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Semantic Web Company Newsletter April 15, 2010 EDITORIAL The Politics of Open Governmental Data Dear Reader! Releasing raw governmental data into the public domain can generate immensive welfare effects. As we have seen from the example of UK based Ordnance Survey the legal reusability of cadastral data leads to an immensive increase in business opportunities for the private sector and tax earnings for the British state. But beside finding new opportunities for commercial exploitation of tax funded data resources, the basic idea behind Open Governmental Data is to enable the creation of value-added, user generated services that empower citizens to generate services they need, make their own interpretations of primary data and finally hold officials accountable for their actions. One such example is the Open Knowledge Foundation's "Where does my money go" that documents the British goverment's spending behaviour over the past years. It is this kind of tools that leverage transparency and lay the basis for an informed and accountable citizenship. The central question though is if governments are willing to support the emergence of such cultural skills. Giving up the control over primary data goes hand in hand with a loss of power. And it is this pill that is hard to swallow for those in power. With best regards, Your Semantic Web Company
VOICES Juan Sequeda: "I believe Linked Data will enable new killer apps that are only possible thanks to Linked Data."
VOICES Sören Auer: "Establishing a network effect around linked data is the most important R&D goal for the near future."
SWC UPDATE 3.000 € prize money for the most promising Linked Data applications
SWC UPDATE The Open Government Data Meetup in Vienna
MARKET SCAN Interview with Wendy Hall on what web science could mean for businesses
MARKET SCAN Yahoo Partners With Healthline
MARKET SCAN AP's news registry gets support from US Department of Justice
TECHNOLOGY SCAN Pellet 2.1: Introducing Terp
TECHNOLOGY SCAN Upcoming RDF Loader in Unclustered Virtuoso loads Uniprot at 279 Ktriples/s!
TECHNOLOGY SCAN Ontology for Media Resource 1.0, API for Media Resource 1.0 Drafts Published
BLOG SCAN Movement on the Big Data Front
BLOG SCAN What Social Media Will Look Like in 2012
BLOG SCAN It's All Semantics: Open Data, Linked Data & The Semantic Web
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Recent
Publications 
Putting People on the Map: Protecting Confidentiality with Linked Social-Spatial Data "Putting People on the Map" finds that several technical approaches for making data available while limiting risk have potential, but none is adequate on its own or in combination. This book offers recommendations for education, training, research, and practice to researchers, professional societies, federal agencies, institutional review boards, and data stewards.
Event Tip Leipzig Semantic Web Day May 5 - 6, 2010, Leipzig / Germany
After the great success of the first Leipziger Semantic Web Tag (LSWT) in 2009 AKSW is organizing another installment of this event on 6th May. In addition to demonstrating the benefits of semantic technologies to enterprises, this year’s LSWT focuses on Open Data in science and E-government. A particular highlight will be the festive announcement of the German chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation.
Event Tip Semantic Technology Conference 2010 Monday, 21. - Friday, 25. June 2010, San Francisco
SemTech 2010 features five days of presentations, panels, tutorials, announcements, new company/product launches, and conversations. It is the only event focused on the commercialization of semantic technologies, bringing the most recognized people, knowledge, thought-leadership and innovation from the semantic community together at one location. The SemTech conference draws together over 1,000 forward-thinking technology and business leaders from around the world, representing the entire marketplace of vendors, developers, researchers, start-ups, investors and customers.
Event Tip I-Semantics 2010 - 6th International Conference on Semantic Systems Wednesday, 01. - Friday, 03. September 2010, Graz/Austria
With more than 400 participants every year I-SEMANTICS is one of the largest conferences in Europe in the field of semantic systems and the Semantic Web. The confernce is held concurrently with the I-KNOW Conference on Knowlede Management and Knowledge Technologies. The combination represents a unique approach bridging the gap between highly affiliated communities and complementary research fields.
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Juan Sequeda, co-chair of the
Leipzig is one of Germany's Semantic Web hotspots. From May 5-6,
2010 the annual 
The New York Times, Wolters Kluwer Germany and Semantic Universe
sponsor the 
Wendy Hall was one of the first computer scientists to investigate
hypermedia and multimedia, and her influence on the business world
looks set to continue as she becomes one of the driving forces behind
a new institute created to study the internet. The Institute of
Web Science has just received £30m of government funding,
announced by Gordon Brown during his recent speech on the importance
of the digital economy. 
Heathline Networks will provide the underlying technology to power
Yahoo's health site. The two companies on Thursday announced a partnership
in which Healthline's proprietary semantic taxonomy will drive the
health-specific search and navigation on the Yahoo site. In addition,
the Web portal agreed to feature Healthline's clinical applications,
including SymptomSearch, TreatmentSearch, and DocSearch. Financial
terms were not disclosed. 
The Associated Press has announced that its plan to create a 'news
registry' has been approved by the US Department of Justice. The
news registry will aim to facilitate the licensing and online distribution
of news content created by the AP, its members and other news creators.
It will be voluntary, and will also assist those who want to legally
re-use content.
Pellet 2.1 introduces Terp, a new syntax for querying OWL ontologies.
Terp is a combination of Turtle and Manchester syntax; it was designed
for maximum legibility and conciseness. With Terp, we have a query
language for domain knowledge, rather than a query language for
the syntax which that domain knowledge is encoded in.
Orri Erling from OpenLink wites: "We recently heard that Oracle
11G loaded RDF faster than we did. Now, we never thought the speed
of loading a database was as important as the speed of query results,
but since this is the sole area where they have reportedly been
tested as faster, we decided it was time loading was addressed.
Indeed, without Oracle to challenge us on query performance, we
would not be half as good as we are. So, spurred on by the Oracular
influence, we did something about our RDF loading."
The W3C Media Annotations Working Group has published Working Drafts
of Ontology for Media Resource 1.0 and API for Media Resource 1.0.
The former document defines the Ontology for Media Resource 1.0,
a core vocabulary to describe media resources on the Web. It is
defined based on a core set of properties which covers basic metadata
to describe media resources. Further it defines syntactic and semantic
level mappings between elements from existing formats.
The enthusiasm for Big Data applications has us putting persistent
data solutions under a microscope these days. It must be noted that
although Big Data applications involve operations with large data
sets, their function can vary from online transaction processing
to analytics to semantics-driven information retrieval. And an application
might be using a distributed key-value store, a row- or column-order
store, a set store, a triples store or some other technology.
It's easy to get caught up in today's trends or even focus on the
next six months. Some of 2009's biggest trends included an increased
emphasis on real-time search and information distribution, while
distribution of marketing content in widgets and other pieces of
portable content that worked across devices and social spaces also
saw its stake rise.
Linked Data is a W3C-backed movement that is all about connecting
data sets across the Web. It can be viewed as a subset of the wider
Semantic Web movement, which is about adding meaning to the Web.
However, there is some confusion in the Semantic Web community about
the crossover. To add to the confusion, there is a term called 'Open
Data' that is being bandied around too. This commonly describes
data that has been uploaded to the Web and is accessible to all,
but isn't necessarily "linked" to other data sets.
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