Update and Semantic Web Austin's next event: Semantic Search in Practice

I should start blogging again! Just a quick update. I am currently a researcher at the Ontology Engineering Group of the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid over the summer. My goal this summer is to start a project on data integration with sensor and stream data, all with semantic web technologies! Therefore, I won't be at any of the events this summer in Austin. However, I will be traveling to SemTech in San Jose (thanks for the free registration!). Nevertheless, I am still organizing events for Semantic Web Austin and fun things are going to happen.

Tonight, we were suppose to have a meetup with Jans Aasman, CEO of Franz and creators of the AllegroGraph triplestore. Unfortunately due to a personal emergency, Jans had to cancel. We hope to reschedule this event for July.

However, June is still going to have an event! I am very please to announce that Peter Mika from Yahoo! Research in Barcelona will be coming to Austin to give a full day hands-on tutorial on "Semantic Search in Practice" . Here is the abstract:

Saturday June 27
MCC Building
3925 W Braker Lane
Austin TX 78759
REGISTER HERE

While current search techniques aim at ever more sophisticated methods for searching over hypertext, the Semantic Web promises to break new boundaries in search by transforming the content itself into a form that is more easily processable by machines.

In this talk we discuss in-depth some of the technologies that can be used to annotate content for machine processing and showcase some of the ways that semantic annotations can be used to improve the search experience for users. Each part will consist of 60 minutes of presentations and 30 minutes of hands on work. This talk is intended for developers and researchers new to the Semantic Web, but also for publishers of Web content (site owners) and SEO specialists interested in preparing content for use by semantic-aware search engines and other applications. We will focus on the Web and formats used on the Web, although similar techniques are applicable to search in other contexts such as enterprise search or desktop search.

Part 1
In the first part of the talk, we describe existing and upcoming formats for embedding metadata inside Web content, including microformats, RDFa, and microdata. We illustrate these formats with practical examples, show some of the tools that can help authoring and give guidance on best practices and point out some of the pitfalls in annotating Web pages, drawing on our experience from working with large web publishers.

Part 2
In the second part, we discuss how semantic annotations are being used to improve the search experience for Web users. We introduce Yahoo's SearchMonkey platform and build a simple SearchMonkey application. We show ways to access the metadata indexed by Yahoo through the use of the BOSS API (Build Your Own Search Service) and the YQL (Yahoo Query Language) service. We also compare Yahoo's SearchMonkey platform to Google's Rich Snippet's effort. We close by discussing some of the open challenges in building semantic search engines on the Web.

Agenda
9:00AM - 12:00AM: Tutorial
12:00PM - 1:00PM: Lunch
1:00PM - 4:00PM: Tutorial
4:30PM - 6:30PM: Networking at North by Northwest

We are really looking forward to this event and hopefully you are too! We have more suprises for the Austin community, so stay tuned!

Semantic Web and Linked Data: what does this all mean

This is a topic that a lot of people are discussing:

http://www.semanticsincorporated.com/2009/02/the-siloed-view-of-the-semantic-web-as-linked-data.html

http://www.web3beat.com/2009/02/the-definitional-challenges-of.html

http://tomheath.com/blog/2009/03/linked-data-web-of-data-semantic-web-wtf

First things first. We are all up to putting names on things and making things even more confusing: Semantic Web, Web of Data, Web 3.0, Giant Global Graph. We all have the same objective: make the web's data more valuable, interoperable and accessible.

We can make smart applications once we have raw data that can be understood and accessed easily by machines.

The W3C has worked on a series of recommendations and technologies: RDF, OWL, SPARQL, RDFa, GRDDL, etc. All in order to fulfill TBL's original Semantic Web vision. In my opinion, a Semantic Web application is one that uses these technologies that have been standardized.

However, this is not the only way! I agree with you. Jinni.com, Pandora.com etc do awesome "smart" stuff with movie and music data respectively. These are definetely semantic applications. However they do not use the specific W3C technologies. So following my definition, they are not Semantic Web applications, only semantic applications.

Linked Data is NOT the Semantic Web. I agree. It is an important outcome of the Semantic Web effort to put the Semantic Web technologies (RDF, OWL, etc) in practice! You can't do "smart stuff" with only linked data. You need to apply more AI techniques. However, when the data is linked, you will be able to provide the Serendipity and Discovery that the Web 3.0 promises (ouch.. not sure if I should say that, however here is my definition of the Web 3.0 http://joshdilworth.com/post/57811660/web-3-0-and-knowability-diagram)

Linked Data Tutorial

Semantic Web Austin is organizing the Linked Data tutorial this Friday and Saturday from 9am to 5pm. The tutorial is exactly the same on each day, so just decide which day suits you better. The tutorial will be delivered by Tom Heath, one of the many researchers and developers of this technology. He is coming in from the UK!

However, the question is... What is Linked Data? Linked Data is about using Web technologies to connect data that is related but stored in different locations. Linked Data techniques are increasingly being used by organizations worldwide to improve the portability, reusability, and interconnectedness of their data. So if you are interested in doing mashups, and want to learn about this new technology, you better come!

More info: http://semanticwebaustin.org/
Register at: http://linkeddataaustin.eventbrite.com/

Linked Data has been the buzz word in the last month. Just last week, Tim Berners-Lee gave a presentation at TED about Linked Data.

The work that BBC Music has launched their site which is a mashup of Musicbrainz and Wikipedia...all linked data! An article about this can be found in Business Week and RWW.

Even the Wall Street Journal has commented on how Linked Data can help solve the problem in Wall Street.

The Harvard Business Review has an article of what are the things people need to know about the Semantic Web.

The Linked Data tutorial is sponsored by ATI of the University of Texas at Austin and also The Guardian newspaper of the UK (yes!! they are sponsoring us!). ATI is providing the venue and food and The Guardian is providing the BEER! We plan to have an "after-party" after the event on each day. Details will be announced on the day of each event.

November Semantic Web Austin Meetup: The Data/Information Integration Aspects of the Semantic Web

Last Semantic Web Austin meetup turned out really well! After the presentation, Roger Nasr told me that he liked the format that I was organizing: presenting other peoples work and slides, and that he wanted to help! Roger attend the JavaOne conference in May and was at Dean Allemang's talk on the Semantic Web. Dean Allemang is the Chief Scientist of TopQuadrant, a company that develops semantic web tools and together with Jim Hendler wrote "Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist: Effective Modelling in RDFS and OWL".

Roger expressed his interest of presenting the data integration aspects of the Semantic Web, inspired by Dean's presentation at JavaOne. Therefore, this Monday, Nov 17, at 6:30pm we will have our next Semantic Web Meetup. It will be at Conjunctured (1309 E. 7th St)

Title: The Data/Information Integration Aspects of the Semantic Web

One aspect of the semantic web that is getting a lot of attention from enterprise IT quarters, is its good fit for tackling the data/information integration issues in that space. In this presentation, Roger will review presentations covering this subject, emphasizing one by Dean Allemang, TopQuadrant's Chief Scientist, earlier this year at JavaOne 2008. Note that Roger's presentation is mostly meant to set the context for a group discussion of these aspects of the semantic web.

Who is Roger Nasr?

Roger started his software career in the mid 1970s, working on operating systems at Digital Equipment Corporation. He later worked on compilers, run time systems, and applications of logic programming-based AI languages. This included a six-year stint at the Austin MCC research consortium, which brought him to Austin in 1985.

Later in his career, Roger got bitten by the startup bug, and hopped around a few companies in that space. In that context, he joined Vignette Corporation, an enterprise content management company, in 1996 as one of its first five founding engineers. In 2002 he retired from Vignette after capping his career there in the role of chief technologist responsible for research projects.

Between 2004 and 2006 he was co-founder and CTO of Content Discovery, Inc, a search technology company that served the litigation digital discovery industry. Roger is currently enjoying retirement, but staying involved by studying and exploring, among others, semantic web technologies and their applications.

See y'all on Monday!

Oct Semantic Web Austin Meetup Summary

Thanks everybody who came out to the Semantic Web Austin meetup. It was held at Conjunctured which was an awesome place to have this meetup. Looking forward to having our future meetups there!

I gave a presentation on Data Portability on the Social Semantic Web. I am no expert on this topic, so I just took the slides of the experts! I want to thank Uldis Bojar and Alexander Passant for letting me use their slides. The slides really say everything that needs to be said, and shows how FOAF and SIOC can solve the Data Portability problem.

But lets be honest. It will never happen this way. And this was the discussion that started at the end of the talk, and that I was of course expecting. What are the insentives for normal users, or big social networks to implement this? Live Journal already does, but so what? This is the famous chicken and egg problem that we have (meaning we as the Semantic Web community): who should start and why? The whole objective of the talk was to let the devlopers and enthusiast know about these existing tools. Chris St. John has already started to experiment with FOAF and XFN, so that is a start.

However, we have to acknowledge that having linked data would be cool! And this will lead me to my next post: Linked Data on the Web of Data -how to do it and -why it is cool!

Cool stuff coming soon!

This is going to be part 1 of several parts. I never had time to blog about our October Semantic Web Austin meetup because I was getting ready for the International Semantic Web Conference where I am right now, in Karlsruhe. Germany.

Tons of things are going on here, so this is my plan: I will try to blog about the meetup first because interesting things came out of that meetup which are now being answered at ISWC. After that post, I will hopefully start blogging every day to offer a short summary of everything that is going on here.

To finish, it seems that the word "ontology" has been transformed to "vocabulary" and "semantic web" is now called "web of data". Are these now official translations that the semantic web community is undertaking?

Hopefully another post tonight, after I get back from drinking german beer and talking about Linked Open Data!

Next Semantic Web Austin meetup: Wed Oct 15

Finally!!!! The next Semantic Web Austin meetup will be this Wednesday October 15 at 6:30pm. It will be at Conjunctured (1309 E. 7th St).

After talking to a lot of people in Austin, I realized that the social media crowd is big! And during these past months, I have personally gotten interested in the social aspect of the Semantic Web, especially data portability. Obviously I am no expert, but I am trying to read and learn about the current Semantic Web technologies that can help solve the data portability problem.

I've decided to title the presentation: "Data Portability on the Social Semantic Web". This presentation is based on another presentation titled "Data Portability with SIOC and FOAF" by Uldis Bojars, Alexandre Passant and John Breslin, highly recognized researchers in the Social Semantic Web community. I will be giving a brief recap on what the Semantic Web is (my personal definition) and explaining what FOAF and SIOC are and how they can help.

I am really excited about our first official meetup. Future meetups will cover other topics presented by others. If everything works out well, our next meeting will about Data Integration with Semantic Web technologies! I'm sure there is going to be a good crowd for that one too!

However, can't wait to see all the interested people this Wednesday!