Alexandre Passant

I've just wrote a Drupal module for SPARCool, which allows to embed SPARCool results in Drupal nodes, so that you can reuse any data from the LOD cloud to enhance your webpages !

It simply works by using the following pattern in your pages [ sparcool | predicate | URI ] (without any space), that is translated to a JSONP callback to the SPARCool service, et voilà ! You can also add a ;l=xx parameter after the property if you want to limit the query to a particular language.

For instance, I can include some bands members in this blog post, from DBPedia:

As well as the abstract of a paper, from the Semantic Web Dog Food:

Or the list of my last.fm contacts, from DBTune:

The Drupal project is hosted at http://drupal.org/project/sparcool, you can get the source via CVS. In addition, I also wrote a tiny JavaScript function (that is used in this module - and requires JQuery if you want to use it separately) that can help to include such results in any page. Finally, SPARCool now relies on prefix.cc to fetch the prefixes.

Have fun with Linked Open Data !

NB: Since the results are included via AJAX when printing the page, you should't get their results in your aggregator or planet websites

I'm pleased to announce that the W3C SPARQL Working Group has just published the First Public Working Draft of SPARQL New Features and Rationale, i.e. description and motivations of the new features to be included in the next version of SPARQL.

The W3C SPARQL Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of SPARQL New Features and Rationale. This document provides an overview of the main new features of SPARQL and their rationale. This is an update to SPARQL adding several new features that have been agreed by the SPARQL WG. These language features were determined based on real applications and user and tool-developer experience. (Via W3C Semantic Web Activity News)

If you're implementing SPARQL engines, please note that the current syntaxes for each features are example syntax, and then should not be considered as final in any way. Any comments regarding this draft are welcomed by e-mail to public-rdf-dawg-comments@w3.org.

De retour de vacances, mon mémoire de thèse (pdf, licence CC BY-NC-ND) et les transparents de la soutenance (qui s'est très bien passée ;-) sont enfin en ligne.

Merci encore à tous ceux qui sont venus / m'ont encouragé / questionnés et avec qui j'ai pu travailler ces dernières années dans le cadre de cette thèse ... l'aventure ne fait que commencer !

The Unit Social Software (USS) in DERI is currently looking for Ph.D. candidates. Applications must be sent by the end of the week at hr.ie@deri.org and positions will start in September.
More details in the add below:

The Unit Social Software (USS) at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute - DERI: http://www.deri.ie/ - of the National University of Ireland, Galway invites applications for a 4 years fully-funded PhD fellowship position.

DERI is a leading research institute in semantic technologies that offers a stimulating, dynamic and multi-cultural research environment, excellent ties to research-groups worldwide and standardization bodies, close collaboration with industrial partners and up-to-date infrastructure and resources.

The DERI Unit Social Software focuses on the convergence of Social Software and the Semantic Web by developing models and tools that support and take advantage of these two trends. Achievements of DERI USS include SIOC - Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities - and a large number of publications and tutorials on the topic in international venues and journals. USS Research is performed in collaboration with other DERI units and industrial partners. The PhD position is funded by Science Foundation Ireland (http://sfi.ie) within the Lion2 project and offers for the successful candidate an annual stipend, course fees and conference travel when presenting.

Applicants should have a strong interest in Social Software, Semantic Web and Web Science in general and hold an excellent primary degree or Masters qualification in a relevant discipline (e.g. computer science, information
science, knowledge representation), with an emphasis on practical aspects of research (e.g. industrial project experience, ontology development and open-source software developement being distinct advantages). Selected
candidates are expected to have the willingness to combine formal scientific work with application-oriented research and development in projects funded by national and international (EU) funding agencies, as well as participating in
open-source projects and standardization activities.

Please submit your application (including cover letter, relevant publications or software implementation, full CV and contact details for two referees) to hr.ie@deri.org by 5pm on Friday, July 3rd with the subject line 'PhD Position - DERI USS'. Candidates will be contacted in the first week of July and interviews will be then conducted for successful applications. For further information please contact Alexandre Passant (alexandre.passant@deri.org) and John Breslin (john.breslin@deri.org).

I've just uploaded the slides of the two Semtech tutorials I was invoved in today. They are embedded below, but you can also access them directly on slideshare. It was a busy day - actually, I'm in the same meeting room from 7:30 am ! - but really interesting and I guess (and hope) the tutorials were well recieved, with interesting feedback and questions from the audience. As said previously and during both presentations, if you have any questions, feel free to drop an e-mail or directly come to have a chat if you want to discuss some of these topics more in detail.

I just arrived in San Jose for SemTech as I will speak in two tutorials tomorrow (i.e. the 15th of June - oh btw, I'll be 29 that day :-) :

• The first one, in the morning, "Hello Open World" is an updated version of our WWW2009 tutorial (given with Michael Hausenblas) that will be given that time with Giovanni Tummarello. We will emphasize on some recent developments as well as on practical use-cases of these technologies in order to improve existing applications as well as building new ones.
• The second one, in the afternoon, "Semantic Enterprise 2.0" will focus on the shortcomings of Enterprise 2.0 systems and how to apply Semantic Web technologies to such ecosystems to solve these issues. In addition to the "theoretical" part, we will describe various uses-cases on the topic. You can also read a short interview on the subject that was recently blogged on semanticweb.com - in which I briefly present the topics that we will address during the tutorial.

That said, that's my first time in SemTech and I should be in the conference venue for the whole event in addition of these two tutorials. If you want to discuss some of these topics or anything related to the Semantic Web - or just say hello - , feel free to ping me here and I'll be happy to have a chat. In addition, I'll also attend the upcoming VoCamp Sunnyvale in Yahoo on thursday afternoon and friday, that sounds also really exsiting, and then will finally take some holidays in San Francisco ... unplugged.

I'm happy to announce CommonTag, a new RDFS vocabulary for Semantic Tagging, designed to bridge the gap between free-text tagging and Linked Data. In a similar way that what I've done in the past with MOAT, CommonTag allows one to create links between his tags (as simple keywords) and the concept they represent, defined as URIs of Semantic Web resources, from public knowledge bases such as Freebase or DBpedia.

What is especially relevant with regards to CommonTag is that the vocabulary aims to be simple to understand, easily accessible, and with an easy RDFa annotation process for end-users and Web developers. On the other hand, it features mappings with existing tagging vocabularies (the Tag Ontology, MOAT, SCOT, SIOC and SKOS) for those who want to go further or use their existing applications with this new model.

But most interestingly, as one can see when browsing the website, a key feature is that CommonTag is not an isolated initiative but supported by various companies involved in the Semantic Web and the Social Web -- and especially in both ! -- namely (for the initial nucleus and by alphabetical order, hope it will grow soon !) AdaptiveBlue, DERI (NUI Galway), Faviki, Freebase, Yahoo, Zemanta and ZigTag - and I must add that was a great experience to design this vocabulary together !

CommonTag is already supported in various applications as you can see on the website and on the following picture, from Zemanta to index your blog posts to Sindice to build applications on the top of it. And there is more to come soon, stay tuned ;-)

Workshop homepage and CFP coming soon !

Here is a screencast I've just made about SPARCool for tomorrow's SFSW Challenge, as I'm unfortunately not in ESWC this year.
The list of challenge submissions and related papers is online and here's the SPARCool one.

Je soutiendrai ma thèse "Technologies du Web Sémantique pour l'Entreprise 2.0" le mardi 9 Juin à 10h30 à la Maison de la Recherche, 28 rue Serpente, Paris.

Résumé:

Les travaux présentés dans cette thèse proposent différentes méthodes, réflexions et réalisations associant Web 2.0 et Web Sémantique. Après avoir introduit ces deux notions, nous présentons les limites actuelles de certains outils, comme les blogs ou les wikis, et des pratiques de tagging dans un contexte d'Entreprise 2.0. Nous proposons ensuite la méthode SemSLATES et la vision globale d'une architecture de médiation reposant sur les standards du Web Sémantique (langages, modèles, outils et protocoles) pour pallier à ces limites. Nous détaillons par la suite différentes ontologies (au sens informatique) développées pour mener à bien cette vision : d'une part, en contribuant activement au projet SIOC - Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities -, des modèles destinés aux méta-données socio-structurelles, d'autre part des modèles, étendant des ontologies publiques, destinés aux données métier. De plus, la définition de l'ontologie MOAT - Meaning Of A Tag - nous permet de coupler la souplesse du tagging et la puissance de l'indexation à base d'ontologies. Nous revenons ensuite sur différentes implémentations logicielles que nous avons mises en place à EDF R&D pour permettre de manière intuitive la production et l'utilisation d'annotations sémantiques afin d'enrichir les outils initiaux : wikis sémantiques, interfaces avancées de visualisation (navigation à facettes, mash-up sémantique, etc.) et moteur de recherche sémantique. Plusieurs contributions ont été publiées sous forme d'ontologies publiques ou de logiciels libres, contribuant de manière plus large à cette convergence entre Web 2.0 et Web Sémantique non seulement en entreprise mais sur le Web dans son ensemble.

La soutenance est publique, si le sujet vous intéresse, n'hésitez pas !
Le mémoire et les slides seront également postés sur ce site par la suite.