]> <p>Semantic Web Company (SWC), based in Vienna, is an SME, which offers consulting services in the fields of semantic web technologies, knowledge management systems and social software since 2005. Besides being one of the first European suppliers of consulting services in semantic web technologies and related topics, SWC is the founder of the I-SEMANTICS conference series, one of Europe’s largest industry outreach events in the field of semantic systems and knowledge management, which will take place for the 6th time in 2010. The mission of SWC is to narrow the gap between industry and academia R&D in semantic systems and to accelerate the time to market process of semantic web-technologies. By providing practice-oriented knowledge transfer SWC help companies and public organizations to integrate and apply semantic technologies for various purposes such as data integration, resource management and knowledge management. SWC communicates benefits and risks of semantic applications in corporate environments to developers and decision makers and serves organizations from the life sciences, insurance, energy and the media. SWC has built a special media focus over the last years specializing in business development aspects through semantic (web) technologies. SWC acts as a hub of a wide network of industry partners (software industry, end-user organizations), other Networks (Know Center Graz, Salzburg Research, Austrian Computer Society, W3C, PWM - Platform for Knowledge Management) and academic and research partners throughout Europe.</p> SWC adopt the tool Poolparty, a self-developed modeling tool for corporate thesauri, as a component for the LOD2 stack. SWC will provide its expertise in technology assessment and business development when it comes to evaluate the economic rationale, organisational effects and the commercial potential of semantic web technologies. SWC will investigate governance and regulatory issues such as competition, IPR issues and privacy thereby contributing to the use cases in WP 7, 8 & 9. Our expertise in communicating the principles, technologies and especially business needs for semantic web applications on the one hand and the „translation“ of practical problems into technological concepts on the other hand will help to disseminate the findings beyond the scope of the use cases. 6 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 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 WP7 – Use Case 1: LOD2 for Media and Publishing Enabling large-scale interoperability based on Linked Data is a necessary precondition in the media industry to profit from the benefits of distributed information sources on the Semantic Web. Hence, the media use case aims to improve access to high-quality, machine-readable data sets generated by publishing houses for their customers. 7 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 PoolParty is a thesaurus management system and a SKOS editor for the Semantic Web including text mining and linked data capabilities. The system helps to build and maintain multilingual thesauri providing an easy-to-use interface. PoolParty server provides semantic services to integrate semantic search or recommender systems into systems like CMS, DMS, CRM or Wikis. PoolParty is a thesaurus management system and a SKOS editor for the Semantic Web including text mining and linked data capabilities. The system helps to build and maintain multilingual thesauri providing an easy-to-use interface. PoolParty server provides semantic services to integrate semantic search or recommender systems into systems like CMS, DMS, CRM or Wikis. <p>OpenLink Software is a United Kingdom SME founded in 1992. It operates a business development and sales subsidiary in the United States. Most product development takes place within the EU, across the UK, Netherlands and Bulgaria. The company is a leading provider of high-performance, scalable, and secure technology covering: data access drivers, data virtualization middleware; native database management (RDBMS or RDF based Graph Store), and enterprise collaboration. Respective product portfolio offerings include: OpenLink High-Performance Drivers for ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET, OLE-DB, and XMLA; Virtuoso Universal Server; and OpenLink Data Spaces for socially enhanced personal and/or enterprise collaboration.</p> <p>OpenLink has extensive experience in scalable RDF triple (and quad) stores as a result of extending its native Virtuoso database/SQL engine to incorporate SPARQL query language support. Virtuoso also includes powerful Linked Data Deployment and RDF to RDBMS transformation functionality. It offers management and creation of physical and virtual triples in conjunctions with the ability to declaratively produce RDF views of SQL Data (SQL to RDF mapping). OpenLink possess pioneering experience at both the applications and data management levels within the Semantic Web technology realm.</p> <p>OpenLink is a W3C member, an active participant in the W3C Semantic Web Education and Outreach (SWEO) Interest Group, a key member of the Linking Open Data project, and timeless supporter of the Open Data Movement. OpenLink is a DBpedia project co-creator and has hosted live instances of the DBpedia database since project inception.</p> <p>As a consortium member, OpenLink will leverage its experience with local and distributed query processing, SQL and SPARQL query optimization, RDF store and heterogeneous data integration technologies en route to developing an integrated database backbone for the LOD2 project.</p> OpenLink contributes in particular to developing the scalable LOD2 knowledge store (WP2); to track and inference about data provenance and reliability; to support personalized views on knowledge and spatial data; alerts on data; to contribute to standardization activities regarding the integration of semantic and spatial technologies. 5 <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