semantic web

Digital Classics: Sharing the Wealth: Numismatics in a World of Linked Open Data

We start with the ambition - dating back to the early days of the semantic web - of assembling a significant portion human knowledge into a contradiction-free form using semantic web technology. We argue that this would not be desirable, because there are concepts, known as essentially contested concepts, whose definitions are contentious due to deep-seated ethical disagreements. Further, we argue that the ninetenth century hermeneutical tradition has a great deal to say, both about the ambition, and about why it fails. We conclude with some remarks about statistics.

Yorick Wilks explores the state of the art in modelling realistic conversation with computers over the last 40 years, and asks what we would want in a conversational agent (or 'Companion') designed for a long-term relationship with a user. This lecture begins by looking at the state of the art in modelling realistic conversation with computers over the last 40 years. Yorick Wilks argues that there has been real progress, even though some systems of the late 1960s were remarkably good, a fact largely forgotten now. Yorick then moves on to ask what we would want in a conversational agent that was designed for a long-term relationship with a user, rather than the carrying out of a single brief task, like buying a railway ticket. Such agents he calls 'companionable' and he distinguishes several functions for such agents, but the feature they share will be that, in some definable sense, an artificial Companion should know a great deal about its owner - derived both from conversation and from the internet itself - and can use that information. For this lecture, it is not important what form, robotic or otherwise, a Companion has and Yorick doesn't focus on developments in speech understanding and generation but just assumes the state of the art. The focus is, first, on the technical issues of what such a Companion should know and how it can gain and use such knowledge though the understanding of conversations and searching the internet; and, secondly, on what the social implications of such Companions will be: will we trust them, will a Government or their manufacturer demand access to what they know about us, will they talk to each other about us, and what will happen to their unique knowledge of us when we die?

The Web 2.0 world is commonplace but the promise of massive scale human computing has barely been exploited. This seminar explores the potential, challenges, and promises for next-generation technologies that can empower humanity to address key problems. Although the read / write world of Web 2.0 is now commonplace - even your parents use Facebook - the promise of massive scale human computing has barely begun to be exploited. New technologies, including the Semantic Web, mobile computing, and open data suggest ways that far more powerful systems than those we have today could be created, empowering humanity to help address some of our key problems. The potential for the sharing of data and knowledge, among willing participants, makes it possible to envision declarative models for creating and evolving new Web technologies that would more open and distributed systems. Further, by explicating the social, not just the technical, protocols, new models of information control that encourage, rather than prohibit, sharing can be explored. In this talk we explore the potential for next-generation social machines, explore some of the challenges, and look at promising technologies for the future.

Hear how Drupal, Semantic MediaWiki and other bleeding edge tech were enlisted along with pixie dust, FOAF, RDF, OWL, SPARQL, Linked Data (basically all the Semantic Web stuff) to build a distributed social network. The focus will be not on evangelism (I don’t really care about that) but how disparate open source platforms can talk and work together. This stuff actually works and makes development more fluid. These technologies make local development easier, but when it is time to broaden your scope, classic search is still king. How can you leverage this? Newcomers such as Yahoo Searchmonkey can play an important role in the creation of a truly distributed information system. David Peterson has been a web developer since 1995. He works way up north in the tropics of Townsville, about as far from any tech as possible. Currently he is Head of Research at BoaB interactive and is working hard to kickstart the Semantic Web down under. Not only that, but he is an Advisory Committee representative to the W3C. Wow. His wonderful family, making lovely photographs and searching for the perfect espresso keeps him happy. Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

* Subject Dr. E. Michael Maximilien from IBM Research organized and moderated our scheduled discussion on: "Ontologizing the Ontolog Body of Knowledge - Discussion Session-2 - Tools, Techniques, and Approaches Panel Discussion". Invited panelists included Dr. John 'Boz' Handy-Bosma (IBM Global Services), Mr. PeterMika (Free University, Amsterdam, Netherlands), Mr. Conor Shankey (Visual Knowledge) and Mr. W. Scott Spangler (IBM Research) * Date Thursday, July 6, 2006 * ONTOLOG Forum session page (with agenda and link to slides) http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2006_07_06 * Abstract (by E. M. Maximilien) In this panel we want to investigate tools, techniques, and approaches that can help us in the task of ontologizing the rich semantic conetnt of the Ontolog Forum. In particular we would like to cover: o (1) Tools to create formal and semi-formal knowledge representation (KR), e.g., OWL, Protege, and so on; o (2) Tools and services to create free-form annotations of contents, e.g., deli.cio.us, Flykr, and others, resulting in folksonomies; o (3) Research, techniques, and tools (if any) to help make sense of resulting folksonomies and ontologies; o (4) Automated techniques, tools, and research approaches to mine structure in unstructured text such as the ONTOLOG Wiki, e.g., UIMA, podzinger.com for podcast to text translation, and others; and o (5) Semantically-rich next generation collaborative platforms, e.g. semantic Wikis or other emerging web 2.0 tools.