Archive for November, 2010

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Call for Participation
Social Game Studies at CHI 2011

http://bit.ly/socialgames-chi2011

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“Social games”, defined as games played and distributed on Social Networks, have become a digital gaming phenomenon. The most popular games boast tens of millions of users each month, using simple mechanics to reach a vast audience apparently under-served by traditional digital games. This enormous success raises important questions about game design, interface design, psychology and the social power of online networks.

This one-day workshop will convene academics and practitioners in the HCI community and other fields to share and discuss the state of the art in social games design and research, and how it connects to HCI as a field. Papers and workshop results will be published on socialgamestudies.org, and contributors will be encouraged to participate in the growing community of researchers and practitioners.

We invite you to submit a 2-4 page position paper that reports current work, contextualises social games in existing (HCI) fields, systematizes research approaches and questions, or otherwise relates to social games. Papers will be selected based on relevance and potential contribution to a vivid discussion.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:
* Interfaces for Social Interaction
* Play Practices in Social Games
* Design for “Freemium” models
* Social Games Audiences
* Player Behavior in Social Networks
* Psychology of Social Games
* Social Mechanics in Social Games

Please indicate how many authors will attend the workshop (places are limited). At least one author of each accepted position paper must register for the workshop and for at least one day of the conference. For more information, visit the workshop site at http://socialgamestudies.org/chi2011.

###Organizing Committee###
* Ben Kirman, University of Lincoln
* Staffan Björk, Göteborg University
* Sebastian Deterding, Hamburg University
* Janne Paavilainen, University of Tampere
* Valentina Rao, Utrecht University

###Submission Details###
* Format: 2-4 pages, in ACM CHI Extended Abstracts format
* Submit: by email to chi2011@socialgamestudies.org
* Deadline: 14th January 2011
* Notification: 11th February 2011
* Workshop: 7th or 8th May 2011

Cheers,
Sebastian

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Sebastian Deterding | coding conduct
Mail: sebastian@codingconduct.cc | Twitter: dingstweets
Web: http://codingconduct.cc | Skype: sebastiandeterding
Mobile: +49 151 400 300 44 | Phone: +49 40 450 217 81
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Semantic Web Journal: Call for Special Issue Proposals

http://www.semantic-web-journal.net

Semantic Web research is interdisciplinary in nature. Indeed, progress towards the Semantic Web vision requires the incorporation of fundamental state-of-the-art and future developments from many domains including Computer & Information Science, Cognitive Science, Geographic Information Science, the social sciences, and many more. To establish bridges between these domains, it is thus important to demonstrate what and how they contribute to the Semantic Web vision, and what the Semantic Web can offer in return to these disciplines.

Hence, the Semantic Web Journal calls for Special Issue proposals on topics which (a) are within the topical realm of a neighboring domain but (b) contribute directly or indirectly to Semantic Web research. Research published in such special issues should strengthen the in-depth information exchange between disciplines by providing novel and high-quality contributions and at the same time demonstrate the impact on foundational research questions relevant for Semantic Web. While such manuscripts can be written with a specific audience in mind, the key ideas and contributions should be accessible to the broader Semantic web community.

Proposals for special issues shall be sent to the Editors-in-Chair (contact@semantic-web-journal.net) and contain the following information in a single PDF file:

* Names and affiliations of all guest editors

* Topic of the special issue

* Tentative list of Guest Editorial Board members

* A short description of the topic

* Why the topic is currently of interest

* Why the topic is relevant to this call

* Credentials of the guest editors regarding their research impact and their community standing with respect to the topic

* A draft call for papers, including a suggested time-line

It will be assumed that all proposed guest editors are aware of the journal’s open and transparent review policy described at http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/reviewers#review

Submission deadline: 10th of January, 2011

Best Regards,

Pascal Hitzler.

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Prof. Dr. Pascal Hitzler
Dept. of Computer Science, Wright State University, Dayton, OH
pascal@pascal-hitzler.de http://www.knoesis.org/pascal/
Semantic Web Textbook: http://www.semantic-web-book.org
Semantic Web Journal: http://www.semantic-web-journal.net

Lexvo.org brings information about languages, words, characters, and other human language-related entities to the Linked Data Web and Semantic Web. Lexvo.org adds a new perspective to this Web by exposing how everything in our world is connected in terms of language, e.g. by considering semantic relationships between multilingual labels (like book or New York). Lexvo not only defines global IDs (URIs) for language-related objects, but also ensures that these identifiers are dereferenceable and highly interconnected as well as externally linked to a variety of resources on the Web. Some of the main features up to date:

• Identifiers for terms in specific languages linked to many external resources (WordNet, thesauri, ontologies, etc.). Examples: English ‘school’, Chinese ‘朋友’
• Over 7,000 language identifiers with names in many languages, links to script URIs, geographic region URIs, etc. Examples: Spanish, Afrikaans, Oriya, Taungyo
• Script URIs identify scripts such as the Latin and Cyrillic scripts, Indian Devanagari, or the Korean Hangul system.
• Character URIs based on the Unicode standard, linked to script URIs, with semantic information about CJK characters. Examples: U+5A34, U+0047 (‘G’)
• Also: ISO 3166-1 / UN M.49 geographical regions (example), WordNet 3.0 (example), KangXi radicals (example), etc.

You can find all the information about this initiative at http://www.lexvo.org/ .

Recently, Ontotext produced a proof-of-concept of a system that automatically embeds controlled annotations into the insemtives.eu website as RDFa. Thereby, the project “eats their own dog food” and shows how the annotations, created in Insemtives, can be published.

For those not familiar with RDFa: RDFa is a way to attach semantic machine-readable metadata to XHTML pages. It is the preferred way to expose annotations on the web. For example, Google and Yahoo consume RDFa, if available, to provide richer and more to-the-point snippets search result pages.

A browser with the respective extensions will be able to understand this metadata and present it in a better way than what can only be presented through plain text.

Currently, the metadata exposed on insemtives.eu is the result of automatic annotation – a kind of bootstrapping. To see the annotations, install a RDFa reader in your browser (e.g. for Firefox – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=rdfa) and open the INSEMTIVES website. To only see the embedded RDFa as RDF, use the W3C web distiller – http://www.w3.org/2007/08/pyRdfa/. You can put the actual online page in the distiller – put “http://insemtives.eu/case_studies.html” in “URI of HTML or SVG File”.

From a more technical perspective, the process works like this:
– for each XHTML page in insemtives.eu:
— either the page is an existing resource in a plaform instance
with stored annotations
— or some annotations are created via automatic annotation
– the original XHTML tree is processed; for each annotation, some RDFa
markup is injected in the original XHTML.

This batch process is executed only once – not on every page visit. Injecting RDFa markup without affecting the visual presentation of the page was particularly challenging. Check it out at www.insemtives.eu!

‘Who Knows?‘ (clic on the Facebook logo inside the application to play) is a simple Q&A game in the style of ‘Who wants to be a Millionaire’. The questions are automatically generated from DBpedia content.

The purpose is the evaluation of some heuristics that are used to determine a ranking of facts within a knowledge base such as e.g. DBpedia.

You can find the whole blog entry at http://moresemantic.blogspot.com/2010/11/who-knows-semantic-web-game.html