Semantic Web Company

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!

(Original post taken from “About the Social Semantic Web“)

A lot of activities around Linking Open Data (“LOD”) and the associated data sets which are nicely visualised as a “cloud” are going on for quite a while now. It is exciting to see how the rather academic “Semantic Web” and all the work which is associated with this disruptive technology can be transformed now into real business use cases.

What I have observed in the last few months, especially in business communities, is the following:

• “Linked Data” sounds interesting for the business people because the phrase creates a lot of associations in a second or two; also the database crowd seems to be attracted by this web-based approach of data integration
• “Web of Data” is somehow misleading because many people think that this will be a new web which replaces something else. Same story with the “Semantic Web”
• “Linking Open Data” sounds dangerous and not trustworthy to many companies

For insiders it is clear, that the “openness” of data, especially in commercial settings, can be controlled and has to be controlled in many cases i.e. by defining the right licensing models. But here we are still at the beginning as a workshop at ISWC 2009 has illustrated.

Anyway, looking at the characteristics of Linked Data Flows, they can be one-way or mutual. In some cases data from companies will be put into the cloud, and can be opened up for many purposes, in other use cases it will stay inside the boundaries. In other scenarios only (open) data from the web will be consumed and linked with corporate data, but no data will be exposed to the world (except the fact, that data was consumed by an entity).

And of course: On many other occasions datasets and repositories will be opened up partly depending on the CCs (or similar, not yet defined attributes) and the underlying privacy regulations one wants to use.

This makes clear that LOD / Linking Open Data is just one detail of a bigger picture. Since companies (and governments) play a crucial role to develop the whole infrastructure, we need to draw a new picture that illustrates the various Linked Data Flows in a better way:

Concluding from this the best thing would be to talk about Linked Data in general and just refer to Linking Open Data in the right context. Despite better knowledge for business people the term  “open” is still associated with “free” and “dubious provenance”. And given the fact that hardly anybody has given hard evidence on the ROI of open business models the “open argument” does count little in a time of decreasing economic prosperity.

So what would be critical to get the Linked Data thing running is to provide the corresponding business and licensing models for your Linked Data strategy. But this includes having a good understanding of the assets you want to capitalize. Given the fact that metada assets are still a novel and vastly unexplored business field which so far lack a regulated supply and demand structure there are still lots of structural obstacles that hinder the uptake of Linked Data. Providing more of the same in a laissez faire mode – like TimBL critisized at this year’s Web 2.0 Summit – might be inspiring for the in-crowd, but it might not be sufficient to build a linked data business.

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

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

The semantic web is suffering of data. Still. To get the network effects we expect to have with the use of the semantic web, there is still the need to open quality content to the semantic web world. One of the fields where such an opening to the RDF-world should happen, is cultural heritage. As works, people, history and references are distributed over various places, archives, libraries and holders of data, a semantic web approach seems to be perfect to resolve a lot of questions in making the world cultural heritage available.

Europeana is such a promising project. Europeana is funded by the European Commission under the eContent+ programme, as part of the i2010 policy. It is a partnership of 100 representatives of heritage and knowledge organisations and IT experts from throughout Europe. In the last two years Europeana’s prototype was done technically and in terms of connecting contents from various European museums, governmental organisations and art foundations. At Europeana two million books, maps, recordings, photographs, archival documents, and paintings can be found. This figure should be raised – with financial support of the European comission – up to 10 million entries until 2010. An effort which will take approximately 350 million euro.

Under the lead of Stefan Gradmann (University of Hamburg) semantic technologies within the framework and also to the outside semantic web are implemented. Even the now running beta version of Europeana focuses on traditional browsing and search algorithms, an additional semantic europeana prototype gives some insights into further developments of Europeana to a well intergrated semantic web service. So, hopefully we can expect a connection of big content networks to the LOD-cloud soon.

Projects like Europeana will go its way to a rich web of data. Hopefully this is not only a development which public institutions follow. Also commercial initiatives dealing with cultural heritage – say Google – should consider a connection of their harvested data into a bigger semantic web.

While some people work heavily on the extension of the semantic web infrastructure, like Talis Connected Commons or OpenLink´s Amazon EC2 Instantiation others have started to bring the semantic web closer to the developers and therefore to a much broader audience: They offer search facilities or Linked Data Navigators like OpenLink´s Entity Finder or DERI´s VisiNav.

Those kind of applications should not be confused with “semantic web” end-user-applications like Google´s Wonderwheel or INTSPEI´s Cloudlet: To add some semantics to existing user-interfaces can be helpful and obviously users are ready for such experiments, but of course this is NOT the innovation which the semantic web will bring but it is a very important step to be taken in parallel with the linked data initiative.

Let´s take a look at Cloudlet: This tool is an easy-to-use free Firefox extension that adds context-sensitive tag clouds to the most popular search engines and helps people more efficiently navigate through their search results. The previous version of Search Cloudlet worked with Google and Yahoo; the new version also works with Twitter. It adds Tag Clouds, Author Clouds, Recipient Clouds and Hashtag Clouds to Twitter search, Twitter user profiles and home pages. See some reviews on this popular tool.

Cloudlet is a child of the Web. INTSPEI has learned all lessons from Web 2.0 especially how to promote ideas using the blogosphere and how to identify market trends as early as possible, and it generates some added value for the users which is obvious. Sure, it doesn´t make use of linked data yet, but as a typical representative of the fast growing “semantic search evolution” it reminds me on Chris Welty´s famous insight: “In the Semantic Web, it is not the Semantic which is new, it is the Web which is new.”

Web 1.0 was the WWW without tons of network effects. Web 2.0 changed that a lot.

Linked Data is not the Semantic Web, it´s the basement for it. From a software developer´s and an IT archictect´s perspective it might seem as those two concepts were the same. But this community represents a very small percentage of all web-users.

So where is the User´s Web in the Linked Data architecture? If you´re looking at TimBL´s Linked Data principles one can clearly see that this is a “Web” for developers.

But things evolve. And some Web companies will jump on the bandwagon and will, for instance, improve their tagclouds, their semantic search, their recommender systems (Twine?) or their similarity search a lot by making use of linked data.

Like semantic search becomes mainstream (or call it “semantic search 2.0″) right now, then (in about three years, I guess) linked data will become part of a lot of mainstream applications. Linked data will generate tons of new network effects, maybe even new business models, it won´t be avant-garde anymore. It will be part of the Semantic Web.

Ireland’s largest online community boards.ie is offering a massive amount of data for download. It contains all the data from 10 years of discussions with topics ranging from banter through politics to philosophy, and is semantically marked up with SIOC and FOAF, which amounts to more than 9 million RDF/XML documents.

Additionally DERI is starting a competition looking for the most innovative use of these data. According to John Breslin, this could be

a novel web application that makes use of the data set, a report on analyses performed on the data, a tool that allows one to visualise or browse the semantic structure, or whatever else the imagination can come up with!

During my stay at DERI over the last couple of months, I worked on exporting and preparing this data set, so I am delighted that it is now used for this competition. It starts on the 1st of September and runs for two months. The prices for the top three submissions amount to a total of $7000.

Read about the details, sign up and download the dataset here. Damien Mulley already has a couple of ideas of what one could do with these data.

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.”

Today I booked my flight and hotel to stay in NYC. I am looking forward to going to the Linked Data Planet Conference. I will meet interesting people, listen to interesting talks (especially to the people from TopQuadrant, Kingsley Idehen and Timbl himself) and I will have fun in New York, it has been a while I´ve been in this great city.