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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.

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.:

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.

zeit·geist | Pronunciation: 'tsIt-"gIst, 'zIt | Function: noun | Etymology: German, from Zeit (time) + Geist (spirit) | Date: 1884 | Meaning: the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era.

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

note: work still in progress

1. Semantic Suggestion Engine, based on a small test-set of Evans:
   "Similar Items": http://evans.ub.rug.nl/~peter/test/?uri=Imprint-41778
2. 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

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":

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)
  

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:

1. 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.
   
2. Add the definition of the namespaces and prefixes on top of the OWL file, and save the file.