Wikanno Project

One of the research strands for the next phase of the DERI CSET is an annotator / wiki system for the social semantic desktop as a means to interconnect individuals, groups and businesses in their working environments and to help with the management of organisational and personal information.

This project is the main work item of the Semantic Web cluster within the DERI CSET and relates to ongoing and future joint work with Hewlett-Packard Galway Limited (HPGL) in the direction of an annotation and wiki workbench that can integrate with current and future desktop systems. The mission of this project is to create a deployed collaborative environment, which improves the state of the art in online collaboration and personal data management and augments the intellect of people by providing and organising information created by single or group efforts. The project is complementing the EU FP6 IP project NEPOMUK in order to maximally benefit from the deployed resources and to start early with potential commercialisation efforts. The total effort is 504 person months (324 PM for DERI Galway, and 144 PM for HPGL).

SIOC Project

Online community sites (forums, weblogs, bulleting boards, etc.) have replaced the traditional means of keeping a community informed via libraries and publishing. They are a valuable source of information and quite often it is a community site where you would end up when searching for some information. But there is a problem - online community sites are like islands without bridges connecting them. You may find information in a forum, but not know that there are missing pieces of related information that can be found on other community sites.

SIOC (Semantically Interlinked Online Communities) is an attempt to link online community sites and to use Semantic Web technologies to describe the information community sites have about their structure and contents and to find related information and new connections between posts.

SNA Project

The aim of this project is to use social network analysis to make use of the wealth of information implicitly produced in open source and commercial groupware applications and environments. The project will use explicit instantiations of this information to create new links between users for the purposes of improved interaction, enhanced information flow and increased document exchange between these users.

SWSE Project

Although the Semantic Web (SW) is still very much in its infancy, there is already a lot of data out there which conforms to the proposed SW standards (e.g. RDF and OWL). Small vertical vocabularies and ontologies have emerged, and the community of people using these is growing daily. People publish descriptions about themselves using FOAF (Friend of a Friend), news providers publish newsfeeds in RSS (RDF Site Summary), and pictures are being annotated using various RDF vocabularies. The amount of available formal data is growing steadily, but a means to find and thus utilize this data is still missing. What is needed is the equivalent of the services a search engine currently provides for the HTML-web: a service which continuously explores and indexes the Semantic Web and provides an easy-to-use interface through which users can find the data they are looking for. We are therefore developing a Semantic Web Search Engine (SWSE, pronounced "swizzy").