Anna Leach of the Wall Street Journal reports, “New scientific research must be published for free online, the vice-president of the European Commission said, in a move designed to increase the knowledge pool open to small business and lead to more innovative products. All scientists receiving European Union funding will have to publish their results in an open-access format, Neelie Kroes, the commissioner responsible for Europe’s digital agenda, said Monday in Stockholm.  Ms. Kroes also  launched the global Research Data Alliance — a group committed to pooling and co-ordinating scientific data so it can be shared better.”

Leach continues, “Opening up scientific research is good for small business, said Victor Henning, CEO of British startup Mendeley, which aims to make academic research more connected. He has noticed the demand for access to academic research from small businesses. Read more

2011 Knight News Challenge Winner Lucy Chambers recently wrote, “As a journalist, to understand European Union institutions, policies and commitments, you have to look where the money goes and understand who affects the money flow in the EU. As the influence of Brussels lobbyists grows, it is increasingly important to draw the connections between lobbying, policy-making and funding. The EU publishes information on its spending and also maintains a transparency register. These, however, are difficult for journalists and citizens to use. With OpenSpending, we set out to use the power of technology to catalyze greater government transparency by providing new tools for media and citizens to more easily access government data in searchable, sortable and machine readable formats.” Read more

KISTI (Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information) and MOJ (Ministry of Justice of Korea) have provided a W3C Semantic Web Case Study on an intelligent Legislation Support System (iLaw). The system integrates legislation texts and academic articles from the USA, Japan, the European Union Countries, and Korea using Semantic Web technologies. Using locally developed ontologies, iLaw provides further relationships, shows trends and related hierarchical information connected with a legal term to local government departments; in doing so, iLaw helps legislators to review bills or legal cases in a wider, more comprehensive and international legal framework.

Introduction to the AXIS-CRM and to its implementation

1. The AXIS-Conceptual Reference Model

1.1 Generalities

A new modular and tailorable approach for the semantic modeling of static and dynamic knowledge has been elaborated under the name “AXIS Conceptual Reference Model” (AXIS-CRM). AXIS organizes that modeling as networks of Autonomous Semantic Objects (ASO). In turn, each ASO is expressed as a network of Elementary Semantic Entities (ESE). The ASO wraps the instances and their models to becomes ‘autonomous’. At Elementary Semantic Entity level (simply called ‘Entities’) the modeling uses four leveled constructors: Term; Document; Relation; Profile. The knowledge models and their instances are represented by a collection of Documents (among with the OWL files expressing the models) bundled by a Configuration Management Document (based on RDF). These collections are semantic Entities that can represent any topical subject or object. These Entities are linked through typed Relations. The dynamic aspects (events) and the imports / exports are also managed by dedicated Entities.

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Executive Summary

SeMuSe is an open and collaborative community based project to work on a Semantic Museum vision, and provides a forum for discussion of the future of applied cultural and natural heritage data management. Members of SeMuSe can greatly benefit from advancements made in the Semantic Technology community. The goal of SeMuSe is to help organizations and practitioners to introduce Semantic Technologies and concepts to cultural and natural heritage data management efforts and to capitalize on the results of more than a decade of Semantic Technology research. Emerging technology standards like RDF, RDFS and OWL and domain specific vocabularies such as museumdat and the CIDOC CRM ontology specification are a marriage made in Semantic Technology heaven, allowing to lead semantic cultural and natural heritage data management to its full potential – SeMuSe.

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