http://data.wien.gv.at is a first well done step in the area of Open Government Data for a modern and open City of Vienna. Open human- and machine readable data in several formats and from several categories (e.g. population, education, budget, leisure time and many more) are availabe for re-use now. Into the bargain available under the CC-BY-3.0 License of Creative Commons.

The road to 17th of May 2011 has started about 1 year ago – at least from the pointview of the Austrian (and Viennese) open data community: on the 8th of April 2010 a group of linked open data enthusiasts – representatives of universities, companies and the civil society – invited interested people to come to the 1st Open Government Data Meetup at the OCG (Austrian Computer Society) in Vienna. For talks there were Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge Foundation on site in Vienna as well as Stefano Bertolo of the European Commission has been hooked up via skype to shine a light on this – at this time – for Austria and Vienna very new topic of Open Government Data to present their experiences and best practices in the field to about 60 participants. The interest was very high – also on the side of the media – and therefore a basic interest as well as a first braod information in Vienna was built.
Afterwards everything went quickly until the 17th of May 2011 (and also if one year seems to be a long time I do think that it was an enormous performance of all involved parties to manage so much in only one year!) – after the mentioned MeetUp, the OGD Austria was founded – an initiative thats’ objective is to open (linked) government data (non personal) in Austria in human- and machine readable formats for re-use. To do this together with politics, administration, civil society and industry. Other initiatives as open3 as well as established institutions in the area of administration research as KDZ – Zentrum für Verwaltungsforschung or the Danube University of Krems or Joanneum Research – but also companies like the Semantic Web Company or Compass Verlag, and above all lots of representatives of the civil society who were interested in the topic of Open Government Data (it is important to say that in Vienna we do have a very active creative scene and web 2.0 community) did work together to push the field of open data in Vienna / Austria.

In June 2010 the Semantic Web Company (SWC) – with support from above mentioned institutions – submitted a proposal to the technology agency of the City of Vienna (ZIT) to build and implement a bundle of measures for awareness-building activities in the field of Open Government Data in Austria – the project: OGD2011 was born. The authorisation of this project (partly funded by ZIT) for sure helped a lot to inform the relevant stakeholders (politics, public administration, civil society, industry, academia and media) in the mentioned time period and to build awareness about the power, the potentials as well as about the challenges – and the important concrete steps – of Open Government Data!

The following measures were implemented and will be implemented in the course of OGD2011:

• Open OGD Austria Stammtisch every second month (meetup, until today only in Vienna)
• 4 Stakeholder Workshops (politics, administration, civil society, industry) in February 2011 to evaluate and identify as well as to discuss the requirements on Open Government Data in Austria from the viewpoint of the respective stakeholder group
• Publishing of the OGD Digest Austria – Information around Open Data in Austria and international in print & PDF (until today 4 editions available)
• Set up and operation of a mailing list as well as a XING group
• Organisation of an open MeetUp on OGD on 15th of  Juni 2011 in Vienna
• Set up and operation of open wiki spaces for collection of information and provision of relevant information in the field of Open Data
• OGD2011 Conference on 16th of Juni 2011 in Vienna
• And very important: about 40-50 bilateral talks with representatives of politicians and public administration in Vienna about OGD to raise awareness and clarify misconceptions
• Networking with international initiatives on the topic of open data as the Open Data Network (Germany), the Open Knowledge Foundation (UK) or the ePSIplattform (just to name a few) to ensure continuous exchange on the topic – as well contentwise as about the process for an Open Government Data strategy – to learn from each other and to support each other…
• Furthermore in July/August 2011 the Open Government Data White Book Austria will be published as a fundamental work on open data in Austria

Inspite the OGD2011 project is arranged for the whole country of Austria the participants at the workshops and events were mainly from Vienna – what is not really surprising as most of the Austrian public bodies are located in Vienna and the City and the State of Vienna has a special status in Austria.

In November 2010 another very important step happened becuase without an Open Government Data strategy it is nearly impossible to be implemented – the political YES to Open Data in Vienna in the programme of the government of the new red-green coalition.

Regarding the implementation of data.wien.gv.at the City of Vienna received support by the EU project LOD2 – LOD2 did consulting on the following topics: Open (Government) Data, Linked Open Data, licenses and business models, as well as in the area of data sheets, meta data and URL schemas in the course of the LOD2 Publink Consultancy Services.

I think that in total the following indicators were crucial for the success of the Open Government Data movement in Vienna so far:

• Broad awareness raising at all involved stakeholder groups
• Collaboration of all stakeholders and establishing of an open dialogue between these groups
• Political commitment on the highest level
• High interest as well as engagement on the side of the public administration at the City of Vienna
• High interest and support by the media – most of all by the Open Data Blog of futurezone
• Support of the OGD2011 project by ZIT to enable a basic funding for concrete activities and measures
• Building of a strong community for Open Data and therefore permanent presence of the topic in the public
• Evaluation and representation of potentials and opportunities – but also of existing risks – of Open Government Data in Vienna
• Exchange of knowledge and experiences with international initiatives to learn from each other and use best practices vice versa
• Intense analysis of: licenses, meta data, data description (data governance) and a very well done implementation of phase 1 of data.wien.gv.at by the City of Vienna (with support by LOD2 et al.)

But this phase one of data.wien.gv.atcan only be a start – the City of Vienna already announced continuous exchange between the public administration and the community for further development of the data portal (and today on 26th of May 2011 we had the first meeting with about 50 participants and really very fine discussions about 2 hours long). Further an online survey is planned for summer 2011 (to ask the public for concrete data needs) and an open data challenge is planned for the end of 2011 on the basis of Viennese Open Government Data – and there will also happen something in the area of the scope of the provided data sets (more data will be opened) as well as in the area of the provision of additional data formats and interfaces (along the lines of the EC and UK the City of Vienna wants to follow the path of Linked Open Government Data)….

… I am absolutely curious about how the process of Open Government Data in Vienna will go on from here in 2011 and 2012!

Additional Links: http://www.wien.gv.at/english/politics-administration/open-data.html

Author Martin Kaltenböck is CFO of the Semantic Web Company Wien and co-founder and member of the executive board of the OGD Austria

Thomas Thurner: Over the recent years the LOD movement gained tremendous momentum. As one of the key players in this area how do you perceive this development? Hype or hope?

Sören Auer: From my point of view the momentum LOD gained is deserved. We should strive for a Web, which is more decentralized, democratic, participatory, transparent and inclusive. Linked Open Data is from my point a key technological building block on this road. However, a lot of work is ahead of us. LOD has to find its way directly into mainstream technology such as CMSes, Search Engines, Web Applications, Mash-Ups and we have to show users and stakeholders the direct added-value of this technology.

Thomas Thurner: What is the current state of the LOD cloud from a technological point of view? Where do you see room for improvement?

Sören Auer: Currently, the technological state of LOD seems to be comparable to the early days of the Web. We are still able to draw maps/clouds of the LOD datasets and data links are still sparse and difficult to maintain. This reminds me a lot of the early days of the Web, where we also had problems with broken links (the infamous 404). Later, after content management systems and Web applications automatized the link generation and maintenance this improved a lot and I hope we are on the same road with LOD technologies finding its way into more and more Web systems.

Thomas Thurner: How is the LOD2 project addressing theses issues? What are the project’s key objectives?

Sören Auer: LOD2 is addressing in three ways: First, we develop new research approaches highly relevant for LOD, for example, for Linked Data management, automatic data linking as well as Linked Data enrichment andquality improvement. Second, we implement and integrate these approaches into specialized tools (e.g. SILK, OntoWiki, Virtuoso and DL-Learner) forming together the integrated LOD2 stack. The LOD2 stack can be used by data publishers for the whole life-cycle of Linked Data management ranging from extraction over linking, authoring, enrichment to exploration & search.

Thomas Thurner: What do you think are the most important factors to bring LOD to the masses?

Sören Auer: From my point of view the key factor here is that we manage to integrate the large number of tools and approaches for supporting the Linked Datalife-cycle stages in a synergistic way, where each aspect adds value and triggers a number of other improvements. For example, the establishing of a new data link has a direct effect on search & exploration of Linked Data. We have to directly show these kind of benefits to users so they receive and instant gratification for contributions to the Web of Data. Semantic Wikis, such as Semantic MediaWiki and OntoWiki, are already nicely working in this direction. An application with an enormous potential to bring LOD to the masses would be the creation of a distributed, social semantic network. With OpenId, WebId, FOAF, Semantic Pingback most of the building blocks are available, but the final step integrating these into an easy-to-use social networking application still has to be done.

Thomas Thurner: Compared to other semantic web approaches linked data principles seem to be rather easy to understand. On the other hand some argue that the “linked data cloud” is a big heap of data which cannot be used for professional purposes. What is your point of view?

Sören Auer: Of course the currently available data is not useful for all potential usage scenarios. However, already now Linked Data can be used for many interesting applications: For example, we just completed the development of a prototype for a large search engine, where users searching are assisted with comprehensive background information obtained from the Linked Data Web. For this use case, information available as Linked Data is already very valuable and useful. The criticism of LOD being a “heap of data” also reminds me a lot of the early days of the Web, where people raised similar criticisms for the Web being a medium of un-professionalism. Later it turned out that, of course there is a lot of amateurism, but as Wikipedia impressively demonstrates the working together of many amateurs with the right tools can in the end outperform few professionals.

Thomas Thurner: Linked Data could also become a new paradigm for light-weight enterprise data integration. What are the biggest obstacles today for linked data to being accepted by the business community?

Sören Auer: Using Linked Data for data integration in large enterprises has an enormous potential. Just last week I was invited for a workshop with the IT department of one of the top car makers and the people responsible there for data integration were extremely excited about the opportunities of Linked Data in the large heterogeneous enterprise with more than 3000 different backend systems. Linked Data technologies can easily fill the gap between unstructured Intranet search and expensive & complicated Service-oriented Architectures. Compared to SOA, Linked Data is a pay-as-you-go strategy, where data integration can be performed incementally and in sync with the requirements and evolution of the data structures in the enterprise. In order to realize this vision, we need to continue the maturation of enterprise Linked Data tools – the availability of PoolParty, Sindice Enterprise Edition, Virtuoso, TopBraid are already important steps in that direction.

Thomas Thurner: Automatic mechanisms to curate linked data and to make alignments between datasets possible play a crucial role for the next phase of linked data economics. Which technologies will play a central role? What will be the most critical point – do you see a “wisdom of the crowd” playing a role in this game?

Sören Auer: Definitely! Tapping the wisdom of the crowd for mapping & linking has a huge potential, which is currently unused. We started working in that direction with DBpedia Live and the DBpedia mapping Wiki. In order, to make it really easy for people to contribute we have to dramatically lower the barrier to contributing to the alignment process. In LOD2 we also plan to enable users to create mapping and links between dataset by simply giving examples of correct links and evaluating some automatically generated ones.

Thomas Thurner: At the moment governments all around the world start to publish open data, more and more stakeholders start to understand the benefit of open linked data. On the other hand enterprises haven´t even started with this topic. What could be the dynamics which will trigger projects in industry sectors like financial industries which will make use of open data principles?

Sören Auer: Making statistical and financial information available in structured form and as Linked Data could have a enormous impact in this regard. With the DataCube vocabulary effort a first step in this direction was made, but it would be nice if this vocabulary would get an official stamp of a standardization organization such as W3C. Since the benefit of publishing statistical and financial data in structured form, e.g. as Linked Data, is visible most when done by many, this could be also facilitated by government regulations and industry best-practices.

About INFAI

The Institute for Applied Computer Science (InfAI) at Universität Leipzig hosts research groups in service sciences, knowledge engineering and management as well as natural language processing. The approximately 20 researchers of the Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web (AKSW) research group at InfAI headed by Dr. Sören Auer are establishing theoretical results and scalable implementations for the field. Particular emphasis is given to areas such as ontology creation and
manipulation, knowledge extraction, ontology learning and information & data integration on the Semantic Data Web. The implemented tools and services (such as DBpedia, OntoWiki, DL-Learner and LinkedGeoData) developed by the group enjoy considerable popularity.

About Sören Auer

Dr. Sören Auer leads the research group Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web (AKSW) at Universität Leipzig. His research interests include semantic data web technologies, knowledge representation, engineering & management, usability, agile methodologies as well as databases and information systems. He aims to combine strong theoretical results with high-impact practical applications. Sören is author of over 50 peer-reviewed scientific publications resulting in a Hirsch index of 15. Sören is leading the large-scale integrated EU-FP7-ICT research project “LOD2 – Creating Knowledge out of Interlinked Data”. Sören is founder (respectively co-founder) of several high-impact research and community projects such as the Wikipedia semantification project DBpedia or the social Semantic Web toolkit OntoWiki. He is co-organiser of several workshops, programme chair of I-Semantics 2008, OKCON 2010, ESWC 2010 and ICWE 2011, area editor of the Semantic Web Journal, serves as an expert for industry, the European Commission, the W3C and is member of the advisory board of the Open Knowledge Foundation.

Florian Bauer is REEEP’s Operations and IT Director, responsible for the overall operational management of the organisation, the product management of reegle (the search engine for renewable energy and energy efficiency) and the management of the IT landscape of REEEP.

PoolParty Team had the chance to talk with Florian about reegle – information gateway on clean energy.

Could you please give us a brief overview over reegle – what are the targets you are pursuing with this platform?

The main aim of the reegle information gateway (http://www.reegle.info) is to provide a one-stop gateway to comprehensive, high-quality and up-to-date information on clean energy. By making this information accessible to stakeholders in the field around the world, and by presenting it in a user-friendly and intuitive format, reegle directly helps to facilitate the transition to low-carbon energy.

The website provides information on renewable energy, energy efficiency and climate change and their various sub-sectors at a global level, and some reegle services actually combine raw data sets from several different sources, put these datasets into context and thus provide enriched information.

reegle is an offshoot of the Renewable Energy & Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP), a non-profit, specialist change agent aiming to catalyze the market for renewable energy and energy efficiency, with a primary focus on emerging markets and developing countries.

The new reegle data portal (data.reegle.info), launched in 2011, has established reegle as a publisher and consumer of Linked Open Data in the energy sector. It provides key clean energy datasets free for re-use using Linked Open Data W3C standards.

reegle consists of two components: one is the semantic search engine (http://www.reegle.info/), the other is the linked data portal (http://data.reegle.info/) – What are your target groups, and which typical problems of the clean energy domain can you solve with these services?

For reegle.info, our target groups are primarily project developers, financiers and government policy-makers. These users can access high-quality information on clean energy-related issues with the set of tools we provide: a special web search, a catalogue of more than 1700 key stakeholders, a map view for geographical browsing, a clean energy glossary, and an energy country profiles function.

The energy country profiles are typical of what we’re trying to achieve. Here, we take information from many different providers and combine it all to present one comprehensive information dossier on renewable energy and energy efficiency in that particular country. This means that in one location you have the country’s most important energy-related information ranging from key statistics, and current regulations to key players in the energy field in both public and private sectors.

For our data portal, the target group is a more technical one: primarily IT developers and open data specialists who want to create new mash-ups and integrate data from reegle into other websites. One of the first using these reegle data sets is the OpenEI.org website, another key portal in the energy field.

Open data is not the same as linked open data. Why did you choose to build your services around W3C´s linked data paradigm and/or standards like RDF?

Tim Berners-Lee once mentioned that he likes to compare the progressive ways of offering data with the “stars system” used to rate hotels. You get:

* for making data public (in any format)
** for machine-readable formats (structured data)
*** if the data is offered in a non-proprietary format
**** if you use URIs to identify things, so people can point to your datasets
***** for linking to other people’s data to provide context

So, as you can imagine, our goal is for reegle to be firmly in the 5-star category, and to establish reegle as an avant-garde tool in energy data.
I also like to view “linked data” as a “single worldwide API”. If the old web was like a huge book, the new semantic web is like a huge database, and SPARQL is the way to ask for information – by sending a query through the SPARQL Endpoint. RDF is the language that offers all possibilities to describe a given dataset with all of the necessary information, including any links to other datasets. Therefore RDF data and SPARQL endpoints provide a powerful tool to find and filter datasets and are crucial, base parts of the semantic web’s architectural layers. On reegle the SPARQL endpoint and the description of the structure of our RDF files is online on our clean energy open data portal.

You also decided to build a SKOS based domain thesaurus for clean energy which now plays an important role to improve the search experience at reegle.
Which experiences have you gained so far from this effort? Which obstacles did you have to overcome?

The SKOS-based renewable energy thesaurus can be seen as the “heart” of reegle as it provides the basis for a lot of related services in reegle, including the refinement suggestions for search results, the auto-completion options and the glossary links between defined terms and their synonyms and related terms.

We decided to use SKOS because we think it is the best language for building a formal and controlled vocabulary for thesauri in a semantic web context, without adding too much complexity. Although it is a simple language, you really still need IT experts to use it to build a thesaurus – domain experts with additional IT skills (hard to find!).

So in our case, we decided to use a scalable and easy-to-use thesaurus server called “PoolParty”. Using this system drastically reduced the complexity, and allowed us to concentrate on the actual building of the thesaurus with our domain experts, and to spend less time on transferring the knowledge into data sets.

What are your future plans with reegle?

Currently we’re working on restructuring the site to better highlight our new added-value services such as the clean energy country profiles. We are also planning to further develop our thesaurus to include climate-compatible development terms and we’ll soon release a wordpress plug-in to insert this thesaurus into clean energy blogs. One of the most exciting projects we are actually working on is the development of “dossier pages”, where we will provide relevant information to several topics mashed up on one page using semantic web technologies. This is part of the EU funded SCMS (“semantic content management system”) project.

The interviewee: Hjalmar is a successful entrepreneur, founder of three startups in the gaming, mobile and web sectors since 1996. Prior to launching DataMarket, Hjalmar worked on new media and business development for companies in the Skipti Group (owners of Iceland Telecom) after their acquisition of his search startup – Spurl. Hjalmar offers a mix of business, strategy and technical expertise.

The idea of providing raw data (first mentioned by Sir Tim Berners Lee in the course of the W3C Linked (Open) Data movement) for free and unrestricted re-use follows the idea and objectives of the reegle.info information system as the single point of access for worldwide clean energy data (renewable energy as well as energy efficiency).

On data.reegle.info you can find data on stakeholders in the clean energy area as well as country (energy) profiles from the 1st day of the launch in November 2010 – later on the reegle.info team will open up its renewable energy and energy efficiency thesaurus (SKOS format) for public re-use and continuously will open up and provide more and more clean energy data on data.reegle.info. As license for data.reegle.info the Open Government Data License for public sector information is used. data.reegle.info follows W3C standards and recommendations for Linked Open Data as well as Open Government Data.

For developers data.reegle.info have created a comprehensive developer guide as well as a SPARQL endpoint as the central API to the reegle.info data. So the the reegle.info consortium  hopes that data.reegle.info initiates a lot of new (data) mash ups as well as innovative apps using data.reegle.info.

You can find the survey at survey.lod2.eu
The survey will be open until the 17th December 2010.

Very much appreciated, is any help in forwarding this to relevant colleagues or suggestions for people this should be  to, and for any blogging/tweeting to make sure as many potentially interested people as possible have the opportunity to respond! If you have any questions or issues about the survey please don’t hesitate to contact Martin Kaltenböck <m.kaltenboeck –at– semantic-web.at> or Thomas Thurner <t.thurner–at– semantic-web.at>.

Andreas Blumauer: “I think this year’s I-Semantics was a big step forward. I had the impression that a lot of industry representatives are looking again for serious solutions there, after they have had already “burned their fingers” with the first-generation semantics. The now presented 2nd generation is much more about running applications and less unproven concepts.”

Tassilo Pellegini: “This is what I also noticed this year. People build now on a solid common knowledge on the topic and are much more aware of the possibilities of the existing technologies and methods. And as this conference also where visited by a quite international crowd, a very homogeneous discussion incorporating a lot of the international trends was possible. So the developed sight on the topic was quite clear. In this respect, the keynote of Peter A. Gloor was a notable and impressive look into the very next future. It seems that the powerful technique of Cool Farming will be on our agenda in the next years, when we talk about prognosis tools, sentiment analysis, aggregated expert’s data, etc.”

Andreas Blumauer: “In terms of a look into the very next trends, also the Keynote of Rafael Sidi was impressive to me, as he draw a real amazing picture how his company Elsevier is on the way to transform their whole business model into a new paradigm. And this gives a glue that LOD has now arrived in real industry environments.”

Tom Schandl: “I think this real-live-aspect of the Semantic Web was one of the unspoken focal points of the conference. In this respect Richard Cyganiak had a brilliant talk about how corporate data integration can benefit from RDF-Solutions, because a RDF based data concept can be developed step-by-step in contradiction to a “conservative corporate data integration” which always goes with a general redesign of the whole data-structure of a company. Richard calls this “pay as you go” – and I think this is what the industry looks for.”

Helmut Nagy: “This is also my impression, standing a lot on our booth. The industry looks for very concrete semantic solutions – and some of them are already there and ready to use. So – to carry some house advertising – our PoolParty demozone was very well recognised and commented. And this is not only because I served Tropical Banana Cocktail there.”

So the talk went on, in the car, at the blogosphere in the Semantic Web Community.

I-Semantics will take place for the 6th time this year in September and it will be co-located again with I-Know in Graz/Austria. This year´s programme shows that Semantic Web and semantic technologies in general are increasingly relevant for all kind of industries:

• Biomedicine
• Public administration & Public transport
• Information technology
• Libraries
• Media & Content Industry
• E-commerce
• Education etc.

I-Semantics “Industry Track” with its 3-days programme full of demos is one of the highlights of the congress. With 28 submissions this year´s Triplification Challenge tells a lot about the significance of Linked Data in areas like librarianship, public administration or GIS & environmental planning. Take a look at the 15 nominees – and if you consider to come to I-Semantics 2010 follow the link for registration.

In March 2010 several Cologne-based libraries have opened their catalogue data under a CC0 license following Tim Berners-Lee’s call for “Raw Data Now!”. What has been the motivation behind this step?

The hbz (“Hochschulbibliothekzentrum des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen”, english: “North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Centre”) has come to the conclusion that libraries need to participate in the development of the Semantic Web. The opening of catalog data followed as a necessary first step. Our intention is to show with this first legal-political step how important the legal/licensing dimension is when you publish data on the web, be it Linked Data or not. So for us at the hbz the Open Data initiative primarily is seen as the first step in eventually publishing Linked Open Data just as Tim Berners-Lee had called for.

Other participants in the Cologne Open Data initiative like the Cologne University and City Library focus more on the direct advantages the releasing of raw bibliographic data bings: With other libraries and consortia following this example it will be easy to enrich existing catalog or other bibliographic services with subject headings, classification numbers, tags etc. Also, published raw data is integrated into other web services like Wikipedia which point back to libraries’ services. Indeed, Open Data is an end in itself which should be pursued by more organizations in the library world and beyond it.

The provided data is currently availble in a proprietary but open format. Can you give us some technical description of the published data? Do you have plans in providing more structured datasets in the future?

“Opaque but open” would be the better description of the underlying format because it isn’t proprietary at all. Actually, alongside the data from the hbz union catalog there is data stemming from libraries’ local databases (see http://opendata.ub.uni-koeln.de/ and http://opendata.zbsport.de/). We are using different internal formats. Generally, all the formats are based on the MAB format (an acronym for “Maschinelles Austauschformat für Bibliotheken” which means “Automatic Interchange Format for Libraries”) that is only used in the German and Austrian library world for the data interchange between libraries similar to the better known MARC format (Machine-Readable Cataloging) of the Library of Congress. It was developed in the 1970s for storing data on magnetic tape. The format documentation can be viewed on the German National Library’s webpages.   As the format is nearly 40 years old, the processing of MAB data is very cumbersome on modern computers. Therefore, the hbz provides an encapsulation method called “generic format”, where the historic data records of the library catalogs are unwrapped into a more common, user-friendly scheme. Each record is placed into a Unicode UTF-8 encoded file, containing all the MAB fields, each of them separated by line feeds, and the whole record set of a library is forming a “tar” archive, which is compressed afterwards to save space.   It is possible to dump those archives by a usual unpack tool. This software is available on all known Windows/Linux/Unix platforms. Or you can use a simple Perl helper script provided by hbz. More tools and scripts, even in other programming languages, are in preparation for publication.   The opaqueness and the age of the standards used in the library world (the english standard MARC which is used worldwide doesn’t differ in these respects from MAB) make it necessary to change to a more open and widely adopted standard. That’s where Linked Data comes into play which is based on the accepted and widespread standards HTTP and URIs. The construction of RDF out of the library catalog raw data is a very sophisticated design task. Our plans are to convert the existing data to RDF using proper vocabularies which enable us to lose as little information as possible and giving access to the data by providing a SPARQL endpoint.

Currently the data you provide is open but not yet linked. What are your plans when it comes to contribute to the Linked Data Cloud?

I have to go into greater detail to answer this question properly. Viewed simply, the data of library institutions can be divided into two broad types: authority data and bibliographic data. Authority data splits up in data about people, about corporate entities and about subject headings. In Germany, authority data is maintained centrally by the German National Library in cooperation with the six German library consortia. Bibliographic databases consist of records about books or rather editions of books. Authority data and bibliographic data are already heavily linked, for instance a bibliographic record contains the author’s or editor’s authority number which links to the corresponding authority record.   The German National Library is also working on migrating library data, especially authority data, into the Semantic Web. They recently made their Linked Data prototype for authority data publicly available. We have already taken first steps to cooperate and coordinate our efforts. The colleagues at the German National Library have recently developed a Linked Data prototype for their authority data. As they take care of authority data we focus ourselves on bibliographic data. At the moment we are exploring the technology and vocabularies for publishing bibliographic data as Linked Data. That’s a demanding task because besides the known vocabularies like Dublin Core or the Bibliographic Ontology (Bibo) which don’t fully map to the density and structure of the information in the catalogs, there has been several years’ work on the new comprehensive cataloging standard RDA (Resource Description and Access) for which a RDF representation has been developed. However, RDA in RDF needs to be modified a lot so that it can be applied to our bibliographic data. We are currently working on a vocabulary for the union catalog’s data based on existing vocabularies like Bibo and RDA.   Of course, as soon as we will have published bibliographic data as linked data we will start linking to hubs in the Linked Data Cloud like DBpedia or GeoNames.

Publishing data to the LOD Cloud is one thing. Consuming data is another. Have you plans to integrate data from the LOD Cloud into your systems? Do you have policies for quality assurance?

Of course the possibility to incorporate data from other sources easily is one major reason for us to publish Linked Data besides the goal of making libraries’ data an integral part of the web. Enriching our data with other data and providing new services through and with mashups would be a main reason to link to other data. We are, however, not working on such projects yet, because we first need to convert our legacy data to RDF.

What role will the Semantic Web play for libraries in the future?

We believe the Semantic Web plays an important role for the future of libraries. Discussions about “Next Generation Catalogs” are a recurring theme in the library world since the 1990s. It is time to finally act and move our data enprisoned in opaque formats to a new level by improving its structure and underlying technology and by migrating to formats that can be easily consumed by others who are not part of the library world. Joining the Linked Open Data community seems to us the best way to go.   Also, the production, publication and dissemination of academic literature is subject to ongoing and fundamental changes which have far-reaching implications for the work of academic libraries and their role in research and education. We believe that semantic markup and interlinking will play an important role in the development of knowledge production and thus indirectly will have great impact on libraries. Clearly, the Semantic Web can’t be cancelled out of the future of libraries.

Moreover, turning your question around, libraries could play an important role for the future of the Semantic Web. Libraries are trusted institutions and deeply grounded in our culture. As indicated above libraries have produced linked data (again: lower case) since the time of card catalogs. We undoubtly have some practice in producing and curating linked data which should be worth a lot to the Semantic Web community. We thus think libraries are predestinated for helping to coninuously order the messy place the Semantic Web always will be and ensuring its trustworthiness and stability.

About Adrian Pohl

Adrian Pohl is working at the Cologne-based North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Center on Open Data, Linked Data and its conceptual, theoretical and legal implications. He regularly writes at Übertext: Blog about the internet, libraries and metadata, Linked Open Data, communication, epistemology and the like. He has studied communication science and philosophy in Aachen and is currently studying Library and Information Science at the Cologne University of Applied Science. You can follow him on Twitter: http://twitter.com/acka47.

Started in 2005 the Semantic Technology Conference has become one of the international community hot spots for the commercial application of and trend scouting in semantic technologies. Tassilo Pellegrini talked to the organizer Eric A. Franzon, VP of Wilshire Conferences and Semantic Universe, about what to expect from the upcoming event and how semantic technologies are becoming mainstream.

From June 21 – 25, 2010 the annual Semantic Technology conference will take place for the 6th time. Looking back: what has changed over time? What are the hot topics at this year’s conference?

We launched SemTech in 2005 in San Francisco.  It was a good turnout for a new event, with around 300 attendees.  By 2009, that number had grown to 1100, so audience size has been a significant change, certainly.  However, our interest all along was to grow an industry as well as an event, and I have absolutely seen that growth and maturation.  Ours was the first conference devoted to the commercialization of Semantic Technologies, and at that first conference, there was a predominant academic presence.  That’s not a bad thing – this, like so many technical industries, came out of academia.  Nonetheless, it’s nice to see that by 2010, there is significant adoption by businesses and organizations. I actually feel comfortable saying that Semantic Technologies are becoming mainstream; certainly not ubiquitous, but widely adopted.

The hot topics at the 2010 conference include exciting news in areas we have covered extensively before such as Linked Data, Semantic Search, Healthcare, and Publishing.  But we also are delving much more deeply into new domains that have received a lot of attention recently such as Open Government, Marketing & Advertising, and Social Networks.  There are new standards benchmarks to discuss such as SPARQL 1.1 and the business rules work that is being done with RIF.  Additionally, we are seeing a lot of traction in Semantics in the Enterprise, so SemTech will have quite a bit to offer in that area as well.

While semantic technologies have been around for quite some years now the advent of the Semantic Web added a new spin to the community. What do you expect for the future when it comes to the convergence of semantic technologies and the Semantic Web?

I see Semantic Technologies as a superset of the space that is the Semantic Web.  The Semantic Web is public; the area I call Semantic Technologies includes non-public, closed systems – behind firewalls.  We’ve actually seen this before.  At the same time that the World Wide Web really hit its stride in the mid-1990’s, we saw widespread adoption of portals and corporate intranets.  Even though they did not sit on the public Web, these systems used the technologies of the Web to link documents, enabling organizations to share those documents globally, quickly, and inexpensively.

As the tools become better and we see more use cases in the Semantic Web, I see parallel development of semantically enabled enterprise systems.  In the same way enterprises were using early Web technologies to share documents behind firewalls, they are now using semantic systems to share data globally, quickly, and inexpensively.  At first – and we are seeing this already – in-house systems will consume data from the public Web, essentially mixing public and private data.  This is relatively easy to do when both systems are built on a similar set of technologies, and there are an increasing number of rich data sets for companies to use.  Think of a corporate system that consumes real-time stock data, for example.  The system is not generating that information itself, but it might be using it in a corporate application.

One of the prominent topics at the moment is Linked Data which in connection with Semantic Web might evoke a paradigm shift in data integration issues. How do you experience this trend? How should companies react?

If you think about the ‘traditional’ challenges that enterprises have faced in managing data and meta data — issues like integration, disparate data, unstructured data, governance, legacy systems, and data quality (to name a few) — Semantic Technologies offer solutions.  They’re not always the best solution for every problem, and I don’t expect that RDBMS systems will go away, but there are companies using Semantic Technology today to make money and save money.

From your perspective: what are the most exciting things to look out for in the near future?

There is a great opportunity for tool developers to enter the marketplace. The community is hungry for new tools and for semantic development to be integrated into the tools and development environments they are already using.  Another area that I believe the industry is hungry for is good UI development.  Data is powerful, but its usefulness is often only seen in solid visualizations and reporting.  I expect that more of these tools will emerge in the very near future.

Tools for publishers like OpenCalais, Zemanta, and the rich semantics available in Drupal 7 are making it possible for less-technical people to include semantics in their web pages.

Another area to watch is consumer applications. Tripit, Siri, and Adaptive Blue’s Glue have shown that there is a market for data-driven applications for consumers.

About Eric A. Franzon

Over the last decade, Eric Franzon has served as VP of Wilshire Conferences, where he has been exploring the world of enterprise data. As VP of Semantic Universe, he has worked to raise awareness and explain the usage of Semantic Technologies and Web 3.0 in business and consumer settings.  A lifelong learner and teacher, Eric is frequently called on as a consultant, coach, and trainer around complex technical topics. He is an advisory committee representative with the World Wide Web Consortium and an Affiliate Analyst with Guidewire Group.  Eric has also taught improvisational comedy, early childhood education, blues harmonica, and gender studies.  A Chicago native, he now lives in Los Angeles.