Archive for Semantic web

StYLiD presented at the ISWC 2008 demo session

I am back from Karlsruhe, Germany after presenting StYLiD at the poster and demo session of ISWC 2008. My paper titled “Consolidating User-defined Concepts with StYLiD” was published in the proceedings CEUR-WS Volume 401. I have also uploaded the paper and the poster.

I prepared some screencast videos to demostrate StYLiD. I will try to post them online soon. Making screencasts proved to be a good idea as the internet connection at the venue was so intermittent 😉

It was a good opportunity for me to attend such an important conference. Prof. Martin Hepp came along and watched my demo in detail and took a picture of the entire poster – an honor for me. He also asked me specific questions and thanks for his comments. He had rightly noted that I have been referring to and citing his works like myOntology and FolksOntology 🙂

There were also other people interested in StYLiD. Luckily my stall was located next to other interesting demos like LENA (a linked data browser) and Thinkbase (a graphical interface to Freebase). However, I could not show my demo in detail to everyone, I realized that it takes time.

I will have more time to explain my work at ASWC 2008, Bangkok where I will present StYLiD as a full research paper.

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Social Web Incubator Group

Social Web Incubator Group

Good to see the Social Web incubator group charter. Great start! Harry Halpin had talked about it when he visited Tokyo and had a meeting with some W3C members here along with prof. Hideaki Takeda and I from NII.  I feel that a group like this can play a very important role in identifying and addressing practical challenges that are still hindering the adoption of open semantic standards in the social web. While movements like Data portability, SIOC and FOAF have been very successful in the Semantic Web world, many issues like privacy, authentication, ownership, security, trust etc should still be addressed if such standards are to be publicly accepted. Otherwise, people feel safe and comfortable within walled data gardens while social web companies prefer to hold their customers and their data.

The mission of the Social Web Incubator Group, part of the Incubator Activity, is to explore the development of open standards for social data portability built on existing W3C standards and standards developed by the community, and to promote these solutions within the W3C.

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StYLiD presented in the Japanese Business Model Society

I got an opportunity to present my paper titled “StYLiD: Structured Information Sharing with User-defined Concepts” in the annual conference of Japanese Business Model Society (Biz-model 2008) held at the university of Tokyo, October 11, 2008. Thanks to assoc. prof. Yutaka Matsuo for organizing the session on “Web technology and business models”. My presentation was special because it was the only presentation in English in the conference :-P. However, the audience seemed to be quite interested and I received some important questions, including some in Japanese that were translated to me in English 🙂

It would be interesting to explore business models or practical applications for StYLiD and receive suggestions from the business community in the future as well. It would be better to serve applications to targeted groups who are really in need rather than trying hard to motivate general people to contribute.

Here are my paper and presentation slides.

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Presenting the social Semantic Web to Nepali Engineers in Japan

Yesterday I presented my paper titled “Information Sharing on the Social Semantic Web” in the Second NEA-JC Workshop on Current and Future Technologies. NEA-JC stands for Nepal Engineers’ Association – Japan Chapter. I made a general introduction to the social web and the Semantic Web, with the general audience from all backgrounds in mind. The paper has been written for non-technical audience. I am glad to see the interest shown by all in this area.

In general people understand what is the social web as there are many example sites many of them are actually using today. However, people find it hard to imagine what the Semantic Web is really like. There are rarely any sites that ordinary people are really using that could be used to cite examples of Semantic Web technologies. People are not satisfied by just understanding the vision and principles of the Semantic Web. People want to see the Semantic Web but its still hard to show to non-technical people.

I hope in the near future we will also have enough Semantic Web sites, just like the social or Web 2.0 sites today, so that people really see, understand and benefit from the Semantic Web. I feel that day will come soon with the social Semantic web, rather than pure Semantic Web technologies only. The social Semantic Web can be as common as the social web today if the social web community and the Semantic Web community work in cooperation.

Below are the links for the PDF and presentation slides.

paper

slides

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Back from the Linked Data Planet

I am just back from the Linked Data Planet. Flying all the way from Tokyo, New York seemed to be as far as another planet for me. It was a great opportunity to be in that planet, thanks to the Semantic Web Company for providing me this opportunity by selecting me in the Linked Data Vision competition. I had the honor of meeting Andreas Blumauer, CEO of the Semantic Web Company and having a talk with him. He also talked about StYLiD and offered me some good suggestions.

The Linked Data Planet was really the place to be for the Semantic Web people that time. I had the opportunity to listen to great keynote speakers including Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Kingsley Idehen, Ian Davis, Atanas Kiryakov and Anant Jhingran. I also had an opportunity to talk to Michael Bergman, CEO of Zitgist. I am a frequent reader of his AI3 blog. I also talked with people from Calais and watched a demo from TopQuadrant. Other exhibitors included OpenLink Software, Inc., Franz Inc. (AllegroGraph), Ontotext Lab and others. It seems that interest is growing in the business community about the Semantic Web and Linked Data.

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Freebase: Dispelling The Skepticism – ReadWriteWeb

Freebase: Dispelling The Skepticism – ReadWriteWeb

Freebase is definitely a nice and powerful application. It is different from Wikipedia though it is based on wikis because it maintains structured data. However, the Freebase interface seems to be quite overwhelming for the casual users. Wikipedia looks rather simple and easy to use. StYLiD is also based on similar idea as Freebase – enabling the users to create structured data. However, StYLiD is a lightweight application towards structured information sharing and not at all intended to be another world’s database (surely I cannot handle that). StYLiD is more like a blog for dynamic information sharing rather than a wiki. Moreover, StYLiD tries to consolidate multiple definitions by different users for the same type and produce richer and evolving conceptualizations. Freebase is cool and it will be interesting to see how people structure information. I am also trying to analyze user-defined types in Freebase and how they can be combined. Thanks to the Freebase API 😉

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StYLiD wins with the vision of a future where ordinary people publish structured data

The Semantic Puzzle | And the winner is: The vision of a future where ordinary people publish structured data

Good news 🙂 The vision of StYLiD was selected as the winner in the Linked Data Vision competition organized by the Semantic Web company for the Linked Data Planet conference and expo. The announcement is online with nice appraisal.

I am thankful to the people who appreciated my thoughts and offered me such an honor. I hope this will really help in bringing my ideas to light, making the StYLiD application widely used by people for their own benefit and joining the global efforts to realize the Giant Global Graph.

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triplify.org : Challenge

triplify.org : Challenge

Wow! The triplification challenges sounds attractive.. Win a MacBook  😉

I hope the linked data web will really grow with tools like Triplify.

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StYLiD: Social Information Sharing with Free Creation of Structured Linked Data

StYLiD: Social Information Sharing with Free Creation of Structured Linked Data

I presented this paper about StYLiD in the Social Web and Knowledge Management Workshop (SWKM 2008), April 22nd, co-located at the 17th World Wide Web Conference WWW2008, Beijing, China. It was a half-day workshop with only 6 selected papers. The session was interesting and very relevant to my area of research.  This was my first time to attend the WWW conference. Quite an honor to be in such a great conference 😉

Here is my paper and here are my slides.

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Dataportability song

Cool song by Danny – about Data Portability!

Enjoyed it 😉

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