Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren!

Die Forderung nach frei verfügbaren Daten ist nicht neu. Creative Commons und Science Commons machten die Open Data Idee salonfähig. Doch spätestens seit Tim O'Reilly mit „Data is the Next Intel Inside“ die freie Verfügbarkeit von Daten im Web als Paradigma aufstellte [1], geistert die Idee durch die IT-Welt und findet in der rasanten Verbreitung von Mashups ihren konkreten Niederschlag

In dem Community-Projekt DBpedia.org verschmelzen die Ideen von Open Data und Semantic Web. DBpedia extrahiert auf Basis von Semantic Web Standards strukturierte Daten aus dem allseits bekannten Wikipedia und stellt diese am Web zur Weiterverarbeitung zu Verfügung. Derzeit umfasst die DBpedia-Datenbank 1,950,000 Objekte, wie Personen, Orte, Musikalben oder Filme und 103 Millionen RDF-Triples. [2]

Der Mehrwert von Open Data ist offensichtlich: im Falle von Wikipedia werden redaktionelle Prozesse vereinfacht; Inkonsistenzen in der Datenhaltung behoben; komplexe Suchanfragen ermöglicht; und die Syndizierung von Wikipedia-Daten erleichtert. Doch der spannendste Aspekt ist, dass Wikipedia in absehbarer Zeit zum globalen Referenzpunkt für URIs und alle möglichen Arten von Ontologien werden könnte. Damit hätte sich die Vision von Tim Berners Lee erfüllt.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen,

Ihre Semantic Web Company

Semantische Systeme halten in der Medizininformatik Einzug. Dies ist eines der Themen bei der diesjährigen Konferenz "USAB 2007 - Usability & HCI for Medicine and Health Care" am 22. November 2007 in Graz. Organisator Andreas Holzinger stand Tassilo Pellegrini Rede und Antwort zum Wechselspiel zw. der nächsten Generation des medizinischen Informationsmanagements und dem ethischen Umgang mit Patientendaten.

In the craze of Web 2.0 Topic Maps gain momentum as an integration tool for collaboration and community management. Roy Lachica, founder of Hyposoft and provider of the social platform FUZZZY.COM believes in a strong future for Topic Maps in the social software domain. He will also be speaker at the international conference TMRA 2007, which takes place October 10 - 12, 2007 in Leipzig / Germany.

SWC Homepage nun auf Englisch verfügbar

Seit Ende September 2007 ist die Homepage der Semantic Web Company auch auf Englisch verfügbar.

Toolshops an der SWC vermitteln Praxis-Wissen für das Semantic Web

Wie man Ontologien modelliert, Systeme für das SemWeb spezifiziert und schließlich Semantic Web-Technologien für sich nutzbar macht, erfahren Sie in den Toolshops der Semantic Web Company.

Yahoo making big improvements in search

Yahoo is making important improvements to the user interface and the output of its search engine. It will now suggest complete search queries for you as you type. It makes entering queries a lot faster and improves the likelihood that you'll spell your query correctly. Google offers a similar feature in its downloadable add-on, Google Toolbar, but not yet on its Web site.

Media executives struggling to wrap their minds around Web 2.0 may be distressed to know they ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Media 3.0 will turn absolutely upside-down the classic one-to-many model of Media 1.0, replacing it with a many-to-one paradigm in which news, entertainment and advertising are delivered in a uniquely individualized fashion to all but the most technologically recalcitrant consumers...

ad pepper media launches iSense™ - an innovative semantic advertising technology suite

ad pepper media, the international online advertising network, unveiled today iSense™, a revolutionary new semantic advertising technology which delivers ads in true context. iSense represents the next generation of advertising delivery, ensuring that marketers can deliver the right message at the right moment and to the right content, while upholding their reputation and trust with consumers.

Zotero is a tool for storing, retrieving, organizing, and annotating digital documents. It has been available for not quite a year. I started using it about six weeks ago, and am still learning some of the fine points, but feel sufficient enthusiasm about Zotero to recommend it to anyone doing research online. If very much of your work involves material from JSTOR, for example – or if you find it necessary to collect bibliographical references, or to locate Web-based publications that you expect to cite in your own work — then Zotero is worth knowing how to use.

While drivers are accustomed to using traffic reports to assess road conditions, pedestrians who navigate cities are typically left without aid to determine the best route. But researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology using wikis and the Semantic Web look to change the way people map and navigate their cities.

Listen Game is an online, multiplayer game prototype that gets players to label songs with words. Electrical engineers and computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego are working together on a computerized system that will make it easy for people who are not music experts to find the kind of music they want to listen to -" without knowing the names of artists or songs.

Bridging the gap between social tagging and semantic annotation

Semantic annotation enables the development of efficient computational methods for analyzing and interacting with information, thus maximizing its value. With the already substantial and constantly expanding data generation capacity of the life sciences as well as the concomitant increase in the knowledge distributed in scientific articles, new ways to produce semantic annotations of this information are crucial.

Today at DEMOfall 07, Exalead, a global provider of search software for business and the Web, introduced BAAGZ(TM), the first service to bring together semantic search and social networking in a powerful, yet simple, consumer-friendly experience. BAAGZ fosters a collaborative environment where users can connect with others on the Web who have similar interests - whether hobbies, travel, music or news - to share and enhance this content with new ideas, in effect contributing to the expansion of the Semantic Web.

Word is out that Gartner, Inc., the firm that never met a buzzword it didn’t like, has signaled its disapproval at the “Web 3.0? moniker that is sometimes applied to the Semantic Web.