypermedia it is therefore about models, openness and interoperability. But also like Open Hypermedia many Semantic Web developers have fallen into the trap of forcing their model down into the system implementation and up into the UI.

So in the end perhaps Open Hypermedia does offer us a valuable lesson – not about the structures of hypertext – but about the need to abstract implementation and user experience away from the conceptual models that drive them.

This is a hard lesson – because you want users and developers to see your models, otherwise how can you convince them of their value. But it needs to be learned, otherwise the resulting systems will be far from convincing, and the machine-readable Web will continue to exist only as a collection of chaotic mashups.

Which takes us right into the interface debate and, e.g., the question whether data browsers are or are not too geeky. What do you think – what would be strategies to deliver the best to be achieved with a data model to the user, without turning the interface into a tricky contraption?

Related articles by Zemanta

Related articles by Zemanta