]> National University of Ireland, Galway (NUI, Galway) - Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) is one of the main actors in research and development of semantic technologies in the world. NUIG performs research in the Semantic Web, social networks, sensor network platforms and applies its research results to solve integration problems in various application-oriented projects in eLearning, eGovernment, eBusiness, and eHealth. NUIG develops advanced Semantic Web infrastructures, such as Semantically Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC), semantic search engines (SWSE, Sindice), and platforms for running large-scale, data-intensive experiments, which facilitate collaborative social working environments, scalable storage and reasoning engines, distributed computing, and ontology development. NUIG actively participates in and leads research funded by the EU FP7 program (FAST, Romulus, Okkam, CONET, PECES, iMP), the EU FP6 program (DIP, SUPER, SemanticGov, NEPOMUK, TripCom, RIDE), Science Foundation Ireland (LION) and Enterprise Ireland (SAOR, eLITE). NUIG will guarantee technical excellence in reliable large-scale data processing with the same practices which have been daily driving the works behind the Sindice and Sig.ma projects. NUIG will provide the relevance, feasibility and consensus of the initiative thanks to the continuous interaction between the Linked Data community and the Linked Data Research Centre, a cross institute initiative. 3 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 WP5 – Adaptive Linked Data Visualization, Browsing and Authoring The objectives of WP5 are to develop new browsing, visualization and authoring interfaces for LOD, which support a wide range of devices (from mobile phones to desktop PCs), which integrate heterogeneous information from various sources and support the evolution of both instance data as well as information structures over time. In order to achieve these objectives we will explore new browsing and visualization paradigms. 5 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 WP4 – Reuse, Interlinking and Knowledge Fusion While WP3 is concerned with making legacy data available via URLs – a prerequisite – and enrichment of knowledge bases, this WP addresses automatic and semi-automatic link creation with minimal human interaction, evolvement of knowledge bases under the aspect of linkage and schema mapping combined with Data Fusion. 4 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 <p><a href="http://Sig.ma">http://Sig.ma</a>is a tool to explore and leverage the Web of Data. At any time, information in Sigma is likely to come from multiple, unrelated Web sites - potentially any web site that embeds information in RDF, RDFa or Microformats (standards for the Web of Data).</p> <p>Sig.ma can be used in 3 main ways:</p> <ul> <li>As a Web of Data browser: start from any entity and then click to another from the resulting page. Remember you are browsing a “network of mashups”, quite a unique thing. It might be noisy but you can spot gems, e.g. interesting description differences in different sources.</li> <li>As an embeddable/linkable widget: create a Sigma, refine it and when you’re ready to paste it around in emails and twits or embed it on your blog. Sigmas are “data live”: if one of your selected sources updates its information, so will your Sigma be updated wherever it shows.</li> <li>As a semantic API: retrieve entity descriptions and specific properties. For example picture,phone@Giovanni Tummarello , ready to consume, in JSON, in RDF.</li> </ul> Sig.ma is a tool to explore and leverage the Web of Data. At any time, information in Sigma is likely to come from multiple, unrelated Websites – potentially any website that embeds information in RDF, RDFa or Microformats (standards for the Web of Data). Sig.ma is a semantic web browser as well as an embeddable widget and also provides a Semantic Web API. <p> Billions of pieces of metadata are on the Web today, with increasing uptake across the Internet from <a href="http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=21997" >search engines</a> to <a href="http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph" >social sites </a> to <a href="http://data.gov.uk/" >governments </a> alike. The key technologies are <a href="http://www.w3.org/RDF/">RDF</a>, <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/">RDFa</a> and <a href="http://microformats.org/">Microformats</a>. Examples of such information types are contacts, events, social networks, web polls, reviews, and hundreds of other domain specific entities. </p> <p> <strong>Sindice is a state of the art infrastructure to process, consolidate and query the Web of Data</strong>. Sindice collates these billions of pieces of metadata into an coherent umbrella of <a href="/developers/welcome">functionalities and services</a>. For more information, visit our <a href="http://blog.sindice.com/">blog</a> or <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/sindice-dev">support group</a>. </p> Sindice is a state of the art infrastructure to process, consolidate and query the Web of Data. Sindice collates these billions of pieces of metadata into an coherent umbrella of functionalities and services. Sparallax is a faceted browsing interface for SPARQL endpoints, based on Freebase Parallax. This demonstrator showcases the benefits of intelligent browsing of Semantic Web data and represents a good starting point for LOD2 interfaces developed in WP 5. Sparallax is a faceted browsing interface for SPARQL endpoints, based on Freebase Parallax. This demonstrator showcases the benefits of intelligent browsing of Semantic Web data and represents a good starting point for LOD2 interfaces developed in WP 5. 2010-12-31 D11.3.1 – Report on standardization activities 2012-08-31 D11.3.2 – Report on standardization activities 2014-08-31 D2.7 – LOD2 knowledge store release with enhanced entity ranking 2013-02-28 This release will contain entity ranking functionality to SPARQL queries which going beyond standard ORDER BY clauses. D3.5.1 – Initial Release of Web Linkage Validator 2012-02-29 D3.5.2 – Release of Web Linkage Validator as LOD2 Stack component 2012-12-31 D4.2.1 – DXX Data Linking Engine Release 2011-11-30 2012-04-30 D5.4.1 – Mobile spatial-semantic annotation interface 2013-12-31 D5.4.2 – Android application for accessing the LOD2 Stack 2014-06-30 D8.2.1 – Specification of semantic features integration in the enterprise dataflow 2012-11-30 D10.4.1 – Video overview of project results 2012-08-31 D10.1.3 – LOD2 PhD workshop and summer school 2012-10-31 D10.4.2 – Video overview of project results 2014-08-31 <p>The Stichting Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI) is the Dutch national research institute for mathematics and computer science. It is a private, non-profit organization located at the Science Park Amsterdam. CWI’s mission is twofold: To perform frontier research in mathematics and computer science, and to transfer new knowledge in these fields to society. This is realized by several means. In addition to the standard ways of disseminating scientific knowledge, CWI actively pursues joint projects with external partners, provides consulting services, and stimulates the creation of spin-off companies. Special efforts are made to make research results known to non-specialist circles, ranging from researchers in other disciplines to the public at large. CWI also manages the Benelux Office of the W3C and hosts both the Semantic Web Activity Lead and the chair of the XHTML and XForms Working Group.</p> <p>CWI has always been very successful in participating in European research programmes (e.g. VITALAS, K-SPACE, QAP, CREDO, MUSCLE, and others) and large-scale national research programmes (e.g., programmes BRICKS, MultimediaN, and VL-e; NWO Veni, Vidi, Vici grants). It has extensive experience in managing these collaborative research efforts. CWI is also strongly embedded in Dutch university research: about twenty-five of its permanent senior researchers hold part-time positions as professors at universities and many projects are carried out in cooperation with university research groups. CWI receives a basic funding from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), amounting to about two third of the institute’s total income. The remaining third is obtained through national research programmes, international programmes, and contract research commissioned by industry. CWI hosts a staff of 235 full time employees, 50 permanent scientific staff, 135 temporary scientific staff, and 50 support staff. The Information Systems (INS) group led by Prof. Dr. Martin Kersten is participating in the LOD2 proposal.</p> CWI will be primarily involved in WP2 and work together with OpenLink on improving RDF data management with state-of-the-art database research approaches. CWI will be involved with a minor stake in WP5 in order to evaluate and adapt browsing and navigation in large-scale knowledge bases. 2 <p>The Web-based Systems Group at Freie Universität Berlin explores technical and economic questions concerning the development of global, decentralized information environments. Its current focus lies on the publication and interlinking of structured data on the Web using Semantic Web technologies.</p> <p>The group has initialized several widely used open source software projects including D2RQ, D2R Server, RAP – RDF API for PHP, and NG4G – Named Graphs API for Jena. The group contributes to several open data publishing efforts including DBpedia and the W3C Linking-Open-Data project which aims at interlinking large numbers of data sources on the Web. The Web-based Systems Group is active within the World Wide Web Consortium where it has contributed to the SPARQL recommendation and participates in the Semantic Web Education and Outreach activity. The group maintains strong research ties with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Hewlett-Packard Labs, and the Open Archives Initiative.</p> Freie University Berlin will bring in expertise, tools and outreach capabilities to LOD2: (1) FUB has developed and maintains the Silk – Link Discovery Framework and Link Quality Assurance Workbench, which will be significantly extended and integrated into the LOD2 Stack. (2) FUB has developed D2R Server, the most widely used tool for publishing relational databases as Linked Data on the Web. D2R Server will be used for the domain complementation task in WP3 and will be included together with Pubby and Silk into the LOD2 Stack (WP6). (3) Within WP10 Training, Dissemination, community building, FUB will use its existing community building (initiator of W3C LOD) and outreach capabilities (Linked Data on the Web (LDOW) workshop series, Semantic Web Challenge competition series) to maximize the impact of LOD2. 4