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

The answer to me is that database and data are different.  They’re different legally and different practically in what consumers and producers of open data want to do with it.  They’re also different in what the future looks like in terms of things like linked data.

Read the details in the full interview.

Take your chance: If you’d like to take the survey, you can currently visit http://www.facebook.com/l/c6596;survey.confirmit.com/wix2/p1075078513.aspx and enter PIN 2000.

Additionally I-SEMANTICS will host the 2nd Pragmatic Web Track and the 3rd Triplification Challenge.

The combined CfP for I-SEMANTICS, Pragmatic Web Track & Triplification Challenge is available here.

The first day started off with a keynote by Richard Cyganiak form DERI Galway’s Linked Data Research Center. He talked about the technical challenges that have to be overcome to allow for more Linked Data applications over heterogenous RDF data. These challenges revolve around discovery of and access to Linked Data, identifier and schema reconciliation, data fusion, quality assessment, aggregation, analytics and mining.
As Richard pointed out, the good news is “that linked data makes it possible that different people do the different steps, e.g., the publisher can help doing the identifier reconciliation by publishing sameAs links, and 3rd parties can help with access by providing a single SPARQL store over multiple related but independent datasets.” Check out the transcript
or slides for Richard’s talk.

After this keynote participants presented their topics of interest in Lightning Talks and working groups formed, some of their outcomes can be found online:
One group worked on the topic of “Dataset Dynamics”. As data in Linked Data sets change, clients having some dependency on data need to be notified about these changes. You can read about their proposed solutions here.
Another group had a go at “Expert search and profiling on the Semantic Web”, their discussions are summarized in this blog post.
Andreas Langegger demonstrated XLWrap, which is a versatile RDF wrapper for spreadsheets. A lot of feature request from participants came up (see here), so he and others worked on this handy application.

On day 2 Leigh Dodds from Talis talked about “Rights Statements on the Web of Data” (slides and transcript). Leigh raised awareness for the issue that the majority of LOD sources do not have licensing information associated with their data. This of course conflicts with the proposed openness of Linked “Open” Data, as it is doubtful whether these sources can be used for commercial puropses.

The organizers from the universities of Linz and Vienna, Joanneum Research, Gnowsis, DERI Galway, STI Innsbruck and the Semantic Web Company would like to thank all participants for making the camp a success! As with VoCamps anyone can organize a Linked Data Camp, so we hope for more camps in 2010!

We started experimenting with the technical infrastructure needed and created some proof-of-concept applications. Part of this work was enabling Linked Data access for the front-end infrastructure we used, Liferay portal. We decided on the appropriate vocabularies for the type of content we wanted to publish (FOAF, SIOC and MOAT mainly), delved on the internals of Liferay and used D2R to map its relational database to the vocabularies of choice, also using techniques to improve performance as much as possible. Since Liferay itself is also based on the notion of communities, we thought our work would be more widely applicable and useful, so we chose to submit it for review at the Triplification Challenge and make it available to the community as open source software. Our applications have gradually matured and are about to be deployed in our commercial projects, while at the same time we are now making the Liferay Linked Data Module available as a Sourceforge project and we are working with Liferay management in order to disseminate this effort to the community and also include it in a future release of the software.

Read the full interview here.

The event took place  just after the first day of the “Linked Data Camp Vienna“, where quite a lot of important questions around linked data were tackled, e.g.: Which role will linked data consolidators play in the future?

After a day full of “insider”-discussions it was also a pleasure to meet people from “outside” the linked data community to re-check if the semantic puzzle is still something worth to be solved.

SWC: In its own saying the European Semantic Technology Conference brings together the smartest minds in Semantic Technologies. What will be the highlights of this year’s conference?

There are many highlights this year! We have a full program of presentations, workshops, panels and a keynote by Susie Stephens from Johnson&Johnson. On top of this, the first day will see the first ever ESTC Innovation Seed Camp, where enterpreneurs and young start ups are invited to pitch their ideas to a panel of venture capitalists and there will be cash prizes! Besides the main program, an open demo space will continually offer new showcases of semantic technologies and products, while a networking zone gives attendees a relaxed space to make business away from the conference hectic. We will also be holding matchmaking sessions, where attendees can schedule one-to-one meetings with other attendees organized by a handy online tool. Finally, in line with ESTC’s focus on semantics and innovation – during the two days we will give participants the chance to check out two innovative conference tools: an electronic vCard exchange and the “Web Comparator”. So, too much to explain, but you can get full information on every aspect of the conference at its webpage www.estc2009.com.

SWC: How would you describe the state of the art in semantic technology business especially in Europe?

We are at a very exciting period in the enterprise uptake of semantic technologies, which can be seen in the growth in attendance at events such as ESTC. Semantic technologies are finally maturing and can be used away from toy examples in real, critical business processes. Technologies are being standardized and tools aligned to those standards, while progress in being made in supporting the sorts of extensions that businesses need (see OWL 2, or SPARQL 1.1). This year, the case studies and the business applications that will be presented are going to reflect that. We are still inside the early adopter phase in semantic uptake, with the critical mass of companies still checking out semantics at a research and prototyping level. However, the balance is shifting and enabling the technology transfer to real business projects is key; ESTC’s focus on direct contact between the technology vendors and the business clients – the networking zone, the open demo space, or the matchmaking sessions – is a reflection of the importance of an event such as ESTC to bring these two groups together.

SWC: One of the big issues at the moment is Linking Open Data. How do you perceive this development and how can you start?

Yes, Linked Open Data is an interesting development, making a significant amount of semantic data about a broad subject range available to everyone. I think it has real value in the research community where large data sources have been needed. For industry, I would say its value is less straight-forward: the data is not always so clean and care needs to be taken before building business applications on top of it. Clear guidelines on how to best make use of Linked Open Data by enterprises is needed. ESTC picks up on this in its program this year: we will have an expert panel precisely on this subject! Of course, leveraging the Linked Data Cloud in the enterprise is already a topic for many organisations – one of our paper sessions is on Linked Data and I am sure there will be plenty mentions of it elsewhere during the conference!

SWC: In recent years large IT-companies and system integrators have rather been playing around with semantic web technologies than identifying the semantic web
 as a market opportunity. Do you think that this situation has changed already?

I think a lot of these companies are being cautious – the Semantic Web was so hyped to industry in its first years that a certain level of cynicism grew. Now, that we have in my opinion very real and valuable tools and technologies built on semantics, the companies are being careful in how to present this to the market. There are already many very encouraging examples of semantics making inroads in key markets where data heterogeneity, integration, and management have become key issues: I think Health Care and Life Sciences is simply the market which is being most open about it (the ESTC keynote speaker Susie Stephens will also report on semantic technologies in this market). There are further examples we just don’t know about, because companies don’t want to let their competitors know, or mention that it is semantics which is being used.

SWC: Please add another statement which is important for you!

ESTC 2009 will be *the* meeting place in Europe this year for semantic technology vendors and users – don’t miss it!

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.

A lot of activities around Linking Open Data (“LOD”) and the associated data sets which are nicely visualised as a “cloud” are going on for quite a while now. It is exciting to see how the rather academic “Semantic Web” and all the work which is associated with this disruptive technology can be transformed now into real business use cases.

What I have observed in the last few months, especially in business communities, is the following:

• “Linked Data” sounds interesting for the business people because the phrase creates a lot of associations in a second or two; also the database crowd seems to be attracted by this web-based approach of data integration
• “Web of Data” is somehow misleading because many people think that this will be a new web which replaces something else. Same story with the “Semantic Web”
• “Linking Open Data” sounds dangerous and not trustworthy to many companies

For insiders it is clear, that the “openness” of data, especially in commercial settings, can be controlled and has to be controlled in many cases i.e. by defining the right licensing models. But here we are still at the beginning as a workshop at ISWC 2009 has illustrated.

Anyway, looking at the characteristics of Linked Data Flows, they can be one-way or mutual. In some cases data from companies will be put into the cloud, and can be opened up for many purposes, in other use cases it will stay inside the boundaries. In other scenarios only (open) data from the web will be consumed and linked with corporate data, but no data will be exposed to the world (except the fact, that data was consumed by an entity).

And of course: On many other occasions datasets and repositories will be opened up partly depending on the CCs (or similar, not yet defined attributes) and the underlying privacy regulations one wants to use.

This makes clear that LOD / Linking Open Data is just one detail of a bigger picture. Since companies (and governments) play a crucial role to develop the whole infrastructure, we need to draw a new picture that illustrates the various Linked Data Flows in a better way:

Concluding from this the best thing would be to talk about Linked Data in general and just refer to Linking Open Data in the right context. Despite better knowledge for business people the term  “open” is still associated with “free” and “dubious provenance”. And given the fact that hardly anybody has given hard evidence on the ROI of open business models the “open argument” does count little in a time of decreasing economic prosperity.

So what would be critical to get the Linked Data thing running is to provide the corresponding business and licensing models for your Linked Data strategy. But this includes having a good understanding of the assets you want to capitalize. Given the fact that metada assets are still a novel and vastly unexplored business field which so far lack a regulated supply and demand structure there are still lots of structural obstacles that hinder the uptake of Linked Data. Providing more of the same in a laissez faire mode – like TimBL critisized at this year’s Web 2.0 Summit – might be inspiring for the in-crowd, but it might not be sufficient to build a linked data business.