Source: Data2Semantics

This june 10 and 11, the Data2Semantics team locked itself in a room in the Amsterdam Public Library to build a first version of the Data2Semantics Golden Demo: a pipeline for publishing enriched data (‘semantics’) directly from Dropbox to Figshare, integrated in the Linkitup webservice.

In two days, we built and integrated:

• A connector to Dropbox
• Term extraction on Word, Excel and text files
• Provenance reconstruction from Dropbox edit history
• Conversion from Excel files to OpenOffice ODS
• Cell and sheet dependency extraction from ODS spreadsheets
• RDF (turtle) representation of spreadsheets
• Complexity analysis of arbitrary RDF graphs
• Report generation for complexity analysis
• Visualization of spreadsheet dependency graphs based on d3.js

Watch the video!

Source: Data2Semantics

During the COMMIT/ Community event, April 2-3 in Lunteren, the Data2Semantics won one out of three COMMIT/ Valorization awards. The award is a 10000 euros subsidy to encourage the project to bring one of its products closer to use outside academia.

At the event, we presented and emphasized the philosophy of Data2Semantics to embed new enrichment tools in the current workflow of individual researchers. We are working closely with both Figshare.com (with our Linkitup tool) and Elsevier Labs to bring semantics at the fingertips of the researcher.

Source: Data2Semantics

BeyondThePDF2 – TimeLapse from Jongens van de Tekeningen on Vimeo.

Data2Semantics was the local organizer for the Beyond the PDF 2 conference. This conference brought together over 200 scholars, technologists, librarians and publishers to discuss the future of research communication. The conference had a huge social media presence with 3,500 tweets sent by 625 participants over the course of the two days. There were also lots of other outcomes.

• A recap of the conference by the conference chair (our own Paul Groth) 
• A list of outcomes, blog summaries, visual notes
• Elsevier was one of the sponsors of the event (their report)

This is another example of how Data2Semantics is reaching out to the scientific and research communities to push new ways of doing research.

Source: Data2Semantics

VU University Amsterdam (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Learn to build better code in less time.

Software Carpentry (http://www.software-carpentry.org) is a two day bootcamp for researchers to learn how to be more productive with code and software creation. VU University Amsterdam brings Software Carpentry to the Netherlands for the first time. PhD students, postdocs and researchers in physics are cordially invited for this free, 2-day workshop, on May 2–3, 2013, in Amsterdam.

Data2Semantics is sponsoring the event to help learn the issues facing scientists around managing their data.

Go to http://www.data2semantics.org/bootcamp for more information and registration (max. 40!) .

Last Wednesday, Frank van Harmelen appeared on the Dutch science TV program “Labyrint”, where he interviews George Dyson, Luc Steels and François Pachet about their ideas on the future of Computers.

Toekomst kijken bij Labyrint TV op 5 december VPRO 20.50 Ned 1 met Frank van Harmelen projectleider #COMMITnl. Over Alan #Turing.

— COMMIT (@COMMIT_nl) December 5, 2012

The program can be watched online (in Dutch):

And here’s the discussion session afterwards (in Dutch):

More information at the website of Labyrint.

Source: Data2Semantics

A few months ago Laurens Rietveld was looking for a query interface from which he could easily query any other SPARQL endpoint.

But he couldn’t find any that fit my requirements:

• Work on all endpoints conforming to the SPARQL protocol (not just the CORS enabled ones)
• Nice / easy to use interface
• Cross-platform (preferably a web interface)
• Query highlighter / syntax checker
• Namespace prefix autocompletion (through http://prefix.cc)

So he decided to make his own!

Give it a try at: http://aers.data2semantics.org/yasgui/

Future work (next year probably):

• extend it with functionality such as predicate autocompletion, and
• integration with the mondeca ‘endpoint status’ catalog (instead of ckan)

Comments are appreciated (including feature ideas / bug reports).

Sources are available at https://github.com/LaurensRietveld/yasgui