The AKSW research group is pleased to announce that OntoWiki 0.8.5 is now available for download. Changes in this release include

• A plug-in and event architecture
• A file / document manager
• Rest webservices for login / query / export databases
• WebDAV support for browsing and exporting resources
• A new JSON exporter that uses the RDF JSON specification draft from talis
• New Plugins: Semantic Sitemap and Container Manager

as well as a bunch of bug fixes.

The project development site moved from SourceForge to GoogleCode. We have also created two new mailing lists as google groups for user support and development issues. The issue tracker moved a few weeks ago in order to prepare the release (see Goodbye SourceForge …).

Many thanks to the main contributors of this OntoWiki release: Norman Heino, Philipp Frischmuth, Christoph Rieß and Julian Jöris as well as Michael Haschke and Maria Moritz!

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.

Yesterday, Steffen Lohmann from the Interactive Systems Working Group at the University of Duisburg-Essen has surprised me with very nice eyetracking images from an OntoWiki 0.7.1 session last year which was arranged in the scope of the SoftWiki project.

We will meet in Duisburg this march and repeat the experiment with the OntoWiki theme which was introduced in 0.8. The results can lead to more GUI enhancements in the OntoWiki default theme and of course I’m looking forward to play around with this very cool technology!

Today, Sören presents OntoWiki at the Open Source Meets Business conference (22. – 24. Januar 2008 in Nürnberg). In preparation for this talk, I’ve prepared a new screencast, which showcases an OntoWiki demo session, which is interrupted by some explanatory bubbles …

Fresh from the subversion repository, our new semantic agent project xOperator is now able to play with my local OntoWiki knowledge bases. The initial development to this tool will be done by Jörg Unbehauen as part of his master thesis.

xOperator tries to create a decentralized network of trust. Information is shared in the form of resources, which can be anything (even the information that you are selling your old washing machine). In a later stage it enables you to find friends of friends like centralized services, can already. At the end of the road, xOperator might even be able to find the best product for you without the normally necessary tedious internet research. Companies will be able to offer semantic annotated information about their products, giving the customer a new way of yet unknown price transparency.

Although xOperator is able to use any SPARQL endpoint out there, our main use case is to marry it with OntoWiki. Users should be able to use the agent just as an additional view to the knowledge bases of their OntoWiki installation.

To do this, it will be possible not only to ask the agent with special query languages like SPARQL but also to ask him with natural language. To achieve this, xOperator will map templates based on the Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) to SPARQL queries and transform the XML result set to the instant message which will be send back to the user.

Implementation Status

The agent is able to log into existing accounts and can receive querying and configuration commands. The template based query generation is still a bit quirky. Queries can only be executed against locally configured data stores, the p2p part is not yet implemented.

If you’re interested in the project, please write to the public mailing list xoperator-public in our SourceForge area. The official homepage is http://aksw.org/Projects/xOperator