SCMS - Semantic Content Management Systems for Enterprise Knowledge Management & News Mining » Partner News

Survey result: Controlled Vocabularies Matter!

Andreas Blumauer — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 09:41:22 +0000

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

knowledge organizsation,
semantic search,
linked data management,
knowledge modeling and
text mining

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.

Indian-Summer School on Linked Data

Sören Auer — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 21:48:34 +0000

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 at IKS Workshop

Axel Ngonga — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 18:05:40 +0000

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 Bauer: I like to view “linked data” as a “single worldwide API”

Andreas Blumauer — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 14:18:15 +0000

Florian 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. reegle consists of two components: one is the semantic search engine (http://www.reegle.info/), the other is the linked data portal (http://data.reegle.info/) – What are your target groups, and which typical problems of the clean energy domain can you solve with these services? For reegle.info, our target groups are primarily project developers, financiers and government policy-makers. These users can access high-quality information on clean energy-related issues with the set of tools we provide: a special web search, a catalogue of more than 1700 key stakeholders, a map view for geographical browsing, a clean energy glossary, and an energy country profiles function. The energy country profiles are typical of what we’re trying to achieve. Here, we take information from many different providers and combine it all to present one comprehensive information dossier on renewable energy and energy efficiency in that particular country. This means that in one location you have the country’s most important energy-related information ranging from key statistics, and current regulations to key players in the energy field in both public and private sectors. For our data portal, the target group is a more technical one: primarily IT developers and open data specialists who want to create new mash-ups and integrate data from reegle into other websites. One of the first using these reegle data sets is the OpenEI.org website, another key portal in the energy field. Open data is not the same as linked open data. Why did you choose to build your services around W3C´s linked data paradigm and/or standards like RDF? Tim Berners-Lee once mentioned that he likes to compare the progressive ways of offering data with the “stars system” used to rate hotels. You get: * for making data public (in any format) ** for machine-readable formats (structured data) *** if the data is offered in a non-proprietary format **** if you use URIs to identify things, so people can point to your datasets ***** for linking to other people’s data to provide context So, as you can imagine, our goal is for reegle to be firmly in the 5-star category, and to establish reegle as an avant-garde tool in energy data. I also like to view “linked data” as a “single worldwide API”. If the old web was like a huge book, the new semantic web is like a huge database, and SPARQL is the way to ask for information – by sending a query through the SPARQL Endpoint. RDF is the language that offers all possibilities to describe a given dataset with all of the necessary information, including any links to other datasets. Therefore RDF data and SPARQL endpoints provide a powerful tool to find and filter datasets and are crucial, base parts of the semantic web’s architectural layers. On reegle the SPARQL endpoint and the description of the structure of our RDF files is online on our clean energy open data portal. You also decided to build a SKOS based domain thesaurus for clean energy which now plays an important role to improve the search experience at reegle. Which experiences have you gained so far from this effort? Which obstacles did you have to overcome? The SKOS-based renewable energy thesaurus can be seen as the “heart” of reegle as it provides the basis for a lot of related services in reegle, including the refinement suggestions for search results, the auto-completion options and the glossary links between defined terms and their synonyms and related terms. We decided to use SKOS because we think it is the best language for building a formal and controlled vocabulary for thesauri in a semantic web context, without adding too much complexity. Although it is a simple language, you really still need IT experts to use it to build a thesaurus – domain experts with additional IT skills (hard to find!). So in our case, we decided to use a scalable and easy-to-use thesaurus server called “PoolParty”. Using this system drastically reduced the complexity, and allowed us to concentrate on the actual building of the thesaurus with our domain experts, and to spend less time on transferring the knowledge into data sets. What are your future plans with reegle? Currently we’re working on restructuring the site to better highlight our new added-value services such as the clean energy country profiles. We are also planning to further develop our thesaurus to include climate-compatible development terms and we’ll soon release a wordpress plug-in to insert this thesaurus into clean energy blogs. One of the most exciting projects we are actually working on is the development of “dossier pages”, where we will provide relevant information to several topics mashed up on one page using semantic web technologies. This is part of the EU funded SCMS (“semantic content management system”) project.

OntoWiki Mobile – knowledge management in your pocket

Timofey Ermilov — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 16:28:27 +0000

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.

Software release: LIMES – Link Discovery Framework for Metric Spaces

Sören Auer — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 12:36:58 +0000

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).

AKSW coordinates EU-funded research project LOD2 aiming to take the Web of Linked Data to the next level

Sören Auer — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 14:51:19 +0000

All wealth of information is already widely available on the Internet or in company-wide Intranets. In many situations, however, we tend perceive this plethora of information as an information overload, since it is still rarely possible to answer search queries going beyond simple keyword-searches and tedious to integrate information from different sources in unforeseen ways. Enabling such intelligent ways to process information on the Web is the key aim of the Semantic Web vision, but it seems that its realization based on logic and reasoning will take more time than initially anticipated. Recently however, the Linked Data paradigm - a more lightweight and pragmatic approach for integrating information on the Web - gained traction. It is based on representing information in facts consisting of subject, predicate and object (aka RDF triples), publishing these on the Web and interlinking them by using the same mechanism as linking between web pages (via URIs). With more than 20 billion facts thus already published as Linked Open Data (LOD) the document Web is enriched with a data commons comprising, for example, all the BBC programming, Wikipedia as a structured knowledge base (DBpedia) and statistical information from Eurostat and the US census. Co-funded by the European Union with 6.5 Million Euro as well as by companies and research institutions from 6 European countries the project LOD2 aims to realize the Web of Linked Data by developing crucial technological building blocks for the application of the Linked Data paradigm in companies, Web communities and governmental institutions. In particular, the LOD2 project will develop:

enterprise-ready tools and methodologies for exposing and managing very large amounts of structured information on the Data Web,
a testbed and bootstrap network of high-quality multi-domain, multi-lingual ontologies from sources such as Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap.
algorithms based on machine learning for automatically interlinking and fusing data from the Web.
standards and methods for reliably tracking provenance, ensuring privacy and data security as well as for assessing the quality of information.
adaptive tools for searching, browsing, and authoring of Linked Data.

The resulting tools, methods and data sets have the potential to change the Web as we know it today. This makes LOD2 relevant for researchers, industry and citizens alike. Whether it is about the efficient integration of enterprise data, the open-standardized access to scientific publications and experiment data or the opening of governmental data silos for the creative use by citizens, LOD2 will improve the usability of the Web for integrating heterogeneous information. The 4-year collaborative research and development project, which is coordinated by the AKSW research group from Universität Leipzig starts in September 2010. Involves the partners Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica from the Netherlands, National University of Ireland, Galway, Freie Universität Berlin, UK-based OpenLink Software, Semantic Web Company from Vienna, the Belgian IT service providerTenForce, the french specialist for Enterprise search Exalead, the international publishing house Wolters Kluwer as well as the non-profit NGO Open Knowledge Foundation. For companies and organizations owning large datasets of public interest and interested in publishing and interlinking these on the Data Web, the LOD2 partners offer a Linked Open Data Starter Service (LODS). The application deadline for this free consulting and development support is 15th of December 2010. Further information is available from the LOD2 website http://lod2.eu.

OntoWiki 0.9.5 Available

Sebastian Tramp — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 14:55:47 +0000

The AKSW research group is pleased to announce that OntoWiki 0.9.5 is now available for download.

OntoWiki is a web-application enabling the collaborative creation and (linked data) publication of RDF knowledge bases.

More information about OntoWiki can be found at http://ontowiki.net. You can download OntoWiki in our google code file section. Enhancements in this release include:

Support for Semantic Pingback, a protocol which enables OntoWiki to communicate named links from linked data resources or blog systems like WordPress.
Support for the publication of provenance information via Linked Data.
A new navigation module which support the configuration and usage of arbitrary navigation hierarchies (e.g. based on classes, SKOS elements, geospatial entities or FOAF groups).
A bookmarklet for collecting RDFa-based information into a specific OntoWiki knowledge base.
More editing widgets, e.g. for phone number and mailto: resources.
A new mapping module for the resource visualisation and filtering based on maps.
Attribute / Tag clouds based on selected RDF properties.
A GUI for complex SPARQL filter (contains, larger, smaller, between and bound)
A JSON/RPC server as an additional interface (e.g. for the command line client)
A plugin to create nice URIs based on the content of a new resource.

A detailed log of the over 200 enhancements and bug fixes of this release is available at our issue tracker. Many thanks to the contributors of this OntoWiki release (in alphabetical order): Atanas Alexandrov, Christian Maier, Christoph Riess, Jonas Brekle, Marvin Frommhold, Michael Haschke, Michael Martin, Michael Niederstätter, Natanael Arndt, Norman Heino, Philipp Frischmuth and Tim Ermilov best regards Sebastian Tramp

Publishing Linked Data for the first time (PoolParty 2.7 release notes)

Andreas Blumauer — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 14:13:23 +0000

I still remember when I was publishing HTML for the first time in my life: It took place in 1996 and I used Microsoft Frontpage. It was exciting because then “I was on the Internet”. Yesterday, around 15 years later something similar happened: I published Linked Data for the first time actively! Eureka! Sure, by using Semantic MediaWiki or Wordpress’s SIOC plugin “I was already on the Semantic Web” – but a lot of data which is produced by such tools is not Linked Data but simple RDF. A closer look at all the datasets in the LOD cloud also reveals that none of them can be edited with an ease, except upcoming DBpedia Live which offers “real-time semantic web”. Conclusio: So far most of the linked data in the LOD cloud was generated by DB2RDF mapping tools like D2R which can only be handled by semantic web experts and technicians. Don´t get me wrong – this is a very important basic layer for the LOD world. All automatically generated datasets like DBpedia are kind of “highways” on the linked data map. Now it´s time to pave the side streets. Just imagine, a teacher would like to publish his knowledge about Italian painters in a way it can be re-used as linked data. Should we tell him to “open an editor, to start typing RDF triples and to upload the file via FTP”? When we started to design PoolParty in 2007 we had people in our minds who would like to contribute actively to producing data for the semantic web. People working for organizations with special domain knowledge are not only able to connect the dots from the linked data highways but also know how to customize such data for their own applications. PoolParty 2.7 offers the following features and functionalities for such tasks:

Linked Data editing: users generate linked data to describe their resources (concepts) on top of SKOS
Linked data lookup: mapping between own thesauri and additional facts from the semantic web The following resources can be used at the moment: DBpedia, Umbel, Yago, DMOZ, LCSH, Geonames & Wordnet; this service is highly configurable – also internal linked data sources can be mapped and used to enrich local thesauri; the lookup service makes use of the very fast TuQS server
Linked data publishing: based on linked data patterns any resource can be published as linked data, ready to re-use for any linked data application; example: http://open.poolparty.punkt.at/Wine/13 which can also be viewed by linked data browsers like Zitgist’s DataViewer
SPARQL endpoint: another way how PoolParty’s RDF data can be accessed by semantic web developers

In addition to these features PoolParty 2.7 comes with some other new features:

Translation support: works for nearly any language and domain with high accuracy – thanks to Google Translate
Online Documentation: PoolParty’s end-user manual is open for the public, easy to access and searchable; since PoolParty 2.7 it is available not only as PDF document but also as browsable Wiki
Flexible Reporting Tool: As we have already blogged before, PoolParty’s new reporting tool is flexible enough to manage to export formats like, for example, Google Synonyms; also “traditional” thesaurus reports like hierarchical reports are available
iPhone front-end: If you have to do research using your thesauri while you are somewhere outside of the office, this could be a possible solution for you – see this screenshot!

If you also want to publish some linked data (for the first time in your life ) register to get a PoolParty demo account and go for it! It´s really easy.

AKSW at ESWC

Sören Auer — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 12:49:42 +0000

Extended Semantic Web Conference started yesterday in Hersonissos, Crete. AKSW is involved in this years ESWC in various ways: We co-organized the 6th Workshop on Scripting and Development (SFSW10) probably for the last time this year at ESWC, since the original aim of promoting more light-weight, pragmatic semantic web applications of the SFSW workshop series became now rather mainstream. Sören was one of the panelists of the panel on “Linked Data: Now what?”. With the two papers “LESS - Template-Based Syndication and Presentation of Linked Data” and “Improving the Performance of Semantic Web Applications with SPARQL Query Result Caching” AKSW is also well represented in the main scientific conference programme.