Semantic Winners Focus on Rating, Navigating

By SemanticWeb.com on November 26, 2007 12:43 PM

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

The results are in from the Semantic Web Challenge 2007, an annual event held at the Sixth International Semantic Web Conference in Busan, Korea. The challenge is designed to help illustrate what the semantic web can provide and to help stimulate research in the area. Nearly 20 applications were submitted, and it’s interesting to see their breadth and scope.

Consider the winners of this year’s awards:

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Revyu.com is a web site where you can review and rate things — anything.
Those things that interest everyone (Google), those that interest a
dispersed but select group (the 3rd International Semantic Web User
Interaction Workshop), and those which have relevance mostly to locals (Ryton Organic Gardens in Warwichshire, for instance).

Submitted by KMi, The Open University, it transparently generates machine-readable RDF metadata for the semantic web, based on human user input. According to the paper submission for Revyu.com, the design aim was to maximize the reuse of external data sources and enable less structured human input, with human-oriented mash-ups enabled by creating links to external sources such as DBpedia. The paper states that Revyu.com is an attempt to overcome the fact that user reviews are mostly isolated in particular silos, with no easy way to aggregate all reviews of a particular item in one place.

“Revyu takes a significant and concrete step towards solving this problem by exposing reviews as linked data using standards such as RDF and SPARQL. In doing so, it helps to create an ecosystem of interlinked reviews and ratings on the web, and to bootstrap the semantic web as a whole,” the paper’s authors write.

Potluck is billed as a tool for mixing heterogeneous semantic web data, for use by the non-programming, non-data-modeling average Joe. Submitted by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the tool aims at letting users merge, navigate, visualize, and clean up data using direct visual manipulations, according to the paper presenting the submission.

It aims to deliver “an instant gratification demonstration of the semantic web’s benefits … rather than thinking hard about proper ontologies or writing functional descriptions of data transformation, users visually manipulate the data until it looks right for their purposes.”

CHIP Demonstrator is a project to use semantic technologies to provide personalized access to digital museum collections and real-world museums, using as an example the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. Its components include an artwork recommender, a web-based rating dialog to build a user profile based on semantics-driven recommendations; a tour wizard, which uses the user profile to automatically generate a personalized museum tour for each user, and semi-automatically generate personalized routes through the digital collection at the Rijksmuseum; and a mobile tour that, using results from the tour wizard, lets people use a PDA to navigate and discover artworks in the physical Rijksmuseum environment.

The project was presented by Enhoven University of Technology and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

And let’s not forget the world of multimedia and entertainment. The runners-up were GroupMe!, a semantic and Web 2.0-powered way for creating, tagging and searching groups of multimedia resources, and iFanzy, a personalized TV guide application using the SenSee semantics-based framework for providing personalized access to TV content in a cross-media environment.

Among some of the other entries to catch the eye are MediaWatch on Climate Change and mle: Enhancing the Exploration of Mailing List Archives Through Making Semantics Explicit. The former is an interactive Web portal that combines a portfolio of semantic services with a visual interface that enables users to access a repository of environmental knowledge built from crawls of some 300,000 news articles weekly, and tagging each to create a contextualized information space. The latter is an automated way to process mailing list archives to help executives and policy makers get the public pulse of their company or agency image, by “RDFizing of the implicit metadata in a top-performing and scalable way.”

To find out more about the entries, visit Semantic Web Challenge 2007 at (http://challenge.semanticweb.org/).

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