The Second International workshop on Applications of Logic Programming to the Web,the Semantic Web, and Semantic Web services will take place on September the 13th in Porto,Portugal.

More here on the conference.

The latest revision of the Music ontology is finally out.

The World Wide Web Consortium today released Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema (SAWSDL) as a Recommendation. With these attributes, semantic annotations can be added to Web Services Description Language (WSDL) components for use in classifying, discovering, matching, composing and invoking Web services.

Sandy is the cute email assistant that will help you find your stuff from Rael Dornfest.

The Economist has a article on The Semantic Web

"The semantic web is so called because it aspires to make the web readable by machines as well as humans, by adding special tags, technically known as metadata, to its pages. Whereas the web today provides links between documents which humans read and extract meaning from, the semantic web aims to provide computers with the means to extract useful information from data accessible on the internet, be it on web pages, in calendars or inside spreadsheets.

It does so using a trio of new technologies: the Resource Description Framework (RDF), the Web Ontology Language (OWL), and the SPARQL query language. Together, they allow computers to group objects and their features—from prices and measurements to locations and user ratings—into meaningful relationships and hierarchies, by analysing their associated metadata."

Nice reference sheet on the Semantic Web.

The Open Data Movement aims at making data freely available to everyone. There are already various interesting open data sets availiable on the Web. Examples include Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Geonames, MusicBrainz, WordNet, the DBLP bibliography and many more which are published under Creative Commons or Talis licenses.

The goal of the W3C SWEO Linking Open Data community project is to extend the Web with a data commons by publishing various open datasets as RDF on the Web and by setting RDF links between data items from different data sources.

RDF links enable you to navigate from a data item within one data source to related data items within other sources using a Semantic Web browser. RDF links can also be followed by the crawlers of Semantic Web search engines, which may provide sophisticated search and query capabilities over crawled data. As query results are structured data and not just links to HTML pages, they can be used within other applications.

The figure below shows the datasets that have been published and interlinked by the project so far. Collectively, the datasets consist of over two billion RDF triples, which are interlinked by 680,000 RDF links (August 2007).

You can find out more about the project here.

The Reasoning Web summer school,organized by the REWERSE Network of Excellence, is taking place the third time this year in Dresden between September 3-7.This summer school is devoted to educate its attendees in Semantic Web Languages and reasoning techniques on top of those languages towards making the Semantic Web vision real. This said the event is not only devoted to purely theoretical aspects but also aimed to convey practical aspects like emerging application areas for Semantic Web technologies and Semantic Web reasoning in particular. For instance, this year's edition feaatures three blocks of lectures ranging Foundations of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning over Rules and Rule Languages to Applications of Semantic Web Reasoning, see reasoningweb.org/2007/Programme.html for details.In the second block, Paula-Lavinia Pătrânjan from LMU Munich and Axel Polleres  from DERI will give a lecture on "Rule Interchange on the Web" where they will present latest results of the W3C Rule Interchange Format Working Group.

 “What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book-a key part of our planet’s cultural legacy.” — The OpenLibrary Project

Frederick Giasson has gone about and made data in the OpenLibrary Project, available on the Semantic Web, in RDF, by creating his Bibliographic Ontology.

The ontology very nicely describes the Open Library data and also enables you to query the data at the same time.

For more on his ontology you can check out his blog.

Sindice is a simple lookup index for Semantic Web resources. Sindice indexes the Semantic Web and can tell you which sources mention a certain resource URI. Sindice does not answer queries. You can use Sindice from within your application to implement a "find more information" button. You can read the ISWC publication for more information. Sindice is developed by Eyal Oren, Michele Catasta, Renaud Delbru and Giovanni Tummarello. Sindice is a research project at DERI and is supported by Science Foundation Ireland under Grant No. SFI/02/CE1/I131.

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Krystian Samp from the e-learning cluster at DERI has created his ATOM interface.

Tree structures can come in many flavors and literally can be found everywhere. It can be a hierarchy of species, a classification tree of articles, a directory tree with folders and files, a well defined taxonomy like DMOZ, facets and their values for a set of resources, categories and sub-categories for a bunch of photos, a menu with options, etc.However, current interfaces for browsing and exploring trees do not use the full potential of tree structure and do not take into consideration many factors that influence user performance, experience and task completion. Some of traditional approaches, for example, visualize the items using orthogonal shapes and containers usually in form of vertical lists (e.g. MS Windows start menu).

His research presents a novel approach to visualize, navigate, browse, explore and interact with tree structures and graphs. It takes into consideration all mentioned disadvantages and problems of existing solutions to build more efficient, meaningful, natural, and engaging interface. It is based on the metaphor of electrons, atoms and molecules and thus the name Atom Interface. Since it is all about interaction, visualization and user interface it is probably not a bad idea to see it in action.

Barcamp Galway is now less than one month away.

Barcamp Galway 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 all to participate in all discussions.

There are currently over 55 people registered to attend.

If you feel like giving a talk please feel free to subscribe to the wiki.

Its free and will be held at DERI,Galway on the 22nd of September

The following people are involved in its planning.Please feel free to leave an email at barcampgalway at gmail.com

The planners involved are:

1. John Breslin
2. Aidan Finn
3. Conor Hayes

and there is also a blog for the event.

Hak Lae has launched his SCOT ontology and his int.ere.st.

The main objective of int.ere.st is to demonstrate how Semantic Web and Web 2.0 technologies can be combined to provide better metadata creation and sharing support across various online communities.With int.ere.st, you can save, tag and bookmark your own as well as other people’s tag clouds, as represented using the SCOT ontology.

int.ere.st is a social tagging, bookmarking, and sharing service for SCOT ontologies. It enables aggregation of SCOT ontologies from various tagging sites, retrieves the ontologies by person, tag, and object, and shares the ontologies among users and communities.

Functionalities of int.ere.st include:

• Various options for tag searching, such as and (&), or (space), co-occurrence (+), broader (>), and narrower (< )
• User searching
• Resource searching
• Integrating tagged data across communities
• Meta tagging
• Ontology bookmarking
• Sharing metadata produced using the FOAF, SIOC, and SCOT ontologies

The main purpose of int.ere.st is to enhance a sharing and exchanging for tag data across people or various online communities. A number of social bookmarking and tagging sites become popular, and tagging in traditional web sites is getting adopted at a good pace. However, tagging data from these sites without a social exchange is regarded as an individual metadata rather than social one that is generated by both the creator and consumers. Although tagging captures our individual conceptual associations, but tagging system itself do not promote social transmission. It is necessary a social transmission to allow individual tags to be social ones.

To achieve social transmission environments for tagging, we need a comprehensive semantic model to represent tagging activity and a service to encourage its exchange. The  SCOT ontology has been introduced for the former requirement. The latter is realized by int.ere.st. It is a social tagging, bookmarking, and sharing service for SCOT ontologies. With int.ere.st, users can import, search, bookmark, and share their own as well as others' SCOT ontologies.

The SCOT ontology consists of two main features. The First is its social features, that of people who are participating in tagging activities. The second  is semantics which consists of relationships among tags in given domain. We try to represent both information in our ontology model using Tagcloud class and Tag class.Other RDF Vocabularies also get used such as SIOC, SKOS, FOAF etc.

The SCOT(Social Semantic Cloud Of Tags) ontology is to semantically represent the structure and semantics of a collection of tags and to represent social networks among users based on the tags.

Tagging has proven successful ways to create metadata through human collective intelligence. It can be considered not only individual efforts for expressing their interests, but also a starting point for leveraging social networks through collaborative tagging with collecting among the individual tags.

Over on John Breslins' blog, John has posted numerous updates about SIOC and all that is currently happening with it.

SIOC-o-sphere.

DERI Galway hosts international Peer-to-Peer conference

NUI Galway’s Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) is to host the 7th IEEE Peer to Peer Conference which will examine the changes P2P makes to the way we exchange information on the Internet. The conference will be launched at DERI’s centre at the IDA Industrial Park, Dangan on Sunday 2 September 2007.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) technology has come into the limelight recently with applications like Skype and collaboration applications like Groove.

Peer-to-peer has already been use in the design of the original Internet where it has enabled global scalability and robustness against failures.

The next stage in its development will see the application of semantics technologies to P2P technologies that will enable more effective inter-business communication and personal collaboration.

IEEE P2P is the flagship conference gathering the leading international experts both from both academia and industry. It is the pronounced goal of the conference to promote the collaboration in research among academic institutions, government organizations, and companies. This is also reflected in this year's conference program which features tutorials and keynote talks from the world's leading academic and industrial experts.

"P2P2007 is another high-profile event hosted by DERI at NUI Galway which demonstrates the international reputation of research in Ireland,"

says Professor Manfred Hauswirth, Vice Director of DERI Galway and program chair and local organiser of P2P2007.

"This conference will provide an opportunity to demonstrate the state of Irish technology base to experts from around the world, and will give Irish companies access to expertise from abroad. As a helpful side-effect, such high-profile conferences allow local Irish companies and Irish subsidiaries of multi-nationals to take a ‘cost-free’ look at the next generation of experts in the domain."

Prof Hauswirth added that the P2P conference would attract a large number of PhD students and post doctoral level experts in ICT, who would be vetted by leading international experts both in industry and academia.

"Companies attending the conference have the opportunity to see what these highly qualified individuals have to offer. This in turn delivers a desperately needed injection of know how given the dramatically low numbers of Irish students in the ICT area."

The high profile speakers at this year’s conference include; Dr Sandeep K. Singhal, Director Windows Networking, Microsoft Corporation, who will give a tutorial on the Peer-to-Peer and Collaboration Platform used in Microsoft's Windows operating system; Dr Wolfgang Kellerer, Senior Manager Future Networking Lab, NTT DoCoMo Euro-Labs whose keynote speech will address "The Bright Future of P2P: a Telecom Operator's Perspective", and Prof Karl Aberer, director of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research - Mobile Information and Communication Systems who will discuss how P2P can be used to improve search engines.

More information on P2P2007 is available at

www.p2p2007.org

The SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities) specification has been initiated at DERI and co-developed with a wide range of companies, research organisations, and volunteers around the world.SIOC enables the exploitation of knowledge created by communities on the Web in applications such as blogging, message boards and media sharing.SIOC is already widely deployed on the Web, e.g., with WordPress (a widespread blogging application), Drupal (a popular content managementsystem) and phpBB (open source forum software). Several Web 2.0 companies are using SIOC for the exchange and aggregation of community information, enabling them to deliver better services.

"DERI Galway is playing a leading role in creating cutting edge Web technology and standard proposals. SIOC is just another example of how technology developed in Ireland is changing the world and the Web for the better, enabling new opportunities for Irish and European industry.

The investment Ireland has made is starting to pay off" says Prof.Stefan Decker, director of DERI.

Dr. John Breslin, also the co-founder of boards.ie, Ireland's largest online discussion community, and Uldis Bojars are leading the SIOC effort in DERI and are coordinating a world-wide team: "SIOC is crucial for the development of a next generation World Wide Web", says Dr.Breslin.

Uldis Bojars confirms: "It brings the world together".