AKSW Blog

This webinar in the course of the LOD2 webinar series will present the release 2.0 of the LOD2 stack, which contains updates to the components Ontowiki, Silk

• the assisting sparql editor SPARQLED (DERI),
• the LOD enabled Open Refine (previously Google Refine) (ZEMANTA),
• the extended version of SILK with link suggestion management from LATC (DERI),
• the rdfAuthor library which allows to manage structured information from RDFa-enhanced websites (ULEI),
• the SPARQLPROXY which is a PHP based forward proxy for remote access to SPARQL end points (ULEI)

Release 2.0 contains also a first contributed debian package for a component which is maintained by a group outside the LOD2 consortium. With the help of ULEI a package for the STANBOL engine (http://stanbol.apache.org/) has been contributed.

If you are interested in Linked (Open) Data principles and mechanisms, LOD tools & services and concrete use cases that can be realised using LOD then join us in the free LOD2 webinar series!

When: 12.12. 2012, 04.00pm – 05.00pm CET
Presenter: Tenforce, Belgium
Information & free Registration: https://www4.gotomeeting.com/register/356917503

The LOD2 team is looking forward to meeting you at the webinar!!

About the LOD2 Stack
The LOD2 stack is an integrated distribution of aligned tools which support the life-cycle of Linked Data from extraction, authoring/creation over enrichment, interlinking, fusing to visualization and maintenance. The stack comprises new and substantially extended existing tools from the LOD2 partners and third parties. The LOD2 stack is organized as a Debian package repository making the tool stack easy to install on any Debian-based system (e.g. Ubuntu). The first release of the LOD2 stack contains the following components (available as Debian packages):

• LOD2 demonstrator, the root package (LOD2)
• Virtuoso, RDF storage and data management platform (Openlink)
• OntoWiki, semantic data wiki authoring tool (ULEI)
• Silk, interlinking engine (FUB)
• D2R, RDF wrapper for SQL databases (FUB)
• ORE, ontology repair and enrichment toolkit (ULEI)

As online services were integrated into the LOD2 Stack: PoolParty (taxonomy manager by SWCG) and Spotlight (annotating texts w.r.t. DBpedia by FUB). The LOD2 Stack also makes use of dataset metadata repositories such as thedatahub.org and http://publicdata.eu. A selection of the datasets has been packaged and are available in the LOD2 stack repository.

The LOD2 stack is an open platform for Linked Data components. We are happy to welcome new components. Detailed instructions how to integrate your component into the LOD2 Stack as Debian package are available in the HOW-TO-CONTRIBUTE. For assistance or any questions related to the LOD2-stack contact support-stack@lod2.eu. From now on we will regularly release improved and extended versions of the LOD2 Stack. Major releases are expected for Fall 2012 and 2013.

More information about the LOD2 Stack

Demo: http://demo.lod2.eu/lod2demo
Virtual Machine Image: http://stack.lod2.eu/VirtualMachines/
How To Document: lod2-stack.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/documents/HowToStart.pdf

Whats next – the LOD2 webinar series

The LOD2 webinar series offers several (one per month) free webinars about Linked Open Data tools and services around the LOD2 project, the LOD2 Stack and the Linked Open Data Life Cycle, also in the form of 3rd party tools.

About LOD2 – Creating Knowledge out of Interlinked Data

LOD2 is a large-scale integrating project co-funded by the European Commission within the FP7 Information and Communication Technologies Work Programme (Grant Agreement No. 257943). Commencing in September 2010, this 4-year project comprises leading Linked Open Data technology researchers, companies, and service providers (15 partners) from across 11 European countries (and 1 associated partner from KOREA) and is coordinated by the AKSW research group at the University of Leipzig, Germany.

LOD2 will integrate and syndicate linked data with large-scale, existing applications and showcase the benefits in the three application scenarios of media and publishing, corporate data intranets and eGovernment. The resulting tools, methods and data sets have the potential to change the Web as we know it today.

More information about LOD2

Web: http://lod2.eu
Blog: http://blog.lod2.eu
Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/lod2project
Twitter: @lod2project , #lod2
flickR: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lod2/

The Big Data Public Private Forum (BIG) is a two years project co-funded by the European Commission within FP7 starting in September 2012. BIG aims to provide a platform for industry, research, policy makers and community initiatives to discuss the challenges of Big Data and the emerging Data Economy and to develop suitable action plans for addressing these challenges.

Our society and economy is at the verge of an era where dealing with large amounts of structured data plays an increasingly important role. Such data can be obtained from climate, pollution or traffic sensors in a city, it can comprise customer demand of an online travel agency or crowd-sourced spatial data such as collected by the OpenStreetMaps community. Integrating, analysing and using such data can result in completely new insights, applications as well as products and services. For example, we will be able to re-route traffic, if we detect traffic patterns causing increased air pollution under certain weather conditions. Travel companies can suggest background information on events, historic sights or attractions for certain travel destinations. Governments and public administrations can come closer to citizens and leverage their creative potential by opening up government data.

The Big Data Public Private Forum (BIG) is a two years project co-funded by the European Commission within FP7 starting in September 2012. BIG aims to provide a platform for industry, research, policy makers and community initiatives to discuss the challenges of Big Data and the emerging Data Economy and to develop suitable action plans for addressing these challenges. The BIG consortium has a holistic view on big data comprising also large amounts of small, heterogeneous data.

Work in BIG is organized in sectoral forums and technical working groups. These include:

• Sectoral forums: Health; Public Sector; Finance & Insurance; Telecommunication; Media & Entertainment; Manufacturing; Retail; Energy, Transport

• Technical working groups: Data acquisition, Data analysis, Data curation, Data storage, Data usage

Work in the sectoral forums and technical working groups is performed online (through mailinglists, webinars, telephone conferences) and at workshops, conventions and conferences. The main event co-organized by BIG is the European Data Forum series (online at http://data-forum.eu), with its next installation taking place 19-20 April 2013 in Dublin, Ireland.

The BIG project comprises 11 companies, research institutions and community initiatives from 6 European countries including ATOS, Press Association, Siemens, AGT Group, Uni Innsbruck, National University of Ireland in Galway, University of Leipzig, DFKI, Exalead, Open Knowledge Foundation and STI International. However, the project aims to liaise and involve stakeholders, enterprises and community initiatives in its sectoral forums and working groups.

Partner quotes

• Sören Auer (University of Leipzig): “The ubiquitous availability of the internet as a medium for data collection, aggregation and distribution enables completely novel data-driven applications and usage scenarios.”

• Jarred McGinnis (Press Association): “It is a key milestone when traditional, non-technological industries such as the press start to recognise the opportunities and challenges of ‘Big Data’.”

• Michael Hausenblas (DERI, NUI Galway): “Benefiting from Big Data means understanding the patterns that are deeply buried within it. With the BIG project, we now have a trailblazing activity to seed and eventually grow the understanding of the opportunities and challenges concerning Big Data in Europe and beyond.”

• Ricard Munné (Atos): “It is an opportunity for the public sector to discover how to exploit the full potential of the information accumulated to improve public services and it’s internal efficiency and effectiveness”.

• Pablo Mendes (OKF): “The impact of Open Data grows as an ever increasing amount, depth and diversity of information is made available on the Web, but its highest value can only be attained with adequate methods to store, analyze and effectively interpret those data.”

• Amar Djalil Mezaour (EXALEAD): “Big Data has been of concern to organizations working in specific fields for some time now. These include physical sciences (meteorology, physics), life sciences (genomics, biomedical research), government (defense, treasury), finance and banking (transaction processing, trade analytics), communications (call records, network traffic data), and, of course, the Internet (search engine indexation, social networks). Now, however, due to our digital fecundity, Big Data is a shared concern for organizations of all sizes and types.”

• Diana Pottecher (ATOS) This project will allow us helping other companies in taking advantage of unmanageable information in their business.

• Felicia Lobillo (Atos): “BIG will bring this huge potential closer to reality, benefiting Telcos and their customers

More information on BIG can found at: http://big-project.eu/

There are no sign-up fees at the EDF however, registration for planning purposes is recommended.

A call for contribution will be issued in mid-November 2012.For further questions please contact  edf2013@deri.org and more information can be found on the website.