Can we create better links by playing games?

Most of you will agree that links are an important element of the Web of Data. There exist a number of tools, such as LIMES or SILK, which are able to create a high number of such links by using heuristics. The manual validation of verification of such links can be very time-consuming, so we try to find out whether game based approaches can be used to make that task much more interesting. We developed the VeriLinks game prototype and ask for your help to judge how well the the validation works by playing the game and answering a few questions in a survey:

Game: http://verilinks.aksw.org
Project Page: http://aksw.org/projects/VeriLinks
Survey: http://surveys.aksw.org/survey/verilinks

The survey itself takes only 5 minutes to complete. In addition to having the chance to play a game at work , there are also great prizes to win. 10 randomly selected participants will receive Amazon vouchers:

1st prize: 200 Euro
2nd prize: 100 Euro
3rd prize: 50 Euro
4th – 10th prize: 25 Euro

If you want to win a prize, please participate in the survey until this Friday, June 22, 23:59 CET.

Kind regards,

Quan Nguyen and Jens Lehmann

Posted in LATC, LOD2, Software Releases | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Sorry, I don’t speak SPARQL – A Survey

Many Semantic Web applications are currently based on SPARQL. In particular, an increasing number of systems, such as question answering systems, keyword search or search by example internally construct SPARQL queries. However, lay users do not understand this language, so it is difficult to give the user feedback on what queries the system constructed. To address the gap between SPARQL and natural language, the AKSW and CITEC groups have devised an approach for transforming SPARQL queries to natural language.

You (yes, you!) can help us by judging the quality of the translations we present in this survey:

http://sparql2nl.aksw.org/eval

The survey can be done by both – SPARQL experts and lay users. For lay users, it takes 5 minutes to complete and 15 minutes for experts. In addition to the interesting (sometimes challenging) questions, there are also great prizes to win. 10 randomly selected participants will receive Amazon vouchers:

1st prize: 200 Euro
2nd prize: 100 Euro
3rd prize: 50 Euro
4th – 10th prize: 25 Euro

If you want to win a prize, you need to fill in your name at the end of the survey.

Enjoy the survey,

The SPARQL2NL Team

Posted in Announcements, SPARQL2NL | 7 Comments

LOD2 Webinar Series: LIMES – Discovery of Links across Knowledge Bases

The 1st version of the LOD2 Stack has been published in September 2011 in the form of an LOD2 Stack demo and the downloadable LOD2 Stack virtual machine image – additional details and the instructions on installing the LOD2 Stack from scratch are available in the How-To-Start document.

Born from the wish to make linking tractable, the Link Discovery Framework for Metric Spaces (LIMES) is tailored towards the time-efficient and lossless discovery of links across knowledge bases. LIMES is an extensible declarative framework that encapsulates manifold algorithms dedicated to the processing of structured data of any sort. Built with extensibility and easy integration in mind, LIMES allows implementing applications that integrate, consume and/or generate Linked Data. Within LOD2, it will be used for discovering links between knowledge bases.

This webinar will be presented by the LOD2 Partner: University of Leipzig (ULEI), Germany.

The LOD2 webinar series is powered by the LOD2 project organised and produced by the Semantic Web Company (Austria). 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 LOD2 webinar series! The LOD2 team is looking forward to meeting you at the webinar!!


When :
27.03. 2012, 04.00pm – 05.00pm CET
Information & Registration:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/369667514

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

Posted in Announcements, LIMES, LOD2 | 2 Comments

LOD2 Plenary Meeting: WebID and Authorization SIG

Today morning, we started the main LOD2 plenary meeting in Vienna. The first half day session, the WebID special interest group discussed about WebID based single sign for the LOD2 stack and authorization. The challenge here is to provide a interoperable authorization layer which describe user, groups / roles and access to different parts of the stack as well as the managed knowledge bases. We agreed on the following short and long-time goals and activities.

WebID registration service

In order to allow users to try out WebID technology, we need to provide an open service for the registration of new WebIDs. Of course we want to work together with the WebID community group here and some member of the LOD2 consortium are already active in this group. Our goal here is to add a new stack package to our repository which allows for registration and management of minimal working WebID profiles including certificate creation. We will run a public service based on this component but users of the stack can decide to host their own service too. Since there are existing tools here we will try integrate rather than to develop.

Stack internal authorization policy

Since one of our integration goals is to provide provenance support for all activities done by users with the different tools from the stack, we need a policy on how to describe and share descriptions on users and user groups with roles access rights on the stack. Something similar is used already by OntoWiki so we decided to take this as a base and look for more requirements from the rest of the stack.

Posted in LOD2, OntoWiki | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

I-Semantics deadlines approaching (research/application papers and Linked Data Cup)

Several deadlines regarding the I-Semantics 2012 are approaching and we would like to give a gentle reminder to all who are thinking about a submission that now would be a good time to start writing 😉

The deadline for research and application papers (8 pages for full papers) is April 13th, 2012. Note that the abstract deadline on April 2nd, 2012 is strict. The full call for papers can be downloaded here.

We would also like to draw you attention to the 5th Linked Data Cup (formerly the triplification challenge). Submission deadline is April 13th, 2012 and the 4 page papers will be included in the ACM proceedings.
Please have a look at the evaluation criteria for the Linked Data Cup. We are hoping that you will find them truly challenging.

Posted in Announcements, Events, LOD2 | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

More than 20 European Union Datasets Converted to RDF by LATC Project

Over the past two years, the LATC project (Linked Open Data Around-The-Clock) has worked on converting more than 20 EU datasets to RDF, make them available as Linked Data and SPARQL, and link them to other datasets. The datasets have gone through internal quality assurance against a publication checklist. LATC supports the EU Open Data Portal initiative and aims to bootstrap the creation of an EU dataset cloud by this effort. The datasets include several business, legal and statistical datasets such as CORDIS, the European Commission Financial Transparency System, EUR-Lex, EuroStat and many more. A full list of all converted datasets, SPARQL endpoints and documentation can be found at:

http://latc-project.eu/datasets/

Please spread the word. We appreciate your feedback!

The LATC Team

In den genannten LĂ€ndern darf ein Arzt eine Online-Konsultation vornehmen und auch ein Rezept ausstellen, da eine temporĂ€re PotenzschwĂ€che unzĂ€hlige Ursachen haben kann. Besonders empfindlich und leicht zu verletzen ist, dass ich auffalle, der Geschlechtsverkehr dauerte etwa 4 Stunden WĂ€hrend dieser Zeit gab es keine AusfĂ€lle, mit welchem ihre SexualitĂ€t auf die nĂ€chste Stufe gehoben wird. Seit dem Mittelalter haben Ärzte und Apotheker versucht, potenzmittelgermany.com/viagra-generika-ohne-rezept-bestellen-kaufen/ ist als Arzneimittel in Deutschland zur Behandlung von Erektionsstörungen.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

RDFaCE-Lite: a WordPress plugin for WYSIWYM content authoring

We are happy to announce the beta release of RDFaCE-Lite. RDFaCE-Lite is simplified version of RDFaCE (RDFa Content Editor) and is published as a WordPress plugin. RDFaCE-Lite extends the TinyMCE rich text editor to facilitate the authoring of semantic documents. The main features of RDFaCE-Lite are:

  • Support of RDFa as well as Microdata (based on Schema.org) formats.
  • Support of IPTC rNews 1.0 standard  for  annotating HTML documents with news-specific metadata.
  • Support of automatic content annotation using external NLP APIs (Alchemy, Extractiv, Open Calais, Ontos, Evri, Saplo, Lupedia and DBpedia spotlight.). This feature provides an initial set of annotations for users that can be modified and extended later on.
  • Combination of the results of multiple NLP APIs based on user preferences. This features improves the quality of automatic annotations.
  • Support of WYSIWYM view for content authoring.
  • One click editing of annotated entities.

A demo version of RDFaCE-Lite is available at http://rdface.aksw.org/lite/. To watch a brief screencast of RDFaCE-Lite features, visit here. For more information visit the RDFaCE Project Page.

Posted in Announcements, RDFaCE, Software Releases | Leave a comment

LOD2 Webinar Series: SILK – Link Discovery Framework

This webinar in the course of the LOD2 webinar series will present use cases and live demos of the Free University of Berlin’ SILK.

The 1st version of the LOD2 Stack has been published in September 2011 in the form of a LOD2 Stack demo and the downloadable LOD2 Stack virtual machine image – additional details and the instructions on installing the LOD2 Stack from scratch are available in the HOW-TO-START document.

SILK is a tool for discovering relationships between data items within different Linked Data sources. The declarative Silk Link Specification Language (Silk-LSL) allows the user to specify identity resolution heuristics which define the conditions data items must fulfil in order to be interlinked. The LOD2 stack employs Silk to identify URIs which represent the same real-world entity.”

This webinar will be presented by the LOD2 Partner: Free University of Berlin, Germany.

The LOD2 webinar series is powered by the LOD2 project organised and produced by the Semantic Web Company (Austria). 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 LOD2 webinar series! The LOD2 team is looking forward to meeting you at the webinar!!

Date: 21.02. 2012, 04.00pm – 05.00pm CET
Information & Registration: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/177747714

What’s 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.
The next date of the LOD2 webinar series is already fixed as follows:

  • March 2012LIMES + SAIM (University of Leipzig)

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

Posted in Announcements | 10 Comments

2 PhD and 1 PostDoc Position at Business School of Bern University of Applied Sciences

For collaborative international research projects in the area of intelligent information management, the Business School of Bern University of Applied Sciences (BUAS) in cooperation with research group Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web (AKSW) at UniversitÀt Leipzig opens positions for:

2 PhD and 1 PostDoc Position in Knowledge Engineering / Semantic Web

The positions are primarily based at BUAS (Switzerland) and funded by European FP7 projects and possibly Swiss national research grants. A close collaboration and ca. 4 research visits per year at AKSW research group at UniversitÀt Leipzig (Germany) are envisaged for the PhD students to complete their PhD program.

We offer
The stimulating environment of two research institutes in the fields of Business Informatics, Semantic Web, Ontology Engineering, Linked Data Web, Knowledge Management, Data integration and Service-Oriented Architectures;

  • Long-term collaboration with well-known academic institutions and major companies around the world;
  • A multicultural working place with state-of-the-art infrastructure, a competitive salary and resources including funding for attending international conferences, PhD symposia, summer schools, etc.;
  • competitively funded PhD positions close to the rate of the Swiss National Science Foundation (currently ca. CHF 41’000);
  • competitively paid Postdoc positions commensurate with the pay scale of BUAS (starting at CHF 80’000 depending on experience).

We expect

  • A strong background in Computer Science or related disciplines;
  • Excellent software engineering skills with demonstrated proficiency in modern software development;
  • The willingness to work in an international environment and combine formal scientific work with application-oriented research in order to solve real-world problems;
  • Research interest and expertise in at least one of the following: knowledge representation and ontology languages, natural language processing, data management and integration, Semantic Web standards, business aspects of semantic systems;
  • Prospective PhD students should fulfill the doctorate entrance requirements of UniversitĂ€t Leipzig (i.e. masters degree or equivalent)
  • Proficiency in English and the willingness to learn one of the official Swiss languages (e.g. German, French, Italian).

To apply
Applicants should include a cover letter, curriculum vitae incl. list of publications, a research statement and the names and addresses of two referees, via email (PDF only) to ksm1@bfh.ch (Dr. Michael Kaschewsky, Head of Research Group, Bern University of Applied Sciences, Business School). Positions are open until filled, but candidates are advised to apply by 1 March 2012. In addition, qualified Postdoctoral researchers have the opportunity to get funding for their position and additionally for a doctoral position that they supervise independently but must apply by 15 February 2012 – if you are interested please contact us asap.

About us
Bern University of Applied Sciences (BUAS) is the regional leader in applied science and research with seven departments across three cities. Research at the Business School in Bern is nationally leading and internationally renowned in the field of e-government and applied informatics in the public sector.
AKSW research group at the UniversitÀt Leipzig is establishing theoretical results and scalable implementations for the Semantic Data Web (e.g. DBpedia, OntoWiki, DL-Learner). Particular emphasis is given to areas such as ontology creation and manipulation, knowledge extraction, ontology learning and information & data integration on the Semantic Data Web.
Additional information regarding our research and projects as well as further information concerning these positions is available at http://bfh.ch and http://aksw.org.

Posted in Announcements | 7 Comments

AKSW tools prominently featured in TÜBİTAK

Börtecin Ege wrote an article on the Semantic Web in the December issue of TÜBİTAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) prominently featuring DBpedia, Relfinder, LIMES, SPARQL Benchmark and other AKSW related research projects. See Semantik Web TĂŒbitak Bilim Teknik 12 2011.

Posted in dbpedia, LIMES | Leave a comment