Webinar recording on crowdsourced OpenCourseWare authoring with SlideWiki available

On Jan 21, 2014 at 15:00 CET we were hosting a webinar on crowdsourced, multilingual OpenCourseWare authoring with http://SlideWiki.org:

https://plus.google.com/events/c2sc6p89v67g91uhrn7ofeu6j1c

SlideWiki.org is a platform for OpenCourseWare authoring and publishing. Similar as Wikipedia allows the collaborative authoring of encyclopedic texts, GitHub of sourceode or OpenStreetMaps of maps, SlideWiki enables communities to create comprehensive open educational resources. SlideWiki is open-source software and all content in SlideWiki is Open Knowledge. In this hangout we want to introduce SlideWiki’s rich feature set and explain how SlideWiki can be used for educational projects and teaching.

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Preview release of conTEXT for Linked-Data based text analytics

We are happy to announce the preview release of conTEXT — a platform for lightweight text analytics using Linked Data.
conTEXT enables social Web users to semantically analyze text corpora (such as blogs, RSS/Atom feeds, Facebook, G+, Twitter or SlideWiki.org decks) and provides novel ways for browsing and visualizing the results.

conTEXT workflow

The process of text analytics in conTEXT starts by collecting information from the web. conTEXT utilizes standard information access methods and protocols such as RSS/ATOM feeds, SPARQL endpoints and REST APIs as well as customized crawlers for WordPress and Blogger to build a corpus of information relevant for a certain user. The assembled text corpus is then processed by Natural Language Processing (NLP) services (currently FOX and DBpedia-Spotlight) which link unstructured information sources to the Linked Open Data cloud through DBpedia. The processed corpus is then further enriched by de-referencing the  DBpedia URIs as well as  matching with pre-defined natural-language patterns for DBpedia predicates (BOA patterns). The processed data can also be joined with other existing corpora in a text analytics mashup. The creation of analytics mashups requires dealing with the heterogeneity of different corpora as well as the heterogeneity of different NLP services utilized for annotation. conTEXT employs NIF (NLP Interchange Format) to deal with this heterogeneity. The processed, enriched and possibly mixed results are presented to users using different views for exploration and visualization of the data. Additionally, conTEXT provides an annotation refinement user interface based on the RDFa Content Editor (RDFaCE) to enable users to revise the annotated results. User-refined annotations are sent back to the NLP services as feedback for the purpose of learning in the system.

For more information on conTEXT visit:

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AKSW Colloquium (Mon, 16.12.2013) about the SINA question answering system (as presented at IBM Watson)

Last week Saeedeh Shekarpour was invited to present her work at the IBM research center (Watson project, DeepQA) in New York. On Monday, December 16 at 1.30 pm in Room P-702 (Paulinum), Saeedeh Shekarpour will present SINA, a question answering system, which transforms user-supplied queries in natural language into conjunctive SPARQL queries over a set of interlinked data sources.

As always, Bachelor and Master students are able to get points for attendance and there is complimentary coffee and cake after the session.

For further reading, please refer to the slides and the publication Question Answering on Interlinked Data (BibTeX).

The SINA Question Answering System

The architectural choices underlying Linked Data have led to a compendium of data sources which contain both duplicated and fragmented information on a large number of domains. One way to enable non-experts users to access this data compendium is to provide keyword search frameworks that can capitalize on the inherent characteristics of Linked Data. The contribution of this work is as follows:

  1. A novel approach for determining the most suitable resources for a user-supplied query from different datasets (disambiguation). It employs a hidden Markov model, whose parameters were bootstrapped with different distribution functions.
  2. A novel method for constructing a federated formal queries using the disambiguated resources and leveraging the linking structure of the underlying datasets. This approach essentially relies on a combination of domain and range inference as well as a link traversal method for constructing a connected graph which ultimately renders a corresponding SPARQL query.
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AKSW Colloquium with Mohamed Morseys PhD defense practise talk on Monday, December 2

On Monday, December 2 at 1.30 pm in Room P-702 (Paulinum), Mohamed Morsey will give a final rehearsal for his PhD defense “Efficient Extraction and Query Benchmarking of Wikipedia Data”. Guests are encouraged to both provide feedback about improvements to the talk and ask preparatory questions.

As always, Bachelor and Master students are able to get points for attendance and there is complimentary coffee and cake after the session.

Efficient Extraction and Query Benchmarking of Wikipedia Data

The thesis consists of two major parts:

  1. Semantic Data Extraction: the objective of that part is to extract data from semi-structured source, i.e. Wikipedia, and transform it into a networked knowledge base, i.e. DBpedia. Furthermore, maintaining the up-to-dateness of that knowledge base to be always in synchronization with Wikipedia.
  2. Triplestore Performance Evaluation: normally the semantic data is stored on a triplestore, e.g. Virtuoso, in order to enable the efficient querying of that data. In that part we have developed a new benchmark for evaluating and contrasting the performance of various triplestores.
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AKSW Colloquium on Monday, November 18

On Monday, November 18 at 3 – 4 pm (not 1.30 – 2.30 pm!) in Room P-702 (Paulinum), Andreas Nareike and Natanael Arndt will present their current project “Electronic Resource Management in context of Libraries”, current research and give an prospect of there PhD topics. As always, Bachelor and Master students are able to get points for attendance and there is complimentary coffee and cake after the session.

Electronic Resource Management in libraries

Within the results of this project we want to apply semantic web technologies, to manage for instance licenses for electronic journals at the Leipzig University Library. We focus on building a scalable and reusable, intelligent data management platform. The platform should accumulate and homogenize the heterogeneous data in in RDF and any other representation formats from different provenances.

Our current research

When reusing ontologies or vocabularies in an application context there occurs a gap between the domain ontology and the program logic. In parallel with the software product line method from software engineering we introduce the application schema as substantiation of the domain ontology. This application schema defines a subset of terms from the domain vocabularies resp. ontologies and enriches the resulting schema by application specific restrictions. While keeping the terminological knowledge in domain ontologies, this approach encourages application engineers to a greater reuse of existing domain vocabularies in combination with software components. With the aid of the Semantic Web Application Framework OntoWiki we implement a use-case within the context of library information systems as application on the Web of Data. Thereby we utilize the application to describe forms, component interfaces and restricted views for rolls in workflows.

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AKSW@SWIB13

From November 25 to 27 the members of the ERM project (electronic resource management for libraries) attended the SWIB13 (Semantic Web in Libraries) in Hamburg. We, that is Andreas, Natanael, Norman and Thomas, went to Hamburg where the conference was held. We were joined by our colleagues Lydia, Björn and Leander from the University Library. We started Monday morning by visiting the DINI-Workgroup meeting where we could get in touch with Carsten Klee, the maintainer of the holding ontology. In the evening some of us attended an introduction to Linked Data for beginners and some a PhD workshop.

Tuesday was the first day of the main conference. We listened to an inspiring key note by Dorothea Salo which focused mainly on how Linked Data and its technology should be more focused on integrating new people rather than overly emphasize technical aspects. After all, the Semantic Web should be for people not computers since, as she said, „data without people is just noise“. This set the overall tenor for the conference, as it helped to sharpen the point that shined through in many other talks of the conference: While we are skilled in producing Linked Data, we sometimes shift too much into the direction of doing Linked Data just for the sake of doing it, but without actual use-cases or applications that understand Linked Data to generate a benefit for librarians. This idea was also strengthened in Martin Malmstens talk, which started the second day. We should not deliver RDF as an optional view of some data hub but rather should see Linked Data as a first class citizen that we build our applications around.

Another question which recurred during the conference was: How can and should we reuse ontologies as opposed to inventing new ontologies? This is a problem that we are also facing in out work for the ERM project. Kai Eckert talked about the DM2E project (which focuses on digitizing manuscripts for Europeana) and about the underlying applications profile and property extensions (DM2E). We also had a brief discussions with Adrian Pohl, who recently blogged about his idea to express a machine readable applications profile with OAI-ORE (blog post). In the evening we could get some personal insights into library topics during the conference dinner in the Blockbräu pub at the Landungsbrücken.

On the last day we could present our projects in a lightning talk. Leander gave a general outline of the project and it’s goals while Natanael gave a brief introduction to OntoWiki and how we are using it in our project (slideshare).

In private talks we could explain further details about the OntoWiki and might get more people to join the OntoWiki community. We were invited by Stefanie Rühle who is the head of the DINI-KIM working group to give a presentation in April next year. We could also get Professor Magnus Pfeffer interested in OntoWiki who thinks about using it for his teachings. We explained some details about setting up OntoWiki and Virtuoso and he might get back to us for more information.

The conference gave us as computer scientists a good chance to get insights into the topics of interest in libraries information management. We liked being in Hamburg and would like to come back for SWIB2014 in Cologne.

Takket være Internett kan du kjøpe fra oss Viagra uten resept og lønnsom eg vi tilbyr deg de beste medikamentene til en god pris. I vår nettbutikk kan du nå kjøp egetapotekno.com eller pDE5i ble gitt til menn som hadde kardiovaskulære lidelser. En forsendelse av Kamagra med Vardenafil online er gjort til hvilken som helst by i Norge.

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AKSW Colloquium with Semantic Web Challenge 2013 Winner on Monday, November 11

On Monday, November 11 at 1.30 – 2.15 pm in Room P-702 (Paulinum), Muhammad Saleem will present the ISWC Big Data Track Challenge winning paper “Fostering Serendipity through Big Linked Data” and “DAW: Duplicate-AWare Federated Query Processing over the Web of Data”. As always, Bachelor and Master students are able to get points for attendance and there will be complimentary coffee and Berliners after the session.

“Fostering Serendipity through Big Linked Data” and “DAW” by Muhammad Saleem (30 minutes + question time)

Muhammad Saleem completed his bachelor in Computer Software Engineering from N-W.F.P University of Engineering and Technology and Master in Computer Science and Engineering from Hanyang University, South Korea. Currently, he is working as a PhD student at Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web (AKSW) University of  Leipzig, Germany.  His research interests includes federated SPARQL query processing over Linked Data, knowledge extraction and database management.
He will give a brief talk about two papers 1) DAW: Duplicate-AWare Federated Query Processing over the Web of Data 2) Fostering Serendipity through Big Linked Data presented at ISWC2013. DAW is a duplicate-aware approach to SPARQL federated query processing to achieve the same recall while querying fewer number of sources. It can be used in combination with any federated SPARQL query engine to optimize the number of sources it selects, thus reducing the overall network traffic as well as the query execution time of existing engines.  While the second paper aim to foster serendipity using Big Data triplification, its continuous integration, and visualization. As a proof of concept, the integration, visualization of the constant flow of bio-medical publications with the 7.36 billion large Linked Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) dataset is shown in the paper.

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AKSW wins Big Data Challenge

Greetings all!

The best 12th ISWC to ever be was concluded with the traditional award ceremony and … we won! The Big Data Challenge award was attributed to our work on Fostering Serendipity Through Big Linked Data. The idea behind this paper was to show how the integration and visualization of large amounts of data can empower end users during their quest for new knowledge. In this paper, we implemented this idea for bio-medical experts by combining Linked TCGA (the winner of the I-Challenge 2013) with publications from PubMed within the visualization available here. This work is intended to be the first in a series of works on exploiting Big Data to support researchers in their everyday work.

Cheers,
Axel

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AKSW Colloquium on Monday, November 4

On Monday, October 4 at 1.30 – 2.30 pm in Room P-702 (Paulinum), Farshad Badie, PhD intern, will give his introductory talk about “Fuzzy OWL Class Expression”. As always, Bachelor and Master students are able to get points for attendance and there is complimentary coffee and cake after the session.

“Fuzzy OWL Class Expressions” by Farshad Badie


The main approaches are Inductive Logic Programming, Fuzzy DL including Learning Axioms, Reasoning with large A-boxes in Fuzzy DL by DL Reasoners, Fuzzy KR with DL & LP fuzzy DL, Reasoning on Fuzzy UML models. The conclusions of the research will be used for constructing an efficient framework for Intelligent Learning based on the Semantic Web.

Education

  • Honoured MSC degree in Software IT and Computer Science (Specialization : Information Systems).
  • Essential courses of MSC in Applied Mathematics.
  • BSC in Applied Mathematics.
  • Work Experience
  • Teaching Assistant in “Mathematical Logic”, Dep of Computer Science, University of Debrecen, Hungary.
  • Management of Information Systems and Decision Making, Trans Iranian Distribution Company, Iran.
  • Teaching Fundamentals of Mathematics, Set Theory, Calculus, Linear Algebra, Discrete Mathematics in High Schools and Colleges, Iran.
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OntoWiki Feature of the Week: Asynchronous Jobs with Gearmand

To be ready for use-cases where time-consuming jobs need to be done in the background, the eccenca dev team added support for the gearmand job server:

Gearman provides a generic application framework to farm out work to other machines or processes that are better suited to do the work.

More specifically, we had esp. the site extension (e.g. asynchronous content publishing) , pingback (web pings can be time consuming), publish/subscribe (same here) data testing (e.g. our own Databugger) and other use-cases in mind.

The asynchronous jobs feature is now merged to the develop branch and will be published with the next regular release (both Erfurt and OntoWiki). To use it now, Christian from eccenca created a nice documentation document for extension developers.

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