Monthly Archives: September 2015

SEMANTiCS 2015

On Wednesday 16 and Thursday 17 I attended the SEMANTiCS 2015 conference in Vienna. I attended in order to present a poster for our FREME Project, to demonstrate the Ocelot based application that we have built on top of the FREME services and to catch up on the state of the art from the thought leaders in this space.

It was an enlightening conference with great presentations from large international companies, like Yahoo!, as well as research and public organizations.

Several presentations mentioned Schema.org as being the primary semantic vocabulary underpinning their technology. There was also a poster presented by researchers from the Semantic Technology Institute at the University of Innsbruck on the usage of Schema.org by hotels.

Whilst I didn’t get to talk to anyone who would be a natural customer of FREME, I left the conference with a strong feeling that the FREME e-Services, in helping to produce semantically rich digital content, would definitely serve the needs of the Linked Open Data Cloud and new technologies and services that will inevitably be built on top of it.

I reached this conclusion after listening to these presentations:

  • Complex Event Extraction from Real-Time News Streams, Alexandra La Fleur, Freie Universität, Berlin
  • When RDF alone is not enough – triples, documents, and data in combination, Stephen Buxton, MarkLogic
  • Semantic Search at Yahoo!, Peter Mika, Yahoo!
  • Evolution of Semantic Technologies in Scientific Libraries, Prof. Dr. Klaus Tochtermann, Leibniz Information Centre for Economics

All in all, an interesting and productive trip.

 

Project Meeting in Turin

On 3 and 4 of September the Istituto Superiore Mario Boella hosted a face to face meeting of all the FREME project members. It was a very productive meeting where we each reported progress, demonstrated our latest prototypes and discussed goals for the coming months and topics best brainstormed in person.

We showed how our Ocelot plug-in uses all of the current v0.3 services of FREME platform (internationalization, translation, terminology, named entity recognition and entity linking) to aid translator productivity and build in semantic mark-up to add intelligence, ease of discovery and interactivity into our customers content.

This was my first time in Turin and it really grew on me as time went on. The journey there made me realise how much I take for granted that I’ll be able to fly directly into my destination city and, more often than not, get a taxi to my meeting destination. Choosing to get just one flight meant getting late into Milan, staying overnight there and then getting a train to Turin the following morning. The train journey was a pleasure: clean, fast, plug sockets for every passenger and the beautiful view of the Alps.

A late flight departure home gave me time to walk around Turin a little. After an unsuccessful attempt to see the Shroud of Turin at the Museo della Sindone (because it is only shown one day each year), I got a ticket for the L’ascensore panoramico at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema. What a stunning view, particularly towards the west and north.

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