Tim Berners-Lee |The Semantic Puzzle

Some Semantic Apps for the iPhone

June 25, 2009 by Andreas Blumauer, Category: Life Sciences, Semantic Web Applications

evriverse Some new releases around Apple´s iPhone family, like the new OS3.0 or the new 3G S have stimulated another big hype around this “little darling”. I took a look at another facet, namely: Has the Semantic Web entered the iPhone realm yet (or vice versa)? Experts have been talking about the need for semantically enhanced mobile applications for years, so let´s see, if they are in place already.

Searching for “semantic web” in the AppStore delivers six results, one of them called “SemanticWb” is obviously an interesting match. The application “extracts current life sciences and health care knowledge and place them conveniently at your fingertips on your iPhone”. The application offers search suggestions and moderated search and retrieves articles from PubMed or genetic disorders which are related to the search term. Good start, this is a neat iPhone application which should be interesting for medical doctors and related professions.

Another application on the iPhone which is related to the semantic web is the “English wordnet dictionary” based on WordNet from Princeton University.

So, not much semantic web on the iPhone so far – I thought until Evriverse was released some weeks ago. The iPhone version of evri.com offers a new way to find connections between all kind of things. Similar to OpenCalais Evri can extract people, places, organisations, products etc. from unstructured information like news or blogs. The innovation around Evriverse is the way how complex search queries around “anything” can be formulated by just touching the screen. For example, if you are looking for information about “Tim Berners-Lee” the application not only offers auto-complete but also suggests related people, organisations etc. to refine any search query. Such relations are updated constantly and are based on the semantic analysis of news and blogs.

Evriverse offers the most comfortable way to do news research on the iPhone today. It shows how semantic technologies can enhance user experience on a mobile device and it will path the way to more semantic (web) apps on the iPhone.

Ethics – the new killer-app?

April 28, 2009 by Marion Fuglewicz-Bren, Category: Politics, Privacy & Information Ethics

Sometimes I hate marketing. Most often you can feel it in your heart whether issues are authentic or not. Whatever medium you are consuming these days – the web, the newspapers or your mailbox – anyone seems to discover a new killer-application called ethics. This seems to be everyone´s cure – be it a seminar, a conference or a book: Ethics is hype.

That´s more than annoying for me who´s been trying for years to establish ethical aspects in my work as a journalist, as a pr-person (believe it or not!) – as a human-being. Being sensitive for the special challenges connected with discussing ethical issues in a diverse global economy I´ve always been trying to publish and talk about the philosophical approach to these matters.

Therefore I ´m happy to come across Tim Berners Lee´s request at the current International World Wide Web Conference in Madrid: Clean the web! He – which is not at all surprising – is claiming a clean web. The user has to know which data he can trust and may pass on. Also privacy must be protected he postulates one more time. All these arguments deal authentically with ethics. But not only. They concern the future. The future of us all.

Tim Berners-Lee: “We need data on the Web to work better together”

April 22, 2009 by Christoph Wieser, Category: Conferences & Events, Linked Data & Open Data

Today, the 18th WWW conference started in Madrid, Spain. In his opening talk, Tim Berners-Lee outlined the status quo of the current Web and focused on areas for ongoing research.

According to Tim Berners-Lee the Web is still static and consists mostly of archived HTML and PDF documents. There is still a need for a read/write Web and the standards are still not used to a sufficient extend. Changes in the Web are the ‘move to mobile’ and the climb up of ‘advertizing to being a science’.

Beside the still existing challenges of the current Web, additional ones arrived. Web Applications as well as Open Social Networking and Open Linked Data count to the area of current interest.

Web Applications are supposed to become new computing platforms and need a serious clean trust system. In the future Web Applications could offer a decentralized modular installation like a webized Debian.

Open Social Networking has become a great application in the Web. Currently it suffers from the ‘Social Silo Problem’. Users have often accounts in several platforms like Facebook or MySpace. The platforms, however, are separated from each other like in a field of silos. The challenge of the Semantic Web Community is now to interconnect the silos via RDF, OWL, HTTP, and SPARQL. A further requirement of Tim Berners-Lee are to focus on a Secure Web id.

Open Linked Data attracted the attention of Tim Berners-Lee most of all. Being one of the chairs of the co-located workshop ‘Linked Data on the Web’ he stressed that “we need data on the Web to work better together” in government, enterprise, and science. Open Linked Data could be a wizard for users of existing relational database systems. As query language he proposed a federated/delegated SPARQL.

Finally, Tim Berners-Lee described the role of researchers in those challenges. Researchers should ‘build a platform for others that follow’. Thereby, one should not assume what people will use the platform for.

(Report by Christoph Wieser / Salzburg Research)

Triplification Challenge 2009 – Call for Participation

April 21, 2009 by Tassilo Pellegrini, Category: Calls & Competitions, Linked Data & Open Data

The yearly organized Linking Open Data Triplification Challenge awards prizes to the most promising triplifications of existing Web applications, Websites and data sets. Chaired by Michael Hausenblas (DERI) and patroned by Tim Berners-Lee the challenge is open to anyone interested in applying Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies. This might include students, developers, researchers, and people from industry. Individual or group submissions are both acceptable.

The call is still open till the end of May 2009. For more information please visit http://triplify.org/challenge

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