SmILE Semantic Information Systems and Language Engineering Group

Well, let's start with an apology to both myself and potential readers, because I kind of don't like these shameless self-promoting shouts...

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!

IUI08 is one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended. The topics were very broad, and as can be expected the presentations and demo’s very visual and interactive. I also met a lot of interesting people - from an academic as well as a social point of view. And of course the venue was also optimal for January (Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain)!

I’m sitting in my hotel room, relaxing after the this year’s combined ISWC and ASWC has come to a close yesterday afternoon. All the talks have been given, the posters and demos presented, name cards handed out, dinners eaten, beers drunk, discussions had and new contacts made. So, how was it?

For the Smile group, I think I can safely say that with three papers presented, as well as a lot of smaller stuff such as posters, demos and Semantic Web Challenge contributions, the conference was a great success. Tudor’s paper on SALT even got nominated as one of the three best student papers (and, I’m proud to say, I was co-author on that paper :)! Congratulations Tudor! We didn’t get the award in the end, but so what.

Also the paper on the CLOnE controlled language, which Brian had co-authored, was well received. Quite surprinsingly, I had been given the chance to chair that session (Natural Language Interfaces), which was a new experience to me, and a lot of fun.

Yesterday, October 28th, was the first day of KCap 2007, the workshops’ day. I was present there, as one of the organizers of SAAKM 2007 - Semantic Authoring, Annotation and Knowledge Markup Workshop (one of the four workshops organized at KCap).

In the first week of September (from 3rd till 7th), I attended the Reasoning Web 2007 summer school in Dresden. It was organized already for the third time by the REWERSE EU NoE; the previous editions were held on Malta and in Lisbon.

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).

Last week I was present in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada at the 7th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering (DocEng 2007) to present our paper, SALT: A Semantic Approach for Generating Document Representations, and our first demo about The SALT Triple: Framework, Editor, Publisher (the movies can be found on the SALT page).