SD News

[hgg]

Dear followers,

I just finished a first workthrough to compile standard information
about past conferences along the lines of the swc ontology
<http://data.semanticweb.org/ns/swc/swc_2009-05-09.html>. I have no idea
if this is a good idea, since the ontology was last updated in 2009 and
the swrc ontology is dead for even a longer time (I decided to use the
dcterms ontology directly and to avoid use of swrc). Moreover the data
model of swc fits only partly our needs, since we have our own SD people
database. Hence swc is mainly used to describe Conference venues and
tracks, but I used the well established ical ontology instead of the
(also seemingly dead) events ontology proposed by swc.

Hence the dependence upon swc is weak and can be considered more as a
starting point for a discussion about the "only true" ontology to be
used in the future for such a purpose.

Each conference information consists of three parts - general, papers,
people. "General" contains general information about the conference,
"papers" (resp. talks) list the papers in dcterms notation (as instances
of sd:Reference and sd:ConferenceTalk, since the dcterms ontology has no
detailed ontology for different types of publications and I found no
convincing substitute for that - but this can be addressed later on).
The main task during preparation was author disambiguation and alignment
with the SD people database. The "people" part contains information (URI
and foaf:name) for backward compatibility. Hence one can compile all
three parts of the conference description into one single self contained
RDF graph - and I did so and published it in the
<http://symbolicdata.org/Drafts/Conferences/> directory on the web. The
intermediate files are stored in the Conferences directory of the CASN
git repo.

The idea for the long run is that conference organizers provide such
information at their local conference site, that can be harvested and
maintained with CKAN. Even now you can pick up any of the conference
desriptions and upload it to your local RDF store to expolre it in more
detail.

Note that as side effect we have
* an enlarged list of (678 as of 2014-08-08) people involved with
Computer Algebra in our RDF data store at
<http://symbolicdata.org/Data/People/> and
* the conference paper and talk records are available in our RDF data
store at <http://symbolicdata.org/Data/ConferencePapersAndTalks/>.

Moreover we started a first alignment of the SD people database with the
ZBMath author database (348 matchings out of 678 persons), see
<http://symbolicdata.org/Data/ZBMathPeople/> in our RDF data store.

Enjoy. hgg

--

apl. Prof. Dr. Hans-Gert Graebe, Inst. Informatik, Univ. Leipzig
postal address: Postfach 100920, D-04009 Leipzig
Hausanschrift: Augustusplatz 10, 04109 Leipzig, Raum P-633
tel. : +49-341-97-32248
email: gra...@informatik.uni-leipzig.de
Home Page: http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~graebe