After a great day yesterday I was eager to to discover what today’s program had to offer.  Unfortunately I had to set off for the airport, where I am now writing this, before the end.  However I caught most of the day and here are my few thoughts and recollections.

Today’s Keynote was in the form of a panel discussing Semantics in the Automotive Industry with Martin [GoodRelations] Hepp, John Kendall Streit of Tribal DDB, William Greenly of AQKA, and François-Paul Servant from Renault.  They discussed their experiences in pioneering the use of Linked Data / Semantic Web technologies and approaches in the automotive domain.
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Semantic Tech & Business Conference Returns to San Francisco

Semantic Tech & Business Conference returns to San Francisco in June! Join us from June 3-7 for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. We're offering a special early rate when you register by February 17. Sign up now!

After December’s episode of the Semantic Link, we asked for your thoughts on both the topics we should cover, and the ways in which you would like to interact with the podcast. You spoke, very clearly asking for an opportunity to pose questions for the team to answer during recordings. This is that opportunity.

February’s episode of the show will be recorded this Friday, 10 February, and we’re joined by a guest with a lot to contribute during our conversation.

There is growing interest in publishing, sharing and using data on the Web. The Semantic Web’s Linked Data effort is clearly one approach to this, but there are others. At Wolfram Alpha, for example, founder Stephen Wolfram suggests that a new Top Level Domain (TLD) for data will make data easier to find on the web. And inside the Wikimedia Foundation (the home of Wikipedia), a new WikiData project is rapidly taking shape.

WikiData project director, Denny Vrandecic, joins us to share his perspectives on these and other approaches to the space.

And now over to all of you. Please use the comments facility below, to share your perspectives on the question, or to submit your comments and questions for Denny and the regular gang to consider. Then tune in the week of 13 February to hear the result!

SMW+ makes it easy for your team to cope with knowledge-intensive processes and to exploit the implicit knowledge locked in unstructured wiki contents.

Karlsruhe, Germany – June 15, 2009 – ontoprise GmbH, the leading provider of industry-proven Semantic Web infrastructure technologies, has released Semantic MediaWiki+ 1.4.4. SMW+ is an open-source semantic wiki, aimed at usage in commercial and corporate environments, allowing you better manage and retrieve wiki contents, compared to conventional enterprise wikis. It provides intuitive means for end-users to collaboratively create, organize and retrieve knowledge in your wiki. By knowledge we mean semantically enriched wiki contents, which can be processed and interpreted by the wiki system and other ontology infrastructures. As a consequence, users are not restricted to simple key word search for knowledge retrieval, but they are able to query and evaluate the wiki’s knowledge base, giving them precisely the information they need. The contained semantics make the wiki context-aware: Thus, a query e.g. for wiki pages tagged with “event”, also yields pages only tagged with “conference”, because the wiki understands that every conference is an event.

The overall functions, enabling the creation, organization and retrieval of semantic data in SMW+, comprise amongst others:

• Toolbars for tagging wiki contents semantically, supporting users e.g. via auto-completion and highlighting
• An ontology browser, allowing you to grasp the semantic data immediately
• A graphical query interface, for easily composing queries to the knowledge base with a few mouse-clicks

These tools provide the basis that your wiki does not become another dump of scattered, unorganized information pieces, but a real knowledge base.

Upon these basic functions, SMW+ provides further features and amenities:

• A WYSIWYG editor for conveniently creating rich texts with embedded media files and semantic queries
• Awareness functions, allowing you not only to track changes on wiki pages, but in the semantic data
• A state-of-the-art search engine, providing search results from full texts (wiki pages and uploaded documents) and the knowledge base on a unified interface
• Permission controls, enabling the protection of wiki contents for users and user groups on different layers (e.g. based on namespaces or single pages)
• Data import component, allowing to integrate data from external systems (e.g. legacy enterprise systems), web services and ‘linked data’ sources on the web
• Semantic-aware forms, for entering recurring structured data, getting annotated semantically on-the-fly
• Various result printers, for enhancing query results visually and creating appealing dash-boards (e.g. pie- and bar-charts, google-maps, event-lines)
• Connectors for triple stores, enabling to query wiki data via SPARQL (from remote) and providing advanced reasoning support (e.g. exploiting user-defined rules)
• A Gardening framework, for maintaining the wiki’s knowledge base via automatic helper tools
• Prime content with a pre-defined ontology, templates and forms providing a base start for teamwork purposes
• Excel Bridge, for querying SMW+ from within Excel and smooth import of the query results into MS Excel spreadsheets
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Discover SMW+, allowing you to blend unstructured content with semantically tagged data, providing a platform for teams covering the whole lifecycle for knowledge management or project management. From the initial start and planning phases with informal workflows, vocabulary building and collection of information, to its termination focussing on post-evaluation and knowledge re-use.

SMW+ can be obtained as pre-packaged, ready-to-use bundle (199 Euro), shipped as Windows installer and as free packages (without prime content) from SourceForge.net. Ontoprise offers commercial support and training. You can also charge us for content and interface customizations and knowledge base building.

SMW+ includes Semantic MediaWiki (developed by Markus Krötzsch and Denny Vrandecic at the University of Karlsruhe) and the halo-Extension which is developed by Ontoprise in the HALO project, a Paul G. Allen initiative which is sponsored by his Seattle-based Vulcan Inc.

For further product information, a demo wiki and comprehensive manuals and tutorials please visit http://wiki.ontoprise.com. 

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About Vulcan Inc.

Vulcan Inc. creates and advances a variety of world-class endeavors and high-impact initiatives that change and improve the way people live, learn, do business and experience the world. Founded in 1986 by investor and philanthropist Paul G. Allen, and under the direction of president and CEO Jody Patton, Vulcan oversees various business and charitable projects including real estate holdings, investments in more than 40 companies, including Charter Communications, DreamWorks Animation SKG, Digeo Broadband, the Seattle Seahawks NFL and Portland Trail Blazers NBA franchises, First & Goal Inc., Vulcan Productions, the Seattle Cinerama theatre, Experience Music Project, the Science Fiction Museum & Hall of Fame, the Allen Institute for Brain Science and the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. For more information about Vulcan, please visit http://www.vulcan.com.

 

About ontoprise GmbH

Ontoprise is the leading independent software vendor for industry-proven Semantic Web infrastructure technologies and products used to support dynamic semantic information integration and information management processes at the enterprise level. With its mature and standards-based products and its know-how ontoprise is delivering a key portion for the upcoming Semantic Web. Ontoprise has developed a comprehensive product suite designed to support the deployment of semantic technologies in the enterprise. Further information can be found on the Internet at www.ontoprise.com.