Back in September 2009, Bob DuCharme highlighted the growth of the Web of Linked Data by comparing versions of Richard Cyganiak’s LOD cloud diagramme. Now I’m sitting in Chris Bizer’s keynote at FIS2010 and just got to see the latest version of this diagramme. The amount of growth looks amazing; just by looking at it you get the impression that things are really happening now. 24.7 billion triples, 436 million links. Also, what I like about the diagramme is how it uses colour to show the different domains the various datasets belong to.

The new version of the LOD cloud will be published later today or tomorrow, but you get a sneak peak here first! ;)

conference, linked data, semanticweb, travel | No Comments »

I just came back from this year’s Web Science Confernce in Raleigh, NC. The idea of the conference – as of Web Science in general – is to give a holistic, multi-disciplinary view on the Web, and while I’m still not sure if and exactly how this will work like in the end (there was a heated discussion between social and computer scientists in the closing panel), I found the event very interesting and a lot of fun. Of course, the best surprise came right at the end, when our paper on Linked Data Usage (I had reported on early stages of this quite a while ago on this blog) was shortlisted as one of three papers for the best paper award! In the end we didn’t win (the prize went to the paper by Metaxas and Mustafaraj: From Obscurity to Prominence in Minutes: Political Speech and Real-Time Search), but just to get the nomination was pretty awesome. I really didn’t expect this, considering that this paper had been in the pipeline for more that a year now, but never quite made it for any submission deadline, and was therefore delayed time and time again. This is great encouragement for continuing our work in this area!

conference, deriblog, linked data, travel, web science | No Comments »

Apparently, the European Semantic Web Conference will be renamed to Extended Semantic Web Conference. That is fantastic news, the original name was so boring. However, renaming to extended seems a lost opportunity to me: the organisers of all major Semantic Web conferences should come together and adopt far more exciting names. Some suggestions came up:

• “International Semantic Web Conference” to “Incredible Semantic Web Conference”
• “Asian Semantic Web Conference” to “Amazing Semantic Web Conference”
• “European Semantic Web Conference” to “Extraordinary Semantic Web Conference”

conference, semanticweb | 4 Comments »

I don’t announce every new addition to the Semantic Web Dog Food Server, but this is a big one: based on the data available from EPrints, we managed to get information about papers and authors for the upcoming WWW2009 in Madrid up as linked data on the dog food server. You can get all the papers, authors and their affiliations, all nicely integrated with the rest of the dog food data from other conferences. You can start start browsing here or get a dump of the data. Enjoy!

conference, deriblog, linked data, semanticweb | No Comments »

Last week we organised a second VoCamp – a grass roots, BarCamp-style workshop for creating Semantic Web vocabularies – in Galway. The setup was much like the first one in Oxford: we as the organisers provided the room and coffee breaks, but otherwise only set a very basic schedule (start-coffee-lunch-coffee-wrapup). The real action was provided by the delegates, who divided up into groups according to interests and worked away. On several occasions throughout the two days we all came together again and every group had the chance to report on their progress, discuss problems with all VoCamp delegates, etc. It was all very relaxed and productive, and with an interesting mix of people. Apart from a good crowd from DERI, there were people from Talis, Yahoo (Peter Mika was luckily able to make it) and Edinburgh. Some people even came from as far as Germany and Florida!

All the different groups and their results can be found on this wiki page, so I’ll just mention a few things here, such as vocabularies for meeting minutes, calls for papers or real estate (not forgetting the very important Ear Worm vocabulary), more work on a SW starter pack, discussions and work on Microformat-RDF mappings and RDFa in Drupal.

Luckily Galway was on its best behaviour – I think it didn’t rain at all during the two days. Looking forward to more VoCamps in other places soon!

conference, deriblog, drupal, rdfa, vocamp | No Comments »

So, ISWC2008 is over and I’m back in Galway. What did I learn this year?

• There are more and more Semantic Web applications out there, and they are getting slicker and more user-friendly every year. The demo and poster session and the Semantic Web challenges clearly showed that. Some highlights were probably paggr (semantic widgets) by Benjamin Nowack and several different apps that make use of mobile technologies (on the iPhone, no less). Incidentally, those two also won the first and second prize in the challenge (Benjamin won this for the second time already, after having won with CONFOTO (seems to be offline at the moment) at ISWC2005.
• Interestingly for me, a lot of people are working on solutions to make SPARQL-querying more accessible to end users. There is our own work on a SPARQL builder component for Konduit, there is the web-based graphical interface NITELIGHT, and some cool SPARQL extensions by Benjamin Nowack (again!). While those were all presented during the poster session, I also talked to some other people in the coffee breaks who told me about their work in this area – this clearly seems to be an area where a lot of developments and improvements are going to surface soon!
• OpenCyc – this is of course not really a new development, but after having attended the tutorial of using OpenCyc for the Semantic Web, I’m starting to think that their ontology and knowledge base are, at the very least, a very interesting point of reference for linked open data. Those guys have worked on their ontologies for a long time, and a lot of reasoning technology is already in place. Therefore, if we hook up our linked data to (Open)Cyc terms, the hope is that we can finally have the inferencing magic that people are dreaming of for the Web.
• And finally, to come to the title of this post. I learned the hard way this year that one cannot put enough effort into advertising one’s work and also oneself. I think Richard and I did a pretty good job with the conference metadata this year, and set up a very nice site with a lot of interesting functionality for developers and conference attendees. Unfortunately, we didn’t spend an equal amount of work on making the people at the conference aware of that, with the result that e.g. way too few knew that there was an option to discuss papers online and make those discussion become part of the metadata about the paper. Also, to my surprise, some people even didn’t seem to know that I had been acting as metadata co-chair at all. Note to self: be more proactive next year.

conference, deriblog, semanticweb, travel | No Comments »