Survey result: Controlled Vocabularies Matter!

04
Jul
2011

By Andreas Blumauer | Category: Partner News, Technology

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.

LIMES at IKS Workshop

06
Jun
2011

By Axel Ngonga | Category: Events & Conferences, Partner News, Technology

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”

16
Mar
2011

By Andreas Blumauer | Category: Partner News, Technology, Use Cases

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 «

OntoWiki Mobile – knowledge management in your pocket

17
Jan
2011

By Timofey Ermilov | Category: Partner News, Technology

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

19
Nov
2010

By Sören Auer | Category: Partner News, Technology

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).

SCMS face2face meeting took place in Amsterdam 7-8 October 2010

11
Oct
2010

By Martin Kaltenböck | Category: Events & Conferences, Project Information, Technology

After the last face to face meeting in Vienna in January 2010 it has been about time to have the next SCMS project meeting to discuss the status of the work packages 2 (Knowledge Discovery),3 (Knowledge Engineering) and 4 (Knowledge Storage) as well as to plan the SCMS project workplan 2011 including work packages 5 (CMS implementation – Enterprise Knowledge Management – at the moment it si planned to implement the SCMS stack into the following systems: Drupal, Typo3, conX and Atlassian Confluence) and 6 (News Mining implementation).

This time the project team was invited by OpenLink Software that hosted the meeting in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

In a two day face 2 face meeting the project team presented the status of the above mentioned work packages including tool demonstrations and hands on sessions as well as discussed required changes on architecture and components. Finally the procedure for the implementation of the SCMS technology stack into CMS solutions has been specified in detail.

Beside the final specification of A) extracting structured information out of unstructured content (using NLP technologies) as well as B) turning this structured information into contextual embedded knowledge using RDF and several semantic web technologies the 1st specification of C) the mechanisms of inferencing and knowledge querying has been specified to build reports/mash ups out of the available internal and external structured and unstructured information / data.

The afternoon of the second day was mainly destined for hands on sessions: these sessions really helped us to solve some important coding- & tool issues – so it was a good idea to manage this sessions beside presentations and specifications!

The meeting will be followed by a SCMS hackaton in Vienna in early December 2010 – the next face to face meeting will take place in May 2011.

At the meeting presented tools:

Please do not hesitate to contact us if any questions on SCMS technologies and methodologies are arising!

Btw the 2 Use Cases (AIDA tours and reegle.info of REEEP) will be finalised and presented as BETA in late 2011 – so watch out!

Report on developments at the European Semantic Technology Market

25
Jun
2010

By Thomas Thurner | Category: Technology

The present state of development, future trends and expected market scenarios for Semantic Technologies are shown in the just published “Demand driven Mapping Report”. The report is part of the EU-funded project Value It, which is about bringing together the various stakeholders within the sector: Industry, Research and Government. VALUE-IT preliminary findings show that the STE potential market in Europe will size up to €1.44B for 2014. Scanning furthermore the executive summary of the report, some findings attract attention:
The survey results also show considerable variation by sector, both of policy and technology implementation. With respect to technologies, ICT companies are also the most willing to consider semantic approaches. The ICT sector has an unusually high interest in all ST components, with 20% or more being willing to consider all of them, and over half of IT respondents looking at Web 2.0 (social computing). [...]  The use of tagging technologies – which overall is the least mature approach in the survey – is most advanced in Life Sciences. The Life Sciences, Media & Entertainment, and ICT sectors all have a reasonably strong interest in Natural Language Processing (roughly 25% on average). Ontologies and RDF/OWL are the technologies least often considered, though the interest in these Semantic Technologies is not insignificant. Taxonomies are slightly more popular, perhaps indicating that companies are taking the first step to prepare for a more semantic approach to IT solutions. The ICT, Energy & Utilities, and Media & Entertainment sectors all have a reasonably strong interest in using taxonomies.
The 190 pages report gives an actual overview of the status quo on European Semantic Technology Market and is now available for download: Final demand driven mapping Report

Stella Dextre Clarke & Alan Gilchrist about the “Future of Knowledge Organization on the Web”

21
Jun
2010

By Andreas Blumauer | Category: Events & Conferences, Technology

Semantic Web Company (SWC) had the pleasure and the opportunity to talk with two internationally recognised experts in the fields of information management and knowledge organization: Alan Gilchrist and Stella Dextre Clarke. SWC asked some questions about the “Future of Knowledge Organization on the Web & Linked Data” on the occasion of an event of the same name organised by ISKO UK which will take place on September 14, 2010 in London. » Read the rest of this entry «

OntoWiki 0.9.5 Available

14
Jun
2010

By Sebastian Tramp | Category: Partner News, Technology

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)

14
Jun
2010

By Andreas Blumauer | Category: Partner News, Technology

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! linked-data-frontend 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.

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