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.”

The Irish Times: The new smarter web by Karlin Lillington

INTERNET TECHNOLOGY: Coming soon to an internet connection near you: the semantic web, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON

To read the article: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/innovation/2009

Breakfast seminar in Dublin last week with the ISA (Irish Software Association), Mason Hayes & Curran

Over 100 people attended this event. Below are the pod cast of the event. The breakfast was a result of a paper published in September titled "The Semantic Web: Legal Challenges" by Brian Harley, Philip Nolan, Liam ó Móráin and Mark Leyden.

Podcast Part 1 - The Semantic Web: Commercial Prospects and Legal Challenges

Philip Nolan, Partner and Head of Commercial, Mason Hayes+Curran speaks on the legal issues relating to the semantic web.

Podcast Part 2 - The Semantic Web: From Research to Reality

Liam Ó Móráin is a Business Development Consultant with DERI an internationally recognised institute in Semantic Web research, education and technology transfer speaks on the topic of The Semantic Web from a Reseach to Reality perspective.

Information Technology Association Galway (ITAG) Annual Industry Awards

Each year, ITAG rewards the achievements and encourages further success of its outstanding members through the ITAG Industry Awards.

Prof. Dr. Stefan Decker, director of DERI won the award of the Academic Contribution to ICT in Galway. "The company members of ITAG greatly value their strong relationship with the academic institutions in Galway and the western regional. This award goes to an individual or group within an academic institution who has made a notable contribution to Information and Communication Technology in Galway."

All of the winners of the 2009 ITAG Annual Awards are listed on http://www.itag.ie

DERI Outreach Schools & Community Projects are Winners at Galway County Heritage Awards 2009

DERI Outreach-supported projects won 3 Awards at the annual Galway County Heritage Awards that took place in a packed Claregalway Hotel on Wednesday night.
Special recognition was also given on the night by all of the main speakers on the important ongoing work that DERI is undertaking with schools and communities in creating digital archives designed to preserve the heritage of the west of Ireland for future generations.

• Fohenagh National School won Best School Award for 'Upstairs, Downstairs' about life in baronial Clonbrock, once one of the largest aristocratic estates in Ireland. The project consisted of a series of podcast interviews with former members of staff. The mansion itself lies now sadly in ruins.
• Craughwell National School won Special Merit Award for their digital movie heritage production. The children told the story of life in the locality in former times through focusing on different implements used in different walks of life such as the farm, the shop, office and pub.
• Ballinasloe Active Retirement Association won an Award for their digital archive website (Fadó Fadó) and a series of podcasts on life on rural Ireland in days gone by as told through the stories of their own members.

These projects and many more from other Galway schools and community groups will be available within a matter of weeks on our special digital archive websites www.irishbeo.ie and www.irishbeo.ie.

Ballinasloe Active Retirement Association:



Craughwell National School:



Fohenagh National School:

SIOC Methodology for Lightweight Ontology Development

We are very pleased to announce that Uldis Bojars passed his PhD Viva today! Congratulations!

Abstract:

Ontologies are an important building block of the Semantic Web and, with the emergence of initiatives such as the Social Semantic Web and Linked Open Data, developers have an increasing need for lightweight ontologies for describing and integrating various kinds of information.

Most existing ontology development methodologies are aimed at the development of heavyweight ontologies. They also do not consider activities for publishing and disseminating the resulting ontologies on the Web. In this thesis we present the SIOC MEthodology for the development of lightweight ontologies aimed at use on the Web. The methodology consists of two parts. The first part presents activities for ontology design, complete with guidelines for the development and publishing of lightweight ontologies. The second part describes ontology dissemination activities which aim to facilitate the use and adoption of the resulting ontologies at Web scale.

The thesis includes a case study of the development and dissemination of the SIOC Core Ontology and its modules. We applied the SIOC MEthodology in developing this ontology and improved the methodology based on feedback from this work. As a part of the case study we validate the impact of the ontology dissemination activities by measuring the use of the SIOC ontology in data and applications on the Web, and its reuse by other ontologies.

The Pedantic Web Group to the RDF Rescue!

SemanticWeb.com conducted an interview about The Pedantic Web Group recently formed by researchers at DERI and Institute AIFB at the Universitaet Karlsruhe.

To read the interview "The Pedantic Web Group to the RDF Rescue!", please click on the following link.

Galway Science & Technology Festival.

Thanks to Brendan Smith- DERI’s Community/Education Outreach Officer, the institute has had its highest ever involvement in the two week Galway Science & Technology Festival.

Open Your Mind

Siegfried Handschuh gave a talk " How Semantics can improve Your Office Work" at the inaugural ‘Open Your Mind’ Lecture, chaired by Connor Hayes.

(Left to Right): Gerry Morgan (Dean of Science), Emer McHugh (Applied Optics), Brendan Smith (DERI), Siegfried Handschuh (DERI), Lindsay Cody (NCBES), Conor Hayes (DERI) & Sarah Knight (ECI).

School Tours of DERI and NUIG: A Success

Last week’s visits by post-primary students to DERI was the third series of school tours that took place over the last year.
These tours are organized in conjunction with our companion institutes at NUI Galway (Applied Optics, ECI, NCBES and REMEDI). Hence participants are exposed to a wide variety of interesting research topics in the lecture halls and laboratories of venues that are recognized internationally as centres of scientific excellence

At DERI, students were treated to a series of talks on different aspects of our research projects by Jacek Jankowski, Krystian Samp and Vinny Reynolds. Deirdre Lee gave visitors a unique female perspective on working in DERI and the challenges facing women entering what has traditionally been regarded as the male-dominated world of technology and scientific development.
One interesting and pioneering aspect of last week’s programme was the introduction of a pioneering Irish language-orientated tour where native Irish speakers were provided at all 5 institutes visited. In DERI, Liam Ó Morain and James Cooley provided fascinating insights in Gaelic to students of Colaiste na Coiribe (one of Ireland’s top schools) on DERI’s main research elements, our involvement with industry and the cosmopolitan nature of our institute’s personnel with dozens of different languages being spoken on a dally basis.

The feedback from participating teachers has been very positive with other schools already applying to be included in the next set of tours.

DERI involved in Galway Science and Technology Festival

In spite of the fact that horrendous rainy weather led to access to Galway city being almost non-existent due to flooded roads , broken bridges and cancelled trains services, today’s Galway Science & Technology Festival was a tremendous success. Thousands and thousands of families braved the harsh conditions to visit the science exhibits and shows in Leisureland and in the adjacent Galway Bay Hotel.

Working with other stakeholders, we helped ensure that ten city and county schools were able to display their projects. The DERI stand was very popular with crowds of children lining up to play the sensor ball game and other computer games (on our ‘One Laptop Per Child’ school scheme computers) as well as to take part in our IT Quiz. In fact our exhibit was the last to close down such was its popularity!

Special thanks has to go to the 10 DERers who staffed our Exhibit – Lukasz (who was there almost the whole day), Ratnesh, Fergal, Julie, Alex, Uldis, Oszkar, Jodi, Smita and Maciez Zaremba. While the Fair was very family and child-orientated and not the place for serious discussions/displays on advanced often theoretical research, nevertheless the presence of the DERIers was strategically vital to our institute. For during the course of the day, we were visited by Irish parliamentarians, the Mayor of Galway city, senior officials in the IDA (Irish Development Authority), top media personnel, the higher echelons of NUIG etc. We would have been noticed by our absence!

Open Your mind : Lunchtimes Seminar Series

Initiative organised collectively by the Outreach officers of REMEDI, NCBES, Applied Optics, ECI & DERI.

Release of SuRF version 1.0.0 Beta

Read the announcement in the previous post

TPAC 2009

The World Wide Web Consortium TPAC 2009 took place at Santa Clara, California, USA from 2 November - 6 November.

"The Combined Technical Plenary / Advisory Committee Meetings Week brings together W3C Working and Interest Groups, the Advisory Board, the TAG and the Advisory Committee for an exciting week of coordinated work. The highlight of the week is the Plenary Day, Wednesday, 4 November, for all to attend."

Visit http://www.w3.org/2009/11/TPAC/PlenaryAgenda and find slides, pdf, demos of the following sessions:

• Decentralized Extensibility in HTML5
• Maintaining a Healthy Internet Ecosystem -- Challenges to an Open Internet Infrastructure
• Lightning Talks (I)
• DCCI, by Rotan Hanrahan (MobileAware)
• Rich Web Application XG Report, by Steven Pemberton (W3C)
• Opera Unite - a Web server for your whole family, by Charles McCathieNevile (Opera Software)
• W3C cheatsheet for developers, by Dominique Hazaël-Massieux (W3C)
• Semantic Web in the Oil & Gas Industry, by Roger Cutler (Chevron)
• United we(b and net) stand!, by Arnaud de Moissac (SFR)
• Privacy on the Web of Applications -- Challenges and Opportunities
• Web Apps vs App. Stores
• Future of the Social Web
• Lightning Talks (II)
• Multimodality in Enterprise Applications, by Raj Tumuluri (Openstream) and Tom Underhill (Microsoft)
• If MacGyver was a spec editor: simple tools, unbelievable results, by Marcos Caceres (Opera Software)
• ReSpec.js — A Fresh Specification-Writing Tool, by Robin Berjon (Robineko)
• Privacy and Data Governance, by Rigo Wenning (W3C)
• XML Test Assertions on Steroids - with TAMElizer, by Jacques Durand (Fujitsu)
• The End of the Beginning, by Daniel Glazman (Disruptive Innovations).

DERI is happy to report that Sindice and the Sindice Team have been awarded recently in two separate occasions.

Sindice was awarded the 1st prize at the European Semantic Web Techology Conference, Business Idea Contest. Stefan Decker presented on behalf of the team and apparently the pitch was very well received in fact. He received the prize itself during the ESTC gala dinner.

In a somehow related news, a few weeks earlier, "Sindice.com: A Document-oriented Lookup Index for Open Linked Data" by E. Oren, R. Delbru, M. Catasta, R. Cyganiak, H. Stenzhorn and G. Tummarello recevied the Saltlux prize for the best 2007 DERI paper.

As it should be clear by now, the Semantic Web is all but an easy thing to get started. The Sindice Team at DERI has taken its own route and decided to invest a lot of time in getting a quality infrastructure up for everybody’s use. In an academic setting, this is a somehow bold choice. As we know academia is mostly based on publications and therefore actual infrastructures (that cost a LOT of time, sweats and have much more uncertainty associated than, say, a conference submission) are generally speaking an investment that few do. It is therefore particularly nice, and useful in fact, to receive these recognitions. They do and will help the Sindice effort to continue its commitment toward a more and more useful Web of Data.

From The Really Useful Guide to Words and Numbers RTÉ One, Sunday, 12.15pm

" In this programme we feature a really useful guide to getting things done in the community, give useful tips on sending an email, and have a look at how the government is made up and who the main government ministers are.The episode also includes a studio interview with Brendan Smith from the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI).

Brendan explains the work that is done by the DERI and how they are trying to improve the accessibility of the internet to a wider group of people who don’t have previous experience. He talks about online communities (e.g. Bebo), describes what a blog is and how groups can set up their own websites, and he also talks about the Digital Storytelling project he is working on where community members are recording and archiving their own memories of their younger days on ipods and digital video cameras. "

Watch the Show Here 

A reminder that DERI Outreach will  be giving a public lecture on Second Life in the Digital Enterprise Research Institute, NUI, Galway, on this Thursday from 8pm. The event has been organised as part of the Engineering Week of Wonder. Further information is available from (087) 2935106, or online at www.weekofwonder.ie

Article from Galway First

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In this short video leader of the E-learning cluster Bill McDaniel, introduces E-learning and the future of E-learning with Semantics at DERI Galway.

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In this short video Liam Moran introduces his role at DERI Galway as Business Outreach Officer.

Congratulations to Dr John Breslin and his blog Cloudlands who is one of 5 finalists in the Blogging category of the 'Irish Digital Media Awards' that will be held at a gala dinner event in the Burlington Hotel on Feb 1st hosted by DJ Dave Fanning and Minister for Communications Noel Dempsey.
Another finalist is Sandra Bunting who has been nominated for her blog Sandwriter

Sandy is a DERI Outreach course participant who was selected for her Sandwriter website, the first blog in Ireland that is used to publish a novel online as it is being written.