The Journal of Web Semantics announced two new special issues, one on semantic sensing and another on the semantic and social web. Both will be publshed in 2012 with preprints made freely available online as papers are accepted.

The special issue on semantic sensing will be edited by Harith Alani, Oscar Corcho and Manfred Hauswirth. Papers will be reviewed on a rolling basis and authors are encouraged to submit before the final deadline of 20 December 2011.

The issue on the semantic and social web will be edited by John Breslin and Meena Nagarajan. Papers will be reviewed on a rolling basis and authors are encouraged to submit before the final deadline of 21 January 2012.

See the JWS Guide for Authors for details on the submission process.

The Mid-Atlantic Student Colloquium on Speech, Language and Learning is a one day, free event bringing together faculty, researchers and students from universities in the Mid-Atlantic area working in Speech/Language/ML. The colloquium is an opportunity for students to present preliminary or completed work and to network with other students, faculty and researchers working in related fields. The event will be held in Baltimore MD at the Johns Hopkins University on Friday 23 September 2011.

Students are encouraged to submit one-page abstracts by Monday, August 15 describing ongoing, planned, or completed research projects, including previously published results and negative results. Student research in any field applying computational methods to any aspect of human language, including speech and learning, from all areas of computer science, linguistics, engineering, neuroscience, information science, and related fields, is welcome. Submissions and presentations must be made by students or postdocs. See the call for papers for more information.

Accepted submissions will be presented as posters and each will also be given a one-minute presentation during a poster spotlight session. A small number of submissions will be selected to be presented as talks, on the basis of diversity and general interest.

Student-led breakout sessions of one hour will also be held to discuss papers on topics of interest and stimulate interaction and discussion. Topics and suggested papers for breakout sessions should be submitted by students alongside abstracts.

The event is sponsored by the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence and the Center for Language and Speech Processing at the Johns Hopkins University.

The Semantic Web community is still unsure what to think of the microdata.

The schema.rdfs.org provides static RDFS documents of the schema.org terms in RDF serialized in turtle, XML and ntriples as well as in JSON.

Mike Bergman argues that the microdata effort will also boost RDF.

Yahoo!’s Peter Mika is still a RDFa fan, but also has a pragmatic appreciation for the agreement of the big three search companies on a standard for semantic data.

“Given the above history, I’m extremely glad that cooperation prevailed in the end and hopefully schema.org will become a central point for vocabularies for the Semantic Web for a long time to come. Note that it will almost certainly not be the only one. schema.org covers the core interests of search providers, i.e. the stuff that people search for the most (hence the somewhat awkward term ‘search vocabularies’). As the simple needs are the most common in search logs, this includes things like addresses of businesses, reviews and recipes. schema.org will hopefully evolve with extensions over time but it may never cover complex domains such as biotechnology, e-government or others where people have been using Semantic Web technology with success.”

The submission deadline for OGK2011 has been extended to 17 June 2011.

AAAI 2011 Fall Symposium
Open Government Knowledge: AI Opportunities and Challenges
4-6 November 2011 • Arlington, Virginia USA
http://tw.rpi.edu/ogk2011

The 2011 AAAI Fall Symposium on Open Government Knowledge: AI Opportunities and Challenges seeks papers on all aspects of publishing public government data as reusable knowledge on the Web. Both long papers presenting research results and shorter papers describing late breaking work, outlining implemented systems, identifying new research challenges, or articulating a position are invited. Submissions are due by June 17, notifications will be sent by July 15, and the final camera-ready copy must be provided by September 9, 2011.

Google, Bing and Yahoo! are cooperating on an approach to representing structured data in Web pages via the launch of schema.org. The approach is microdata and the schema.org site documents the schemas that are supported today.

“This site provides a collection of schemas, i.e., html tags, that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers. Search engines including Bing, Google and Yahoo! rely on this markup to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages. Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data. Many applications, especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data. On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web. Markup can also enable new tools and applications that make use of the structure. A shared markup vocabulary makes easier for webmasters to decide on a markup schema and get the maximum benefit for their efforts. So, in the spirit of sitemaps.org, Bing, Google and Yahoo! have come together to provide a shared collection of schemas that webmasters can use.”

That’s the good news. The bad news, or at least the less good news, is that it based on microdata and not RDFa. Microdata is a relatively new way to embed semantic information in HTML and designed to be part of the HTML5 suite. It is less expressive than RDFa but also simpler. It’s main advantage over microformats is that it is extensible — you can define new semantic vocabulary terms. Here is how the three companies described the choice.

Google: “Historically, we’ve supported three different standards for structured data markup: microdata, microformats, and RDFa. We’ve decided to focus on just one format for schema.org to create a simpler story for webmasters and to improve consistency across search engines relying on the data.”

Yahoo!:“Today’s announcement offers tremendous opportunity for growth. In addition to consolidating the schemas for the vocabularies we already support, there are schemas for more than a hundred newly created categories including movies, music, organizations, TV shows, products, places and more. We will continue to expand these categories by listening to feedback from the community and will continue publishing new schemas on a regular basis. Don’t worry if your site has already added RDFa or microformats currently supported by our Enhanced Displays program, that site will still appear with an Enhanced Display on Yahoo! – no changes required.”

Bing:“At Bing we understand the significant investment required to implement markup, and feel strongly that by partnering with Google and Yahoo! on standard schemas webmasters can be more efficient with the time they invest… Bing accepts a wide variety of markup formats today (Open Graph, microformat, etc.) for features like Tiles and will continue to do so, but by standardizing on schema.org we are looking to simplify the markup choices for webmasters and amplify the value the receive in return.

The scheme.org site has a FAQ that includes the question “Q: Why microdata? Why not RDFa or microformats?” which is answered thusly:

“Focusing on microdata was a pragmatic decision. Supporting multiple syntaxes makes documentation for webmasters more complex and introduces more overhead in terms of defining new formats. Microformats are concise and easy to understand, but they don’t offer an open extensibility mechanism and the reuse of the class tag can cause conflicts with website CSS. RDFa is extensible and very expressive, but the substantial complexity of the language has contributed to slower adoption. Microdata is the most recent well-known standard, created along with HTML5. It strikes a balance between extensibility and simplicity, and is most suitable for building the schema.org. Google and Yahoo! have in the past supported both microformats and RDFa for certain schemas and will continue to support these syntaxes for those schemas. We will also be monitoring the web for RDFa and microformats adoption and if they pick up, we will look into supporting these syntaxes. Also read the section on the data model for more on RDFa.”

Guha has a generous comment in his post on the official Google blog:

“While this collaborative initiative is new, we draw heavily from the decades of work in the database and knowledge representation communities, from projects such as Jim Gray’s SDSS Skyserver, Cyc and from ongoing efforts such as dbpedia.org and linked data. We feel privileged to build upon this great work. We look forward to seeing structured markup continue to grow on the web, powering richer search results and new kinds of applications.”

I’ve not studied microdata yet, so don’t know how I feel about the expressiveness/simplicity tradeoffs it has made. I wonder if it is possible to add an OWL-like layer on top ofMicrodata, for example.

The 2011 AAAI Fall Symposium on Open Government Knowledge: AI Opportunities and Challenges (OGK2011) seeks papers on all aspects of publishing public government data as reusable knowledge on the Web. Both long papers presenting research results and shorter papers describing late breaking work, outlining implemented systems, identifying new research challenges, or articulating a position are invited. Submissions are due by June 3, notifications will be sent by July 15, and the final camera-ready copy must be provided by September 9 for the November 4-6 workshop.

Relevant topics include the automatic and semi-automatic creation of linked data resources, ontologies for government data, entity linking and co-reference detection between linked data resources, adding temporal qualifications to government data, creating mash-ups with open government data, linked open government data analysis, metadata for provenance, certainty and trust, policies for information sharing, privacy and use, social networks and government data, machine learning applied to government data, data visualization techniques, and applications. The symposium organizers are Li Ding (RPI), Tim Finin (UMBC), Lalana Kagal (MIT) and Deborah McGuinness (RPI). Program committee members and additional information are listed on the OGK2011 symposium site.

The new Journal of Web Semantics preprint server is now online. Final drafts of accepted papers will be added to the preprint server as papers are accepted for publication, making a preprint available as soon as possible.

We are loading papers from back issues into the preprint server as time permits. The preprint server is based on the Open Journal Systems software and hosted by Gesis, the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences.

After drafts are on the preprint server, they enter Elsevier’s production pipeline in which they are professionally copy edited, formatted for the journal, and proofed by the authors. The result is assigned a DOI and put online as a JWS article in press available to to individual and institutional subscribers. When the article is assigned to an issue and printed, the final copy will be available online to subscribers in Elsevier’s Science Direct system.

We would like to thank the people who helped stand up the new preprint server, including Ute Koch of Gesis, Kaixuan Wang of the University of Manchester, and Silke Werger of the University of Koblenz and Landau.

The 2011 AAAI Fall Symposium on Open Government Knowledge: AI Opportunities and Challenges (OGK2011) seeks papers on all aspects of publishing public government data as reusable knowledge on the Web. Both long papers presenting research results and shorter papers describing late breaking work, outlining implemented systems, identifying new research challenges, or articulating a position are invited. Submissions are due by June 3, notifications will be sent by July 15, and the final camera-ready copy must be provided by September 9.

Websites like data.gov, research.gov and USASpending.gov aim to improve government transparency, increase accountability, and encourage public participation by publishing public government data online. Although this data has been used for some intriguing applications, it is difficult for citizens to understand and use. This symposium will explore how AI technologies such as the Semantic Web, information extraction, statistical analysis and machine learning can be used to make the knowledge embedded in the data more explicit, accessible and reusable. The symposium’s location of Washington, DC will facilitate the participation of U.S. federal government agency members and enable interchange between researchers and practitioners. We also expect attendance of international open government data players from e.g. UK and Australia.

Relevant topics include the automatic and semi-automatic creation of linked data resources, ontologies for government data, entity linking and co-reference detection between linked data resources, adding temporal qualifications to government data, creating mash-ups with open government data, linked open government data analysis, metadata for provenance, certainty and trust, policies for information sharing, privacy and use, social networks and government data, machine learning applied to government data, data visualization techniques, and applications.

This symposium will include a mix of invited talks, paper presentations, panels, system demonstrations, a poster session, and discussions. We plan to have several invited speakers drawn from government, academia and industry. We will run panels on the emerging challenges and best practices, including (i) how to enhance transparency and interoperability within an agency and across different agencies/countries, and (ii) how to promote nationwide health information network that effectively integrates government-curated public records and citizens’ personal health data.

The symposium organizers are Li Ding (RPI), Tim Finin (UMBC), Lalana Kagal (MIT) and Deborah McGuinness (RPI). Program committee members and additional information are listed on the OGK2011 symposium site. For more information about the the symposium, send email inquiries to ogk11-info@googlegroups.com.

Important Dates

• Workshop: 4-6 November 2011 in Arlington, Virginia USA
• Submissions due: 3 June 2011
• Decisions by: 15 July 15 2011
• Camera ready by: 9 September 2011

Twitter reports that its users are sent an average of 140M tweets a day last month. That adds up to a billion a week, in round numbers. Another impressive statistic their post cites is that last month saw an average of 460K new Twitter accounts per day. Both numbers are very impressive.

Liz Gannes comments on the fact that Twitter does not report on the total number of users it has or how many of these are active. The number of users is thought to be over 200M, but I recall data that is now over a year old estimating that 40% of the users have made no tweets and 80% have made fewer that 10 tweets. Maybe the bulk of those 460K new users a day are signing up to follow @charliesheen.

Pervasive, context-aware computing technologies can significantly enhance and improve the coming generation of devices and applications for consumer electronics as well as devices for work places, schools and hospitals. Context-aware cognitive support requires activity and context information to be captured, reasoned with and shared across devices — efficiently, securely, adhering to privacy policies, and with multidevice interoperability.

The AAAI-11 conference will host a two-day workshop on Activity Context Representation: Techniques and Languages focused on techniques and systems to allow mobile devices model and recognize the activities and context of people and groups and then exploit those models to provide better services. The workshop will be held on August 7th and 8th in San Francisco as part of AAAI-11, the Twenty-Fifth Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Submission of research papers and position statements are due by 22 April 2011.

The workshop intends to lay the groundwork for techniques to represent context within activity models using a synthesis of HCI/CSCW and AI approaches to reduce demands on people, such as the cognitive load inherent in activity/context switching, and enhancing human and device performance. It will explore activity and context modeling issues of capture, representation, standardization and interoperability for creating context-aware and activity-based assistive cognition tools with topics including, but not limited to the following:

• Activity modeling, representation, detection
• Context representation within activities
• Semantic activity reasoning, search
• Security and privacy
• Information integration from multiple sources, ontologies
• Context capture

There are three intended end results of the workshop: (1) Develop two-three key themes for research with specific opportunities for collaborative work. (2) Create a core research group forming an international academic and industrial consortium to significantly augment existing standards/drafts/proposals and create fresh initiatives to enable capture, transfer, and recall of activity context across multiple devices and platforms used by people individually and collectively. (3) Review and revise an initial draft of structure of an activity context exchange language (ACEL) including identification of use cases, domain-specific instantiations needed, and drafts of initial reasoning schemes and algorithms.

For more information, see the workshop call for papers.

ReadWriteWeb reports that Twitter recently made changes in its Terms of Service. Specifically, Twitter will no longer grant any more requests for whitelisting and it would no longer allow redistribution of its content either for commercial or non-commercial purposes. Twitter whitelisting was a way of allowing developers or researchers to access large quantities of data via the REST api. Although Twitter will honor already “whitelisted developers”, it will not grant any further requests.

The second change in the Terms of Service is with respect to redistribution of content.  This means any one who is gathering twitter data whether a developer or researcher can no longer share it with others even if it is for academic or non-commercial purposes. As ReadWriteWeb points out these changes will most likely hurt researchers who are dependent on third party organizations to provide data for their research.

As part of the new Twitter terms of service, 140kit like other organizations can no longer offer exports of Twitter data for any purposes – whether that’s for profit or non-profit, whether that’s for developers or scholars. You could be writing the next killer app. Or you could be working on the final chapter of your PhD dissertation. (And let me interject right here and say that having your access to research data shut down as a PhD student is beyond devastating.) It doesn’t matter. Exporting Tweets now violates the TOS.

It looks like Twitter just made it difficult for researchers to access data for their research.

The Journal of Web Semantics has announced two new special issues to be published in 2010.

An issue on Reasoning with context in the Semantic Web seeks papers by June 15, 2011 and will be published in the Spring of 2012. The special issue will be edited by Alan Bundy and Jos Lehmann of the University of Edinburgh and Ivan Varzinczak of the Meraka Institute.

An issue on The Semantic Web in a Mobile World will accept submission until October 1, 2011 and will be published in September 2012. The special issue will be edited by Ansgar Scherp of the University of Koblenz-Landau and Anupam Joshi of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.