The call for ISWC 2008 posters and demos for the the Seventh International Semantic Web Conference is out. The poster/demo session is an opportunity for presenting late-breaking results, ongoing research projects, and speculative or innovative work in progress. Posters and demos are intended to provide authors and participants with the ability to connect with each other and to engage in discussions about the work. Technical posters, reports on Semantic Web software systems, descriptions of completed work, and work in progress are all welcome.

I’ve always found the ISWC poster and demo session to be very stimulating and, in many ways, much more interesting than the regular paper presentation sections. Plus there is lots of food and drink available.

Submissions are due by 25 July 2008. For further information and for any questions regarding the event or submissions, contact the ISWC 2008 posters and demonstration co-chairs, Chris Bizer and Anupam Joshi.

Brian Suda has a good, practical article on XFN on opera.dev — XFN encoding, extraction, and visualizations.

“In this article I will take a good look at XFN - the microformat for describing relationships between people. I will look briefly at what it is and the basic markup needed to add the information to your sites, before then going into depth, looking at the benefits you can get from that data by extracting it and using it in different ways.”

He covers the how and why of XFN and has good examples and code fragments. FOAF is only mentioned once in passing, however..

The 2008 Intternational Semantic Web Conference Doctoral Consortium (DC) allows PhD students to present their work and obtain guidance from mentors as well as interact with other postgraduate students. Students who submit papers to the main conference are also invited to apply to the DC. All papers submitted to the DC track will undergo a thorough reviewing process with a view to providing detailed and constructive feedback. The best submissions will be selected for presentation at the ISWC 2008 DC sessions. Five page papers will be published in the main ISWC proceedings. The deadline for submissions is May 16. The ISWC 2008 DC is chaired by Diana Maynard.

ISWC 2008, the 7th International Semantic Web Conference, will have a special track on the Semantic Web in Use for papers that highlight applications in business, government, science, education or society. The ISWC 2007 in use track had twelve full papers and the ISWC 2006 had nine industry track papers. Papers for the 2008 In Use track must be submitted by 16 May, 2008. The ISWC 2008 Semantic Web in Use track is chaired by Mike Dean (BBN) and Massimo Paolucci (DoCoMo).

ISWC 2008, the 7th International Semantic Web Conference, seeks proposals for tutorials that present the state of the art of a Semantic Web area enabling attendees to fully appreciate the current issues, main schools of thought, and possible application areas. The half- or full-day tutorials will be given on 26-27 October, just before the main conference begins. Email proposals to David Martin (martin@ai.sri.com) by 16 May 2008. The ISWC 2008 tutorial program is chaired by Lalana Kagal (MIT) and David Martin (SRI).

Over the years I’ve given a number of tutorials and always found it to be a very rewarding experience. You can reuse the material in tutorials for other events and, if you are an academic, in your classes. And, even if you consider yourself to be an expert, you will always learn something about the subject.

Social Networks and Web graphs exhibit certain typical properties. The classic work by Barabási–Albert showed how nodes in such network link preferentially — popular nodes often gain disproportionately larger share of the links. This is also known in other fields as the 80/20 rule or simply the “rich get richer phenomenon“. Another early work by Steve Borgatti studied social networks and found that they exhibit a core-periphery property. A small set of (popular) nodes form the core and the rest comprise of the peripheral nodes. To the best of my knowledge, community detection algorithms have often worked independent of such underlying network properties.

I have been exploring an idea that can utilize the core-periphery structure of social networks to approximately compute the communities in the graph. The intuition behind this method is really quite simple. The basic idea boils down to the following:

“The core of the social network typically defines the communities present in it. By looking at the link structure of the core and identifying how the rest of the network connects to the core we can efficiently compute communities in large graphs.”

This idea can be easily explained by considering the following network of email communication (obtained from Dr. Mark Newman’s site). The original adjacency matrix was permuted to order the nodes based on their degree. Thus the core is represented by submatrix A which is quite dense. The submatrix B, here corresponds to how the rest of the network links to its core. The submatrix C is a very sparse matrix that consists of links between nodes in the long tail. Since C is quite sparse, it can be ignored without much degradation of the clustering/community detection results. Thus it leads to saving a significant amount of computation and storage. By utilizing just the core of the social network (matrix A) and how other nodes link to the core (matrix B) we can approximate the overall community structure of the entire graph, much more efficiently.

The rest boils down the to the mathematical formulation of the above idea using Spectral clustering techniques. You can read more about it in my poster paper that was recently accepted to ICWSM. (A Tech Report version with a more detailed analysis would be available shortly)

Co-located workshops are an important and vital part of modern computer science conferences. They open up events for more participation, allowing researchers to present and discuss new work in a more intimate and focused setting. The call for ISWC-08 workshop proposals for the 2008 International Semantic Web conference (26-28 Oct 2008, Karlsruhe DE). Workshop proposals are due by 28 March.

Bernard Lunn of ReadWriteWeb has a post on 11 Things To Know About Semantic Web. I found his list to be both reasonable and interesting, with some of the 11 more speculative than most. For example,

“Semantic Web will start the long, slow decline of relational database technology. Web 3.0 enables the transition from “structure upfront” to “structure on the fly”. The world is clearly too complex to structure upfront, despite the tremendous skills brought by data modelers. Structure on the fly is done by people adding structure as they use the service and by engines that automatically create structure from unstructured content. Structure on the fly is very, very hard and RDBMS is very, very entrenched so this will be a long and slow transition; but the decline is inevitable. Innovation has slowed in the RDBMS world - with open source at one end and Oracle at the other, there is little reason to innovate - just when Semantic Web innovation is accelerating. RDBMS was good for enterprise scale performance and reliability but for Internet scale it falls short; just look at what companies like Amazon use.”

I agree with this to some degree, but I expect RDBMSs to continue to dominate information systems while I still walk the earth. Well, maybe that’s what he had in mind by a slow decline.

Here’s the item I found most amusing.

“3. If you have a firm grasp of the theoretical underpinnings of the semantic web, things like RDF, tuples, Sparql and OWL that make my brain hurt, you will be able to charge a fat premium in consulting fees for a while, as not many people really understand this stuff. But make hay while the sun shines, as some entrepreneur will surely figure out how to abstract this stuff and make it accessible for the masses.”

How true. In ten years the Video Professor will be hawking Semantic Web lectures on late night TV.

I’m working on my own N things list, but it will cover a more fundamental subject.

Tim O’Reilly wrote in Reuters CEO sees “semantic web” in its future about Reuters’ motivations for embracing Semantic Web technology.

“At Money:Tech yesterday, I did an on-stage interview with Devin Wenig, the charismatic CEO-to-be of Reuters (following the still-not completed merger with Thomson). Devin highlighted what he considers two big trends hitting financial (and other professional) data: … The end of benefits from decreasing the time it takes for news to hit the market. … he increasingly sees Reuters’ job to be making connections, going from news to insight. He sees semantic markup to make it easier to follow paths of meaning through the data as an important part of Reuters’ future. … Ultimately, Reuters’ news is the raw material for analysis and application by investors and downstream news organizations. Adding metadata to make that job of analysis easier for those building additional value on top of your product is a really interesting way to view the publishing opportunity. If you don’t think of what you produce as the “final product” but rather as a step in an information pipeline, what do you do differently to add value for downstream consumers? In Reuters’ case, Devin thinks you add hooks to make your information more programmable.”

This provides some background for their recent announcement of the Reuters Calais information extraction service. It extracts named entities, events and relations from text and returns the information as RDF data.

Hypertable 0.9 alpha is out.

“Hypertable is a high performance distributed data storage system designed to support applications requiring maximum performance, scalability, and reliability. Hypertable will be particularly invaluable to any organization that needs to manage rapidly evolving data to support demanding real-time applications. Modeled after Google’s well known Bigtable project, Hypertable is designed to manage the storage and processing of information on a large cluster of commodity servers, providing resilience to machine and component failures. Hypertable seeks to set the open source standard for highly available, petabyte scale, database systems. ” (link)

Update: LinuxWorld has an article, Zvents releases open-source cluster database, on the release along with a podcast with Doug Judd, principal search architect for Zvents.

The Second International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2008) will be held March 30 - April 2, 2008 at the Hilton in Seattle, Washington. Registration is now open and the deadline to qualify for the early registration date is Friday, February 15 18. The conference will bring together academic and industrial practitioners to present and to discuss new research, applications, thoughts and ideas that are shaping the future of social media analysis. The conference aims to bring together researchers from different subject areas including computer science, linguistics, psychology, statistics, sociology, multimedia and semantic web technologies.

The program includes an impressive line-up of invited speakers: Bernardo Huberman (HP Labs), who will speak on “Social Dynamics in the Age of the Web,” David Sifry (Founder, Technorati, Sputnik, and Linuxcare), and Brad Fitzpatrick (Google, LiverJournal Founder). Two tutorials are planned, including “Subjectivity and Sentiment Analysis” by Jan Wiebe (Univ. of Pittsburgh) and “Graph Mining Techniques for Social Media Analysis” by Mary McGlohon and Christos Faloutsos (CMU).

Next Friday, UMBC alumnus Filip Perich (PhD 2004) will talk about his recent work using policies expressed in the Semantic Web language OWL to control how software radios manage access to the radio spectrum.

We present an overview of the policy-controlled dynamic spectrum access technology, which provides an order-of-magnitude improvement to wireless communications and spectrum management in terms of spectrum access, capacity, planning requirements, ease of use, reliability, and jam resistance. We describe the current radio systems developed by Shared Spectrum Company as part of the DARPA XG program and provide results from field testing and benefit studies.

The talk, SSC Dynamic Spectrum Access Technology, will be 1:00pm-2:30pm in ITE 229 on Friday 8 February 2008.