Source: Think Links

I think since I’ve moved to Europe I’ve been attending ESWC (Extended/European Semantic Web Conference) and I always get something out of the event. There are plenty of familiar faces but also quite a few new people and it’s a great environment for having chats. In addition, the quality of the content is always quite good. This year the event was held in Montpellier and was for the most part well organized: the main conference wifi worked!

The stats:

• 300 participants
• 42 accepted papers from 162 submissions
• 26% acceptance rate
• 11 workshops + 7 tutorials

So what was I doing there:

• I presented a paper in the Sepublica workshop co-authored with Sara Magliacane on Repurposing Benchmarks for Provenance Reconstruction.
• With Jun Zhao and Olaf Hartig, we gave a half-day tutorial on PROV.
• I presented Open PHACTS at the EU Project Networking Session.

The VU Semantic Web group also had a strong showing:

• Albert Meroño-Peñuela won the best PhD symposium paper for his work on digital humanities and the semantic web.
• The USEWOD workshop’s (led by Laura Hollink) datasets were used by a number of main track papers for evaluation.
• Stefan Schlobach and Laura Hollink were on the organizing committee. And we organized a couple of workshops & tutorials.
• Posters/Demos:
  • Albert Meroño-Peñuela, Rinke Hoekstra, Andrea Scharnhorst, Christophe Guéret and Ashkan Ashkpour. Longitudinal Queries over Linked Census Data.
  • Niels Ockeloen, Victor de Boer and Lora Aroyo. LDtogo: A Data Querying and Mapping Framework for Linked Data Applications.
• Several workshop papers.

I’ll try to pull out what I thought were the highlights of the event.

What is a semantic web application?

Can you escape Frank?

The keynotes from Enrico Motta and David Karger focused on trying to define what a semantic web application was. This starts out in the form of does a Semantic Web application need to use the Semantic Web set of standards (e.g. RDF, OWL, etc). So from my perspective, the answer is no. These standards are great infrastructure for building these applications but are they necessary, no (see google knowledge graph).  Then what is a semantic web application?

From what I could gather, Motta would define it as an application that is scalable, uses the web and embraces Model Theoretic semantics. For me that’s rather limiting, there are many other semantics that may be appropriate… we can ground meaning in something else other than model theory. I think a good example of this is the work on Pragmatic Semantics that my colleague Stefan Schlobach presented at the Artificial Intelligence meets the Semantic Web workshop. Or we can reach back into AI and see discussion’s from Brooks’ classic paper Elephant’s Don’t Play Chess.  I felt that Karger’s definition (in what was a great keynote) was getting somewhere. He defined a semantic web application essentially as:

An application whose schema is expected to change.

This seems to me to capture the semantic portion of the definition, in a sense that the semantics need to be understood on the fly. However, I think we need to role the web back into this definition… Overall, I thought this discussion was worth having and helps the field define what it is that we are aiming at. To be continued…

Homebrew databases

Homebrew databases

As I said, I thought Karger’s keynote was great. He gave a talk within a talk, on the subject of homebrew databases from this paper in CHI 2011:

Amy Voida, Ellie Harmon, and Ban Al-Ani. 2011. Homebrew databases: complexities of everyday information management in nonprofit organizations. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 915-924. DOI=10.1145/1978942.1979078 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1978942.1979078

They define a homebrew database as “an assemblage of information management resources that people have pieced together to satisfice their information management needs.” This is just what we see all the time, the combination of excel, word, email, databases and don’t forget normal paper brought together to try to attack information management problems. A number of our use cases from the pharma industry as well as science reflect essentially this practice. It’s great to see a good definition of this problem grounded in ethnographic studies.

The Concerns of Linking

There were a couple of good papers on generating linkage across datasets (the central point of linked data). In Open PHACTS, we’ve been dealing with the notion of essentially context dependent linkages. I think this notion is becoming more prevalent in the community. We had a lot of positive response on this in the poster session when presenting Open PHACTS. Probably, my favorite paper was on linking the Smithsonian American Art museum to the Linked Data cloud. They use PROV to drive their link generation. Essentially, proposing links to human’s who then verify the connections. See:

• Pedro Szekely, Craig Knoblock, Fengyu Yang, Xuming Zhu, Eleanor Fink, Rachel Allen and Georgina Goodlander.Connecting the Smithsonian American Art Museum to the Linked Data Cloud.

I also liked the following paper on which hardware environment you should use when doing link discovery. Result: use GPU’s there fast!

• Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo, Lars Kolb, Norman Heino, Michael Hartung, Sören Auer andErhard Rahm. When to Reach for the Cloud: Using Parallel Hardware for Link Discovery.

Additionally, I think the following paper is cool because they use network statistics not just to measure but to do something, namely create links:

• Bernardo Pereira Nunes, Stefan Dietze, Marco Antonio Casanova, Ricardo Kawase, Besnik Fetahu and Wolfgang Nejdl.Combining a co-occurrence-based and a semantic Measure for Entity Linking.

APIs

APIs were a growing theme of the event with things like the Linked Data Platform working group and  the successful SALAD workshop. (Fantastic acronym). Although I was surprised people in the workshop hadn’t heard of the Linked Data API. We had a lot of good feedback on the Open PHACTS API. It’s just the case that there is more developer expertise for using web service apis rather than semweb tech. I’ve actually seen a lot of demand for Semweb skills and while we our doing our best to train people there is still this gap. It’s good then that we are thinking about how these two technologies play together nicely.

Random Notes

• We should support content negotiation in dev.openphacts.org.
• The  Semantic Graph Management Tutorial had good introductory slides (ask me if you want them).
• The Benchmark Handbook edited by Jim Gray
• http://sdshare.org is worth a look for publishing updates for RDF based info.
• Bio2RDF version 2 is looking great. Lots of updates and they use PROV.
• Tobias Kuhn talked about nanopublications.
• I’m getting more and more convinced that you can get good results with SPARQL to SQL translators.
  • Prefetch data anyone?
• IPTC news subject codes in skos.
• LOD cloud colored by license. Huge and neglected issue.
• I should stop having high hopes for panels.
• Golden rule of session organization: be on time.

Filed under: events, linked data Tagged: conference, eswc2013, linked data, semantic web

Source: Think Links

Last week, I attended ACM CHI 2013 and Web Science 2013 in Paris. I had a great time and wanted to give a recap of both conferences, which were collocated.

CHI

This was my first time at CHI – the main computer-human interaction conference. It’s not my main field of study but I was there to Data DJ. I had an interactivity submission accepted with Ayman from Yahoo! Reseach on using turntables to manipulate data. Here’s the abstract:

Spinning Data: Remixing live data like a music DJ

This demonstration investigates data visualization as a performance through the use of disc jockey (DJs) mixing boards. We assert that the tools DJs use in-situ can deeply inform the creation of data mixing interfaces and performances. We present a prototype system, DMix, which allows one to filter and summarize information from social streams using a audio mixing deck. It enables the Data DJ to distill multiple feeds of information in order to give an overview of a live event.

Paul Groth and David A. Shamma. 2013. Spinning data: remixing live data like a music dj. In CHI ’13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3063-3066. DOI=10.1145/2468356.2479611 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2468356.2479611 (PDF)

It was a fun experience… although it was a lot of demo giving (reception + all coffee breaks). The reactions were really positive. Essentially, once a person touched the deck they really got the interaction. Plus, a couple of notable people stopped by that seemed to like the interaction: Jacob Nielsen and @kristw from twitter data science. The kind of response I got made me really want to pursue the project more. I also learned about how we can make the interaction better.

The whole prototype system is available on github. I wrote the whole using node.js and javascript in a web browser.  Warning: this is very ugly code.

In addition to my demo, I was impressed with the cool stuff on display (e.g. traceable skateboards) as well as the number of companies there looking for talent. The conference itself was huge with 3500 people and it was the first conference I attended where they had multiple sponsored parties.

WebSci

Web Science was after CHI and is more in my area of research.

What we presented

I was pleased that the VU had 8 publications at the conference, which is a really strong showing. Also two of our papers were nominated for the best paper award.

The two papers I had in the conference were very interdisciplinary.

• Fabian Eikelboom, Paul Groth, Victor De Boer and Laura Hollink (2013) A Comparison between Online and Offline Prayer. In Web Science 2013. PDF
• Anca Dumitrache, Paul Groth, Peter van den Besselaar (2013) Identifying Research Talent Using Web-Centric Databases. In Web Science 2013.  PDF

These papers were chiefly done by the first authors both students at the VU. Anca attended Web Science and did a great job presenting our poster on using Google Scholar to measure academic independence. There was a lot of interest and we got quite a few ideas on how to improve the paper (bigger sample!).

The other paper by Fabian Eikelboom was very well received. It compared online and offline pray cards and tried to see how the web modified this form of communication. Here’s a couple of tweets:

Interesting talk on online and offline prayer and comparing them at #websci13. First time I've heard of this http://t.co/i0w0mLWGbK—
Alvin Chin (@GadgetMan4U) May 02, 2013

Absolutely BRILLIANT #websci13 Pecha Kucha on comparisons of on and offline prayer @WebSciDTC—
maire byrne (evans) (@MaireAByrne) May 02, 2013

Conference thoughts

I found quite a few things that I really liked at this year’s web science. A couple of pointers:

• Henry S Thompson, Jonathan A Rees and Jeni Tennison: URIs in data: for entities, or for descriptions of entities: A critical analysis – Talked about the http range 14 and the problem of unintended extensibility points within standards. I think a critical area of Web Science is how the social construction of technical standards impacts the Web and its development. This is an example of this kind of research.
• Catherine C. Marshall and Frank M. Shipman: Experiences Surveying the Crowd: Reflections on methods, participation, and reliability – really got me thinking about the notion of hypotheticals in law and how this relates to provenance on the web.
• Panagiotis Metaxas and Eni Mustafaraj: The Rise and the Fall of a Citizen Reporter – a compelling example of how twitter influences the mexican drug war and how trust is difficult to determine online. The subsequent Trust Trails project looks interesting.
• The folks over at the UvA at  digitalmethods.net are doing a lot of fun work with respect to studying the web as a social object. It’s worth looking at their work.
• Jérôme Kunegis, Marcel Blattner and Christine Moser. Preferential Attachment in Online Networks: Measurement and Explanations – interesting discussion of how good our standard network models are.  Check out there collection of networks to download and analyze!
• Sebastien Heymann and Benedicte Le Grand. Towards A Redefinition of Time in Information Networks?

Unfortunately, there were some things that I hope will improve for next year. First, as you can tell above the papers were not available online during the conference. This is really a bummer when your trying to tweet about things you see and follow-up later. Secondly, I thought there were a few too many philosophy papers. In particular, it worries me when a computer scientist is presenting a philosophy paper at a science conference. I think the program committee needs to watch out for spreading too thinly in the name of interdisciplinarity. Finally, the pecha kucha session was a real  success – short, succinct presentations that really raised interest in the work. This, however, didn’t carry over into the main sessions which often ran too long.

Overall, both CHI and Web Science were well worth the time – I made a bunch of connections and saw some good research that will influence some of my work. Oh and it turns out Paris has some amazing coffee:

Filed under: data dj, interdisciplinary research Tagged: #chi2013, conference, data dj, web science, websci13