The Semantic Web Company compiled a suite of some of the best semantic web applications and put them in one place for you to try out: The SWC Demozone.

We selected tools pertaining to the different application areas of the Semantic Web – be it for finding, creating, linking and/or publishing information.

The showcased applications and services so far are:

• OpenCalais
• Semantic MediaWiki
• Evri
• OntoWiki
• Neologism
• Relation Browser
• KiWi
• SIMILE Exhibit

Have a look at the demos and try them out for yourself – we provided explanations and links to screencasts teaching you how to use them.

We will add more demos in the future. If you are the owner of or a contributer to an application that you’d like to see showcased in the demozone, too, please drop us a line and we’ll try to add a demo for your software.

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!

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.

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… it uses Semantic Drilldown, so you can narrow the displayed articles down by author (“geschrieben von” = “written by”) or by topic (“Schlagwort”): For instance, select a topic from the tagcloud style list and you’ll be presented with a list of articles covering the subject in question. You can add another topic (which makes the set of results larger) or additionally specify an author (which further narrows it down).

• Semantic queries

A straightforward approach to exploring the values of a semantic property is to just look at the property’s wiki page. E. g. view a list of everyone’s blog URLs on this page: Property:Weblog.

More sophisticated queries can be made on the Special:Ask page.
To display all organisations located in Vienna or Graz just copy paste

[[Category:Organisation]][[Hat Sitz in::Wien||Graz]]

into the left hand box (“Hat Sitz in” = “is based in”).

Now go a step further and ask for the name and email address of all persons that work for a organisation located in Vienna or Graz and print their e-mail addresses. Again, copy and paste

[[Category:Person]][[arbeitet bei::<q>[[Category:Organisation]][[Hat Sitz in::Wien||Graz]]</q>]]

into the query box and copy and paste

Email

into the box for additional printouts

What is also very useful is that you can save any query on its own page, so users don’t have to know or remember the syntax. Here is the query page for people living in Vienna or Graz: Concept:Persons_working_in_Vienna_or_Graz,

• Entering data via forms

This feature is one of the essential advantages that SMW holds over a regular MediaWiki: Most of the content of our wiki is automatically generated from data which have comfortably been entered by filling in forms. This means a regular user doesn’t have to edit any wiki text to be able to contribute content.

See for yourself:

Log in with testuser and testuserpw, go to the page Form:Person and enter a name (e.g. your own name; click to enlarge).

When you fill in the fields “Works for”, “Friends” and “Topics” you will notice that an autocomplete feature assists you by suggesting pages that are already in the wiki. This helps to avoid multiple wiki pages for a single entity.

Before you submit the form, copy this line and paste it into the “free text” box – it’s the line that calls up the appropriate template, in this case for a person:

{{Template:Person_additional}}

In combination with the data you entered, this will generate the actual wiki page.

There is one thing you need to observe: You will probably find that your information is missing in some of the page’s paragraphs. If that happens just click on “edit” and save the page again, after which the page content will be updated properly.

In this way, a properly set up SMW with Semantic Forms enables the users to enter data without knowing how to write wiki syntax, and assists him or her in the data entering process.

• RDF export

To top it off, SMW enables you to link your data into the LOD cloud and to reuse properties and classes from external ontologies. Take a look at this exported RDF/XML containing data about the author Andreas Blumauer. You’ll see a lot of foaf terms reused and also an owl:sameAs pointing to his personal URI.

This sums up the introductory tutorial – if you want to learn more about SMW, then check out the wiki document for the complete tutorial or see SMW’s own documentation.

Author: Thomas Schandl, SWC

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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.