Archive for July, 2009

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $362,000 to the Open Annotation Collaboration to “build new digital annotation tools and define and demonstrate a framework for sharing annotations of digital content across the World Wide Web”.

As stated on the OAC’s Web site: 

Annotating is a pervasive element of scholarly practice for both the humanist and the scientist. It is a method by which scholars organize existing knowledge and facilitate the creation and sharing of new knowledge. It is used by individual scholars when reading as an aid to memory, to add commentary, and to classify. It can facilitate shared editing, scholarly collaboration, and pedagogy. Over time annotations can have scholarly value in their own right. Yet scholars remain dissatisfied with the options available for annotating digital resources. Scholars wanting to annotate have to learn different annotation clients for different content repositories, have no easy way to integrate annotations made on different systems or created by colleagues using other tools, and are often limited to simplistic and constrained models of annotation. The importance of annotating as a scholarly practice coupled with the real-world limitations of existing practices and tools supporting annotation of digital content has had a retarding effect on the growth of digital scholarship and the level of digital resource use by scholars.

The overarching goals of this project (consisting of multiple phases) are:

• To facilitate the emergence of a Web and Resource-centric interoperable annotation environment that allows leveraging annotations across the boundaries of annotation clients, annotation servers, and content collections. To this end, interoperability specifications will be devised.
• To demonstrate through implementations an interoperable annotation environment enabled by the interoperability specifications in settings characterized by a variety of annotation client/server environments, content collections, and scholarly use cases.
• To seed widespread adoption by deploying robust, production-quality applications conformant with the interoperable annotation environment in ubiquitous and specialized services, tools, and content used by scholars — e.g.: Zotero, AXE, LORE, Co-Annotea, Pliny; JSTOR, AustLit, MONK.

(via: DigitalKoans)

The INSEMTIVES consortium is happy to welcome another exciting invited speaker: Peter Mika, Yahoo! Research (http://research.yahoo.com/Peter_Mika), just confirmed his invited talk at our next project meeting. The meeting is hosted by Telefonica R&D in Madrid in October 2009.

Sebastian Schaffert and “Kiwi”  joined our INSEMTIVES project meeting in Innsbruck. Sebastian presented the project and gave a demo of the tools. Additionally, we had some interesting discussions on the topic of community equity. We are planning to follow up on these discussions with a dedicated collaboration meeting in September.

International Journal of Knowledge Engineering and Data Mining (IJKEDM)

Call For Papers

Special Issue on: “Incentives for Semantic Content Creation”

Guest Editors :

• Elena Simperl and Katharina Siorpaes, University of Innsbruck, Austria
• Denny Vrandecic, Universität Karlsruhe, Germany

https://www.inderscience.com/browse/callpaper.php?callID=1066

“The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.” Berners-Lee et al., The Semantic Web, Scientific American, 2001.”

Soon a decade will have passed since the publication of this article, but the original vision of the Semantic Web still remains to a large extent unrealised. Web-scale automated computer interaction and intelligent information processing technology producing added value for humans still have to become reality. Nevertheless, the Semantic Web community, academia as well as industry, were very active during the past decade and their efforts resulted in a wide range of maturing methodologies, methods, and tools for creating, processing, managing and using semantic content, be that ontologies or RDF data. A critical mass of useful semantic content is, however, missing; one can only find very few, well-maintained and up-to-date domain ontologies on the Web and even though recently growing, the amount of RDF data publicly available is limited compared to the size of the traditional Web.

One reason for this state of affairs is the lack of user involvement in semantic content creation tasks. Only a small number of Web users, typically members of the Semantic Web community, annotate their Web resources semantically or build and publish ontologies. This is a sharp contrast to several Web 2.0 applications, such as Wikipedia, Del.icio.us, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook or LinkedIn, which exhibit great popularity and user involvement and generate huge amounts of data at comparatively low costs and impressively high quality. To encourage large-scale user participation, the Semantic Web community has to look into incentive structures and means to motivate humans to become part of the Semantic Web movement and to contribute their knowledge and time to create useful ontologies and to use these in annotating documents, images, videos or even Web services.

In this special issue, we aim to present approaches that tackle the incentive bottleneck in semantic content creation. In particular we are looking for high quality research papers describing the way humans can be effectively involved in the development of useful ontologies, and the generation of massive amounts of RDF annotations of resources.

Subject Coverage

Topics of interest for the prospective special issue include, but are not limited to:

• Motivations and incentives of several Web 2.0 applications and their application and applicability to the Semantic Web and semantic applications.
• Incentive structures both within enterprise intranets and the open Web and their semantic extensions.
• Games with a purpose for the creation of semantic content, ontologies as well as RDF data.
• Tools and applications exploiting collective intelligence and the “Wisdom of Crowds” in the context of semantic technologies, and their respective incentive structures.
• Community-driven semantic applications.
• Empirical studies on the usage of Web 2.0 principles to encourage large-scale user participation in Semantic Web-related tasks.
• Instruments to derive and estimate the value of semantic technologies from quantitative and qualitative criteria.
• Experience reports and models of the benefits of semantic technologies.

Notes for Intending Authors

Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere

All papers are refereed through a peer review process. A guide for authors, sample copies and other relevant information for submitting papers are available on the Author Guidelines page.

Important Dates

Paper submission: 15 September, 2009 (extended)
Acceptance notification: 31 October, 2009
Camera ready papers due: 1 December, 2009

Editors and Notes

You may send one copy in the form of an MS Word file attached to an e-mail (details in Author Guidelines) containing the subject line “Submission – IJKEDM Special Issue on Incentives for Semantic Content Creation” to the following email address:

incentives_specialissue@sti2.at

with a copy to:

Editorial Office
E-mail: editorial@inderscience.com

Please include in your submission the title of the Special Issue, the title of the Journal and the name of the Guest Editor.

As usual, the Computable and Experimental Economics Lab at the Faculty of Economics with support from the John S. Latsis Public Benefit Foundation is hosting the annual summer school aimed at the top doctoral students in economics and management. This year, one of the guest lecturers will be James Evans from the University of Chicago who is going to deal with a theme which is central to our project:

Friday, July 17th morning: 9-12
Semantic Networks: Novelty, Integration and Application, Coevolution of Social and Semantic Networks
afternoon: 2-3
Information Extraction, Natural Language Processing and Modeling the Dynamics of Semantic Networks

Here is a link to  the program