Semantic Web Company

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.

In a recent interview Prof. Chris Bizer from FU Berlin gave some insights into the commercial opportunities of linked data. In the short run he predicts three application areas:

I think we will see a growing number of applications that use data from the public Web as background knowledge to offer better search capabilities and to augment local content with additional content from the Web of Data.
[...]
Beside of the classic search engines, there might also be market opportunities for new search engines that specialize on Linked Data. [...] This will allow them to sell access to cleaned views on the Data Web and to become central components within Linked Data applications.
[...]
Within the corporate market, there is interest in using Linked Data as a lightweight, pay-as-you-go data integration technology.

Additionally Chris comments on the latest developments in the area of triple stores and D2RQ, and the necessity for more privacy awareness and information accountability in an increasingly interlinked world.

Read the full interview on our homepage.

One of the many ways that the election of Barack Obama as president has echoed that of John F. Kennedy is his use of a new medium that will forever change politics. For Mr. Kennedy, it was television. For Mr. Obama, it is the Internet. Obama´s Internet Campaign Changed Politics. “Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president. Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not have been the nominee,” said Arianna Huffington, editor in chief of The Huffington Post.

America´s new president Barack Obama didn’t go out and recruit on facebook, they came to him at first. Did the internet make Obama’s natural “viralness” quicker and more transparent? Obama’s huge victory on Tuesday night was celebrated in Austria and Germany, as it was around the world: German Press on Obama Victory: “The Dream is Alive“. Der Spiegel’s Gabor Steingart – who for months dismissed the notion that Obama had a real chance for the White House – writes about the Resurrection of the American Dream: “His base note is conciliatory, his overtone is exalted and the harmony is finely balanced. If anyone out there still doubted that the American dream was alive, he called out to his supporters in Chicago, “tonight is your answer.”

However things will happen or not and however the „Change has come to America“: The president´s new official website is online www.whitehouse.gov. And here users are really being involved. We all are involved. Obama means change. Let´s see in what ways this will concern the future of the internet.

Jennifer Golbeck, Matthew Rothstein. Linking Social Networks on the Web with FOAF: A Semantic Web Case Study. Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI’08).
Download (PDF, 320 KB).

ABSTRACT
One of the core goals of the Semantic Web is to store data in distributed locations, and use ontologies and reasoning to aggregate it. Social networking is a large movement on the web, and social networking data using the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) vocabulary makes up a significant portion of all data on the Semantic Web. Many traditional webbased social networks share their members’ information in FOAF format. While this is by far the largest source of FOAF online, there is no information about whether the social network models from each network overlap to create a larger unified social network model, or whether they are simply isolated components. In this paper, we present a study of the intersection of FOAF data found in many online social networks. Using the semantics of the FOAF ontology and applying Semantic Web reasoning techniques, we show that a significant percentage of profiles can be merged from
multiple networks. We present results on how this affects network structure and what it says about relationships and individual behavior. Finally, we discuss the implications this has for using web-based social networking data to create intelligent user interfaces and social software.

The tradition of Barcamps is not very old. The idea of course, is. Some of you might remember the upcoming of TED in 1984. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. „The power of the spreading of ideas“ led this initiative. The talks are inspired by the world’s greatest thinkers and doers and to my mind this is the nicest way to kind of relax during a Semantic-Web-Business-Day.

„Today, TED is therefore best thought of as a global community. It’s a community welcoming people from every discipline and culture who have just two things in common: they seek a deeper understanding of the world, and they hope to turn that understanding into a better future for us all.“ [Source]

Not only is it sine qua non to regularly get one’s inspiration from charismatic people or events in a creative environment like the web’s future – but it’s also very nice for networking. So – don’t forget to let some more entertainment into your everyday-lives instead of concentrating exclusively on the very crucial technological issues. And, certainly: Keep spreading your ideas.

Read (and write) more on TED Blog: mfb

Author: Marion Fugléwicz-Bren

Two days ago in upper Austria, the BarCamp Traunsee, subtitled “Social Media Review Camp”, took place, which I had co-organized and which was co-sponsored by our own lil’ Semantic Web Company. Andreas Blumauer (also SWC) joined me on the first day, hosting a session about and giving an introduction to Linked Data. Given the angle of the BarCamp, he gave it to an audience of Web 2.0 people (i.e. consultants, marketers, developers, communications people). And was he able to bridge the gap between 2.0 and 3.0?

Half a year ago, I had been a complete newbie to the Semantic Web and Linked Data myself, and while the concept of the Semantic Web is undoubtedly as persuasive as a technological concept possibly can be, I remember how hard it was to come to grips with it (btw, I am a Humanities/Liberal Arts person). I think that Andreas’ presentation on Friday was probably the most accessible introduction to the topic I have witnessed this far, and it allowed me to backtrack once more where the biggest comprehension and communication issues probably are.

If Semantic Web people start explaining their concepts to ‘other species’, they very soon start juggling acronyms and technical lingo, in particular names and abbreviations from the Semantic Web Stack – understandably so, as URIs, XML and RDF form the very foundation, on the technological side. But the only concept where the web 2.0 people (in particular those who approach it from the business, PR or marketing side) might still be with them is XML – even though it might sound surprising, not everyone is able to guess without context that the term URI refers to the same kind of thing as URL. And when you say RDF, people are surprisingly often inclined to think you are talking about “RFID” (Radio Frequency Identification) – it’s got, after all, also to do with unique identification, doesn’t it?

Just as the Semantic Web interfaces are only about to become more accessible to web 2.0 people (once more, hooray for Parallax), I think a VITAL next step in promoting the Semantic Web is to find human-readable explanations of its technologies.

The generic explanations all sound very good ( “At the moment, we have a web of documents, but the Semantic Web aims for the web of data” or “The Semantic Web wants computers not only to be able to process, but also to understand data”), but what they fail to achieve is to make non-tech people interested in the (workings of the) technology.

Without addressing technology, these generic explanations are just too bland to convey what is really exciting about the semantic web – yet as soon as SemWeb people start to talk technology, the acronym shower starts – see above. Dilemma.

Back to the BarCamp: I think that Andreas took a good approach in that he
a) kept the acronym level low
b) went on to explain how Linked Data can be a better source for mashups than APIs – because APIs really are the Holy Grail of the Web 2.0 community. I saw it happen before and I saw it happen at the BarCamp Traunsee – as soon as a new tool or feature is introduced, people start asking: “Does it have an API?” – - “Will it have an API?” – “Can I get access to the API?” – “Is the API documentation online?”

What seems to be pegged in people’s mind is that you have to have an API to make mashups, and that mashups are what constitutes the miracle of the web 2.0. So my simple advise for all Semantic Web evangelists would be:

If you want to develop a showcase that people understand, develop a mash-up, and more specifically one that uses data that average users would use and understand.

Develop something like DBpedia mobile (call up in emulator), and go into the details of the Semantic Web stack only after people have seen and understood that you don’t need an API (well, theoretically) and huge programming effort to obtain structured, processable data.

Btw, things got even more semantic on the second day of the BarCamp: Alexander Kirk presented his Factolex dictionary, a dictionary consisting of “short and concise explanations” which can be enhanced by tags, and which, because of their simplicity, would ideally lend themselves for a conversion into triples. Alexander confirmed that he keeps semantic integration in mind while developing Factolex further.

Alexander’s presentation was followed by input from Michael Schuster (who hasn’t yet put his session online, and I seem unable to remember the names of the sites he uses and showed us). One of them was a tool that uses natural langauge processing to interpret user notes, and which is able to decide, for instance, whether an entry should be added to the calendar or to a to do list.

Nifty tool (and I hope I’ll be able to provide a link later), but what I mostly remember his presentation for is that he presented it as an example of a “dirty semantic web approach”, making it sound as something diametrically opposed to the (potentially anal) endeavours of those who rely on the Semantic Web stack.

But why open up this binary opposition? You can and must have both, semantic technologies likes NLP, and open standards such as defined in the Semantic Web stack.

It’s not like one is for the ‘cool kids’ (or web 2.0 kids) and the other one for the ‘geeks’ – if anything, then I’d say that the ‘cool kids’ are probably more interested in improving the service of just their site (making the industry and software market more diverse, if there are enough of them), whereas the ‘geeks’ work towards global exchange through the definition and further development of open standards (and make sure the ‘cool kids’ don’t get trapped in their data silos).

In the end, once the Semantic Web enters maturity level, it will need both of them.

The Semantic Web Company is one of the partners of this year’s LinkedData Planet Conference in New York (June 17-18, 2008). As part of this partnership, we launched a competition, asking for your vision of a future with Linked Open Data – and we have a winner!

Aman Shakya, who is a PhD student at the Department of Informatics at The Graduate University for Advanced Studies (SOKENDAI) in Tokyo, developed his vision around the idea of ordinary people being able to publish structured data instead of unstructured text:

The current gigantic network of web documents could be realized by enabling any user to publish any document and link to other documents. If we want to see the network of Linked Open Data explode on a similar scale, we need to enable general users to publish “data” directly on the web and link to other “data”. We need to move the paradigm of web page publishing and hyperlinking towards data publishing and data linking. We should enable people to post structured data about anything rather than just unstructured text. We need the active participation and contribution of the billions of worldwide internet users. Recently, the web has seen enormous user participation with the rise of easy-to-use social software. We should exploit this trend of social web applications, however, for enabling people to create, share and link “data” on the global Linked Data Web.

To endorse his vision, Aman Shakya also introduced his StYLiD application, which I would like to describe as a ’semantically enhanced tumblelog’, and which “enables people to share a wide variety of structured data with the freedom to define their own structured concepts on the fly.” We have chosen his proposal because it met the criteria of the competition in various ways:

• The feasibility of the vision is clearly laid out in the proposal, which describes the process of the creation of structured data and the interaction with existing data on the web.
• The proposal has innovative potential in that it seeks to further and harness the collaborative sharing of structured data, and combines bottom-up and top-down governance for the social semantic web.
• Sustainability is achieved by its reliance on open standards such as SPARQL.

Read his full proposal here.

We would also like to make an honorary mention of Mike Veytsel’s quadruple-fold approach to a semantic future in which users will be able “to easily and finely tune in to the long tail of knowledge and find content with low friction and high precision.”

Finally, I would also like to give my personal bookworm award to Rob Styles, for his prose account of a life with the semweb which he develops as an antithesis to Orwellian dystopia.

A big ‘Thank you’ to everyone who contributed!

Media. One of the sexiest businesses there is. Such is also true regarding the definitions of media within the last – let´s say – ten years.

Let´s catch a few glimpses. Explore the latest Web 2.0 developments at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco end of April. Web 2.0 has come to a close and now the work begins.

Change of scenery. Vienna has been a town of congresses ever since. A few days ago journalists and media experts all over Europe discussed the Online-versus-Print-topic at a European Newspaper Congress in the Wiener Rathaus (Photo: pte). Naturally, there are numerous interpretations and perspectives – dependent on the individual position, viewpoint and employment – but also on objectives: Who is the target group? Amazingly enough, I can notice all over the place – and across all businesses – that this primary topic within marketing is often being neglected. Lots of managers lose sight of this in their daily business.
In media terms: Who is going to read, watch or listen to my content? That´s THE question for media people. And being a journalist myself, I have been keeping an eye on this matter for many years. But whether something is sexy or not – who is going to judge? Even media experts might differ in this question.
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