The Catalogus Professorum is a project by historians and AKSW research group from Universität Leipzig to enlighten the academic history in Germany by representing information about professors, their professional, familiar and societal context in a comprehensive, semantically structured knowledge base. It currently features more than 1500 detailed biographies of academics with some ties to Universität Leipzig, but due to the mobility of the academic community it gives also insights on the academic life in Germany and central Europe in general. The knowledge base allows historians to pursue various research questions by employing the Catalogus Professorum knowledge base. Of particular interest are currently the relationship between religious movements, political systems, family ties and academia. However, since the information is represented semantically independent of a particular usage scenario it can be easily used to facilitate the investigation of novel research questions. We believe, that the Catalogus Professorum can contribute to triggering a paradigm shift in historian research towards more collaborative work and easier reuse of previous results.

Catalogus Professorum is based on OntoWiki, the Semantic Data Wiki developed by AKSW research group. In addition, to a simplified Web interface for accessing the knowledge base by the general public, OntoWiki offers access to domain experts and knowledge engineers to the knowledge base in a comprehensive semantic collaboration platform.

Currently, the historical online database about professors of the University of Leipzig – Catalogus Professorum Lipsienses – has been featured in the media. First it was discussed in a feature by Leipzig’s university radio station Mephisto 97,6 and also the leading local daily newspaper Leipziger Volkszeitung wrote about the catalog last week.

The AKSW research group is represented in the main ISWC conference programme this year with four papers. International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) is the major international forum where the latest research results and technical innovations on all aspects of the Semantic Web are presented. Acceptance rates for the main conference programme were this year 20% for the research track and 26% for the In-Use track. AKSW’s presentations at ISWC in Shanghai include:

• Christoph Rieß, Norman Heino, Sebastian Tramp, Sören Auer: EvoPat – Pattern-Based Evolution and Refactoring of RDF Knowledge Bases.
• Jens Lehmann and Lorenz Bühmann: ORE – A Tool for Repairing and Enriching Knowledge Bases.
• Sören Auer, Matthias Weidl, Jens Lehmann, Amrapali J. Zaveri, Key-Sun Choi: I18n of Semantic Web Applications.
• Thomas Riechert, Ulf Morgenstern, Sören Auer, Sebastian Tramp, Michael Martin: Knowledge Engineering for Historians on the Example of the Catalogus Professorum Lipsiensis.

The paper titled Knowledge Engineering for Historians on the Example of the Catalogus Professorum Lipsiensis was awarded the best In-Use track paper award.

The AKSW research group is pleased to announce that OntoWiki 0.9.5 is now available for download.

OntoWiki is a web-application enabling the collaborative creation and (linked data) publication of RDF knowledge bases.

More information about OntoWiki can be found at http://ontowiki.net. You can download OntoWiki in our google code file section.

Enhancements in this release include:

• Support for Semantic Pingback, a protocol which enables OntoWiki to communicate named links from linked data resources or blog systems like WordPress.
• Support for the publication of provenance information via Linked Data.
• A new navigation module which support the configuration and usage of arbitrary navigation hierarchies (e.g. based on classes, SKOS elements, geospatial entities or FOAF groups).
• A bookmarklet for collecting RDFa-based information into a specific OntoWiki knowledge base.
• More editing widgets, e.g. for phone number and mailto: resources.
• A new mapping module for the resource visualisation and filtering based on maps.
• Attribute / Tag clouds based on selected RDF properties.
• A GUI for complex SPARQL filter (contains, larger, smaller, between and bound)
• A JSON/RPC server as an additional interface (e.g. for the command line client)
• A plugin to create nice URIs based on the content of a new resource.

A detailed log of the over 200 enhancements and bug fixes of this release is available at our issue tracker.

Many thanks to the contributors of this OntoWiki release (in alphabetical order): Atanas Alexandrov, Christian Maier, Christoph Riess, Jonas Brekle, Marvin Frommhold, Michael Haschke, Michael Martin, Michael Niederstätter, Natanael Arndt, Norman Heino, Philipp Frischmuth and Tim Ermilov

best regards

Sebastian Tramp

We’ve released the third version of our OntoWiki Command Line Interface (owcli). owcli is a php-based command line tool to administrate and manipulate OntoWiki Knowledge Bases. The release is a complete remake as an JSON/RPC client in order are save for future extensions at the OntoWiki RPC server base. owcli can be downloaded at the google code download page and is featured in detail at this wiki page.

From this summer term onwards the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at Leipzig University provides structured information about academia such aslectures, tutors, rooms and timetables as Linked Open Data. The platform http://od.fmi.uni-leipzig.de, which is based on the OntoWiki framework, provides a vocabulary and an ontology. Apart from the possibility of the direct linking of resources in the semantic web, this platformn offers a SPARQL endpoint. The accessible information provides a basis for the integration into E-Learning platforms or personal knowledge management applications.