A short while ago the Semantic Web Journal was launched. Pascal Hitzler and Krzysztof Janowicz are editors-in-chief and AKSW’s Sören Auer serves on the editorial board. The journal published by IOS Press differs from other journals, in particular, since it follows an open and transparent peer-review process, which engages a wider community besides expert reviews. Supported by its young and agile editorial board, the SWJ can be expected to bring a lot of fresh wind to an already aging Semantic Web community. Since SWJ just started, it is right now a perfect time to submit an article to SWJ or propose a special issue. Please check out: http://www.semantic-web-journal.net.

We’ve announced LESS today - an end-to-end approach for the syndication and use of linked data based on the definition of visualization templates for linked data resources and SPARQL query results.

Such syndication templates are edited, published and shared by using LESS’ collaborative Web platform. Templates for common types of entities can then be combined with specific, linked data resources or SPARQL query results and integrated into a wide range of applications, such as personal homepages, blogs/wikis, mobile widgets etc.

LESS and further information and documentation can be found at:

http://less.aksw.org

Particular thanks go to Raphael Doering (Netresearch) who performed most of the development work and to Sebastian Dietzold (AKSW) for contributing in various ways.

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

The new year is slowly approaching and people start compiling their top x lists of 2009, with x usually ranging between 10 and 365.

The popular Web technology blog ReadWriteWeb has chosen x with value 10 and picked DBpedia as one of their top Semantic Web products of 2009. Its actually the only non-commercial community project in the list and in good company with products such as Google’s Search Options and Rich Snippets, Apperture and Data.gov. Other picks, which btw. heavily use or link to DBpedia, include OpenCalais, Freebase, BBC Music and Zemanta.

Read the full article at http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_semantic_web_products_of_2009.php

We currently feature a live extraction of DBpedia on one of our servers. The live extraction is aimed at bringing Wikipedia and DBpedia closer together. Errors in DBpedia can soon be corrected directly by editing the corresponding Wikipedia article.
We created a test page on Wikipedia for observing the effects of the live extraction on the endpoint at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DBpedia

Our further plans regarding the live extraction are:

• Changing the current Virtuoso version to 6.0, which will come out soon (counting the days…)
  Note: since Virtuoso has a Wikipedia page with an Infobox, you could tell your personal semantic agent to notify you, as soon as the 6.0 release is out, as it can now be queried with SPARQL on DBpedia-Live. See the Wikipedia page, DBpedia and DBpedia-Live (Addition: Kidehen just contacted us and installed a DBpedia vad on our DBpedia mirror and now the data is accessible via LinkedData also. See http://db0.aksw.org:8890/resource/Virtuoso_Universal_Server. Note the owl:sameAs link to the original DBpedia.)
• Getting all extractors online (some are deactivated right now)
• Gathering feedback from the community, as DBpedia is a vital resource of the Semantic Web.
• Deploy the Live-Extraction on the public DBpedia endpoint.
• Deploy an OntoWiki on our DBpedia-Live mirror.

As we are in the phase of active developments, we are looking forward to receive your feedback and comments on the live extraction and our further ideas (described below).
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