CSSW 2007 - Conf. on Social Semantic Web in Leipzig - Aftermath

Back again -- this time in Jena -- I have a few minutes left to draw some resume about the last to days at CSSW 2007.

But first, I have to continue, where I left the day before. The final event yesterday (before the conference diner) was a panel discussion on the topic 'Is there a Social Semantic Web?' with Kingsley Idehen, Marc Fleischmann, KJlaus-Peter Fähnrich, Matthias Bärwolf, and myself. First at all, we did not provide any valid answer to the overall question. In the end, we were discussing, why the Semantic Web does not get the right attention, about (working) business models in Social Web and Social Semantic Web, and about incentives for participation (as well as on open source and open data)....

Finally, I really enjoyed this conference (esp. if you consider my bad experiences with the two conferences last week). O.k., maybe this was because the conference's topic was closer to my core interests compared to e-Learning (DeLFI) or XML (XML-Tage Berlin). There were also much more interesting people to meet, esp. I'm looking forward to meet again a collegue at Potsdam (Universität Potsdam, not HPI). I think, the basic question (as mentioned before) 'Is there a Social Semantic Web?' can be answered with YES. Why?...simply because many Social Semantic Web applications have been resented in the last two days, ranging from Semantic Wikis (where semantic data is authored in a collaborative way), over social networking applications that make use of implicit (semantic) data (and vice versa). I also guess that the topic will become even more important in the very next years. One major point (or objection) was the question about a (working) business model and the incentives being necessary to convince people to participate. It's rather difficult to predict the people's attitude and behaviour. Of course, maybe it's just 'ease of use'. Wikipedia is successful, because everybody can participate with only small effort (he/she must only be able to speak the Wiki-Language). Given that most people have some extraverted tendencies, given the user community of an aplication is of sufficient size, social reputation is an important incentive fr participation. But first, you need to have a sufficient large user community to attract users. Thus, it's similar to the chicken-and-egg problem....
Nevertheless, I hope this tpoic will also be present at this year's IWLS in Korea....

CSSW 2007 - Conf. on Social Semantic Web in Leipzig, Sep. 27th 2007 - Day 02

The second day of the Social Semantic Web Conference (CSSW 2007 here in Leipzig. Fortunately, Weimar has a rather good train connection to Leipzig (approx. 55 minutes...). Thus, I can sleep at home and don't have to stay in a hotel in Leipzig (and ofcourse the costs for travelling will be reduced...as we have a very low budget at the University for conference travells). Ok, first thing I had to learn was, the conference catering isn't really as bad as I had written yesterday. Actually, you get 5 tickets for refreshments every day (not for the whole conference). Thus, you won't die of thirst ;-)
(the Picture above is showing the University of Leipzig, Jahn Campus, where CSSW 2007 together with SABRE07 takes place)

But, back to the conference program. Today, I will chair the first session and therefore, I'm not able to blog live (at least during the morning). But I will write about the talks as soon as I find some spare time. The following talks are scheduled: Patrick Maué from the University of Münster with the topic 'Collaborative Metadata for Geographic Information'. Patrick is addressing so called participatory Geographic Information Systems (GIS) that are used for decision making, as e.g. in urban planning. Usually this data is published as a catalogue on the web. But, queries to this catalogue suffer of very bad recall and precision. This also comes from the dicersity of people involved in the process of generating metadata. People have different perspective, mental models, and terminology. Thus, the general problem being addressed is refinement of shared metadata. Of the three diffeent levels of semantics ( implicit semantics whic means data gathered from statistical analysis of the original data, soft semantics such as e.g. folksonomies, and formal semantics that allow proper reasoning), Patrick addresses the gap between implicit and soft semantics, and tries to bridge this gap by detecting similarities of metadata.

The following talk by Thomas Riechert has the title'Mapping Cognitive Models to Social Spaces - Lightweight Collaborative Development of Project Ontologies'. There, an application of the SoftWiki ontology for requirement analysis (SWORE) in the software development process is presented. Software development is carried out collaboratively by the different stakeholders of the process with the goal to model an application on an abstract level from different points of view. Stakeholders formulate their requirements in natural language and use the SoftWiki for coordination and aggregation of the requirement model, the project model, and the bug model. Then, stakeholders tag the requirements and from the tags the system extracts relationships between requirements that finally end up in the project model (=project ontology). The content of the three models serves as input to the Software Development process (a.k.a. CASE-Tool), which maps the models to UML and in this way creates the input data for the software developers.

Sören Auer (also co-chair of the conference) concludes the session with a talk on'DBpedia Relationship Finder'. Firt at al, DBpedia is an interesting project that makes use of the (inherent) structured data in wikipedia. This structured data can be found in so called 'info-boxes', i.e. tables usually put in a columns right of the wikipedia article containing data in a well structured (and hopefully commonly agreed) format. This data can be extracted from the wikipedia dump. The structured data is transformed into RDF-Triples that constitute a huge graph. The goal of DBpedia is (in the end) to enable the user to ask complex queries on the structured wikipedia data. The general problem anyway is to visualize this huge amount of data in an efficient way. The relationship finder tries to draw connections between two terms in DBpedia and therefore traverses the DBpedia graph trying to find paths (via different properties being specified by extracted content the original wikipedia info-boxes). These paths are presented in shortest path first order. Up to now, no ranking of paths with similar length is performed. Interesting thing to mention ist that the terms 'Leipzig' and 'Semantic Web' are connected via the property of Leipzig being the city, where Johann Sebastian Bach died ;-)
To get more information, you can exclude certain properties from the result paths (i.d. then only paths, which don't include that specific property are included).

The upcoming session is focusses on presentations around the SoftWiki project (as also was the talk of Thomas Riechert in the first session). The following talks are scheduled: Kim Lauenroth is presenting 'A Processmodel for Wiki-based Requirements Engineering Supported by Semantic Web Technologies', followed by Haiko Cyriaks with 'Supporting Requirements Elicitation by Semantic Preprocessing of Document Collections', followed by Steffen Lohmann with 'Ways of Participation and Development of Shared Understanding in Distributed Requirements Engineering', and Thomas Riechert with 'Towards Semantic Based Requirements Engineering'.

The Session after the lunch break starts with Stefan Kröger from the University of Potsdam with 'Analysing Wiki-based Networks with SONIVIS. The main goal of the Project SONIVIS is (or at least one of the goals...) the Unterstanding of Emergence of Knowledge in Social Knowledge Spaces. As a tool, SONIVIS integrates analysis, evaluation, visualization, and data handling of wiki-based networks.
Rainer Hammwöhner from the University of Regensburg is next talking about 'Semantic Wikipedia -- Checking the Premisses'. For this reason, they took samples from (different multilingual versions of) wikipedia and tested, as e.g., if the wikipedia category system really is a sound taxonomy (...I would say 'no'!). As we already have thought, the category system makes inadequate use of hierarchies, and that the quality of different language versions varies. There seems to be a high amount of disagreement in the category systems of the different language versions.
Joshua Bacher from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology is giving a Demo Talk on 'BoWiki' - a collaborative editor for biomedical ontologies, gene functions and annotations (originally derived from Semantic MediaWiki, but for being able to use reasoning SMW was given up).
The next demo is given by Marc Fleischmann entitled sMeet-Let's Meet real, a web platform to talk and to sozialice (in an synchronous way) just as in real life. sMeet constitutes a 3D Avatar based virtual community (just as 2nd Live), but connects the virtual world with the phone system....(really an entertaining presentation, I even saw my very first live iPhone...But, I`m missing semantics....). The phone system enables real mobility (a kind of ambient 2nd Live....and the phone system is also something that people are used to pay for) and with sMeet several heterogeneous communities are (at least planned) to be connected.
Richard Cyganiak closes the session with a presentation on 'DBpedia - a Nucleus for a Web of Open Data' providing more background information on the DBpedia project. In DBpedia, every item has an own URI. Simply take the wikipedia URI of an article and substitute 'www.wikipedia.org/wiki' by 'www.dbpedia.org/resource' (here you might find the DBpedia resource named 'Leipzig'). Thus, DBpedia becomes a repository for Semantic Web identifiers.

The final event of today (before the conference diner) was a panel discussion on the topic 'Is there a Social Semantic Web?', in which I took part (therefore no live-blogging). I will refer to that in my next post....

CSSW 2007 - Conf. on Social Semantic Web in Leipzig - Sep 26th, 2007

For the next two days I'm going to participate at the CSSW 2007 (Conference on Social Semantic Web) in Leipzig.

The sessions will start at 10am. WLAN is working, live blogging in progress ;-)
Ok, I should not start complaining before it even starts. But, 195 Euros conference fee for 2 days (including allowance for being an 'active' participant) and you have to pay for refreshments in the conference breaks? Ok...we have also received some refreshment tickets...incredibly valuable...representing 5 Euros (of the 195 Euros conference fee)...but one glass of water (or one cup of coffee) is 1 Euro. This makes 5 glasses of water for two days. Anyway.......back to the conference ;-)

After a brief intro by the conference chair Sören Auer, the first talk is presented by Andreas Hees on 'Alternative Searching Services: Seven Theses on the Importance of Social Bookmarking' prommising an interesting combination of traditional search engine indexing and the use of taging. A major difference in both approches lays in the coverage of web pages. While search engines encompass almost up to 85% percent of the 'Surface Web', manual tagging only coveres about a fraction of that. This leads to

• thesis 1: Limited but Growing Coverage (of Social Bookmarking Services).


• thesis 2: A smaller index of Social Bookmarking Services does not mean less quality.


• thesis 3: Less frequent update of Social Bookmarking indexes.


• thesis 4: The larger the community the more likely users will find specific content


• thesis 5: SBS are less prone to manipulation (remember the Google vs. BMW case...).


• thesis 6: SBS are perceived to be more trustworthy than algorithmic search engines


• thesis 7: Quality of assigned tags will improve

Ok...we all agree on the advantages that SBS do offer. But...how to combine the traditional search engine results with SBS results. This raises issues concerning indexing, actuality, inconsistency, ranking, etc...
The presentation only offers some tag suggestion and tag auto correction mechanisms....so 'how to get better quality tags'. This does not solve the general problem of combining both services.

Rico Landefeld is next, presenting 'Collaborative Web Publishing with a Semantic Wiki', presenting our SemanticWiki implementation Maariwa. One of the questions at the end of the talk concerned the very important topic of the extra 'effort' invested by the author that is necessary for the creation of semantic annotation. The benefit for all the other users is obvious, but for the author himself? Therefore, the extra 'effort' has to be minimized to the limit to make semantic annotation also attractive for the ordinary user.

Mohamed Bishr from the University of Münster concludes the session with 'Weaving Space and Time into the Web of Trust'. What is the influence of spatial dimension on trust? There is evidence of the effects of social network structures on trust as well as of geography on social networking. So the goal is a theory of the dynamics of trust in social networks with respect to the spatio-temporal regularities of the social networks.

The second session is more focused on Semantic Technology. In the first talk, Uldis Bojärs from DERI Galway ist talking about `A Prototype to Explore Content and Context on Social Community Sites`, the SIOC-Explorer ('you may call it RSS on steroids'....as Uldis says). SIOC (pronounces as shok) stands for Semantically Interlinked Online Communities is a W3C submission and is based on an ontology representing the process of social networking on the web (at the SIOC website there is even a wordpress plugin for your blog)....and with the SIOC Explorer SIOC data are crawled and aggregated for browsing and exploring. Furthermore it enables faceted browsing.

The next talk is on 'Adapting an ORDBMS for RDF Storage and Mapping' and is presented by Orri Erling. According to the title a native Relational Database System (Virtuoso) is adapted for RDF. Christian Weiske concludes the session with a talk on 'Implementing SPARQL support for RDBMS and possible enhancments'. To achieve this, a new SPARQL engine was developed and integrated into a database in a way that most of the work load will be accomplished by the database.

So far, so good...Lunch took place nearby in separate room of the Mensa (a review will soon available at küchenschreck and -- the world is small -- I've made some new enjoyable acquaintance, also coming from Potsdam. The afternoon session starts with an invited talk of Hans Hartmann with the topic 'SOA for IT? Hype, Trap, or Hoax?'. First of all, there is a SOA Hype, nobody can deny that. For an illustration, Hartmann compares tha SOA Hype with the excitement of an Austrian radio soccer reporter "....Tor! Tor! Tor! Tor! Tor! - I werd' narrisch! Krankl schießt ein, 3:2 für Österreich" (here you may find the original audio file as mp3).

Next, there is the afternoon's poster (+ demo) session with 5 short presentations. Santtu Toivonen from VTT talks on 'Mobile Social Media - General Characteristics and Interfaces with the Semantic Web'. He starts with a general review on Social Networking Companies and organizes them according to their underlying business models....but in the end, there are no mobile semantic web applications arround.alt least not yet. Next talk on 'Galaxy: IBM Ontological Network Miner' is given by John Judge working at project NEPOMUK (remember the semantic desktop...). I guess I have reviewed this paper...but it has left no remarkable impression so far. Next, Andreas Walter from FZI Karlsruhe on 'IMAGENOTION: Collaborative Semantic Annotation of Images and Work Integrated Creation of Ontologies' being motivated by Image based navigation in Multimedia-Archives. An Imagenotion represents a semantic notion graphically through an image, aggregating synonyms, Labels, links to web pages and other kinds of annotations. In the end, Imagenotions -- if I have got this right -- should ripe (= Ontology Maturing) to real ontologies). Finally....a live presentation (c.f. www.imagenotion.com). The last talk is presented by Philipp Heim from the University Duisburg-Essen on 'Semantic Integrator- Semi-Automatically Enhancing Social Semantic Web Environments.

As my battery is slowly fading away, this was the last paragraph for today (as being also the last talk). There is a 'Sächsischer Abend' announced in the conference schedule and as for my train is leaving at about 7pm, I still have some time left to take a drink. See you tomorrow ;-)