This year’s International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2008) will host a workshop on Social Data on the Web. Submitted papers are due by July 25, 2008.

“The 1st Social Data on the Web workshop (SDoW2008) co-located with the 7th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2008) aims to bring together researchers, developers and practitioners involved in semantically-enhancing social media websites, as well as academics researching more formal aspect of these interactions between the Semantic Web and Social Media.”

Social media systems is all about information sharing, so its inevitable that it will have strong ties to Semantic Web technologies. Moreover, the ties will go both ways. Social media needs ways to annotate information objects with sharable data and meta data that can be understood by machines. Semantic computing systems focused on sharing data and ontologies can benefit from social computing systems that offer users easy ways to collaboratively develop, publish, comment on and link to their output.

Deadlines for submitting papers, Doctoral Consortium applications and tutorial proposals for the Seventh International Semantic Web Conference are fast approaching. ISWC ‘08 will be held 26-30 October 2008 in Karlsruhe, Germany. Key upcoming dates include:

• Research papers: due May 9 (title and abstracts), 16 May (full)
• Semantic Web in Use papers: due May 16
• Tutorial proposals: May 16
• Doctoral Consortium applications: due May 16
• Posters & Demo proposals: due July 25
• Workshops papers (13 workshops): mid-summer
• Semantic Web & Billion Triples challenge: Oct 1
• ISWC 2008 CONFERENCE: October 26-30

See the ISWC 2008 site for CFPs and other details. Inquires about specific tracks should be sent to the appropriate chairs. Send general questions and suggestions for panel topics, invited speakers, birds of a feather meetings, etc. to iswc08@gmail.com.

The call for the ISWC 2008 Sixth Semantic Web Challenge and Billion Triples tracks is out.

“We invite submissions to the sixth annual Semantic Web Challenge, the premiere event for demonstrating practical progress towards achieving the vision of the Semantic Web. The central idea of the Semantic Web is to extend the current human-readable web by encoding some of the semantics of resources in a machine-processable form. Moving beyond syntax opens the door to more advanced applications and functionality on the Web. Computers will be better able to search, process, integrate and present the content of these resources in a meaningful, intelligent manner.

As the core technological building blocks are now in place, the next challenge is to show off the benefits of semantic technologies by developing integrated, easy to use applications that can provide new levels of Web functionality for end users on the Web or within enterprise settings. Applications submitted should demonstrate clear practical value that goes above and beyond what is possible with conventional web technologies alone.

Unlike in previous years, the Semantic Web Challenge of 2008 will consist of two tracks: the Open Track and the Billion Triples Track. The key difference between the two tracks is that the Billion Triples Track requires the participants to make use of the data set –a billion triples– provided by the organizers. The Open Track has no such restrictions.

As before, the Challenge is open to everyone from academia and industry. The authors of the best applications will be awarded prizes and featured prominently at special sessions during the conference”

The following workshops will be held as part of 2008 international Semantic Web Conference. Watch the 2008 ISWC workshop page for more information, including dates and links to workshop pages.

• Service Matchmaking and Resource Retrieval in the Semantic Web
• Terra Cognita 2008
• 3rd International Workshop on Ontology Matching
• 3rd ExpertFinder Workshop: Personal Identification and Collaborations - Knowledge Mediation and Extraction (PICKME’08)
• 7th Semantic Web Services Challenge Workshop
• 4th International Workshop on Semantic Web Enabled Software Engineering (SWESE2008)
• Workshop on Uncertainty Reasoning for the Semantic Web
• International Workshop on Ontology Dynamics (IWOD2008)
• Nature inspired Reasoning for the Semantic Web (NatuReS)
• Social Data on the Web
• 4th International Workshop on Scalable Semantic Web Knowledge Base Systems (SSWS2008)
• Incentives for the Semantic Web
• Ontology-supported Business Intelligence (OBI 2008)

In this week’s ebiquity group meeting, Palani Kodeswaran will talk about his research in developing protocols to govern how network routers implement the Border Gateway Protocol. here’s the aabstract.

“Policies in BGP are implemented as routing configurations that determine how route information is shared among neighbors to control traffic flows across networks. This process is generally template driven, device centric, limited in its expressibility, time consuming and error prone which can lead to configurations where policies are violated or there are unintended consequences that are difficult to detect and resolve. In this work, we propose an alternate mechanism for policy based networking that relies on using additional semantic information associated with routes expressed in an OWL ontology. Policies are expressed using SWRL to provide fine-grained control where by the routers can reason over their routes and determine how they need to be exchanged. In this paper, we focus on security related BGP policies and show how our framework can be used in implementing them. Additional contextual information such as affiliations and route restrictions are incorporated into our policy specifications which can then be reasoned over to infer the correct configurations that need to be applied, resulting in a process which is easy to deploy, manage and verify for consistency.”

Our meetings are open to anyone who wants to come, so drop in if you are interested. (10am Tuesday 29 April 2008, room 325 ITE building)

The 2008 International Semantic Web Conference anticipate having funds from the US National Science Foundation to partially support students currently enrolled in US universities in attending ISWC 2008. Students will be required to submit application and include proof of student status and a letter of recommendation. Since the funds are limited, only partial travel support can be provided. Preference will be given to students who are participating in the doctoral consortium, are an author or co-author on a paper, or are presenting a poster or demonstration. Awards will be based on a combination of merit and need and will probably range from US$ 500-1500.

Talis announced Nodalities — a magazine available in print and online devoted to the Semantic Web. They describe its mission as bridging “the divide between those building the Semantic Web and those interested in applying it to their business requirements.” The initial April 2008 Nodalities issue is available as pdf. While it can be expected to promote Talis and its activities, it should be a useful source of information and comment. You can request a free subscription to the print edition online.

Many tasks require representing and reasoning with uncertain knowledge and data. Current Semantic Web languages are grounded firmly in classical logic and no extensions to manage uncertainty have gained popularity. In our lab, Professor Yun Peng and his students have been developing systems to integrate Bayesian reasoning with OWL and explore applications to ontology mapping.

The W3C’s Uncertainty Reasoning for the World Wide Web Incubator Group has released a report, Uncertainty Reasoning for the World Wide Web, surveying requirements for “reasoning with and representing uncertain information available through the World Wide Web and related WWW technologies”. The report

• identifies and describes situations on the scale of the World Wide Web for which uncertainty reasoning would significantly increase the potential for extracting useful information,
• identifies methodologies that can be applied to these situations and the fundamentals of a standardized representation that could serve as the basis for information exchange necessary for these methodologies to be effectively used,
includes a set of use cases illustrating conditions under which uncertainty reasoning is important,
• provides an overview and discusses the applicability to the World Wide Web of prominent uncertainty reasoning techniques and the information that needs to be represented for effective uncertainty reasoning to be possible,
• includes a bibliography of work relevant to the challenge of developing standardized representations for uncertainty and exploiting them in Web-based services and applications.”

The Economist has a short article on the Semantic Web, Start making sense that is positive and upbeat.

“Big and small companies are getting into the business of building an intelligent web of linked data

Some new ideas take wing spontaneously. Others struggle to be born. The “semantic web” is definitely in the latter category. But it may have found its midwife in Reuters, a business-information company.

The semantic web (or “web 3.0”, as some people are trying to re-brand it), is the name given to the idea that the pages of the world wide web ought to carry more than just the meaning they are intended to convey to the human reader. They should also, the thinking goes, be tagged and flagged in ways that machines can make semantic sense of, as people make semantic sense of language. That way, machines could make instant connections that would take serious amounts of time for people to see, or might even elude them altogether.”
…

The article touches on RDF and OWL and a number of companies building on the technology, including Reuters Calais, Twine and Qitera. The last one was new to me.

EPA is on a web 2.0 kick. They sponsored a 2-day monster mashup exercise last Fall, the Puget Sound Information Challenge, and are making plans for further efforts. EPA’s CIO Molly O’neill talks a little about it here.

They’ve also been tracking and flirting with the semantic web, and are wondering how much effort to expend on a more full-on semantic engagement. I presented our semantic eco-blogging work at EPA headquarters in February, and was surprised at the turnout and enthusiasm. In response to a screen shot of a Fieldmarking post describing beach closings, a person from the Water Office related that he learned of the closing of his favorite Lake Erie swim-spot from a blog post. This made an impression on him, since, by rights, the closing should have been reported at the county level, up to the state level, and, ultimately, to his office in DC. It struck him that EPA should be systematically tapping the blogosphere for citizen sentiment and concern.

If they to do this, they will, implicitly, be saying to the citizenry “If you can’t be bothered to fill out the right form in the right office, at least blog about it, and maybe the machinery of the blogosphere will direct your thoughts our way.” I kind of like that. (This particular example - finding information on beach closings in a given area - can probably be done fairly efficiently with Yahoo pipes).

EPA will be hosting this week’s meeting of the multilateral ecoinformatics cooperation, and there will be participation from a wide swathe of EPA - I’m curious to learn of their plans.

The call for ISWC 2008 research papers for the Seventh International Semantic Web Conference is online. The track is co-chaired by Amit Sheth and Steffen Staab and has nineteen distinguished vice chairs and an program committee of experienced experts. Key dates for the research track are:

• Abstracts due by 9 May 2008
• Submissions due before 16 May 2008
• Rebuttal phase during 14-16 June 2008
• Notification sent by 11 July 2008
• Camera ready due before 15 August 2008

Mike Bergman has a comprehensive list of about 100 papers on Wikipedia as a knowledge source.

“Since about 2005 — and at an accelerating pace — Wikipedia has emerged as the leading online knowledge base for conducting semantic Web and related research. The system is being tapped for both data and structure. Wikipedia has arguably replaced WordNet as the leading lexicon for concepts and relations. Because of its scope and popularity, many argue that Wikipedia is emerging as the de facto structure for classifying and organizing knowledge in the 21st century.”

This complements a similar list on Wikipedia itself, Wikipedia in academic studies.

“Below is an incomplete list of academic conference presentations, peer-reviewed papers and other types of academic writing which focus on Wikipedia as their subject. Works that mention Wikipedia only in passing are unlikely to be listed. Unpublished works of presumably academic quality are listed in a dedicated section.”

(spotted on the dbpedia mailing list)