Semantic Web Company

The present state of development, future trends and expected market scenarios for Semantic Technologies are shown in the just published “Demand driven Mapping Report”. The report is part of the EU-funded project Value It, which is about bringing together the various stakeholders within the sector: Industry, Research and Government. VALUE-IT preliminary findings show that the STE potential market in Europe will size up to €1.44B for 2014. Scanning furthermore the executive summary of the report, some findings attract attention:

The survey results also show considerable variation by sector, both of policy and technology implementation. With respect to technologies, ICT companies are also the most willing to consider semantic approaches. The ICT sector has an unusually high interest in all ST components, with 20% or more being willing to consider all of them, and over half of IT respondents looking at Web 2.0 (social computing). [...]  The use of tagging technologies – which overall is the least mature approach in the survey – is most advanced in Life Sciences. The Life Sciences, Media & Entertainment, and ICT sectors all have a reasonably strong interest in Natural Language Processing (roughly 25% on average). Ontologies and RDF/OWL are the technologies least often considered, though the interest in these Semantic Technologies is not insignificant. Taxonomies are slightly more popular, perhaps indicating that companies are taking the first step to prepare for a more semantic approach to IT solutions. The ICT, Energy & Utilities, and Media & Entertainment sectors all have a reasonably strong interest in using taxonomies.

The 190 pages report gives an actual overview of the status quo on European Semantic Technology Market and is now available for download: Final demand driven mapping Report

Leipzig is one of Germany’s Semantic Web hotspots. From May 5-6, 2010 the annual Semantic Web Day provides the opportunity to catch up with latest developments especially in the domain of Linked Data and the foundation of the German chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation. Organizer Sören Auer gave us some background information.

From May 5 – 6, 2010 the 3rd Semantic Web Day in Leipzig will take place. What will be this year’s topics? Who should attend?

The Semantic Web Day is targeting IT people, software developers, decision makers and users interested in learning about the potential of semantic technologies. The language during the event is German, so primarily Austrians, Swiss and Germans will attend. Beside semantic technologies a particular focus of this years event is open data in governments, public administrations and science. Although the programme is not yet finalized we already compiled an interesting number of talks and presentations including talks about the open biodiversity database Fishbase, the European Digital Library Europeana, a Linked Data project of the German Umweltbundesamt, use case presentations in the pharma, publishing and telecommunication industries and many more (cf. http://aksw.org/LSWT). Also, in addition to AKSW the Topic Maps Lab and the Web Data Integration Labs from Universität Leipzig be present at LSWT.

One of the highlights of this year`s Semantic Web Day is the official institutionalization of the German Chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation. How did this come around? What does this mean for the OKF as a whole?

OKFN started to work in 2006 and since then managed to sucessfully complete a number of projects facilitating open knowledge. In particular, the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN), the OKCon conference series, the open knowledge definition and recently OKFN’s involvement in the launch of data.gov.uk are prominent examples of OKFN’s successful work. However, many of the OKFN activities were primarily driven by an active group of volunteers in the UK. With the official launch of the German OKFN branch we will strengthen the international dimension of OKFN’s work. Especially for Germany, where data privacy and security are perceived to be most important, raising awareness for enabling open, standards compliant access to public information will be an important target of OKFN’s activities.

The InFAI has become one of the hotspots in Semantic Web development in Germany over the past few years. What are you working on at the moment? What are the most interesting research and development aspects for the near future?

From our point of view establishing a network effect around the publishing and use of linked data is the most important research and development goal for the near future. We just completed a first draft and implementations of a semantic enabled pingback method (http://aksw.org/Projects/SemanticPingBack), which applies a similar peer notification mechanism to linked data endpoints as it is widely deployed on the blogosphere. Other important research issues we are tackling with our partners are closing the performance gap between RDF and relational data management, increasing the coherence and quality of linked data and the provisioning of adaptive user interfaces for authoring and maintaining information on the data web.

About Sören Auer

Dr. Sören Auer leads the research group Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web (AKSW) at University of Leipzig. His research interests include Semantic Web technologies, knowledge representation, engineering and management, agile methodologies as well as databases and information systems. Sören is founder (respectively co-founder) of several high-impact research and community projects such as the Wikipedia semantification project DBpedia, the open-source innovation platform Cofundos.org or the social Semantic Web toolkit OntoWiki. Sören is author of over 50 peer-reviewed scientific publications, co-organiser of several workshops, chair of the Social Semantic Web conference 2007 and I-Semantics 2008, serves as an expert for industry, the European Commission, the W3C and is member of the advisory board of the Open Knowledge Foundation.

Juan Sequeda, co-chair of the Triplification Challenge 2010 and one of the core figures in the Linked Data movement, gives us his view how the Semantic Web might evolve. His central message: “Once there is an incentive to create quality links, these links will start to show up. And then users will start linking to the data hubs of their interest.”

Linked Data itself has grabbed a lot of attention inside the Semantic Web community recently. But what about the outside perspective? Could linked data be called the killer app for the Semantic Web?

I foresee two things happening with Linked Data. One is from the web development perspective (the so-called Web 2.0 developers) and the other is from the enterprise perspective. The web development community will sooner than later realize that Linked Data will enable easy integration of data and therefore will ease the pain of consuming data from different data sources. Thanks to big organizations such as BBC, New York Times, Reuters, Best Buy, etc. web developers will start paying attention to this “new thing” called Linked Data.

What we need is that the inside Semantic Web community starts to create applications on top of current Linked Data so when the outside web development community starts to pay attention, they have something to chew on. We (the semantic web community) needs to start speaking the web development language. There is still a big gap. I have had personal experiences with people in the web development community who think that RDF is XML and because they hate XML, they will never consider it. This is false and this is something that we need to change.

From the enterprise perspective, Linked Data is another data integration solution. Data integration has been a problem since day one of relational databases. I believe enterprises will be open to consider new solutions with new technologies. I’m hoping to see new startups tackling the enterprise domain. Imagine being able to query “get all my clients from cities whose population is greater than 1 million” even though I don’t have the data about population of cities in my database.

Is Linked Data the killer app for the Semantic Web? Before I answer that, I would like to ask, what was the killer app of the Web? Was it the browser? Was it e-commerce? Was it search? Was it Amazon or Ebay or Google? I believe Linked Data will enable new killer apps, apps that are only possible thanks to Linked Data. The browser was only possible because of HTML. So let’s ask ourselves what is possible because of Linked Data, and there we will find our killer app.

One of the core deficiencies of the young open data cloud is the little amount of interlinks between datasets. Is it just a matter of time to overcome this or are there other measures needed to turn the existing datasets into a true giant global graph?

I like to remind myself that this new wave of semantic web technologies is an extension of the current web. Therefore we should analyze how the web evolved in the beginning. Initially, everything were a bunch of documents on the web in which people manually created links to other documents. When Google started, it created an incentive to offer quality links between documents. This also created data hubs. If you write a blog post about a book, most probably you will link to the web document of that book either on Amazon and/or Wikipedia. I believe that this will happen with Linked Data. Once there is an incentive to create quality links, these links will start to show up. And then users will start linking to the data hubs of their interest.

Open Governmental Data is a big issue at the moment. The US and UK government have started to apply Linked Data principles to turn this vision into reality. Lots of other countries are following. What do you expect from this trend?

I believe that Linked Data will take off thanks to the initiative of governments. We always talk about the chicken and egg problem of the semantic web. Once we have organizations that don’t even think about it and are just interested in putting their data on the web, the semantic web will start to grow. If Bookstore ABC puts their data on the web, it may not be so meaningful. But if the US and UK government puts their data on the web, following the Linked Data principles, then people can wake up and say “ok, so this is for real. Let me start paying attention to this”.

You are one of the chairs of the Triplification Challenge 2010. Can you give us a brief insight what to expect from this year’s challenge? What are the conditions to participate?

The Triplification Challenge this year has grown and is very exciting. For the first time, it is offering two different tracks.

The first track, the Open Track will accept submissions on three areas 1) new datasets that are published following the Linked Data principles and that show potential benefit, 2) generic methods, mechanisms and approaches of creating Linked Data from legacy datasets and 3) applications that make use of Linked Data.

The second track is the New York Times track which will accept submissions of applications that make use of the New York Times Linked Data and one or more government dataset. The objective is to create an application powered by Linked Data that would be of interest to any constituent of that government.

I personally believe that the year 2010 is the year of creating Linked Data applications and the Triplification Challenge is the way to be part of it.

3.000 € prize money for the  most promising Linked Data applications

The New York Times, Wolters Kluwer Germany and Semantic Universe sponsor the Triplification Challenge 2010 taking place at the I-SEMANTICS Conference from 1 – 3 September 2010 in Graz / Austria. Together they have provided 3.000 Euro in prize money which will be given to the  most promising application demonstrations and approaches built upon Linked Data.

The Challenge is organized by an international consortium consisting of Juan Sequeda (University of Texas at Austin), Bernhard Schandl (University of Vienna), Sören Auer (University of Leipzig), Ivan Herman (World Wide Web Consortium), Tassilo Pellegrini (Semantic Web Company Vienna) and patroned by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Participants can choose between an open track and a special NYT track.

The open track sponsored by Wolters Kluwer Germany and Semantic Universe encourages submissions that fit into one or more of the following categories:

• novel data sets that are published as part of the Web of Data, according to Linked Data principles, and demonstrating potential benefit of use within applications;
• novel generic mechanisms, approaches, and technologies that convert certain types and formats of information into triples, interlink them to other data sets, and expose them as Linked Data;
• applications showcasing the benefits of Linked Data to end-users such as for information syndication, specialized search, browsing, or augmentation of content.

The NYT track invites submissions that make use of the Linked Data published at data.nytimes.com and one or more government datasets that relate to politics. Any dataset qualifies that is produced by any government in the world that would be of interest to a constituent of that government. These can range from the demographics of election districts to campaign finance to corporate spending on political messaging.

The submission deadline for both tracks is 18 May 2010.

All submissions will be reviewed by an international program committee from industry and academia electing two winners in the open track and one winner in the NYT track.

For detailed information on the Triplification Challenge visit

http://i-semantics.tugraz.at/triplification-challenge or

http://triplify.org/Challenge/2010

Cordial thanks to our sponsors:

Uberblic.org connects structured data from the web. The Berlin-based inventor Georgi Kobilarov gives a brief insight into the mashup service and talks about the challenges when it comes to build applications upon linked data.

You have recently published the service uberblic.org, a Linked Data mashup editor. What was your motivation to develop this tool?

Uberblic.org provides an integrated view of web data. Our goal is to integrate all the structured data on the web, and give web-developers a single point to access to that reconciled data. More than that, we will open up the tools we use to manage the data sources to the community, so that the people can help us curating that repository of free data. We re-publish all the data we import as Linked Data, under the licenses of the original data publishers.

Some of the data sources we import are available in the Linked Open Data cloud as well, but many are not. Linked Data is an elegant way to publish data in a distributed way on the web, but consuming it from that distributed cloud is – at least – impractical. In every real-world application using linked data from the web I’ve seen, organizations built up internal copies of the cloud, and often even reconcile linked data sources. They build their own Linked Data proxies. Uberblic.org helps those users by providing one public proxy for data from the web. Many of our sources get monitored for data changes, and the according data in uberblic is updated in real-time.

Can you give us a brief insight how the tool works? What technology is is built on?

My company, Uberblic Labs, has developed a data integration platform that we use to power uberblic.org. We call it the Uberblic Platform (the name uberblic is derived from the German “Überblick” – English “overview”). This platform enables us to do the full process of “data fusion”: Importing and converting external data sources, mapping the data schemas to a central ontology, filtering out data errors, automatically suggesting duplicates to the user, and merging data from different sources into a single, reconciled representation.

Structured and semi-structured data from the web is an excellent use case for our software platform, since there we come across all the interesting cases of real-world data heterogeneity. But what I think is especially powerful and yet missing in other Linked Data projects I know, is the ability to subscribe to update-feeds. We do that extensively, fetching updates in real-time from Wikipedia and the like.

Our platform is built in Scala and runs a on cluster of machines, with workers communicating through a messaging system. We developed an RDF storage layer on top of a distributed key-values store for storing all provenance information used in the extraction process, currently around 100 million named graphs for uberblic.org. That storage layer does not directly provide SPARQL access, so we push all the output data into a SPARQL endpoint hosted by Talis as well.

What have been the biggest challenges in tackling the integration issues of dispersed data?

It was quite a steep learning curve to do Linked Data not only in an academic environment, but in a reliable, industry-strength set-up. In academia, there was always the excuse that things are just research prototypes. Now that excuse is gone. That’s also where it becomes necessary to manually clean up data. And there are two ways to do that: Either you enable the users to change facts directly in your repository after you have imported the external data (that is what Freebase does), or you facilitate clean-up cycles in the original data source and fetch these updates in real-time. That is what we do.

I believe that data publishing must happen in a distributed style, because then each data source gets taken care of by a specialized group of people using specialized tools. And it’s what you see not only on the web, but also inside organizations and enterprises. But consuming data trough centralized APIs is more than just convenient. We all use Google
or another search engine as a central access point to web pages which are published in a distributed way all over the web, don’t we? Can you imagine today researching a topic on the web without the centralization power of search engines, just by following links across web sites, like in the old days?

When we built the Uberblic Platform, some of the things I imagined to be large headaches, like schema mapping, turned out to work really well. Those pathologic cases you often see in academic “challenges” are – well – pathologic. It’s not necessary to solve them fully automatically through super-intelligent algorithms. Much more important than the sophistication of your algorithms are well designed workflows so that the user becomes a part of the solution. And that’s not about crowd-sourcing or swarm intelligence, the editorial curating of schema mappings and object reconciliation can be done just by a small team of people. If they have the right set of tools.

What are the next plans with uberblic.org? Where will the journey go?

Uberblic.org will continue to integrate more interesting and useful data sources from the web, and we will start making more APIs available to web developers to build their applications on top. We are also looking for partners who are interested in developing applications and have been struggling in the past to get the cross-source data from the web they need.

The work on improving uberblic.org will also benefit our Uberblic Platform, and hence our clients who use that same software for integrating organizational data sources with each other and with the web of data.

About Georgi Kobilarov

Georgi is founder and managing director of Uberblic Labs, a company based in Berlin specialized in Linked Data integration. He worked as a research associate in the Web-based Systems Group at Freie Universität Berlin and as a visiting researcher at Hewlett Packard Labs Bristol. As co-founder and lead developer of DBpedia, he was also a day-one contributor to the Linking Open Data project. Georgi is consulting with the BBC on several Linked Data related projects. He organizes the Web of Data Meetup London, a bi-yearly gathering of the UK Linked Data community. Georgi graduated with a Diplom in business administration from Freie Universität Berlin and has many years of work experience as a software developer. Visit his blog: http://blog.georgikobilarov.com

The Vienna-based company punkt. netServices is just about to release a demo version of their PoolParty service, a SKOS-based thesaurus management tool with linked data capabilities. I had the chance to pre-read a white paper and test their service. Here is a brief overview. You can also try a demo.

Purpose

Poolparty was conceived to facilitate various applications like

• Semantic search engines
• Recommender systems (similarity search)
• Corporate bookmarking
• Annotation- & tag recommender systems
• Autocomplete services and facetted browsing.

These use cases can be either achieved by using PoolParty stand-alone or by integrating it with existing Enterprise Search Engines and Document Management Systems or Enterprise Wikis.

Thesaurus Management

PoolParty is aiming to be easy to use for people without a strong Semantic Web background or special technical skills. The GUI is entirely web-based and utilizes AJAX so the user can e.g. quickly merge two concepts via drag & drop. An overview over the thesaurus can be gained with a tree or a graph view on the concepts.

PoolParty also helps to semi-automatically add concepts to a thesaurus as it can be used to analyse documents (e.g. web pages or PDF files) relevant to a thesaurus’ domain in order to glean candidate terms. This is done by the key-phrase extractor of KEA. The extracted terms can be selected by the user, thereby becoming “free concepts” which later can be integrated into the thesaurus, turning them into “approved concepts”.

Documents can be searched in various ways – either by keyword search in the full text, by searching for their tags or by semantic search and similarity search. The latter takes not only a concept’s preferred label into account, but also its synonyms and the labels of its related concepts are considered in the search. The user might manually remove query terms used in semantic search. Boost values for the various relations considered in semantic search may also be adjusted. In the same way the recommendation mechanism for document similarity calculation works.

PoolParty by default also publishes a Semantic Wiki version of its thesauri, which provides an alternative way to browse and edit concepts. Through this feature anyone can get read access to a thesaurus, and optionally also edit, add or delete labels of concepts. Search and autocomplete functions are available here as well. The Wiki’s XHTML source is also enriched with RDFa, thereby exposing all RDF metadata associated with a concept to be picked up by RDF search engines and crawlers. (See two examples: Cocktail thesaurus &  Standard Thesaurus for Economics)

PoolParty also supports the import of thesauri in SKOS (including several consistency checks) or Zthes format. Those functionalities can also be consumed as stand-alone web services via PoolParty SKOS Services. Additionaly, lists of concepts and their labels can also be imported via CSV files.

Linked (Open) Data

PoolParty not only publishes its thesauri as Linked Open Data (in addition to a SPARQL endpoint), but it also consumes LOD in order to expand thesauri with information from LOD sources.

Concepts in the thesaurus can be linked to e.g. DBpedia  via a service like Georgi Kobilarov’s DBpedia lookup service, which takes the label of a concept and returns possible matching candidates. The system suggests relevant resources from DBpedia and the user can select the one that matches the concept from his thesaurus, thereby creating a skos:exactMatch relation between the concept URI in PoolParty and the DBpedia URI. The same approach can be used to link to other SKOS thesauri available as Linked Data.

Other triples can also be retrieved from the target data source, e.g. the DBpedia abstract can become a skos:definition and geographical coordinates can be imported and be used to display the location of a concept on the map, where appropriate. The DBpedia category information may also be used to retrieve additional concepts of that category as siblings of the concept in focus, in order to populate the thesaurus.

PoolParty is capable of importing a SKOS thesaurus from a Linked Data server, and may also receive updates to thesauri imported this way. This feature has been implemented in the course of the KiWi  project funded by the European Commission. KiWi also contains SKOS thesauri and exposes them as LOD. Both systems can read a thesaurus via the other’s LOD interfaces and may write it to their own store. This is facilitated by special Linked Data URIs that return e.g. all the top-concepts of a thesaurus, with pointers to the URIs of their narrower concepts, which allow other systems to retrieve a complete thesaurus through iterative dereferencing of concept URIs.

Additionally KiWi and PoolParty publish lists of concepts created, modified, merged or deleted within user specified time-frames. With this information the systems can learn about updates to one of their thesauri in an external system. They then can compare the versions of concepts in both stores and may write according updates to their own store.

This means each system decides autonomously which data it accepts and there is no risk of a system pushing data that might lead to inconsistencies into an external store. Data transfer and communication are achieved using REST/HTTP, no other protocols or middleware are necessary. Also no rights management for each external systems is needed, which otherwise would have to be configured separately for each source.

Technology

The software is written in Java and utilizes the SAIL API, so it can be used with various triple stores. The thesaurus management itself (viewing, creating and editing SKOS concepts and their relationships) can be done in an AJAX Frontend based on Yahoo User Interface (YUI). Editing of labels can alternatively be done in a Wiki style HTML frontend. For key-phrase extraction from documents PoolParty uses a modified version of the KEA 5 API, which is extended for the use of controlled vocabularies stored in a SAIL Repository (this module is available under GNU GPL). The analysed documents can be stored and indexed in Lucene/Solr or any other (enterprise) search system along with extracted and semantically related concepts.

Jordan S. Hatcher is, among other things, a lawyer, academic, and entrepreneur working on Intellectual Property and Internet law issues in the UK and worldwide. He is heavily involved in the Open Data Commons initiative. Last month he gave me an interview on IPR issues associated with data licensing. His brief answer to the question why data needs a seperate licensing framework:

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.

From September 1 – 3, 2010 I-SEMANTICS, the 6th international conference on semantic systems, will take place in Graz / Austria. This year’s focus is „Towards a Web of Linked Data”. As a conference aiming to bring together science and industry, I-SEMANTICS encourages both, scientific (research/application) and industrial contributions.

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.

Earlier this month the first ever Linked Data Camp took place in Vienna at the Quartier für Digitale Kunst. This two day event attracted about 35 people to discuss and to jointly work on novel applications for the Web of Data.

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!