"World of Warcraft and Second Life are proving a boon to social scientists who are using them as virtual laboratories.

Researchers are getting insights into real life by studying what people do in virtual worlds, reveals a review in the journal Science. It suggests virtual worlds could help scientists studying ideas of government and even concepts of self. Others are looking at behaviours peculiar to online worlds and how they differ from real life."

Via the BBC

Watson is a Semantic Search engine.

Not unlike DERI's own SWSE.

Excellent article via Adaptive Information

"A Millennial Perspective

The Semantic Web, by whatever name it comes to be called, is an inevitability. History tells us that as information content grows, so do the mechanisms for organizing and managing it. Over human history, innovations such as writing systems, alphabetization, pagination, tables of contents, indexes, concordances, reference look-ups, classification systems, tables, figures, and statistics have emerged in parallel with content growth."

"OpenSearch was originally developed at Amazon.com's A9 incubator. It's a specification under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, covering discovery and description documents for search engines, expression of queries, and the convention of RSS 2.0 or Atom Web feed results."

Introducing Opensearch

The 2nd International Experts Finder Workshop will be held later this year at the International Semantic Web conference (ISWC 2007).

Some interesting presentations on how the Web will scale found here.

Over on Internetnews.com there is an article on Nepomuk which you can find here.

"The Msc in Computer Science (Interactive Entertainment Technology) is a one-year course, directed by Dr Steven Collins (co-founder of Havok) and has been designed in collaboration with Microsoft, Demonware, Radical Entertainment and other leading game industry companies. The programme immerses students in a state of the art learning environment, including the Microsoft sponsored XNA Gamelab, featuring Xbox360 systems and multi-core PCs with DX10 GPUs per-student, with classes given by leading researchers in computer graphics, vision, networking and distributed systems, where students use the latest hardware, software tools and technologies, as used by professional game development companies."

Dream course?

Via Tech Wire

Over at Kingsley Idehen's blog he talks about Dynamic Linked Data pages and that he has the first cut of a Facebook application called: Dynamic Linked Data Pages.

"A dynamically generated Web Page comprised of Semantic Data Web style data links (formally typed links) and traditional Document Web links (generic links lacking type specificity).

Linked Data Pages will ultimately enable Facebook users to inject their public data into the Semantic Data Web as RDF based Linked Data. For instance, my Facebook Profile & Photo albums data is now available as RDF, without paying a cent of RDF handcrafting tax, thanks to the Virtuoso Sponger (middleware for producing RDF from non RDF data sources) which is now equipped with a new RDFizer Cartridger for the Facebook Query Language (FQL) and RESTful Web Service."

The Semantic Web-FAQ.

What are content labels? From Segala.

Theres a little bit more on Nepomuk-KDE and Sebastian Trüg's  presentation over at Liquidats blog.The post can be regarded as an extension to the post State and Plans of Nepomuk-KDE.

The XML School 2007 is to be held at Wadham College, in Oxford University.Its for all of those interested in XML and no doubt ,there will find plenty of material  to challenge themselves with.Its currently in full swing and will run until the 27th of July.Its still running and is not being affected by the current flooding in the UK.They have a pretty interesting curriculum as far as XML goes and you can find it here.

There will also be a Semantic web Interest Group meeting too at Wadham College tomorrow scheduled from 7.00-8.30pm tomorrow for anyone interested.

Alice in Metaland is a community effort based.A veritable cocktail of a Wiki all about Web evolution,from Web 2.0,Web 3.0,Semantic Web technologies and AI thrown in for good measure and according to Mr Miles Davis "Metaland is a collaborative knowledgespace about all things web 3.0. It has a mission. Help keep us up to speed on developments with semantic technologies, vendors, products, services, solutions, market and industry studies, case studies, education, jobs."

This is just one of the reasons why the social networking news site Mashable is just so good.This is another excellent list compiled by them on online maps.

Online Maps: 50 = Tools and Resources.

There are currently some internship positions available, at DERI Galway, for both  Master and Bachelor students.

We are looking for talented candidates,with solid development skills and good hacking skills, who will in turn, receive a competitive salary and stimulating enviroment from a Semantic Web prespective here at the IDA Business Park.

If you are interested in applying or know some one who may be interested in coming to the West coast of Ireland for 3-10 months, please send an email with your CV to giovanni.tummarello@deri.org

"In recent months we have witnessed a number of social networking sites begin to open up their platforms to outside developers. While this trend has been exhibited most prominently by Facebook, it is being embraced by all the leading social networking services, such as Plaxo, LinkedIn, Myspace and others. Along separate dimensions we also see a similar trend towards "platformization" in IM platforms such as Skype as well as B2B tools such as Salesforce.com.

If we zoom out and look at all this activity from a distance it appears that there is a race taking place to become "the social operating" system of the Web. A social operating system might be defined as a system that provides for systematic management and facilitation of human social relationships and interactions."

From Nova Spivack Minding the Planet

Linked Data

There is a Semantic Web group on Facebook.

201 members and counting...

"This post ties in with new best-practices on the Web published by Chris Bizer, Richard Cyganiak, and Tom Heath — called the Linked Data Publishing Tutorial — that provides definitions and viewpoints from the perspective of the use of RDF (Resource Description Framework) and W3C practices. My initial post in this series and their tutorial occasioned Kingsley Idehen to post his own Linked Data and the Web Information BUS entry, adding the valuable perspective of practices and terminology going back to the early 1990s in object and relational database systems and standards such as ODBC.

All of these efforts share a desire to craft practices, language and terminology to help promote the availability and interoperability of useful data on the Web."

Via Adaptive Information

"The Cult of the Amateur is a broadside attack on Web 2.0, a term we may hastily define here as that growing sector of the internet which serves mainly as a platform for user-generated content, including sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Typepad, Blogger and YouTube. The main thrust of his argument is that all this home-made content - blogs, podcasts, amateur videos and music - is an inadequate replacement for mainstream media. It may be a harmless, even occasionally enriching addition, but we can't have both, because the former is swiftly killing off the latter. Thanks to Web 2.0, newspapers, record companies, movie studios and traditional publishers are on the verge of extinction, he says. Along the way he also finds time to bash Second Life, online gambling, copyright theft and porn."

Via The Guardian

The Cult of the Amateur

Imagine a library that collected all the world's information about all the world's books and made it available for everyone to view and update.?

The Open Library

Congratulations to Aodhan Cullen!

"Aodhan  has been named BusinessWeek’s Young Entrepreneur of the Year for his company StatCounter, which boast 1.4 million members. StatCounter began back in 1999 when Cullen was a 16 year old web designer.

Customers would constantly ask him about traffic to their site, leading him to come up with the idea of StatCounter, a free service monitoring numbers visiting a site, where they were coming from, and what key word searches brought them there.

From its beginnings in a home office, StatCounter now has over 90 servers in Texas and six full-time employees in the head office at the Guinness Enterprise Center in Dublin."

Semsol from Benjamin Novak.

The structured Web is object-level data within Internet documents and databases that can be extracted, converted from available forms, represented in standard ways, shared, re-purposed, combined, viewed, analyzed and qualified without respect to originating form or provenance.

Via Adaptive Information

"Driven by a vision of the convergence of social, technical and economic waves of disruption, Talis have created an environment for building next generation applications and services. The Talis Platform enables innovative applications that learn from and assist their users to be created by any software developer.

Using Semantic Web technologies coupled with advanced indexing and fast searching, any type of unstructured or semi-structured data can be managed by the Talis Platform and made available to share, remix and reuse. Developers have access to a wide range of open web services that use standard protocols and formats to dramatically reduce the complexity and cost of application development.

Talis are already applying the Talis Platform successfully in the library sector by providing the foundations for applications and services. However, the Talis Platform is domain-agnostic, capable of supporting applications in any field requiring strong information analysis and management capabilities."

Talis

Both Red Herring and Time Warner are in trouble.With Red Herring receiving an eviction notice and Business 2.0 also seeing ad pages drop over 20%.

Its cheaper to run blogs and to look at sites like TechCrunch and Valleywag.With a few laptops and a web server these type of sites are more or less, moving into an area, that was once dominated by the big name magazines and publications, that depended on the printing presses and full time writers and editors.

The bottom line:A successful blog can simply grab more readers, per employee, than more traditional media.

Picture courtesy of Valleywag

Story courtesy of Forbes

[youtube Xe1TZaElTAs nolink]

Better togther or on your own?Clay Shirky discusses people's passion for technology especially regarding the newly emerged social networking tools.

The future of the Web as seen by its creator

Picture courtesy of Businessweek

Whats next for the Internet?

An interesting new model is developing for sharing Web pages and searches. This is the concept of "tagging" Web pages for sharing. A number of Web sites such as del.icio.us and stumbleupon.com have appeared that provide this service. Any member of one of these services can "tag" a Web site that they find useful. The Web site now becomes available for browsing a directory of "tagged" sites searches, or for "random access" to such sites.

The next wave

Collaborative tagging with review works for searching and browsing because of the cooperative nature of the Web community, especially those who would get involved in such a "techie" enterprise. The collaborative tag is an incremental improvement on the Web. Some predict that the next real paradigm shift in the Web is going to arrive with the implementation of the Semantic Web.

What is the Semantic Web, and why is it so important? Let's answer these questions and see how Semantic Web concepts can be useful for organizing medical, scientific, research—or for that matter any—information...

Getting to a Semantic Web on the Internet

"Online advertising in Europe is set to double in both value and volume by 2012, according to a new study.

Research group Forrester has concluded that the value of online ads will rise to $22 billion over the next few years, up from $11 billion last year, and that the market share of online advertising would increase from its current 9% to 18%.

The U.K. is set to see the greatest rise, ahead of Germany and France.“After five years of dipping their toes into the online marketing waters, firms have come to realise that the net is a valuable medium for client acquisition, retention and market expansion,” said the study."

European online ads set to double by 2012

Picture courtesy of Business Analyst

" BarCamp is a technology-focused, ad-hoc gathering of passionate folks who want to share, interact and spread the love around what they spend their days and nights toiling away on.

It is an informal gathering of people from technical and business backgrounds, where information and experiences are exchanged. The event is geared towards sharing knowledge and learning from others and there is a policy of encouraging active participation in all discussions

If you are interested in sponsoring BarCamp Galway, do let us know!

This will go towards tea / coffee, lunch, t-shirts and anything else that is required for the event…

E-mail us at barcampgalway at gmail dot com"

Via Cloudlands

"Irish music site Downloadmusic.ie has announced that 10,000 singles have been sold using its SMS payment service in the past four months. According to the music site, which specialises in Irish acts, eight acts have made the Irish top 40 singles chart on the back of selling singles using Download.ie’s SMS service. The site now sells music for over 350 independent Irish artists.

By sending an SMS with a code to a dedicated number, consumers receive a password which allows them to download the song from downloadmusic.ie to their computer, without having to register or use a credit card.

Downloadmusic.ie has also unveiled plans for an independent music festival in Carrick-on-Shannon in Co Leitrim this summer. Indie Summer 2007 will take place from 19-22 July and will feature 28 bands and 14 singer-songwriters."

Via SiliconRepublic

Picture courtesy of newfreedownloads. 

"Social network MySpace has said more than 10m UK users look at its website each month, making it the most popular social network in the country.

The most popular page on MySpace UK is for Aids charity Project RED, with more than 627,000 "friends".

Independent net monitoring firm Nielsen/Net Ratings said MySpace had 6.5m unique UK visitors in May 2007. Nielsen said rivals Bebo had 3.96m unique visitors in the same month, while Facebook had 3.2m. "

Via the BBC

Picture courtesy of James Coops

"Threats to the security of computer systems"

Dr Tomasz R. Surmacz, University of Wroclaw

Venue : Rm 301, Mc Laughlin Building, Nun's Island,Galway,Ireland

Time : Thurs, 2pm. All welcome

Dr Tomasz Surmacz,will give an overview of password based authentication systems, Network attacks (Denial of Service, Ping of Death, etc.) Network sniffing Mail spoofing and mail phishing Viruses, trojan horses, worms and other malware Facts about encryption Usage of security software such as SSH or PGP Firewalls and security aspects of data communication (applicable also to hardware-level communication) over in the McLaughlin Building at Nun's Island in Galway.

Picture courtesy of CBCnews

Communities, a podcast with Sean O' Driscoll found here via Paul Dunay's blog.

"Irish ICT firms are missing out on enormous revenue potential from exports to Japan, Enterprise Ireland’s CEO Frank Ryan said yesterday. The value of Irish exports to Japan is just 2.3pc of our total export value, compared to the worldwide average of 12pc.

“Japan is the second-biggest market in the world and is currently enjoying its longest economic boom. The value of our exports to Japan was just 2.3pc of total exports in 2006, where the accepted figure as a percentage of trade worldwide is 12pc. Irish global companies simply cannot afford to ignore this market of 127 million people,” Ryan said at ‘Japan – Take a Closer Look’, a joint Enterprise Ireland and IBEC conference in Dublin.

ICT, medical devices, financial services and food and drink are sectors that could prove lucrative for Irish exporters to Japan, he remarked."

Via Siliconrepublic

"Want to connect with other professionals in the Innovation space? Using this free service you can; setup your profile, post files and share information, set-up groups of like minded peers, set-up meetings, send memo's, run, invite and manage delegates from the comfort of your browser! Best of all its FREE and you can also search for and connect with people in other associated online networks hosted by the investnet software platform."

Investnet.ie

John Breslin gave a talk at Barcamp Belfast on Semantic Web 2.0 recently found here.

The Semantic Web Challenge

The Semantic Web Challenge 2007 is organized in conjunction with the Sixth International Semantic Web Conference, which will take place November 11-15, 2007, in Busan, Korea.

The central idea of the Semantic Web is to extend the current human-readable web by encoding some of the semantics of resources in a machine-processable form. Moving beyond syntax opens the door to more advanced applications and functionality on the Web. Computers will be better able to search, process, integrate and present the content of these resources in a meaningful, intelligent manner.

The core technological building blocks are now in place and widely available: ontology languages, flexible storage and querying facilities, reasoning engines, etc. Standards and guidelines for best practice are being formulated and disseminated by the W3C.

The Semantic Web Challenge offers participants the chance to show the best of the Semantic Web. The Challenge thus serves several purposes:

• Helps us illustrate to society what the Semantic Web can provide
• Gives researchers an opportunity to showcase their work and compare it to others
• Stimulates current research to a higher final goal by showing the state-of-the-art every year

"The Annotation CReatiON for Your Media (ACRONYM) prototype is a system that suggests probable identities for subjects depicted in photographs. Instead of using face recognition techniques the system leverages context information automatically available at the scene of the photo such as creation time, location and any wireless devices nearby at creation time. This information is then used in combination with associated information available on the Web.

The system exploits a combination of Ambient Intelligence and Semantic Web technologies including Bluetooth, Global Positioning System (GPS), Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web services and Online Social Networks to lookup or create human-readable metadata from the machine-readable metadata recorded in the photo. Based on the GPS location, creation time and nearby Bluetooth devices, the system provides suggestions to the user during photo annotation.

 The photo being annotated is displayed (centre) along with suggested candidates (far left) and those chosen by the user as correct subjects (2nd from left). The user can choose the photo to annotate using the address bar (top).

The tool uses an algorithm to provide ranked suggestions to the user on who might be in the photo based on who was known to be in proximity to the GPS coordinates at creation time, who those people know and who was detected as being present via their Bluetooth device, amongst other related factors. The user can then select which of the suggestions are correct, annotating those people as subjects in the photo. This process of tagging photos with context information and then providing users with a photo annotation tool accelerates the photo annotation process dramatically. This in turn aids photo search and query for a wide range of query tools that currently trawl through the millions of photos available on the Web."

For more details contact Fergal Monaghan.

Link to larger photo.

"Next versions of JeromeDL, should also feature following components, currently developed by the group projects ran together with Gdansk University of Technology:

• Semantic Query Expansion engine, based on extrapolated user profile, and other context information, will finally make its way to JeromeDL. Its first implementation in Elvis-DL, prececessor of JeromeDL, became absolute once we made a high-sky jump to current JeromeDL 2.0. I cannot wait to see, the “tell me why button” finally in action; with all the data we can now handle in JeromeDL, it is bound to be a success.
• MARC21 and OAI - I hope that we will finally close this chapter of unsuccessful attempts to support these standards. MARC21 was supported by Elvis-DL, but somehow did not make it fully to JeromeDL. OAI-PMH, although said to be implemented by Bugi, never become mature enough
• collaborative photo annotations - well, we can handle photos in JeromeDL, even now; but there is a lot of features I always missed, including photo-specific type handling. If you know ESP game, you should enjoy the asynchronous version of it; I know I will. "

Via the Corrib cluster blog

What is Jerome DL?

From Bill Mc Daniel

"Found Picturetrail recently and it's great. It let's you build small display widgets with your own photos then embed them onto your own websites.For learning, this means access to information, knowledge, training, expertise, advice, and ideas all the time, spashed onthe walls and tables, on the surfaces that surround you.

I think that is the promise of so called surface computing (look back at my old entry on a new theory of surfaces), not these simple photo sharing apps we see in the MS Surface marketing vids.

But the technology is coming along nicely. Microsoft's is intriguing, but Apple's may be better. And we are experimenting with our own here at DERI."

Via Bill McDaniels' Blog.

"I see over at Tom Rafterys blog that The European Web Expo is being held in Berlin this year from the 5th-8th of November.Its expected to attract 5,000 delegates this year.There is a deadline for proposals of July 17th."

Via Semantic Bits

"During my travels and airport delays, I was able to keep up with my e-mail, negotiate my way around the downtown, get tips on the city from an old friend whose number I don’t normally have handy, check the weather conditions in New York and D.C., monitor baseball scores and blogs, listen to an early Neil Young concert and amuse myself with silly YouTube videos and an episode of “Weeds,” all on a single charge before the battery ran down. Now, just about all those things could have been done by devices that are already out on the market. But considering I’d had the iPhone for just a day, and never taken a glance at a manual, it was an impressive introduction. "

The most eagerly anticipated gizmo ever.