Here are a few projects that won awards at ISWC (Just a sampling of the one’s that most caught my eye. I’ve already lost track of which won what):
Michiel Hildebrand won for his work on effective interfaces for exploring “cultural heritage” (art and history) collections.
Sofia Angeletou won for her work on “semantically enriching folksonomies”—using [...]
They ask, what use are these online profiles of interests? One application would be personalization. They observe that individual’s tag clouds often suggest what they are interested in. They gather and correlate tags from a user’s many different accounts (they find them by you typing in your home page url; this is generally associated with [...]
Someone from Tagora spoke about the relationships between different tags that get applied to the same document, and the tags that different people apply to the same documents. The looked at the ternary relation (user, resource, tag) and tried to infer measures of similarity. What tags are “related” to others, or to other pages? What [...]
Tamas Hauer presented from the Health-e-child project.
Motivating example: clinician collects tumor patient data over years; want to explore it to discover correlations of disease to other characteristics of patient. Decision making and knowledge discovery. Need to collect information, query/analyze it, visualize the results. Challenge: life sciences are based not on analytical methods but on concepts [...]
Sam Chapman of k-now.co.uk and Sheffield University presented a discussion of how to get large organizations to share knowledge. He observes that many portals are abandoned in favor of ad-hoc methods like emailing data around or sharing directories. One big reason is that the portal is too rigid, forcing everyone to follow same schema. Need [...]
xOperator is a tool that lets you query your social-network-friends’ information (semantic web data) using IM. You write your queries in “english” interpreted according to AIML, the AI Markup language. Kind of like the pidgin we’ve explored for jourknow.
Raphael Troncy of CWI presented a news browser that uses semantic web tools to integrate information from lots of sources (along with the entities they refer to) into a single unified news browser. It looks pretty nice; you can try it here.
Leo Sauermann talked about Gnowsis, a “semantic desktop” built and studied several years ago. It’s like the old Haystack system, aiming to give people a unified repository of all the information they work with on their desktop, with categories, annotation, etc. Unlike haystack, they made sure it was bug-free and ran a user study in [...]
Just saw a presentation on RDF123. This is a framework in two parts for exposing spreadsheets as rdf. First part is a protocol for writing an RDF file that explains how the spreadsheet should be transformed into RDF—eg, that depending on whether cells in a given “professor” column “yes” or “no”, the rdf should say [...]
Fourth of a set of industry talks at ISWC. “Data Intelligence”. Today, lots of research is inhibited because of data that cannot be made available to the research community (this has been one of my gripes for a while, so great to be hearing from MS). Big issue of course is data privacy. Goldcorp challenge. [...]