Out of the submissions for the LOD Triplification Challenge we received eight were nominated to win one of the three prizes. The submissions and demos can be viewed on the challenge nominations page. The final decision about the winners of the challenge will be made by the organizing committee. The prizes will be awarded at I-SEMANTICS 2008, 3–5 September 2008, Graz, Austria.

Please vote for your personal favorite (using the poll widget on the nominations page) and invite your friends and colleagues to do so as well. Although this will not have a formal influence on the committee decision the winner of the community vote will draw more attention and finally earn a honorable mention.

This ParticipatoryResearch initiative launched by AKSW aims at developing and promoting the concept of stakeholder-driven research. Goals are to (1) develop a prediction market model for research funding, (2) implement a Web platform for organising this market and the participatory research process, (3) persuade research funding agencies to use this platform for managing a part of their research portfolio.

A first step towards this goal was made with Cofundos.org – a market for open-source software R&D. The Web site of the ParticipatoryResearch initiative is hosted at: http://wiki.Cofundos.org.

Media sharing and social networking websites have attracted many millions of users resulting in vast collections of user generated content. The contents are typically poorly structured and spread over several platforms, each supporting specific media types. With the increasing growth and diversity of these websites, new ways to access and manage the contents are required - both within and across web platforms.

This workshop focuses on the interaction with these multimedia contents. We are particularly interested in contributions that follow Web 2.0 principles of simplicity and/or social navigation in combination with the representation, annotation, and linking power of the Semantic Web.

The Submission Deadline is the 14th September. A complete workshop description including topics of interest and important dates is available at http://aksw.org/Events/2008/IMCSSW.