Through a job announcement of STI Innsbruck I was made aware of the LarKC project.

To quote the job announcement:

Current Semantic Web reasoning systems do not scale to the requirements of their hottest applications, such as analyzing data from millions of mobile devices, dealing with terabytes of scientific data, and content management in enterprises with thousands of knowledge workers.

The Large Knowledge Collider (LarKC, for short, pronounced “lark”), a platform for massive distributed incomplete reasoning will remove these scalability barriers. This will be achieved by:

• Enriching the current logic-based Semantic Web reasoning methods with methods from information retrieval, machine learning, information theory, databases, and probabilistic reasoning,
• Employing cognitively inspired approaches and techniques such as spreading activation, focus of attention, reinforcement, habituation, relevance reasoning, and bounded rationality.
• Building a distributed reasoning platform and realizing it both on a high-performance computing cluster and via “computing at home”.

The project consortium is an interdisciplinary team of engineers and researchers in Computing Science, Web Science and Cognitive Science, well qualified to realize this ambitious vision. The Large Knowledge Collider will be an open architecture. Researchers and practitioners from outside the consortium will be encouraged to develop and plug in their own components to drive parts of the system. This will make the Large Knowledge Collider a generic platform, and not just a single reasoning engine.

What more shall I say than: Way to go LarKC!

I tried to figure out some additional information about the project.

What I’ve found is this blog entry. A colleague of mine discovered a presentation given at a workshop.

After some silent time in the field of information retrieval in the semantic web, search in the next generation web seems to be an upcoming topic in different research communities. Recently two calls for papers have been posted. Both are CFPs from workshops. One is hosted on the European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC) the other one is hosted the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR).

If you are interested in research related to information retrieval / search and semantic web you might be interested in these two meetings:

• Semantic Search 2008 Workshop
• Exploiting Semantic Annotations in Information Retrieval

From September 24 to September 26 I was in Halle (at the river Saale) in Germany attending FGIR 2007. FGIR is part of LWA, an annual event of several interest groups of the German Computer Society. The venue was located at the computer science instate of the Martin Luther university. The community represented by the different interest groups (all of them in some form related to knowledge) was very interesting and for 20€ of registration feed you even got refreshments and snacks .
We had two papers there: In the presented first we focused in detail on the evolution of the associative retrieval component (which was first presented at i-Semantics). Besides simply presenting the obtained results in this paper we argued why our chosen approach to evaluation of an information retrieval on the Semantic Desktop is valid. With the German interest group for information retrieval we had the perfect audience for this talk.
The other paper presented is a survey of current approaches to information retrieval in the Semantic Web and on the Semantic Desktop. In this paper we also try to find a definition what information on the Semantic Web actually is.

This years edition of our (Know-Center’s) annual conference the I-Know is over and it was a success! Collocated with the I-Know there was the I-Semantics conference. There I presented our recent work on Associative Retrieval on the Semantic Desktop, which was done within the APOSDLE project.

Edit: Knud Möller wrote a nice wrap-up about the session in which we both presented our research.

Krzysztof Janowicz (the person behind (Semantic) Similarity-Blog) is working on Sim-DL – Semantic Similarity Measurement Theory for the Description Logic ALCNR. In my eyes the notion of similarity is a good thing for search on the Semantic Web:

Currently, there is a lot of work going on in the development of query languages for the Semantic Web, see SPARQL for example. With these query languages you specify a query and an interpreter will return you those parts of an RDF graph exactly matching your query. This is a different search paradigm that we are used from search engines like Google. There, you enter a query and you will get results similar to that query, with the documents ranked highest that are most similar to it. Ranking by relevance is something not possible in SPARQL, as every results returned is equally relevant.

Markus pointed me to a nice connotation for semantic applications that found on technology created for the Semantic Web: ?Semantic as in the Semantic Web?. While we are still missing its origin (a paper?) it fits pretty well the following note on Semantic Search Engines.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels is interviewed on the success of Amazon. He states very nicely that they are using services at Amazon to make this large web application scale.

My personal QOTD on this interview comes from Ian Davis:

Yeah, I like all that. But I want it bigger and I want anyone to be able to do it

DEC - Glimpse of the Future, 1994:

This kinda reminds me of …

the Semantic Web …

as it is now.

And if you are using FOAF check out my profile under: http://scheir.net/foaf-pscheir.rdf (watch the video and know what I mean )

[Via glück auf!]

GRDDL has advanced to being a Proposed Recommendation. GRDDL is a (Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages) provides a mechanism to specify that an XML document contains data that can be mapped to RDF. In addition the implementation for transforming the initial XML data RDF-XML can be specified. Thus GRDDL provides an easy way to generate RDF from, say, microformats.

Since July 6, 2007 Protégé3.3 is out (and not beta anymore). Besides bug fixes and other improvements two very nice features were added: Collaborative Protégé and the DataMaster plug-in.

• Collaborative Protégé: a new extension of the existing Protégé system that supports collaborative ontology editing. In addition to the common ontology editing operations, users can annotate both ontology components and ontology changes. There is support for searching and filtering of user annotations based on a variety of different criteria. Two types of voting mechanisms have been implemented to allow users to vote on change proposals. Collaborative Protégé can be used with the Protégé-OWL editor, the Protégé-Frames editor, and client-server Protégé. Please note that Collaborative Protégé is still considered a prototype that is under active development. Your feedback is most welcome! An installation guide, a user’s guide, an online demo, and more documentation are available on a separate Web page.
• DataMaster: a new plug-in that allows users to import schema structure and data from relational databases into Protégé. DataMaster is documented on the Protégé Wiki.

Check out the release notes.