SmILE Semantic Information Systems and Language Engineering Group

We're happy to announce that Konduit, our tool for visual end-user programming on the semantic desktop, won the best demo award at this year's European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC2008) on Tenerife, Spain.

Semanta and the sMail Conceptual Framework are now online!

Finally, we managed to get our demo video clip from the Nepomuk review online. The video demonstrates the Nepomuk middleware and the distributed search capabilities.

On the 15th of August I, together with Knud and Vit from DERI, attended the TF-Ont meeting in Karlsruhe. Well, I chaired the two-day meeting so it didn’t start just there. It was a very productive meeting, that saw lots of outstanding issues being settled, and also had no casualities! In the first day we mainly tackled changes to NRL (Representational Language motivated by NEPOMUK’s requirements) and discussed the draft specifications for NAO (Annotation Ontology).

I’m just on the train back from Graz in Austria, where I made a quick visit to the I-Semantics conference to present our paper on the NEPOMUK project (The NEPOMUK Project - On the way to the Social Semantic Desktop). I-Semantics is part of the Triple-I conference, the other two in the trio being I-Media and I-Know.

Although it happened some time ago, unfortunately I didn’t have the chance to blog it, so I’m doing it now :). At the beginning of last month (more precisely, July the 1st), I attended aKademy 2007 - the annual meeting of the KDE community.

We are happy to announce that the following papers were accepted at ISWC:

• “SALT: Weaving the Claim Web”
  Tudor Groza, Knud Moeller, Siegfried Handschuh, Diana Trif, and Stefan Decker.
• “Controlled-Language Information Extraction for Knowledge Management”
  Adam Funk, Valentin Tablan, Kalina Bontcheva, Hamish Cunningham,
  Brian Davis, and Siegfried Handschuh.

and one more thing (in the In-Use Track):

• “Recipes for Semantic Web Dog Food — The ESWC and ISWC Metadata Projects”
  

For the last two months or so, Dragos Andronic, who does part of his BSc with us, has been working on a KDE version of Shift. Shift is a tool for bloggers and Web developers who want to embed formal metadata in their blog posts or Web pages. You can take objects from other desktop applications, such as a calendar or address book, and generate chunks of embeddable metadata from them. At the moment, the only output format is RDFa, but other formats, such as Microformats, are planned.Before, Shift was a pure Mac OS X application. As part of the Nepomuk project, Shift is now being ported to KDE. Where on the Mac Shift uses the Spotlight index to access desktop objects and their metadata, KDE Shift uses the infrastructure of the upcoming Nepomuk KDE, in particular the Soprano RDF store, and the Strigi metadata crawler. KDE Shift isn’t quite finished yet, but coming along nicely (see the screenshots below).