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.

The set of tools released by the AKSW research group has a new member: ORE. ORE stands for ontology repair and enrichment. It is a tool for knowledge engineers to improve an OWL ontology through a wizard like repair process. It uses state-of-the-art methods for fixing inconsistencies and suggesting additions to an ontology, while still being efficient for small and medium sized ontologies. A screencast, which demonstrates its functionality, is available. As usual, the tool is available as open source, so you are free to download it. More information is available on the ORE wiki page. While the initial release already offers some quite powerful features, we plan to extend the tool in the mid term future with full support for knowledge bases available as Linked Data or SPARQL endpoints (as opposed to OWL/RDF files) and the detection of many common modelling errors. Thanks to Lorenz Bühmann for implementing ORE in his master thesis.

Today, we released a major update of the DL-Learner plugin for Protege 4, the popular ontology editor. The plugin allows you to get suggestions for axioms you may want to add to your OWL ontology by analysing the instance data using the DL-Learner framework. A screencast is available to show you how it works. The plugin is installable via the standard Protégé plugin mechanism (Protege 4 stable release required). This version allows to fine tune the language features you want to use and displays the length of expressions, which have been searched. It also fixes bugs related to inconsistency handling. More information can be found on the plugin wiki page. Enjoy!

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