During a workshop on June 27th at the Historical College in Munich, the AKSW group and the group of the New German Biography at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities presented their results of the LOD2-supported PUBLINK project. Within this project meta-data about 46,000 biographies, 42,000 people and 12,000 locations were made available as Linked Data and RDF. We used the GND vocabulary of the German National Library and enriched it with a few additional classes and relations. In addition to the representation in RDF,  we offer an OntoWiki instance for browsing and querying the dataset. With the help of the RelationshipFinder tool relations between two or more persons may be visualized by using this SPARQL endpoint.

The 22 workshop participants from AKSW, BAdW, BSB, BMLO, Deutsches Museum, FAU Erlangen, GNM, ISGV and LMU started a discussion particularly on the question of how to increase the interlinking of historical information on the Semantic Web. The most crucial aspects in this respect were related to the representations of historical locations and to a more generalized vocabulary for historical information.

More information is available at the following websites:

Linked data endpoint / project page: http://data.deutsche-biographie.de

German Biography:  http://www.deutsche-biographie.de

SPARQL endpoint and OntoWiki instance: http://ndb.publink.lod2.eu

LOD2 project page: http://lod2.eu

On June 8, I (Jens) visited the process control engineering research group (PLT) of Leon Urbas at the Dresden University of Technology. We first met on the Leipziger Semantic Web Day where Leon Urbas presented interactive Linked Data applications and decided to have a longer meeting later on. I first gave a talk on the Linked Data Lifecycle (slides as PDF), which is a central element of the vision behind the LOD2 project – a cycle of mutual refinement which can help to overcome some of the problems in using Linked Data. It extends on an earlier vision description by Sören and me.

After the initial presentation, we exchanged ideas for collaboration between our groups. The PLT group has a very strong record in large scale practical applications, mobile devices and usability testing. Since their background is automation engineering, they view semantic technologies as a way to connect large networks of knowledge in a flexible manner. They were particularly interested in some of our research and software tools like LIMES, SAIM and OntoWiki. I enjoyed staying at the group and I am looking forward to further meetings.

Like in the past two years, we again organize a Leipzig Semantic Web Day on May 5th at the marvelous Mediencampus Villa Ida. This year’s theme is “Linked Data  for the Masses”, particularly focusing on its use in enterprises. This event will not only give you the opportunity to discuss current developments around semantic web technologies, but also to get in touch with companies from the German-speaking world. LSWT2011 will have two distinguished keynote speakers: Martin Hepp will share his vision and recent developments around the GoodRelations ecommerce vocabulary with us. The second keynoter Andreas Blumauer from the Semantic Web Company in Vienna will show us how Linked Data can facilitate clean energy.

On the pre-conference day May 4th we will have two tutorials  – an introduction to the Semantic Data Web and another one on the GoodRelations ecommerce vocabulary. Also, on May 4th SoLoMo the Local Media Conference takes place at the Mediencampus, discussing developments around Groupon, Foursquare, Qype, MyHeimat and other local-oriented media.

You can find more information about LSWT at: http://aksw.org/LSWT.

We thank the following LSWT sponsors for their support:

Members of AKSW are actively participating in some key (Semantic) Web conferences this spring.

AKSW was already involved in the organization of 8th Extended Semantic Web Conference 2011 with Jens being one of the PC Chairs of the Linked Data track and a number of other AKSW researchers serving as members of the PC of various tracks, workshops and side events. Now also three AKSW submissions were accepted for the main conference programm (having a 23% acceptance rate) at ESWC:

• AutoSPARQL: Let Users Query Your Knowledge Base by Jens Lehmann and Lorenz Bühmann
• OntoWiki Mobile – Knowledge Management in your Pocket by Timofey Ermilov, Norman Heino, Sebastian Tramp, Sören Auer
• Weaving a Distributed, Semantic Social Network for Mobile Users by Sebastian Tramp, Philipp Frischmuth, Natanael Arndt, and Sören Auer

For 11th International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2011), Sören serves as chair of the programme committee and Axel is one of the Demo & Poster Chairs.

Sören is also giving a key-note on “Creating Knowledge Out of Interlinked Data” at the International Conference on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics (WIMS’11). WIMS takes place from May 25th-27th in Sogndal, Norway.

The AKSW research group is pleased to announce the first prototype of OntoWiki Mobile, which allows users to collect instance data and refine structured knowledge bases on-the-go. The development of OntoWiki Mobile was triggered by users aiming to gather data in field conditions (e.g. bio-diversity surveys). It allows accessing OntoWiki on a mobile device, even without persistent data connection and limited electric power supply.

OntoWiki Mobile is a mobile semantic collaboration platform based on the OntoWiki framework. It is implemented as an HTML5 web application and completely mobile device platform independent. The mobile UI was built using HTML5 and jQuery Mobile specially for mobile devices. It allows simple navigation through interlinked resources in OntoWiki knowledge bases.
OntoWiki Mobile allows offline access to selected knowledge bases with the ability to author data offline and synchronize it later once the data connection becomes available again.
An faceted browsing mode optimized for the mobile use enables OntoWiki Mobile users to quickly retrieve information on the go. Resource editing in OntoWiki Mobile is done using RDFauthor. The system makes use of RDFa-annotations in web views in order to make the RDF model data available on the client.

More details can be found at the project page.

Latest revision is always available as a demo.