Semantic Web Company

The LinkedData Planet conference is over now. I had a great time here and met a lot of great and inspiring people. The exhibition area especially turned out to be THE meeting point of the conference. People from media companies, major IT-companies like IBM or from governmental and non-governmental organizations were there, meeting up with some of the most prestigious software providers and experts of the semantic web world.

And that says a lot about the semantic web both as a technology and a movement: The semantic future is made happen not behind closed doors or in some ivory tower, not thought up by some secluded genius, but by people, companies and research institutions that are as close to the heart of the web as one can be.

I learned a lot about the upcoming new release of UMBEL (Upper Mapping and Binding Exchange Layer) thanks to Mike Bergman (who you can see in the picture below, sporting Semantic Web Company gear). UMBEL (in the words of the project itself) has two purposes:

1) to provide a lightweight structure of subject concepts as a reference to what Web content or data “is about”;
and 2) to define a variety of binding protocols for different Web data formats to map to this “backbone.”

You might want have a look at the UMBEL subject concepts explorer provided by Mike’s Zitgist: Start exploring here, with a preset concept search for ‘Manager’.

I also learned more about the huge variety of possible applications which can be built on top of the Talis platform – thanks to Ian Davis. One example is the Lancashire Lantern WiCI – WiCI because it is a service providing Community Information.

And finally I met Richard Cyganiak in person who gave me a thorough overview of the Semantic Web index Sindice – try a search for Richard Cyganiak to see how it works (and to learn more about him, of course).

I ended up discussing possible applications using linked data with Tom Heath, Mike Bergman, Gregory Williams, Eric Hoffer (picture on top, see also his blogpost where he features the SWC “Escape from the Data Silo” logo) and Marco Neumann, both from Semantic Web Meetup NYC. It was a great evening!

Thank you, folks!

Read also pt. 1 of our conference report: LinkedData Planet in New York: A great community event for all things semantic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Image: official-ly cool]

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

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

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

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

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

Read his full proposal here.

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

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

A big ‘Thank you’ to everyone who contributed!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tell us your vision and win a full conference pass for LinkedData Planet 2008, worth $1095! The Semantic Web Company is an Association and Analyst Partner of this year’s LinkedData Planet conference, taking place on June 17-18, 2008 in New York. Keynote speaker include Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Kingsley Idehen, Ian Davis, Anant Jhingran and Atanas Kiryakov will be among the Keynote speakers.

Here is what you need to do to enter the competition:

Send us a brief description of your vision of the impact that linking Open Data will have on business, politics and culture. Share with us your ideas how linking open data will change the world – with all the pros and cons involved.

We welcome ideas in the following categories:

• mashups
• search applications
• ontologies & schemas
• scenarios for lifestyles
• policies for the practice of linking Open Data

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

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

LinkedData Planet provides insights into those technologies that enableus to:

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

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