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.

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.

Sören will give a presentation “From DBpedia to OntoWiki - Emergent Data and Semantics from Social Collaboration” at this years LinkedDataPlaned Conference & Expo on June 18, 2008 at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. The presentation will cover AKSW’s current work regarding social semantic collaboration (i.e. DBpedia and OntoWiki) and light-weight technologies aiming to overcome the chicken-and-egg problem of the Semantic Web (such as Triplify). If you are at the East Coast in June consider joining us for the LinkedDataPlanet and meeting other LinkedData protagonists such as Tim Berners-Lee, Kingsley Idehen and Ian Davis. For those on a tight budget SWC is awarding a free conference pass (worth $1095) or email Sören (for a guest pass).

Together with this years I-Semantics conference we are organizing a Linking Open Data Triplification Challenge.

The challenge aims at expediting the process of revealing and exposing structured (relational) representations, which already back most of the existing Web sites, as well as raising awareness in the Web Developer community and showcasing best practices.

The challenge awards attractive prices (MacBook Air, EeePC, iPod) to the most innovative and promising semantifications. The prizes are kindly sponsored by OpenLink Software, Punkt.NetServices and InfAI.

More Information about the challenge can be found at:

http://triplify.org/Challenge

Outreach to the Web developer communities (as intended with the challenge) is really crucial right now to expedite the Semantic Web deployment and we would be very excited if you support this effort - e.g. by spreading the word and/or submitting to the challenge.

When & Where?

Next week (27.02.2008) we arrange the first OntoWiki Plugin Developer Workshop (OPDW-ONE ) at the IfI / University of Leipzig (room 5-10 3-36).

Group of Participants

• OntoWiki Core Team: Christoph Riess, Michael Haschke, Norman Heino, Philipp Frischmuth, Sebastian Dietzold
• Plugin Developer: Ceriel Jacobs (vakantieland.nl), Deniz Dalli (Interactive Systems), Martin Peklo, Maria Moritz, Michael Martin, Leszek Kotas, Thomas Kappel, Rolland Brunec

Program

• 10:00 Welcome (Seebi)
• 10:15 Introduction to proposed plugins:
  SoftWiki (Lesz), DL-Learner GUI (Maria), Flash Visualization (Deniz), vakantieland.nl Backend (Micha), Social Network Integration (Thomas), OntoBuilder 3 (Seebi)
• 11:30 Introduction to the Zend framework (Norm)
• 12:00 Introduction to the plugin and CSS framework (Haschek)
• 13:00 Lunch
• 14:00 Extraction of common plugin requirements and discussion of solutions for them (all)
• 15:00 Team programming of a plugin from the scratch (Phil + all)

Deliverables after the Workshop

• Plugin development cookbook for common plugin problems
• Example plugin which uses most tricks of the plugin development cookbook
• Screencast of the team programming session (maybe)

The workshop language is german. If you are interested in participation or want your own OntoWiki workshop drop a note to me.