For people who can read german:

I have written a summary about ISWC2006 for www.semantic-web.at.

you can find the article here.

In a recent article on Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense by the New York Times, the Semantic Web is entitled as Web 3.0. They say:
But in the future, more powerful systems could act as personal advisers in areas as diverse as financial planning, with an intelligent system mapping out a retirement plan for a couple, for instance, or educational consulting, with the Web helping a high school student identify the right college.

The projects aimed at creating Web 3.0 all take advantage of increasingly powerful computers that can quickly and completely scour the Web.

Interestingly, a "Deutsche TelekomTechnology Radar" Article was written by Wolfgang Wahlster and Andreas Dengel, I contributed there a little. We defined the Web 3.0 as: "Convergence of Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web". Here is the abstract:
The World Wide Web (WWW) has drastically improved access to digitally stored information. However, content in the WWW has so far only been machine-readable but not machineunderstandable. Since information in the WWW is mostly represented in natural language, the available documents are only fully understandable by human beings. The Semantic Web is based on the content-oriented description of digital documents with standardized vocabularies that provide machine understandable semantics. The result is the transformation from a Web of Links into a Web of Meaning/Semantic Web [ ], (see arrow A in Fig. ). On the other hand, the traditional Web .0 has recently undergone an orthogonal shift into a Web of People/Web 2.0 where the focus is set on folksonomies, collective intelligence, and the wisdom of groups (see arrow B in Fig. ). Only the combined muscle of semantic web technologies and broad user participation will ultimately lead to a Web 3.0, with completely new business opportunities in all segments of the ITC market. Without Web 2.0 technologies and without activating the power of community-based semantic tagging, the emerging semantic web cannot be scaled and broadened to the level that is needed for a complete transformation of the current syntactic web. On the other hand, current Web 2.0 technologies cannot be used for automatic service composition and open domain query answering without adding machine-understandable content descriptions based on semantic web technologies. The ultimate worldwide knowledge infrastructure cannot be fully produced automatically but needs massive user participation based on open semantic platforms and standards. The interesting and urgent question that arises is: what happens when the emerging Semantic Web and Web 2.0 intersect with their full potential? We analyze this question throughout this feature paper and present the converging idea that we call Web 3.0. We use the following definition in this paper: Web 3.0 = Semantic Web + Web 2.0. A good example for developing Web 3.0 is the mobile personal information assistant (see Fig. 2). The user makes queries using natural language, and the assistant answers by extracting and combining information from the entire web, evaluating the information found while applying Semantic Web technologies. Today’s second-generation search engines are based on keywords within the syntactic web, while open domain question answering engines are based on information extraction and the Semantic Web.


The whole article can be downloaded here.

A weird theory about one aspect of the web is: "If you can't sell adult entertainment with it, the technology won't succeed"

So simple minds like me could measure the successfullness of the Semantic Web by seeing how much XXX is advertised in Semantic RDF Spam.

and see, today I got a first measurement:
PingTheSemanticWeb recently recrawled pornotube.com/labels.xml



you may not see it anymore, but it was here:
http://www.pingthesemanticweb.com/

This on itself says nothing, and I have not noticed any use of advertisment on the Semantic Web. It is only a small indicator what to expect in the next years. Probably the people in adult (male) entertainment will sniff us up and realize there is plenty of new services to use for advertisement, which is first honoring our efforts and second - spam.

I found it walking down a few links from planetrdf to SIOC.

Last week I attended the Fifth International Semantic Web Conference (more reports will follow), and it was interesting indeed.

At the moment we see that Semantic Web is picked up by big business, and that more and more people are putting data on the web. For example, Yahoo Food uses RDF for some detail problems (see Dave Beckett's post). Bot looking on the semantic web website, I see no guide how to enable my website to be semantic-web conformant. The best practices group published documents how to use it, but they aren't so easy to find and may not cover everything (for example 303 redirects).

I am annoyed by organizations like rorweb.com , that make advertisment for "RDF-like" solutions, because:

• they have great websites that tell you how to use metadata in 5 minutes
• they look good
• they got statements in the sense of "Our company uses RDF and it changed my life. TCO lowered, ROI is sooner and RDF cleans my teeth while I sleep. Vernor Doe, CEO of example.com".
• we don't have such a site

Look at the classical version of foaf-project.org: a limited simple site, saying what it is, how to use it and who uses it. Perfect.



So I explained this view of mine at the web 2.0 panel at the conference and asked "Why can't the W3C hire one marketing person that creates such a "how to use Semantic Web for dummies" website?"

Reactions were negative, TimBl said that W3C is a standards organization and does not make marketing, Dave Beckett says (and blogs) that he does not want a hype and should instead:
Start from concrete data-centric approaches that build up to use layers of technology solutions to different problems as they emerge, only if needed and demonstrating usefulness at each stage.

Indee, but the use should be shown on a simple example and some success stories - we need a website to collect those. And we need a few guys that transfer the knowledge into understandable bullet points and demos. So TimBl suggested that instead of hiring a marketeer, Leo should just join the Semantic Web Education and Outreach (SWEO) group. Point.

[Update]: Antoni Mylka found a video of this panel discussion, and thus of this discussion.

So, I will evaluate if my current position allows me joining SWEO and if yes, try to contribute somehow to better marketing.

My statement would be: Yes, we need a hype for Semantic Web. Buzzword it out, smush your data, swoogle the web, make the Service Oriented Architecture that takes metadata middleware and enterprise application application integration to the next level.

lookout for our upcoming guide for concept URIs (based on 303 redirect and hash-uris) and more...

The DFKI Knowledge Management lab is proud to release Gnowsis version 0.9.2

Gnowsis is a tool for realising a Semantic Desktop - a desktop where all your data is inter-linked and related. Gnowsis gives you a tool for structuring your data as well as your thoughts! This release is part of the Nepomuk project, providing a prototype implementation of some core services.

To see what gnowsis looks like, watch the videos that Dominik Heim made:
GNOWSIS Videos

• http://gnowsis.opendfki.de/wiki/GnowsisUsage

Gnowsis has a range of features for helping you manage your personal information:

• Integration with Aperture for easy integration of the data in the applications
  you already use on your desktop! This release is based on the Aperture Framework
  Release 3, for more information about aperture see http://aperture.sourceforge.net

• A new approach to personal information management. We call it your PIMO.
• Integration with the Semantic Wiki Kaukolu, see http://kaukoluwiki.opendfki.de
  for information
• goodies for developers: AJAX support with XML/RPC
• Quick and easy full-text searching of all your data using Lucene.

Additional new added in this release include:

• Web2.0 Goodies: bookmarklets for tagging pages and creating things, geo tagging of PIMO Locations and showing these on a google-map, showing creation and modification of PIMO things on a Simile Timeline
• Many additional data-sources, both from aperture, and some additional web2.0
  sites, such as flickr, bibsonomy and del.icio.us!
• Support for PIMO synchronisation over SSH
• Many many bug fixes and minor enhancement

Download gnowsis here:

http://www.gnowsis.org/Download

And for additional information see

• http://www.gnowsis.org
• http://gnowsis.opendfki.de

Contributors to this release include Malte Kiesel, Benjamin Horack, Dominik
Heim, Sebastian Weber, Gunnar Aastrand Grimnes, Leo Sauermann, Antoni Mylka

We are pleased to announce the third alpha release of the Aperture framework.

Aperture is a Java framework for extracting and querying full-text content and metadata from various information systems (e.g. file systems, web sites, mail boxes) and the file formats (e.g. documents, images) occurring in these systems.

The most notable feature in this release is a new IcalCrawler. It works with
iCal files generated by many calendaring applications (Apple iCal, Korganizer,
Lotus Notes ...). It uses a ical-rdf mapping developed by the W3C Rdf
Calendaring group. Apart from that there are numerous small improvements and
bugfixes. The tutorial has been expanded with more code examples and UML
diagrams to facilitate learning for new users.

This the last release before the switch to the RDF2Go framework.
(The curious can already examine the RDF2Go branch in the cvs).

The project homepage:
http://aperture.sourceforge.net

Aperture 2006.1-alpha-3 can be downloaded from here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=150969&package_id=166878&release_id=460471

What's new in alpha-3?

- new IcalCrawler

- added MIME type detection for many formats:

- improved MIME type detection of MHTML files (web archives)

- introduced HtmlParserUtil, containing large parts of the HtmlExtractor
implementation, as HTML (fragments) may occur in other document types
as well (e.g. saved mails, see MimeExtractor)

- added ThreadedExtractorWrapper class, for catching and interrupting
hanging Extractors

- added RepositoryAccessData, an AccessData implementation storing its
information in a Repository

- added ability to specify a port number for an IMAP source

- set target platform to Java 5

Leo Sauermann
Christiaan Fluit
Gunnar Grimnes
Antoni Mylka

Two weeks ago I gave a talk at ZGDV.
Benjamin Nowack blogged about the ZGDV Semantic Web congress and was so polite to put his slides on the web. Also, he published the nice pictures of me having fun while giving my talk.

I can only copy that behavior and here they are, my slides on Semantic Desktop (in German):
www.dfki.uni-kl.de/~sauermann/2006/10/19/009_sauermann.pdf

I took the freedom to copy them to flickr, not to push his bandwith too much :-) here they are:

I will be blogging about my Semantic Web PhD for the next months, until I am finished. You will learn what I did in the last years and what I plan to do in the next months to write my thesis. Perhaps you can copy something for your own work or point me to information I missed - critique, positive and negative, is warmly welcome.

The topic of my PhD thesis is derived from my Diploma Thesis "The Gnowsis: Using Semantic Web techonologies to build a Semantic Desktop". The work I did in 2003 was to create a Semantic Web Server for a single user, on your desktop. So the desktop is turned into a Semantic Desktop. The abstract ends with:
Using the gnowsis prototype, which is a result of this work, applications have access to all important information stored in a single computer. Users are able to classify and structure their information in any way they want by creating bidirectional links between resources. A prototype information management tool GnoGno based on a wiki /weblog was built to explore this possibility.

So, what am I going to do for PhD? Continue! I got different remarks on that by others:

• That was a diploma thesis? After reading it, I thought it was your PhD
• Just write down, we will see then...
• You can never write a thesis about an implementation, thats not science

Note that I worked for 18 months on this diploma thesis, beginning June 2002 and finishing December 2003, which is far more time than any thesis student has here at DFKI, so it may contain enough to be accepted as PhD at some universities in the world. At least, I did publish a description of an implemented Semantic Wiki, a Semantic Blog and a way to extract data from Outlook using find(SPO) queries, using a mapping language like D2RQ. All these topics are still very hot, years after my work. Also, I published them piece by piece in peer-reviewed conferences or journals. Nothing to hide there.

So, I am positive that my work is science. Coincidence, I googled for websites that are like mine today, stumbling across Dennis Quan. His thesis made with David Karger at MIT on Designing End User Information Environments Built on Semistructured Data Models is a good example of the direction I want to go: describing how to build Semantic Web environments for the real world. And I interpret Dennis' thesis in a way that you indeed can write a PhD thesis about implementation matters, half his thesis is about Adenine, Ozone and the RDF bits and pieces he created (which are very good, btw).

So the research question I have is on the borders between Semantic Web, Artificial Intelligence, and Knowledge Management:

If Personal Information Management is the main use of Personal Computers, why is then not part of the Operating System of the computers? Why does it only handle files and folders, and not Persons, Projects and Topics?

We need a system int he spirit of the memex - a personal extension of the brain. A system then be used to write down notes in a "new" way. My diploma thesis ended with the idea that Users are able to classify and structure their information in any way they want by creating bidirectional links between resources. But "Any Way" has to be specified further. We miss an answer to: how to write down information the best way, on a Semantic Desktop?

So my PhD will contain a roundtrip on the Semantic Desktop - the idea of a central server and applications around it - and then go into the Personal Information Model (PIMO) we use to manage information. At the end, I will shine light how to automatically generate the PIMO, something that is addressed a lot in our group.

The way to answer these questions and challenges is (for me) clear: Personal Information Management cannot be handled by a single applaction like MindManager of Microsoft Outlook. It has to include all information items that come into our attention during every day, it has to include my web-browsing, my e-mails, my project management tools, my co-workers, my employees and students, my project and my tasks there, my SVN commits, my papers, travel to conferences, giving talks, powerpoints, blog posts.

So it has to include all the applications in this chain: blogging, flickr, powerpoint, e-mail, MS-Word, etc etc. And what we did in gnowsis and the EPOS project, was to look that all these applications can be enhanced with plugins so that they can capture the information behind. What we need is a unified tagging scheme for each person, a "personal Technorati". If I use the tag "burning man 2006" in delicious, I will also use it on flickr, and on my e-mails. so simple - I am always the same person, so independent of application, my PIMO is the same. Simple in theory, tricky in practice.

practice will follow.

Last week we had several Nepomuk related meetings in Paris, one I attended myself. The Nepoverse came together to discuss user interface related things.

Yngve Sundblad and Bosse Westerlund from the HCI group at CSC from the Stockholm university were there, with their staff Rosa, Kikki, Sinna, Henrik and Christian, and more I think..

They presented our current state and many prototypes they did, mostly video prototypes. Also they start to identify features, we gave priorities to them and had to work on the ideas.

For example, this is such a user interface idea:

This is a still photograph of a video presentation, you will see the results of this interface in about a year in the open source implementations.

During the meeting, we:

* read e-mails


* watched presentations


and worked on prototypes. This point I did not photograph, because I had to work.

We also had dinner together, here are some pictures:






Alltogether a good meeting on the social semantic desktop features, we worked for three days, some people also had meetings before and after.

Today I gave a talk in Darmstadt's ZGDV Institute, at the 3rd Semantic Web Congress. Hugo Kopanitsak organizes these events and managed to get an interesting round of speakers for this event.

Update: slides are for download here, Benjamin Nowack inspired me to put them online, thx.


Here is the homepage:
http://www.zgdv.de/zgdv/zgdv/Seminar/Darmstadt/Kongresse/3_SemWeb

I gave a talk about Semantic Desktop, and as I was the last speaker, I tried to keep it short because all of the previous speakers managed to sum up some minutes of delay.

The audience was filled with people from industry and government, hungry for Semantic Web. Here are two pictures of my audience:



And here is Hans-Peter Schnurr from Ontoprise, a picture I had to "gimp" up a little (a coffe cup was to the lower left and the light had to be corrected for the beamer vs Hans-Peter, luckily Sven Schwarz taught me how to do this on The Great Escape :-).


And Benjamin Nowack


Benjamin made more pics of my talk with his digicam, we will probably see them soon.