Tag Archives: linking open data

Thomas Thurner

Cultural heritage and the Semantic Web

by , Category: Linked Data & Open Data

datacloudThe 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.

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Andreas Blumauer

Linked Data is not owl:sameAs Semantic Web

by , Category: Linked Data & Open Data, Search Engines

twitter_cloudletWhile 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.

Thomas Schandl

Boards.ie SIOC Semantic Data Competition starts September 1st

by , Category: Calls & Competitions, Mashups & Web services

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.

Jana Herwig

And the winner is: The vision of a future where ordinary people publish structured data

by , Category: Calls & Competitions, Linked Data & Open Data

Vision CompetitionThe 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!

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