DERI announces € 400,000 “Enterprise of the Future” Project Supported by Cisco

The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at NUI Galway today (Wednesday, 13 January) announced a three-year “Enterprise of the Future” technology project, supported by Cisco.

The € 400,000 project will develop new ways for the “Enterprise of the Future” to integrate information and make it easily accessible for employees. Today, a typical company has information stored across a variety of often unconnected formats including documents, emails, instant messaging and wiki pages. DERI’s semantic search and integration technology will seek to more cleverly and usefully link information and make it accessible across the company.

Visit our Press Release section to read the entire text

The prefix.cc website

The prefix.cc website, which provides management and lookup of namespace URIs for the RDF and SPARQL user community, has received a major update. New in this version is reverse lookup of namespace mappings, an improved voting system to combat spam, data export in VANN format, and more. Details are available here. The prefix.cc website is developed by Richard Cyganiak of DERI's Linked Data Research Centre.

SMOB v2.0

From Alexandre Passant's Blog:

About 2 years ago, we -Alexandre Passant, Tuukka Hastrup, Uldis Bojars and John Breslin - designed SMOB, a Semantic Microblogging client and server application, in order to demonstrate how Semantic Web and vocabularies like FOAF and SIOC could be used to provide a more open microblogging experience.

While we did not improve is much since then, there have been a lot of work on it these last months (about 250 SVN commits since end of October, when we decided to revive it) and I'm happy to announce that SMOB v2.0 is now officilay out, after some internal beta-testing during the last weeks.

Overall, it has been a complete code rewriting and architecture redesign since the previous release. While the initial version relied on clients and servers to respectively publish and aggregate data, this new version is based on the concept of distributed and independent hubs that communicate each other to exchange data, being microblog posts as well as followers / following lists.

To read the entire post, visit http://apassant.net/blog and check http://smob.me for more information

A new public Google Calendar has been set up for the Reading Groups

This new public Google Calendar contains upcoming Reading Groups [1] with the title of the talk, the name of the presenter, a short description of the topic, references to related publications, time and location (room) of the presentation. Additionally, all past Reading Groups --- since 2005! --- are archived in this calendar.

You can consult the calendar online (HTML), import it to your favorite calendar application (iCal or XML) or add it to your own Google Calendar account using the links below.

• XML link
• iCal link
• HTML link

[1] The Reading Group is a seminar for DERI researchers and other people interested in learning about seminal works in areas relevant to our research. In this weekly held event, scientific papers or textbooks chosen by the speaker are being presented and discussed. The Reading group is meant as a forum where we particularly focus on research done outside of DERI. Topics of the presented articles can vary greatly, and serve the purpose to deepen knowledge on relevant research going on in the fields DERI is involved in. Also, the seminar gives the presenters the chance to present excellent research results in a confined environment to practice their presentation skills and get feedback from a broader audience. Each of the presentations is followed by a discussion about impact and relevance of the presented work on our own research. Reading groups are normally held on Wednesday afternoon at 14:00 in the DERI Conference Room, unless otherwise specified. - http://www.deri.ie/teaching/reading-groups/

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.”

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).

SuRF 1.0.0 Beta

We are pleased to announce release of SuRF 1.0.0 Beta. This version includes some significant changes and improvements in interface, thus the major version number shift.

SuRF is an Object - RDF Mapper based on the popular rdflib python library. It exposes RDF triple sets as sets of resources and integrates them into the Object Oriented paradigm of Python in a similar manner as the ActiveRDF does for Ruby.

New features in 1.0.0 Beta version:

• Improved resource querying. Can mix any of these features together:
• filter resources by attribute values
• filter resources using SPARQL filter expressions
• limit, offset, order ascending/descending
• specify graph/context where resources should be loaded from and later saved to
• eager-load resource attributes
• Improved attribute querying. All the querying features available at resource level are also available at attribute level.
• Growing amount of documentation and examples. Still big gaps there but the situation is improving.

Project Google Code site: http://code.google.com/p/surfrdf/
Documentation: packages.python.org/SuRF/

You are very welcome to try it out, tell us about your experiences, report bugs and participate!

contact: Peteris Caune

DERI's Pipe's Project (formerly Semantic Web Pipes) has been awarded 3rd prize at the Triplification challenge

Inspired by Yahoo's Pipes, DERI Web Data Pipes implement a generalization which can also deal with formats such as RDF (RDFa), Microformats and generic XML.

DERI Pipes are Open Source Software, ad as such they can be easily extended and applyed in use cases where a local deployment is needed.

DERI Pipes provides a rich web GUI where pipes can be graphically edited, debugged and invoked. The execution engine is also available as a standalone JAR, which is ideal for embedded use, thus making it an innovative integration component for data level mashups. 

DERI Pipes, in general, produce as an output streams of data (e.g. XML, RDF, JSON) that can be used by applications. However, when invoked by a normal browser, they will provide a end user GUI for the user to enter parameter values and browse the results.

Warmest congrats to Danh and the DERI pipe team.

" Current and future software needs remain focused towards the development of large and complex Intelligent Networked Information Systems, covering a wide range of issues. These include Data and Web Semantics, Distributed Objects, Web Services, Grid Computing, High-performance and Distributed Applications, Databases, Workflow, Cooperation, Interoperability, and Mobility as required for the deployment of Internet- and Intranet-based systems in organizations and for e-business. This federated event is unique at providing an opportunity for both researchers and practitioners to meet and understand recent developments in ubiquitous computing, interacting with colleagues in adjoining related fields."

Call for papers

"Expert System has announced a collaborative agreement with Dartmouth College involving use of its semantic software, which searches, classifies and analyzes text information.

The partnership focuses on the use of the technology for unstructured information management--the natural language in which people speak and communicate. The research will delve particularly into the effectiveness and accuracy of semantic intelligence in the analysis of large amounts of documents (reports, e-mail, etc.), according to a press release from Expert System.

Paul Thompson, a professor in the Computer Science Department at Dartmouth, says, "We are using Expert System's semantic technology for research on electronic discovery, or e-discovery, the process which takes place when two or more organizations engaged in litigation request access to each other's documents. We are participating in a U.S. government-sponsored benchmark evaluation of e-discovery technology to determine whether advanced information retrieval technology, such as semantic search, can provide better performance than the current state-of-the-art."

Researching the power of the Semantic web

Andreas speaks to Talis

" In our latest Talking with Talis podcast I talk with Andreas Harth of DERI in Galway, Ireland. We talk about Andreas' work on the Semantic Web Search Engine ('swizzy'), before discussing DERI's involvement with the evolving SIOC project."

You can listen to the  MP3

Research as Business in Ireland

“The Irish economy needs to get away from its dependency on multinationals and start blazing its own trail,” says Jack Downey, an industry liaison officer with University of Limerick-based Lero, a Science Foundation Ireland-based Centre for Science, Engineering and Technology (CSET)."

Bridging the gap between the worlds of academia and business has long been called for but rarely achieved in Ireland. In the US, the story is different insofar as most companies look keenly to college research as portals to riches and it is understood that 60pc of the academic staff at Stanford University have commercial interests in business and tech start-ups.

SMEs across Ireland are being urged to invest more in research and development (R&D) in order to create new products that allow them to export more overseas and scale up in size. Enterprise Ireland (EI) is targeting that by 2010 at least 55 companies in Ireland will spend in excess of €2m a year on R&D.

"Lots of people are doing research around the Web...and there are interesting results, but a lack of a core curriculum in the universities," Tim Berners-Lee told a gathering of scientists at HP Labs and other Silicon Valley executives here. "I've been told the Web has 10 to the 10 to the 11 (number of) Web sites. The brain we study as a complex system." So why not the Web?

What millions of Internet users take for granted every day--using the Web as a means to download movies, read the news, or check Facebook--will look drastically different five years from now, and that calls for study of it as a science, according to Berners-Lee and his colleagues at the Web Science Research Initiative . Launched a year ago, WSRI is a partnership between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Southampton in England, and is encouraging the study of both the social and technological implications of wide-scale use of the Web.

More found here.