After the great success of the first Leipziger Semantic Web Tag (LSWT) in 2009 AKSW is organizing another installment of this event on 6th May. In addition to demonstrating the benefits of semantic technologies to enterprises, this year’s LSWT focuses on Open Data in science and E-government. A particular highlight will be the festive announcement of the German chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation. More information on the LSWT can be found (in German) at: http://aksw.org/Events/2010/LeipzigerSemanticWebDay.

OKCon, now in its fifth year, is the interdisciplinary conference that brings together individuals from across the open knowledge spectrum for a day of presentations and workshops.

Open knowledge promises significant social and economic benefits in a wide range of areas from governance to science, from culture to technology. Opening up access to content and data can radically increase access and reuse; improving transparency, fostering innovation and increasing societal welfare.

In addition to high-profile initiatives such as Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap and the Human Genome Project, there is enormous growth among open knowledge projects and communities at all levels. Moreover, in the last year, many governments across the world began to open up their data.

And it doesn’t stop there. In academia, open access to both publications and data has been gathering momentum, and similar calls to open up learning materials have been heard in education. Furthermore, this gathering flood of open data and content is the creator and driver of massive technological change. How can we make this data available, how can we interlink it, how can we use it to collaborate and share our work?

• where: London, UK
• when: Saturday 24th April, 2010
• www: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/
• cfp: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/cfp/ (deadline: Jan 31st 2010)
• hashtag: #okcon2010

Some AKSW members are involved in next year’s Semantic Web in Use Track of the Extended Semantic Web Conference 2010. Yes, its called “Extended”, instead of formerly “European”, in order to reflect the broadening of the topics of interest. Next year’s In-Use track is particularly devoted to:

• Description of concrete problems in specific application domains, for which Semantic Web technologies can provide a solution.
• Description of an implemented application of Semantic Web technologies in a specific domain.
• Assessment of the pros and cons of using Semantic Web technologies to solve a particular business problem or other practical problems in a specific domain.
• Comparison with alternative or competing approaches using conventional or competing technologies.
• Assessment of the costs and benefits of the application of Semantic Web Technologies, e.g. time spent on implementation and deployment, efforts involved, user acceptance, returns on investment.
• Evidence of deployment of the application, and assessment/evaluation of usage/uptake.
• Domains of interest include, but are not limited to: semantics in the enterprise, improving access to governmental data, semantics-based solutions for health care and life sciences, digital libraries, games with a purpose, semantic geo-data management.

More information can be found at: http://www.eswc2010.org/calls/semantic-web-in-use

We will present our semantic data wiki OntoWiki as well as its role in the emerging data web at a workshop in Darmstadt on 25th November. The aim of the workshop is to give practitioners insight into recent developments in the field of semantic wikis and into their applicability for collaboration scenarios in enterprise settings. More information about the event can be found on the website of eXousia Management (in German), who organize this one-day workshop.

On Friday the winners of this year’s Triplification Challenge were announced at I-Semantics 2009 in Graz. The winners are:

• 1st prize: Anja Jentzsch, Jun Zhao, Oktie Hassanzadeh, Kei-Hoi Cheung, Matthias Samwald, Bo Andersson with Linking Open Drug Data
• 2nd prize: Bernhard Schandl with TripFS: Exposing File Systems as Linked Data
• 3rd prize: Matthias Quasthoff, Sebastian Hellmann, Konrad Höffner with Standardized Multilingual Language Resources for the Web of Data: http://corpora.uni-leipzig.de/rdf

We received a number of very high-quality submissions and decided to award two honorable mentions to:

• Danh Le Phuoc with SensorMasher: publishing and building mashup of sensor data
• Andreas Koller with SKOS Thesaurus Management based on Linked Data with Poolparty