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.

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.

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!

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.
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
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.
A short while ago the Semantic Web Journal was launched. Pascal Hitzler and Krzysztof Janowicz are editors-in-chief and AKSW’s Sören Auer serves on the editorial board. The journal published by IOS Press differs from other journals, in particular, since it follows an open and transparent peer-review process, which engages a wider community besides expert reviews. Supported by its young and agile editorial board, the SWJ can be expected to bring a lot of fresh wind to an already aging Semantic Web community. Since SWJ just started, it is right now a perfect time to submit an article to SWJ or propose a special issue. Please check out: http://www.semantic-web-journal.net.
Martin Hepp just published a short tutorial on using the GoodRelations vocabulary for product, price, and company data together with LESS. Martin explains, how a public SPARQL endpoint holding GoodRelations data can be accessed and results displayed using LESS. The tutorial is available at: http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelationsAndLESS

This is the weblog of the EUREKA Eurostars SCMS project : Semantic Content Management Systems for Enterprise Knowledge Management and News Mining.

The SCMS project is a project funded in the EUREKA Eurostars! Programme. It started in October 2009 and has a duration of 33 months until June 2012. The project consortium consists of 5 partners from 4 differnt countries. If you are interested in the project just read the ‘about section’.

On this weblog we will inform you continuously about the project SCMS! We will provide news flashes in the area of technology, use cases, partner news and news about the progress of SCMS.

So stay in touch – we will keep you informed!

The SCMS project team