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

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.

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).

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

Martin Kaltenböck — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 14:54:36 +0000

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:

CARE of Digital Trowel, Israel
(see also article about: TheStockSonar.com in TechCrunch)
OntoWiki of InFAI, Germany
Virtuoso of OpenLink Software, UK
PoolParty of punkt. netServices, Austria
(see also new demo zone available)

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

Thomas Thurner — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 14:38:01 +0000

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”

Andreas Blumauer — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 06:00:10 +0000

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. 1. Alan, you are one of the leading experts in the field of thesaurus construction. Organising knowledge in a (worldwide) Semantic Web is a rather young discipline compared to your domain. What do you think can the Semantic Web community learn from “traditional” thesaurus management and vice versa? You put inverted commas round the word traditional, but it might be more appropriate to put them round the word thesaurus! So long as words are used in information retrieval and in information sharing, different forms of structured vocabularies will be required, and many of the fundamental principles of thesaurus construction are still valid for their construction. Of course, the “traditional” thesaurus has mutated since the days when it was used only for controlled indexing and retrieval; and now, with the many enrichments possible it can be viewed as an ontology (in one of the definitions of this word). What remains a difficulty is to create a generalisable typology of associative relationships, though this is, of course, possible in relatively closed systems. In short, structured vocabularies with broadly thesaurus formats will be a necessary component in the web stack. 2. Stella, as a consultant you are specialized in the design and implementation of knowledge structures for information retrieval applications. In the last few months we have seen that SKOS can serve as a significant building block to link “traditional” thesaurus management to knowledge structures from the semantic web. Can you see that this development is market-driven, is there a significant growth of demand for solutions built around SKOS? This question sounds surprisingly sceptical about the growth of SKOS. I guess the dizzying speed of phenomena like Facebook and Twitter has fuelled expectations of tools springing up overnight like mushrooms, fully formed and ready to eat. But actually it takes time, not just for the tools to be fashioned, but for the potential market to develop an understanding of what they can do and what will happen next when they are used. Applications for SKOS are springing up all the time, as fast as people can grow the skills and vision to deploy them. At the moment the market, or shall we say the power-base, seems to be with the academic sector and allied not-for-profit organisations. This will spread progressively through the public to the private sector, as enterprises find ways of adapting their business models. The main hurdles to overcome could be intellectual property rights and the need for compilers of databases to keep earning their living. 3. Alan, constructing thesauri for the semantic web also means that one has to make the “open world assumption”. In which sense does this change the way to manage thesauri, keep them growing and assure quality? Can you see new, upcoming methodologies to do that? Everything changes with the “open world assumption”! Following on from my answer to the previous question, it seems clear that one manifestation of the thesaurus will be found in those systems that support interoperability, such as federated searching or metadata registries. Even with simple thesaurus management software, it is possible to construct a “master vocabulary” or “word bank” to support different applications within an enterprise; thereby promoting interoperability. More sophisticated software is already available (though not very widely); more will be needed and, doubtless, will be created. A more formal answer to both questions will be found in a new standard – ISO 25964, currently being prepared on the basis of BS 8723. The two fundamental features of these two standards are (1) the thesaurus as a theoretical and practical basis for the construction of structured vocabularies for information retieval and (2) the growing and vital need for interoperability between systems and the intelligent mapping of the vocabularies used by those systems. 4. Stella, just recently at ESWC 2010, Sean Bechhofer was asked during his keynote why there are so few SKOS tools on the market. What do you think are the reasons for this? Are there still shortcomings of the SKOS specification compared to other existing thesaurus standards? (see also: http://www.eswc2010.org/program-menu/keynote-speakers/155-sean-bechhofer & http://www.slideshare.net/seanb/skos-past-present-and-future ) Regarding the speed of development, see my reply above. As to shortcomings, did you note in one of Bechhofer’s slides: “Standardisation is necessarily a compromise: Everyone equally unhappy = success!” The SKOS development team took a conscious decision to keep the schema sufficiently simple that it could be applicable to as many different types of KOS as possible. On the downside, this means SKOS is unsatisfactory for conveying sophisticated features of some thesauri and classification schemes. But by keeping the entry barrier low, more widespread use has been encouraged. By way of illustration, compare SKOS with the data model and XML schema of BS 8723. This schema is comparatively specialized, with the aim of enabling exchange of any thesaurus carrying any or all of the features recommended in the standard. And incidentally, this data model and schema will have some further capabilities added when published in the forthcoming standard ISO 25964. SKOS does not provide for a number of features in these standards (such as compound equivalence). But the schemas in BS 8723 and ISO 25964 are designed for thesaurus developers to share their work, rather than for easy publication on the Web, and will never have so many users or associated tools as SKOS. So I believe that SKOS has done well to accept compromises that encourage generalisation although they might not suit some specialists. That said, I do regret one of its weaknesses in the context of mapping. Compound equivalence mappings (that is to say, where Concept A in one vocabulary maps to a combination of Concepts B and C in another) are very commonly needed when extending a search across multiple databases, and the SKOS mapping properties do not currently allow for them. Perhaps there will be some provision in future? 5. Stella, Alan, in September ISKO UK will organise an event on “The Future of Knowledge Organisation on the Web”. “Linked Data” seems to be a promising approach to organise knowledge in large scale environments. Could you imagine that SKOS as a small subset of semantic web specifications will play a central role in this environment since it is quite intuitively comprehensible by virtually any knowledge worker or do you rather think SKOS is too simple (or too complex)? (see also: http://poolparty.punkt.at/using-skos-as-an-interface-to-the-linked-data-cloud ) Stella: Of course SKOS will have a central role (whether or not every knowledge worker finds it as intuitive as you suppose). “Linked Data” will find even wider applicability. ISKO-UK (the organiser of the meeting in London on 14 September) has a mission not just to spread the word about both these technologies, but to build bridges between the several communities who must share their expertise and data to build more exciting applications. We’re expecting an audience of over 100 at this low-cost event. Alan: Yes, of course, just as all the tools in the web stack will be necessary if semantic web technologies are to be effective. But it is obvious that we are dealing with complexities of a higher order than ever before. Any structured vocabulary is an “artificial language” which, while acknowledging many aspects of theoretical linguistics is forced to be pragmatic in its construction. Consequently, it would not be surprising if SKOS is seen to be “catching up”, and this became apparent in the work of BS 8723 when thesaurus models using UML were being constructed. There remains much work to be done on all fronts. Stella Dextre Clarke is an independent consultant specializing in the design and implementation of thesauri and other knowledge organization structures. She currently leads ISO NP 25964, the project to update and revise the international standards for thesauri. Previously she was the Convenor of the Working Group which developed BS 8723. In 2006 she won the Tony Kent Strix Award for outstanding achievement in information retrieval, in recognition for her development work on IPSV (Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary), as well as on the vocabulary standards. She is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals. Alan Gilchrist has been a consultant for many years in the fields of information management and information architecture, specialising in the vocabulary aspects of information retrieval. He is co-author, with Jean Aitchison and David Bawden of Thesaurus Construction and Use, now in its fourth edition. In 1979 he founded and edited the Journal of Information Science, and is now Editor Emeritus. He has an Honorary Degree (D. Litt.) from the University of Brighton and is an Honorary Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Librarians and Information Professionals.

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.