ESWC 2008 is over, and it was interesting. Best paper on combining data mining and sparql. Best poster was Heiko Hallers quikey (nepomuk) and best demo Knud Möller/Laura Dragan/Sebastian Trügs semantic desktop pipes for kde, also from the Nepomuk project. Score.

I kept chatting with interesting people about the future of the semantic desktop and my plans for bringing it to more people. During the whole event internet was rare and I currently type this on my nokia e70 at ristorant pomodoro in san telmo, they have free wifi..... Once I got web, you will see the nice pictures I did on flickr, but don't hold your breath, from today on I am one week on holiday.

eswc rocks, and although our science is young, it can (in the words of Manfred Hauswirth) "feed itself"., and like an evolving being, starts to walk.

In April 2008 there was a symposium on mashups:
http://www.nmc.org/conference/2008-spring-symposium

In their call for proposals they used a picture to illustrate the ideas of mashups:


which shows a mashup I coded myself on my home linux box to combine CanonEOS400 pictures with a GPSLogger of a yacht with google earth.

The classical kissology effect: the bits we spent most time on are not as much viewed as the simple nice hacks.

Join the 1st NEPOMUK Social Semantic Desktop Summer School at Hotel Victoria, Sliema, Malta 7-13 September 2008. For PhD students, learning about Semantic Desktop and PIM, Social Semantic Desktop.

• Application Closes: 9th June 2008
• Notification of acceptance: 16th June 2008
• Deadline for registration: 15th July 2008

The NEPOMUK Social Semantic Desktop EU Project brings together researchers, industrial software developers, and representative industrial users, to develop a comprehensive solution for extending the personal desktop into a collaboration environment which supports both the personal information management and the sharing and exchange across social and organizational relations.

The NEPOMUK Summer School will represent a very good opportunity for postgraduates students to refine their knowledge in a variety of topics such as Semantic Web, Personal Information Management, P2P, HCI or Social Networking, all in the context of the Social Semantic Destkop. It will consist of a range of theoretical and practical sessions taught by leading researchers in the field and combined with a series of mini-projects to encourage collaboration between participants. In addition to the taught and practical sessions, the students will also benefit from and enjoy a stimulating environment through social interactions with the lecturers, tutors or the other students.

Target audience
We welcome applicants independently of the location in the world. As requirements, the applicants should be PhD students, postdocs or young researchers acting in relevant disciplines for the field.

The accepted participants are expected to arrive in Malta on September the 7th and be willing to commit theirselves to the Summer School's activities, in terms of a full participation, until noon September 13th. Applications that do not fulfill these requirements, will not be considered.

Happy Birthday, Free Web. On April 30 1993 (well, I am a week late to gratulate, but anyway) CERN published the software and standards of the web as free software.

"CERN's decision to make the Web foundations and protocols available on a royalty free basis, and without additional impediments, was crucial to the Web's existence. Without this commitment, the enormous individual and corporate investment in Web technology simply would never have happened, and we wouldn't have the Web today."

Tim Berners-Lee, Director, WWW Consortium

(10 years of web)

The original announcement says "CERN relinquishes all intellectual property rights to this code, both source and binary form and permission is granted for anyone to use, duplicate, modify and redestribute it."
Signed by W. Hoogland and H. Weber.

Through my HTTP and HTML based weblog, I can only say: thanks Mr W.H. and H.W. !

read on at wikipedia.

Jean-Jacques Solari provided a French translation and Yakura Masataka a Japanese translation of the Cool URIs for the Semantic Web note.

http://www.w3.org/2005/11/Translations/Query?titleMatch=Cool+URI&lang=any&search1=Submit

Excellent!

do you miss the document in your language? Create a translation (and get in touch with W3C, I am not responsible for putting the translations on the site)

We need some facts about what the Semantic Web can be used for. The SWEO case studies provide a great start, listing deployed corporate Semantic Web applications. I added them up, identifying some key benefits: profit, data integration, querying, and taxonomies.

Read my notes.

At ISWC2005, one talk presented a slide about "what are the key reasons to use Semantic Web". Sadly, I lost the reference and the paper did not list them (do you know which paper this was? It was presented in the industry track).
Interestingly, there is not much data available about the actual benefits of deploying Semantic Web technology. To create such overviews, we can either do interviews and questionnaires or look at documented case studies.

The Semantic Web Education and Outreach SWEO Interest Group of the W3C did collect and publish 27 case studies and 10 use cases (numbers as of 22.4.2008). The case studies report of deployed systems, therefore I concentrate of them. As methodology, I copy/pasted all key benefits into a spreadsheet and mapped them to classifications I made up on the run. I added explanatory text about the categories by copy/pasting statements by the authors. Then I sorted the results, showing the top-named benefits first. One argument from a use case could map to multiple of my categories (i.e. when a benefit touches both a business profit and is about data integration, it will be added to both categories).

Read the whole report with the data.

The correct scientific method to do such study would be to use questionnaires and to check if the statements given by the authors are true, so the scientific value of this note is questionable, but I love controversy.

Du er nå på Internett.

I am currently attending the Semantic Days 2008 in Stavanger. From the speakers, you recognize it's a melting pot of Defence (Rear Admiral Morten Jacobsen and Major General Arnvid Løvbukten), Oil&Gas (StatoilHydro, DNV, NOV, Epsis) and Semantic Web. For the last subject, amongst others, Ora Lassila and Ian Horrocks presented. I also fall in the last subject.



The conference is located at Clarion Hotel Stavanger, in the city center. From my room I have a great view of the sourrounding sea and town, but there is not much time to go there.



My presentation contains some new data about the use of semantic web technologies, but I will blog that extra, as it deserves some more space.

Download my slides here.

I visited CHI2008 last week, and finally found time to upload the pictures and videos.

The sleeping phone:


Naturalinteraction.org table:


my pictures from the set:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/leobard/sets/72157604570968864/

The Semantic Days 2008 Conference will be next week, Stavanger, 21-23 April 2008. From Monday 21 to Wednesday 23 April 2008 at the Clarion Hotel, Stavanger.


Official website

In the words of the organizers:

Semantic Days is an annual conference that has become a meeting place for industrial use of Semantic Web technologies with significant contribution also from research institutions and universities.

My talk will be on Semantic Web in use on the first day.

For the interested social researcher:
I let xing.com check if people from my desktop address book are on xing, and if I am connected with them (a feature that linkedin had before them, I think).

• 623 contacts in my address book have email addresses and can be compared
• 105 (17%) of them are Xing members
• I am already connected with 52 (8%) of them

Does this say anything scientifically? Hm....

and, you 53 people, expect to get mass-mailed soon...