This ParticipatoryResearch initiative launched by AKSW aims at developing and promoting the concept of stakeholder-driven research. Goals are to (1) develop a prediction market model for research funding, (2) implement a Web platform for organising this market and the participatory research process, (3) persuade research funding agencies to use this platform for managing a part of their research portfolio.

A first step towards this goal was made with Cofundos.org – a market for open-source software R&D. The Web site of the ParticipatoryResearch initiative is hosted at: http://wiki.Cofundos.org.

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!

I will give a talk about our xOperator project at the European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC2008) on Tenerife next Wednesday. The xOperator is an agent for xmpp / jabber network which queries and shares trusted resources (using RDF/SPARQL) for you and your jabber friends. In addition to the full paper, we got good reviews for the demo session too. So I present the xOperator in a more technical way at the demo session on Tuesday.

Another project which we started here is RDFAPI-JS. I present this work at the Scripting for the Semantic Web Workshop (SFSW2008) which is co-located with the ESWC. RDFAPI-JS is used for RDFa widgets which can be used to modify embedded RDF models.

Thanks to Jörg, Martin and Seppl (and of course Haschek for the awesome poster) which helped me preparing the demo and the presentations. Sorry for this last week …

For more information about the projects, have a look at the following publications:

• xOperator - Interconnecting the Semantic Web and Instant Messaging Networks (Sebastian Dietzold, Jörg Unbehauen and Sören Auer)
• Using JavaScript RDFa Widgets for Model/View Separation inside Read/Write Websites (Sebastian Dietzold, Sebastian Hellman and Martin Peklo)

Danh Le Phouc (a computer science PhD student from DERI Galway) is starting the Google Summer of Code project “Joomla! semantification - expose Joomla data as RDF and Linked Data”. Danh already created a first guess for a Joomla! Triplify configuration (available at http://triplify.org/Configuration/Joomla)). Work of the project will focus on tighter integrating Triplify into Joomla! and showcasing the benefits of of the Joomla! triplification to the user community. The GSoC project is mentored by Sören.

Together with this years I-Semantics conference we are organizing a Linking Open Data Triplification Challenge.

The challenge aims at expediting the process of revealing and exposing structured (relational) representations, which already back most of the existing Web sites, as well as raising awareness in the Web Developer community and showcasing best practices.

The challenge awards attractive prices (MacBook Air, EeePC, iPod) to the most innovative and promising semantifications. The prizes are kindly sponsored by OpenLink Software, Punkt.NetServices and InfAI.

More Information about the challenge can be found at:

http://triplify.org/Challenge

Outreach to the Web developer communities (as intended with the challenge) is really crucial right now to expedite the Semantic Web deployment and we would be very excited if you support this effort - e.g. by spreading the word and/or submitting to the challenge.