AKSW is pleased to announce the first availability of our Adaptive SPARQL Query Cache, a light-weight SPARQL proxy for caching query results and selectively invalidating stored results upon updates. SPARQL-backed applications can be accelerated by simply routing all SPARQL and SPARUL queries through the proxy. In scenarios with recurring query patterns the caching increases responsiveness and overall performance as we validated with an adapted version of the BSBM benchmark. The caching and invalidation was implemented in Java and in PHP and is available together with additional documentation from:

http://aksw.org/Projects/QueryCache

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

The AKSW team is very delighted to announce a new major release of our semantic data wiki OntoWiki. OntoWiki 0.9 is available from our download page. A screencast showing some new features is also available.

OntoWiki 0.9 Frontend Changes

• RDFa widget editing This feature separates the visualization of the RDF data in the browser
  from the statement editing component by using RDFa annotations inside the view and JavaScript
  editing widgets which are sensible to the type and context of the edited data.
• Extension architecture with support for components, themes, datawrapper, translations and
  generic plugins: Most of OntoWiki’s functionality is implemented as extensions now; thus keeping
  the OntoWiki core very small.
• Authentication support for local sioc:Users, FOAF+SSL WebIDs and OpenIDs.
• Support for LinkedData both as server and consumer (see data gathering backend below).
• Translations in English, German and Chinese

OntoWiki 0.9 Backend Changes (Erfurt)

• Separation of the Semantic Web API Erfurt from the OntoWiki core
• Support for multiple SPARQL RDF stores: Implementations are available for Virtuoso and
  ZendDB (i.e. MySQL); allowing installations with support for millions of triples.
• Pattern-based query cache: In order to improve the performance of Semantic Web applications, we
  developed an approach for caching SPARQL query results and complete application objects, which
  is sensitive to knowledge store updates.
• Data gathering: Support for plugable data gathering backends, e.g. for LinkedData gathering,
  DataWrapper for Twitter and Musicbrainz or Exporter, e.g. for EXIF data

Selected extensions packed with OntoWiki 0.9

• FileManager: Upload / serve files and manage associated metadata.
• Community: Create comments and discuss resources.
• History / versioning: See last changes, browse history and rollback edits.
• Map extension: Visualize resources which have direct and indirect geo-attributes attached.