The IMC-SSW Programme Committee has now finished the task of selecting papers for the International Workshop on Interacting with Multimedia Content in the Social Semantic Web (IMC-SSW). The list of accepted submissions is available at the workshop homepage. We thank all authors for submitting papers and look forward to seeing you in Koblenz in December.

Today, we released DL-Learner Build 2008-10-13. DL-Learner is a tool for learning complex class descriptions from examples and background knowledge. It extends Inductive Logic Programming to Description Logics and the Semantic Web.

Downloads are available at the sourceforge.net project page. For a list of the most important changes since the previous release (Build 2008-02-18), see the ChangeLog. Some notable features are:

• addition of a new learning algorithm, which uses background knowledge more efficiently to find solutions of learning problems
• a GUI as interface to create or modify configuration files and execute algorithms
• a fast approximate instance checking algorithm decreasing the time for example coverage checks (the most expensive operation) significantly, thereby improving overall performance
• a matured fragment extraction algorithm, which allows to grab OWL-DL fragments from large knowledge bases (using SPARQL), which contain enough relevant information to conduct concept learning, while they are small enough to reason efficiently (more information)

DL-Learner can be used to:

• solve general supervised Machine Learning problems using ontologies as background knowledge (given as OWL files, SPARQL endpoints, etc.) , e.g. it was used to predict whether chemicals can cause cancer
• help knowledge engineers by learning definitions and subclass axioms (plugins for Protégé and OntoWiki in progress)
• support searching/navigating/recommendations in knowledge bases

On 22nd of October Sören will give a talk at the Web of Data Practitioners Days in Vienna. Topics of the talk will be
how to expose RDF data from existing Web applications and how structured and semi-structured legacy data sources can be exposed as RDF and Linked Data.

In particular we will present Triplify - a lightweight plugin for Web applications, D2R - a mapping system which allows to expose relational data as RDF and enables mappings of SPARQL queries to SQL queries on the underlying relational databases, Virtuoso’s RDF Views - a technology, which is part of the Virtuoso Universal Server - a combined database and triple store - and which has similar functionality as Triplify and D2R. We will demonstrate how Wikis can serve as a source for structured content and semantics with the example of how DBpedia extracts knowledge from Wikipedia. We will show how OpenCalais can be used to annotate textual content. Last but not least we will explain how to expose other legacy sources, in particular from LDAP directories, CSV/Excel files, digital libraries with OAI-PMH.

A large portion of their time researchers are searching for information, e.g. about calls, people, projects, tools, journals. Such information is not always easy to find and it is consequently difficult especially for young researchers or researchers crossing community boundaries to quickly get relevant information. Semantic Wiki’s are tools, where many people can collectively gather, structure and organize content - not just textually, but also semantically. In order to improve access to scientific information, increase transparency and efficiency of research, we have set up a semantic Wiki for science meta-data at: http://OpenResearch.org.