Archive for February, 2010

HyperTwitter allows users to consolidate or relate pairs of:

• Twitter hashtags,
• user IDs, and
• arbitrary URIs.

by a simple yet powerful syntax. For example, users can easily state that two hashtags mean the same:

#muenchen = #munich

The Hypertwitter application can extract and interpret such special tweets (Twitter messages) for two purposes, namely:

1. To expand your queries / search in Twitter (e.g. turn a query for tweets containing #muenchen into those also containing #munich), and
2. to create an RDF graph of all such statements for usage in other Web applications.

Now, given the millions of Twitter users, this could naturally lead to chaos, so there are two a simple yet effective ways to control which subset of statements should be considered:

1. Just use your own tweets.
2. Create a new public or private Twitter list that contains all users whose tweets you want us to consider. We call the list used for HyperTwitter the “trust list”.

In the simplest form, you will just trust your own statements, so you would use your Twitter ID without a list.

You can find all the information at http://semantictwitter.appspot.com/.

As part of the OntologySummit2010 series of activities, three online questionnaires have been developed and launched to help collect community/expert opinion and insight on the subject matter. Ontology summit conveners and invited experts are invited to provide their input through these online survey forms on/before the deadline of Monday 22-Feb-2010 (end-of-day US Eastern Standard Time, UTC -5:00).

The three questionnaires are designed to:

1. Conduct a survey on present ontology education/training content and quality.
2. Conduct a survey to elicit information about the knowledge and skills ontologists need, or are expected to have, in a variety of working contexts.
3. Conduct a real-time delphi study to elicit expert opinion and shared vision on the future of ontologists, their education and the field of ontology. [*to access this questionnaire for the first time, you will have to register yourself first ... and then, when prompted, enter the study code: "ontology"]

You can find all the information about the surveys here.

1st CALL FOR GAME IDEAS

Co-located with the 7th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2010)
as part of the SemWiki 2010 workshop.

30th May – 3rd June, 2010, Heraklion, Greece
http://www.eswc2010.org/

Deadline for submission: 09.04.2010 (12.00 AM, GMT)

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Awards

Win attractive prizes at the INSEMTIVES Game Idea Challenge!

• 1st Prize: iPhone
• 2nd Prize: iPod Nano
• 3rd Prize: iPod Shuffle

Summary

Useful semantic content cannot be created fully automatically, but motivating people to contribute to this process remains challenging. Our project INSEMTIVES revisits fundamental design issues of semantic-content authoring tools in order to find out which incentives speak to people to become engaged with the Semantic Web, and to determine ways in which such mechanisms can be transferred into technology design. Hiding the technicalities of knowledge engineering, semantic annotation and data integration behind captivating, entertaining games seems to be a promising approach to achieve this goal.

As part of the INSEMTIVES game challenge we are looking for colorful, innovative ideas with a twist for new “games with a purpose”. The purpose, of course, is primarily the creation of useful semantic content, but there are no bounds to your creativity. To get some inspiration, you can have a look at some of our games: OntoPronto and OntoTube, which are about the development and population of an ontology, and the semantic annotation of video content, respectively. Other relevant topics could include the annotation of text, music files, photo collections, but also the interlinking of RDF data sets, their curation, the alignment of data sources, or any other aspect that facilitates the uptake of the Semantic Web.

Format

The ideas should be submitted in PDF format per email to games@sti2.at. The text should not exceed five pages and follow the outline below:

• Overview:

             What Semantic Web-related aspect will this game solve? What will attract people to play this game? What is innovative in your idea?

• Game description:

             Explain the game scenario: Is it a multi-players or a single-player game? Is there any time restriction? What is the target of the game? What makes your game entertaining? How do you prevent cheating?

• Screen mocks or sketches of the game:

              How will your game look like? Describe the game interface and provide some pictures, either as screenshots or as hand-made sketches.

• Semantic content creation:

             Explain how the game creates semantic content, that is, how user inputs are translated into RDF(S), OWL etc.

• Validation:

              Explain how can you test whether the semantic content that the game creates is useful.

Review Process

The submitted game ideas will be reviewed by 3 reviewers according to its novelty, entertainment and Semantic Web-related impact value. The awards ceremony will be held at the European Semantic Web Conference as part of the SemWiki 2010 workshop.

Reviewers

• Pierre Andrews, University of Trento, Italy
• Roberta Cuel, University of Trento, Italy
• Carl Goodman, Pepper’s Ghost Productions, UK
• Elena Simperl, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
• Katharina Siorpaes, STI Innsbruck, Austria
• Germán Toro del Valle, Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo
• Torben Wiedenhöfer, University of Siegen, Germany
•  Ilya Zaihrayeu, University of Trento, Italy
• Marco Zamarian, University of Trento, Italy

Important Dates

• Deadline for submissions: 09.04.2010 (12.00 AM, GMT)
• Notification of the winners: 23.04.2010
• ESWC2010 conference: 30.05 – 03.06.2010
• Awards ceremony: 31.05.2010, co-located with the SemWiki workshop

Contact Information

Katharina Siorpaes
STI Innsbruck, Austria
Email: katharina.siorpaes@sti2.at

I found this very interesting quote today:

“The Vienna-based company punkt. netServices is just about to release a demo version of their PoolParty service, a SKOS-based thesaurus management tool with linked data capabilities. I had the chance to pre-read a white paper and test their service. Here is a brief overview. You can also try a demo.

PoolParty is aiming to be easy to use for people without a strong Semantic Web background or special technical skills. The GUI is entirely web-based and utilizes AJAX so the user can e.g. quickly merge two concepts via drag & drop. An overview over the thesaurus can be gained with a tree or a graph view on the concepts.

PoolParty also helps to semi-automatically add concepts to a thesaurus as it can be used to analyse documents (e.g. web pages or PDF files) relevant to a thesaurus’ domain in order to glean candidate terms.“

You can find the whole article here