Media sharing and social networking websites have attracted many millions of users resulting in vast collections of user generated content. The contents are typically poorly structured and spread over several platforms, each supporting specific media types. With the increasing growth and diversity of these websites, new ways to access and manage the contents are required - both within and across web platforms.

This workshop focuses on the interaction with these multimedia contents. We are particularly interested in contributions that follow Web 2.0 principles of simplicity and/or social navigation in combination with the representation, annotation, and linking power of the Semantic Web.

The Submission Deadline is the 14th September. A complete workshop description including topics of interest and important dates is available at http://aksw.org/Events/2008/IMCSSW.

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)

Sören will give a presentation “From DBpedia to OntoWiki - Emergent Data and Semantics from Social Collaboration” at this years LinkedDataPlaned Conference & Expo on June 18, 2008 at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. The presentation will cover AKSW’s current work regarding social semantic collaboration (i.e. DBpedia and OntoWiki) and light-weight technologies aiming to overcome the chicken-and-egg problem of the Semantic Web (such as Triplify). If you are at the East Coast in June consider joining us for the LinkedDataPlanet and meeting other LinkedData protagonists such as Tim Berners-Lee, Kingsley Idehen and Ian Davis. For those on a tight budget SWC is awarding a free conference pass (worth $1095) or email Sören (for a guest pass).

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.