]> <p>Founded in 2000 by search engine pioneers, Exalead is a global software provider in the enterprise and Web search markets. Exalead worldwide client base includes leading companies such as Price Waterhouse Cooper, Michelin, American Greetings and Sanofi Pasteur, and more than 100 million unique users a month use Exalead's technology for search. Today, Exalead is reshaping the digital content landscape with a platform that uses advanced semantic technologies to bring structure, meaning and accessibility to previously unused or under-utilized data in the disparate, heterogeneous enterprise information cloud. The system collects data from virtually any source, in any format, and transforms it into structured, pervasive, contextualized building blocks of business information that can be directly searched and queried, or used as the foundation for a new breed of lean, innovative information access applications. Exalead's technology provides users with a single access point to information, regardless of format or location. Its patented Search by Serendipity® navigation system adapts to user habits. Exalead devotes substantial efforts in supporting research and innovation for helping customers succeed and to be in the forefront of emerging technology developments. Therefore, Exalead is engaged in European and French research projects with academic partners and some of the industry's top research organizations to forge new ground in the analysis, classification and usage of digital multimedia content, ranging from text, speech, and music to images and video.</p> Exalead will contribute and advance components of its search engine infrastructure, with emphasis on semantic linked data and search on linked data. Exalead search technology will be adapted and integrated as a component in the LOD2 Stack. An open search API will be developed to browse and access to the semantic linked data. As an (application) service provider in corporate environments, Exalead will lead the specification, setup and implementation of the enterprise use case (WP8). In addition to this, Exalead will provide a prominent channel for exploiting this use case and the outcomes of the LOD2 project as a whole. 8 WP1 – Requirements, Design and LOD2 Stack Prototype Objectives of this work package are: (1) to develop use case specifications and to collect user requirements by consulting the communities of practice relevant for the LOD2 use cases and additional prospective application scenarios, (2) to identify technical constraints as well as standards, (3) to produce the architecture and the LOD2 Stack design and (4) to produce an early prototype of the LOD2 Stack in the first year. 1 WP6 – Interfaces, Component Integration & LOD2 Stack This work package will continue the prototyping activity under WP1/Task 1.4 by fully integrating the individual components developed in WP2-5 into a ready-to-use LOD2 Stack and associated APIs. The primary goal of the LOD2 Stack integration is to enable communities of practice to rapidly create domain specific Linked Data applications. Consequently, the LOD2 Stack will support the whole life cycle of Linked Data from creation over enrichment, interlinking, fusing to maintenance. The stack will be very versatile, for all functionality we will define clear interfaces, which enable the plugging in of alternative third-party implementations. We will also provide a stack configurator, which enables potential user to create their own personalized version of the LOD2 Stack, which contains only those functions relevant for their usage scenario. 6 WP2 – Storing and Querying Very Large Knowledge bases This work package implements the LOD2 knowledge store component needed for managing the Web of Linked Data as a vast database. The starting point is OpenLink Virtuoso and MonetDB on the database side and Sindice on the information retrieval side. The present data volumes handled are around 10 billion RDF triples and the target is over the 1 trillion triples. The approach is scale-out out (physical) complemented with significant scalability improvements in the RDF engine (logical): Physically, when data grows, servers can be added and data redistributed without interruption of service, ibid for server failure. Logically, there is no point answering questions nobody is asking. Therefore the base data is kept as RDF with text indexing and search ranking. Additional inference results or indices for caching joins are made as a by-product of querying; further exploitation of such (partially) materialized inferences through the graph at run-time is to exploit structural correlations in the graphs. 2 WP3 – Knowledge Base Creation, Enrichment and Repair WP3 contains tasks focused on the transformation of legacy data to RDF and Linked Data and furthermore on the improvement of existing or extracted data especially with respect to schema enrichment and ontology repair. It is complementary to WP4, which is concerned with interlinking several knowledge bases and providing unified views of them. Tasks concerning the triplification of data will be grounded on existing techniques and know-how of the consortium and will be refined during the lifetime of this project and integrated into the LOD2 Stack. Legacy data triplification represents the entry point for legacy systems to participate in the LOD cloud. The members of the Consortium are leading in the development of transformational tools such as Virtuoso Sponger, RDF Views, D2R server, Triplify, and the DBpedia framework, which have received high acceptance in the Linked Data community. 3 WP8 – Use Case 2: LOD2 for Enterprise Data Web This use case will be driven by Exalead, one of the leading enterprise search providers worldwide. We will deploy the LOD2 platform in a real corporate environment with high semantic information integration requirements and needs. Based on the authoring tools and semantic GUIs developed for the LOD2 Stack, we will implement a set of procedures for data input that integrate semantic features and annotations early in the ingestion process of data. We will also suggest a set of best practices for storing, managing, accessing and exchanging data. Moreover, a quality framework will be defined to measure the benefit of using LOD2 components in the corporate. This framework will consist of a set of quality measures to define the gain in precision, recall of searching and browsing the corporate data. Other measurements will be investigated like the impact of the LOD2 platform in the activity of the corporation (income, costs, efficiency, etc). 8 WP10 – Training, Dissemination, Community Building, Fertilization The general aim of this work package is to establish a worldwide focal point for academic and industry parties interested in contributing to or taking advantage of the novel Linked Data methodologies and components, which will emerge in the project. 10 Realizing the vision of LOD2 together with the ones of the three use cases will have significant socio-economic impact. Standardization of such an architecture and exploitation of knowledge and technical results (and related IPR) is covered in this work package. 11 The project management will entail strategic, project-wide as well as day-to-day central management and coordination activities. The several different management boards which will be established in the consortium will be responsible for decisions and activities of different scope and level according to their function. 12 2011-02-28 2011-08-31 D6.1.1 – Initial release of integrated user-interface components 2012-08-31 D6.1.2 – Intermediate release of integrated user-interface components 2013-08-31 D6.1.3 – Final release of integrated user-interface components 2014-08-31 D6.2.1 – Initial release of integrated LOD2 Stack API components 2012-08-31 D6.2.2 – Intermediate release of integrated LOD2 Stack API components 2013-08-31 D6.2.3 – Final release of integrated LOD2 Stack API components 2014-08-31 <p>TenForce is a Belgian software company specialized in delivering pragmatic solutions for complex problems. TenForce has years of international experience in knowledge management combined with an in-depth expertise in emerging technologies. Besides designing, marketing and supporting their in-house product – a web-based management environment for project and operational activities – , they conduct several projects on European scale focusing on modelling complex systems. Delivering services in high-end semantic technology for industrial purposes is their core business: taxonomy management systems, generic portal technology for international publishers or the European Commission. Next to this TenForce has extensive experience in building, integrating and setting up corporate and web-based applications in several industries: telecom, services, banking, manufacturing. Already in 2001 TenForce developed a Thesaurus Management System for Wolters Kluwer Belgium that is still being fine-tuned and maintained today. Since 2007 TenForce has been building a multilingual multipurpose publishing solution for Wolters Kluwer Legal, Tax & Regulatory Europe – based on semantic technology (OWL, RDF). Using the same technologies, TenForce is building a Thesaurus Management System for the Office of Official Publications of the European Commission (OPOCE) since summer 2008. In this project the so-called EUROVOC-thesaurus is made available through an online portal, for which an extension to existing SKOS standards needed to be defined. Another TenForce project on a European scale - called EURES -, scopes to make similar sets of information available through SPARQL end-points and as Linked Open Data, besides the latter web services.</p> TenForce brings in LOD2: (1) thorough expertise in industrial implementation of taxonomies and metadata for automatic categorization and content management, (2) hands-on experience in conducting large-scale projects in this matter, such as portals for Wolters Kluwers Europe and the European Commission, (3) the capacity to deliver product quality thanks to years’ experience in engineering methodologies when building software products. 7 <p>Wolters Kluwer Deutschland GmbH (WKD) is part of Wolters Kluwer n.v., a leading global information services and publishing company. The company provides products and services for professionals in the health, tax, accounting, corporate, financial services, legal and regulatory sectors. Wolters Kluwer has annual revenues (2008) of €3.4 billion, employs approximately 18,400 people worldwide and maintains operations in 20 European countries, North America and Asia Pacific. Wolters Kluwer is headquartered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.</p> <p>WKD is involved in LOD2 with its dedicated “Business development and Strategy” department. This department is e.g. responsible for strategic product development and innovation. It analyzes trends in the IT and publishing market as well as in the professional environment of the customers and investigates important trends and how they will influence the future of WKD.</p> <p>WKD is a legal publisher, aiming at legal and financial professionals. Main target groups are lawyers, tax advisers, companies (e.g. HR departments), social and health insurances, public administrations and schools. In addition, one business unit is dealing with B2C customers, mainly offering software for income tax return. The media portfolio spreads from traditional paper books, magazines and loose-leafs to mere software solutions, including also offline, online and intranet solutions. Main brands are “Carl Heymanns Verlag”, “Luchterhand”, “Addison Software”, “CW Haarfeld”, “Deutscher Wirtschaftsdienst” and “Carl Link”.</p> <p>International Subject Matter Expert (SME) teams like the “European Content Core Team” or the global “SME team on Associative Retrieval” use e.g. collaboration tools and video presentations on a regular basis in order to transfer best practices and know-how into all WK branches. The project members are also part of a number of these teams and will thus disseminate LOD2 results to all WK branches worldwide. Dedicated interest in LOD2 was e.g. already signalled e.g. from Wolters Kluwer Spain.</p> WKD will primarily work on adapting and evaluating the LOD2 Stack for media and publishing, as well as contribute to the GovData.eu use case, due to the experience as a publisher with governmental information. 9