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Semantic
Web Company Newsletter July, 2010 EDITORIAL What's the turbo engine to Google? Dear Subscriber ! E voila! Your are reading the first SWC-Newsletter penned by me - Thomas Thurner. From now on I'm in charge for compiling this lines. So if you miss something, or you have suggestions for improvement, drop a line to t.thurner@semantic-web.at.Some weeks ago my colleague Andreas Blumauer said in a webinar on the business perspectives of the Semantic Web, that Semantic Web is something that will spread widely in the coming years, but it will remain "under the hood" (in German: "Motorhaube") of services. Last week's acquisition of Metaweb's Freebase by Google seems to be a milestone in this development. Google uses Semantic Web technologies to improve accuracy and to enable more complex searches. BestBuy.com has also put semantic technologies under their hood. Read more about this in the newsletter. Also to be found here: How RDF and RDFa evolve and what could be a way for this standards to be of use for anyone. And finally it´s summer! So you'll find some links to mp3's and to videos you can enjoy at the beach or in a deck-chair. With best regards, Thomas Thurner
VOICES Paul
Miller talking with Richard Stirling about progress with data.gov.uk
SWC UPDATE I-SEMANTICS 2010: Program Overview avaible and Earlybird registration open till July 31, 2010
This year in September i-Semantics will take place for the 6th time and it will be co-located again with i-Know in Graz/Austria. This year´s program shows that the Semantic Web and semantic technologies in general are increasingly relevant for all kind of industries. Do not forget to get your "Earlybird Registration" for the I-SEMANTICS Conference in Graz from September 1 - 3, 2010. You can expect more than 100 talks and a rich social program there.
SWC UPDATE The
fire went on: Open Government - Graz, 31-08-2010
MARKET SCAN A
piece of the puzzle: The internet of things
MARKET SCAN Why
Semantics, BestBuy.com?
TECHNOLOGY SCAN Dicussion around the hopes and future of RDF triggered by Dan Brickley
TECHNOLOGY SCAN Simplicity
is paramount ... RDFa changes on it's way to the masses
BLOG SCAN Knowledge
for the deck-chair: Videos of Heraklion
BLOG SCAN Is
there a economic impact on Open Government Data?
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Recent
Publications 
Networked Knowledge - Networked Media When
Social Media and the Semantic Web became popular a few years ago it was
a simple co-existence between the two, but in the meantime they have
increasingly melted making it impossible to think of knowledge
technologies without thinking of the Semantic Web.
Save
the date! Kiwi
Release Party
October
14, 2010, KiWi
is a service-oriented platform for building Social Media applications
with functionalities typically required by Social Media applications
like versioning, (semantic) tagging, rich text editing, easy linking,
rating and commenting, as well as advanced "smart" services like
recommendations, intelligent search, a sophisticated social reputation
system, vocabulary management, and rich visualisation. The
Open Source Project will party it's release 1.0. Be part of it!
Event Tip I-Semantics 2010 - 6th International Conference on Semantic Systems
September 1 -3, 2009, 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.
Event Tip Workshop On Linked
September 14 This workshop aims at introducing to the Linked Data Web and discuss the relation between the upcoming Linked Data infrastructures and existing OGC services-based Spatial Data Infrastructures. It's furthermore to better define the data, knowledge representations, reasoning methodologies, and additional tools needed to link locations seamlessly into the Web of Linked Data. Subsequently, with the advent of "Linked Locations" in Linked Data, the gap between the Semantic Web and the Geo Web will begin to narrow.
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In
February 2009 Richard Stirling started his work to officially establish
Europe's biggest Open Government Initiative: data.gov.uk and Europe is
looking to the UK, because their sucess is somehow crucial for getting
other European Governments on the Open Government Data train. Hear an
interview about the first year of official OGD-Policy in the UK. Listen
to the audio recording.
After
having a real enlightening first meetup on the issue in March 14th at
Vienna's Computer Society, the flame has been kept alive. Now people in
Styria take the lead and organize a meetup on Open Government Data. A
good reason to be in Graz on the eve of the i-Semantics.
How
many networked devices and sensors will be on the Internet in the next
few years? Joe Grimm of 'internet evolution' has read Harbor Research's
report on the development of the 'web of things'. These new services
which are based upon the convergence of networks, embedded computing,
control, content, and sensor feedback will strongly interact with
concepts of the Semantic Web. So taking a look at this future is worth
a glance.
Increasing
the visibility of its products and services, with data such as store
name, address, store hours and GEO data being marked up using RDFa is
the primary reason for big company's like BestBuy.com to go the
semantic way. " We are doing that for getting better results at search
engines, and thus getting better visibility and services for the end
consumers market" Jay Myers, Lead Web Development Engineer at
BestBuy.com tells in an interview.
In
July 2010 Amsterdam based Semantic Web Evangelist Dan Brickley triggerd
an intense discussion concerning the necessary further changes for the
RDF efforts to become a success. In his posting "An RDF Wishlist" at
the mailing list of W3C's Linked Open Data-Workinggroup, he stated his
uneasiness with some major deficits of RDF he figured out. Recapitulate
his critic, it's much about the "gappy design" of RDF, the deficits in
the mechanism to manage data within the RDF world comfortable, the
confusing landscape of vocabularies and finally the RDF-enthusiast's
insistence on their own evangelic view onto standards inspite of a
common effort within the users community to bring RDF on the way. Dan
Brickley's criticism encouraged his readers to react with a long thread of
replys, with arguments pro and con. It's a good summer reading to
get into this discussion of status and future of RDF. So read more in
the W3C's Mailinglist's archive.
As
RDF is a complex and production-heavy language, it has struggled to
gain adoption over the past decade. In using RDFa (as a simpler version
of the primary language of the Semantic Web - RDF) in adding metadata
to existing HTML or XHTML web pages, big commercial companies such as
Facebook and BestBuy find their way to the Semantic Web. Especially
Facebook doesn't stick to the original RDFa standard - but rather
developed their own abbreviation. Facebook open standards evangelist
David Recordon's motto "simplicity is paramount" may guide a way for
RDFa to become a more interesting technology for more people consuming
it. 
As
summer is getting hotter, we prefer a more relaxed style this days. So
I suggest you to watch some excellent speeches recorded at sunny Greece
for the Extended Semantic Web Conference 2010 - Heraklion. Lie back an
watch!
Semantic
Web technologies make it possible to publish online tenders,
regulations, documents, procedures and many other raw public data, from
digital maps to pollution measurements, for improving transparency in
government and foster local economical and cultural activities. The
recently started study on the economic effects of such a turn to an
open data governance in Europe is promising. So we get real data about
the impact of this common effort, often driven by the Semantic Web
Community (like it is in Austria too).
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