As part of the "Social Semantic Enterprise" project, and in collaboration with Cisco Systems and the IRCSET (Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology), the Digital Enterprise Research Institute is currently seeking a Ph.D. candidate on the topic of Social Software, Enterprise data integration, information quality and privacy. This research project is part funded by Cisco Research Center in response to the collaboration RFP category.

The successful candidate will study how to integrate public data from the Social Web (Tweets, linkedIn profile, Facebook updates, etc.) in the Enterprise, while at the same time respecting privacy of employees and ensuring that only relevant and accurate data is shared in the enterprise. This integration will provide a better integration of Social Web platforms both inside and outside the workspace, leveraging both with common semantics for an integrated social knowledge management experience.

Candidates should have at least a M.Sc. degree in computer science, science or engineering with excellent results, have the pre-requisites for Ph.D. studies at NUI Galway, and must be fluent in english. The Ph.D. position covers academic fees, a generous monthly stipend and a research travel allowance for a three year period, as well as the use of DERI's facilities for experimentations and research.

The following criteria are expected from the student:

• Interest with Semantic Web technologies (RDF(S)/OWL, SPARQL, etc.) and Linked Data
• Interest and familiarity with social software (blogs, wikis, microblogging, etc.)
• Interest in Enterprise information systems and data integration
• Interest for standardisation processes
• Good programming skills
• Good english writing skills

The successful candidate will work with Dr. Alexandre Passant in DERI, NUI Galway, within the Social Software Unit. There will be extensive opportunities for collaboration with other researchers and research units and projects in DERI and in Europe, as well as in other world-wide institutes with whom DERI collaborates, including opportunities for a long-term visit during the Ph.D. timeframe. The Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Galway (DERI) is one of the largest semantic research organization in the world. DERI's mission is to enable networked knowledge, globally interlinking information from the Web and the physical world. DERI is based in Galway is one of the most beautiful Irish cities shaped by artistic communities, active student life, innovative industry and leading edge research. Galway is located at the beautiful west coast of Ireland within the Galway Bay, 'between' Europe and the U.S., making it an ideal hub for national, European and international research.

The application must be send by June 28th, 2010 to Dr. Alexandre Passant in either (X)HTML, pdf or plain text and must contain the following:

• a CV
• a one page statement explaining the candidate's interest in and compatibility with the objectives of the position
• a list of (minimum two) referees
• additionally, publications, software and other artifacts that the student may be consider relevant - ideally as links to resources available online
• copies of M.Sc. results and transcripts

Applications that do not follow the previous format will not be considered. Requests for information should be addressed to the same person.

The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at the National University of Ireland Galway is seeking applications for a fully-funded Ph.D. position in Modeling Sensor Data and incorporating Social Feedback and Community Sharing. The successful candidate will join the EU-funded FP7 SPITFIRE project team in DERI at NUI Galway: Semantic-Service Provisioning for the Internet of Things using Future Internet Research by Experimentation.

The Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Galway (DERI) is one of the largest semantic research organization in the world. DERI's mission is to enable networked knowledge, globally interlinking information from the Web and the physical world. DERI is based in Galway is one of the most beautiful Irish cities shaped by artistic communities, active student life, innovative industry and leading edge research. Galway is located at the beautiful west coast of Ireland within the Galway Bay, 'between' Europe and the U.S., making it an ideal hub for national, European and international research.

SPITFIRE is an international project funded by the European Union working towards the realisation of a stronger connection between the natural and the digital worlds. The goal of this project is to investigate unified concepts, methods and software infrastructures that facilitate the efficient development of applications that span and integrate the Internet and the embedded (i.e., sensor) world, and make use of state-of-the-art Web and Semantic Web technologies to achieve this goal. SPITFIRE will drastically lower the effort required for developing robust, interoperable and scalable applications in the Internet of Things. This will facilitate new kinds of applications and services that are not possible to date and thus have an impact on research, industry and private households. The project consortium consists of academic and industrial partners from Ireland, Germany, Greece and Belgium. It is coordinated by DERI, NUI Galway.

The successful candidate is expected to work towards (1) the modeling of sensor data as Linked Data, (2) the incorporation of user-feedback for validating sensor description and (3) collaborative methods for sharing sensor description and related queries at Web scale. This will provide new methods and techniques for enabling sensor data description being available on the Web, being able to share these description within communities of interest. Use-cases where such methods could be deployed include Ambient Intelligence and Reality Mining. Ambient Intelligence is focused around personal applications, varying dependent on context, user’s goals, user roles, relations and entities. Reality Mining deals with the investigation and modelling of principles underlying the evolution and interactions in large social, communication and collaborative networks derived from individual sensors and their data.

The work will be achieved in close cooperation with other units and projects in DERI, as well as with the other partners from the SPITFIRE consortium. The FIRE initiative and its large-scale experimental facilities provide the unique opportunity to evaluate the developed methods and algorithms at large scale and in a realistic environment.

Areas of interest include - but are not limited to:

• Modelling Sensor data as Linked Open Data and using ontology engineering best practices
• Incorporating user-feedback in output of mined sensor description
• Designing social software and community sharing applications for sensor data
• Querying sensor data and sharing queries description in online communities

The successful candidate should have at least a Bachelor’s degree in computer science, science or engineering (M.Sc. is a plus), have the pre-requisites for Ph.D. studies at NUI Galway, and must be fluent in english. The Ph.D. position covers academic fees, a generous monthly stipend and a research travel allowance for a three year period, as well as the use of DERI's facilities for experimentations and research. The Ph.D. position is initially funded for a 3-years duration, with subject to extension to 4-years.

The following criteria are expected from the student:

• Interest with Semantic Web technologies (RDF(S)/OWL, SPARQL, etc.) and Linked Data
• Interest and familiarity with social software (blogs, wikis, microblogging, etc.)
• Interest for standardisation processes
• Good programming skills
• Good english writing skills

The successful candidate will work with the DERI Principle Investigator Prof. Manfred Hauswirth and Dr. Alexandre Passant in DERI, NUI Galway. There will be extensive opportunities for collaboration with other researchers and with other research groups and projects in DERI and in Europe, as well as in other world-wide institutes with whom DERI collaborates, including opportunities for a long-term visit during the Ph.D. timeframe.

The application must be send by Jun 30th, 2010 to Dr. Alexandre Passant in either (X)HTML, pdf or plain text and must contain the following:

• a CV
• a one page statement explaining the candidate's interest in and compatibility with the objectives of the position
• a list of (minimum two) referees
• additionally, publications, software and other artifacts that the student may be consider relevant - ideally as links to resources available online

Applications that do not follow the previous format will not be considered. Requests for information should be addressed to the same person.

SFSW2010 was actually the last edition of the SFSW workshop series. As shown in the closing session, lots of things happened in the community since 2005, when there was almost no API for managing RDF data on the Web, scalable RDF store, UI nor mash-ups. I believe that these SFSW workshops played an important role in that move, building a pragmatic vision of the Semantic Web landscape. Thank you guys for that !

Besides that, the conference is ongoing for the next three days and I'm presenting our demo paper on dbrec today, and in the demo session tonight (dbrec is also participating in the AI mashup challenge, so your votes are highly welcome :-). Slides will be uploaded after the presentation, and here's some teasing, since I'll avoid the usual bullet-points approach for these ones. Edit : here are the slides of the short presentation.

In the past few years, the Web has increasingly shifted from its initial document and librarian paradigm to an ecology of socially-generated data and services. Websites such as Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, etc. emphasise the huge popularity of sharing information in real-time. In addition, the wealth and breadth of applications that exploit open social networking APIs to provide new services and functionalities are growing rapidly, enabling new ways to interact and browse this user-generated content.

At the same time, the deployment of network-enabled mobile devices, RFID and sensors, is realising the ubiquitous nature of social networks. More objects of our everyday life are getting connected to the Internet to become part of its applications, including the Web and social networking services. We are only starting to contemplate the potential of a wide Internet of things, but it is certain that in that new augmentation of our reality, the Semantic Web will be one of the cornerstones of interoperability.

Advances in the Semantic Web and Linked Data realms offer new capabilities for such paradigms, ranging from data integration to knowledge representation for such social data, objects, and service descriptions. However, many challenges remain to be addressed such as scalability, reasoning in dynamic contexts, quality and provenance, privacy and security, multi-modal accesses, context capture and awareness, etc. Nevertheless, Semantic Web frameworks provide the means to support the architecture of such real-time social and ubiquitous platforms.

In this special issue, we seek contributions that tackle the issues of real-time and ubiquitous Social Semantics. In particular, we expect contributions addressing the following topics:

• From raw social data to semantic data
  • semantic grounding of raw social data
  • generation and aggregation of social semantics
  • ontologies and data models for social data representation and analysis
  • real-time semantic mining and analysis of social data
  • trends and dynamics in social semantic web
  • capturing and representing context in social networking
• Ubiquitous Web and social semantics
  • integration of virtual and physical worlds
  • integration tools, technologies, and platforms
  • privacy, ethics, and confidentiality
  • presence tracking and semantic augmentation
  • semantic sensors and RFID
  • social semantics on mobile devices
• Real-time querying frameworks and languages for social data
  • stream querying and reasoning on social data
  • location or time based reasoning, context based reasoning
  • querying volatile, moving and dynamic networks and data sources
  • dynamics, changesets and push-based notifications
  • scalability, approximate reasoning and querying in social applications
  • provenance and quality for querying social data

We solicit high-quality contributions addressing one or more of the aforementioned topics. Submissions should clearly address how they relate to the topic of this special issue (more than "potential" use-cases) and how the contribution enhances the state of the art in its particular domain. We especially welcome papers dealing with real data, description of deployed systems, and discussions on related experiments and methodology.

Papers must be submitted using the journal guidelines available at http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/authors. Upon submission on mstracker, the authors should mention "Social Semantics Special Issue" in the cover letter of their article. In addition, authors must keep in mind that the journal relies on an open and transparent review process and that their paper(s) will be available online during the review process. We suggest the authors to carefully check details of the review process at http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/reviewers#review.

Important dates

Submissions:

12th of September

Reviews due:

31st of October

Camera-ready version:

28th of November

Online Publication:

February 2011

Printed Publication:

March 2011

• From next Sunday (23rd) to Wednesday 25, I'll be in Washington, D.C. for ICWSM. John and myself will give a tutorial on the Social Semantic Web, and also have 2 poster presentations - a first one overviewing the new features of SMOB2, a second one, by Julie, on the use of Twitter during #iswc2009 (some of you may have seen a longer version at WebSci10);
• On the 29th, I'll flight to Heraklion for ESWC, where I'll first attend the INSEMTIVES User Advisory Board meeting, and conclude with the COST Action on Agreement Technologies workshop. I will also present dbrec and sparqlPuSH during the conference, the first one in the demo session and in the AI Mash-up challenge, the second one in the Semantic Scripting workshop, as well as a position paper by Jodi on semantically-enhancing Talk pages in Wikipedia. In addition, the SPOT2010 workshop will be held here
• Then, on the 8th of June, and after a short break in Paris, I'll be in Vienna for some meetings, but I should stay the morning after (9th)
• From the 18th to the, I'll then be in San Francisco and the bay area for SemTech2010. Together with Stephane, Lin and Axel, we'll give a 6 hours tutorial on the Semantic Web, Drupal and RDFa. I'll also give another joint talk on using ontologies in Semantic Enterprise 2.0 environments, and a lightning talk on semantic microblogging.
• Finally, from the 5th to the 9th of June, I'll be in Vienna again for ICWE2010, where I'll present a full paper about the distributed SMOB architecture, as well as demoing it.

The related papers will be available on this website soon (currently refactoring the biblio, etc.). If you want to meet one of these days, just drop me a comment here or an email !

Here's an abstract of the CfP, that is available in full-length here.

Following the international success of the past six BlogTalk events, the next BlogTalk - to be held in Galway, Ireland from 26-28 August 2010 - is continuing with its focus on social software, while remaining committed to the diverse cultures, practices and tools of our emerging networked society. The conference is designed to maintain a sustainable dialog between developers of innovative social software solutions, academics and researchers who study and advance social software and social media, practitioners and administrators in corporate and educational settings, and other general members of the social software and social media communities.

Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the conference, audiences will come from different fields of practice and will have different professional backgrounds. We strongly encourage proposals to bridge these cultural differences and to be understandable for all groups alike. For researchers, BlogTalk is an ideal conference for presenting and exchanging research work from current and future social software projects at an international level. For developers, the conference is a great opportunity to fly ideas, visions and prototypes in front of a distinguished audience of peers, to discuss, to link-up and to learn. For practitioners, this is a venue to discuss use cases for social software and social media, and to report on any results you may have with like-minded individuals.

We invite you to submit papers describing your research and applications at the BlogTalk 2010 conference. To encourage submission of various types of work by researchers, developers and practitioners, papers can be submitted in either of two tracks:

Regular Track (full paper required, 12-14 pages in LNCS format). We expect papers that discuss mature and implemented work, both regarding (1) practical or industrial implementations and use-case reports for social software and social media, or (2) theoretical and research aspects of social networks and social data. Papers should clearly motivate the approach and provide relevant evaluations. Each submission will be reviewed by three members of the Program Committee.

Demonstration and Poster Track (a two-page abstract describing what will be presented). This track gives the opportunity to present recent and in-progress work, in a forum that will encourage discussions since this track will be held in a special session with ample time for discussions and networking.

In addition to the research papers and the poster session, the conference will feature a set of invited speakers: Stowe Boyd, Dan Gillmor and Don Thibeau. We're looking forward to your contributions covering any theoretical or practical aspect of social software, and looking forward to seeing you in Galway !

The result is sparqlPuSH, an interface that can be plugged on any SPARQL endpoint and that broadcast notifications to clients interested in what's happening in the store using the pubsubhubbub protocol. At a glance, anyone can register a particular query to the RDF store (e.g. list all microblog posts, or list any changes made by X, using the Changesets vocabulary) and results are provided in an RSS / Atom feed that is then sync-ed using pubsubhubbub: each time new data corresponding the register query is added into the store, the store itself notifies the interested parties of such updates.
Practically, this means that you can be notified in real-time of any change happening in a SPARQL endpoint.

The following video describes how the approach works as well as shows a related use-case and you can download its source at http://code.google.com/p/sparqlpush/.
It can be used as an interface on the top of any SPARQL endpoint and also comes with an ARC2 interface (if you're using a different endpoint, the interactions happen via HTTP and use requires that your endpoint provides JSON SPARQL query results).

We believe that a push system like this for RDF notification can change lots of things regarding RDF data management and how to make sense of it, in real-time. In addition, we hope that such approach could be generalised not only to SPARQL endpoints, but to resource themselves, so that one resource can ping a pubsubhubbub hub when it changes, the notifications being then broadcasted to interested parties.

Actually, OMB is something we planned to look at for a long time, as briefly discussed when Status.net / OMB was presented in the W3C Social Web XG telco. I've finally took the time to analyse the full spec and checked how it compares with the distributed microblogging implementation of SMOB, and more generally with the vision of Semantic Web / Linked Data (SW/LD) microblogging services.

So here is a proposal for "Semantic OMB" (on Status.net wiki) that describes how the current OMB protocol fits with the previous idea. In particular, it aligns the terminology with existing classes / properties from well-known ontologies, and discusses how some current parts of the spec should be updated. It also discuss how OMB operations can be mapped to SPARQL/Update queries, based on the ones that currently happen in SMOB for cross-hubs synchronisation.

As you can see when browsing it, besides the terminology mappings, most of the things are compliant and there are only a few things that shall be discussed, in order to:

• enable a better "distributed-ness" by keeping profiles owned by their users and not necessarily creating remote accounts;
• making some mandatory elements being optional, as they are contained in the data that is exchange between services thanks to the Linked Data principles.

Thanks to these small updates, it could provide a protocol enabling SW/LD systems to be designed based on the OMB protocol, while having a sufficient abstraction level to comply with OMB systems using other technologies for data modeling and exchange. I'd be more than happy to see such features in an upcoming OMB release, and hopefully see deeper links between OMB and SW/LD efforts, as both aims to achieve the same goal of openness and interoperability. Comments and feedback are welcome on the related thread on the OMB mailing-list.

One more week, one more release, here's SMOB v2.2. This one fixes a few bugs (apparently the #tag tabs where unavailable on the 2.2 due to a bug I introduced in the .js file) and provides the following new features:

• geolocation of microblog messages (see example below), which shows one more benefit of the LOD cloud, as coordinates of posts are provided thanks to the GeoNames integration and OPO;
• ability to delete messages (deletion being then propagated to other hubs using SPARQL/Update) and to automatically purge messages older than X days (mainly to keep the DB lightweight - starred messages are not removed);
• on-demand creation of FOAF profile, in case one wants to try SMOB but does not have one (or does not want to provide it);
• parser for hyerlinks in microblog posts; and
• updated installer, allowing to select if SMOB should be used as a Twitter client (read / write settings).

BTW, as for the previous updates, you have to remove your config file and re-do the install procedure, and it will not remove your existing messages.

In addition, the new release provides:

• RSS feed for hub owner's messages;
• Automatic @reply when replying to a Twitter message (including sioc:addressed_to annotation);
• Updated user-interface for #tags mappings, now done using tabs to avoid too much scrolling;
• Ability to directly check @reply messages;
• Starring system using the Review vocabulary.

SMOB v2.1 can be downloaded here. If you used a previous version, you will also need to apply this patch after the update. It may remove some of your following / followers (as there have been some changes in the related RDF data - this should be taken into account by the patch, but who knows ...), in that case you'll add to add them again, sorry for the inconvenience !

Hopefully, a 2.2 release will be out in the next weeks, including geolocation of messages, advanced browsing features and other funky improvements. Feature requests can also be suggested on its dedicated bugtracker.