Semantic Web 2.0 Tutorial at World Wide Web Conference in Edinburgh

I just got the notification that our tutorial proposal (together with John Breslin) for the World Wide Web Conference 2006 on "Semantic Web 2.0: Creating Social Semantic Information Spaces" has been accepted. The contents of the tutorial will be about Semantic Blogging, Semantic Wikis, Social Semantic Collaborative Filtering and other new approaches related to applying and deploying semantics and social networks for information dissemination and assessment. We will introduce the audience in the state of the art in this area, including the approaches that are developed in the Semantic Web cluster at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute. The tutorial is scheduled for Friday, May 26, 2006 in Edinburgh, at the WWW Conference.

Social Networks for Organizing Information becomes Mainstream

SNARF, the Social Network and Relationship Finder, developed by Microsoft Research, deploys social network information for organizing information, helping users to organize their email in Outlook. A quote: “The coolest thing to me,’ Brush says, “is the power of collecting and presenting ‘simple information.’ I was surprised and pleased by how much power you can get from simply counting the e-mails you send to people and using that information to organize e-mail for users. Social information is very powerful.” It looks like we are on the right track with NEPOMUK and the Social Semantic Desktop: social networking information is relevant for assessing all information that we get and also send - not only email, but instant messaging, documents, websites, VOIP calls etc. Developing open standards is the challenge in front of of us. FOAF is a beginning, but we need far more: standards and protocols for dissemination of information and documents within social networks, ranking of information etc. Develping these standards is an important aspect of the NEPOMUK project.