Group items tagged

See also: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2008Apr/0005.html NaturalOWL is an open-source natural language generation engine written in Java. It produces descriptions of individuals (e.g., items for sale, museum exhibits) and classes (e.g., types of exhibits) in English and Greek from OWL DL ontologies. The ontologies must have been annotated in RDF with linguistic and user modeling resources. We demonstrate a plug-in for Protege that can be used to produce these resources and to generate texts by invoking NaturalOWL. We also demonstrate how NaturalOWL can be used by robotic avatars in Second Life to describe the exhibits of virtual museums. NaturalOWL demonstrates the benefits of Natural Language Generation (NLG) on the Semantic Web. Organizations that need to publish information about objects, such as exhibits or products, can publish OWL ontologies instead of texts. NLG engines, embedded in browsers or Web servers, can then render the ontologies in multiple natural languages, whereas computer programs may access the ontologies directly.

Inspired by Yahoo's Pipes, DERI Web Data Pipes implement a generalization which can also deal with formats such as RDF (RDFa), Microformats and generic XML. DERI Pipes are Open Source Software, ad as such they can be easily extended and applyed in use cases where a local deployment is needed. DERI Pipes provides a rich web GUI where pipes can be graphically edited, debugged and invoked. The execution engine is also available as a standalone JAR, which is ideal for embedded use. DERI Pipes, in general, produce as an output streams of data (e.g. XML, RDF,JSON) that can be used by applications. However, when invoked by a normal browser, they will provide a end user GUI for the user to enter parameter values and browse the results

RPI's Tetherless World Constellation will address this emerging area of "Web Science," focusing on the World Wide Web and it's future use. Faculty in the constellation will explore the research and engineering principles that underlie the Web, will enhance the Web's reach beyond the desktop and laptop computer, and will develop new technologies and languages that expand the capabilities of the Web. We will use powerful scientific and mathematical techniques from many disciplines to explore the modeling of the Web from network- and information- centric views. Our goals will include making the next generation web natural to use while being responsive to the growing variety of policy and social needs, whether in the area of privacy, intellectual property, general compliance, or provenance. The Tetherless World Constellation will design new techniques to explore social, scientific, and legal impacts of the evolving technologies deployed on the Web.

We believe individuals from the general public have a vital role to play in making personal genomes useful. We are recruiting volunteers who are willing to share their genome sequence and many types of personal information with the research community and the general public, so that together we will be better able to advance our understanding of genetic and environmental contributions to human traits and to improve our ability to diagnose, treat, and prevent illness. Learn more about how to participate in the Personal Genome Project.

Individual-intelligence research, from a neurological perspective, describes the cortex as a medium for performing conceptual abstraction and specification. This idea has been used to explain how motor-cortex regions responsible for different behavioral modalities such as writing and speaking can express the same general concept represented in the cortex. For example, the concept of a dog, abstractly represented in the higher-layers of the cortex, can either be written or spoken about depending on the context. Abstract models in the higher-layers propagate activation patterns down the cortical hierarchy to the desired region of the motor-cortex for worldly implementation. In this paper, the individual-intelligence framework is expanded to incorporate collective-intelligence within a hyper-cortical construct. This hyper-cortex is a multi-layered network used to represent abstract collective concepts. This collective-intelligence framework plays an important role in understanding how collective-intelligence systems can be engineered to handle collective problem-solving. To conclude the paper, five common problems in the scientific community are solved using an artificial hyper-cortex generated from digital-library metadata.

To manage information quality (IQ) effectively, one needs to know how IQ changes over time, what causes it to change, and whether the changes can be predicted. In this paper we analyze the structure of IQ change in Wikipedia, an open, collaborative general encyclopedia. We found several patterns in Wikipedia's IQ process trajectories and linked them to article types. Drawing on the results of our analysis, we develop a general model of IQ change that can be used for reasoning about IQ dynamics in many different settings, including traditional databases and information repositories.

In ECOSPACE, the Semantically Interlinked Online Community (SIOC) is used to facilitate CWE interoperability [1, 2]. SIOC provides an ontology for representing rich data from the Social Web in RDF. The SIOC ontology was recently published as a W3C Member Submission, which was submitted by 16 organisations [3]. The SIOC Core ontology defines the main concepts and properties required to describe information from online communities on the Semantic Web. The main terms in the SIOC Core ontology are shown in Figure 1. The basic concepts in SIOC have been chosen to be as generic as possible, thereby enabling many different kinds of user-generated content to be described. Once proprietary CWE data is annotated with the SIOC ontology, it becomes interpretable by other CWEs. Based on this, a CWE Interoperability Architecture has been designed.

Semantic Cloud is the API that powers semantic search engine SenseBot and contextual linking tool for bloggers LinkSensor. The API supports SOAP and REST protocols (HTTP GET). The idea is to empower semantic startups or any ventures that are looking to utilize an affordable high-quality semantic solution to build their applications. Semantic API features include: * extraction of semantic concepts from a page or document; * creating a "semantic cloud" of concepts describing a group of documents; * generating a multi-document summary of a set of pages; * generating an essay on a topic based on a set of documents. Multiple parameters allow the client to control the type and format of results.

This document defines a concise bounded description of a resource in terms of an RDF graph [5], as a general and broadly optimal unit of specific knowledge about that resource to be utilized by, and/or interchanged between, semantic web agents. Given a particular node in a particular RDF graph, a concise bounded description is a subgraph consisting of those statements which together constitute a focused body of knowledge about the resource denoted by that particular node. The precise nature of that subgraph will hopefully become clear given the definition, discussion and example provided below. Optimality is, of course, application dependent and it is not presumed that a concise bounded description is an optimal form of description for every application; however, it is presented herein as a reasonably general and broadly optimal form of description for many applications, and unless otherwise warranted, constitutes a reasonable default response to the request "tell me about this resource".

Keotag lets users search for tags across 14 different sites, from Reddit to Ice Rocket.Keotag will also generate folksonomy tags for a blog post, or submit a bookmark to multiple sites.

Service for the Next Generation Library - A Library 2.0 Perspective by Michael Casey

tagCare lets you to maintain all your tags jointly in one place, which is especially useful if you normally use several of these different platforms. Many users apply a variety of different tags within different platforms - and finally get lost among them. For example, it is hard to keep track of consistent spelling variants (e.g. not using "science_fiction" in one case and "scienceFiction" in the other) or of preferred terms (e.g. not using "bike" in one case and "bicycle" in the other). Some documents may be tagged with the general term "dog", others more specifically with "greyhound" or "border_collie". tagCare will help you to apply some structure to your tagging vocabulary so that you will more easily navigate through vocabulary choices and use tags more consistently. In tagCare, a user can assemble all tags which he has used within different systems and may then create his own vocabulary hierarchy, synonym collections and cross-references to related terms to establish some lightweight form of controlled vocabulary. This process is also called "tag gardening". Edited and structured tags will then be used to browse document collections in other platforms and to directly tag documents out of tagCare. tagCare is still under development, a first demo version will be available soon and more features will then be added step by step. tagCare will first support Flickr, Bibsonomy and del.icio.us.

Perhaps this is a meme worth exploring more generally but I thought others might be interested in my story, partly because it illustrates how funding drives scientists, and partly because it shows how the combination of opportunism and serendipity can make for successful bedfellows.

Built on top of Calais and scalably hosted on Amazon's EC2 service, the new site at SemanticProxy.com enters public beta today, and enables anyone to easily generate rich semantic metadata for pages on the open web, simply by passing the URL to SemanticProxy.

I think that needs to change fundamentally, so that corporations really are in the business of serving all of the factors that help generate wealth-all of the stakeholders, in effect. One way to describe what has to happen, and the way that the situation in the future would be different, would be to describe it as a series of transformations. The first would be a transformation in the market. There would be a real revolution in pricing. Things that are environmentally destructive would be-if they were really destructive-almost out of reach, prohibitively expensive.

"The Institute of the Future will soon be launching what it calls the first massively multiplayer forecast game, billed as The Superstruct Game. According to the game's FAQ, the idea is to 'imagine how we might solve the problems we'll face.' Interestingly, the game itself is meant to be played 'on forums, blogs, videos, wikis, and other familiar online spaces.' From the IFTF website's sneak peak, the game is set in the year 2019, where the Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS) has forecast the possibility of human extinction by the year 2042 as the result of five simultaneous 'super-threats:' Quarantine, which is a result from 'declining health and pandemic disease;' Ravenous, which relates to the global collapse of the world food system; Power Struggle, related to the flux of power 'as nations fight for energy supremacy and the world searches for alternative energy solutions;' Outlaw Planet, covering increased surveillance and loss of liberties; and, lastly, Generation Exile, which covers the massive increase in refugees."

s Richard MacManus recently predicted, in 2008 we'll witness the rise of semantic web services. From the native support for Microformats in Firefox 3, to the New York Times' utilization of rich headers metadata, to this week's release of the Social Graph API by Google, semantics are starting to slip onto the web. The impact is being felt because large companies are really starting to focus on structured information. In the same vein, last week Reuters - an international business and financial news giant - launched an API called Open Calais. The API does a semantic markup on unstructured HTML documents - recognizing people, places, companies, and events. This technology is the next generation of the Clear Forest offering, which Reuters acquired last year. We have profiled Clear Forest on ReadWriteWeb and in this post we will look at what Reuters opened up and why.

Andreas Hotho's talk more specifically addressed the search for methods to identify tags which describe the same concept (or a more specific / a more general concept respectively) within a folksonomy. He suggested two approaches: 1. Applying measures directly to folksonomy statistics, allowing to describe tags as a vector; e.g. co-occurrence frequency and FolkRank could serve as a similarity measure (with these two having a tendency towards high-frequency tags) or a cosine method (which is more likely to produce "siblings") 2. Looking up tags in an external thesaurus/vocabulary (for instance achieving semantic grounding by mapping a tag and its most similar tags with Wordnet Synsets)

Vannevar Bush's 1945 article, "As We May Think," has been much celebrated as a central inspiration for the development of hypertext and the World Wide Web. Less attention, however, has been paid to Bush's motivation for imagining a new generation of information technologies; it was his hope that more powerful tools, by automating the routine aspects of information processing, would leave researchers and other professionals more time for creative thought. But now, more than sixty years later, it seems clear that the opposite has happened, that the use of the new technologies has contributed to an accelerated mode of working and living that leaves us less to think, not more. In this talk I will explore how this state of affairs has come about and what we can do about it.

Protocol buffers are a flexible, efficient, automated mechanism for serializing structured data - think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages. You can even update your data structure without breaking deployed programs that are compiled against the "old" format.