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 secured a number of awards at this year's International Semantic Web Conference. The prices are:

• Winner: Best In-Use paper Produce and Consume Linked Data with Drupal! Stephane Corlosquet, Renaud Delbru, Tim Clark, Axel Polleres, Stefan Decker
• 3rd Place Semantic Web Challenge: Sig.ma: live views on the Web of Data? Giovanni Tummarello, Richard Cyganiak, Michele Catasta, Szymon Danielczyk and Stefan Decker - Presented by Richard Cyganiak
• 2nd Place Semantic Web Challenge: Interactive Exploration of Web Datasets with VisiNav Andreas Harth - Andreas Harth (ex-DERI member who recently joined AIFB)
• Best paper award at the 5th International Workshop on SW-Enabled Software Engineering: www.abdn.ac.uk/~r01srt7/swese2009/ Implementing Semantic Web applications: reference architecture and challenges. Benjamin Heitmann, Sheila Kinsella, Conor Hayes and Stefan Decker

DERI is involved in the Drupal Community by giving the relevant practise to integrate RDF in Drupal and also by supporting some events such as the  Drupalcamp Galway of this last weekend - 4th and 5th April.

About Drupal

Drupal is a free and open-source modular framework and Content Management System use from small personal blogs to large corporate and political sites as the recently launched recovery.gov website.

From wikipedia, 450,000 users accounts have been created on Drupal.org. And since last year, core downloads more than doubled to 200k/month.

Drupal has a dynamic community. More than 1400 people attended the last DrupalCon in Washington DC (USA), a 4 day conference which had more than 100 sessions. Moreover, 2000 people have a developer account and contribute to the growth of the community.

To know more about Drupal :
Dries Buytaert Blog – creator of Drupal -, you will find also proposal of books and videos for both mainstream and technical audience for training, understanding, development.
Visit the Drupal Website, for any queries about it.

RDF in Drupal

The video “RDFa and Drupal” shows examples and use-cases about having embedded RDFa representation of Drupal Structure.

Many RDF modules have been developed for Drupal 6, including three which were developped at DERI:
The SIOC module which allows community data from a Drupal website to be exported in RDF using the SIOC vocabulary.
The RDF CCK module which allows site administrators to map each content type, node title, node body and CCK field to an RDF term (class or property)
The RDF external vocabulary importer module . It will cache any external RDF vocabulary in Drupal, and expose its classes and properties to other modules. 
According to the statistics available on drupal.org, 1102 sites had installed the core RDF API module in Drupal 6. 

Drupal 7, announced for 2010, will see RDF baked in its core. If you want to know more about the Roadmap for RDFa in Drupal 7, visit the Drupal Website. 
A few developers of the Drupal community will gather at DERI in May during the event titled “ RDF Sprint” in order to integrate RDF in drupal 7. The dates are to be decided soon.

Drupalcamp - 4th and 5th April 2009

More than 60 people attented the DrupalCamp Galway. Mix of newbies and developers.
On the Saturday, the event included presentations from experienced Drupal developers. Two tracks were defined. The newbies sessions aimed to give an introduction to Drupal and to learn entire website development process from start to finish.  Specific topics were presented such as “Documentation”, “Building a site with Drupal”, and to the more advanced “what's new in Drupal 7”, “Security in Drupal”.

At 5pm started the challenge, during 24hours, 2 groups of Drupal developers worked on building 2 real working Drupal sites for 2 good causes. The two winners are :

• Rural Science Association
• Zikomo Ireland

Among other speakers, Addison Berry, head of the Drupal documentation team, was visiting from the US. She gave a presentation about the Drupal Documentation and explained also the need to get more people involved in it. To know more about it.

On Flickr, few photos of this event.

Upcoming events : The next DrupalCon - official twice-yearly conference -  will be hold in Paris, France in early September.

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.

Video found here.

"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.

DERI Seoul established

Today the Biomedical Knowledge Engineering Laboratory (BiKE) of the Seoul National University and the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) in Galway of the National University of Ireland agreed to collaborate on the integration and commercialization of their innovative Semantic Web technologies. This collaboration will be formally established under the name of DERI Seoul as the commercial entity.

DERI Galway brings advanced technologies such as Semantic Digital Library JeromeDL, and search services like the Semantic Web Search Engine (SWSE) and Sindice, which are meeting industry demands for semantically enhanced information processing in vertically focused application domains. Its experience in establishing standards like the Semantically Interlinked Online Communities Ontology (SIOC) will further increase the reach and value of this collaboration.

“We are very happy to have found such a strong partner in Korea” says Prof. Stefan Decker, Director of DERI Galway. “This collaboration enables us to demonstrate the industrial relevance of our technologies not only in Europe, but also in the Asian markets. Specifically, vertical application domains like eHealth and Telecommunications are of particular interest to us. This is where BiKE with its deep experience and DERI Galway’s broad technologies are able to provide exceptional complimentary benefits.”

More details here.

Barney Pell gave the opening talk of the day at ISWC this morning. Barney is former CEO, now CTO of natural language search company Powerset.

He talked about how natural language (NL) helps the Semantic Web (SW), especially both sides of the chicken-and-egg problem (the chicken AND the egg). On one side, annotations can be created from unstructured text, and ontologies can be generated, mapped and linked. On the other side, NL search can consume SW information, and can expose SW services in response to NL queries.

The goal of Powerset is to enable people to interact with information and services as naturally and effectively as possible, by combining NL and scalable search technology. Natural language search interprets the Web, indexes it, interprets queries, searches and matches.

Historically, search has matched query intents with document intents, and a change in the document model has driven the latest innovations. The first is proximity: there’s been a shift from documents being a “bag of keywords” to becoming a “vector of keywords”. The second is in relation to anchor text: adding off-page text to search is next.

via Cloudlands

Galway LUG is organising a Linux installfest on Saturday 17th from 10am-noon in the DERI building, Lower Dangan (map). This is a chance for you to bring along your old laptop/desktop and give it new purpose in life! If you have thought about trying Linux, but haven’t yet summoned up the courage, here is your chance to get some hands-on help. We will have several experienced users on hand to help you select, install and configure your first Linux.

A word of warning: if you have data on your hard drive, please BACK IT UP before bringing your machine. Galway LUG and its volunteers cannot be held responsible for loss of data. It is your responsibility to have current backups.

Galway linux fest

The 6th international Semantic Web conference is currently being held in Busan in South Korea.John Breslin recounts his tale of getting to his destination...

and includes some pictures