Tutorial |The Semantic Puzzle

Interview on Enhancing Semantic Web applications with Linguistic Information

May 23, 2011 by Thomas Schandl, Category: Conferences & Events, Text Mining

John McCrae (Uni Bielefeld), Elena Montiel-Ponsoda (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) and Tobias Wunner (DERI Galway) will hold a tutorial at the ESWC 2011 with the title “Enriching the Semantic Web with Linguistic Information“. We had a chance to talk to them beforehand:

Can you please tell us about the aims and purpose of your tutorial and the importance of incorporating linguistic information in the Semantic Web?

With the continuing growth of linked data and semantic technologies the incorporation of linguistic descriptions into Semantic Web resources has become a challenging issue. The integration of linguistic information especially on a multilingual level could greatly benefit Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. Furthermore, the continuing growth of ontologies for semantic modeling and the use of terminological resources to add human language descriptions has raised the issue of how to add linguistic information to ontologies and linked data vocabularies and to represent models of lexical and terminological information in a way which is compatible with Semantic Web standards. Prominent examples here are, for instance, multilingual language tags in RDF Schema or SKOS’s success in bringing terminological information to the Semantic Web.

In the Tutorial we would like to discuss trends and novel models such as Lemon – the lexicon model for ontologies – to show possible future directions. The tutorial is targeted at researchers and practitioners interested in learning how to enrich ontologies with linguistic information in one or several natural languages and NLP tool developers interested in understanding how Semantic Web resources can be leveraged fro NLP. There will be two hands-on sessions in this tutorial.

Why did you choose to use PoolParty thesaurus management system in your tutorial?

To create terminology models on the web there are only few tools available which are often very technical and not straightforward to use for non-experts. We found that PoolParty in contrast to other SKOS editors has an attractive and usable interface. In addition the web based interface was preferable, as it did not require the participants to download software, the immediate publishing of linked data is more compatible with linked data principles and the tool has similarities to our own tools for working with lemon.

Thank you for this interview!

Short Semantic MediaWiki Tutorial (with link to sandbox)

November 5, 2008 by Thomas Schandl, Category: Conferences & Events, Knowledge Management, Linked Data & Open Data, Social Software, Tools & Software, Videos & Tutorials

On the occasion of the recent publication of our book, Social Semantic Web, we have created an accompanying wiki for you to explore the contents of the book and obtain information about its authors. Staying true to the motto “Eat your own dog food”, the Semantic Web Company has used a semantic wiki for that purpose.

We opted for Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) and the extensions Semantic Forms and Semantic Drilldown. In this blog post we’ll take a look at the handy features you get with these. This short tutorial is based on my SMW demonstration at the Web of Data Practitioners’ Days in Vienna two weeks ago.

As the book is in German, the wiki is set up in German, too, but that shouldn’t be a problem for understanding the demonstrated features. For the following examples, we have created a mirror of our productive wiki, so don’t hesitate to edit and play with this mirror wiki (we might refresh it occasionally, so don’t write any data into the wiki that you don’t also have stored elsewhere). This tutorial is going to take you through the following SMW features:

Automatically created lists
Faceted search
Semantic queries
Entering data via forms
RDF export

So let’s see what these features hold for us.

Automatically created lists

A common problem in wikis like Wikipedia is the (amount of) effort it requires to create and maintain various lists like the list of the EU’s largest cities. It’s an equally laborious and error-prone activity to keep such lists up to date; as a result, there are a lot of useful Wikipedia lists we can imagine that don’t exist at all, like a list of the world’s largest corporations with a CEO younger than 35.

In SMW it is easy to create all kinds of lists with queries. This page for the book’s table of contents is an example. View its source to see the inline queries used to generate the page (click to enlarge or view the source on the wiki):

As a result, the list is generated afresh any time the table of contents page is called up. If the data on an article’s page has changed, it will also be updated in that list – while in regular MediaWikis one has to manually update the data in both places (the article, and the list), which, apart from the extra work, also makes errors and inconsistencies much more likely.

Faceted search

Take at look at the list of articles page… Continue reading →

The Semantic Web, explained with Lolcats

October 13, 2008 by Jana Herwig, Category: Videos & Tutorials

Here is a link to the video “Semantic Web, explained with Lolcats.”
***
EDIT: Yes, I have retracted this blogpost, and I am glad I did. I also already admitted the blog post was written in a hurry, I see now that it was indeed ill-worded and gave rise to an interpretation I never had in mind.

I doesn’t make sense for me to continue this discussion if it consists of people reinterpreting my words with the intention to provide evidence that I must have wanted to say something that I, actually, never meant to say.

All I meant to say was that an approach incorporating elements of popular culture (here: Lolcats) might get new, and particularly female, audiences interested in the Semantic Web. Because many women like Lolcats.

I should not have written “female” though, as femininity is a contested issue – even though this made sense to me in that hurried moment of writing as I am clearly more interested in getting more women interested in the Semantic Web than I am interested in getting “just anyone” interested.

I am critical of a certain notion of “good” femininity underlying some comments in the previous discussion. Women doing a tech degree? Yay! Women whose technical interests go way beyond Web 2.0 and Lolcats? Yes, they’re the ones we want! Women going shopping? Not so interesting! Women reading People magazine or PerezHilton? Baaad!

Why can’t they just stop conforming to the gender mold?

Such a notion of femininity means to denigrate the experience of many, probably the majority of women out there – women, by the way, who have embraced the web (2.0) to organize their family pictures online, who write blogs about parenting or crocheting and who will also embrace the (Social) Semantic Web if it offers any benefits to them.

This is actually one of the silenced voices Bath talked about – the discourse that is marginalized here is the domain of the domestic sphere, which has been and is traditionally associated with women. When will there be an ontology for yarns, knitting or crocheting? (If you’re laughing now: laugh at the ontology for beer or whiskey first. Didn’t make you laugh, too? Now that’s food for thought, isn’t it?)

In marketing departments world wide, people think about what women might like and how this could be harnessed to advertise products, as women are typically the ones who influence what is bought in a household or not.

But as soon as one brings up the idea of using Lolcats (again: because many women like Lolcats) to get more women interested in the Semantic Web…

… people get worked up and argue that the author actually really meant to say that women are intellectually ONLY able come to grips with technology with the aid of a cute animal.

No, I did not mean to say that – because I don’t look at popular culture in such a denigrating way.

Ever tried to create a Lolcat? It’s an art form in itself – try making one yourself that’s witty!

And for the time being, try for yourself if you can use Lolcats to get someone with a yet underdeveloped knowledge of the Semantic Web interested in the topic. Not necessarily a woman – but I’d appreciate if you also tried it on women. Just to see whether it does or does not work (better) (on men/women).

Start here (I am sure you can do better than me – use the LolcatBuilder!)

moar funny pictures

While we’re at it: I really liked Bob DuCharme’s showcase “Navigating Hollywood gossip with semantic technology.”

I think we need more of that – you know why.

	if not otherwise specified