Semantic Web Company

The Annual (German) AI Conference goes semantic: In 2009 there’s an “Ontologies & Semantic Web” track, Franz Baader and Frank van Harmelen are invited speakers, and there’s a tutorial on OWL 2 and Rules.

As a special treat, there’s also going to be a Mashup Challenge – which promises to be a fun event.

• Dates: September 15 – 18, 2009
• Location: Paderborn, Germany
• Paper submission: April 26, 2009
• Mashup Challenge Deadline: July 15, 2009

[Pascal Hitzler]

Just a few weeks after der W3C has published the official SPARQL-recommendation the U.S. technology company TopQuadrant releases a (potentially) disruptive scripting app for Sparql queries. Seeing it in action reminds a little bit of Yahoo’s mashup editor Yahoo!Pipes and indeed it is all about mashing up your resources.

To us this is one of the really exciting features we have seen during the last few months and we think its a big leap forward in the usability of the Semantic Web.

Whether you are using Google Earth, NASA World Wind or MS Virtual Earth: I think we have all had our few mesmerized moments when first playing with one of these virtual representations of our beautiful planet Earth. The easter eggs are the best part, of course, at least for the majority of users who use them, but who do not actually create any mashups themselves. Arno Scharl, Head of the Department of New Media Technology at MODUL University Vienna, even thinks that these virtual globes “are among the main drivers of mash-ups and user-generated content” (on to Andreas Blumauer’s interview with Arno Scharl). This makes sense – even though I myself might not be contributing to geospatial mashups, it’s the long tail that eventually makes the difference.

What was your latest geospatial mashup experience? To me it was finally taking a look at John O’Groats ‘myself’, courtesy of a few snapshots that users had contributed to Google Earth, after having read about this northernmost settlement of mainland Great Britain in Bill Bryson’s hilarious travelogue Notes from a Small Island (a highly recommended read for your next trip to the U.K).

Another project of Prof Scharl’s that he talks about in the interview is the US Election 2008 Web Monitor, which reflects attention and sentiment towards the US presidential candidates. They’re currently working on a way to improve the system’s ability to detect humour and sarcasm – sounds difficult enough. It’s also good to see that scientists like Scharl are embracing OpenCalais and seeking to collaborate with the open source community – read more about it in the interview.