Preview release of RDFaCE special edition for Schema.org

During the last weeks I was working hard on the next release of RDFaCE . RDFaCE implements the WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) concept in order to facilitate the process of semantic content authoring.

The new version of RDFaCE is focused on Schema.org . You can create RDFa or Microdata annotations based on the schemas defined by schema.org. It will help to improve the SEO of your Website.

The main features of this new version include*:

• Providing a flexible form-based approach to annotate the content by using schemas defined by schema.org
• Providing a mechanism to select a subset of schemas defined by schema.org
• Providing colors for schemas
• Automatic content annotation

Links:

• Video explaining the WYSIWYM concept
• RDFaCE demo
• Annotation steps in RDFaCE
• RDFaCE plugin for WordPress
• More information about RDFaCE and WYSIWYM concept

*Of course it is only a preview release and might have some bugs.Please report the possible bugs using our issue tracker. As our next step, we will integrate the functionality of previous versions of RDFaCE with support for schema.org.

Back to ali1k.com

Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens. –Jimi Hendrix

+ I am still working on SlideWiki platform. We have already started importing some popular and high quality Semantic Web lecture series into SlideWiki. We also have plan to create the corresponding translations in at least 10 other languages (For example Persian). The mobile version of SlideWiki is just started and is under progress. We hope that SlideWiki will enable Many people in the world to access to high quality educational material. If you also want to help us in creating great educational resources:

• Look for decks at SlideWiki, whose domain you know
• Review the content of decks and help improving them
• Add self-assessment questions to the slides
• Translate decks covering topics you know well into your mother tongue
• Look for existing presentations and e-learning material, which could be imported into SlideWiki
• …

+ How is SlideWiki different?

SlideWiki: create, store and re-use your presentations in a Wiki-like style

SlideWiki is a platform for collaborative authoring of presentations. We created SlideWiki as a showcase for our proposed CrowdLearn concept. The CrowdLearn concept aims to exploit the wisdom, creativity and productivity of the crowd for the creation of rich, deep-semantically structured e-learning content. SlideWiki empowers extremely large communities of instructors, teachers, lecturers, academics to create, share and re-use sophisticated educational content in a truly collaborative way. The main features of SlideWiki are:

• Based on HTML technologies. It employs many tools and libraries like deck.js, SCSS, Aloha-editor, impress.js, svg-edit, MathJax, etc. to provide an online platform for semi-structured content authoring.
• Support of versioning. It follows the Wiki paradigm to enable collaborative content authoring.
• Flexible theme/transition management. Users can easily create their desirable themes and transitions and share it with other users.
• Support of questionnaires for slides. Users can create questions for each slide and based on the collective questions can take an evaluation test.
• Support of social networking. Users can follow slides/decks/users, can discuss the content of slides/decks and share their presentations on popular social networks.
• Support of translation. Users can translate their presentations into other languages and correct the translations afterwards.
• WYSIWYG slide authoring/ LaTeX/SVG. SlideWiki uses Aloha floating WYSIWYG editor to facilitate slide authoring. Users can also use HTML source code (and soon Markdown syntax) to edit the presentation. To design add shapes to slides, users can employ svg-edit. To add LaTeX formulas users can use MathJax editor.
• Import/Export to other formats. Users can now import pptx presentations (not fully supported) and deck.js html files into SlideWiki. export to deck.js and pdf is also supported.

More information: SlideWiki EKAW paper, SlideWiki CSEDU paper, SlideWiki Documentation

Pharmer: a semantic prescription writer

Pharmer is a tool which implements the general idea of WYSIWYM UI (introduced in RDFaCE) in a specific domain namely Pharmaceutical research and development. Using Pharmer, users can generate Semantic Prescriptions —  intelligent e-prescription documents enriched by drug-related meta-data thereby know about their content and the possible interactions.

Semantic Prescriptions provide the following main benefits for their  users:

• Increase the awareness of patients. They provide patients with all the related information of the prescribed drugs thereby mitigating the possible misuse of drugs.
• Provide persistent connection to up-to-date drug information coming from multiple dynamic data sources available on Linked Open Data.
• In contrast to database-oriented e-prescriptions, semantic prescriptions can easily be exchanged among other e-health systems without need to changing their related infrastructure.

The Pharmer implementation is open-source and available for download together with an explanatory video and online demo.

More information: eTELEMED2013 paper, Pharmer Poster

One step forward…

“In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.” – Mother Teresa

+ We have completed the main components of our new application called SlideWik. Hopefully we will go to the public version in few days. SlideWiki is a platform for collaborative creation of online presentations. It employs many of the existing javascript libraries like deck.js, ALOHA editor, impress.js and etc. In SlideWiki users can share and reuse the existing presentations in a collaborative manner. For more information about SlideWiki you can refer to our paper accepted in EKAW2012 conference.

+ I spent a summer full of trips this year. It started by two weeks stay at Kalamaki village and Heraklion in Greece. I attended the ESWC summer school as well as the ESWC conference. Right after I came back to Leipzig, I was headed to Zingst in north of Germany for our annual group meeting. Some days later I got prepared for another trip to Izmir, Turkey. Another taste of the Mediterranean sea! I attended the COMPSAC conference which was a nice and memorable experience due to the best-paper award I received for the RDFaCE paper.

High Hopes…

“The grass was greener
The light was brighter
The taste was sweeter
The nights of wonder
With friends surrounded
The dawn mist glowing
The water flowing
The endless river

Forever and ever…” – Pink Floyd

+ Again Spring… a good time for breathing deeply and to enjoy the greenness of forgetting the darkness…

RDFaCE-Lite

RDFaCE-Lite is a lite version of RDFaCE which is customized especially to address the requirements of non-expert users in the process of Semantic Content Authoring.

With RDFaCE-Lite it is really easy to create and publish linked data posts.  It supports rNews 1.0 standard for embedding meta-data about Places, Persons and Organizations in the text.

Users can select RDFa or Microdata (based on schema.org) as their preferered annotation markup.

Users can also select from a list of available NLP APIs and automatically annotate their content by one click!

A demo version is available at: http://rdface.aksw.org/lite/

You can download the WordPress plugin from here.

Tools available for semantic blogging…

With the proliferation of Semantic Web technologies  2012 seems to be a promising year for SemWeb. Particularly in the area of Semantic Blogging, there are already many tools released which show the applicability of the SemWeb to make the life easier for lay users as well as experts. Below is an overview of three popular tools available for semantic blogging in WordPress:

• veeebeditor For WordPress:  a Flash-based semantic blogging tool which analyzes your blog post in real time and provides you with contextual information for the most important concepts found in the text.
  • +: a user friendly interface with support for faceted viewing, a powerful media manager.
  • - : not yet compatible with WordPress 3.3.1 (last version), do not embed annotations in the text for publishing, not acts well on HTML content (good for raw text).
• Zemanta:  a very popular semantic blogging widget which recommends related content to the users to be inserted in the blog posts.
  • +:  a powerful user interface which is well integrated into the WordPress, adds links to the recognized entities, also available as a  browser extension.
  •  - : a limited support of RDFa for publishing linked data, grouping content for faceted viewing is not supported.
• RDFaCE:  a WordPress plugin for automatic annotation of content based on the RDFa format which can be used as a complementary tool for the above tools.
  • +: can combine the results of multiple NLP APIs for automatic annotation, adds RDFa annotatations to be published on your blog
  •  -: do not support faceted viewing of entities recognized, do not provide contextual information for the entities found.

Knowledge Sharing, Organization, Social Structures

Social structures are considered as an important channel for knowledge sharing within organizations. In recent years, knowledge management has begun to shift from focusing primarily on technology solutions toward exploring the social relationships through which knowledge is shared. Therefore, a wide variety of social structures have been recognized within the context of organizations. To utilize these social structures as an effective channel for knowledge sharing, necessity of a holistic view on their types and attributes seems crucial. An understanding of the different types and attributes of social structures in organizations will provide a lens through which to examine their dynamic nature in relation to knowledge-sharing activities.

Some months ago, I performed a research on knowledge sharing social structures within organizations. The goal was to extract the different types and properties of social structures and their potential effect on knowledge sharing process within an organization. I  put my report here (report_oss_knowledge) for those who are interested in this area .

Tranquility…

“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence… Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”- Calvin Coolidge

There is always a way to find your tanqulity point.  A nice smile, a nice music, a nice poem, a nice thought and a nice conversation are just a few examples of things that can turn you back on the track. Just open your arms and let the destiny target you.