Semantic Web Company

The Semantic Web Company created a series of online seminars (aka webinars) for you to acquire basic and practical knowledge about methologies, technologies and standards of the Semantic Web. In 90 minute sesseions we will cover the business aspects of topics such as content engineering, Knowledge Management, business intelligence, e-Business and more.

In order to allow for a high level of interaction, the attendance is limited to ten participants and ample time for questions and discussion with our experts is designated. Each webinar works as a stand-alone module, so you can pick and choose some of them or book the whole series of 6 webinars.

We’ll kick off with a session about Semantic Wikis on Thursday 22nd of October. A German language version will be held at 9 a.m., alternatively you can atted an English version at 6 p.m. CET.

Each Thursday we cover a different topic such as Semantic Search, Corporate Thesaurus Management, Text Mining on the Corporate Semantic Web, Linking Open Data and Semantic Advertising.

In order to participate you only need broadband access to the internet, Windows or a Mac and a fairly up-to-date browser. For detailed system requirement see the webinar overview.

We hope to talk to you in one or more of these sessions!

Time for a bit of over-the-top web 2.0 adulation… at yesterday’s Digitalks event (organized once again wonderfully by Meral Akin-Hecke), Luca Hammer was there and filmed throughout the presentations and discussions – using two cameras at a time AND live-editing and live-streaming it on Make.tv. What is Make.tv? The most incredible web 2.0 application I’ve seen so far – it’s a TV-Studion in your browser! And it’s free! (Although I doubt I will stay free forever)

You can live-edit the input from several cameras – this can also be achieved by logging in on different computers at a time, thus using the input from several built-in webcams at a time. You can drag and drop the video input channels into your scene, make the embedded videos smaller to achieve a screen-in-screen effect, create your own TV design and virtual studio from graphics…. wow, wow, wow.

I played with it today, not being quite as adventurous as Luca, in that I used only one camera (see what he achieved yesterday with multiple screens), nor did I interrupt and restart the recording (which I could have), but even though, I find the visual result, i.e. the ’studio’ I built from the book cover, impressive enough.

So here is it: My introduction of the Social Semantic Web publication (which is in German, which is why the audio is in German, too, but you don’t need to understand what I am saying to be impressed by Make.tv). Jump to seconds 3:30 to 4:30 to see how you can switch between different screens while doing the web cast.

P.S. That’s an image below – you can embed the video, but you cannot (yet) deactivate that it starts automatically if you embed it, so I’ve decided to use an image on the blog instead. Click here, or the image, to launch the webcast on the Make.tv website.

Btw, I am not sure whether I said XML or XHTML in the webcast, but of course I meant XHTML when talking about the benefits of RDFa.

On the occasion of the recent publication of our book, Social Semantic Web, we have created an accompanying wiki for you to explore the contents of the book and obtain information about its authors. Staying true to the motto “Eat your own dog food”, the Semantic Web Company has used a semantic wiki for that purpose.

We opted for Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) and the extensions Semantic Forms and Semantic Drilldown. In this blog post we’ll take a look at the handy features you get with these. This short tutorial is based on my SMW demonstration at the Web of Data Practitioners’ Days in Vienna two weeks ago.

As the book is in German, the wiki is set up in German, too, but that shouldn’t be a problem for understanding the demonstrated features. For the following examples, we have created a mirror of our productive wiki, so don’t hesitate to edit and play with this mirror wiki (we might refresh it occasionally, so don’t write any data into the wiki that you don’t also have stored elsewhere). This tutorial is going to take you through the following SMW features:

• Automatically created lists
• Faceted search
• Semantic queries
• Entering data via forms
• RDF export

So let’s see what these features hold for us.

• Automatically created lists

A common problem in wikis like Wikipedia is the (amount of) effort it requires to create and maintain various lists like the list of the EU’s largest cities. It’s an equally laborious and error-prone activity to keep such lists up to date; as a result, there are a lot of useful Wikipedia lists we can imagine that don’t exist at all, like a list of the world’s largest corporations with a CEO younger than 35.

In SMW it is easy to create all kinds of lists with queries. This page for the book’s table of contents is an example. View its source to see the inline queries used to generate the page (click to enlarge or view the source on the wiki):

As a result, the list is generated afresh any time the table of contents page is called up. If the data on an article’s page has changed, it will also be updated in that list – while in regular MediaWikis one has to manually update the data in both places (the article, and the list), which, apart from the extra work, also makes errors and inconsistencies much more likely.

• Faceted search

Take at look at the list of articles page… (more…)

Here is a link to the video “Semantic Web, explained with Lolcats.”
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EDIT: Yes, I have retracted this blogpost, and I am glad I did. I also already admitted the blog post was written in a hurry, I see now that it was indeed ill-worded and gave rise to an interpretation I never had in mind.

I doesn’t make sense for me to continue this discussion if it consists of people reinterpreting my words with the intention to provide evidence that I must have wanted to say something that I, actually, never meant to say.

All I meant to say was that an approach incorporating elements of popular culture (here: Lolcats) might get new, and particularly female, audiences interested in the Semantic Web. Because many women like Lolcats.

I should not have written “female” though, as femininity is a contested issue – even though this made sense to me in that hurried moment of writing as I am clearly more interested in getting more women interested in the Semantic Web than I am interested in getting “just anyone” interested.

I am critical of a certain notion of “good” femininity underlying some comments in the previous discussion. Women doing a tech degree? Yay! Women whose technical interests go way beyond Web 2.0 and Lolcats? Yes, they’re the ones we want! Women going shopping? Not so interesting! Women reading People magazine or PerezHilton? Baaad!

Why can’t they just stop conforming to the gender mold?

Such a notion of femininity means to denigrate the experience of many, probably the majority of women out there – women, by the way, who have embraced the web (2.0) to organize their family pictures online, who write blogs about parenting or crocheting and who will also embrace the (Social) Semantic Web if it offers any benefits to them.

This is actually one of the silenced voices Bath talked about – the discourse that is marginalized here is the domain of the domestic sphere, which has been and is traditionally associated with women. When will there be an ontology for yarns, knitting or crocheting? (If you’re laughing now: laugh at the ontology for beer or whiskey first. Didn’t make you laugh, too? Now that’s food for thought, isn’t it?)

In marketing departments world wide, people think about what women might like and how this could be harnessed to advertise products, as women are typically the ones who influence what is bought in a household or not.

But as soon as one brings up the idea of using Lolcats (again: because many women like Lolcats) to get more women interested in the Semantic Web…

… people get worked up and argue that the author actually really meant to say that women are intellectually ONLY able come to grips with technology with the aid of a cute animal.

No, I did not mean to say that – because I don’t look at popular culture in such a denigrating way.

Ever tried to create a Lolcat? It’s an art form in itself – try making one yourself that’s witty!

And for the time being, try for yourself if you can use Lolcats to get someone with a yet underdeveloped knowledge of the Semantic Web interested in the topic. Not necessarily a woman – but I’d appreciate if you also tried it on women. Just to see whether it does or does not work (better) (on men/women).

Start here (I am sure you can do better than me – use the LolcatBuilder!)

moar funny pictures

moar funny pictures

moar funny pictures

moar funny pictures

While we’re at it: I really liked Bob DuCharme’s showcase “Navigating Hollywood gossip with semantic technology.”

I think we need more of that – you know why.