New York Semantic Web Meetup at the Museum 2008
Host:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1000 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10028 Uris Center entrance at 81 street and 5th ave
Semantic Web at the Museum: Enhancing Information Retrieval in Web-Based Virtual Cultural Heritage Environments
Marco Neumann, KONA
The Semantic Web has changed the way professional cultural heritage organizations think about documenting their collections and their managing business processes. The rich semantic interrelationship of cultural descriptions until today presents a challenging task for information systems designers and practitioners alike. We are now at a point where semantic technologies have matured to a level where they can enrich and in some instances even replace existing infrastructures to provide better services and sustainable solutions for content management.
CoReWIKI and Semantic Web: A node for cultural heritage standards
Thomas Tunsch, SMB SPK
Slides Museums as well as other communities related to cultural heritage have developed many standards with different scopes and levels of implementation. The CIDOC CRM is the international standard (ISO 21127:2006) for the controlled exchange of cultural heritage information. Although covering the universe of cultural heritage concepts and providing the formal ontology for archives, libraries and museums, implementations and utilizations of this model are still considered rare.
While the CIDOC CRM is the result of the efforts of the specialized CIDOC working group, it seems to be difficult for other members of the professional community of museum specialists to share the highly abstract essence of a conceptual reference model. The same is true for other complex and diversified standards. Wikis with semantic functionality (Semantic MediaWiki) are capable to deal with both the complex and abstract features of an ontology as well as multiple pieces of data and information. Therefore the combination of the model and a wiki can provide new qualities of accessibility and connectivity for cultural heritage standards.
Semantic Web and Wikis
What to do with an OWL DL Reasoner: An Introduction to Pellet Slides Mike Smith, Clark & Parsia LLC Kendall Clark, Clark & Parsia LLC http://clarkparsia.com/
In this talk we introduce OWL and Pellet, the leading OWL DL reasoner. Pellet is an open source Java program for handling OWL ontologies, including traditional and non-traditional reasoning services like consistency checking, explanation, SPARQL-DL conjunctive query, SWRL rules, etc. Available via Jena or OWLAPI, the 1.5.2 release of Pellet is a useful tool in many semantic technology applications.
We will review some of the interesting applications---cancer research, probabilistic reasoning, virtual experts, and policy management---being developed with and for Pellet, both by Clark & Parsia LLC and by our customers and other users. We'll also review some of the changes in the next release, 1.6, including technical and licensing issues.
Clark & Parsia LLC, founded in 2006, is a small startup in Washington, DC, focusing on semantic application infrastructure applications, including OWL reasoners, ontology engineering tools, Linked Data & RDF clients and reasoners, automated planners, machine learning, and related technologies. C&P technologies are typically available as Open Source dual-licensed products available for commercial OEM applications.
Speech Mashups - A Compositional Approach to Speech, Web and Semantic Services
Giuseppe (Pino) Di Fabbrizio AT&T Labs - Research, Inc. http://www.research.att.com
Accessing information and services over the web is a daily routine for professionals and casual web surfers. Recently published web services interfaces such as Google Maps, Fliker, YELLOWPAGES.COM™, etc. greatly simplified the creation of new web services by hiding the complexity in the network. We applied this successful paradigm to our advanced speech technology and created the new concept of Speech Mashups where AT&T's WATSON automatic speech recognition engine is integrated with regular web services to economically bring speech processing technologies to the larger web and mobile developer community. This new capability provides network-hosted speech technologies for multimedia devices with broadband access (iPhone, BlackBerry®, IPTV set-top box, SmartPhones, etc.) without the need to install, configure, and manage speech recognition software and equipment. The purpose of this presentation is to introduce the concept of speech mashups and demonstrate how to build simple voice-enabled services by using the rich RDF and OWL syntactic structures to describe complex multimodal interactions on mobile devices.