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The European Commission’s ISA programme, led by DERI’s eGovernment Unit Leader Dr. Vassilios Peristeras (currently on a career break from NUIG), has defined a set of common Core Vocabularies, which will facilitate the provision of cross-border and cross-sector eGovernment services. These Core Vocabularies are simplified, reusable, and extensible data models that capture the fundamental characteristics of an entity in a context-neutral way. The current specification contains three core vocabularies describing business, location and person.

The vocabularies were elaborated in a three month period by a multi-disciplinary Working Group consisting of three Task Forces, one for each vocabulary, totalling 67 experts from 21 countries, (17 Member States, USA, South-Africa, Croatia and Hungary), and several EU Institutions. The editor of the vocabularies is Phil Archer (W3C/ERCIM).

The Core Vocabularies Working Group, has launched a public comment period for the Core Vocabularies until 16 March 2012. Comments can be posted in the forum topic  and will be discussed by the Working Group in March 2012. This will lead to a final version of the specification that will be submitted to the European Commission for endorsement by the EU member states.

The Core Vocabularies are under consideration as recommended standard vocabularies for the  W3C Government Linked Data WG, which DERI actively participates in.

DERI’s Outreach section is using an eclectic mix of science fiction, video gaming, open data hacker workshops, computer programming courses, science lab tours and the establishment of Ireland’s only computer museum to spark interest amongst the school-going population towards careers in science and engineering.

“As part of this month’s National Engineers’ Week which commences on February 14th the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at NUI Galway, an internationally acclaimed centre of web science research, is organising an fascinating array of activities designed to capture the imagination of youth and to show them the benefits and challenges that careers in science and technology represent”, according to its Outreach Officer, Brendan Smith. “A key component of the schedule will be the introduction of computer programming courses to pupils in primary and primary schools across Galway city and county tutored by DERI’s young researchers. We feel that this initiative if developed further will prove invaluable not just to the pupils involved but to the county as a whole because, though programming forms the basis of much of modern science and engineering, the subject is not taught within either the primary or post primary curricula. We are already providing an after-school pilot course at St. Mary’s College Galway city which has worked out extremely well with students from both the junior and senior cycle attending the classes.

“But programming is only one element in the institute’s attempts to inspire and motivate a whole generation to consider careers in science and technology. One-day second-level school tours of five of the university’s top research institutes will take place during National Engineers Week . There will also be guided visits of Ireland’s only Computer and Communications Museum which was established at the institute during 2010 in partnership with the multi-sectoral eGalway group. This unique facility provides a fascinating insight into the development of communications from ancient hieroglyphics to today’s Internet with a particular emphasis on the development of the microcomputer and the involvement of youth as well as Irish people in communications innovation.

“The museum will be the location for a range of events and exhibitions including a vintage computer gaming night known as ‘Pacman Returns’ on February 16th; exhibits and lectures on topics such as ‘Hidden Histories: Women in Technology’; on ‘Space Exploration from Sputnik to the Space Shuttle’ and how the science fiction of the 1960s television series Star Trek influenced the development of many of today’s electronic devices such as the mobile phone and the iPad. Of special significance to Galwegians will be a special commemorative exhibit on February 18th to celebrate the 40th year anniversary by Digital Equipment Corporation, then the world’s second largest computer manufacturer, to open its first overseas manufacturing plant in Galway city.

“In conjunction with the community-based 091 Labs, DERI will host Galway’s first ‘Open Data Hack Day’ on February 19th to raise public awareness about the benefits of Open Government Data that will allow increased engagement and participation by citizens in the democratic process as well as provide new opportunities to develop meaningful public service applications. This inaugural ‘Hackathon’ should be of interest to all those concerned about improving political governance and accountability in the country including local government officials, public representatives, concerned voters, community activists and social web-developers.”

NUI Galway Researchers Lead European Policy Project

NUI Galway Researchers at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) are leading a European Union, multi-million euro initiative aimed at government transparency and giving citizens a voice in creating policies. The project is entitled ’Puzzled by Policy, Helping you to be part of the EU’.

The project aims to help end the detachment and disillusionment of citizens in the policy making process of the EU by improving information resources and tools. Current ways of informing citizens and allowing them to participate can be difficult to access, time consuming to use and yield little results. By providing citizens with an engaging and easy-to-use platform, where they can learn about and engage with policy issues, the initiative hopes to make participation in EU policy much easier.

Many Governments today recognise that to deliver effective public policy they need to enhance citizen and community involvement in the policy making process. Unfortunately, many citizens and communities feel that policy development is a process that they do not understand and have little control over. Policy making can be seen by many as an elitist process, taking place only amongst government and the more influential members of society; this project aims to dispel this belief.

Professor Stefan Decker, Director of DERI says “New Web technologies can support our democratic systems. They not only make government more cost effective, but also more transparent. Research and development out of Ireland is leading the way.”

The project combines advanced eParticipation methods with new Web 2.0, social networking and mobile technologies, in order to reduce the complexity of policy-making and legislative processes of EU and national governments and to pro-actively engage citizens in the policy-making process.

’Puzzled by Policy’ is funded by the European Commission’s Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP) - ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) with a total budget of € 3.89 million. It has a consortium consisting of 12 partners from nine European Countries (Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and United Kingdom). The project began in October 2010 and will run for 3 years.

For further information, contact Deirdre Lee, Project Coordinator at DERI on 091 495336, email: deirdre.lee@deri.org or log onto www.puzzledbypolicy.eu

Contact: Deirdre Lee

Geeks went wild on Ireland’s open data this weekend, celebrating the International Open Data Day with a hackathon hosted at DERI, NUI Galway and a post-event wrap up at Galway’s hacker space, 091 Labs.

Some great applications, built on top of Irish data, came out of the event:

• A map showing the latest planning applications submitted to Galway City Council
• A bus schedule application for connections between Galway and Dublin.
• An interactive map of public toilets in Galway with details about opening hours and wheelchair access.

The Galway-based Hackathon was part of a global series of events, ranging from Bangalore to Los Angeles and from Brasilia to Thailand, celebrating and highlighting the use of Open Data for citizens. More than 1000 people in over 73 cities on 5 continents dedicated time to helping foster both a local and international community of open data hackers, advocates and citizens.

With the success of the Galway hackathon, the geeks plan to get together again in late January to get more public data released and build more applications. Stay tuned for details and join us!

The 2 week long Galway Science & Technology Festival was the most successful ever, with a programme that endeavored to promote an awareness of science and technology amongst both young children and the school-going teenage population.
As well as introducing these pupils and students to adult mentors and experts, providing valuable young Role Models, the Festival also gave young people an important platform to show off and demonstrate their own prowess in Chemistry, Physics, Biology & the Web.

The visitors to Sunday’s exhibition in Áras na Mac Léinn at NUI Galway exceeded all our expectations with over 30,000 visitors attending. The queues started at 12.00 and were still there at closing time (5.30pm)!

A fantastic achievement and a welcome sign that young Irish people have a growing interest in experiencing the challenges of innovation, the sciences and the technologies. Long may it be nurtured.

Three schools mentored by DERI exhibited their projects: a) Scoil Bhride Menlo (online mapping), b) St. Patrick's School Fohenagh (digital archiving) and c) Galway Educate Together with their fascinating topic of 'How the 1960s science fiction television series Star Trek inspired many of today's technologies'.

DERI's Outreach Officer also coordinated the involvement of most of the other 12 schools that exhibited

The DERI/eGalway 'Communications & Computers Museum' was one of the highlights of the Festival with thousands enjoying the fantastic array of equipment on display from classic 1970s computer games such as Space Invaders & Pacman to the large DEC minicomputers manufactured in Galway from 1971 until the early 1990s.

Through giving talks on their work, facilitating school tours of the DERI institute, agreeing on a post-primary computer programming initiative, demonstrating their research projects at Sunday's exhibition, DERI's volunteers provided Galway's young people with the opportunities to engage in a real and a meaningful sense with Science & Technology

It's a great pleasure to announce that Renaud Delbru has successfully defended his thesis on friday. Evaluators are not asking for thesis updates as they consider it's absolutely satisfactory as it is. Congratulations!

Searching Web Data: an Entity Retrieval Model

Abstract:

More and more (semi) structured information is becoming available on the Web in the form of documents embedding metadata (e.g., RDF, RDFa, Microformats and others). There are already hundreds of millions of such documents accessible and their number is growing rapidly. This calls for large scale systems providing e ffective means of searching and retrieving this semi-structured information with the ultimate goal of making it exploitable by humans and machines alike.

This dissertation examines the shift from the traditional web document model to a web data object (entity) model and studies the challenges and issues faced in implementing a scalable and high performance system for searching semi-structured data objects on a large heterogeneous and decentralised infrastructure. Towards this goal, we de fine an entity retrieval model, develop novel methodologies for supporting this model, and design a web-scale retrieval system around this model. In particular, this dissertation focuses on the following four main aspects of the system: reasoning, ranking, indexing and querying. We introduce a distributed reasoning framework which is tolerant against low data quality. We present a link analysis approach for computing the popularity score of data objects among decentralised data sources. We propose an indexing methodology for semi-structured data which o ers a good compromise between query expressiveness, query processing and index maintenance compared to other approaches. Finally, we develop an index compression technique which increase both the update and query throughput of the system. The resulting system can index billions of data objects and provides keyword-based as well as more advanced search interfaces for retrieving the most relevant data objects.

This work has been part of the Sindice search engine project at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), NUI Galway. The Sindice system currently maintains more than 100 million pages downloaded from the Web and is being used actively by many researchers within and outside of DERI. The reasoning, ranking, indexing and querying components of the Sindice search engine is a direct result of this dissertation research.

DERI researchers Danh Le-Phuoc, Dr. Josiane Xavier Parreira, Dr. Vinny Reynolds, Prof. Manfred Hauswirth won the best demo award at the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2010) in Shanghai, China. ISWC is the premier world-wide conference bringing together hundreds of researchers and industry creating the next generation of the web.

The winning demo, called "RDF on the go", provides a fully-fledged RDF storage and SPARQL query processor with support for processing spatial data for mobile devices, specifically Android phones. RDF is the base technology for Linked Data which is becoming the basis for exchanging information in an interoperable and reusable fashion over the Internet. "'RDF on the go' not only allows applications on the mobile phone to store and integrate their information inside the phone in one central store, but it also enables the mobile phone to consume and use the wealth of billions of information items available on the Linked Data cloud.", says Prof. Hauswirth, vice-director of DERI.

The importance of Linked Data as a core technology of the Future Internet is demonstrated by the focus it is given in the next Future Internet Assembly in Ghent, Dec 16/17 (http://linkeddata.future-internet.eu/), the EU's central initiative to promote European leadership in Internet technologies. "Our RDF store is one of the central components which will greatly decrease development costs of Android applications and strengthen the mobile phone's position as the key application platform.", adds Prof. Hauswirth.

Links: http://iswc2010.semanticweb.org/, http://rdfonthego.googlecode.com/

Peracton Ltd., a new DERI NUIG spin-out targeting finance markets, has been shortlisted together with other 2 Irish companies for the Connaught & Leinster High Growth Company Category final of the InterTradeIreland All island Seedcorn Competition 2010.

Peracton Ltd. develops software products to help solve complex business and analytical problems in the investment management and the retail banking sector.

Peracton brings out to the finance/business world MAARS technology, developed within DERI, NUI Galway. The original MAARS technology development research has been funded by Enterprise Ireland and SFI. Also, in a recent report of this summer, Forrester claims that Peracton's MAARS is the Hot Technology to Watch for 2010, in its Q2 report for vendor strategy professionals.

Recent R&D results by the Monnet project on Multilingual Ontologies for Networked Knowledge, which is coordinated by DERI, will be presented October 26th at the W3C Workshop "The Multilingual Web - Where Are We?" in Madrid, Spain.

In particular, the 'lemon' ontology-lexicon model will be presented, which provides a format for the integration of (multilingual) linguistic information in ontologies. Use cases of 'lemon' are in multilingual information extraction, ontology localisation, ontology verbalisation etc.

Call for Position Papers for the FIA Session “Linked Data in the Future Internet” at the Future Internet Assembly, Ghent, 16 December 2010

• http://www.fi-ghent.eu/
• http://www.future-internet.eu/

The Future Internet sparked the interest of many different communities. All of these communities develop specific parts of infrastructure, which at one point of time need to be able to interoperate. Unfortunately, currently the Future Internet architecture does not include means to achieve interoperability at a data level. At the same time Linked Data is becoming an accepted best practice to exchange information in an interoperable and reusable fashion. Many different communities on the Internet use Linked Data standards to provide and exchange interoperable information. This is strikingly confirmed by the dramatically growing Linked Data cloud and the currently more than 25 billion facts represented and interconnected therein with exponential growth rates both in terms of data sets and contained data.

The OSI/OSI 7-Layer architecture is a conceptual view on networking architectures. One possible view is a look at Linked Data as an independent layer in the Internet architecture, on top of the networking layer, but below the application layers, since it provides a common data model for all applications as shown in the figure below. This session investigates this view, what implications this imposes on the Future Internet Architecture, but also how future architectures and system developments can benefit from this new layer.

We are looking for position papers regarding the use of Linked Data in the Future Internet. These can be either concrete current use-cases or envisioned usages for the topics relevant for the Future Internet (examples include: Internet of Things, embedded systems, FIRE, services, smart cities., Open Government Data, Future Internet Architecture and others).

The papers provide an input for the ongoing discussion on the role of Linked Data for the Future Internet.

Submission

Your position paper should have between 1 and 10 pages. We encourage authors to comply with the Springer LNCS format (see http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0).

Position papers can be submitted until 30th November 2010 by email to FutureInternet@SemanticWeb.org in HTML or PDF.

Selection

The session’s organizers reserve the right to do a relevance check of submitted position papers and reject papers, which are clearly not relevant to the topic outlined above.

Publication

Submitted position papers will be published on a website related to the Future Internet Assembly Linked Data Session.

Session Organisers

Sören Auer, Email:auerinformatik.uni-leipzig.de

Stefan Decker (main contact), Email:Stefan.Deckerderi.org

Manfred Hauswirth, Email:Manfred.Hauswirthderi.org