Tag Archives: Semantic Web

Tassilo Pellegrini

Looking back I-Semantics 2009

by , Category: Conferences & Events

isemantics_logoLast 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!

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Tassilo Pellegrini

Great satire: “Web 3.Oh No!”

by , Category: Miscellaneous, Semantics & Philosophy

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.


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Helmut Nagy

Knowledge Management and the Semantic Web

by , Category: Knowledge Management, Literature & Publications

That’s the title of my diploma thesis and first of all, thanks to SWC for the possibility to say some words about it. My interest in knowledge management reaches back some time now and I decided to make it the subject of my diploma thesis in my first attempt to write one back in 2001. The semantic web “came to me” in the last one or two years and the TRIPLE-I conference last year was somehow the trigger for me to connect the two topics.

My basic idea was very simple. When you read about the Semantic Web you are confronted right away with connections to creating knowledge and knowledge management. But in my understanding the Semantic Web is a technical thing and knowledge management is primarily a cultural and organisational thing. So the research questions for my thesis where:

  • What relevance do knowledge management and semantic technologies have in the daily work of people working in knowledge intensive domains?
  • Which possibilities lie in the adoption of knowledge management and semantic technologies?
  • Are semantic technologies already fit for practical use?

The basis of the empirical part of my thesis are group discussions held in different organisations. As a result I developed starting points for an understanding of the topics “Knowledge Management” and “Semantic Web” and their relevance in organisations. The empirical results, in short, provide the following answers to the research questions:

  • The “theoretical relevance” of both topics is high, the “practical relevance” on the other hand is rather low. Neither do structured concepts for knowledge management exist in the studied organisations, nor are there attempts at using semantic technologies
  • Most of the participants have not heard of the “semantic web” prior to the discussions. After having been introduced to the topic, the relevance of the semantic web and of semantic technologies is rated high
  • Possibilities are seen in a better management of information or knowledge in organisations and, especially for semantic technologies, in the improvement of search functionality’s and search results
  • Semantic technologies are not yet seen as fit for practical use
  • The connection between knowledge management and semantic web is taken as a fact without giving any justification for it.

In my conclusion I tried to match my results with the results of the Semantic Web Barometer 2009 and it was very interesting for me, that there were several similarities. I also found that talking to the people that have to work with technologies that are developed for them can be quite interesting and that group discussion are a great way to do that.

I wrote most parts of my diploma thesis in a wiki (and the rest is available as PDF) so you can find it on my wiki.

Your comments and annotations are very welcome!

Thanks for reading as far as this, Helmut

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Thomas Thurner

55 people enjoyed the first semantic web meetup in vienna

by , Category: Conferences & Events

dsc_0494Yesterdays 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

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