Semantic Web Company

Yesterdays first “semantic web meetup” attracted 55 attendees to join in for presenting, talking and socialising. Approximately one year after the series of semantic web meetups started in NYC, there is now also a vital community gathering in vienna. Beside an inside view on brandnew ideas and developments of austrias semweb-labs in presenations and lightning talks, Steve Sandhouse of New York Times joined in via webmeeing to give an insight on NY-Times’s Semantic Web – efforts, which have a back-history of about 100 years now – as he explained.

In conclusion: A good start for the First Vienna Semantic Web Meetup, which may paved the way for a next meeting in the very next future. In the meanwhile some pictures of the venue to amuse those which were there and to inspire new people to join: www.meetup.com

In recent days – here at Semantic Web Company – we have had a lot of discussions on how the future of the Semantic Web (name it Web3.0 if you like) will develop. Several stakeholders on the future of the Semantic Web see already, that also a potential danger will come along with the technical realisation of the web3.0: This is the present possibility to create applications and mashups with semantic technologies that are a real drain on privacy and information ethics. Without an underpinning discussion about the ethical framework within technolgies like linked data, text-mining, biometric-systems and geo-systems in combination with the web of data, the whole domain is in danger to be doomed like genetic engineering some years ago.

It’s crucial for the public opinion on the Semantic Web, to adress the immanent risks regarding privacy and ethics. In this context I’ll see also Tim Berners-Lee’s statement yesterday: “W3C wants to help make sure data use is appropriate,” he said. Berners-Lee, who is director of W3C, said in an interview on Wednesday that the teams working on the Semantic Web project are making sure that privacy principles are included in its architecture: “The Semantic Web project is developing systems which will answer where data came from and where it’s going to — the system will be architectured for a set of appropriate uses.”

Maybe it’s an important step in keeping the further development of Semantic Web trusty in the eyes of public opinion, that the W3C has privacy and information ethics on their agenda and persons like Berners-Lee stand with their reputation for it. But it is also crucial to build this awareness on the corporate side. Only if everyone within the domain follows a common ethic understanding we have a public opinion, which is on the future potential of the Semantic Web, and not in fear of the same.

News has reached me this morning that UMBEL has now been publicly released! UMBEL is a new vocabulary for the Semantic Web – I first learned about it when Andreas Blumauer returned from LinkedData Planet where he had met up with Mike Bergman from Zitgist LLC who are working on UMBEL.

Here is the release announcement Mike communicated via email yesterday:

UMBEL (Upper Mapping and Binding Exchange Layer) [1] is a lightweight ontology for relating Web content and data to a standard set of 20,000 subject concepts. Based on OpenCyc [2], these subject concepts have defined relationships between them, and can act as semantic binding nodes for any data or Web content. A further 1.5 million named entities have been extracted from Wikipedia and mapped to the UMBEL reference structure with cross-links to YAGO [3] and DBpedia [4]. The system can easily be extended with additional dictionaries of named entities, including ones specific to enterprises or domains.

UMBEL is provided as open source under the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution-Share Alike license. The complete ontology with all subject concepts, definitions, terms and relationships can be freely downloaded [see 5]. All subject concepts and named entities are available as Linked Data [see 5]. Five volumes of documentation [5] are also available.

The release is accompanied by about a dozen Web services [6] for using or manipulating UMBEL, along with a new introductory slide show [7]. Additional release information may be found on Fred’s [8] or my [9] separate blog postings. We welcome those with interest or suggestions for improvements to do so through the UMBEL discussion forum [10]. We will shortly be putting easier services online for such input.

So, enjoy! We look forward to your commentary, suggestions and putting UMBEL under production-grade stress. We know will be doing the same!

Regards, Mike

Great release! They have also given us access to a media-oriented article which you can read on our portal.

First of all: LinkedData Planet is a big success in terms of visitor numbers to begin with. The “Grand Ballroom” at Hotel Roosevelt, a lovely old hotel in Manhattan, was packed not only when Tim Berners-Lee gave his keynote this afternoon.

But not only the quantity of attendees, also the high quality of talks and discussions which are going on at this first conference on the “commercialization of the web of Linked Data” show that we are facing a fast growing phenomenon with a “great momentum” as Berners-Lee stated.

Kingsley Idehen from OpenLink Software started the first day of the conference with his keynote in which he tried to “demystify” the term Linked Data. He said that “Linked Data is the foundation of the semantic web, its connectivity is growing and the line between enterprise and individual level is blurring”. He also stressed the similarities between ODBC (Open DataBase Connectivity) and Linked Data – which might be interesting for my next talk with an “old-fashioned” CTO.

Uche Ogbuji from Zepheira referred to DBpedia as “the star” of the Linked Data Cloud and gave an interesting talk about the possibilities of Linking Enterprise Data.

Tim Berners-Lee listed in his keynote the areas in which the LOD-community is now facing the biggest challenges:

• standards, for instance levels of inference, link following on linked data clients and servers
• federated query; query service descriptions
• ultimate human interface to all the data there are
• balancing diversity & harmony in ontology development
• and, of course, continuing the great momentum

Tim Berners-Lee also emphasised that hiding information in some cases like product information is “just crazy”. One way to expand the LOD cloud could be “lobbying” for data sources (with governments, providers of commercial information, etc).

Between the talks people spent their time in the exhibition area. Dean Allemang from TopQuadrant gave a demo of TopBraid Composer. I talked to Tom Tague from OpenCalais about the new features the next releases will have and how to use their service behind the firewall and Mike Bergman from Zitgist showed me the power of UMBEL web services.

All in all – LinkedData Planet is a great community event, well organised and well populated by people who want to use the semantic web in different commercial settings.

And to those who weren’t able to attend: I recommend to take a look at the Linked Data Shopping List, a page within the Linked Data Initiative’s wiki where you can add the data that you want to see published as Linked Data.

Read also pt. 2 of our conference report: The social hub @ LinkedData Planet 2008

[Image: official-ly cool]

The Semantic Web Company is one of the partners of this year’s LinkedData Planet Conference in New York (June 17-18, 2008). As part of this partnership, we launched a competition, asking for your vision of a future with Linked Open Data – and we have a winner!

Aman Shakya, who is a PhD student at the Department of Informatics at The Graduate University for Advanced Studies (SOKENDAI) in Tokyo, developed his vision around the idea of ordinary people being able to publish structured data instead of unstructured text:

The current gigantic network of web documents could be realized by enabling any user to publish any document and link to other documents. If we want to see the network of Linked Open Data explode on a similar scale, we need to enable general users to publish “data” directly on the web and link to other “data”. We need to move the paradigm of web page publishing and hyperlinking towards data publishing and data linking. We should enable people to post structured data about anything rather than just unstructured text. We need the active participation and contribution of the billions of worldwide internet users. Recently, the web has seen enormous user participation with the rise of easy-to-use social software. We should exploit this trend of social web applications, however, for enabling people to create, share and link “data” on the global Linked Data Web.

To endorse his vision, Aman Shakya also introduced his StYLiD application, which I would like to describe as a ’semantically enhanced tumblelog’, and which “enables people to share a wide variety of structured data with the freedom to define their own structured concepts on the fly.” We have chosen his proposal because it met the criteria of the competition in various ways:

• The feasibility of the vision is clearly laid out in the proposal, which describes the process of the creation of structured data and the interaction with existing data on the web.
• The proposal has innovative potential in that it seeks to further and harness the collaborative sharing of structured data, and combines bottom-up and top-down governance for the social semantic web.
• Sustainability is achieved by its reliance on open standards such as SPARQL.

Read his full proposal here.

We would also like to make an honorary mention of Mike Veytsel’s quadruple-fold approach to a semantic future in which users will be able “to easily and finely tune in to the long tail of knowledge and find content with low friction and high precision.”

Finally, I would also like to give my personal bookworm award to Rob Styles, for his prose account of a life with the semweb which he develops as an antithesis to Orwellian dystopia.

A big ‘Thank you’ to everyone who contributed!

[This article was written by guest author Aman Shakya and originally submitted as an entry in our LinkedData Vision Competition]

The current gigantic network of web documents could be realized by enabling any user to publish any document and link to other documents. If we want to see the network of Linked Open Data explode on a similar scale, we need to enable general users to publish “data” directly on the web and link to other “data”. We need to move the paradigm of web page publishing and hyperlinking towards data publishing and data linking. We should enable people to post structured data about anything rather than just unstructured text. We need the active participation and contribution of the billions of worldwide internet users. Recently, the web has seen enormous user participation with the rise of easy-to-use social software. We should exploit this trend of social web applications, however, for enabling people to create, share and link “data” on the global Linked Data Web.

With this vision, I am working on a social Semantic Web application called StYLiD (an acronym for Structure Your own Linked Data), now available at www.stylid.org. A basic demo video is also available at www.stylid.org/quickstart.php#video

It enables people to share a wide variety of structured data with the freedom to define their own structured concepts on the fly. (more…)

The first entries have begun to trickle in in our Linked Data Vision Competition – the fabulous prize is full conference pass for this year’s LinkedData Planet conference in New York, worth $1095!

James Yue Gee (drawing on N.J. Slabbert) proposes the idea of a tele-community “composed of enterprises, individuals, homes, schools, hospitals, retail shops, and everything possible” which “are all the nodes of a huge web of this tele-community.”

Colin Herridge build his vision around LEADSExplorer, a tool to “identify B2B website visitors by company name and qualify these companies as leads by analyzing the website data on company level.”

Rob Styles, in a prose account of his vision, offers a rereading of Georg Orwell’s 1984, as he believes that “so much of what we see in the news, media and politics today is described as Orwellian”. He proposes that “the semweb, and therefore Linked Open Data have to be the antithesis.”

According to Rajkumar Kannan, “semantic web is the only way of interconnecting and interrelating the information universe of data by means of tagging through ontologies” and his expectations are that this “will certainly enable the society to achieve high impact on its developments.”

Aman Shakya points out that “if we want to see the network of Linked Open Data explode on a similar scale, we need to enable general users to publish “data” directly on the web and link to other “data”. We need to move the paradigm of web page publishing and hyperlinking towards data publishing and data linking. We should enable people to post structured data about anything rather than just unstructured text.”

In a recent interview just published on our web site, Ken North (from the LinkedData Planet conference faculty) suggested that EU privacy laws can be a guiding light in the process of modelling privacy regulations for the web of data:

Many members of the emergent Linked Data and Open Data developer communities are Europeans who are familiar with EU privacy laws. We need them to serve as thought leaders on ethical issues related to publishing open data, although we’ll still need global awareness of privacy issues. We also need an international agreement that provides a process for resolving disputes about the accuracy or removal of private and confidential data.

I’m currently having a mild case of tunnel vision regarding privacy issues, partly also because I attended the PRISE conference here in Vienna last week. It was the concluding conference for the PRISE project, the aim of which was to provide “criteria and guidelines for privacy enhancing security research and for the application of the developed security solutions. As a supporting activity under the PASR programme the project will assist the European Union in shaping forthcoming security research programmes in accordance with its fundamental values.” PRISE developed a framework to ensure that privacy policies are already considered in the design of research projects, and not simply taken care of as an ‘add-on’ shortly before the release of a prototype or publictaion of a research project. In other words: Research on privacy friendly research – I approve!

So if there’s anybody in the Linked Data and Open Data community eager on getting in touch with people familiar with the technological side of EU privacy laws: PRISE was coordinated by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, more specifically by Johann Cas at the Institute for Technology Assessment. I am also happy to put you in touch if need be! Also, don’t forget to read the full interview with Ken North.

Come share your expertise with linked data and semantic technologies and learn from others at LinkedData Planet in New York City (June 17-18, 2008).

In creating the modern generation of enterprise and web applications, we typically integrate information from multiple sources. Relating data from disparate sources presents a challenge of deriving information. However, semantic tools and technologies are evolving that enable us to understand information derived by linking data from different sources, including data from applications, databases, ontologies and content management systems. Semantic technologies and tools support techniques such as tagging online information to make it more readily accessible for data integration. This makes it easier to understand data in relation to other data, even if some of this data is inside your firewall, some is in a business partner’s system, and some is part of the growing collection of useful publicly available data on the web.

LinkedData Planet provides insights into those technologies that enableus to:

• connect data contained in silos within organizations in a meaningful way
• extract and correlate data from web sites and databases for purposes such as analyzing trends and decision support, customer and vendor relationship management, and social networking

(more…)

It was the result of hard work and dedication: Early in the wee hours, precisely at 3:53 am, Sören Auer from AKSW (Leipzig University) announced the release of a new version of Triplify, the web application plugin that exposes structured data from relational databases as RDF, Linked Data and JSON.

With Triplify, AKSW want to overcome the present dilemma of the Semantic Web: Even though significant research and development efforts are undertaken, the growth of semantic representations is still outpaced by the growth of traditional web pages – to an extent that one might be skeptical about the potential success of the Semantic Web.

Within the Semantic Web initiative a number of standards and techniques were developed supporting the encoding and exchange of structured information and knowledge on the Web. And that’s the core of the Triplify approach – exploiting structured relational representations behind Web applications for creating a critical mass of semantic representations on the Web. Read more on our homepage.

Related pages:
Triplify.org
i-Semantics Triplification Challenge