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

LOD2 Webinar Series: LIMES – Discovery of Links across Knowledge Bases

Nadine Jaenicke — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 13:03:48 +0000

The 1st version of the LOD2 Stack has been published in September 2011 in the form of an LOD2 Stack demo and the downloadable LOD2 Stack virtual machine image – additional details and the instructions on installing the LOD2 Stack from scratch are available in the How-To-Start document. Born from the wish to make linking tractable, the Link Discovery Framework for Metric Spaces (LIMES) is tailored towards the time-efficient and lossless discovery of links across knowledge bases. LIMES is an extensible declarative framework that encapsulates manifold algorithms dedicated to the processing of structured data of any sort. Built with extensibility and easy integration in mind, LIMES allows implementing applications that integrate, consume and/or generate Linked Data. Within LOD2, it will be used for discovering links between knowledge bases. This webinar will be presented by the LOD2 Partner: University of Leipzig (ULEI), Germany. The LOD2 webinar series is powered by the LOD2 project organised and produced by the Semantic Web Company (Austria). If you are interested in Linked (Open) Data principles and mechanisms, LOD tools & services and concrete use cases that can be realised using LOD then join us in the LOD2 webinar series! The LOD2 team is looking forward to meeting you at the webinar!! When : 27.03. 2012, 04.00pm – 05.00pm CET Information & Registration: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/369667514 The LOD2 team is looking forward to meeting you at the webinar!!

José Manuel Alonso: “If you want to scale up, you should consider LOD”

Martin Kaltenböck — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 10:34:06 +0000

José Manuel Alonso has been working for W3C and CTIC in many open data projects. At the Web Foundation he promotes and supports (linked) open data in developing countries. Martin Kaltenböck from SWC talked with José about ongoing activities in the area of Open Government Data. Open Data is a powerful worldwide movement these days. Regarding open data projects in developing countries and in high industrialised countries (Europe, US, Australia et al) where do you see the main differences – regarding organisational – cultural – technical issues? We conducted feasibility studies in Ghana and Chile several months ago, are supporting the Ghana government on the development of its national initiative and have visited and have engaged in Open Data discussions with many other countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia. The situations are quite diverse and can vary significantly from country to country. It is always difficult to generalize, but I think there are a few important differences that can be highlighted (in no particular order):

The amount of information available in digital form is generally much lower
The IT infrastructure is yet to be fully developed or under development
The capacities on the government and civil society side have to be improved
The mobile phone is the main device to access information but data connectivity is still scarce, only available in the big cities and not at all in the rural areas
Digital literacy related issues have to be seriously considered and addressed
Multilingualism is an important factor, as there are dozens of dialects being spoken in many countries

Said all of the above, I would say that there are also quite a number of commonalities such as privacy and security concerns, the resistance to change but also the existence of champions within government, and the interest and willingness in civil society, that is already producing a number of interesting applications. You are also very familiar with the concept of Linked Open Data (LOD) – where do you see the main benefit in using LOD – where do you think are the main challenges – where the main obstacles? Having managed a few projects achieving 5-star open data, I’ve learned a thing or two about the pros and cons. I’ve been saying consistently that there are a few important issues:

There is still little knowledge about LOD out there and it is perceived as too complex
The demand for LOD is, hence, very low
The tooling is not powerful enough yet, specially when compared to XML tooling and others
The modeling part is very tough

People are used to work with XML and Web Services and believe that anything along this line such as REST+JSON fulfils most expectations and needs. But this is not fully true. In my opinion, the power of LOD resides on the linking part more than anything else. Combination of data from disparate sources using RESTful techniques is much more difficult while it’s a natural fit for LOD. My experience tells me that for dealing with few and simple datasets, investing in LOD is not really needed, but if you want to scale up and, specially, if you want to link and integrate, then you should consider LOD. It is generally a bigger investment but it pays back for interlinking big volumes of information, facilitates re-use in multiple formats, and can get very powerful when using SPARQL appropriately as it allows access to the whole underlying knowledge base. Where do you see the main differences regarding effort of publishing and benefit in re-use (or the re-use itself) between Open Data and Linked Open Data? I would say that the main difference here is between using the Web as an archive for files and using the full potential of the Web. If one publishes hundreds of spreadsheets on the Web using an open format and license, he is already doing Open Data, but more than using the Web, he is going back to the FTP days. And that is not too different from giving away a USB stick with the files. We can do much better nowadays. The often cited Tim Berners-Lee’s 5-star scale is a good reference here. The higher you can achieve on that scale, the more power of the Web you are using, the more you are facilitating reuse. Are there differences regarding the use of LOD principles and technologies between developing countries and industrialised countries in your opinion? For example: does it make sense to start an Open Data Initiative in a developing country using Linked Open Data from the scratch? All the issues with LOD I mentioned above apply and are even more strongly found in the developing world. I think we should take a step by step approach and start going from no data to some-star data in the very near term, lower the barriers one by one and start to building capacities in government and civil society but always with Web architecture principles in mind. We will have to address the specificities of the developing world. For example, given that the LOD community is relying more and more on cloud-based options, on centralized data stores that require stable high-speed internet, how would one deploy a LOD solution in a country where clients (computers/mobile phones) have limited resources (disk, cpu) and where connectivity is unstable and with low-bandwidth? We’re participating in a worskhop to explore these issues. This does not mean that LOD is completely ruled out from the beginning. As I pointed out before, there are cases on which it can be extremely useful and powerful and in those, we intend to accelerate adoption, likely piloting and building capacities as a first step. Could you please tell us a few words about the Web Foundation? The Web Foundation was launched by the inventor of the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, in 2009 to address global challenges by connecting humanity and empowering individuals through an increasingly inclusive and powerful Web. More on the vision of the Web Foundation at: http://www.webfoundation.org/vision/ Jose, many thanks for this interview. It seems that there is a quick progress in open data in developing countries as well as there are different requirements there to be taken into account in comparison to open data projects in Australia, the US or in Europe! Also the potential of Linked Open Data seems an interesting point for these countries! We are looking forward to staying in touch with you on this in the future and wish you all the best for your future work in this area!

Linked Open Data: The Essentials – A quick start guide for decision makers

Andreas Blumauer — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 08:18:51 +0000

Together with REEEP (Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership) the Semantic Web Company (SWC) has composed a fundamental publication on the topic of Linked Open Data. Linked Open Data: The Essentials provides answers to the following key questions:

What do the terms Open Data, Open Government Data and Linked Open Data actually mean, and what are the differences between them?
What do I need to take into account in developing a LOD strategy?
What does my organisation need to do technically in order to open up and publish its datasets?
How can I make sure the data is accessible and digestible for others?
How can I add value to my own data sets by consuming LOD from others?
What can be learned existing best practices?
What are the key potentials of sharing and consuming open datasets?

Read more about this publication and find out how to obtain a copy.

Using WordPress to publish Linked Data

Andreas Blumauer — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 15:11:43 +0000

PoolParty Team has recently published an improved version of their WordPress plugin which enables linked data enrichments of blogs. Therefore a SKOS based vocabulary has to be uploaded or retrieved from a SPARQL-endpoint. Users and developers benefit from

automatic annotation of all blog entries displayed as tooltips
a comfortable search facility with auto-complete over all concepts from the linked thesaurus including semantic search over the whole blog
an integrated thesaurus browser, plus
a corresponding linked data frontend including RDF/XML serialization of the underlying thesaurus + SPARQL endpoint

The improvements of version 2.2.3 compared to older versions in detail:

Updating the plugin via the wordpress admin interface has been simplified. The plugin now gets the ARC2 triplestore and installs it automatically without need to intervene manually.
There is a new sidebar-widget which incorporates a search field including autocomplete. This autocomplete service suggests terms from the glossary. Once such a term is chosen, one is automatically connected to the webpage describing the term. The widget can be pulled into any sidebar (depending on the theme) from the sub-section of appearance/widgets.
There is a new shortcode with which specific parts of the content can be excluded from automatically being linked. The shortcode is called ppt-noparse. Automatic linking is disabled for any text between the code.
Automatic finding and linking of concepts in running content can be totally disabled under settings. The glossary area is still present and can be reached via the glossary link and the sidebar widget.

The plugin can be downloaded from the WordPress plugin directory. SKOS based vocabularies can be obtained from the vocabulary server of the Semantic Web Company, from the W3C-SKOS Wiki or as another example, for the area of clean energy from reegle-Server. The plugin is already used by the reegle blog, (reegle is a leading search and data hub in the are of clean energy) or – as another example – by the Semantic Puzzle Blog. For blogs which are specialised on writing about climate change or renewable energy a specialised version of the WordPress linked data plugin can be downloaded and installed. A comfortable way to generate SKOS thesauri for nearly any domain was recently published: SKOSsy is a tool which extracts controlled vocabularies from DBpedia serving as a “seed thesaurus” for further extensions and enhancements which can be managed with powerful SKOS editors like PoolParty Thesaurus Manager.

Price-winning SCMS Technology

Axel Ngonga — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 08:44:37 +0000

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, ISWC. LIMES, 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

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.

SCMS Interview in Austrian FFG EUREKA Aktuell magazine published

Martin Kaltenböck — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 15:24:06 +0000

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