Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

At Jupitermedia’s upcoming LinkedData Planet Conference and Expo, June 17 and 18 in New York, researcher and author Dr. Sören Auer of the University of Pennsylvania will be speaking on the topic of “Emergent Data and Semantics from Social Collaboration.”

Learn how the Semantic Web is changing the way we treat data at the LinkedData Planet Conference. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the W3C, is among the event’s keynote speakers.

Auer, who also leads the research group Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web at the department Business Information Systems (University of Leipzig), has plenty of street cred when it comes to that topic. The founder of the Wikipedia knowledge-extraction project DBpedia, the open-source innovation platform Cofundos.org, and the social Semantic Web toolkit OntoWiki, he is now working on Triplify.org, a project to provide a building block for the “semantification” of Web applications.

Semanticweb.com recently caught up with Auer about his work, past and present.

Semanticweb.com: It’s been noted that tools such as OntoWiki and DBpedia are designed to apply techniques whose goal is to decrease the entrance barrier for project and domain experts to collaborate using semantic technologies. Why does that have to happen?

Auer: Traditional knowledge engineering and ontology authoring tools follow heavyweight methodologies and consequently require significant resources for deployment, training and maintenance. Knowledge management is commonly considered to be important, but often not at the core of an enterprise’s activities, and an activity being rather complementary and collateral to established and structured business workflows. In order to make knowledge management an integral part of everyday business, tools have to be simple-to-install, easy-to-use, and users should sense benefits of using them instantly, and not after days or months work.

Semanticweb.com: How high is that entrance barrier today?

Auer: Many enterprises already use wikis as internal knowledge management tools. Wikis fulfill many of the adaptive knowledge management requirements found frequently in today’s knowledge-based industries. They can be used for arbitrary content and information, they are easy to install, use and maintain. However, wikis have one significant drawback: the information within a wiki cannot be structured beyond conventional text formatting, thus limiting exploration and search to simple keyword searches. The lack of structure in wikis also prevents information from being automatically rearranged and prepared for different audiences.

Semanticweb.com: Is there any evidence — statistical or anecdotal — that those
barriers are being breached?

Auer: Currently, we experience increasing interest in OntoWiki, whose download numbers, for example, were growing from 100 downloads per month to more that 500 within the last year. Also, other similarly oriented tools, such as Semantic MediaWiki or IkeWiki, seem attract a steadily growing user community. In addition, conventional Wikis add more sophisticated functionality for content structuring and knowledge management tools to become more adaptive. However, I think the deployment of semantic-based knowledge management technologies on a large scale is still ahead of us.

Semanticweb.com: How do you expect Ontowiki and DBpedia to evolve over the next few years — for example, billions of “things” in the DBpedia dataset? What might challenge that vision?

Auer: For OntoWiki we plan to increase scalability and specifically adopt the tool to certain application scenarios, such as corporate knowledge management or ontology browsing and authoring for life sciences. For DBpedia we aim at significantly increasing the quality of the dataset by removing synonymous identifiers (currently often found in the datasets) and by integrating it better with both other information sources, such as from the sprouting LinkedDataWeb.

We also plan to couple DBpedia direcly with Wikipedia such that Wikipedia updates show up instantly in DBpedia and inconsistencies and other inaccuracies found in DBpedia are propagated back to the Wikipedia community.

Semanticweb.com: How does Triplify.org also fit into the idea of lowering the
“semantification” barrier?

Auer: Triplify is a small plugin, which equips existing database-driven Web applications with semantic access interfaces such as LinkedData, RDF, and JSON. Triplify empowers users to publish semantics without even switching to another application. It can be used with any relational database backed Web application such as blogs, content management systems or Web shops. We are currently working on making Triplify part of major open source Web applications such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal in order to significantly increase the amount of structured information on the Web and thus overcome the chicken-and-egg problem of the Semantic Web.

Semanticweb.com: Is there any other work you are involved in that also weaves into the mission of lowering the semantic barrier?

Auer: In order to outreach to the large Web developer community and to accelerate the process of the “semantification” of Web applications, we are organizing a Triplification Challenge together with this year’s I-Semantics conference in September in Vienna. The challenge awards attractive prizes (such as a MacBook Air) to promising tools and deployments of semantic and Linked Data technology. The deadline for submissions is June 30th.

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