KWTR: Blogs

Main Contributors: Knud Möller. See the list of contributors

• 1. CURRENT TRENDS IN SEMANTIC WEB (In the following part we intend to identify the state of the art of Semantic Web based theories, methods, applications and tools in your research field.)

• • 1.1. One or more examples (case studies) in which semantic web has been used.

  Name of the institutions: National Institute of Informatics, Japan 
  (provider of technology), Senshu University, Japan (user of technology)
  Industry / sector: Education
  Business activities improved by the SW solutions: The “semblog” and RNA 
  tools developed by the group around Hideaki Takeda were adapted and used by 
  Senshu University to provide class support. Each teacher and student had 
  their own semantic blog, which were connected using the tools. 
  Research Needs: 
  Name of the project:
  Tools and applications implemented in the project: semblog and RNA. For a description see the paper in 1.3.2
  Note: semblog is not the same as semiBlog (below), although the names are almost identical.

• • 1.2. The first 4 Semantic Web based tools used in your research fields.

Name: semiBlog
Website: http://semiblog.semanticweb.org
White paper: http://sw.deri.org/~knud/papers/semiBlogSemDesk2005/semiBlogSemDesk2005.pdf
Main characteristics: semiBlog is an authoring tool for Semantic Blogs. It is 
desktop-based and allows the user to create    semantic metadata from desktop 
objects like calendar events, address book contacts, etc.. The main focus is on 
usability and easy-of-use, which I consider important for the acceptance of SW technology in the mainstream.
Open problems: 
Platform independence -- medium relevance -- will be solved in the short term
Stability -- high relevance -- will be solved in the short term
                     
Name: HP Labs semantic blogging demonstrator
Website: http://www.semanticblogging.org/semblog/blog/default/
White paper: http://www.idealliance.org/papers/dx_xmle04/index/author/7691905a7307fb7f2731ee67e8.html
Main characteristics: The first implementation of what Semantic Blogging 
could be and how it could look like. The demonstrator is web-based and restricted to the bibliographic domain. 
The main goal was not to provide a complete solution, but to give an impression 
– a demonstrator. The “open problems” mentioned below are therefore not really problems 
of this particular tool, which is why I don’t specify a time when they will be solved.
Open problems: 
“Web-based”-ness (see below) -- high relevance 
Restricted Domain -- high relevance 

Name: semblog and RNA
Website: http://www.semblog.org
White paper: http://www-kasm.nii.ac.jp/papers/takeda/05/takeda05www.pdf
Main characteristics: Another implementation of the Semantic Blogging idea. 
This one focuses on connecting semantic blogs from various users in a FOAF-based 
network, allowing automatic recommendations from one user to another based on the network. 
Open problems: no one has been identify
                                            
Name: YARS
Website: http://sw.deri.org/2004/06/yars/
White paper: http://sw.deri.org/2005/02/dexa/yars.pdf
Main characteristics: YARS is a high-performance RDF store, and as such 
potentially an important building block in the emerging Semantic Web. For Semantic 
Blogging, it can be a solution to host, index and give access to semantic metadata 
in the blogosphere. YARS implements quads instead of triples, which allows to model 
context and provenance, an important aspect in Semantic Blogging.
Open problems: 
Complete SPARQL support -- high relevance -- will be solved in the short term
Stability -- high relevance -- will be solved in the short term 

• • 1.3. A short summary of the first 3 best papers in the field.

Reference:  S. Cayzer. Semantic Blogging: Spreading the Semantic Web 
Meme. In XML Europe 2004, Amsterdam, Netherlands, Proceedings, April 2004.
Short abstract: This paper first introduced the term “Semantic 
Blogging”. It describes the general idea and presents a web-based 
implementation of Semantic Blogging for the bibliographic domain, showing – 
in a very limited domain – how to author, host and consume a semantic blog.

Reference:  H. Takeda and I. Ohmukai. Semblog Project. 
In Activities on Semantic Web Technologies in Japan, A WWW2005 Workshop, 2005.
Short abstract: Short abstract..This paper gives a good overview 
of the “semblog” and “RNA” tools for Semantic Blogging. While these tools 
are not very powerful with respect to annotation of blog posts, this paper 
shows well how blogs can be interlinked with the FOAF network, and how the 
resulting structure can be used to facilitate automatic referral of bookmarks 
between neighbour nodes in the network. 

Reference: K. Möller, U. Bojars and J. G. Breslin. Using Semantics to 
Enhance the Blogging Experience. In 3rd European Semantic Web Conference 
(ESWC2006), Budva, Montenegro, June 2006.
Short abstract: The paper investigates two complementing aspects 
of semantic metadata in the blogosphere - structural and content-related 
metadata. The nature of these two kinds of metadata is discussed in detail, 
as well as ways of creating such metadata in a convenient and non-obstrusive 
way for the user, how to publish such metadata on the web, and how to best make 
use of such metadata from the point of view of a blog consumer. 
The paper is based on the SIOC project and the semiBlog tool.

• • 1.4. A short list of open problems in theories and methods.

* ”URI crisis” – the problem of how to coin URIs for arbitrary objects 
and how to interprete a given URI is highly relevant for Semantic Blogging 
-- high relevance -- will be solved in the medium term
* Representing RDF in blogs – As of yet, there is no standard for representing RDF 
(the semantic metadata) in web pages (the blog post) – 
by linking, inline (e.g. RDF/A), etc: high relevance -- will be solved in the short term
* Desktop- vs. Web-based – Semantic Blogging (as many other domains) can be implemented 
in both ways. Both have advantages and disadvantages. Not really a problem, 
but it will be interesting to see which way will be more prominent: 
medium relevance -- will be solved in the short term
* Other: Today users find conventional blog content using generic 
search engines like Google, or specialized ones like Technorati (and, 
of course, links within the blogosphere). As of yet, there is not search 
engine that crawls and indexes SW data and allows conceptual queries (e.g. SPARQL). 
Without such a SW-Google, the improved possibilities of Semantic Blogging in terms 
of searching and finding relevant posts cannot be implemented. This, of course, 
is a general SW problem and not restricted to Semantic Blogging.

• 2. TRENDS ON THEORIES AND METHODS, SERVICES AND APPLICATIONS

• • 2.1. Research projects in which contributors are involved, along with a general description. Moreover, suggest for each project the possible future uses and applications related to the Semantic Web, the acceptance and diffusion in each period considered, the benefits, and the problems that will be probably occur.

Name of the project: Nepomuk
Type: FP6
Duration: 2006-2008
Partners: 
Research Institution: DFKI Kaiserslautern, AIFB Karlsruhe, NUIG Galway, 
EPFL Lausanne, L3S Hannover, ICCS Athens, KTH Stockholm, USI Lugano 
Industrial Partners: HP, IBM, SAP, PRC Group, EDGE-IT, 
Cognium Systems SA, Irion Management Consulting GmbH, Thales SA
Core activities: 
Developing an architecture standard for interlinked semantic desktops 
-- very high relevance -- will be solved in the short term
Developing a reference implementation of the standard
-- high relevance -- will be solved in the short term
Market opportunities: Developing standards compliant Semantic Desktop 
applications. Thanks to the standard, they will be interoperable. 
This will increase market chances.
Benefits for industry and practitioners: 
Industry partners can be early adopters and influence the standard -- high relevance
Bringing the SW to the desktop allows to try out many things in controlled, 
manageable environment -- medium relevance
Technological Problems (missing theories and methods):"
Open World vs. Closed World – which one will SemDesk data be? 
If closed world – how do we integrate open world SW data?
-- high relevance -- will be solved in the medium term
“URI Crisis” – just as relevant here as in Semantic Blogging (see 1.4)
-- very high relevance -- will be solved in the medium term
Problems – Missing tools:
Visualizing RDF – there is still no good solution for visualizing complex RDF graphs for ordinary users (i.e. our target)
-- high relevance -- will be solved in the medium term
SW peer2peer infrastructure – Nepomuk communication is to be based on P2P. There is no sufficient solution yet
-- high relevance -- will be solved in the short term
Problems – Semantic Web culture is missing: 
Digitize your life – in order for the SemDesk to be useful, users have to be 
willing to organize a lot of their lives in terms of the Semantc Desktop. 
-- medium relevance -- will be solved in the medium term 
Privacy – Linking my personal data to other people opens up huge privacy 
questions. Also, the web needs to stay as decentralized and out of reach of 
government institutions as possible. -- high relevance -- will be solved in the medium term 

• • 2.2. Some topics that will not be solved in short and medium term, for each of them there is a short explanation of the main reasons and (if possible) some references.

I would consider authoring in the SW in general and Semantic Blogging in particular to be more about engineering than fundamental science. As such, I think all the necessary building blocks, techniques and theories are really in place, and there are no fundamental questions that have to be solved in order to allow Semantic Blogging to work and be accepted in the mainstream, at least none that could not be solved in the short or medium term. The problems mentioned here are therefore more of a general nature.

Topics: URI crisis – I have mentioned this before, but I think this 
really is a fundamental question for all the SW to work.
Reason: In the SW, we want to make statements about things or concepts. 
To do that, we need to refer to that thing (e.g. a person) using a URI. 
Now, the question is: given e.g. some person, how do we assign a URI to it? 
There is no  central agency to do that, and such an agency is probably not 
desirable either. For specific domains like people, some sort of registry might 
work. As a workaround, users sometimes use e.g. the URL of the home page of a 
person to represent that person, but this creates new problems – not everybody 
has a home page, and it is now impossible to distinguish between statements about 
the person and the home page. Semantics like inverse functional properties can solve 
this in part (we do NOT assign URI to a person, but say that each person object with 
e.g. the same email address represents the same real life person), but they don’t 
work in all cases and are not widely implemented. Conventions such as the one 
outlined in [2] can help to cure the problem, but only if everyone adheres to them, 
and only from the point when they are introduced. There is no general solution yet, 
and even though a lot of people have been discussing this for a long time, 
nothing has come up. This might or might not be solved in the short or medium term, I’m not sure. 
References: [1] S. Pepper and S. Schwab. Curing the web’s identity crisis.   
http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/identitycrisis.html 
[2] E. Oren, R. Delbru, K. Möller, M. Völkel, and S. Handschuh. Annotation 
and navigation in semantic wikis. In SemWiki2006 - From Wiki to Semantics, at ESWC2006, Budva, Montenegro, June 2006.

Topics: Natural language understanding
Reason: This will show up again in the WP 3.2. The power of the SW lies 
in its complex graph structures, and the concise queries they allow. 
However, these queries require the use of complex query languages (e.g. SPARQL), 
and this will keep mainstream users from using it. One solution could be interfaces 
that translate natural language into such queries. However, this holy grail of 
computational linguistics has been pursued for decades now, and I’m not aware 
that we are anywhere near a robust and reliable solution yet. 
References: none

• 3. TRENDS ON TOOLS
  • 3.1. A list of the most relevant semantic based demos in the area.

See tools described above

• • 3.2. A short description of tools that are still missing. A description of business activities and problems they should solve, will be provided.

Name: Conceptual query interfaces for my mother
Description: The power of rich graph representations of information 
over “simple” textual representations is – among other things – 
the precision with which they can be queried. However, to make use 
of these powerful queries, users currently have to use complicated 
query languages. Not an option for my mother (or my father, for that matter). 
So, we need tools that allow to formulate powerful queries in a simple way. 
I wonder if it can be done at all. Alternative solutions like 
faceted browsing might turn out to be more useful. 
Related business activities End-user targeted application development. UI development.

• 4.Please fell free to add any comment or suggestion.

At the moment, developments in this area seem to be hampered by the fact that people either focus on distributed solutions with very little semantics or at semantic solutions with almost no decentralization.