It’s late already and we are packed and ready to go.

Where to you might ask?

Knowledge Hives has been invited to participate in the Innovation Seed Camp collocated with European Semantic Technology Conference in Vienna, Austria.

We are hoping to impress the jury with our solutions and our plans to capitalize on them. Even more, we are hoping to learn as much as possible from world renown entrepreneurs, venture capitals and business angels.

It is going to be a very interesting event.

Stay tuned, as we are going to keep you up to date though our @knowledgehives twitter account, tagging our posts with #isc and #estc2009.

After the tutorial, we have reviewed a couple of existing solutions for information discovery; we have identified a set of common features of next generation of search engines.

During the last presentation we have reviewed various interaction models for information retrieval with social media. We have described how certain social services can be used to perform realtime search and deliver more context-oriented results.

The session concluded with a panel on the future of web search and semantic technologies. Together with other panelists we agreed that:

1. Although it would be nice to have, it is very unlikely that there is going to be another, semantic Google-killer search engine. More likely there is going to be a hand-full of  services delivering specialized solutions for concrete needs.
2. The major breakthrough in providing next generation of search engines requires new user interface paradigm, which … we do not have (or are not aware of) yet.

The blog is in Polish at the moment. But we hope to make it more international in the (near) future:

Już jutro przeczytacie tutaj pierwszy post o podstawach Semantic Web. I tak z dnia na dzień będziemy wam przybliżać czym jest Web 3.0, czyli połączenie technologii semantycznych i społecznych. Dowiecie się nie tylko o podstawach tej technologii, ale również jak tworzyć i korzystać z istniejących rozwiązań semantycznych. Będziemy prezentowali ciekawe istniejące systemy semantyczne, oraz informowali o ważnych wydarzeniach związanych z rozwojem Web 3.0. Na bieżąco będziemy też informować o nowych wynikach prac badawczych prowadzonych na całym świecie.semanticschool.com,  Szkoła Web 3.0

Stay tuned.

You can read more about it on his blog.

ocabularies to the space of linked data.

This is the mission of our new project – Open Vocabulary.

Our goal is to take existing, open and free to use vocabularies (taxonomies or thesauri), translate them into SKOS/RDF, and deliver access to this vocabularies through Java and REST API.

The Open Vocabularies project consists of three modules:

• SKOS/RDF representations of open and free vocabularies.
• Java and REST API for accessing, searching and managing vocabularies.
• Portal for browsing and searching vocabularies.

Vocabularies in SKOS/RDF

At the moment we have prepared and tested following vocabularies:

• Taxonomies:
  • Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
  • Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC)
  • Library of Congress (LOC)
  • Polska Klasyfikacja Tematyczna (PKT) – popular taxonomy used in Polish libraries
  • Universal Decimal Classification (UCD)
  • Open Directory Project Taxonomy (DMoz)
  • Polish concepts from the Open Directory Project (DMoz – PL)
• Thesauri:
  • WordNet 2.0 Thesaurus – the original RDF/OWL extended with SKOS relations
  • OpenThesaurus (PL) – SKOS/RDF version of the Polish thesaurus used in the OpenOffice software

SKOS/RDF representations for all taxonomies (except DMoz) where created from flat-file specifications. DMoz taxonomies were created out of RDF-like version of DMoz, and enriched with use of SKOS relations. We have also enriched WordNet RDF/OWL with SKOS relations.
The SKOS/RDF version of Polish OpenThesaurus has been created based on rules we have designed for processing OpenThesaurus document type.

Java and REST API

The OpenVocabulary delivers Java library which can be used to embed OpenVocabulary in JEE applications. It delivers:

• Java API for managing taxonomies, thesauri and tags stored in RDF Storage (RDF2Go over Sesame)
• Access to full-text index (using Lucene) to improve search and retrieval of vocabulary concepts stored in Open Vocabulary repository.
• REST API that enables access to Open Vocabulary repository and concepts though HTML, RDF and JSON clients.

The REST API has been build following guidelines outlines by the Linked Data initiative, especially recommendation for Cool URIs and content negotiation. Apart from RDF rendering API, Open Vocabulary delivers two methods for vocabulary concepts retrieval:

• Lookup – provided through /vocabularis/lookup?uri= scheme enables rendering information about any vocabulary concepts in the RDF storage, including those from WordNet OWL/RDF which URI scheme is not hosted at OpenVocabulary.info.
• Search – provided through /vocabularies/search?q=[&threshold=&size=] scheme enables searching through the full-text index of vocabularies. It is possible to define similarity threshold or maximal number of results, or both.

Online portal for browsing and searching vocabularies

We have setup an online portal at http://www.openvocabulary.info/ to:

• Expose supported vocabularies (in the openvocabulary.info URI scheme) through Cool URIs; at the moment we support agents accepting HTML, RDF and JSON documents.
• Present capabilities of OpenVocabulary Java API, including access to full-text index.
• For registered users – provide access to all-in-one RDF bundles with all currently supported vocabularies and related ready to use Lucene indexes.

Open Vocabulary in action

One of the reasons we have created OpenVocabulary project was to support semantic user tagging, i.e., encourage users of social network systems to use meaningful concepts instead of tags. We have realized that idea in the digi.me service. If you have not used it before – you should give it a try. digi.me brings semantics, better social interactions and smart recommendations to a social bookmarking; think about it as del.icio.us on steroids. There is also a Polish localization of the digi.me service called www.węzełki.pl.

Open Vocabularies is the next generation of previous open source prototype called JOnto (created at DERI, NUI Galway). Unlike JOnto, Open Vocabularies uses SKOS/RDF, provides REST API (built according to Linked Data guidelines), and features more vocabularies, including Open Thesaurus and WordNet OWL/RDF. Similar to JOnto, Open Vocabularies is also delivered as open source software, but it uses BSD license (instead of restrictive Corrib license).
We would like to thank Linked Data community, especially Richard Cyganiak for their help.

We are happy to announce that after many hours of testing behind us (and very probably still many ahead of us) our bookmarking services twins: http://digi.me/ and http://www.węzełki.pl/ are going public tomorrow.

Make sure to visit either (or both) of these services after 8 AM [CEST] tomorrow, to register and change the way you organize and share your bookmarks.

With the Internet becoming the major medium of communication, business, … and life, we have observed the growing popularity and importance of the open source software, especially in the commercial applications. We can risk saying that the open source solutions were one of the major assets contributing to the success of the Web.

Knowledge Hives has been brought up in the research community where contributing to the open source was a very common practice. We understand that in order to support the coming of third generation of the Internet (Web 3.0) a host of open source software needs to become widely accessible.

Apart from our contribution to open source solutions delivered by others, a part of the mission of Knowledge Hives is to continue the research and development efforts of the Corrib.org group that has delivered many open source projects based on the research on the Web 3.0. In addition to publishing our own open source solutions and contributing to the existing open source projects, especially from the Corrib.org group, we provide commercial support that allows to leverage the potential of the open source software in more demanding environments, e.g., enterprises or large organizations.

Hence, our mission for the open source support is three-fold:

• Deliver new solutions (libraries, frameworks, tools) to the open source community using clean BSD license.
• Contribute to the code base of other open source projects.
• Provide commercial support and training to existing open source projects, especially those delivered by the Corrib.org group.

To learn more about our projects, please:

• visit the open source section on our home page: http://www.knowledgehives.com/lang-en/opensource
• visit the wiki page our our open source mission: http://opensource.knowledgehives.com/
• browser our subversion repository at http://opensource.knowledgehives.com/svn/
• subscribe to the opensource@lists.knowledgehives.com mailing list at http://lists.knowledgehives.com/listinfo.cgi/opensource-knowledgehives.com

Remember to follow us at:

• http://blog.knowledgehives.com/
• http://twitter.com/knowledgehives
• http://knowledgehives.blip.pl/

Should you have any questions – please send them to opensource@lists.knowledgehives.com or to info@knowledgehives.com.

We will make sure you will receive constant updates on our new products, services, research results, and community activities.

There is so much that can be done to make Web 3.0 come true. We are on it.

If you want to stay up to date – subscribe to our RSS feed, or follow us on Twitter and Blip.pl.