Organizations working in the environmental sector most often act as intermediates between politics, economy and citizens. They are growing out of their role as plain content providers. To service the demands of their stakeholders they have to act also as data and tool providers for their respective communities.

On June 13 this webinar introduces several good practice examples achieving data governance in using the linked open data paradigms. Together with a basic overview of the possibilities of linked open data you get an appealing picture of the new opportunities which are provided by these principles and technologies, also for your organisation!

Learn more about three organizations and their linked data projects

Global Buildings Performance Network (GBPN)

GBPN established the “Policy comparative tool on building stock data” together with a domain specific thesaurus used for a domain specific news aggregator.

Renewable Energy and Efficiency Partnership (REEEP)

As one of the pioneers in the sector, REEEP has an extensive focus on the use of linked data for renewable energy and energy efficiency, facilitating that in various services, like an automatic annotation service, aggregated country data presented as fact sheets, a domain specific search engine, etc.

Austrian Geological Survey (GBA)

The main driving factor for institutions like the GBA to invest in thesaurus and taxonomy projects, is the increasing need for a uniform description of their data. The idea is that this enhances value and re-usability of their products for their stakeholders. Especially in the geo-spatial sector the INSPIRE directive of the European Parliament and Council gave a push in that direction. As a public authority, the GBA was legally called to implement the directive for its domain.

Presenters in this Webinar

• Martin Kaltenböck (SWC)
  CFO and Project Lead at Semantic Web Company for Data Portal Solutions
• Florian Bauer (REEEP)
  Operations and IT Director of REEEP as well as the  clean energy information portal www.reegle.info
• Andreas Blumauer (SWC)
  CEO and Evangelist for Linked Data and SKOS based Thesaurus Management

Free Register

• When: 13.06. 5PM – 6PM CEST
• What: Presentations on Linked Data for the Environmental Sector
• Who: Project developers and decision makers in the environmental sector
• Register: https://www4.gotomeeting.com/register/908888415
  

This series of tutorials has been produced in cooperation with our partner Term Management, LLC.

Coming from the semantic web / linked (open) data community to this publishing industry event with about 320 participants (mainly decision makers) from small to huge publishers all across Europe made me really curious in the forefront of the Forum – what would be the most important issues for innovative publishing processes, what would be the hypes and hopes of a sector that is in the middle of a big change: coming from paper publishing straight into the world of our todays’ data economy?

And  then in Berlin, Monday morning – the big surprise: already the opening keynotes by David Worlock, Outsell, UK (Title of Talk: The Atomization of Everything) and Dan Pollock, Nature Publishing Group, UK (Title of Talk: Networked Publishing is Open for Business) mentioned topics as the Semantic Web, Linked (Open) Data and even RDF and Triple Stores – last but not least pointing out that the content of publishers needs to be atomized down to the ‘data level’ and then can to be used successfully for new and innovative business models to serve existing and future customers…

David Worlock ‘singing my song’ at the Publishers’ Forum 2013

As I participated in the European Data Forum 2013 (EDF2013) just a few days before the Publishers’ Forum my first thought was: WOW – publishers today have arrived in modern data economy (following already the data value chain)! And I enjoyed talking to David Worlock in the coffee break telling him my thoughts and that I will manage a workshop about ‘Enterprise Terminology as a basis for powerful semantic services for publishers’ in the afternoon that day (see slides on slideshare) and his answer was ‘Yes Martin, it seems that I was singing your song’.

The following 1.5 days of the Publishers’ Forum 2013 were full of presentations, workshops and discussions about innovative publishing processes, new business models for publishers and innovative approaches and services – full of terms that are well known by myself like: meta data management, semantics, contextualisation and very very often: Big Data and Linked (Open) Data…..and I listened very carefully to all of this – and at some point it was clear: this discussion needs to be evaluated more carefully – because many of talks and presentations were using the above mentioned terms, principles and technologies only as marketing buzz words – but taking a deeper look showed: there is no semantic web technology in place?!

Hey, Linked Data does NOT mean to establish something like a relation / a link between ‘an Author and a publication’ inside of a repository / a database – Linked (Open) Data is a well established and specified methodology using W3C semantic web standards:

Tim Berners-Lee outlined four principles of linked data in his Design Issues: Linked Data as follows:

• Use URIs to denote things.
• Use HTTP URIs so that these things can be referred to and looked up (“dereferenced”) by people and user agents.
• Provide useful information about the thing when its URI is dereferenced, leveraging standards such as RDF*, SPARQL.
• Include links to other related things (using their URIs) when publishing data on the Web.

Please read in more detail here:

• Wikipedia
• W3C Wiki
• Linked Open Data – The Essentials – a quick start guide for decision makers
• Or the FP7 project working on Linked Open Data: LOD2

As being a bit like an evangelist for Linked (Open) Data I think such a hype can be very dangerous for the publishing industry – because I see a very strong need for these companies to go for innovative content- and data management approaches very quickly to ensure competitiveness today as well as competitive advantage tomorrow – but not using the respective standards (means: only having the packaging and marketing brochures branded with it) cannot fulfill the hopes in the mid- and the long term!

Thereby I would like to point out here that ‘Linked Data’ seems not always to be ‘Linked Data’ – and I would like to strongly recommend to take a look at the well proven standards – and when selecting IT consultants and IT vendors (means: your IT partners – also a very interesting message taken home from the Forum: that publishers and IT vendors should co-operate more closely in the future in the form of sustainable partnerships) to ensure that these partners really have worked already and are working continuously with these standards and mechanisms!

Christian Dirschl (Wolters Kluwer) presenting the
WKD Use Case on Enterprise Terminologies

Btw. I had a great workshop on Monday afternoon together with Christian Dirschl from Wolters Kluwer Germany (WKD) discussing applications on top of enterprise terminologies (controlled vocabularies using real linked (open) data principles). And: The Semantic Web Company (SWC) is already a partner of the publisher WKD – and this partnership seems to become a more and more fruitful and sustainable one every day – using real linked (open) data…

In its core, PoolParty is built upon SKOS, W3C’s standard to define controlled vocabularies like taxonomies or thesauri. However, the latest release 3.2.2 of the well known Thesaurus Software offers a highly flexible RDF schema editor to introduce either widely accepted schemas like FOAF or SIOC or even individual ones, customized to one’s own needs.

“This extension of PoolParty offers new options to our clients to create highly expressive knowledge graphs. Custom schemas can also be used to make links between differing enterprise vocabularies. One the other hand we have taken care not to overload the PoolParty user interface with unwanted complexity”, says Helmut Nagy, COO of the Semantic Web Company.

Watch this video to get an impression how this new feature works:

In addition to “Custom Schemas”, PoolParty Thesaurus Server is now integrated with Virtuoso Universal Server. Thesaurus managers can ‘deploy’ stable versions of their knowledge graphs into a Virtuoso RDF store. Virtuoso is well-known for its high performance even when complex queries are made across different (named) graphs.

The following video will show a short demo of this brandnew feature which opens up completely new options for big data solutions based on enterprise linked data integration:

To get a complete overview over all new features of PoolParty Thesaurus Server 3.2.2, please take a look at the release notes.

I-SEMANTICS 2013, the 9th International Conference on Semantic Systems, has extended the deadlines of its Call for Papers.

Important Dates (Research & Application & Challenge Papers)

• Extended Abstract Submission Deadline: April 8, 2013
• Extended Submission Deadline: April 15, 2013
• Notification of Acceptance: May 20, 2013
• Camera-Ready Paper: June 24, 2013

Please download the CfP in the format of your choice.

We are happy to announce as this year’s Key Note Speakers

• Ed Chi from Google, USA
• Aldo Gangemi from Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, Italy
• Tiit Paananen from Skype, USA
• Yves Raimond from BBC, UK

The conference will take place from September 4-6, 2013 in Graz, Austria and brings together both researchers and practitioners in the areas of Semantic Technologies, Linked Data and the Semantic Web in order to showcase cutting edge research, demonstrators and applications for the Corporate and Social Semantic Web.

I-SEMANTICS 2013 will also hold the “I-CHALLENGE”, which brings to you the 6th Linked Data Cup (formerly Triplification Challenge), the Best Paper Award and the Best Poster Award. The proceedings will be published with the ACM ICP series. Last year’s event attracted 85 submissions from 33 countries.

The topics of the forthcoming conference will be:

Beside the scientific track we are also planning an extended industry track and a redesigned Linked Data Cup. Please expect more detailed information in the weeks to come.

In order to foster synergies among the research fields of knowledge discovery, social computing,  and semantic technologies I-SEMANTICS Conference will be held together with the I-KNOW Conference, the 13th International Conference on Knowledge Technologies (www.i-know.at).

We are looking forward to your contributions and hope to see you at the conference.

This year’s i-Praxis Track is running under the title „The linked enterprise – how linked open data revolutionize industry“.

I-Semantics Conference invites presenters coming from industry, to submit to the iPraxis Call 2013. All accepted submission will be granted a presentation slot of 30 minutes within one of the largest conferences in Europe in the field of semantic systems and the Semantic Web.

The call is open –> get information and apply at i-semantics.tugraz.at

Submission Deadline: June 03, 2013
Notification of Acceptance: June 28, 2013
Submission of final PDF/PPT: August 23, 2013

It has been designed as a participative knowledge hub and data hub harvesting, sharing and curating best practice policies in building energy performance globally. Available in English and soon in Mandarin, this new web-based tool of the Global Buildings Performance Network (GBPN) aims to stimulate collective research and analysis from experts worldwide to promote better decision-making and help the building sector effectively reduce its impact on climate change. To sustain and accelerate change in the building sector, the GBPN encourages open and transparent access to good quality and verifiable data. The data can be used and re-used in HTML, PDF and machine readable raw data (CSV) formats – provided by a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 3.0 FR) license.

The GBPN Knowledge Platform is built on Drupal CMS and seamless connected with the PoolParty Semantic Information Management Platform of Semantic Web Company. Thereby this knowledge platform makes use of semantic technologies and Linked Open Data (LOD) principles and techniques under the hood. A lot of the available data of the various GBPN tools is provided as (linked) open data under a Creative Commons Attribution license. The Semantic Web Company is responsible for conceptual design and technical implementation of the GBPN Knowledge Platform.

As follows an overview and description of the most important features, tools and services of the information management system.

Beside others the GBPN Knowledge Platform offers the following tools and services:

The Linked Open Data (LOD) based GBPN Terminology: http://bit.ly/YSbD9S
gathering key terms in the field of buildings energy performance to fill the lack of a common terminology and facilitate international research collaboration. The GBPN Terminology is linked with DBpedia at the moment and will be linked to other relevant sources as for instance the reegle Thesaurus on Clean Energy and Climate Change soon! Also a SPARQL endpoint to query the data is available.

The GBPN News Aggregator Tool: http://bit.ly/13JLJqk
based on semantic technologies, aggregating RSS news feeds from several 3rd party online information sources provides powerful search and filter mechanisms on the basis of automated semantic annotation based on the PoolParty PPX Extractor Technology.

The GBPN Policy Comparative Tool: http://bit.ly/X9Vihm
enabling comparison of the world’s best practice policies for new buildings (residential and commercial), by reviewing 25 state of the art building energy efficiency codes and using 15 criteria developed with some of the world’s leading experts in the field. The Policy Comparative Tool provides interactive data visualization. Users can access detailed building codes information, search specific parameters and generate graphs and comparisons on the fly. By understanding how jurisdictions have designed and implemented best practice codes and supporting packages, policy makers can use this information to strengthen the future design of dynamic policies that can help move the building stock towards zero energy.

This Comparative Tool provides raw data / open data for free download and re-use of the interactive graph generation tool: http://bit.ly/XU3NNv in CSV format.

Further features and services of the GBPN KNowledge Platform are:

A Report Database: http://www.gbpn.org/reports
a unique knowledge pyramid presenting all of our publications in 10 different formats to address the information needs of different stakeholders. Users can browse our database and check out which steps of the GBPN knowledge pyramid best suits their information needs.

The Laboratory: http://www.gbpn.org/laboratory
a participative platform for building energy efficiency experts to share information and generate knowledge on how best to develop ambitious building energy performance policies globally. The Laboratory focuses on two main topics: Positive Energy Buildings and More and Deeper Renovation.

A webblog: http://bit.ly/X9VSeW
to explore blog posts from the GBPN’s experts around the world.

The platform also connects to the GBPN Regional Hubs data portals:

• Buildingsdata.eu, a comprehensive open data portal for energy efficiency in European buildings developed by the Buildings Performance Institute Europe (BPIE) in 2012 (http://www.buildingsdata.eu) .
• Buildingrating.org, the leading online tool for sharing global intelligence and best practices on building rating and disclosure policies worldwide launched by the Institute for Market Transformation (IMT) in 2011 (http://www.buildingrating.org).

How to participate in this project?
As we wish to favour new synergies with energy efficiency experts and building professionals and help influence change in the building sector, we invite you to join us and contribute in enriching this collaborative knowledge platform. The GBPN Knowledge Platform is a (Linked) Open Data project that aims to open and connect with the best resources, data and information on buildings energy performance policies worldwide. Feel free to suggest us any further opportunities for collaboration through data exchange projects and research partnerships.

How to help promote this new tool?
In order to reach as many relevant stakeholders as possible, please feel free to spread the word around your organisations and contacts through your Twitter accounts, websites and/or blogs.

You can also Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to find out more about the GBPN and its activities and subscribe to our Newsletter to receive regular updates from the GBPN network.

Please explore the GBPN knowledge plattform via: http://www.gbpn.org – your feedback is more then welcome!

The GBPN is open for collaboration and co-operation – see contact details as follows.
————————————————
Anne-Claire BELLEC
Communications Manager
9 rue du Quatre Septembre
75002 Paris – France
+33 6 68 40 15 15
Twitter: @GBPNetwork
Discover our Knowledge Platform: www.gbpn.org
————————————————

This webinar gives insights into software development based on semantic web standards. We will give a short overview over frequently used standards (SPARQL, SKOS and RDF), application scenarios and technologies (OpenRDF, Virtuoso, Solr/Lucene) and we will give live-demos on how to make use of PoolParty technologies to build a variety of semantic applications.

Part 1 (15min):
Short introduction to semantic web and linked data standards, overview over typical application scenarios

Part 2 (30min):
PoolParty architecture, components and APIs: making use of the linked data front end, Sparql endpoint, PoolParty reports, thesaurus API (PPT API), extractor API (PPX API) and semantic search API (PPS API) -  for each API, an example will be shown (incl. returned formats and how to make use of it in a programming language like PHP)

Part 3 (10min):
Putting the pieces together: Combine the APIs to build

- a semantic search engine
- a content recommender
- a linked data mashup

Part 4 (min. 5min):
Questions and answering

Register now: https://www4.gotomeeting.com/register/774130327

Cologne/Vienna (February 05, 2013) – Wolters Kluwer Deutschland (WKD), knowledge and information service provider located in Cologne and the Austrian Semantic Web Company (SWC) act in collusion with each other. The aim of this cooperation is to offer the sustainable creation and targeted usage of domain specific thesauri and enterprise taxonomies based on Linked Data technologies as a market-ready and ready to use product.

Whereas WKD with its core competences in law, business, tax, finance and health is covering the domain and methodological dimension of the cooperation, SWC is contributing the technological know-how. Main target is to fulfill concrete needs and requirements of customers in a highly efficient and practical way.

• Metadata management and enterprise thesaurus management
• Semantic search and data integration
• Text mining and knowledge extraction
• Creation of knowledge networks and knowledge management systems
• Supporting the creation of Linked Data and Open Data infrastructures