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Traditionally, visitors to museums have been left having to choose between finding their way around exhibits on their own or taking a standardized group tour with a guide. In this paper, we describe a context-aware museum tour guide that adjusts its recommendations to the interests and contexts of individual visitors and enables them to selectively share their experience with others. The tour guide is built around an innovative semantic Web framework that minimizes the development and maintenance costs associated with the introduction of new exhibits, new visitor-oriented services and new sources of contextual information. In particular, it features a semantic Web rule reasoning engine that enables visitor-oriented services to identify relevant sources of contextual information and to enforce user-specified privacy preferences about what information they are willing to share with others (e.g. "only members of my group can see my current location", or "only my friends can see how I rate exhibits"). While still in prototype stage, the tour guide's target environment is the National Museum of Natural Science, one of Taiwan's largest museums with over 3 million visitors per year.

This document concerns the management of the output of insight generators, the software agents utilized in the insight generation systems. The solution to managing these reports involves the automatic creation of a repository for all materials generated by various insight generators; this repository allows the user to navigate through this continually growing space of marketing reports, gaining new insights about the relationships between items of interest and adding new insights in the process. The goal of the system is to make all marketing information and insights generated by the man/machine interaction available to the user, so that there is a convergence towards a "conservation of information". To use a geometric metaphor, the goal is to make the user equidistant from all information at all times, as illustrated below.

eLearning is fast, relevant and just-in-time learning grown from the learningrequirements of the new, dynamically changing, distributed business world. The term „Semantic Web" encompasses efforts to build a new WWW architecture that supports content with formal semantics, which enables better possibilities for searching and navigating through the cyberspace. As such, the Semantic Web represents a promising technology for realizing eLearning requirements. This paper presents an approach for implementing the eLearning scenario using Semantic Web technologies. It is primarily based on ontology-based descriptions of content, context and structure of the learning materials and benefits the providing of and accessing to the learning materials.

September 23, 2008 Research, done by MarketCap in cooperation with Aduna, shows that more than 60 percent of companies with over 200 employees, intend to invest in a project that uses semantic technology (Web 3.0) within a year's time. Almost 10 percent already uses semantic technology, or has already defined a semantic technology project. The fact that 60 percent of the companies plan to invest indicates an enormous increase of the use of semantic technology in the coming 12 months. Companies abound in information, but only a tiny amount is used by managers, either because most of the information is not visible or connections are not, or cannot be made. This is the situation mid-2008, but with the rise of semantic technologies this will change drastically in the coming years. More and more information will come to light and it will become easier to judge its usefulness.

"Andreas Blumauer (Semantic Web Company) talked with Brian Donnelly about a new system on the market called "Semantic Discovery System" (SDS), which helps to do sophisticated queries across existing datasets. Also talking why complex scripts or triple stores should not be exposed to the end-users anymore."

Recent developments in Web technologies and using AI techniques to support efforts in making the Web more intelligent and provide higher-level services to its users have opened the door to building the Semantic Web. That fact has a number of important implications for Web-based education, since Web-based education has become a very important branch of educational technology. Classroom independence and platform independence of Web-based education, availability of authoring tools for developing Web-based courseware, cheap and efficient storage and distribution of course materials, hyperlinks to suggested readings, digital libraries, and other sources of references relevant for the course are but a few of a number of clear advantages of Web-based education. However, there are several challenges in improving Web-based education, such as providing for more adaptivity and intelligence. Developments in the Semantic Web, while contributing to the solution to these problems, also raise new issues that must be considered if we are to progress. This paper surveys the basics of the Semantic Web and discusses its importance in future Web-based educational applications.

IBM New semantic information management schemes enable companies to make better use of their information. What exactly is semantics? And how can semantics technology help your development efforts? Juhnyoung Lee, a researcher at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, reviews the basics in order to get you started. More >

At the ACM Hypertext Conference a panel discussed "The Next Big Thing Inc." in the area of hypertext and hypermedia. The Web has been the "Big Thing" during the past 10 years, but its success has also made it very difficult to find the appropriate information in an ocean of over 3 billion pages. Whereas search engines achieve incredible precision, they suffer from the same "one size fits all" approach that characterizes the Web sites they index. The paper defends the position that personalization, and in particular automatic personalization or adaptation, is the key to reach the goal of offering each individual user (or user group) the information they need. During the panel discussion there was debate about whether the user should always have access and control over the entire (hypertextual) information space. There were different views on whether the "right" to all the information is best guaranteed by offering tools that reduce the information space the user perceives so that the user can actually find and reach the information, or by offering unfiltered access to an ocean of information in which everything is available but in which perhaps nothing can be found. We argue in favor of adaptation but at the same time point out flaws in the way adaptive hypermedia has been used until now. The paper then proposes a new, modular adaptive hypermedia architecture that should lead to adaptive Web-based systems as the "Next Big Thing" indeed.

Project10X has just published a new study that charts the next stage of internet evolution - Web 3.0 - and the role semantic technologies in next generation applications and business models. Entitled Semantic Wave 2008 Report: Industry Roadmap to Web 3.0 and Multibillion Dollar Market Opportunities, this study is must reading for investors, technology developers, and enterprises in the public and private sector who want to better understand semantic technologies, the business opportunities they present, and the ways Web 3.0 will change how we use and experience the internet for pleasure and profit. The report is 400+ pages, comprehensive, well illustrated, and written to be readily understood by business and government executives as well as IT professionals. We invite you to download a free 27-page summary of this report at the following link: Semantic Wave 2008 Report: Executive Summary

About the Conference The vision of the Semantic Web is to enhance today's Web by exploiting machine-processable metadata. The explicit representation of the semantics of data, enriched with domain theories (ontologies), will enable a web that provides a qualitatively new level of service. It will weave together a large network of human knowledge and makes this knowledge machine-processable. Various automated services will help the users to achieve their goals by accessing and processing information in machine-understandable form. This network of knowledge systems will ultimately lead to truly intelligent systems, which will be employed for various complex decision-making tasks.

In this paper it is presented our contribution for carrying out adaptive and intelligent Web-based Education Systems (WBES) that take into account the individual student learning requirements, by means of a holistic architecture and Framework for developing WBES. In addition, three basic modules of the proposed WBES are outlined: an Authoring tool, a Semantic Web-based Evaluation, and a Cognitive Maps-based Student Model. As well, it is stated a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) oriented to deploy reusable, accessible, durable and interoperable services. The approach enhances the Learning Technology Standard Architecture, proposed by IEEE-LTSA (Learning Technology System Architecture) [IEEE 1484.1/D9 LTSA (2001). Draft standard for learning technology - learning technology systems architecture (LTSA). New York, USA. URL: http://ieee.ltsc.org/wg1], and the Sharable Content Object Reusable Model (SCORM), claimed by Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) [Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative (2004). URL: http://www.adlnet.org].

Semantic Web Company Newsletter 15 October, 2008 EDITORIAL Towards a Semantic Web Industry VOICES Danny Ayers: "The Semantic Web is the path of least resistance" SWC UPDATE New book available: "Social Semantic Web" First KiWi project milestones achieved SWC sponsors Web of Data Practitioners Days

The "Social Semantic Web" is here - yay! The book of the same name, edited by Andreas Blumauer (right) and Tassilo Pellegrini, is now available in stores. Another contributor from SWC is Matthias Samwald (left), who, together with Holger Stenzhorn, discussed the relevance of the Semantic Web for biomedial research in their article for the book.

Cycorp is a leading provider of semantic technologies that bring a new level of intelligence and common sense reasoning to a wide variety of software applications. The Cyc® software combines an unparalleled common sense ontology and knowledge base with a powerful reasoning engine and natural language interfaces to enable the development of novel knowledge-intensive applications. As a premier knowledge-based technologies research and development company, Cycorp leverages its cutting edge innovations in knowledge representation, machine reasoning, natural language processing, semantic data integration, and information management and search to offer an array of semantic middleware, knowledge-based application development capabilities, and turn-key solutions.

Portal for semantic project news

Thomas K Landauer, Department of Psychology, University of Colorado at Boulder Peter W. Foltz, Department of Psychology, New Mexico State University Darrell Laham, Department of Psychology, University of Colorado at Boulder Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is a theory and method for extracting and representing the contextual-usage meaning of words by statistical computations applied to a large corpus of text (Landauer and Dumais, 1997). The underlying idea is that the aggregate of all the word contexts in which a given word does and does not appear provides a set of mutual constraints that largely determines the similarity of meaning of words and sets of words to each other. The adequacy of LSA's reflection of human knowledge has been established in a variety of ways. For example, its scores overlap those of humans on standard vocabulary and subject matter tests; it mimics human word sorting and category judgments; it simulates word<>word and passage<>word lexical priming data; and, as reported in 3 following articles in this issue, it accurately estimates passage coherence, learnability of passages by individual students, and the quality and quantity of knowledge contained in an essay.

What are the big players doing in semantic search? And which of the startups are challenging them? How does semantic technology change search results? What are the key advantages and new opportunities that semantics provides in both the consumer and business search markets?

"A naïve ontology for concepts of time and space for searching and learning" Introduction. In this paper, we propose a new approach for developing naïve ontology as the basis for optimal information access interfaces for multimedia digital documents intended for novice users. Method. We try to elicit the knowledge structure of domain novices and patterns of its modification in their searching and learning processes by eye-tracker and showing eye-movements in the post-search interviews. Analysis. Recorded interview data were fully transcribed and coded using Atlas.ti and analysed following a bottom-up strategy of the constant-comparative technique. Results. We developed a taxonomy of knowledge modification which includes (1) adding, (2) correcting, (3) limiting, (4) relating, (5) specifying and (6) transforming. Conclusion.The taxonomy may be expanded and elaborated as the project progress and findings are expected to be incorporated into the design of the naïve ontology. The study results provided theoretical implications on knowledge building, methodological implications on data collection using eye-tracker and showing eye-movements in the post-search interviews and useful information on the design of information access interface for novices users.

"The company is Israel-based MindCite, and its semantic-based software lets homeland security agencies and intelligence agencies collect, integrate, research, and analyze diverse types of information, from structured formats like databases and unstructured formats such as text, to solve crimes, crack cases and get alerts. The company's systems are installed in over a dozen countries, though not stateside yet. "

"Mainstream businesses increasingly are taking the semantic web seriously. Consider the U.K. Governments Technology Program's Market Blended Insight (MBI) project. While funded under that program as a three-year applied research project, it includes as part of its consortium the marketing departments of ParcelForce Worldwide, British Gas Business, AXA, Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank (NAGE), 3M and pH Group. Having these partners on board helps ensure that the work it is doing to help companies improve their marketing activities has application in real-world scenarios. "