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.

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.

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.

The SPARQL Query Language for RDF is back to the status of Candidate Recommendation. Some of you may know it already had this status on April 6, 2006. It was returned to being a Working Draft on October 4, 2006.

Swoogle - a search engine for semantic web documents (a.k.a. ontologies) - is now available in an improved 2007 version:

The biggest change is that Swoogle?s IR index is now updated incrementally, as new or modified Semantic Web documents are processed. When Swoogle processes an RDF document, it analyzes it to extract metadata, and then adds or updates the metadata in Swoogle?s database as well as (re-) indexes information about the document in Swoogle?s IR engine. Previously, these information in the database was updated as documents were found but the IR index was regenerated periodically in an off line batch process. Consequently, the two were not completely synchronized. They are now, at least on a daily basis.

Recently I discovered a nice survey on semantic web search engines. If you are interested in this topic (as I am) you should not miss it:

A Categorization Scheme for Semantic Web Search Engines (Esmaili & Abolhassani, 2006)

In addition check at the references on the Search on the Semantic Web page (of course there is some overlap - search on the semantic web is a young discipline ).

James Hendler explicitly and Tim Berners-Lee implicitly inform us about the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) formed by MIT and University of Southampton. The initiative aims at exploring web-related research issues. For a motivation on WSRI the interested reader is referred to Creating a Science of the Web (Berners-Lee et al. 2006) available on the WSRI site. Also very interesting: The page of the Web Science Workshop with pictures of some of the web science celebrities.

As Danny Ayers notes Chris Bizer and Richard Cyganiak yesterday announced a RDF version of DBLP, the popular computer science publication database. More info can be found on their D2R Server DBLP page.