For the german readers....

Springer hat Kapitel aus einem Buch bei dem ich beigetragen habe online, aber nur für Springer Abonnementen (und eigentlich ein alter Hut, aber vielleicht doch für jemanden interessant)

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/3-540-29325-6

" Semantic Web - Wege zur vernetzten Wissensgesellschaft"

Why should you provide the data of your website in RDF? To let the users use it! If you got news on your page, you may already have an RSS feed, but if you got calendar items, people, friend networks, tags - triplify them! Then the users can mashup the data they created.

And you can win a MacBook Air :-)

http://triplify.org/Challenge


The
I-Semantics Conference
includes a Linking Open Data Triplification Challenge which will award three prizes to the most promising triplifications of existing Web applications, Websites and data sets. The prizes are:

• MacBook Air or Euro 1.000 (1st prize)
• Asus EeePC or Euro 300 (2nd prize)
• iPod Touch or Euro 200 (3rd prize)

For the success of the Semantic Web it is from our point of view crucial to overcome the chicken-and-egg problem of missing semantic representations on the Web and the lack of their evaluation by standard search engines. One way to tackle this problem (some might say the only one) is to reveal and expose existing structured (relational) representations, which are already backing most of the existing Web sites. The Triplification challenge aims to expedite this process by raising awareness and showcasing best practices.

Imagine you could avoid an animal experiment if you would find the result of the experiment online?



Press Release/Transinsight:
the knowledge-based semantic search engine www.Go3R.org is now available online. It enables information transparency for the prevention of animal testing.

In only four months development time, Transinsight from Dresden, Germany, succeeded in making available online Go3R, the worldwide first knowledge-based search engine for alternative methods to animal experiments. Via www.Go3R.org, scientists from all over the world can take advantage of the benefits of semantic searches for the area of alternative methods in accordance with the 3Rs principle. The Search engine can from now on used as Beta version.

The so-called 3Rs principle developed by Russell and Burch in 1959 stands for Replacement, Reduction and Refinement. It describes scientific methods that can either replace animal experiments, or reduce animal numbers or refine the suffering of the animals during the procedures. In the European Union, compliance with the 3Rs principle is legally required. In accordance with the EU Laboratory Animal Directive, just as with the German Animal Welfare Act, animal experiments may only be performed if the scientific goal pursued cannot be achieved by any other means, i.e. in totally non-animal procedures, or in methods using fewer animals or entailing less animal suffering.

In practice, however, this legal requirement oftentimes is not met, because the scientists and the responsible authorities are unaware of 3Rs alternatives that would exist to the respective foreseen animal experiment. Queries for alternative methods are time consuming and cumbersome, and this situation has possibly even become worse in the era of the internet. Additionally, at the end of a search, it remains unclear whether all relevant information sought for was indeed retrieved. This is where the search engine Go3R sets in.

News from the PIM 2008 workshop. I made some pictures, Manas Tungare uploaded them here.

look great on black :-)


Great workshop, nice to meet all the people I have been citing for long.

Thomas Bandholtz blogs about cool-URIs in a RESTful World.

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/04/cool-uris-rest

He summarized literature about URIs, SOA, and REST into something combined:

RESTful SOA may argue that this mainly fits for a provision of fix document files. A dynamic SOA server can easily implement this "generic" URI concept without any redirection, just by rendering the content in the requested format on demand. This view satisfies content provision, while the redirection architecture better supports linkage and reference. It also leverages resource management and governance, be it in the Semantic Web, or in RESTful SOA. And may be these two application areas are not so distinct from each other.

If you look at one paper from the CHI2008 conference, look at "Video Browsing by Direct Manipulation". The conference is the place where innovation in computer-human interaction is presented each year.

Video and more documentation available at
http://www.aviz.fr/dimp/

A small video is available here:
http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~bonzo/index.html

The idea of this system was developed by four groups in parallel, without being aware of each other (in the beginning) ... the other paper was "DRAGON: A Direct Manipulation Interface for Frame-Accurate In-Scene Video Navigation"

Abstract:
We present a method for browsing videos by directly dragging their content. This method brings the benefits of direct manipulation to an activity typically mediated by widgets. We show that this method can out-perform the traditional seeker bar in video browsing tasks that focus on visual content rather than time.


I wish they would put the system demo video on youtube. I have both the paper and the video on the proceedings, but its up to the authors to publish this. - just saw the project homepage

Get to know how cool URIs can be, for the Semantic Web.

Everything needs to be identified, being it a person, a web document, an image, or a mythical unicorn. The Semantic Web and RDF are based on the assumption to identify them all using URIs. But these need to be cool, so read "Cool URIs for the Semantic Web" which was published on 31.3.2008 as a W3C Working Group Note.

http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/

The official statement is:
2008-04-01: The Semantic Web Education and Outreach (SWEO) Interest Group has published an Interest Group Note Cool URIs for the Semantic Web. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) allows users to describe both Web documents and concepts from the real world people, organizations, topics, things in a computer-processable way. Publishing such descriptions on the Web creates the Semantic Web. URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) are very important to the Semantic Web, providing both the core of the framework itself and the link between RDF and the Web. This document presents guidelines for the effective use of URIs in the context of the Semantic Web.

The note was edited by Richard Cyganiak and myself, and it took us from November 2006 (ISWC, where we had the idea to write it) until yesterday, the 31st March 2008 to finally finish it. Max Völkel was also with us at the beginning and helped us to stay motivated. I am happy about this event - we have finished it! Excellent! Horray!

Read some comments from reviewers that also made us happy:

• "... I think this is quite an important note..." Harry Halpin
• "... I thought it was good before, but now it's excellent!..." Susie Stephens
• "I think this is an important document. It contains a large amount of very valuable material, ... " Tim Berners-Lee
• "... a few places which are confusing, and a small number places which are, I believe, actively misleading. There are also one or two places where I disagree about the recommendation it makes. On the whole, though, the document is important and I hope energy is found to incorporate these comments. " Tim Berners-Lee, about an earlier draft. And all these issues have been answered, Horray! :-)

Alltogether, we had a hard work to get it right and there have been some last minute changes on 20th March 2008 incorporating much feedback from the W3C Technical Architecture Group.

Many thanks to Tim Berners-Lee who invested much time and helped us understanding the TAG solution by answering chat requests and contributing many emails with clarifications and detailled reviews of this document. Special thanks go to Stuart Williams, Norman Walsh and all the other members from TAG, who reviewed this document and provided essential feedback in June 2007 and September 2007 about many formulations that were (accidentially) contrary to the TAG's view. Also special thanks to the Semantic Web Deployment Group's members Michael Hausenblas, Vit Novacek, and Ed Summers' reviews and their review summary sent in October 2007. We wish to thank everyone else who has reviewed drafts of this document, especially Chris Bizer, Gunnar AAstrand Grimnes, Harry Halpin, Xiaoshu Wang, Henry S. Thompson, Jonathan Rees, and Christoph Päper. Susie Stephens reviewed the document, managed SWEO, and helped us to stay on track. Ivan Herman did much to verify that the W3C requirements are met and submitted the note.

The work was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education,
Science, Research and Technology (BMBF), (Grants 01 IW C01, Project EPOS: Evolving Personal to Organizational Memories; and 01 AK 702B, Project InterVal: Internet and Value Chains) and by the European Union IST fund (Grant FP6-027705, Project Nepomuk).

We opened the last call for comments on "Cool URIs for the Semantic Web" before publishing as note.

Published yesterday as W3C news, we have changed and finalised the document. You can read the draft in this version and send comments to public-sweo-ig@w3.org until 28th March, but I would prefer to get feedback before. Together with Richard Cyganiak, I am editor of this article (and we have been working on it now for over 14 months, since ISWC 2006). The document is, in the eyes of the editors and contributors, finished. Therefore comments about typos, stilistic errors, bugs are welcome, whereas comments of the kind "but in general HTTP URIs are bad" are out of scope to be answered now.

2008-03-21: The Semantic Web Education and Outreach (SWEO) Interest Group has published the Last Call Working Draft of Cool URIs for the Semantic Web. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) allows users to describe both Web documents and concepts from the real world people, organizations, topics, things in a computer-processable way. Publishing such descriptions on the Web creates the Semantic Web. URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) are very important to the Semantic Web, providing both the core of the framework itself and the link between RDF and the Web. This document presents guidelines for the effective use of URIs in the context of the Semantic Web. Comments are welcome through 28 March. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity.

In general, the document will help you to understand basic ideas about URIs on the Semantic Web and how to tweak HTTP servers to serve useful URIs to identify mythical unicorns and other important things such as people or products. Some paragraphs, like the ones in the Section on distinguishing have been editor over and over again, until sounding a little weird at the end. Next week, we got a final, looking forward to having this problem solved and described nicely from now on.

"QROBO WILL REPLACE OTHERS. The brand-new QROBO is the real semantic web search engine."

Check this citation yourself at semantics.co.kr to verify this statement. SWESE, Swoogle, look out... :-)

I met people from the company at CeBit.

Update (9.3.2008): They also patented PERSONAL INFORMATION MANAGEMENT METHOD USING INTERNET in 2007, which shows how completly fucked up the patenting system is when you can patent something like this (which we incidentially publshed as papers 5 years ago and you can download as software since the web exists...)

Tomorrow, at the 8th March 2008 I am presenting some slides about Semantic Desktop tomorrow at the SFI Studecki Festiwal Informatyczny.

Drop in at 15:45 in beautiful Krakow University.



At the moment Chad Fowler is giving a talk on Ruby, and its great fun to listen and learn.