Linked Data on the Web (LDOW2010) - a WWW 2010 workshop
LDOW2010 follows the successful LDOW workshops at WWW2008 in Beijing and at WWW2009 in Madrid. While the two previous workshops in the series focused respectively on the publication of Linked Data, and on Linked Data application architectures, linking algorithms and Web data fusion, the LDOW2010 workshop will have a broader focus.
As the publication of Linked Data on the Web continues apace, the need becomes more pressing for principled research in the areas of user interfaces for the Web of Data as well as on issues of quality, trust and provenance in Linked Data. We also expect to see a number of submissions related to current areas of high Linked Data activity, such as government transparency, life sciences and the media industry. The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum for exposing high quality, novel research and applications in these areas. In addition, by bringing together researchers in this field, we expect the event to further shape the ongoing Linked Data research agenda.
LDOW2010 is jointly organised by Christian Bizer (Freie Universität Berlin), Tom Heath (Talis Information Ltd), Tim Berners-Lee (MIT CSAIL), and Michael Hausenblas (Linked Data Research Centre, DERI, NUI Galway.)
1st Workshop on the Multilingual Semantic Web at WWW2010
Although knowledge processing on the Semantic Web is inherently language-independent, human interaction with semantically structured and linked data will remain inherently language-based as this will be done preferably by use of text or speech input – in many different languages. Semantic Web development will therefore be increasingly concerned with knowledge access to and generation in/from multiple languages, i.e., in:
- multilingual querying of knowledge repositories and linked data
- multilingual knowledge and result presentation in semantic search
- multilingual verbalization of ontology structure in ontology engineering
- ontology-based information extraction from multilingual text and semi-structured data
- ontology learning from multilingual text and semi-structured data
Multilinguality is therefore an emerging challenge to Semantic Web development and to its global acceptance – across language communities around the world. The workshop will therefore be concerned with discussion of new infrastructures, architectures, algorithms etc. that will enable easy adaptation of Semantic Web applications to multiple languages, addressing issues in representation, extraction, integration, presentation etc.
Visit http://msw.deri.ie/
2nd Workshop on Trust and Privacy on the Social and Semantic Web - Co-located with ESWC2010
More than ever, the Semantic Web is becoming reality as it is an integrated component of the Web we are browsing everyday - be it the Open Linked Data movement that nowadays exposes over 10 billion triples of RDF or the annotated and structured information available on Web pages used by major search engines, such as Yahoo! SearchMonkey and Google. Moreover, social data about people and their interaction is made available in machine-understandable format in projects like FOAF or SIOC. Facing this amount of data, privacy and trust consideration is an important step to take right now. The challenging research questions arising from this movement include:
- How do people know that the data gathered from several sources for reasoning purposes can be trusted?
- How can one avoid that personal data exposed on the Semantic Web will be combined with other available semantic data in a way that sensitive information may be revealed?
- How shall a safe reasoning process look like that does not end up in a conflict only because a single Semantic Web peer exposed a contradiction?
We expect discussions and results concerning questions like these at SPOT2010 leading to solutions and research results in the realm of Semantic Web and social data for the pervasive issue of privacy and trust on the Web.
For any enquiries about the workshop, please contact us at spot2010 [at] easychair [dot] org.
The SPOT2010 workshop at ESWC2010 is co-chaired by Philipp Kärger (L3S Research Center, Germany), Daniel Olmedilla (Telefonica R&D, Spain), Alexandre Passant (DERI, NUI Galway, Ireland) and Axel Polleres (DERI, NUI Galway, Ireland).
http://spot.semanticweb.org/2010/
Workshop on Visual Interfaces to the Social and Semantic Web (VISSW2010) - in conjunction with the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2010)
This workshop is co-organised by Siegfried Handschuh (DERI, NUI Galway, Ireland), Tom Heath (Talis Information Ltd, UK), VinhTuan Thai (DERI, NUI Galway, Ireland), Ian Dickinson (Epimorphics Ltd, UK), Lora Aroyo (VU Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Valentina Presutti (Semantic Technology Laboratory (STLab), ISTC, Italy).
Further details are available at http://www.smart-ui.org/events/vissw2010/.
Successful Completion of ECOSPACE
ECOSPACE launched in May 2006 as one of the Integrated Projects in the Collaborative Working Initiative of the European Commission. The major focus of ECOSPACE was the development of a collaboration environment for eProfessionals, i.e. workers who rely on modern communication and collaboration technologies to perform their daily work. The ECOSPACE project concluded in October 2009, with the highly successful final review being hosted by the coordinating partner, Fraunhofer-FIT, Sankt Augustin, Germany. Within the project, NUIG held the responsibility of work-package leader for the Reference Architecture and Ontologies (Peristeras, et al., 2009), as well as participating in other work-packages concerned with semantic services, tool development, and dissemination.
The reviewers were pleased with the results presented at the final review, stating that "ECOSPACE has without doubt contributed to the European knowledge base in the area of new working paradigms for eProfessionals. The project team has extensively researched and developed user-centric, interoperable platforms and tools that enable innovative collaboration techniques and services. The demonstrated new work environments and tools critically help address the challenge for users of information and communication overload enabling them to concentrate on creativity and productivity."
NUIG was commended for its contribution to standardisation initiatives, and in particular for its involvement in the OASIS Integrated Collaboration Object Model Technical Committee (ICOM TC).
The final ECOSPACE newsletter is available at: http://www.ami-communities.eu/wiki/ECOSPACE_Newsletter_No_11
Bibliography
Peristeras, V., Fradinho, M., Lee, D., Prinz, W., Ruland, R., Iqbal, K., Decker, S. (2009). CERA: A Collaborative Environment Reference Architecture for Interoperable CWE Systems. Service Oriented Computing and Applications , 3, 3-23.
eSanta’s Gift to Irish & African Schools
The Outreach programme at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) of NUI Galway provided 50 second-hand computers at Christmas for shipment to east African schools.
According to DERI’s Education Outreach Officer, Brendan Smith, “Since 2005, our institute has distributed circa 250 good quality second-hand computers to schools across Galway county, from Inis Meain to Creggs as well as for the establishment of a number of community Internet training centres throughout Connacht. The bundled software used tends to be free open source programmes.
We also provided a laptop for each pupil in the senior classes of Scoil Bhríde in Menlo which has created a whole new learning dimension by allowing the provision of personal mobile classrooms. Our objective is this regard is to underwrite the government’s strategy of creating a knowledge-based society. Providing low-cost computers especially laptops, in combination with the provision of student mentors drawn from the higher echelons of our third-level research establishments, could be a successful method in further resourcing our schools and up-skilling our young people in the latest web technology tools.
DERI is the largest institute in the world developing the next stage of the world wide web. So while our raison d’etre is of course high-level research, our work with schools also provides us with tests sites as well as creating the environment for eLearning applications.
However, we are now handing over our computer recycling programme to the recently formed Galway branch of Camara, an Irish charity that upgrades old computers for use in East African schools. The NUIG authorities have generously allocated computer storage space for the new student society led by DERI’s Deirdre Lee who spent summers volunteering for Camara in Kenya and Lesotho.”
