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 «

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!

Semantic Web Company talked with Kingsley Idehen who is CEO of OpenLink Software and probably one of the most profound experts on data integration issues about “Linked Data”.

The interview covers questions like:

  • How can Linked Data help to make companies more productive?
  • Do you think that the Linked Data Initiative can build upon a stable architecture or will it face more and more problems the bigger the “cloud” will grow?
  • What´s the ultimate argument for an Enterprise Architect to use languages like SPARQL at least in addition to SQL?
  • How will a “Real Time Semantic Web” change the whole game?
  • How will the “Semantic Web” be called in 10 years? Will there still be a “Semantic Web”?

Read the full version of the interview here.

We recently heard that Oracle 11G loaded RDF faster than we did. Now, we never thought the speed of loading a database was as important as the speed of query results, but since this is the sole area where they have reportedly been tested as faster, we decided it was time loading was addressed. Indeed, without Oracle to challenge us on query performance, we would not be half as good as we are. So, spurred on by the Oracular influence, we did something about our RDF loading.

Read more on Orri Erling’s Weblog…

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