20 students from about 10 different countries were in Leipzig last week, from 12 – 18 September, to attend the Indian-Summer School on Linked Data. Right from the basics of Linked Data, introduced by Chris Bizer and Sören Auer, they learnt about the intricate details of Linked Data such as Interlinking, Conversion, NLP, Reasoning, SPARQL, Linked Semantic Multimedia and more. The AKSW experts shared the details of OntoWiki, RDFaCE, Mobile Semantic Applications, LinkedGeoData.  A poster session was also organized in the middle of the week, where each student got a chance to present their work as well to see the work of other attendees, aiding in networking, finding students with similar interest for further collaborations and also getting insightful comments from experts in the field. The best poster with the title “On Linked Data Indexing and Querying”, was awarded to Martin Svoboda from Charles University in Prague. Besides just passively listening to lectures, the students were asked to do a student project within a week to get hands-on experience of Linked Data. They were presented with several topics, from the AKSW members who would act as mentors, which they could choose according to their interest and over the next two days they were given time to work on it. On Saturday, all groups presented their work and the projects really showed that exciting results can be achieved even in a short period of time using Linked Data! Each group could implement their ideas and show a demo too. We awarded a prize to the best group, which consisted of Gareev Rinat, Michael Meder, Ivo Lasek and Robert Yao, based on a poll from all the attendees. They worked on the “Entity Disambiguation” project, supervised by Axel Ngonga. With all the hard work, there was also time for play, which included a welcome reception at an authentic German restaurant, Thüringer Hof, a city tour around Leipzig’s cultural center and an excursion to Fockeberg, a small hill in Leipzig, accompanied with barbecue and drinks. Check out the photographs here !

We partook in the organization of the Semantics and Media Workshop at the University of Mainz, where Axel is a Research Fellow. The aim of the workshop was to bring practitioners and research all around media and semantics together and to discuss the application of semantic technologies to achieve media representation, retrieval and convergence. The workshop took place from the 14th to the 15th and attracted four dozen practitioners and researchers from multiple areas such as publishing, semantic web, information retrieval and classification as well as digital humanities. Results from our research projects LOD2 and SCMS were received with great interest by the participants. The presentations (incl. Sören’s) will be available here soon. Furthermore, the talks will be published asap.

Stay tuned,
Axel

During a workshop on June 27th at the Historical College in Munich, the AKSW group and the group of the New German Biography at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities presented their results of the LOD2-supported PUBLINK project. Within this project meta-data about 46,000 biographies, 42,000 people and 12,000 locations were made available as Linked Data and RDF. We used the GND vocabulary of the German National Library and enriched it with a few additional classes and relations. In addition to the representation in RDF,  we offer an OntoWiki instance for browsing and querying the dataset. With the help of the RelationshipFinder tool relations between two or more persons may be visualized by using this SPARQL endpoint.

The 22 workshop participants from AKSW, BAdW, BSB, BMLO, Deutsches Museum, FAU Erlangen, GNM, ISGV and LMU started a discussion particularly on the question of how to increase the interlinking of historical information on the Semantic Web. The most crucial aspects in this respect were related to the representations of historical locations and to a more generalized vocabulary for historical information.

More information is available at the following websites:

Linked data endpoint / project page: http://data.deutsche-biographie.de

German Biography:  http://www.deutsche-biographie.de

SPARQL endpoint and OntoWiki instance: http://ndb.publink.lod2.eu

LOD2 project page: http://lod2.eu

On June 8, I (Jens) visited the process control engineering research group (PLT) of Leon Urbas at the Dresden University of Technology. We first met on the Leipziger Semantic Web Day where Leon Urbas presented interactive Linked Data applications and decided to have a longer meeting later on. I first gave a talk on the Linked Data Lifecycle (slides as PDF), which is a central element of the vision behind the LOD2 project – a cycle of mutual refinement which can help to overcome some of the problems in using Linked Data. It extends on an earlier vision description by Sören and me.

After the initial presentation, we exchanged ideas for collaboration between our groups. The PLT group has a very strong record in large scale practical applications, mobile devices and usability testing. Since their background is automation engineering, they view semantic technologies as a way to connect large networks of knowledge in a flexible manner. They were particularly interested in some of our research and software tools like LIMES, SAIM and OntoWiki. I enjoyed staying at the group and I am looking forward to further meetings.

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.

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.