SemanticMetadata.net

CfP (Reminder): Workshop on Common Sense Knowledge and Goal-Oriented Interfaces

Here is a reminder as the deadline is approaching (2007-11-19): The workshop CSKGOI’08 takes place at the at IUI’08 in January 2008. Topics include, but are not limited to

Knowledge Acquisition:

• Mining of common sense knowledge and goals from different corpora
• Algorithms and techniques for collaborative knowledge acquisition
• Methods for knowledge validation

Knowledge Representation

• Representational theories of commonsense knowledge
• Distributed forms of knowledge representation, such as goal-oriented ontologies and metadata
• Goal-oriented modeling languages and frameworks
• Algorithms for goal-centered reasoning and inference

User Interfaces

• Integrating commonsense knowledge and inference into user interfaces
• Observational and interactive techniques for goal elicitation and recognition
• Evaluation of goal-oriented user interfaces
• Goal-oriented software configuration

Full papers as well as demo descriptions (+ screen shots) are accepted for submission. Submission deadline is Nov. 19th 2007. The full CfP as well as additional information are available on the CSKGOI’08 homepage.  Hope to meet you there …

Report from SWAt 11

Yesterday evening Semantic Web Atelier (SWAt) 11 took place in Graz, Austria. We had one great talk from Martin Höffernig about the architecture and implementation for a semantic validation service for multimedia metadata documents called VAMP. Martin had support from Werner Bailer and Georg Thallinger who also described the broader context of the work in detail.

So what does VAMP do? In short words: This validation service allows to verify the (partial) semantic correctness of an XML (especially MPEG-7) file. Take for example the temporal decomposition of a video file described in XML. You’ve scenes (longer sequences of video frames), which are grouping shots (shorter sequences of video frames). One semantic constraints is that no shot start point (time in the video) can occur before the start point of the parent scene. The same goes for end points: With the parent scene all child shots should end. However in distributed environment one can never be sure. Also automatic extraction routines also fail to detect the exact frame number, where shot boundaries are found. A semantic validation service provides means to detect such semantic errors and that’s what VAMP does.

More information can be found on the VAMP website and I think Martin Höffernig, Werner Bailer and Georg Thallinger are open to questions

[Note this is a cross post from here]

SWAt 11: Call For Participation

This post is actually only a copy of the one on the SWAt blog, which is implicitely announcd by this statement. We’d like to use the SWAt blog to announce and write about events as well as give summaries of things happening and happened.

Original announcement: While there has been a long break (since April ‘07) the next Semantic Web Atelier is already planned and on its way. Werner Bailer, Michael Hausenblas & Martin Höffernig (Joanneum Research) present VAMP - A semantic validation service for MPEG-7 Profiles Description.

The SWAt is scheduled on Oct. 17th 2007 starting at 17.3o in Graz, at the Know-Center. We’d like to invite everyone (people from industry and research as well as lecturers and students) to participate. For further questions either comment this entry or write a mail to swat <at> know-center <dot> at.

How to get there: View map

Report from Semantic Web Atelier (SWAt) X

Yesterday the 10th SWAt event took place. Due to the low number of participants we had a lively discussion about all presented concepts and ideas.

Peter Scheir  (here is his blog from the lecture he gives at the Graz University of Technology, and here his Xing profile) gave us an insight in OpenLaszlo and Flex, which are frameworks for rich internet applications, and compared the tools. He also showed the fancy OpenLaszlo demo and pointed out that in v4 of this framework one could render the output in Flash as well as DHTML (Ajax).

Alexander Stocker (Xing profile) talked about the Corporate Web 2.0. He showed what Web 2.0 can do for business models and where the potential ROI lies. His talk was very interesting from an economic as well as from a social point of view as in the Web 2.0 companies have to put trust in consumers & users.

User Generated Metadata

Following Cow Paths in Bonn I did a presentation on user generated metadata in the Web 2.0. This user generated metadata (short UGM) is the result of (social) interaction in the web. I put up my slides on user generated metadata here: UGM 2006-11-17 small.pdf.

Report from the Semantic Web Atelier

Yesterday the 9th SWAt (Semantic Web Atelier) in Graz took place. As I would write a summary anyway I’m blogging it here and now:We two talks, the first one was from Peter Scheir about the performance of RDF databases and the second one was from Gisela Dösinger about the findings of a survey.

The RDF databases part was in general a lively discussion as there are not many good scientific evaluation results available on the internet. It is true for all databases that were tested (Sesame, Jena, Kowari, …) that inference and reasoning kills performance. Furthermore if the API instead of query languages for operations on the data is used the performance is much better. In general Sesame is faster than Jena, only performance of delete operation is dreadful within Sesame. The Sesame API and the processes inside suffer from missing documentation. Jena on the other side has enough docs and is therefore easier to use. SPARQL support is not very good in both cases. One essence of the discussion was that if it is possible (based on the use case) one should use a database, like for instance MySQL, for storing and retrieving the triples.

Gisela Dösinger presented the results of an interview and online survey done within the Sembase project. Many people from Austria, who are somewhat involved with IT and / or Semantic Web were questioned. One major finding can be summarized as follows: The interview results show for example that the Semantic Web lacks clear definitions of problems, results and benefits as well as best practice examples. More results and corresponding figures are available the presentation slides.

The slides of both presentations will be available here.