Semantic Web Summer School 2006

The Summer School for the Semantic Web and Ontological Engineering is an annual event that brings together PhD students from all over the world and some of the brightest heads in the Semantic Web, to teach, to socialize, to learn, and to have fun. This year's invited speakers are Jim Hendler himself, and Enrico Motta, Stephan Baumann, Guus Schreiber, and the tutors are John Domingue, Asun Gomez-Perez, Jerome Euzenat, Sean Bechhofer, Fabio Ciravegna, Aldo Gangemi. You will learn a lot. You will have lots of fun. The place is really beautiful, the girls, well at least last year, were really beautiful, the stuff we learned was interesting, and inspired quite some cooperation further on. And it's really great for getting to know a lot of people: at the next conference you're guaranteed to meet someone again, and thus it is also a perfect possibility ot get into the community.

The deadline is May 1st, so be sure to go over to the SSSW2006 website and sign up.

If this didn't convince you, take a look at my series of posts about last year's summer school.

Research visit

So, I have arrived for my very first longer research visit. I am staying at the Laboratory of Applied Ontologies in Rome. I have never been to Rome before, and all my type of non-work experience I'll chat about in my regular blog, in German. Here I'll stick to Semantic Stuff and such.

So, if you are nearby and would like to meet -- give me a note! I am staying in Rome up to the WWW, i.e. up to May 20th. The plan is to work on my dissertation topic, Ontology Evaluation, especially in the wake of the EON2006 workshop, but that's not all it seems. People are interested in and knowledge about Semantic Wikis as well. So there will be quite a lot stuff happening in the next few weeks -- I'm excited about it all.

Who knows what will happen? If my plan works out, at the end of the stay we will have a common framework for Ontology Evaluation. And I am not talking about this paper frameworks -- you know, that are presented in papers with titles starting "Towards a..." or "A framework for...". No, but real software, stuff you can download, and play with.

Semantic Mediawiki 0.3

Yay! Markus "the Sorcerer" Krötzsch finished the new release of Semantic Mediawiki today. The demo website is already running version 0.3 for a while.

I'll let Markus speak:

I am glad to finally announce the official release of Semantic MediaWiki 0.3,
available as usual at http://sourceforge.net/projects/semediawiki/. The final
0.3 is largely equivalent to the preview version that is still running on
wiki.ontoworld.org -- the latest changes mainly concern localization.

Semantic MediaWiki 0.3 now runs on MediaWiki 1.6.1 that was released just
yesterday. Older versions of MediaWiki should also work but upgrading is
generally recommended.

The main new features of 0.3 are:

• support for geographical coordinates (new datatype),
• improved user interface: service links for JScript tooltips, CSS layout,
• OWL/RDF export of all annotation data,
• simplified installation process (including special page for setup/upgrade),
• (almost) complete localization; translations available for English and German,
• better MediaWiki integration: namespaces, user/content language, support for MediaWiki 1.6,
• specials for displaying all relations/attributes,
• experimental (OWL/RDF) ontology import feature,
• and, last but not least, we also fixed quite some bugs.
  

The next steps towards 0.4 will probably be the inclusion of query results
into existing pages, date/time support, and individual user settings for
displaying certain datatypes. We also will have another look at ways of
hiding the annotations from uninitiated users.

Have fun.

Markus

P.S.: I am not available during the weekend. Upgrading existing wikis should
work (it's what we do all the time ;), but be aware that there is not going
to be much support during the next three days.