ESWC 2010 Semantic Web in Use Track

Posted on November 5, 2009 by Sören Auer

Some AKSW members are involved in next year’s Semantic Web in Use Track of the Extended Semantic Web Conference 2010. Yes, its called “Extended”, instead of formerly “European”, in order to reflect the broadening of the topics of interest. Next year’s In-Use track is particularly devoted to:

  • Description of concrete problems in specific application domains, for which Semantic Web technologies can provide a solution.
  • Description of an implemented application of Semantic Web technologies in a specific domain.
  • Assessment of the pros and cons of using Semantic Web technologies to solve a particular business problem or other practical problems in a specific domain.
  • Comparison with alternative or competing approaches using conventional or competing technologies.
  • Assessment of the costs and benefits of the application of Semantic Web Technologies, e.g. time spent on implementation and deployment, efforts involved, user acceptance, returns on investment.
  • Evidence of deployment of the application, and assessment/evaluation of usage/uptake.
  • Domains of interest include, but are not limited to: semantics in the enterprise, improving access to governmental data, semantics-based solutions for health care and life sciences, digital libraries, games with a purpose, semantic geo-data management.

More information can be found at: http://www.eswc2010.org/calls/semantic-web-in-use

Posted in Announcements, DL-Learner, Erfurt, Events, Linked Geo Data, OntoWiki, SoftWiki, Triplify | Leave a comment

Triplify 0.7 Released

Posted on October 30, 2009 by Sebastian Tramp

We just released version 0.7 of the Triplify script, which includes the following feature enhancements and fixes:

  • Triplify can now be used as a tool for Extract-Tranform-Load (ETL) cycles by calling it from the command line.
  • The default behavior for mapping URIs to SQL queries can now be easily extended by using regular expressions to match request URL’s.
  • The default provenance namespaces was fixed
  • A error with two or more tables in a query (#2875711) was fixed

The new features are documented on triplify.org.

Thanks to everybody contributing bug fixes or comments and code (especially Sören Auer and Soren Roug)

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Triplify 0.6 Released

Posted on October 1, 2009 by Sebastian Tramp

We just released version 0.6 of the Triplify script, which includes the following changes:

  • Support for the Provenance Vocabulary (added by Olaf Hartig): The Provenance Vocabulary enables providers of Web data to publish provenance-related metadata about their data. For a more detailed description of this extension, have a look at this wiki page.
  • small fix and docu for better postgresql support
  • small fix for better character encoding

Thanks to everybody contributing bug fixes or comments and codes (especially Olaf Hartig and Thomas Schandl).

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Semantic Data Wiki Talk on 25th November in Darmstadt

Posted on September 24, 2009 by Sören Auer

We will present our semantic data wiki OntoWiki as well as its role in the emerging data web at a workshop in Darmstadt on 25th November. The aim of the workshop is to give practitioners insight into recent developments in the field of semantic wikis and into their applicability for collaboration scenarios in enterprise settings. More information about the event can be found on the website of eXousia Management (in German), who organize this one-day workshop.

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SoftWiki Final Seminar

Posted on September 7, 2009 by Sebastian Tramp

Tomorrow the final seminar of the BMBF-sponsored project SoftWiki – Distributed, End-user Centered Requirements Engineering for Evolutionary Software Development will take place within the framework of the Mensch und Computer 2009.


Workshop: Nutzerinteraktion im Social Semantic Web
September 8, 2009: 11:00 am – 4:30 pm
Main Building at the Humboldt University of Berlin
Unter den Linden 6
Berlin

Apart from many publications on details about Requirements Engineering und Semantic Web technologies, the most important results of the SoftWiki project are

  • a prototype on the basis of OntoWiki as well as several supporting tools,
  • and an OWL-Ontology for the description of requirements.

The results of the project are comprehensively outlined in the book

Agiles Requirements Engineering
für Softwareprojekte mit einer großen Anzahl verteilter Stakeholder
Sören Auer, Kim Lauenroth, Steffen Lohmann, Thomas Riechert (Hrsg.)
Leipziger Beiträge zur Informatik | Band XVIII
ISBN: 978-3-941608-05-4

which will be issued at the final seminar in Berlin.

The SoftWiki-Competence-Network continues with this work, aiming to provide the technologies for future applications. It is notable for its interesting group of members. Together with the Universities of Duisburg-Essen and Leipzig we comprise an extraordinary scientific know-how. RE-tool developers (QA-System, ProDV) und users mainly in the field of Web-Engineering and E-Government (T-Systems MMS, Lecos GmbH) participate as partners for further development in the future und will facilitate the business deployment.

Im Rahmen der Mensch und Computer 2009 findet morgen die Abschlussveranstaltung des BMBF-geförderten Projektes SoftWiki – Distributed, End-user Centered Requirements Engineering for Evolutionary Software Development statt.
Workshop: Nutzerinteraktion im Social Semantic Web
08.09.2009: 11:00 Uhr – 16:30 Uhr
Hauptgebäude der Humboldt Universität zu Berlin
Unter den Linden 6
Berlin

Die wichtigsten Ergebnisse des SoftWiki – Projektes sind, neben vielen Publikationen über Details des Requirements Engineerings und Semantic Web Technologien,

  • ein Prototyp auf Basis von OntoWiki, sowie mehreren unterstützender Werkzeuge,
  • und eine OWL-Ontologie für die Beschreibung von Anforderungen.

Die Ergebnisse des Projektes werden ausführlich im Buch

Agiles Requirements Engineering
für Softwareprojekte mit einer großen Anzahl verteilter Stakeholder
Sören Auer, Kim Lauenroth, Steffen Lohmann, Thomas Riechert (Hrsg.)
Leipziger Beiträge zur Informatik | Band XVIII
ISBN: 978-3-941608-05-4

vorgestellt, welches zur Abschlussveranstaltung in Berlin veröffentlicht wird.

Das SoftWiki-Kompetenznetzwerk führt diese Arbeiten mit dem Ziel fort, die Technologien für zukünftige Anwender zur Verfügung zu stellen. Es zeichnet sich durch eine interessante Kombination seiner Mitglieder aus. Mit den Universitäten Duisburg-Essen und Leipzig verfügen wir ausgezeichnetes wissenschaftliches Know-how. RE-Werkzeughersteller (QA-System, ProDV) und Anwender vor allem im Bereich Web-Engineering und E-Government (T-Systems MMS, Lecos GmbH) stehen als Entwicklungspartner für zukünftige Weiterentwicklung und den industriellen Einsatz zur Verfügung.

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Triplification Challenge 2009 Winners

Posted on September 7, 2009 by Sören Auer

On Friday the winners of this year’s Triplification Challenge were announced at I-Semantics 2009 in Graz. The winners are:

We received a number of very high-quality submissions and decided to award two honorable mentions to:

Posted in Events, Triplify | 2 Comments

LinkedGeoData official launch

Posted on July 8, 2009 by Sören Auer

We are pleased to announce the first public version of the LinkedGeoData.org datasets and services.

LinkedGeoData is a comprehensive dataset derived from the OpenStreetMap database covering RDF descriptions of more than 350 million spatial features (i.e. nodes, ways, relations).

LinkedGeoData currently comprises RDF dumps, Linked Data and REST interfaces, links to DBpedia as well as a prototypical user interface for linked-geo-data browsing and authoring.

More information can be found at the LinkedGeoData homepage at: http://linkedgeodata.org

Posted in Announcements, Linked Geo Data | 1 Comment

Foaf+ssl presented by Henry Story in Leipzig

Posted on July 8, 2009 by Sebastian Hellmann

Next week, we are happy to welcome Henry Story on his foaf+ssl world tour. Henry will arrive on Sunday by bike (let’s wish for good weather and few wind) from Berlin.
On Monday, we will have an open meeting at the Johannisgasse 26, Leipzig starting 10 am , so whoever (students, colleagues, other) is interested in the topic is welcome to join us.

Semantic Social Web
“It is possible and easy to do what Facebook, LinkedIn, Orkut and others do in a distributed way. On Facebook every user has a limited view of the social network available to him. Facebook on the other hand has the complete view of the network of its 200 millions members. We can now do the same and cut out the middleman.”

More information about foaf+ssl

Time: 13.07.09 starting at 10 am
Place: Johannisgasse 26, Leipzig
Room: Felix-Klein Hörsaal 1-22
Schedule (not strict):
– 10.00 talks: AKSW members give a brief introduction about current work and projects and then Henry talks about Foaf+ssl
– 13.00 Lunch
– 14.00 hands on session: creating foaf files, setting up a foaf+ssl server amongst other

Note from Seebi: Maybe we hack foaf+ssl support into OntoWiki? 🙂

Thanks in advance to Henry

Posted in Announcements, Events, OntoWiki | 1 Comment

Master studies Content- and Media Engineering at Leipzig School of Media

Posted on July 8, 2009 by Sören Auer

Together with HTWK Leipzig Universität Leipzig is organizing extra-occupational master study courses at Leipzig School of Media in the splendid media campus. AKSW is particularly involved in implementing the master course Content- and Media-Engineering, which focuses on topics such as media creation, management, sharing and search as well as e-commerce and semantic technologies. Students can accomplish the master studies while working full or part time; monthly presence lectures are accompanied by distance learning units. More information can be found on the homepage of Leipzig School of Media or in the following article at Contentmanager.de (in German).

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The Road to OntoWiki 1.0

Posted on June 29, 2009 by Norman Heino

As our new APIs slowly become stable it is time to announce some of the new features. OntoWiki 1.0 will have an enhanced plug-in architecture and a lot of APIs that allow you to customize the user interface. In addition to plug-ins which have been around for some time, there are three new extension types:

  • Components
  • Modules
  • Wrapper

In short, components are pluggable controllers, modules are those little boxes OntoWiki has been using for some time now and wrapper are extension for extracting triples from external sources and importing them into your knowledge base.

One wrapper that ships with OntoWiki can e. g. load triples from Linked Data-enabled endpoints like Sindice or DBpedia. Among others, this feature is demonstrated in the new screencast. But the wrapper is only a part of OntoWiki’s new Linked Data enhancements. A plug-in publishes resources as linked data, provided their URI shares the prefix with the domain the respective OntoWiki installation runs under and the named graph is readable.

Besides extensibility, improvements in performance was one of the key goals for OntoWiki 1.0. Thus, it was only natural to make OntoWiki work with Virtuoso, one of the fastest RDF triple stores around. Besides Virtuoso, MySQL is still supported as well. It underwent, however, serious refactoring and is now based around ZendDb instead of ADOdb as its abstraction layer.

A preliminary version (OntoWiki 0.9) will be released in the coming weeks. It is based on the 1.0 code base but doesn’t contain all the features we’d like to include in 1.0.

Posted in Announcements, OntoWiki, Software Releases | 2 Comments