A short while ago the Semantic Web Journal was launched. Pascal Hitzler and Krzysztof Janowicz are editors-in-chief and AKSW’s Sören Auer serves on the editorial board. The journal published by IOS Press differs from other journals, in particular, since it follows an open and transparent peer-review process, which engages a wider community besides expert reviews. Supported by its young and agile editorial board, the SWJ can be expected to bring a lot of fresh wind to an already aging Semantic Web community. Since SWJ just started, it is right now a perfect time to submit an article to SWJ or propose a special issue. Please check out: http://www.semantic-web-journal.net.

This is an announcement of the technical report as well as three different implementations of Semantic Pingback.

Semantic Pingback tackles the quality, timeliness and coherence as well as direct end user benefits of the emerging Linked Data Web. Semantic Pingback extends the well-known Pingback method, which is a technological cornerstone of the blogosphere.

It is based on the advertising of an RPC service for propagating typed RDF links between Data Web resources. It is downwards compatible with conventional Pingback implementations, thus allowing to connect and interlink resources on the Social Web with resources on the Data Web.

We implemented the Semantic Pingback mechanism in three different scenarios:

• A Semantic Pingback server and client plugin for OntoWiki
• A Semantic Pingback server integrated in Triplify, thus supporting the interlinking with relational data on the Data Web.
• A standalone Semantic Pingback server was implemented in PHP, that can be utilized with arbitrary resources that do not provide a Pingback service themselves.

If you do not want to provide a Pingback service on your own, you can use the AKSW Semantic Pingback Service which notifies you via email.

We just released version 0.8 of the Triplify script, which includes the following feature enhancements and fixes:

• Triplify now supports the Semantic Pingback mechanism: It exposes a X-Pingback HTTP header field, it contains a XML-RPC service (also usable by conventional Pingback clients) and it exports Pingback statements along with the instance data.
• Fix: The cache ID is now generated using the server name, port and request URI.
• Fix: We added a 404 Resource not Found error message.
• Fix: We added a config option to disable the use of mod_rewrite (for cases, where the module is available, but not configured).
• Fix: Removed hard-coded MySQL settings to allow e.g. PostgreSQL servers (#2899948)
• Fix: Duplicate triples in some cases (#2833620)
• Fix: 404 when URI with query was requested (e.g. json output, #2631600)

The new features are documented on triplify.org.

Thanks to everybody contributing bug fixes or comments and code (especially Eric Feliksik).

We’ve announced LESS today - an end-to-end approach for the syndication and use of linked data based on the definition of visualization templates for linked data resources and SPARQL query results.

Such syndication templates are edited, published and shared by using LESS’ collaborative Web platform. Templates for common types of entities can then be combined with specific, linked data resources or SPARQL query results and integrated into a wide range of applications, such as personal homepages, blogs/wikis, mobile widgets etc.

LESS and further information and documentation can be found at:

http://less.aksw.org

Particular thanks go to Raphael Doering (Netresearch) who performed most of the development work and to Sebastian Dietzold (AKSW) for contributing in various ways.

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