New W3C Group to Standardize Relational Database to RDF Mapping

We are please to announce the launch of the W3C RDB2RDF Working Group which is co-chaired by Michael Hausenblas. Richard Cyganiak and Nuno Lopes are also participating to represent DERI.

"W3C announces the new RDB2RDF Working Group, whose mission is to standardize a language for mapping relational data and relational database schemas into RDF and OWL, tentatively called the RDB2RDF Mapping Language, R2RML. From the beginning of the deployment of the Semantic Web there has been increasing interest in mapping relational data to the Semantic Web. This is to allow relational data to be combined with other data on the Web, to link semantics directly to relational data and to aid in enterprise data integration. The creation of this Working Group follows the work of a previous W3C Incubator Group in this area. Read the RDB2RDF Working Group Charter" by Yvan Herman.

One minute inside DERI - DERI and W3C by Michael Hausenblas

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To know more about the DERI's working Groups, visit www.deri.ie/research/working-groups/

Congratulation to Hak Lae Kim on sucessfully defending his thesis at DERI

We are very pleased to announce this week that Hak Lae Kim passed his PhD viva. The committee: Tom Gruber, Phillipe Laublet, John Breslin (Supervisor) and Stefan Decker were impressed with the achievements that Hak-Lae showed. 

His worked is entitled "Leveraging a Semantic Framework for Augmenting Social Tagging Practies in Heterogeneous Content Sharing Services". 

Next week, more information about his work and what is doing now.

knowledgeHives.com - a Web 3.0 Startup - launches Semantic School

Director General for Research at the European Commission visited DERI, NUI Galway on last monday

José Manuel Silva Rodríguez - DG Research - began his tour of Irish Universities at NUI Galway. Speaking at a welcome reception in Galway, he explained the purpose of his visit and his confidence of the future relationship between his office and Ireland's education institutions.

From left to right : Brendan Hawdon (HoU f.f. – Inter-institutional relations and coordination of the Framework programme), Ann-Sofie Ronnlund (assistant to Director General), Mike Turley (CEO DERI), Stefan Decker (Director DERI), José Manuel Silva Rodríguez (DG Research), Siegfried Handschuh (DERI), Brian Wall (Operations Manager, DERI), Manfred Hauswirth (Vice Director DERI) and András Siegler (Director - Transport)

What is Linked Data? by Richard Cyganiak

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visit linkeddata.deri.ie

The Triplification Challenge : The Linking Open Drug Data Task Force won the first prize

The Linking Open Drug Data Task Force of the W3C Health Care and Life Science Interest Group won the first prize (equaling 1000 Euros) at this years Triplification Challenge that was held in Graz, Austria and chaired by Michael Hausenblas. Matthias Samwald from DERIs Health Care and Life Science group was among the winning LODD team. The goal of this work is to make data pharmaceutical data relevant to doctors, pharmaceutical companies and patients better accessible through linked data technologies.
 
You can find more information about the work in the Triplification Challenge submission:Linking Open Drug Data (pdf), Authors: Anja Jentzsch, Jun Zhao, Oktie Hassanzadeh, Kei-Hoi Cheung, Matthias Samwald, Bo Andersson.
 
You can also view a screencast of the talk by Anja Jentzsch. The RDF data produced by the task force are accessible via the HCLS Knowledge Base hosted at DERI.

The third prize, sponsored by DERI, was attributed to a project titled Standardized Multilingual Language Resources for the Web of Data.

Atom Interface - a new navigation interface developed at DERI, NUI Galway by a PhD student - Krystian Samp.

We are pleased to announce that an article about it appears today in the print and online edition of the Irish Times - "Atom hopes to run rings around online search rivals" by Claire O'Connell.

Visit the Atom Interface website: hci.deri.ie/%7Eksamp/atom.mas

News

# DERI will host the first Xcake iPhone Development Meeting on the 17th September 6-8 PM.

# The upcoming Social Data on the Web workshop at ISWC2009 has published the list of accepted papers.

# The report of the Reasoning Web summer school by Nuno Lopes is available here.

# We are glad to announce that Bill Mc Daniel - Senior Researcher &
Stream Leader & Unit Leader AIT - is released from hospital today and going home to recouperate. Get well soon!

Report on the Reasoning Web summer school by Nuno Lopes.

Last week (30/08 - 04/09) was held the 2009 (5th) edition of the Reasoning Web Summer School in Brixen-Bressanone, Italy, hosted by the Free University of Bolzen-Bolzano. This year all the talks were very interesting. Bellow is a short overview of them, presenting the main topics covered:

• Description Logics by Franz Baader
In this tutorial we had a good introduction to Description Logic (DL) presenting the ALC description language along with the necessary definitions. This gave the background to present reasoning in DLs, namely Tabelaux and Automata based approaches. The final part of the tutorial was about reasoning in the "light-weight" DLs EL and FL₀.
• Answer Set Programming: A Primer by Thomas Eiter, Giovambattista Ianni, Thomas Krennwallner
This tutorial consisted of 3 different parts: firstly Thomas Eiter presented all the formalisms and theory behind the Answer Set Programming (ASP) declarative programming paradigm and several extensions such as strong negation and disjunction. Thomas Krennwallner followed by presenting some common methodologies for problem solving using ASP and finally Giovambattista Ianni presented the Semantic Web related extensions of the DLV system.
• Logical foundations of XML and XQuery by Maarten Marx
Maarten Marx presented a good introduction to XPath, making the connection to it's logic roots. A more detailed look into some of the XPath functions was provided, showing practical use-cases for these.
• Foundations of RDF Databases by Claudio Gutierrez, Marcelo Arenas, Jorge Perez
This tutorial, fully presented by Marcelo Arenas, focused on RDF datamodel and RDFS inference rules, complexity and optimization of SPARQL query answering. Also presented was they're approach for querying RDFS with SPARQL: a navigational language (with similar aspects as XPath) for SPARQL called nSPARQL.
• Database Technologies for RDF by Souripriya Das
The lecturer, from Oracle, presented several key concepts on database representations and optimizations for RDF storing with querying in mind. The representation needs to allow for effective storage and querying. Also presented the language they're using for RDF querying, which consists of SQL allowing graph patterns in the WHERE clause. Interesting since it allows to reuse all the well established SQL features.
• Technologies for the Social Semantic Desktop by Siegfried Handschuh, Michael Sintek
Siegfried Handschuh presented an overview of the challenges of building the Semantic Desktop. Started a bit of history (Vannevar Bush, Doug Englebart) and with a very high level description of the vision and proceeded to a more in-depth presentation of Nepomuk, Semanta and the Nepomuk Representational Language.
• Ontologies and Databases by Diego Calvanese
This lecture presented the techniques of reasoning and query answering for DLs (Lite), such as query reformulation (based on the TBox) and taking into account certain assumptions held for relational databases (for instance, unique name).

Hi everyone and welcome to this new academic year after the summer break.

Summer Schools

The Institute always tries to offer to his members a good environment to improve their skills and knowledge. Last year, for instance, a set of fundamental lectures in the core topics of the different DERI’s research units was proposed. And this summer, as usual, some PhD students were granted to participate to some summer schools. All reported it was a very good experience.

The Web Science summer school was held at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York, July 21-28, 2009. 18 students were selected to participate to this summer school. The program included presentations by well-known Web Science researchers, working sessions and hands-on student activities. You can find the details and slides of the students’ projects relating to both the technical and social aspects of the World Wide Web.

The summer school for Multimedia semantics was held at Koblenz,Germany from 23 to 29th of August. There were 30 participants including students from Namibia, Brazil and Chile. The attendees were a good mixture from both multimedia content processing (computer vision and video retrieval) community and semantic web researchers. One of the major focus was to use of collective intelligence and user generated content in bridging the existing semantic gap, and of course connecting to "Linked data cloud" mentioned in almost every talk with the exception of three which were quite geared to content and signal processing.

The 7^th European Summer School of Information Retrieval (ESSIR) was held at Padova, Italy with around 190 attendees. Some well-known presenters attended the conference as Ricardo Baeza-Yates (Yahoo Research) and Stephen Robertson (Microsoft Research). The topics covered are the following: Foundations of Information Retrieval, Indexing Techniques, Formal Models, Evaluation of Information Retrieval Systems, Users and Context, Multimedia and Multilingual Retrieval, Digital Libraries, Semi-structured Data, Machine Learning, Distributed Search, Advertising and Mining on the World Wide Web.

The Reasoning Web summer school was held at Brixen-Bressanone, near  Bozen-Bolzano, Italy from 30 August - 4 September 2009. "This year edition will concentrate on the use of semantic technologies to enhance data access on the web. For this reason, courses will present a range of techniques an formalisms which bridge semantic based and data intensive systems." For more information, visit their website: http://reasoningweb.org/2009/

The Semantic Web: Legal Challenges

The Society for Computers and Law published the article “The Semantic Web: Legal Challenges” by Brian Harley, Philip Nolan, Liam Ó Móráin and Mark Leyden.

They “tease out, from the current state of the emerging technologies, what legal challenges those involved in the development of the Semantic Web and its applications need to be aware of. They also give lawyers who are not familiar with the Semantic Web a glimpse of the potential and pitfalls that these exciting new technologies present.” 

Released of a new version of the Semantic Radar 1.1

That is a Firefox plugin for detecting Semantic Web data (RDFa, FOAF, SIOC, ...) in web pages, developed by Uldis Bojars and Sergio Fernandez. The new version adds compatibility with Firefox 3.5. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3886

Next Weeks Events

DERI will host the first Xcake iPhone Development Meeting on the 17th September 6-8 PM.

This networking event aims to reach out to programmers, designers, and anyone who might be interested in the App Store platform.
The meeting includes a quick tutorial on 
using the iPhone developement tools and build a simple "Hello World" 
application, a presentation on testing on the device 
and submitting to the App Store and following that a Q&A session where Vinny Coyne and a couple of other developers will be
 available to answer questions on the platform, the App Store, help out 
with coding issues and explain certain areas of the SDK in more detail 
if required.

The organizer is Vinny Coyne, developer for EirText, popular free webtext solution for iPhones/iPod Touches.

The MALLOW Workshop

The Mallow workshop on Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms in agent systems in on-line communities (COIN) will be held next week in Torino, co-chaired by Axel Polleres from DERI and Julian Padget from University of Bath.

It features various presentation involving DERI members:

- Alexandre Passant. Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities (Invited talk)

- Uldis Bojars, Alexandre Passant, John Breslin, Stefan Decker. SIOC Project: Semantically Interlinked Online Communities

- Milan Stankovic, Alexandre Passant and Philippe Laublet. Directing Status Messages to their Audience in Online Communities

What is the Linked Data Research Center (LiDRC) by Michael Hausenblas

[youtube I9H2op7C6nU nolink]

visit linkeddata.deri.ie

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