SWHi Blog - University Library Groningen

Emerging Science of the Internet: Some New Opportunities (Ron Brachman, Yahoo)

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 16:49:33 +0200

This article is a free writing from the last keynote speaker, Ron Brachman, from Yahoo. I write any ideas during the presentation, which reader might find not complete or structured. Anyway.. enjoy this note.

Knowledge Representation (KR) is a very important ingredient for the semantic web movement. And in the Semweb, KR meets the Web. Semweb can be said as "addding logic to the Web."

Ron's thought is that Semantic Web is now transforming the industry. He explained why Yahoo needs the SW, why KR is great, and how we can get profit wildly. However, major web company seem to take different direction.

SWHi Demo and Poster at the ESWC 2007

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 16:45:14 +0200

In the ESWC 2007, I presented a poster and a demo about my work at the Library, in collaboration with Junte Zhang (previous master student) and two supervisors, Gosse Bouma and Henk Ellermann. Lately I was helped by Peter Scholing and Rene v.d. Ark to improve the program.

The paper was published in the LNCS on "The Semantic Web: Research and Application" and can be downloaded here: http://www.eswc2007.org/pdf/eswc07-fahmi.pdf . The poster it self can be downloaded here: ...odur..

From 7 to 9.30 p.m. there are around 10 system descriptions (poster + demo), 17 demos, and 37 posters presented on the Kristal Foyer floor of the Innsbruck Congress. My paper is entitled "SWHi: A Case Study in Information Retrieval,k Inference, and Visualization in the Semantic Web.:

Tutorial on Semantic Digital Library - ESWC 2007

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 16:34:40 +0200

Good bye Old Digital Library: Community-based Collaboration is a MUST

There are three systems presented and demonstrated in a full day tutorial about the Semantic Digital Library (DL), on Sunday, 3rd of June 2007. The three systems are JeromeDL (DERI Galway), Fedora (Cornell University), and BRICK (Univ of Vienna). I followed this tutorial because I want to know the current development and the future vision of the digital library, w.r.t to the semantic web.

The explosion of the involvement of communities into the Internet, for example indicated by the huge number of blogs and blogospheres, have shifted the old paradigm of the digital library. The old digital library are not enough any more, because it is a one way communication, from librarian to users. Library and librarian have information, and users just use them. The future of digital library should allow community of users to give contribution to the system.

Another Experiment: Zeitgeist

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 21:52:05 +0200

Inspired by our Information Visualization mantra--"Unlocking patterns"-- and Google Zeitgeist, this is experiment #3 (see last weeks experiments in my previous post):

This is the Evans Zeitgeist, to see what was on the people's minds in early America, available for specific years and decades from 1640 to 1810
(at the moment only for my limited 2000-record sample dataset)

Clearly, in the 1770s, Revolution was on the people's minds, as this example shows:
http://evans.ub.rug.nl/~peter/test/zeitgeist.php?time=1770&type=decade

Two Experiments: Generation suggestions (similar items) and Timeline / Map views

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 11:54:16 +0200

note: work still in progress

Semantic Suggestion Engine, based on a small test-set of Evans:
"Similar Items": http://evans.ub.rug.nl/~peter/test/?uri=Imprint-41778
Presenting historical data in different ways: Faceted Search / Timeline / Map (Sample Evans search results for "abolition" using the Simile Exhibit framework)
"Unlocking (temporal and geographical) patterns": http://evans.ub.rug.nl/~peter/exhibit/sample_search.htm

Microformats and embedded semantic info in (X)HTML

Fri, 09 Mar 2007 15:50:46 +0100

Just an idea:

If we're going to use (X)HTML as our web interface of our semantic info/ontology, why not augment the (unstructured) HTML-code and give the code some extra meaning?

It's really easy to add some extra code, right, so if it helps, why not?

There are two ways that I came across in the last couple of weeks, Microformats and just by adding RDF, OWL or SHOE code to the HTML source code (like on this page: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hendler: "view source" for the example)

The latter example is one mentioned by Tim Berners Lee himself in his article "The Semantic Web. A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities":

Hello World

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 16:22:21 +0100

Hello world!

Happy New Year! (And Some Interesting Conferences)

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 01:11:10 +0100

I have discovered some interesting conferences that may be interesting for the SWHi project. I have ranked them by deadline of paper submission.

11th International Conference on Electronic Publishing (deadline paper: 10 January 2007)
11th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (deadline paper: 15 March)
6th International Semantic Web Conference (deadline paper: 18 May 2007)

SWHi ontology from RDFS to OWL

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 16:12:30 +0100

I could not find a real walkthrough online for converting RDFS to OWL semi-automatically, so here it is. Easy way to semi-automatically convert RDFS to OWL in 5 steps:

Use Protege to convert the existing RDFS file to OWL. However, Protege fails with the namespaces and prefixes. So the OWL file needs to be edited.
Add the definition of the namespaces and prefixes on top of the OWL file, and save the file.



Overview of the SWHi ontology
Mon, 13 Nov 2006 20:19:58 +0100

This figure gives a comprehensive overview of the SWHi ontology. The only important concept that is missing is the swhi:PlaceOfPublication concept, which is a subconcept of vicodi:Location. However, as Sesame's SeRQL uses inferencing, querying vicodi:Location also retrieves the instances of its subconcepts. For creating queries, this figure is useful, because it depicts all the concepts which have instances, and the relations between these concepts.
For an explanation, please check my thesis, but I think this figure speaks for itself, as it is pretty clear.


My Master's Thesis
Thu, 31 Aug 2006 17:21:45 +0200
My work as an intern at the Digital Library has been described in my Master's thesis. It has been attached to this post. The title of my master's thesis:

Semantic Web: Mapping Metadata is More

Making more use existing metadata from Digital Libary using Semantic Web technologies

Abstract:
The SWHi (Semantic Web for History) project is aimed at integrating, combining, and deducing information on the early American history, based on the Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800 collection, to assist general users or historians in exploring American history by using new technology offered by the Semantic Web.


Timeline presentation
Wed, 30 Aug 2006 10:27:47 +0200
Take a look at the timeline for George Washington. 
Problem:

There are too many items at same year, therefore all of the items cannot be displayed in the provided timeline height.
Its titles are cropped.

Todo:

Solve it :-)


The first implementation of JSF for SWHi
Tue, 29 Aug 2006 12:22:00 +0200
After 1,5 months learning Java, JSF, and AJAX, finally I could deliver an almost-pure-JSF implementation of the SWHi. The search interface allow you to type a name of person and an AJAX scripts will give suggestion containing fullnames matched with your query. After submitting the query, you will get a list of person names with year, and links to their works presented in an ajaxy timeline. A pop-up window containing a short description will be showed when you click a work title. The timeline java scripts is taken from the SIMILE Timeline project. 


Maven error: Cannot find parent
Fri, 14 Jul 2006 16:08:34 +0200
Reference: Maven Getting Started
First time I run Maven with this command:
fahmi@evans:~/workspace/swhi/WebContent$ mvn archetype:create -DgroupId=rug.swhi -DartifactId=swhi -Dpackaging=war

I got the following error:
Downloading: http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/codehaus/plexus/plexus-container-default/1.0-alpha-7/plexus-container-default-1.0-alpha-7.pom
1K downloaded
Downloading: http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/plexus/plexus-containers/1.0.2/plexus-containers-1.0.2.pom
471b downloaded
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------


Eclipse: Committing generated class files
Thu, 13 Jul 2006 14:56:43 +0200
I use Eclipse and Subversion for this project. I can commit the modified java files, but am unable to commit the generated class files. From the package perspective of the Eclipse, I cannot see the WEB-INF/classes directory. Therefore I cannot select and commit the class files manually. 
There is no .svn directories in packages under the WEB-INF/classes directory.
It is true, because:
Which files should NOT be added to CVS?
By comparision, the following files should NEVER be added to CVS: