Semantic Web Company

A group of Cologne-based libraries has taken a big step towards open data. In an concerted action they have relased their catalogue data for reuse on the web. Project manager Adrian Pohl comments on the initiative and what role the Semantic Web will play for libraries in the future.

In March 2010 several Cologne-based libraries have opened their catalogue data under a CC0 license following Tim Berners-Lee’s call for “Raw Data Now!”. What has been the motivation behind this step?

The hbz (“Hochschulbibliothekzentrum des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen”, english: “North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Centre”) has come to the conclusion that libraries need to participate in the development of the Semantic Web. The opening of catalog data followed as a necessary first step. Our intention is to show with this first legal-political step how important the legal/licensing dimension is when you publish data on the web, be it Linked Data or not. So for us at the hbz the Open Data initiative primarily is seen as the first step in eventually publishing Linked Open Data just as Tim Berners-Lee had called for.

Other participants in the Cologne Open Data initiative like the Cologne University and City Library focus more on the direct advantages the releasing of raw bibliographic data bings: With other libraries and consortia following this example it will be easy to enrich existing catalog or other bibliographic services with subject headings, classification numbers, tags etc. Also, published raw data is integrated into other web services like Wikipedia which point back to libraries’ services. Indeed, Open Data is an end in itself which should be pursued by more organizations in the library world and beyond it.

The provided data is currently availble in a proprietary but open format. Can you give us some technical description of the published data? Do you have plans in providing more structured datasets in the future?

“Opaque but open” would be the better description of the underlying format because it isn’t proprietary at all. Actually, alongside the data from the hbz union catalog there is data stemming from libraries’ local databases (see http://opendata.ub.uni-koeln.de/ and http://opendata.zbsport.de/). We are using different internal formats. Generally, all the formats are based on the MAB format (an acronym for “Maschinelles Austauschformat für Bibliotheken” which means “Automatic Interchange Format for Libraries”) that is only used in the German and Austrian library world for the data interchange between libraries similar to the better known MARC format (Machine-Readable Cataloging) of the Library of Congress. It was developed in the 1970s for storing data on magnetic tape. The format documentation can be viewed on the German National Library’s webpages.   As the format is nearly 40 years old, the processing of MAB data is very cumbersome on modern computers. Therefore, the hbz provides an encapsulation method called “generic format”, where the historic data records of the library catalogs are unwrapped into a more common, user-friendly scheme. Each record is placed into a Unicode UTF-8 encoded file, containing all the MAB fields, each of them separated by line feeds, and the whole record set of a library is forming a “tar” archive, which is compressed afterwards to save space.   It is possible to dump those archives by a usual unpack tool. This software is available on all known Windows/Linux/Unix platforms. Or you can use a simple Perl helper script provided by hbz. More tools and scripts, even in other programming languages, are in preparation for publication.   The opaqueness and the age of the standards used in the library world (the english standard MARC which is used worldwide doesn’t differ in these respects from MAB) make it necessary to change to a more open and widely adopted standard. That’s where Linked Data comes into play which is based on the accepted and widespread standards HTTP and URIs. The construction of RDF out of the library catalog raw data is a very sophisticated design task. Our plans are to convert the existing data to RDF using proper vocabularies which enable us to lose as little information as possible and giving access to the data by providing a SPARQL endpoint.

Currently the data you provide is open but not yet linked. What are your plans when it comes to contribute to the Linked Data Cloud?

I have to go into greater detail to answer this question properly. Viewed simply, the data of library institutions can be divided into two broad types: authority data and bibliographic data. Authority data splits up in data about people, about corporate entities and about subject headings. In Germany, authority data is maintained centrally by the German National Library in cooperation with the six German library consortia. Bibliographic databases consist of records about books or rather editions of books. Authority data and bibliographic data are already heavily linked, for instance a bibliographic record contains the author’s or editor’s authority number which links to the corresponding authority record.   The German National Library is also working on migrating library data, especially authority data, into the Semantic Web. They recently made their Linked Data prototype for authority data publicly available. We have already taken first steps to cooperate and coordinate our efforts. The colleagues at the German National Library have recently developed a Linked Data prototype for their authority data. As they take care of authority data we focus ourselves on bibliographic data. At the moment we are exploring the technology and vocabularies for publishing bibliographic data as Linked Data. That’s a demanding task because besides the known vocabularies like Dublin Core or the Bibliographic Ontology (Bibo) which don’t fully map to the density and structure of the information in the catalogs, there has been several years’ work on the new comprehensive cataloging standard RDA (Resource Description and Access) for which a RDF representation has been developed. However, RDA in RDF needs to be modified a lot so that it can be applied to our bibliographic data. We are currently working on a vocabulary for the union catalog’s data based on existing vocabularies like Bibo and RDA.   Of course, as soon as we will have published bibliographic data as linked data we will start linking to hubs in the Linked Data Cloud like DBpedia or GeoNames.

Publishing data to the LOD Cloud is one thing. Consuming data is another. Have you plans to integrate data from the LOD Cloud into your systems? Do you have policies for quality assurance?

Of course the possibility to incorporate data from other sources easily is one major reason for us to publish Linked Data besides the goal of making libraries’ data an integral part of the web. Enriching our data with other data and providing new services through and with mashups would be a main reason to link to other data. We are, however, not working on such projects yet, because we first need to convert our legacy data to RDF.

What role will the Semantic Web play for libraries in the future?

We believe the Semantic Web plays an important role for the future of libraries. Discussions about “Next Generation Catalogs” are a recurring theme in the library world since the 1990s. It is time to finally act and move our data enprisoned in opaque formats to a new level by improving its structure and underlying technology and by migrating to formats that can be easily consumed by others who are not part of the library world. Joining the Linked Open Data community seems to us the best way to go.   Also, the production, publication and dissemination of academic literature is subject to ongoing and fundamental changes which have far-reaching implications for the work of academic libraries and their role in research and education. We believe that semantic markup and interlinking will play an important role in the development of knowledge production and thus indirectly will have great impact on libraries. Clearly, the Semantic Web can’t be cancelled out of the future of libraries.

Moreover, turning your question around, libraries could play an important role for the future of the Semantic Web. Libraries are trusted institutions and deeply grounded in our culture. As indicated above libraries have produced linked data (again: lower case) since the time of card catalogs. We undoubtly have some practice in producing and curating linked data which should be worth a lot to the Semantic Web community. We thus think libraries are predestinated for helping to coninuously order the messy place the Semantic Web always will be and ensuring its trustworthiness and stability.

About Adrian Pohl

Adrian Pohl is working at the Cologne-based North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Center on Open Data, Linked Data and its conceptual, theoretical and legal implications. He regularly writes at Übertext: Blog about the internet, libraries and metadata, Linked Open Data, communication, epistemology and the like. He has studied communication science and philosophy in Aachen and is currently studying Library and Information Science at the Cologne University of Applied Science. You can follow him on Twitter: http://twitter.com/acka47.

Started in 2005 the Semantic Technology Conference has become one of the international community hot spots for the commercial application of and trend scouting in semantic technologies. Tassilo Pellegrini talked to the organizer Eric A. Franzon, VP of Wilshire Conferences and Semantic Universe, about what to expect from the upcoming event and how semantic technologies are becoming mainstream.

From June 21 – 25, 2010 the annual Semantic Technology conference will take place for the 6th time. Looking back: what has changed over time? What are the hot topics at this year’s conference?

We launched SemTech in 2005 in San Francisco.  It was a good turnout for a new event, with around 300 attendees.  By 2009, that number had grown to 1100, so audience size has been a significant change, certainly.  However, our interest all along was to grow an industry as well as an event, and I have absolutely seen that growth and maturation.  Ours was the first conference devoted to the commercialization of Semantic Technologies, and at that first conference, there was a predominant academic presence.  That’s not a bad thing – this, like so many technical industries, came out of academia.  Nonetheless, it’s nice to see that by 2010, there is significant adoption by businesses and organizations. I actually feel comfortable saying that Semantic Technologies are becoming mainstream; certainly not ubiquitous, but widely adopted.

The hot topics at the 2010 conference include exciting news in areas we have covered extensively before such as Linked Data, Semantic Search, Healthcare, and Publishing.  But we also are delving much more deeply into new domains that have received a lot of attention recently such as Open Government, Marketing & Advertising, and Social Networks.  There are new standards benchmarks to discuss such as SPARQL 1.1 and the business rules work that is being done with RIF.  Additionally, we are seeing a lot of traction in Semantics in the Enterprise, so SemTech will have quite a bit to offer in that area as well.

While semantic technologies have been around for quite some years now the advent of the Semantic Web added a new spin to the community. What do you expect for the future when it comes to the convergence of semantic technologies and the Semantic Web?

I see Semantic Technologies as a superset of the space that is the Semantic Web.  The Semantic Web is public; the area I call Semantic Technologies includes non-public, closed systems – behind firewalls.  We’ve actually seen this before.  At the same time that the World Wide Web really hit its stride in the mid-1990’s, we saw widespread adoption of portals and corporate intranets.  Even though they did not sit on the public Web, these systems used the technologies of the Web to link documents, enabling organizations to share those documents globally, quickly, and inexpensively.

As the tools become better and we see more use cases in the Semantic Web, I see parallel development of semantically enabled enterprise systems.  In the same way enterprises were using early Web technologies to share documents behind firewalls, they are now using semantic systems to share data globally, quickly, and inexpensively.  At first – and we are seeing this already – in-house systems will consume data from the public Web, essentially mixing public and private data.  This is relatively easy to do when both systems are built on a similar set of technologies, and there are an increasing number of rich data sets for companies to use.  Think of a corporate system that consumes real-time stock data, for example.  The system is not generating that information itself, but it might be using it in a corporate application.

One of the prominent topics at the moment is Linked Data which in connection with Semantic Web might evoke a paradigm shift in data integration issues. How do you experience this trend? How should companies react?

If you think about the ‘traditional’ challenges that enterprises have faced in managing data and meta data — issues like integration, disparate data, unstructured data, governance, legacy systems, and data quality (to name a few) — Semantic Technologies offer solutions.  They’re not always the best solution for every problem, and I don’t expect that RDBMS systems will go away, but there are companies using Semantic Technology today to make money and save money.

From your perspective: what are the most exciting things to look out for in the near future?

There is a great opportunity for tool developers to enter the marketplace. The community is hungry for new tools and for semantic development to be integrated into the tools and development environments they are already using.  Another area that I believe the industry is hungry for is good UI development.  Data is powerful, but its usefulness is often only seen in solid visualizations and reporting.  I expect that more of these tools will emerge in the very near future.

Tools for publishers like OpenCalais, Zemanta, and the rich semantics available in Drupal 7 are making it possible for less-technical people to include semantics in their web pages.

Another area to watch is consumer applications. Tripit, Siri, and Adaptive Blue’s Glue have shown that there is a market for data-driven applications for consumers.

About Eric A. Franzon

Over the last decade, Eric Franzon has served as VP of Wilshire Conferences, where he has been exploring the world of enterprise data. As VP of Semantic Universe, he has worked to raise awareness and explain the usage of Semantic Technologies and Web 3.0 in business and consumer settings.  A lifelong learner and teacher, Eric is frequently called on as a consultant, coach, and trainer around complex technical topics. He is an advisory committee representative with the World Wide Web Consortium and an Affiliate Analyst with Guidewire Group.  Eric has also taught improvisational comedy, early childhood education, blues harmonica, and gender studies.  A Chicago native, he now lives in Los Angeles.

Facebook — Open Graph — Semantic Search

Alex Wilhelm from The Next Web writes:

There is data outside of Facebook that the company wants to be brought in and made relevant inside of the Facebook platform. Enter the Open Graph protocol, Facebook’s way to say, in the common tongue ”all your graph are belong to Zuck.”

The product combines graphs, be they music graphs from Pandora or what have you, into the Facebook wider social graph. You can think of it has a “knit-up” with Facebook for other websites that are not Facebook affiliated.

Nick O’Neill from AllFacebook:

If HTML is the way developers get information into Google’s search engine, meta data is the way developers will get data into Facebook’s semantic search engine which will be based on the company’s “Open Graph”. Through the use of easy to implement plugins, Facebook is rapidly collecting structured data on every user. Facebook has also upgraded their API to make building on top of the Open Graph a much easier process. What’s pretty clear is that it’s an attempt to tackle the residing search giant.

[...] As Mark Zuckerberg said on stage an hour ago, by the end of the day Facebook should have more than 1 billion likes and that data will grow exponentially.

[...] There are a number of standards that have been created in the past as some developers have pointed out, microformats being the most widely accepted version, however the reduction of friction for implementation means that Facebook has a better shot at more quickly collecting the data. The race is on for building the semantic web and now that developers and website owners have the tools to implement this immediately.

Juan Sequeda, co-chair of the Triplification Challenge 2010 and one of the core figures in the Linked Data movement, gives us his view how the Semantic Web might evolve. His central message: “Once there is an incentive to create quality links, these links will start to show up. And then users will start linking to the data hubs of their interest.”

Linked Data itself has grabbed a lot of attention inside the Semantic Web community recently. But what about the outside perspective? Could linked data be called the killer app for the Semantic Web?

I foresee two things happening with Linked Data. One is from the web development perspective (the so-called Web 2.0 developers) and the other is from the enterprise perspective. The web development community will sooner than later realize that Linked Data will enable easy integration of data and therefore will ease the pain of consuming data from different data sources. Thanks to big organizations such as BBC, New York Times, Reuters, Best Buy, etc. web developers will start paying attention to this “new thing” called Linked Data.

What we need is that the inside Semantic Web community starts to create applications on top of current Linked Data so when the outside web development community starts to pay attention, they have something to chew on. We (the semantic web community) needs to start speaking the web development language. There is still a big gap. I have had personal experiences with people in the web development community who think that RDF is XML and because they hate XML, they will never consider it. This is false and this is something that we need to change.

From the enterprise perspective, Linked Data is another data integration solution. Data integration has been a problem since day one of relational databases. I believe enterprises will be open to consider new solutions with new technologies. I’m hoping to see new startups tackling the enterprise domain. Imagine being able to query “get all my clients from cities whose population is greater than 1 million” even though I don’t have the data about population of cities in my database.

Is Linked Data the killer app for the Semantic Web? Before I answer that, I would like to ask, what was the killer app of the Web? Was it the browser? Was it e-commerce? Was it search? Was it Amazon or Ebay or Google? I believe Linked Data will enable new killer apps, apps that are only possible thanks to Linked Data. The browser was only possible because of HTML. So let’s ask ourselves what is possible because of Linked Data, and there we will find our killer app.

One of the core deficiencies of the young open data cloud is the little amount of interlinks between datasets. Is it just a matter of time to overcome this or are there other measures needed to turn the existing datasets into a true giant global graph?

I like to remind myself that this new wave of semantic web technologies is an extension of the current web. Therefore we should analyze how the web evolved in the beginning. Initially, everything were a bunch of documents on the web in which people manually created links to other documents. When Google started, it created an incentive to offer quality links between documents. This also created data hubs. If you write a blog post about a book, most probably you will link to the web document of that book either on Amazon and/or Wikipedia. I believe that this will happen with Linked Data. Once there is an incentive to create quality links, these links will start to show up. And then users will start linking to the data hubs of their interest.

Open Governmental Data is a big issue at the moment. The US and UK government have started to apply Linked Data principles to turn this vision into reality. Lots of other countries are following. What do you expect from this trend?

I believe that Linked Data will take off thanks to the initiative of governments. We always talk about the chicken and egg problem of the semantic web. Once we have organizations that don’t even think about it and are just interested in putting their data on the web, the semantic web will start to grow. If Bookstore ABC puts their data on the web, it may not be so meaningful. But if the US and UK government puts their data on the web, following the Linked Data principles, then people can wake up and say “ok, so this is for real. Let me start paying attention to this”.

You are one of the chairs of the Triplification Challenge 2010. Can you give us a brief insight what to expect from this year’s challenge? What are the conditions to participate?

The Triplification Challenge this year has grown and is very exciting. For the first time, it is offering two different tracks.

The first track, the Open Track will accept submissions on three areas 1) new datasets that are published following the Linked Data principles and that show potential benefit, 2) generic methods, mechanisms and approaches of creating Linked Data from legacy datasets and 3) applications that make use of Linked Data.

The second track is the New York Times track which will accept submissions of applications that make use of the New York Times Linked Data and one or more government dataset. The objective is to create an application powered by Linked Data that would be of interest to any constituent of that government.

I personally believe that the year 2010 is the year of creating Linked Data applications and the Triplification Challenge is the way to be part of it.

3.000 € prize money for the  most promising Linked Data applications

The New York Times, Wolters Kluwer Germany and Semantic Universe sponsor the Triplification Challenge 2010 taking place at the I-SEMANTICS Conference from 1 – 3 September 2010 in Graz / Austria. Together they have provided 3.000 Euro in prize money which will be given to the  most promising application demonstrations and approaches built upon Linked Data.

The Challenge is organized by an international consortium consisting of Juan Sequeda (University of Texas at Austin), Bernhard Schandl (University of Vienna), Sören Auer (University of Leipzig), Ivan Herman (World Wide Web Consortium), Tassilo Pellegrini (Semantic Web Company Vienna) and patroned by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Participants can choose between an open track and a special NYT track.

The open track sponsored by Wolters Kluwer Germany and Semantic Universe encourages submissions that fit into one or more of the following categories:

• novel data sets that are published as part of the Web of Data, according to Linked Data principles, and demonstrating potential benefit of use within applications;
• novel generic mechanisms, approaches, and technologies that convert certain types and formats of information into triples, interlink them to other data sets, and expose them as Linked Data;
• applications showcasing the benefits of Linked Data to end-users such as for information syndication, specialized search, browsing, or augmentation of content.

The NYT track invites submissions that make use of the Linked Data published at data.nytimes.com and one or more government datasets that relate to politics. Any dataset qualifies that is produced by any government in the world that would be of interest to a constituent of that government. These can range from the demographics of election districts to campaign finance to corporate spending on political messaging.

The submission deadline for both tracks is 18 May 2010.

All submissions will be reviewed by an international program committee from industry and academia electing two winners in the open track and one winner in the NYT track.

For detailed information on the Triplification Challenge visit

http://i-semantics.tugraz.at/triplification-challenge or

http://triplify.org/Challenge/2010

Cordial thanks to our sponsors:

The Vienna-based company punkt. netServices is just about to release a demo version of their PoolParty service, a SKOS-based thesaurus management tool with linked data capabilities. I had the chance to pre-read a white paper and test their service. Here is a brief overview. You can also try a demo.

Purpose

Poolparty was conceived to facilitate various applications like

• Semantic search engines
• Recommender systems (similarity search)
• Corporate bookmarking
• Annotation- & tag recommender systems
• Autocomplete services and facetted browsing.

These use cases can be either achieved by using PoolParty stand-alone or by integrating it with existing Enterprise Search Engines and Document Management Systems or Enterprise Wikis.

Thesaurus Management

PoolParty is aiming to be easy to use for people without a strong Semantic Web background or special technical skills. The GUI is entirely web-based and utilizes AJAX so the user can e.g. quickly merge two concepts via drag & drop. An overview over the thesaurus can be gained with a tree or a graph view on the concepts.

PoolParty also helps to semi-automatically add concepts to a thesaurus as it can be used to analyse documents (e.g. web pages or PDF files) relevant to a thesaurus’ domain in order to glean candidate terms. This is done by the key-phrase extractor of KEA. The extracted terms can be selected by the user, thereby becoming “free concepts” which later can be integrated into the thesaurus, turning them into “approved concepts”.

Documents can be searched in various ways – either by keyword search in the full text, by searching for their tags or by semantic search and similarity search. The latter takes not only a concept’s preferred label into account, but also its synonyms and the labels of its related concepts are considered in the search. The user might manually remove query terms used in semantic search. Boost values for the various relations considered in semantic search may also be adjusted. In the same way the recommendation mechanism for document similarity calculation works.

PoolParty by default also publishes a Semantic Wiki version of its thesauri, which provides an alternative way to browse and edit concepts. Through this feature anyone can get read access to a thesaurus, and optionally also edit, add or delete labels of concepts. Search and autocomplete functions are available here as well. The Wiki’s XHTML source is also enriched with RDFa, thereby exposing all RDF metadata associated with a concept to be picked up by RDF search engines and crawlers. (See two examples: Cocktail thesaurus &  Standard Thesaurus for Economics)

PoolParty also supports the import of thesauri in SKOS (including several consistency checks) or Zthes format. Those functionalities can also be consumed as stand-alone web services via PoolParty SKOS Services. Additionaly, lists of concepts and their labels can also be imported via CSV files.

Linked (Open) Data

PoolParty not only publishes its thesauri as Linked Open Data (in addition to a SPARQL endpoint), but it also consumes LOD in order to expand thesauri with information from LOD sources.

Concepts in the thesaurus can be linked to e.g. DBpedia  via a service like Georgi Kobilarov’s DBpedia lookup service, which takes the label of a concept and returns possible matching candidates. The system suggests relevant resources from DBpedia and the user can select the one that matches the concept from his thesaurus, thereby creating a skos:exactMatch relation between the concept URI in PoolParty and the DBpedia URI. The same approach can be used to link to other SKOS thesauri available as Linked Data.

Other triples can also be retrieved from the target data source, e.g. the DBpedia abstract can become a skos:definition and geographical coordinates can be imported and be used to display the location of a concept on the map, where appropriate. The DBpedia category information may also be used to retrieve additional concepts of that category as siblings of the concept in focus, in order to populate the thesaurus.

PoolParty is capable of importing a SKOS thesaurus from a Linked Data server, and may also receive updates to thesauri imported this way. This feature has been implemented in the course of the KiWi  project funded by the European Commission. KiWi also contains SKOS thesauri and exposes them as LOD. Both systems can read a thesaurus via the other’s LOD interfaces and may write it to their own store. This is facilitated by special Linked Data URIs that return e.g. all the top-concepts of a thesaurus, with pointers to the URIs of their narrower concepts, which allow other systems to retrieve a complete thesaurus through iterative dereferencing of concept URIs.

Additionally KiWi and PoolParty publish lists of concepts created, modified, merged or deleted within user specified time-frames. With this information the systems can learn about updates to one of their thesauri in an external system. They then can compare the versions of concepts in both stores and may write according updates to their own store.

This means each system decides autonomously which data it accepts and there is no risk of a system pushing data that might lead to inconsistencies into an external store. Data transfer and communication are achieved using REST/HTTP, no other protocols or middleware are necessary. Also no rights management for each external systems is needed, which otherwise would have to be configured separately for each source.

Technology

The software is written in Java and utilizes the SAIL API, so it can be used with various triple stores. The thesaurus management itself (viewing, creating and editing SKOS concepts and their relationships) can be done in an AJAX Frontend based on Yahoo User Interface (YUI). Editing of labels can alternatively be done in a Wiki style HTML frontend. For key-phrase extraction from documents PoolParty uses a modified version of the KEA 5 API, which is extended for the use of controlled vocabularies stored in a SAIL Repository (this module is available under GNU GPL). The analysed documents can be stored and indexed in Lucene/Solr or any other (enterprise) search system along with extracted and semantically related concepts.

From November 11 – 13, 2009 this will be one of the big issues at the 5th International Conference on Topic Maps taking place in Leipzig/Germany. When asked about the relationship between TM and SemWeb conference organizer Lutz Maicher says:

With the vision of the web of data Topic Maps and the Semantic Web move closer over time. Anywhere URIs represent subjects, structured statements are gathered around them. In this context I see subj3ct.com as an interesting ventures. This recently launched service provides URIs for 15 million subjects to be used in structured data. Naturally, linked data hubs like dbpedia or geonames.org are part of it. The crowd is invited to contribute to this collection, also the Topic Maps Lab provides several feeds to register new URIs. Subj3ct.com turns out to be an infrastructure technology for Web 3.0 applications, regardless whether they are based on Topic Maps or other Semantic Web technologies.

Through this convergence the uniqueness of each technology sharpens. Reasoning is the strong point of the Semantic Web. But the strength of Topic Maps are semantic portals and the global federation of facts around subjects. Bringing together all and even contradictory information about each subject – and not building reasoning-ready consistent models of the world – is built into the genes of Topic Maps.

Read the full interview here.

On accasion of the upcoming 4th International Conference on Semantic and Digital Media Technologies (SAMT ‘09) from December 2 – 4, 2009 in Graz/Austria, Werner Bailer from Joanneum Research gave us a short interview about state of the art in multimedia semantics.  When asked about the Multimedia and the Semantic Web he says:

There have been a number of proposals for multimedia ontologies and mappings of multimedia vocabularies (cf. the excellent report from the W3C MM Semantics XG), differing in complexity and expressivity. Thus the W3C has chartered a working group to develop an ontology and API for multimedia content on the Web. The group is developing a lightweight core set of metadata properties and an API specification for accessing these properties, which may come from metadata documents in different standards. Thus mappings to many relevant standards have also been specified. The set of metadata properties will be formalized for interoperability with the Semantic Web. A W3C recommendation is expected in 2010.

Read the full interview here.

Last Friday, September 4, 2009 I-Semantics, the 5th International Conference on Semantic Systems, ended. I am extremely happy about the positive response from so many people I got in the last few days. It was a lot of work and I am glad everything worked out fine.

I-Semantics, which started on Wednesday, September 2, and was colocated with I-Know, the International Conference on Knowledge Management, for the third time now, attracted 450 participants. As inteded by our original idea – bringing the Semantic Web out of the echo chamber – this colocation has proven to be absolutely fertile as the semantic systems community and the knowledge management community really fit well together and complement each other. So we had a rich program consisting of 64 scientific talks (30 I-Semantics / 34 I-Know), a poster session, an industry track and numerous mini tracks and discussion panels. Read a review of the first, second and third conference day on Harald Sack’s blog (with whom I enjoyed pondering about Net Neutrality and IPV6.)

For the first time we had the Pragmatic Web Community on board, which held a special track bringing in lots of new ideas and views on computational semantics. Beside that I recognized that in this track we had quite large amount of people from the social sciences and humanities among the audience, which is a promising signal and hopefully leads to new research and human-oriented technologies.

Another highlight was this year’s matchmaking event which aims at initiating business contacts between industry and academia. According to the organizers the Styrian Research Agency and the Enterprise Europe Network,  120 bilateral meetings took place. Astonishingly 56 of the 71 registered participants had a company background.

And finally we hosted the second Triplification Challenge where Chris Bizer gave a keynote and introduced quite a bunch of people to the idea of Linked Data. Unfortunatelly Michael Hausenblas who chaired this year’s challenge could not attend so I did the moderation during the award ceremony and Chris assisited me handing over the awards to the winners. For the results of the challenge go to Soeren Auer’s blog.

Wrapping up, all this would not have been possible without the great support of Prof. Klaus Tochtermann and his team from Know Center. Year after year they do a great job and it is a great opportunity and pleasure to work together with them. Big thanks also go to Adrian Paschke from Corporate Semantic Web of Free University of Berlin, Hans Weigand from Tilburg University and the guys from Salzburg New Media Lab, who helped to set up the I-Semantics conference this year.

The next I-Semantics will take place from September 1 – 3, 2010. Hope to see you next year in Graz!

Found this piece on FCW.com. I love it!

Posted by John Klossner on Aug 03, 2009

For those of you, like me, who need a way to keep these things straight, I offer the following handy, wallet-sized program.

WEB 1.0 (browsers) – Users find data
WEB 2.0 (social networks) – Users find each other
WEB 3.0 (semantic Web) – Data find each other

Of course, a lifetime of science-fiction reading and viewing leads me to fear we can look forward to the following developments:

WEB 4.0 – Data create their own Facebook page, restrict friends.
WEB 5.0 – Data decide they can work without humans, create their own language.
WEB 6.0 –Human users realize that they no longer can find data unless invited by data.
WEB 7.0 – Data get cheaper cell phone rates.
WEB 8.0 – Data horde all the good YouTube videos, leaving human users with access to bad ’80’s music videos only.
WEB 9.0 – Data create and maintain own blogs, are more popular than human blogs.
WEB 10.0 – All episodes of Battlestar Gallactica will now be shown from the Cylons’ point of view.