Step 1. Generate a thesaurus by using a linked data source like DBpedia

As recently reported SWC has developed a tool called SKOSsy which can be used to extract seed thesauri from DBpedia. In our example I will generate a knowledge model describing the domain of “digital photography“. This step took around 15 minutes.

Step 2. Load the thesaurus into PoolParty and improve it to your needs

After the seed thesaurus has been loaded into PoolParty Thesaurus Manager you have many possibilities to enhance the knowledge model further: Add more categories, synonyms, relations etc. In this example I use the seed-thesaurus without any further improvements. This step took approximately 2 minutes.

Step 3. Generate an automatic text extractor on top of your thesaurus

This step took a couple of seconds and ended up in having generated a fast and reliable text mining application on top of PoolParty Extractor, ready to be used to enrich your documents with data from the LOD cloud.

You can try it out here: PPX Live-Demo

To try the extractor on your own, please take a look at the image above which shows a proper configuration, you have to insert the following UUID in the form: d35d4ddb-adc3-4ea5-b027-deacac03e391

Since our example is all about ‘digital photography’, we recommend to use text samples (or some fragments) like these ones to test the quality of PPX based text analytics:

• Digital Camera Image Noise (Results as HTML, RDF/XML)
• Nikon D3S In-depth Review (Results as HTML, RDF/XML)
• Introduction to Shutter Speed in Digital Photography (Results as HTML, RDF/XML)
• Digital Camera Sensors (Results as HTML, RDF/XML)

Let us know what you think about this straight-forward approach and your opinion about the quality of the results. We believe that thesaurus based text mining is in many cases an alternative to some other approaches, especially if you want to to enrich your content with information from the upcoming web of data.

Of course we would be happy to generate other demos in the areas of your interest! Just get in contact with us by using our contact form.

Digital Identity on the Semantic Web
Thursday, April 7, 2011

While recent developments in ICT make it easier for companies and consumers to reach each other, they can also scatter your personal information more widely, making life easier for criminals. On the other hand public institutions and government agencies are collecting personal data too. So personal data is processed without the consensus (or even the knowledge) of the respective citizen. As we know, leaks in this field may unleash sensible personal data as well. The misuse of personal data can be restricted – this is a challenge to both, the technological and the juridical domain. This meetup takes a look on how Semantic Web Technologies can take over its responsibility in this emerging field.

• Christof Tschohl (BIM)
  Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Human Rights
• Mischa Tuffield (Garlik)
  A Standards-based, Open and Privacy-aware Social Web (W3C)

>> read more, and register for free



Portals, Apps and Visualizations for Open Government Data
Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Picking up Keith Andrews suggestion, this is a MeetUp focusing on tools, services and projects dealing with Visualization, Apps-creation and Portals/Catalogs for Open [Government] Data. As this MeetUp is on the eve of Austrians first Open Government Data – Conference (OGD2011) we expect to meet experts ans enthusiasts from Austria and abroad.

• Keith Andrews (IICM)
  Institute for Information Processing and Computer Supported New Media at Graz University of Technology
• Andreas Blumauer (SWC)
  Storing, searching, serving Open Government Data – getting an overview on the growing market for open data solutions

>> read more, and register for free





Drupal is the leading CMS when it comes to implementing Semantic Web standards. What are the reasons for this, what makes Drupal such a good fit for Semantic Web technologies?

Historically, Drupal is known to be web standard compliant. It supported the RDF-based aggregation format known as RSS 1.0 as early as in 2001, which was later upgraded to RSS 2.0. The Drupal community prides itself in valid HTML code, not only for the code generated by Drupal, but also by taking the extra step of automatically fixing faulty HTML entered by its users. Drupal has been using XHTML since its version 4.0 in 2002. The next logical step beyond XHTML was to add a layer of semantics with the RDFa standard, a W3C recommendation published in 2008.

There are definitely many reasons that contributed to the addition of RDFa into Drupal 7. The first comes from the Drupal project lead, Dries Buytaert, who is passionate about the web and open source. Secondly, the growing Drupal community is very web savvy and includes many experts from different backgrounds in accessilibity, CSS, HTML, security etc. As a result, every release of Drupal includes many latest standards. The community meets twice a year at conferences (DrupalCons), thes events play a great role in hashing out what technologies or designs will be incorporated into the next version of Drupal. Because of the flexibility of its internal architecture, Drupal is able to keep up with the latest web standards. Content in Drupal is very structured and provides site administrators with a user interface to build the site structure they want, using entity types, content types, fields and taxonomies for categorization. When it comes to other CMSs, Joomla!’s community appears to be more fragmented with a core software that is not as extensible as Drupal and WordPress is more of a blogging platform, so turning it into a full blown CMS can be challenging. Both WordPress and Joomla! are in fact adapting the concept of Drupal’s Content Construction Kit (CCK) to their software but they have not yet reached the same level of maturity as Drupal.

A common objection to the adoption of Semantic Web technologies is that the learning curve is steep and that it is too complicated for many web developers to get into it. How can Drupal 7 change that? Which features accessible for the average web site operator will it offer?

Semantic Web technologies don’t have to be complicated when applied to simple use cases! We purposely chose only of a subset of semantic web technologies to integrate into the core of Drupal, keeping the learning curve for the Drupal developers and users as low as possible. The main technology is RDFa which includes the notions of vocabularies (a schema, or collection of attributes) as well as Compact URIs (CURIEs) which make the authoring of RDFa easier. In fact, some web developers might have come across these notions before when working with Dublin Core in the meta tags as such dc:title or dc:date.

Which benefits will web site owners get when they switch to a semantics enabled Drupal 7?

Google and Bing increasingly rely on machine-readable structured data from the websites that they crawl. The design of Drupal 7 embeds semantic meta data that makes machine-to-machine (M2M) search native for a Drupal 7 website. RDFa can add value by giving search engines more details such as the latitude and longitude of a venue for display on a map; or providing the ISO date format for localization and proper display in the search results for different countries.

What are your hopes regarding the development of other applications that either provide or consume data from D7 sites? Which improvements of standards, best practices or (lightweight) ontologies in the Semantic Web community would you like to see?

Services like Sig.ma are already able to collect semantic data from different sources and display it in new ways in the form of mash-ups. Eventually, these services that consume semantic data will not be just Drupal specific, as more platforms jump on the semantic web band wagon. What I hope to see as improvements or best practices in the future are more well-maintained vocabularies. Many of the existing vocabularies are over engineered, some fail to de-reference properly. Their is also some work to be done in order to improve the tooling made available to web developers as well as introducing the simple concepts of Linked Data to web developers via easy to read documentation.

Thank you for this interview, Stéphane!

From September 6 – 8, 2010 we kicked off the LOD2 project in Leipzig / Germany. LOD2 is funded by the European Commission within the 7th Framework Programme (Grant Agreement No. 257943) consisting of 10 partners from 7 countries. Its main aim is to integrate and syndicate linked data with large-scale, existing applications and showcase the benefits in three application scenarios: 1) Media & Publishing, 2) Enterprise Data Management and 3) Open Government Data. The resulting tools, methods and data sets have the potential to change the Web as we know it today. (You can download the project flyer here.)

The first day was dedicated to the general introduction of the project partners which are Universität Leipzig (Germany), Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (Netherlands), National University of Ireland in Galway (Ireland), Freie Universität Berlin (Germany), OpenLink Software (United Kingdom), Semantic Web Company (Austria), TenForce (Belgium), Exalead (France), Wolters Kluwer Deutschland (Germany) and Open Knowledge Foundation (United Kingdom). Below you see a picture of the kick off team.

During the morning of the second day a first introduction to the technical components took place. The picture below shows an abstraction of the LOD2 high level architecture.

Orri Erling and Hugh Williams from OpenLink introduced Virtuoso, which will be used as one of the storage technologies in the LOD2 stack. The second knowledge store technology will be MonetDB introduced by Peter Boncz from CWI. Both systems will also be used as a kind of benchmark laboratory for hosting and querying linked data.

Christian Bizer from FU Berlin talked about Silk and D2R. In combination they will be used to discover relationship and similarities between entities within different linked data sources – generally called identity resolution.

Giovanni Tummarello from DERI introduced Sindice and Sig.ma under the aspect of how to update, validate and reuse data that is available on the web and support the production of professional, collaboratively governed linked data especially for enterprise use. Beside that an important aspect will be how to handle the high amounts of generated data. So according to Giovanni scaling the infrastructure and the use of appropriate hardware will be central in bringing the Sindice index into enterprise stacks i.e. as an approach for lightweight data consolidation purposes.

Norman Heino from AKSW University of Leipzig introduced OntoWiki and Semantic Pingback. Ontowiki will be used at the interface layer for producing, annotating, browsing and querying linked data and presenting it to the enduser in various GUIs. Semantic Pingback’s aim is to interlink the Web 2.0 with the Semantic Web by backwards compatible RPCs (remote procedure calls). It detects new typed or untyped external links, manages the GET and POST commands and it takes care of server autodiscovery.

Andreas Blumauer from Semantic Web Company demonstrated PoolParty as a smart editor for metadata in enterprise stacks. Like Ontowiki PoolParty also addresses the interface level of LOD2 especially when it comes to generate, edit and link metadata to documents primarily based on SKOS. PoolParty deliberatelly uses Thesauri as a mapping layer to discover similarities of documents, generate tag recommendations for their annotation and publish used vocabularies as Linked Data.

In the afternoon we continued with individual breakout sessions to discuss work package interdependencies and start profiling the use cases and requirements eingineering in more detail.

The third day started with an introduction by Stefano Bertolo – the responsible scientific project officer from the EC side for the LOD2 project – who pointed out that the LOD2 project is an important one for the European Web of Data and the EC among others specially is interested in the Open Government Data use case of LOD2.

After this introduction talks of the 3 Use Cases were presented by A) Jonathan Gray (OKFN) about the Open Gov Data use case followd by B) Amar-Djalil MEZAOUR (Exalead) speaking about the Linked Business Data use case and C) Christian Dirschl (Wolters Kluwer) having a talk about the LOD in the publishing & media industry use case.

Central to the success of LOD2 will be a smart handling of all the integration issues which will come up in the course of the project. Here Tenforce, an integration specialist from Belgium, will have the lead. CEO Bastiaan Deblieck gave a detailed outlook on the methodologies  and he presented a nice and comprehensive overview how the integration issues will be approached from a SCRUM perspective.

After a presentation about LOD2 project dissemination, training and community building activities by Martin Kaltenböck (Semantic Web Company) there were serveral discussions going on until the successful kick off meeting was closed by project lead Sören Auer (Universität Leipzig) at 04.00pm of 08 September 2010.

Updated news information can be accessed on the LOD2 project website as well as on the LOD2project twitter stream (and on twitter using #lod2)…

Stay tuned!

Andreas Blumauer from Semantic Web Company (SWC) talked with David Huynh, “Interaction Scientist” at Metaweb, the company which developed Freebase, an “open, shared database of the world’s knowledge”.

SWC: David, you have been working for MIT´s Simile Project and now for Metaweb Technologies – two “building blocks” of the Semantic Web. Could you tell us a bit about your ongoing work at Metaweb?

David: My official title at Metaweb is “Interaction Scientist,” and so my main focus is coming up with novel interaction designs for Metaweb’s platform and products, and prototyping them to some extent to evaluate their effectiveness. Parallax was one such prototype that has gathered much excitement within Metaweb and the Semantic Web community at large. And the Freebase query editor 2.0 shows my interaction designs at the other end of the spectrum – targeting developers rather than just end-users.
I’ve also learned that data-centric user interfaces and interaction designs can only be as good as the data allows them to. So I am also dedicating some of my time toward analyzing the data we have and improving its quality so that I can design even better interactions.

Freebase Query Editor 2.0 from David Huynh on Vimeo.

SWC: With Parallax you have introduced a new way to search and explore data: Could you explain the “set-based browsing paradigm”?

David: In the browsing paradigm of the original Web, while looking at a web page, you can only click on one hyperlink to get to one other web page. But in a lot of cases, the hyperlinks on that web page can be grouped into different groups based on what they mean to the human reader: these are the links that lead to reviews, these are the links that lead to authors, these are the links that lead to vendors, etc.
Now if the computer actually knows what these links mean, then you can tell it to follow several of those links that mean the same thing: follow all the links that lead to authors. Think of it as powered browsing: the computer does the work of following several similar browsing paths at the same time – going from a set of things (web pages or data entries) to a similarly related set of things – and making all of that information available for your perusal in one shot. It is a paradigm shift compared to how we browse the Web today. And it’s only possible when the computer is capable of telling which link is similar to which other link. And that capability, in turn, will be made possible by the Data Web.
(See this unpublished paper which goes into depth about this concept)

SWC: Linked Data is evolving fast. A huge amount of RDF data is available and ready for exciting new applications. Unfortunately, one bottleneck is still the availability of Semantic Web user front-ends which demonstrate the power of linked data. Do you think, that the Semantic Web is rather a server-technology than an end-user experience?

David: I have never thought of the Semantic Web as either a server technology or an end-user experience. I only care about usefulness, and then a matching amount of usability to make that usefulness accessible to people, especially those without Computer Science expertise.
I find that it’s so much easier to explain to people and get them excited about “immediate, personal, local benefits” of a particular technology than about “long-term, communal, global benefits” of a vision. For most people, the former must be experienced and felt often before the latter can appear vaguely appealing enough to call for actions. I’m lazy – I don’t like to spend efforts convincing people of visions; I only want entice people into using the tools that I have created.
So if Parallax is considered a success, it is so not just because of its technologies and research contributions, but also because the accompanying screencast explained it in a way that people who cared nothing about the Semantic Web could understand why Parallax would be useful to them. This was achieved by pointing out limitations of existing web technologies as already experienced and understood by a lot of web users, and then illustrating concretely a possible solution enabled by data web technologies.
Perhaps I could venture further and say that the dichotomy of server technologies and end-user experience is what’s holding back Semantic Web user interface efforts. For those who don’t have expertise in design, it is a comfort to think that once the back-end technologies are solid, then it’s just a matter of putting on some polishes, a.k.a. user interfaces from their point of view, to make the whole package appealing. This approach is wrong. The user interface design must inform the back-end design. Otherwise, the user interface will almost always reflect the internal system model, and that’s usually very dissonant with how users think and behave. Recall all the Semantic Web interfaces you have seen that force users to think in terms of triples or of raw URIs. Those were made by starting from the data model, not from user needs.

SWC: Quite often I hear people saying: Where is the Semantic Web? – I still can´t “see” it! How could the linking open data community make use of such user interfaces like Exhibit, Piggy Bank or Parallax? Is the set-based browsing paradigm a universal way to browse linked data or just one possible way?

David: My research prototypes embody a number of UI ideas that are quite transferable to other platforms. Most of my code is open source, too. This, by the way, is rarer than it should be: research prototypes often fall apart as soon as, or even sooner than, the relevant research papers get presented at conferences, and research code rots rather than gets offered free for reuse. This is sad, because reusable data needs reusable code to proliferate even more widely, but there is no reward system for making research code reusable, or for keeping research prototypes running. So perhaps people can’t “see” the Semantic Web because research prototypes are not presented in appealing and comprehensible ways, and they break down and disappear too quickly.
Regarding the set-based browsing paradigm, it is most certainly not the only way to browse linked data. It is just the first good one that came to my mind, around 2005. But it’s not until 2008 that I actually got around to implement it for real. One of the factors so important in its feasibility is the quality of data in Freebase, compared to other data sources that I had access to. Even the simple fact that a lot of Freebase topics have images makes Parallax look a lot more interesting and useful. People like to see pictures rather than raw URIs. And the diversity of types of data helps illustrate the browsing paradigm of Parallax – that ability to shift focus from one set of things to another set of things, even across very seemingly unrelated domains of information, such as from politicians to their celebrity friends in the movie industry.
So, perhaps one of the main challenges in adopting Parallax ideas on any arbitrary RDF data set is curating the data sufficiently for the purpose of presenting it. In fact, if you don’t know how some data is to be presented and used, there’s no way for you to determine if that data is of sufficient quality. User needs and interface designs drive back-end implementation and data curation, not the other way around. It’s a simple idea, really, but it can be hard to adopt if one is fixated on data alone.

SWC: Do you plan new versions of Parallax? When will it become part of Freebase or of even more Linked Data Sources?

David: I’ve done a few further experiments with the ideas in Parallax, but they are not ready for public use, yet. Freebase data makes my job much easier by allowing me to focus mostly on interaction designs rather than mostly on data quality, or rather, fighting the lack of data quality, for the purpose of presenting it. So I’ll start with Freebase data and we’ll see where it takes me.

SWC: What else are you working on at the moment?

David: As mentioned briefly earlier, reusable data needs reusable code to proliferate widely. That gives you a hint at an effort that I’m involved with.

SWC: Many thanks, David!

About David François Huynh

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According to Tim Berners-Lee the Web is still static and consists mostly of archived HTML and PDF documents. There is still a need for a read/write Web and the standards are still not used to a sufficient extend. Changes in the Web are the ‘move to mobile’ and the climb up of ‘advertizing to being a science’.

Beside the still existing challenges of the current Web, additional ones arrived. Web Applications as well as Open Social Networking and Open Linked Data count to the area of current interest.

Web Applications are supposed to become new computing platforms and need a serious clean trust system. In the future Web Applications could offer a decentralized modular installation like a webized Debian.

Open Social Networking has become a great application in the Web. Currently it suffers from the ‘Social Silo Problem’. Users have often accounts in several platforms like Facebook or MySpace. The platforms, however, are separated from each other like in a field of silos. The challenge of the Semantic Web Community is now to interconnect the silos via RDF, OWL, HTTP, and SPARQL. A further requirement of Tim Berners-Lee are to focus on a Secure Web id.

Open Linked Data attracted the attention of Tim Berners-Lee most of all. Being one of the chairs of the co-located workshop ‘Linked Data on the Web’ he stressed that “we need data on the Web to work better together” in government, enterprise, and science. Open Linked Data could be a wizard for users of existing relational database systems. As query language he proposed a federated/delegated SPARQL.

Finally, Tim Berners-Lee described the role of researchers in those challenges. Researchers should ‘build a platform for others that follow’. Thereby, one should not assume what people will use the platform for.

(Report by Christoph Wieser / Salzburg Research)

I think there is something quite frustrating about music recommender systems at the moment though. First, they do not explain how a particular recommendation was derived. I would really like them to tell me “I recommended this track because the harmonies are similar to other tracks you liked according to such and such criteria”. I think I would place more trust in a recommender system that actually explains recommendations, like a friend would do.

Another frustration is that we now have a really huge music-related web of data, created within the scope of the Linking Open Data project, which is not used at all by current recommender systems.

We started some work with Alexandre Passant, driven by these two frustrations. Using all these interlinked data for recommendation purposes allows us to break free from the traditional ‘information barriers’, and use all sorts of data as a basis for a musical recommendation.

For example, using the datasets currently available and interlinked on the web, you can already provide recommendations such as “You’re interested in intentional living and the Beastie Boys? Did you know that B.B. King is a vegetarian, as is Adam Yauch, who is a member of the Beastie Boys?”

Last.fm, are you listening? The full interview can be found here.

Yves is also going to be a keynote speaker at the Web of Data Practitioners Days, Oct 22-23, here in Vienna, where you’ll have the chance to discuss the issue of LOD-based music recommendation with him in greater detail.

Other highlights of the program: Web of Data 101 (interested SemWeb beginners: please attend!), an Open Hacking Session, and keynotes from Danny Ayers and Keith Alexander, Richard Cyganiak, Ansgar Scherp, Alan Dix, Leo Sauerman, Sören Auer and Tassilo Pellegrini. URL of the website is webofdata.info

Other news of the day: Physicists can’t dance, but hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com?

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Triplify itself is a small web application plugin – its crucial parts consisting of roughly 200 lines of code – currently only implemented in PHP. It is based on the definition of relational database queries for a specific web application in order to retrieve valuable information and to convert the results of these queries into RDF, JSON and Linked Data. More information about Triplify can be found here.

On to the nominees: Eight of the submissions were nominated and can now be voted on using the poll widget on the nominations page. The nominees are:

1. Automatic Generation of a Content Management System from an OWL ontology and RDF import and export by Alastair Burt, Brigitte Jörg.
   URL: www.lt-world.org/triplify
2. Integrating Triplify into the Django web application framework and discover some math by Martin Czygan.
   URL: pcai042.informatik.uni-leipzig.de:9103
3. Linked Movie Data Base by Oktie Hassanzadeh, Mariano Consens.
   URL: www.linkedmdb.org
4. Interlinking Multimedia Data by Michael Hausenblas, Wolfgang Halb.
   URL: sw.joanneum.at/CaMiCatzee
5. Showcases of light-weight RDF syndication in Joomla! by Danh Le Phuoc, Nur Aini Rakhmawati.
   URL: swm.deri.org/jsyndication
6. Semantic Web Pipes Demo by Danh Le Phuoc.
   URL: pipes.deri.org
7. DBTune by Yves Raimond.
   URL: dbtune.org
8. Triplification of the Open-Source Online Shop System osCommerce by Elias Theodorou.
   URL: triplify.org/vocabulary/oscommerce

Detailed information can be found in PDF outlines on the nomination page – and don’t forget to vote! The final decision about the winners of the challenge will be made by the organizing committee.

The prizes will be awarded at I-SEMANTICS 2008, 3–5 September 2008, Graz, Austria, which is part of TRIPLE-I, a joint venture of three conferences (I-SEMANTICS, I-KNOW, I-MEDIA).

Related post:
Sören Auer: Triplification Challenge Nominations