AKSW recently announced the beta release of RDFaCE-Lite: “RDFaCE-Lite is simplified version of RDFaCE (RDFa Content Editor) and is published as a WordPress plugin. RDFaCE-Lite extends the TinyMCE rich text editor to facilitate the authoring of semantic documents… A demo version of RDFaCE-Lite is available at http://rdface.aksw.org/lite/. To watch a brief screencast of RDFaCE-Lite features, visit here. ” Read more

The Business School of Bern University of Applied Sciences, in collaboration with the AKSW, is looking for two PhD and one Post Doctorate positions in Knowledge Engineering & the Semantic Web: “The positions are primarily based at BUAS (Switzerland) and funded by European FP7 projects and possibly Swiss national research grants. A close collaboration and ca. 4 research visits per year at AKSW research group at Universität Leipzig (Germany) are envisaged for the PhD students to complete their PhD program. We offer the stimulating environment of two research institutes in the fields of Business Informatics, Semantic Web, Ontology Engineering, Linked Data Web, Knowledge Management, Data integration and Service-Oriented Architectures.” Read more

Juan Sequeda reported for SemanticWeb from ISWC 2011 in Bonn, Germany (see his five days of coverage here.) Juan reported on a number of prize winners from the conference including the winner of best paper: AKSW’s DBPedia SPARQL Benchmark – Performance Assessment with Real Queries on Real Data. The paper was written by Mohamed Morsey, Jens Lehmann, Soren Auer, Axel Cyrille, and Ngonga Ngomo. Read more

AKSW is back in the news after announcing “the first version of the Federated knOwledge eXtraction (FOX) framework. FOX integrates and merges the results of frameworks for Named Entity Recognition, Keyword/Keyphrase Extraction and Relation Extraction by using machine learning techniques. By these means, FOX can generate RDF out of natural language with improved accuracy. FOX has been shown to be up to 15% more accurate than other frameworks, including commercial software.” Read more

AKSW has announced the latest release of their project, LIMES, “a link discovery framework for the Web of Data. It implements time-efficient approaches for large-scale link discovery based on the characteristics of metric spaces. It is easily configurable via a web interface. It can also be downloaded as standalone tool for carrying out link discovery locally.” According to the AKSW blog, “We could not resist the pleasure of making the demo of the new release candidate of LIMES (0.5RC1) available for all. LIMES 0.5 comes fitted with a new grammar for complex metric specification and fully novel algorithms.” Read more

The Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web group has announced a new release of LinkedGeoData. According to the announcement, “The aim of the LinkedGeoData (LGD) project is to make the OpenStreetMap (OSM) datasets easily available as RDF. As such the main target audience is the Semantic Web community, however it may turn out to be useful to a much larger audience. Additionally, we are providing interlinking with DBpedia and GeoNames and integration of class labels from translatewiki and icons from the Brian Quinion Icon Collection.” Read more