1. Vorstellung Forschungsgruppe
Agile Knowledge Engineering &
Semantic Web (AKSW)
Dr. Sören Auer

2. Research Group “Agile Knowledge
Engineering and Semantic Web”
Founded 2006
Initially hosted by the chair for Business Information Systems (Prof. Klaus-Peter
Fähnrich)
Now transition to Institute for Applied Informatics (InfAI)
• An-institute at Universität Leipzig
• Combines competences and resources of 8 University chairs from Computer
Science and Economics faculties as well as industry and sponsors
AKSW aims:
• Contributing to the advancement of science in Semantic Web, Knowledge
Engineering, Software Engineering
• Cost efficient, high-impact R&D, which proves usefulness at an early stage
• Bridge the gap between research results and applications
AKSW actively educates students in Semantic Technologies and serves the
community by (co-) organizing events such as Conference on Social Semantic
AKSW Vorstellung
Web, I-Semantics, Scripting for The Semantic Web workshop series etc.

3. AKSW Team
• Dr. Sören Auer, Head, everything currently especially DBpedia, Cofundos, Triplify
• Thomas Riechert, wiss. Mitarbeiter, Software Engineering and teaching
• Jens Lehmann, doctoral student, DL-Learner, DBpedia, Machine Learning
• Sebastian Dietzold, doctoral student, OntoWiki, xOperator, RDF-LDAP and Data integration
• Axel Ngonga, doctoral student (2006), Text Mining, Knowledge Management
• Thorsten Berger, doctoral student (2007), Software Engineering
• Michael Martin, doctoral student (2008), Semantic Web Applications
• Sebastian Hellmann, doctoral student (2008), Machine Learning
• Jörg Unbehauen, doctoral student (2008), Software Engineering
Alumni
• Dr.-Ing. Muhammad Ahtisham Aslam, Ass. Prof. COMSATS Institute of Information Technology (CIIT),
Lahore, Pakistan
Permanently ca. 10 student assistants, bachelor/master/diplom students
AKSW Vorstellung

4. AKSW Funded Projects
SCMS: – Semantic Content Management Systems for Enterprise Knowledge Management and News Mining
• Cooperative research project; 24 month / 2009-2011
• Funding agency: Eurostars
• Participants: Semantic Web Company, Digital Trowel, OpenLink Software Ltd., Netresearch
OntoWiki: – Semantic Collaboration for Knowledge Management, E-Learning and E-Tourism
• Cooperative research project; 24 month / 2008-2010
• Funding agency: European Union FP7 / Research for the benefit of the SME program
• Participants: OpenLink Software Ltd., Business Intelligence GmbH, B2 d.o.o., Vakantieland
LE4SW - Regionale Technologieplattform OntoWiki für soziale, semantische Kollaboration
• Cooperative research project; 24 month / 2009-2011
• Funding agency: BmbF (German Ministry for Education and Research), Programme “Regionale
Wachstumskerne / Potential”
• Participants: Universität Leipzig, Business Intelligence GmbH, Netresearch GmbH & Co. KG, Ebrosia
GmbH
SoftWiki: End-user driven, distributed Requirements Engineering for agile Software Development
• Cooperative research project; 42 months / 2006-2009
• Funding agency: BmbF (German Ministry for Education and Research)
• Participants: Universität Duisburg-Essen, T-Systems MMS, ProDV AG, LeCoS GmbH, QA Systems GmbH,
ISA Tools GmbH
Vakantieland – Semantic Collaboration Platform for Tourist Information
• Industry / public funding; 36 months / 2006-2008
• Funding agency: SenterNovem (Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs)
AKSW Vorstellung
• Participants: Universität Leipzig, Vakantieland

5. Impact beyond the Scientific
Community
DBpedia.org – knowledge extraction from Wikipedia
• Impact: 300 posts about DBpedia in the Blogosphere (according to Technorati), ca. 100.000
visitors of the DBpedia website in 2007, on average 350 daily visitors. DBpedia became the most
popular dataset used with Semantic Web applications and research prototypes and is for
example extensively referred in official W3C standards such as RDFa.
Cofundos.org – open-source innovation and resource pooling
• Impact: more than 10.000 visitors in Oct 2007, 62 Blog posts (according to Technorati), Cofundos
news announcements in major news channels (e.g. Heise.de, Golem.de, Linux.com), more than
300 registered users, 100 projects, 10k€ pledged donations.
OntoWiki.net – social, semantic collaboration platform
• Impact: more than 8.000 downloads of the OntoWiki software (since 2004) / 773 in Sep 2007, on
average 3.000 monthly visitors of http://Ontowiki.net, users include SAP, OpenLink SW, T-
Systems MMS, ProDV AG.
Triplify.org - “semantification” of Web applications
• Impact: more than 1.000 visitors on the Triplify.org Website in the first week alone, Numerous
blog posts e.g. in the no 1 Web technology blog ReadWriteWeb, Triplify configurations for major
Web applications such as Drupal, Joomla!, Wordpress, WackoWiki
AKSW Vorstellung

6. Ausgewählte Partner und Projekte
Linke dGe o Data .o rg
AKSW Vorstellung

7. Semantic Leipzig
Basic Research Applied Research Applied Research
Applied Research Technology Transfer Product Development
Business Scenarios
Knowledge Management Semantic Web Infrastructure
Logical Foundations & Reasoning Semantic Search
Service Engineering & Management Social Software & Web 2.0
Machine Learning & Text Mining eGovernment
AKSW Vorstellung

8. AKSW Linked Data Web Bausteine
DL-Learner OntoWiki
Machine Learning for Collaborative creation of Vakantieland
explicit knowledge via Building Data Web applications
Ontologies
Semantic Wikis
SoftWiki
Distributed, stakeholder driven
OWLDB DBpedia Requirements Engineering
Extending DBs for ontology “Semantification” of
handling / revealing implicit Wikipedia
OpenResearch.org
information A semantic Wiki for the sciences
RDF Query Subsumption Triplify xOperator
& View Maintenance “Semantification” of (small) Combining Instant Messaging
Scaling database backed Web Applications with the Data Web
Triple Stores
…
Grundlagen Anwendungen
Marrying databases with RDF Werkzeuge Bringing the Data Web to
and ontologies
end users
AKSW Vorstellung

9. The Semantic Data Wiki
• Agile, distributed knowledge engineering
• Not a Wiki with semantic extensions (Semantic MediaWiki,
IkeWiki), but an ontology editor using Wiki
• Concepts:
– Make it easy to
correct mistakes
(ant intelligence)
– Activity can be
watched and
reviewed
– Everything can
be undone
AKSW Vorstellung

10. SoftWiki
Problem: Requirements
Engineering with large, spatially
distributed stakeholder groups
Solution: comprehensive ontology
for representing RE relevant
knowledge + adapted OntoWiki
application
Application of text-mining
methods for duplicate detection
Lohmann, Heim, Auer, Dietzold,
Riechert: Semantifying Requirements
Engineering – The SoftWiki Approach.
In I-SEMANTICS 2008.
AKSW Vorstellung

11. Vakantieland*
One of the largest tourist information sites in NL
(>100.000 daily page views, >20.000 points of interest)
Traditional relational DB system was to inflexible to capture the increasingly
heterogeneous content types
• Development of an OntoWiki based Data Web application
• Geo-data integration from OpenStreetMaps
• Semantic-Search
• Integration of
DBpedia data
• Comprehensive
performance tuning
* work with Ceriel Jakobs,
Michael Martin partially
funded by SenterNovem
AKSW Vorstellung

12. OpenResearch.org – Semantic Wiki for the
Sciences
Based on SMW
Support for scientific
content types
• Events (Conferences,
Workshops, etc.)
• People, research
groups, science
genealogy
• Journals
• Funding calls
Additional categorization schemes include scientific field (not limited to CS) and
location/region
Semantic annotation and structuring of these facilitate search (e.g. SE conferences by
acceptance rate)
Already one of the largest KB’s of science meta-information more than 7.000
pages/entities
AKSW Vorstellung

13. xOperator–connecting IM & Data Web
Semantic overlay network for Instant messaging
Naturally solves some provenance, trust issues and
context awareness
Dietzold, Unbehauen, Auer: xOperator - Interconnecting the Semantic Web and Instant
Messaging Networks. In ESWC 2008.
AKSW Vorstellung

14. • Knowledge base derived from Wikipedia
• One of the largest ontologies
• Multi-domain, multi-language
• Joint work with FU Berlin and OpenLink
• Extract RDF/OWL from Wikipedia, e.g. From
Infoboxes, categories, Geo-Coordinates, Images, ...
• 274 million triples, 213.000 persons, 328.000
places, 57.000 music albums, 36.000 films, 20.000
companies
• 2500 manual mappings for infobox attributes to
DBpedia Ontology (175 classes, 384 object
properties, 336 data properties)
Auer; Bizer, Lehmann, Kobilarov, Cyganiak, Ives: DBpedia: A Nucleus for a Web of Open Data.
In ISWC 2007.
Bizer, Lehmann, Kobilarov, Auer, Becker, Cyganiak, Hellmann: DBpedia - A Crystallization
Point for the Web of Data. In Journal of Web Semantics, 2009.
AKSW Vorstellung

15. Extraction Manager
Wikipedia
Extraction Job
Update Article- Destinations
Stream Queue Extractors
N-Triple N-Triple
Label Category Image Serializer
Dumps
PageCollections Redirect Disambiguation SPARQL-
Update
Wikipedia Database Abstract Geo Pagelink Destination
Dumps Wikipedia
Generic Infobox
Wikipedia Live
Wikipedia Mapping-based Infobox
OAI-PMH
Triple Store
Virtuoso
Ontology- Parsers
Mappings
DateTime Units Geo
String-List Numbers
SPARQL endpoint Linked Data
The Web DBpedia apps SPARQLVorstellung
AKSW clients RDF browser HTML browser

16. Triplify
Auer, Dietzold, Aumueller, Lehmann, Hellmann: Triplify - Light-weight Linked Data Publication from
Relational Databases. In WWW 2009.
AKSW Vorstellung

17. Triplify
Keyword-based
Web Browser Semantic-based
Search Engines
Search Engines
HTML pages
RDF triple-based descriptions
(Linked Data, RDF, JSON)
Webserver
Endpoint registry
Web Application Triplify script
Triplify
Configuration
Relational repository
Database
AKSW Vorstellung

18. LinkedGeoData.org
How to publish geo-data using Triplify?
Lon Lat RadiusAttribute Value
http://linkedgeodata.org/near/48.213056,16.359722/1000/amenity=Hotel
http://linkedgeodata.org/node/212331
http://linkedgeodata.org/node/944523
http://linkedgeodata.org/node/234091
http://linkedgeodata.org/way/56719
node/150760824 amenity "pub";
created_by "JOSM";
distance "5995";
name "La friolera";
geo#lat "40.4474";
geo#long "-3.7173".
AKSW Vorstellung

19. Faceted Linked-Geo-Data Browser
AKSW Vorstellung

20. Ontology Learning (DL-Learner)
• Framework for Supervised
Machine Learning for OWL and
Description Logics
• Application Areas:
– “Classical” Machine Learning,
e.g. predicting Carcinogenesis
– Ontology Engineering
– recommendation/navigation
• Works on OWL Files and SPARQL
Endpoints
• Supports different reasoner
interfaces
• Accessible via command-line,
GUI, web service
Hellmann, Lehmann, Auer: Learning of OWL Class Descriptions on Very Large Knowledge Bases. International
Journal On Semantic Web and Information Systems, 2009.
Lehmann, Hitzler: Concept Learning in Description Logics. Machine Learning Journal, 2009
AKSW Vorstellung

21. Participatory Research Idea
• Engaging the wisdom of the crowds for research
project definition and assessment
• Outsource idea evaluation and progress review
to the stakeholder community
• Organize research funding like an information
market – the best known instruments for
aggregating (asymmetrically distributed)
information
• Facilitate involvement of private endowments,
foundations, individuals
Auer, Braun-Thürmann: Towards Bottom-Up, Stakeholder-Driven Research Funding – Open Source Funding, Open
Peer Review. In Peer Review Reviewed: The International Career of a Quality-control Instrument and New
Challenges, 2008.
AKSW Vorstellung

22. Open Science Platform Concept
• Research ideas: published by Researchers or SMEs on an open-science
Web platform as early as possible
• Project definition:
– All participants of the platform, i.e. researchers and stakeholders (e.g. SMEs, NGOs) are
equipped with a virtual cash budget for pledging
– Stakeholders comment on the ideas, add requirements and pledge a certain amount of
money they would be willing to “pay” for a successful realization.
• Selection: A funding agency can select and fund the highest ranked
proposals in a certain area or application domain
• Project runs: involved investigators report publicly (e.g. Weblog) =>
enables stakeholders to influence the projects (e.g. changed
requirements or alternative approaches appear)
• Results are published, everybody is invited to comment on the success,
only the stakeholders (i.e. those who pledged) are eligible to vote about
the success / write an evaluation report (publically available => track
record of a researcher) AKSW Vorstellung

23. Cofundos.org
• Application of the concept for open-
source software development
• Funding is provided by individuals
• Stakeholder community interested in a
certain software (feature) decides
collaboratively about requirements, who
to entrust, project success
• All contributions licensed under Creative
Commons
• Based on: Reputation & community,
fairness & trust, open-knowledge & open
source, iterative methodology
Sören Auer: Endanwendergetriebene Open-source Softwareentwicklung mit
Cofundos. In Open Source Jahrbuch 2008.
AKSW Vorstellung

24. Portal
• Web app
• Cofundos.org
• Uses tagging/
folksonomies,
OpenID, RSS
feeds, AJAX,
REST,
Semantic Web
technologies
AKSW Vorstellung

25. AKSW Linked Data Web Bausteine
DL-Learner OntoWiki
Machine Learning for Collaborative creation of Vakantieland
explicit knowledge via Building Data Web applications
Ontologies
Semantic Wikis
SoftWiki
Distributed, stakeholder driven
OWLDB DBpedia Requirements Engineering
Extending DBs for ontology “Semantification” of
handling / revealing implicit Wikipedia
OpenResearch.org
information A semantic Wiki for the sciences
RDF Query Subsumption Triplify xOperator
& View Maintenance “Semantification” of (small) Combining Instant Messaging
Scaling database backed Web Applications with the Data Web
Triple Stores
…
Grundlagen Anwendungen
Marrying databases with RDF Werkzeuge Bringing the Data Web to
and ontologies
end users
AKSW Vorstellung