The paper “DBpedia SPARQL Benchmark – Performance Assessment with Real Queries on Real Data” won the best paper award at the world’s most prestigious Semantic Web conference, ISWCLIMES, one of the technologies developed by InFAI during the course of the SCMS project, played a central role in the generation of this benchmark.The basic observation behind the paper was that most of the current SPARQL benchmarks were extracted from data that reflect relational schemas (small number of properties and classes) and not necessarily native RDF data. The aim of the paper was to generate a benchmark that addresses this drawback by mining the query log of one of the best reknown knowledge bases in the world, DBpedia . The resulting benchmark consists of 25 queries that can be used to assess the characteristics of triple stores when they are confronted with native RDF data. One of the main challenges during the mining process was to compute the similarity of queries in a time-efficient manner without loss of recall. The LIMES framework was used for this purpose and reduced the runtime of whole algorithm to less than 17% of the original runtime. The new version of LIMES (described here) can achieve the same computation orders of magnitude faster. Also remember to check out the new GUI.
Link on,
Axel

As announced in another blog post a survey was conducted by Semantic Web Company which should find out how controlled vocabularies are perceived and applied by information managers today. Some of the results are covered by a blog post titled “Thesaurus based search engines will become main stream in the near future“, the survey results can be downloaded here.

PoolParty as a provider of standards based tools for

is pleased with the results because they reveal that industry is heavily interested in open standards like SKOS or RDF and sees the value of linked data based on W3C´s semantic web stack. Here is a short extract of the survey:

Do you think enterprises and other organizations can significantly benefit from using Linked Data?

The answer is a clear YES. A subsequent question also reveals that all kind of organisation sizes have about the same opinion concerning linked data. Only few people think that linked data is a “niche thing”. In general it can be said, that over 90% of the participants think that most or at least some organisations can benefit from using linked data.

ISSLOD takes place in late summer from Sep 12-18, 2011 in Leipzig with hopefully still a lot of Indian Summer (i.e. Altweibersommer / Бабье лето) sunshine rays.

The Linked Data methodology is a light-weight approach to facilitate the transition from the document Web to the Web of Data and ultimately a Semantic Web. With a wide availability of Linked Data tools and knowledge bases, a steadily growing R&D community, industrial applications, the Linked Data paradigm already became crucial building block of the Web architecture.

ISSLOD is primarily intended for postgraduate (PhD or MSc) students, postdocs, and other young researchers investigating aspects related to the Semantic Data Web. The Summer School will also be open to senior researchers wishing to learn about Semantic Web issues related to their own fields of research.

For further details please visit: http://isslod.lod2.eu

ISSLOD is organized by the EU-FP7 project “LOD2 – Creating Knowledge out of Interlinked Data”. Lecturers comprise distinguished experts from LOD2 member organizations as well as invited speakers, the majority of which will – apart from their lectures – also be present for the duration of the school to interact with students. Interaction with senior researchers and establishing contacts within young researchers is a main focus of the school, which will be supported through social activities and an interactive, amicable atmosphere.

  • ISSLOD Application Deadline: 30 July 2011
  • Notifications: 5 August 2011
  • ISSLOD: 12-18 September 2011

There will be a limited number of student grants available. Details of the registration process will be announced on the Web site, after the application deadline. We will keep the registration fee low (175 EUR) and provide reasonable accomodation packages (less than 40 EUR per night) for students.

LIMES will be presented at the IKS workshop in Paris on July 6th. The upcoming version of LIMES (version 0.5) is up to 6 orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art software and offers tons of new functionality. More info here. The beta can be tested at http://limes.aksw.org. Stay tuned for more.

Florian BauerFlorian Bauer is REEEP’s Operations and IT Director, responsible for the overall operational management of the organisation, the product management of reegle (the search engine for renewable energy and energy efficiency) and the management of the IT landscape of REEEP. PoolParty Team had the chance to talk with Florian about reegle – information gateway on clean energy. Could you please give us a brief overview over reegle – what are the targets you are pursuing with this platform? The main aim of the reegle information gateway (http://www.reegle.info) is to provide a one-stop gateway to comprehensive, high-quality and up-to-date information on clean energy. By making this information accessible to stakeholders in the field around the world, and by presenting it in a user-friendly and intuitive format, reegle directly helps to facilitate the transition to low-carbon energy. The website provides information on renewable energy, energy efficiency and climate change and their various sub-sectors at a global level, and some reegle services actually combine raw data sets from several different sources, put these datasets into context and thus provide enriched information. reegle is an offshoot of the Renewable Energy & Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP), a non-profit, specialist change agent aiming to catalyze the market for renewable energy and energy efficiency, with a primary focus on emerging markets and developing countries. The new reegle data portal (data.reegle.info), launched in 2011, has established reegle as a publisher and consumer of Linked Open Data in the energy sector. It provides key clean energy datasets free for re-use using Linked Open Data W3C standards. » Read the rest of this entry «

The Austrian National Funding Agency FFG (Österreichische Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft) has published an interview about the SCMS project with Martin Kaltenböck of punkt. netServices who is project lead of the SCMS project – Martin talks about the ideas and objectives of the project as well as about used and developed technologies and the co-operation inside of the SCMS project consortium – the interview is only available in German language.

SCMS Interview EUREKA aktuell

The AKSW research group is pleased to announce the first prototype of OntoWiki Mobile, which allows users to collect instance data and refine structured knowledge bases on-the-go. The development of OntoWiki Mobile was triggered by users aiming to gather data in field conditions (e.g. bio-diversity surveys). It allows accessing OntoWiki on a mobile device, even without persistent data connection and limited electric power supply. OntoWiki Mobile is a mobile semantic collaboration platform based on the OntoWiki framework. It is implemented as an HTML5 web application and completely mobile device platform independent. The mobile UI was built using HTML5 and jQuery Mobile specially for mobile devices. It allows simple navigation through interlinked resources in OntoWiki knowledge bases. OntoWiki Mobile allows offline access to selected knowledge bases with the ability to author data offline and synchronize it later once the data connection becomes available again. An faceted browsing mode optimized for the mobile use enables OntoWiki Mobile users to quickly retrieve information on the go. Resource editing in OntoWiki Mobile is done using RDFauthor. The system makes use of RDFa-annotations in web views in order to make the RDF model data available on the client. More details can be found at the project page. Latest revision is always available as a demo.

The new PoolParty Release 2.8.1 is available now. It’s a minor update mainly addressing security issues, some of the improvements are:

  • Information on generation of snapshots
  • Admin Dashboard offering information for projects
  • Custom parameters for queries in the SPARQL endpoint.

Snapshot Information

To get an overview on all changes made in Release 2.8.1 you can read the Release Notes.

Try PoolParty and get a Demo Account or join our next webinar to learn more about PoolParty.

The first public release of the LIMES framework (Link Discovery Framework for Metric Spaces) is available for download at: http://limes.sf.net LIMES implements time-efficient and lossless approaches for large-scale link discovery based on the characteristics of metric spaces. It is typically more than 60 times faster that other state-of-the-art link discovery frameworks. LIMES is available:
  • as a standalone Java tool for carrying out link discovery on a local server (faster). In this case, LIMES must be configured via an XML file,
  • via the easily configurable web interface of the LIMES Linking Service at http://limes.aksw.org (results can be downloaded as nt-files).

Les Kneebone is Project Manager at Education Services Australia Ltd.
Among other projects he is responsible for Schools Online Thesaurus (ScOT).

PoolParty Team asked Les a couple of questions about thesaurus management, linked data and the semantic web. Here is a short summary of this interview:

Why did you choose thesauri to organize your information? What kind of problems are you able to solve with this approach?

A thesaurus approach was chosen rather than a subject headings approach because we assumed (and continue to assume) that post-coordinate indexing will drive vocabulary-assisted discovery.

Which role does SKOS and/or Linked Data play in order to achieve your goals?

ScOT concepts are now published as URIs. This approach solves the problem of different ScOT versions in disparate systems.

What are the most important values you generate for your stakeholders? What kind of applications can be built or have been built on top of your thesauri?

The Achievement Standards Network (ASN) provides a model for profiling curriculum statements and linking those statements to education resources using various rdf vocabularies. By profiling curriculum statements to learning resources, more precise matching is achieved.

What are the most important arguments to use Semantic Web standards and linked data, especially in education?

The Australian education sector is characterized by many disparate systems in different education jurisdictions. Semantic web technologies are one solution to linking education data in Australia.

Why did you choose PoolParty to manage your thesauri?

We had already identified SKOS as an important standard for ScOT so it was natural to select PoolParty as a our new thesaurus management tool.

What are your future plans and next steps? How do you manage to get your thesauri used, how are you going to build an “eco-system” around your work? (Do you plan to publish ScOT on the LOD cloud? Under which licenses?)

Our vocabularies are currently for non-commercial use and we don’t anticipate any change to the license at this stage. The ScOT license requires attribution, permits derivatives that must be shared, and is for non-commercial use.

Read the full interview here.