Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

The Freie Universitaet Berlin recently held a business-plan contest as part of its project to identify potential spin-off companies at the university. Among the projects — which included everything from Web 2.0 start-ups to an innovative lens for easier skin cancer detection — was a Semantic Web effort: Loomp, a Web 3.0 tool that provides content management features for end-user-friendly, cross-media publishing of semantically annotated information. Loomp garnered fourth place.

“The overall vision of Loomp is to create a catalyst for the Web 3.0 as WordPress was for the Web 2.0,” Markus Luczak-Rösch, a graduate research associate at the university and one of the Loomp team members SemanticWeb.com in an email discussion. “With WordPress, a mass of people without technical experience got the opportunity to create articles on the Web in form of hypertext pages. Loomp picks up the idea of an easy-to-install system for Web content publishing with low requirements on the server setup. However, now the content is … a fine-grained and semantically enriched structure which yields better search results and is suitable for multiple purposes on multiple devices or channels.”

Loomp is compatible with LAMP, a solution stack of usually free and open source software used to run dynamic Web sites or servers.

As Luczak-Rösch describes it, in Loomp the author writes down so-called “fragments,” which can appear in various information mashups. The author can compare fragments with paragraphs or images within an article structure (an article is the correspondent of a mashup). While authoring a fragment, the user can select terms or phrases and annotate them with one click on a toolbar. The annotations are defined in configurable RDF vocabularies, and as a result, an XHTML standard output with embedded RDFa is generated.

“Formatting text — bold, italic, or underlined — is no longer necessary, because the power of highlighting important information is transferred to the consumer of those information fragments and mashups, who can define faceted filters when visualizing them (for example, show all names of rivers in this text colored blue and bold),” he says. “All annotations of fragments and mashups are stored in an RDF backend and can also be accessed via an integrated linked data endpoint by humans and machines. Internally, Loomp provides semantic search, so it is possible to navigate along concepts or to find all fragments and mashups that contain specifically queried information or similar ones.”

Luczak-Rösch says this approach conforms with the trend of social networking platforms and microblogging.

“These two use cases of the Web show that the information snippets which the ordinary Web user wants to publish online are rather small and very often bound to workflows or specific purposes — for example, message chats or address books. Moreover, those workflows and purposes are more and more part of the every-day and social life, and raise the need for an integrated access to the information sources and channels,” he says.

Loomp lets the user control all information on his or her own as part of the semantically interlinked Web of data. “The unique selling point is the simplicity of semantic content generation which allows technically inexperienced users to become part of the Web of data,” he says.

Loomp holds possibilities both for business users and consumers, he believes.
For the private user, Loomp can be the artifact that enables the management of continuously available and interoperable information at one personal space.

“And Loomp can act as an open social network as well, as it is possible to link fragments with other resources on the Web using SIOC and FOAF annotations. Thus, the user can handle social networks for all his interests without logging on to several third-party platforms,” he says.

Business world use cases can be found in areas such as knowledge- and content- intense domains — journalism, for example. “Journalists research specific topics on demand and access various information sources for this purpose — e.g. websites, books, related articles, and human informants. Only few journalists use digital devices for this task and even fewer apply information management systems,” Luczak-Rösch says.

“Loomp can help journalists to manage their notes, interview logs, references, addresses, etc. Loomp helps to link an article to its information sources,” he said. “On the side of the publishing houses, editors can use Loomp to revise and edit articles written by journalists. They can add additional annotations to articles and possibly interlink them. Finally, they can choose a publishing channel for the work (e.g. such as a blog, an RSS feed, a wiki, or print) and release them.”

The benefits of Loomp in this context include its semantic search engine, which decreases efforts around finding information that a user has created before. Based on the semantic annotations, the content provider can offer content and target group- specific services, such as providing related information or appropriate advertisements.

“Everyone searches for the killer application that solves all those personal information management issues,” he says. “The information does not need any specific visualization since the most important aspect is that I can find and access it. That Loomp provides multiple content reuse and flexible cross-media (or at least cross-channel) publishing is because this is another big problem for people in knowledge intense domains: Trying not to do the same work twice.” That, he says, separates Loomp from wikis and semantic wikis: “Wikis think in hypertext which is for visualization, semantics are an additional task. Loomp thinks in semantics which is for finding information, visualization can flexibly and individually be added on demand later.”

Currently anyone can try Loomp out online at Loomp.org, but the decision about whether Loomp will be a downloadable open source product or not has not yet been finalized. As part of the business plan the team created, it evaluated potential business models and Luczak-Rösch says he expects one of those will be deployed when the team reaches a stable 1.0 version. The Loomp team is in discussions with some key contacts from German publishing houses to gain feedback about Loomp, and they plan to participate in two more business plan contests.

They’re also working hard on advancing the existing alpha version towards a beta version, and they have developed a technology roadmap that points to including features such as automatic annotation support and multimedia integration by year’s end.

SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !