“KWARC was!”

Scientific writing with Emacs: style-check and writegood-mode

Christoph — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 23:00:00 +0000

Today I discovered a nice tool for improving your scientific writing: Neil Spring’s style-check.rb. In a primitive but effective way (and aware of LaTeX markup!), it checks your document for the occurrence of typical style or syntax errors. These are implemented as a configurable list of regular expressions. style-check.rb reports any encountered errors like a compiler, with line and column number, according to the developer’s philosophy that writing is just a special case of coding. When executing the script manually, its output is somewhat hard to “process” for a human, so I thought, why not integrate it into Emacs. Emacs is prepared for dealing with compiler output, so the solution was straightforward:

(defun style-check-file ()
  (interactive)
  (compile (format "style-check.rb -v %s" (buffer-file-name))))

In the same run, I should also recommend another tool, which finds different errors, and overall less of them, but integrates into Emacs even more conveniently: Benjamin Beckwith’s writegood-mode. I recommend binding it to C-c g:

(require 'writegood-mode)
(global-set-key [(control c) ?g] 'writegood-mode)

For those who don’t use Emacs, there is also the possibility to use Matt Might’s standalone “weaselwords” script, which gave the inspiration for writegood-mode.

AI Mashup Challenge 2012

Christoph — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 23:00:00 +0000

If you are developing mashups – lightweight web applications that offer new functionality by combining, aggregating and transforming web resources and services – this a great opportunity to win a prize.

Call for Papers

AI Mashup Challenge 2012 at the 9th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC) Hersonissos, Crete, Greece; May 27–31, 2012

Submission deadline: March 31, 2012

Topics of interest

A mashup is a lightweight (web) application that offers new functionality by combining, aggregating and transforming resources and services available on the web. The AI mashup challenge accepts and awards “intelligent” mashups that use AI technology, including but not restricted to

machine learning and data mining
machine vision
natural language processing
reasoning
ontologies and the semantic web.

The emphasis is not on providing and consuming semantic markup, but rather on using intelligence to mashup these resources in a more powerful way.

Some examples:

Information extraction or automatic text summarization to create a task-oriented overview mashup for mobile devices.
Semantic Web technology and data sourcesÂ adapting to user and task-specific configurations.
Semantic background knowledge (such as ontologies, WordNet or Cyc) to improve search and content combination.
Machine translation for mashups that cross language borders.
Machine vision technology for novel ways of aggregating images, for instance mixing real and virtual environments.
Intelligent agents taking over simple household planning tasks.
Text-to-speech technology creating a voice mashup with intelligent and emotional intonation.
The display of Pub Med articles on a map based on geographic entity detection referring to diseases or health centers.

You find more detail on the website of the 2011 challenge.

Awards

€ 1750 sponsored by Elsevier
Speech outfit from Linguatec
10 O’Reilly e-books
10 books from Addison-Wesley

Submission and deadline

The challenge tries to mediate between a grassroot bar-camp style and standard conference organization. This means for submitters:

You announce your mashup as soon as you are ready, simply sending an email to the organizers (address below).
The deadline is March 31, 2012.
At a subpage of the mashup website provided by the organizers, you explain your work and refer to its URL.
Your mashup stays at your URL and under your control. You can go on improving it.
At review time (March 31, 2012), reviewers need a 5 page paper (LNCS format) that explains the mashup.
The reviewers select the most interesting mashups for presentation and vote during the conference.
Vote is public for all conference participants, but the reviewer quota makes up 40%.
Be prepared to a give a brief talk and a demo during the conference.
Awards will be handed over during the conference, and everybody will congratulate the winners!

Organizers

Brigitte Endres-Niggemeyer, Hannover, Germany
Krzysztof Janowicz, Santa Barbara, USA

Program Committee

Luis M. Vilches Blázquez, Universidad Politécnica Madrid, Spain
Christoph Lange, Univ. of Bremen & Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany
Emilian Pascalau, University of Potsdam, Germany
Giuseppe Di Fabbrizio, AT&T Labs, Florham Park NJ, USA
Jevon Wright, Massey University, Palmerston North, NZ
Aidan Hogan, DERI Galway, Ireland
Alexandre Passant, DERI Galway, Ireland
Emanuele Della Valle, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Tomi Kauppinen, Muenster, Germany
Thorsten Liebig, Univ. of Ulm & derivo GmbH, Germany
Mao Ye, Cornell University, Ithaca, USA
Daniele dell’Aglio, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Main Contact

Brigitte Endres-Niggemeyer

I-Semantics Conference and Linked Data Cup

Christoph — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:40:16 +0000

I-Semantics is a very nice conference on applied semantic web research, excellent for networking with the European research community and industry.

Call for Papers

I-SEMANTICS 2012 8th International Conference on Semantic Systems Graz, Austria, 5 – 7 September 2012

including Call for Submissions 5th Linked Data Cup

Latest News:

Wolters Kluwer Germany main sponsor of I-SEMANTICS 2012
I-SEMANTICS proceedings published by ACM ICPS
Important Dates (Research & Application Papers & I-Challenge)
- Abstract Submission Deadline : April 2, 2012
- Paper Submission Deadline : April 13, 2012
- Notification of Acceptance: May 7, 2012
- Camera-Ready Paper: June 4, 2012
Important Dates (I-Challenge)
- Paper Submission Deadline : April 13, 2012
- Notification of Acceptance: May 7, 2012
- Camera-Ready Paper: June 4, 2012
Important Dates (Posters & Demo Papers & PhD Track)
- Submission Deadline: May 21, 2012
- Notification of Acceptance: June 18, 2012

Scope

I-SEMANTICS 2012 is the 8th International Conference within the I-SEMANTICS series. I-SEMANTICS 2012 brings together both researchers and practitioners in the areas of Semantic Technologies, Linked Data and the Semantic Web in order to showcase cutting edge research, demonstrators and applications for the Corporate and Social Semantic Web. I-SEMANTICS 2012 is proud to announce the new format “I-CHALLENGE”, which brings to you the 5th Linked Data Cup (formerly Triplification Challenge), the Best Paper Award and the Best Poster Award. As in the past years the I-SEMANTICS Conference will be complemented by I-KNOW, the 12th International Conference on Knowledge Management, aiming to reflect the increasing importance and convergence of knowledge management and semantic systems.

Topics

As a conference aiming to bring together science and industry, I-SEMANTICS encourages scientific research and application-oriented contributions in the field of Semantic Technologies, Semantic Web and Linked Data. The topics of interest for this year’s conference include but are not limited to:

The Web of Data
- (Large scale) triplification of existing (structured) data
- Vocabularies, taxonomies and schemas for the Web of Data
- Querying, searching and browsing over the Web of Data
- Data integration and interlinking for the Web of Data
- User interaction and innovative visualizations for the Web of Data
- Languages, tools and methodologies for representing, managing and reasoning on the Web of Data
- (Mashup) applications utilizing (large scale) Linked Data resources
- Recommender systems making use of the Web of Data
- Integrating microposts into the Web of Data
- Linked Enterprise Data and (Open) Linked Government Data
- Connecting the Web of Data with real world sensor data
- Location-based services and mobile semantic applications
Quality of Semantic Data on the Web
- Provenance information for the Web of Data
- Large scale ontology inspection and repair
- Co-reference detection and dataset reconciliation
- Maintenance of Linked Data models
- Trust, privacy and security in Semantic Web applications
Corporate Semantic Web
- Corporate thesauri, business vocabularies, ontologies and rules
- Semantic business, e-commerce and m-commerce systems
- Semantic procurement for enterprises and governments
- Semantics, pragmatics and semiotics in organizations
- Enterprise trust and reputation management
Semantic Content Engineering
- Collaborative ontology engineering
- Ontology modularity, alignment and merging
- Ontology design patterns and life cycle management
- Ontology learning and knowledge acquisition
- Quality criteria for collaboratively generated semantic content
- Semantic annotation and tagging
- Making sense of microposts
- Semantic content management systems
Semantic Multimedia
- Semantic-driven multimedia applications
- Multimedia ontologies and infrastructures
- Content-based semantic multimedia analysis and data mining
- Semantic-driven multimedia indexing and retrieval
- Named entity recognition and disambiguation in multimedia documents
- Human-computer interfaces for multimedia data access
- Smart visualization and browsing of multimedia documents
- User-generated semantic metadata for multimedia documents
Studies, Metrics & Benchmarks
- Case studies of and benchmarks in semantic systems usage
- Evaluation perspectives, methods and Semantic Web research methodologies
- Technology assessment, acceptance/media choice theories
- Usability and user interaction with semantic technologies
- Applications with clear lessons learned or evaluations
(Linked) Data Ecosystems & Markets
- Economic foundations of data assets, markets and data crowd sourcing
- Business and governance models for data commerce
- Production principles and measures of data creation, curation and utilization
- Business models and economic impacts of Linked (Enterprise) Data and/or large scale semantic systems
- Case studies for sector-specific (Linked) Data strategies

I-SEMANTICS Submission Information

All accepted full papers and short papers of I-SEMANTICS 2012 will be published in the digital library of the ACM ICP series. Please note: Poster and Demo papers are planned to be published within CEUR-WS. Optional publication of PhD papers in CEUR-WS is under discussion.

Research/Application Papers

Submissions must be original and must not have been submitted for publication elsewhere. Papers should follow the ACM ICPS guidelines for formatting and must be submitted via the online submission system available at the conference website as PDF documents (other formats will not be accepted). For the camera-ready version, we will also need the source files (Latex, Word Perfect, Word). The publication will be available under the following ISBN: 978-1-4503-1112-0

Research papers report on novel research and/or applications relevant to the topics of the conference. Submissions must be original and must not have been submitted for publication elsewhere. The number of pages of research papers is limited to 8 pages for full papers and 4 pages for short papers including references and an optional appendix.

Important Dates (Research & Application Papers)

Abstract Submission Deadline (strict): April 2, 2012
Paper Submission Deadline : April 13, 2012
Notification of Acceptance: May 7, 2012
Camera-Ready Paper: June 4, 2012

Posters, Demos & PhD Track

The conference also particularly welcomes the submission of posters, demonstrations, and PhD track submissions. The Posters, Demonstrations & PhD Track complements the Research Paper Track and offers an opportunity for presenting late-breaking research results, ongoing research projects, and speculative or innovative work in progress.

The informal setting of the Posters, Demonstrations & PhD Track encourages presenters and participants to engage in discussions about the presented work. Such discussions can be invaluable inputs for the future work of the presenters, while offering participants an effective way to broaden their knowledge of the emerging research trends and to network with other researchers. Poster and demo submissions should consist of a 2-3 page description that allows us to judge the quality of the presentation. Submissions to this track must be in the Springer LNCS format, i.e. please do NOT use the ACM template here.

The objective of the PhD Track is to provide doctoral students with a forum to present and discuss their research projects with experienced researchers (“mentors”) and fellow students. It addresses PhD students at an early stage of their doctoral studies, who want to receive feedback from internationally recognized researchers. Ideally, participants will have a well-defined problem statement and precise questions to discuss with their mentor. Applicants should be PhD students (from any country), conducting ongoing research in the areas of semantic technologies, Linked Data and the Semantic Web.

PhD track submissions should consist of up to 1.500 words and contain the following:

Name, affiliation and contact details of the PhD student
Name(s) of the supervisor(s)
Summary of the research project, including:
Problem: research questions, motivation, state of the art and relevance for the fields of Semantic Technologies, Linked Data and Semantic Web
Approach: (planned) approach and methodology
Current status / timeline: current status of the work and any results that have already been reached plus outlook to future work
A list of key questions that the PhD student wants to discuss during the event

Submissions will be reviewed by experienced researchers; each submission will receive detailed feedback. The program committee will select participants who will give a short presentation about their research project during the I-SEMANTICS PhD Track. Main focus of the event is on discussion, support and solving open questions.

Important Dates (Posters & Demo Papers & PhD Track)

Submission Deadline: May 21, 2012
Notification of Acceptance: June 18, 2012

I-CHALLENGE

For the first time in 2012 we will bring to you the I-CHALLENGE, consisting of the Best Research/Application Paper Award, the Best Poster Award, the Best PhD Paper Award and the Linked Data Cup. While the best paper will be selected by the program committee, the Best Poster will be voted by the conference audience via online voting. (Please expect more details for all the Best Paper Awards in the weeks to come.) Information on the Linked Data Cup can be found below:

Linked Data Cup 2012

The yearly organised Linked Data Cup (formerly Triplification Challenge) awards prizes to the most promising innovation involving linked data. Four different technological topics are addressed: triplification, interlinking, cleansing, and application mash-ups. The Linked Data Cup invites scientists and practitioners to submit novel and innovative (5 star) linked data sets and applications built on linked data technology.

Although more and more data is triplified and published as RDF and linked data, the question arises how to evaluate the usefulness of such approaches. The Linked Data Cup therefore requires all submissions to include a concrete use case and problem statement alongside a solution (triplified data set, interlinking/cleansing approach, linked data application) that showcases the usefulness of linked data. Submissions that can provide measurable benefits of employing linked data over traditional methods are preferred.

Note that the call is not limited to any domain or target group. We accept submissions ranging from value-added business intelligence use cases to scientific networks to the longest tail of information domains. The only strict requirement is that the employment of linked data is very well motivated and also justified (i.e. we rank approaches higher that provide solutions, which could not have been realised without linked data, even if they lack technical or scientific brilliance).

Evaluation Criteria

The submissions will be initially evaluated with a well-known five star ranking system. Furthermore, entries will be assessed according to the extent to which they

motivate the relevancy of their use case for their respective domain;
justify the adequacy of linked data technologies for their solution;
demonstrate that all alternatives to linked data would have resulted in an inferior solution;
provide an evaluation that can measure the benefits of linked data

Topics

Ideas for topics include (but are not limited to):

Improving traditional approaches with help of linked data
Linked data use in science and education
Linked data supported multimedia applications
Linked data in the open source context
Web annotation
Generic applications
Internationalization of linked data
Visualization of linked data
Linked government data
Business models based on linked data
Recommender systems supported by linked data
Integrating microposts with linked data
Distributed social web based on linked data
Linked data sensor networks

Submission and Reviewing

Submissions to the Linked Data Cup will be reviewed by members of the Linked Data Cup Board and invited experts from the Linked Data community. Submissions should consist of 4 pages and must be original and must not have been submitted for publication elsewhere. Papers should follow the ACM ICPS guidelines for formatting as accepted submissions will be published in the I-SEMANTICS 2012 proceedings in the digital library of the ACM ICP series. Please read the submission page for detailed information on how to submit.

Important Dates (Linked Data Cup)

Paper Submission Deadline : April 13, 2012
Notification of Acceptance: May 7, 2012
Camera-Ready Paper: June 4, 2012

I-SEMANTICS Committee

Scientific Chair
- Harald Sack (Hasso-Plattner-Institute for IT Systems Engineering)
Program Chairs
- H. Sofia Pinto (Technical University of Lisbon)
- Valentina Presutti (Institute for Cognitive Science and Technology, Rome)
Track Chairs
- I-CHALLENGE:
  - Sebastian Hellmann (University of Leipzig)
  - Jörg Waitelonis (Hasso-Plattner-Institute for IT Systems Engineering)
- PhD Track Chair: Katrin Weller (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)
- Poster Chair: Steffen Lohmann (University of Stuttgart)
Industry Chair
- Andreas Blumauer (Semantic Web Company)
Conference Chair
- Tassilo Pellegrini (Semantic Web Company / University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten, Austria)
Program Committee

SePublica@ESWC Workshop (May 27 or 28, Crete)

Christoph — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 23:00:00 +0000

an ESWC 2012 Workshop. May 27 or 28, Hersonissos, Greece.

http://sepublica.mywikipaper.org/

At SePublica we want to explore the future of scholarly communication and scientific publishing. As we are going through a transition between print media and Web media, SePublica aims to provide researchers with a venue in which this future can be shaped.

Important Dates

submission deadline: March 18 (extended)
acceptance notification: April 1
camera ready: April 15

The Future of Scholarly Communication and Scientific Publishing

Consider research publications: Data sets and code are essential elements of data intensive research, but these are absent when the research is recorded and preserved by way of a scholarly journal article. Or consider news reports: Governments increasingly make public sector information available on the Web, and reporters use it, but news reports very rarely contain fine-grained links to such data sources. At SePublica we will discuss and present new ways of publishing, sharing, linking, and analyzing such scientific resources as well as reasoning over the data to discover new links and scientific insights.

Workshop Format

We are planning to have a full day workshop with two main sessions. During the first part of the workshop accepted papers will be presented; the second part of the workshop will address by means of focus groups two main questions, namely “what do we want the future of scholarly communication to be?” and “how could data be preserved and delivered in an interactive manner over scholarly communications?”. These focus groups will be followed by a panel discussion. As an outcome of these activities we will have a communique that will be the editorial for the workshop proceedings,

Issues to be addressed

Representation:
- Formal representations of scientific data; ontologies for scientific information
- What ontologies do we need for representing structural elements in a document?
- How can we capture the semantics of rhetorical structures in scholarly communication, and of hypotheses and scientific evidence?
- Integration of quantitative and qualitative scientific information
- How could RDF(a) and ontologies be used to represent the knowledge encoded in scientific documents and in general-interest media publications?
- Connecting scientific publications with underlying research data sets
Technological Foundations:
- Ontology-based visualization of scientific data
- Provenance, quality, privacy and trust of scientific information
- Linked Data for dissemination and archiving of research results, for collaboration and research networks, and for research assessment
- How could we realize a paper with an API? How could we have a paper as a database, as a knowledge base?
- How is the paper an interface, gateway, to the web of data? How could such and interface be delivered in a contextual manner?
Applications and Use Cases:
- Case studies on linked science, i.e., astronomy, biology, environmental and socio-economic impacts of global warming, statistics, environmental monitoring, cultural heritage, etc.
- Barriers to the acceptance of linked science solutions and strategies to address these
- Legal, ethical and economic aspects of Linked Data in science

Submission

submission system

Research papers are limited to 12 pages and position papers to 5 pages.
For system/demo descriptions, a paper of minimum 2 pages, maximum 5 pages should be submitted.
Late-breaking news should be one page maximum.

All papers and system descriptions should be formatted according to the LNCS format. For submissions that are not in the LNCS PDF format, 400 words count as one page. Submissions that exceed the page limit will be rejected without review.

Depending on the number and quality of submissions, authors might be invited to present their papers during a poster session. The author list does not need to be anonymized, as we do not have a double-blind review process in place.

Submissions will be peer reviewed by three independent reviewers; late-breaking news get a light review w.r.t. their relevance by two reviewers. Accepted papers have to be presented at the workshop (requires registering for the ESWC conference and the workshop).

Semantic Web Collaborative Spaces (SWCS) Workshop at WWW 2012

Christoph — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 23:00:00 +0000

In conjunction with World Wide Web Conference 2012 (WWW 2012) Lyon, France, 17 April 2012

http://www.swcs2012.org

Important dates

Paper Submission: 6th February 2012
Author Notification: 8th March 2012
Camera ready: 29th March 2012
Workshop: 17th April 2012

Goal and Motivations

Semantic Web Collaborative Spaces such as semantic wikis, semantic social networks, semantic forums, etc. are social semantic software with the mission to bring together human agents and software agents in order to foster knowledge-intensive collaboration, content creation and management, annotated multimedia collection management, social knowledge diffusion and formalising, and more generally speaking ontology-oriented content management life-cycle.

The domain spans from multidisciplinary research to deployed commercial web applications and contributions from all this spectrum are encouraged. The aim of the SWCS 2012 workshop is to exchange ideas, to discuss pressing research questions arising from theoretical studies and practical usage of semantic web collaborative spaces.

Topics

Contributions to this workshop will address one or more of the following topics:

Representing and reasoning on semantics in social web platforms:
- reconciling formal semantics and social semantics
- semantic social network analysis, community detection and community building
- analyses of semantic wiki contributors and their contributions
- combining, transforming, translating formal and informal knowledge
- coping with disagreement, inconsistencies
- semantics in social/human computing, and vice versa
- change management, truth maintenance, versioning, and undoing semantic changes
- connecting knowledge and social interaction
- from asynchronous interactions to real-time/multi-synchronous interactions in SWCS
- optimising, distributing, scaling SWCS
- managing and exploiting the emergence of models and their semantics
Interacting with and within SWCS:
- browsing, navigating, visualizing
- editing linked open data, schemas, rules, etc.
- ergonomics of SWCS, interaction design and usability studies
- object-centered sociality, knowledge-centered sociality
- overcoming entrance barriers and giving incentives for contributing
- provenance, traceability, permissions, trust, licensing, access control, privacy,
- making formal knowledge accessible, social knowledge evaluation
- mobile and multimodal accesses to SWCS
Return on experience and applications of semantic web collaborative spaces:
- swcs platforms in e-science, e-learning, e-health, e-governement,
- enterprise workflows, document flows, business intelligence, technological watch
- corporate knowledge management or personal information management
- expert matching, team creation,
Integration, interoperability and reuse of web collaborative spaces:
- integrations and interoperability with other semantic applications and mashups
- interlinking, distributing, federating SWCS
- extending non-semantic social web platforms with semantics
- exporting and reusing semantics gained from SWCS

Steering Committee

Pascal Molli, LINA, Nantes University (FR) (chair)
Hideaki Takeda, NII National Institute of Informatics (JP)
John Breslin, DERI NUI Galway (IE)
Sebastian Schaffert, Salzburg Research (AT)

Submissions and Proceedings

We invite the following different kinds of contributions:

full research or application papers (15 pages) describing recent research outcomes, mature work, prototypes, applications, or methodologies; authors of accepted full papers will be able to present their work in a 15 minute talk at the workshop
short position papers (5-10 pages) describing early work and new ideas that are not yet fully worked out; authors of short papers will be able to present their work in a 5-10 minute lightning talk at the workshop
demo outlines (5 pages) describing the demonstration of a software prototype in the poster and demo session during the workshop
poster descriptions (2 pages) outlining a poster to be presented in the poster and demo session during the workshop

All submissions must be written in English and must be formatted according to the ACM format. Please submit your contributions electronically in PDF format.

For any further informations, please contact organizers via swcs2012@easychair.org.

KISSWIN congress: support for early career researchers

Christoph — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 23:00:00 +0000

On 2012-01-18 Wed I attended the KISSWIN congress, an information event about support for early career researchers:

career paths
funding possibilities
networking possibilities

Their homepage contains a lot of helpful information, which I can highly recommend – at least for getting started with things. The information applies to anyone interested in a scientific career in Germany. Not all information is as detailed as I would like it to be, but in addition they also offer career seminars:

Unfortunately, as any other project, KISSWIN is limited in time. If I understood correctly, the proper project will run until the end of 2012, whereas they intend to offer some services (such as the homepage) beyond that. So take the opportunities!

An old Subversion annoyance finally explained

Christoph — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 18:34:15 +0000

I finally found the explanation for a Subversion misbehavior that has been annoying me for a long time. Many repositories of KWARC projects have a world-readable root, whereas access to certain subdirectories is restricted. Now, when checking out such repositories, I never got those subdirectories. So I always ended up doing another checkout for them, but that meant that inside the working copy of the overall repository I had a directory “sub”, which appeared as an unversioned item from above, but was an independent working copy of “sub” in itself – not quite convenient, as that makes it impossible to commit changes in the whole repository at once.

The Subversion book explains why that is the case (quoting from the section on “path-based authorization”):

Partial Readability and Checkouts

If you’re using Apache as your Subversion server and have made certain subdirectories of your repository unreadable to certain users, you need to be aware of a possible nonoptimal behavior with svn checkout.

When the client requests a checkout or update over HTTP, it makes a single server request and receives a single (often large) server response. When the server receives the request, that is the only opportunity Apache has to demand user authentication. This has some odd side effects. For example, if a certain subdirectory of the repository is readable only by user Sally, and user Harry checks out a parent directory, his client will respond to the initial authentication challenge as Harry. As the server generates the large response, there’s no way it can resend an authentication challenge when it reaches the special subdirectory; thus the subdirectory is skipped altogether, rather than asking the user to reauthenticate as Sally at the right moment. In a similar way, if the root of the repository is anonymously world-readable, the entire checkout will be done without authentication—again, skipping the unreadable directory, rather than asking for authentication partway through.

As a workaround, you temporarily have to restrict access to the root directory, while checking out.

SePublica@ESWC Workshop on Semantic Publication (May 30, Crete), LNCS Post-proceedings, Best Paper Award by Elsevier

Christoph — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 12:58:48 +0000

I am a chair of the following workshop (and Michael is on the PC), which is closely related to KWARC’s research interests (specifically KWARC-relevant topics highlighted below):

1st International Workshop on Semantic Publication (SePublica 2011)
at the 8th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2011)
May 30th, Hersonissos, Crete, Greece

Keynote by Steve Pettifer, Manchester University, UK: “Utopia Documents and The Semantic Biochemical Journal experiment”

SUBMISSION DEADLINE (extended) March 4

Highlights:

Best Paper Award sponsored by Elsevier: US$ 750+250 for the most innovative and feasible proposal concerning semantic publishing
Springer LNCS post-proceedings: A selection of revised versions of the best submissions will be published in the “ESWC 2011 Workshop Highlights” LNCS volume.

The MISSION of the SePublica workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners dealing with different aspects of Semantic Technologies in the Publishing Industry. How is the Semantic Web impacting the publishing industry? How is our experience of publications changing because of Semantic Web technologies being applied to the publishing industry?

The CHALLENGE of the Semantic Web is to allow the Web to move from a dissemination platform to an interactive platform for networked information. The Semantic Web promises to “fundamentally change our experience of the Web”. In spite of improvements in the distribution, accessibility and retrieval of information, little has changed in the publishing industry so far. The Web has succeeded as a dissemination platform for scientific and non-scientific papers, news, and communication in general; however, most of that information remains locked up in discrete documents, which are poorly interconnected to one another and to the Web. The connectivity tissues provided by RDF technology and the Social Web have barely made an impact on scientific communication nor on ebook publishing, neither on the format of publications, nor on repositories and digital libraries. The worst problem is in accessing and reusing the computable data which the literature represents and describes.

Consider research publications: Data sets and code are essential elements of data intensive research, but these are absent when the research is recorded and preserved in perpetuity by way of a scholarly journal article.
Or consider news reports: Governments increasingly make public sector information available on the Web, and reporters use it, but news reports very rarely contain fine-grained links to such data sources.

QUESTIONS AND TOPICS OF INTEREST

What does a network of truly interconnected papers look like? How could interoperability across documents be enabled?
How could concept-centric social networks emerge?
Are blogs and wikis new means for scholarly communication?
What lessons can be learned from humanities and social science publishers (i.e. going beyond scientific publishing towards scholarly publishing)?
How could we move beyond the PDF? How can we embed and link semantics in EPUB and other e-book formats?
How are digital libraries related to semantic e-science? What is the relationship between a paper and its digital library?
How could we realize a paper with an API? How could we have a paper as a database, as a knowledge base?
How is the paper an interface, gateway, to the web of data? How could such and interface be delivered in a contextual manner?
How could RDF(a) and ontologies be used to represent the knowledge encoded in scientific documents and in general-interest media publications?
What ontologies do we need for representing structural elements in a document?
How can we capture the semantics of rhetorical structures in scholarly communication, and of hypotheses and scientific evidence?

AUDIENCE

researchers from diverse backgrounds such as argumentative structures, scholarly communication, multi-modality in publications, digital libraries, semantics in publications, and ontology engineers.
practitioners active in the publishing industry, repositories of experimental information and document standards.

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper/Demo Submission Deadline (extended): March 4, 23:59 Hawaii Time
Acceptance Notification: April 1
Camera Ready Version: April 15
SePublica Workshop: May 30

SUBMISSION AND PROCEEDINGS

Research papers are limited to 12 pages and position papers to 5 pages. For system descriptions, a 5 page paper should be submitted. All papers and system descriptions should be formatted according to the LNCS format.

We encourage the submission of semantic documents. LaTeX documents in the LNCS format can, e.g., be annotated using SALT or sTeX. We also invite submissions in XHTML+RDFa or in the format or YOUR semantic publishing tool.

However, to ensure a fair review procedure, authors must additionally export them to PDF. For submissions that are not in the LNCS PDF format, 400 words count as one page. Submissions that exceed the page limit will be rejected without review.

Depending on the number and quality of submissions, authors might be invited to present their papers during a poster session.

Please submit your paper via EasyChair

The author list does not need to be anonymized, as we do not have a double-blind review process in place.

Submissions will be peer reviewed by three independent reviewers. Accepted papers have to be presented at the workshop (requires registering for the ESWC conference and the workshop) and will be included in the workshop proceedings that are published online at CEUR-WS.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Christopher Baker, University of New Brunswick, Saint John, Canada
Paolo Ciccarese, Harvard Medical School, USA (SWAN)
Tim Clark, Harvard Medical School, USA (SWAN)
Oscar Corcho, Politecnica de Madrid, Spain
Joe Corneli, Open University, UK (PlanetMath)
Stéphane Corlosquet, Massachusetts General Hospital, USA (Drupal)
Henrik Eriksson, Linköping University, Sweden
Benjamin Good, Genomic Institute, Novartis, USA
Michael Kohlhase, Jacobs University, Germany
Sebastian Kruk, knowledgehives.com, Poland
Thomas Kurz, Salzburg Research, Austria
Steve Pettifer, Manchester University, UK
Matthias Samwald, Information Retrieval Facility, Austria
Jodi Schneider, DERI, NUI Galway, Ireland
Dagobert Soergel, University of Maryland, USA
Robert Stevens, Manchester University, UK

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Alexander García Castro, University of Bremen, Germany
Christoph Lange, Jacobs University Bremen, Germany
Anita de Waard, Elsevier, USA/Netherlands
Evan Sandhaus, New York Times, USA

TEI Guidelines mention MathML, OpenMath, and OMDoc

Christoph — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 13:06:35 +0000

Someone in the humanities must be interested in OMDoc. I was really surprised to find a reference to OMDoc in the section “Formulæ and Mathematical Expressions” guidelines (a.k.a. specification) for TEI. TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) is the standard semantic markup language for humanities, social sciences and linguistics, much like DocBook for technical manuals. All that TEI itself has is an element , where notation refers to the language in which the formula is represented. But the guidelines refer to some mathematical markup languages, from which the document author is asked to “make an informed choice”:

TeX – the obvious candidate, also used in some examples
MathML – the obvious candidate when XML is desired. They give one Presentation MathML example but also mention Content MathML.
OpenMath – much less expected. Nice to see that here. Oh the other hand, the links to the OpenMath standard are outdated. I should probably report that.
OMDoc – I didn’t expect that at all.

OpenMath CDs as Linked Data

Christoph — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 11:54:04 +0000

I am currently pursuing the integration of OpenMath Content Dictionaries (CDs) into the Web of Data. (Here is the agenda, which I will present and discuss at the upcoming OpenMath workshop.) The motivation is that mathematical knowledge is currently underrepresented on the Web of Data, but that it is needed for certain use cases, such as dealing in a reasonable way with all those numbers in statistical datasets published by governments.

Only now I discovered several blog posts, which are almost a year old, on the question whether something that is called “Linked Data” must use RDF. In the proposed OpenMath setup, we will primarily publish the OpenMath CDs themselves according to the Linked Data principles. That works, because the CDs and the symbols defined in them have URIs. The XML language, in which the CDs are written, is well known in the OpenMath community. It consists of a thin XML wrapper around the actual objects of interest, the so-called OpenMath objects, i.e. mathematical formulæ in a functional tree structure. When a web service wants to know how to compute, e.g., the Human Development Index of a country, assuming that the auxiliary data points LE, ALI, GEI and GDP are already known, it looks up the definition of the HDI symbol by its URI, e.g. http://example.org/statistics#hdi. It would request the CD as application/openmath+xml, locate the desired symbol, find out that its definition is 1/3 (LE + 2/3 ALI + 1/3 GEI + GDP) (encoded as an OpenMath object), substitute the values it knows for the parameters, and let a computer algebra system do the computation.

Thus, my answers to these previous blog posts are:

to Paul Miller’s “Does Linked Data need RDF?”: No, it does not. OpenMath CDs also work. Well, in principle, at least for entirely OpenMath-based application scenarios, as sketched above. For making a real contribution, the data should additionally be made available as RDF (which is no problem for us, we have the software for translation), so that RDF-based Linked Data applications don’t get stuck on a link saying, e.g., the function used to compute this entry of our dataset is http://www.openmath.org/cd/arith1#sum.
to Toby Inkster’s comment on that blog post: Yes, in principle we could convert a whole OpenMath CD to RDF. At the moment, I’m not doing this. I provide the complete structural outline of the CD (i.e. what symbols it contains, what metadata have been given for the CD and its symbols), but so far I have not implemented a translation of OpenMath objects to RDF. Why?
1. There is no suitable RDF representation of the ordered tree nature of mathematical expressions. Several people have tried it (e.g. [1], [2]), but none of these representations have been adopted by the community, if they have been implemented at all.
2. RDF-based reasoning engines don’t understand mathematical expressions. They don’t know, e.g., what a bound variable is, so even if we expressed a formula in RDF, it would be useless.
3. Software that does understand mathematical expressions (e.g. a computer algebra system) can usually either process OpenMath, or a language for which translations from/to OpenMath have been implemented.
Note that I have been thinking about what information from the OpenMath objects might reasonably be represented in RDF. In my own applications, I do make use of the information about what symbols occur in a formula (regardless of the depth at which they occur and the order), so I represent that information in the RDF I extract from OpenMath CDs. I have seen other applications that care about the symbol at the root of an expressions, such as the “plus” in a+2b², so that could as well be represented in RDF. One could also think about applications making use of OpenMath objects in CDs obtaining them from the RDF representation of a CD, as XMLLiterals. (That could entirely replace the XML-based CD format without losing expressivity, but I’m sure the OpenMath community wouldn’t like that.)
to Ian Davis’ blog post: I do not agree with the idea that the term Linked Data may only be used together with RDF. I will continue to call what I’m doing with OpenMath “Linked Data”. However, being aware of the ubiquity of RDF and the software supporting it, I will also make RDF data available for the OpenMath CDs, so the difference is a philosophical one.

And a general remark for the RDF community: Most OpenMath users don’t care. The OpenMath community is conservative, and it has tools that work with the OpenMath knowledge model and its concrete XML representation. In fact, both communities are quite similar. Both have their own standard, with useful applications, and they say: “Why should we need any other knowledge model or format? OpenMath/RDF is fine for us. We won’t use RDF/OpenMath. But of course we’d appreciate if you could come up with another real-world use case that uses OpenMath/RDF and shows its superiority.” (BTW, I would be interested in feedback from other communities whose original data you have published as RDF Linked Data. What attitudes to they have?)