New Springer-Book: Social Semantic Web

It took a while and I was waiting for the book to come like a child waiting for Christmas. But now it´s out – our new book: Social Semantic Web (Web 2.0 – was nun?).

Springer: Social Semantic Web

Web 2.0 – and now? This question is answered by 49 authors in 24 articles.

One hypothesis which is discussed in this book: Especially the idea of “transferring” Web 2.0 into an Enterprise Environment should be backed by semantic web technologies.

Read more about this book (in German) in our Semantic Wiki.

Freebase Parallax: Browsing ad infinitum

Just recently an inspiring new user interface came out, which gives users an idea, that “googling” the web isn´t the ultimate way to find information on the web: Freebase Parallax by David Huynh. David was also strongly involved in some projects of CSAIL at MIT which also dealt with the “simple” question: How to make (web) data more accessible for users who aren´t aware of SPARQL, SQL or OLAP cubes. For example, Exhibit became a wide-spread environment to setup a faceted search on a given dataset. A bit more sophisticated is the “nested faceted browser” – and now Parallax is out.

In his screencast about this “novel browsing interface” David stresses the advantages over Google or Wikipedia. Is this a fair competition? So what is the novel thing?

1. If you want to learn a bit more about Abraham Lincoln – go to Wikipedia!
2. If you want to know where you can find even more information about Abraham Lincoln – go to Google!
3. If you know a bit about Abraham Lincoln already, and you want to aggregate or compare some facts of his life to other presidents or you want to visualise some data on a time-line or on a map – learn how to handle a tool like Parallax (and don´t complain, that this isn´t as simple as Google anymore)!

In some ascpects Parallax was a missing building block in the web universe: (Professional) fact finding on the web could work like this in the close future (although Parallax needs some more servers and – indeed – some more data in the database).

But what if Parallax became the graph-based UI on top of Freebase + LinkingOpenData?

Web 2.0 meets the Semantic Web in September…

September 2007 will start with an exciting event (Triple-I in Graz/Austria) and will end with a top-class conference (Semantic Web Strategies, San Jose, CA) both dealing with questions about the applicability of the semantic web.

Since the global semantic web community is growing fast (many new technologies, start ups and more or less mature systems pop up every week) it is very important to keep track of interesting projects.

I will chair a semantic wiki tutorial (thanks to Sebastian Schaffert who is presenting IkeWiki and Danny Vrandecic who will explain the benefits of his semantic media wiki) and give a talk about “Enterprise n+1” together with Franz Novak and Henry Story from Sun Microsystems in Graz.

After I have made my long way to the Silicon Valley I will give a tutorial on the Semantic Web in general with a strong focus on economic issues. Again, Semantic Wikis play an integral role when explaining the benefits of the Semantic Web, metadata can´t be produced only by some experts. From a technical point of view it´s clear what´s exciting about the semantic web, but in what cases is it really applicable? How can a project roll-out be done? What role plays “semantic education” for the involved employees?

I am also looking forward discussing in a Keynote roundtable about Semantic Web Strategies for organizations. (See also: Interview with Bob DuCharme).

Still both, promoters and critics, have the same opinion: The Semantic Web is (or: would be) an exciting new option to enhance the Web (1.0 and 2.0) and Information Management throughout companies. Promoters are maybe still a bit too optimistic and enthusiastic and critics often are not aware how simple the semantic web can be applied. Maybe they will meet each other this year in September….

Scripting for the Semantic Web

This year´s ESWC hosted the 3rd International Workshop on “Scripting for the Semantic Web” (SFSW 2007). I really enjoyed that event, also because of the very friendly and relaxed atmosphere in that community. Danny Ayers started with a talk called “Two Webs!“. He pointed out the ways to use the “Semantic Web” (again: it´s NOT a completely new web aside Web 2.0!) as an “RDF-Bus” where existing data sources can be interlinked quite easily (see: LinkingOpenData @ SWEO).

• Michael Hausenblas presented “PSIMeter” which is a demo to show alternative ways to RDF-ize the flickr API regarding machine tags.
• Chris Bizer outlined once more the importance of the “Web of (open) data” and presented The RDF Book Mashup: From Web APIs to a Web of Data (For a demo go here)
• Eyal Oren was talking about two services which play an important role in a Semantic Web infrastructure: Sindice and Ping the Semantic Web
• Uldis Bojãrs and some others from the SIOC project presented their ideas and I really liked the SIOC Browser.
• And finally the brilliant Ripple won the Semantic Scripting Challenge (Paper).

I also enjoyed talking with Sören Auer, Chris Bizer, Danny Ayers, Tom Heath and some others very much. Thanks to the organizers!

On top of the Viennese library

together with Leo Sauermann talking about the Semantic Desktop “war mir ein großes Volksfest”. Thanks Leo!

Reminder: Call for papers TRIPLE-I

TRIPLE-I
The Innovation Conference for Knowledge Management, New Media Technology and Semantic Technologies

5 – 7 September 2007
Graz, Austria

http://www.triple-i.info

The TRIPLE-I Conference series is a joint venture of the conferences

•   I-KNOW – International Conference on Knowledge Management
•   I-MEDIA – International Conference on New Media Technology
•   I-SEMANTICS – International Conference on Semantic Technology

Regular paper submissions for I-KNOW may include but are not limited to:

- Identifying Relationships between different kinds of Knowledge Entities
- Service-oriented Architectures for Knowledge Management Systems
- Service-based Knowledge Management
- Orchestration of Knowledge Management Services
- Distributed Knowledge Management
- Social Network Analysis
- Knowledge Work Productivity
- Communication and Collaboration in Knowledge Management
- Context and Usage Pattern Identification and Management
- Agile Approaches to Knowledge Management

Regular paper submissions for I-MEDIA may include but are not limited
to:

- Web 2.0 Applications for Content Providers
- Business Models for New Media
- Social Media Platforms
- User-Generated Content
- Cross-Media Content Production and Delivery
- Cross-Media Search and Retrieval
- New Media Services
- Innovative User Interfaces for Media Devices
- The Geospatial Web
- Marketing of Products and Services via New Media

Regular paper submissions for I-SEMANTICS may include but are not limited to:

- Semantic Social Software
- Semantic Wikis and Weblogs
- Semantic Desktop
- Social Tagging and Folksonomies
- Ontology Engineering
- Terminology Management
- Visualisation of Semantic Models
- Interoperability, Integration and Reasoning
- Semantic Web Applications
- Experiences, Studies and Metrices

Deadlines
21 May 2007: Full paper submission (4-8 pages)
18 June 2007:   Notification of acceptance
13 July 2007:  Final version (8 pages)
5-7 September 2007: TRIPLE-I Conference

Yet another search interface for wikipedia?

It has always been worth using exalead from time to time to “exalead” (somehow that verb isn´t that popular as “to google”) one´s favourite search phrases (you usually type in when you start your computer in the morning . That´s because exalead finds sometimes really “new” websites for you when you´re a regular google-user. So, until now exalead was rather interesting as an alternative like alcohol-free beer – give it a chance!

Now there is a reason to go to exalead: Try out exalead´s search over wikipedia and you will have a similiar experience as you have with dbpedia.

You´ll be able to refine your search phrase, therefore exalead offers even typed tagclouds (different colors mean different types of associations, like people or places). A nice Web 2.0-like GUI and high performance convinces finally.

One last question: What if dbpedia and exalead would combine their different approaches (dbpedia tripled wikipedia, exalead still remains in the area of automatic text-extraction) to put even more semantics into wikipedia?

Navigating Wikipedia with a little help from a visualisation

One more reason to buy an Apple is Pathway: This program helps to navigate through Wikipedia in a bit more structured way. It visualises pathways through wikipedia and proposes interesting links to other wiki pages. After a while navigating through wikipedia users normally find themselves “totally lost in myriads of loosely related pages. What I needed, was an application that could easily archive the path I follow through Wikipedia pages”, says the author of Pathway.

Thanks to Thomas Fundneider for pointing that out!

Semantic Web is about Knowledge relationship discovery

If you try to explain what the Semantic Web is all about, it always comes to things like “you will find things better in the semantic web…”. But what exactly is it, what you´ll find better?

To my opinion it´s all about relationships – and that´s exactly, what transforms information into knowledge: To know, how things belong together. It sounds trivial, but it´s still not that clear:

Semantic Web is about Knowledge relationship discovery.

A really great example for that was recently published by Sören Auer, Jens Lehmann, Chris Bizer and others:

• What have Innsbruck and Leipzig in common? Extracting Semantic from Wiki Content.
• Try it out!

Semantic Wikipedia Query

Semantic Wikipedia Query is based on dbpedia.org, which is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia (~ 91. mio. triples) and to make this information available on the Web. It allows you to ask sophisticated queries against Wikipedia and to link other datasets on the Web to Wikipedia data.

This project shows why the semantic web won´t fail: In contrast to simple queries against full-text indices, semantic queries (similar like SQL-based database-queries) allow queries like “show me all projects we´ve done in Russia the last 10 years”. Semantic Queries in the Semantic Web can be realised deploying SPARQL-endpoints and are one of main advantages semantic wikis have compared to classic wikis.

Another great benefit when all the information on the web is “tripled down” comes up, when meshups (with geo-information or foaf-profiles) are realised.

Examples:

• Tennis players from Moscow
• Sitcoms set in NYC
• People influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche

Also try out dbpedia search!