Wikimania2006

From LoaWiki

Wikimania 2006 is held in Cambridge, MA from August 4-6.

1 Interview with La Stampa
2 Interesting Talks/Workshops/Panels we attended
3 People contacted with possible follow-ups

Interview with La Stampa

La Stampa is an italian daily. One of its delegate (Sara Arrigoni) interviewed Malvina Nissim and Valentina Presutti (LOA-ISTC CNR) about the Semantic Web. The video of the interview is available online.

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Interesting Talks/Workshops/Panels we attended

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Tagging the real World

This is a project developed at Semapedia. See the short abstract on the Wikimania program here. This is the idea:

take a Wikipedia page on some real object that is of interest to you (say the Tower of Pisa), and copy the URI
go on the Semapedia, and paste the URI in the dedicated space
a Semapedia label (well, a series of those) is created (look at this special wooden one!)
take the label and go stick it in the relevant place (the Tower of Pisa, or better nearby if you don't want to get arrested)

Now the Tower of Pisa is tagged! Whoever passes by and has a phone equipped with a camera and the appropriate (free) software (you can get it on the Semapedia page) will be able to take a picture of the code on the label and directly access the related Wikipedia page!

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Wikipedia and the Semantic Web

This is the panel LOA was involved in as active participant.

This is the abstract on the Wikimania site.
These are the slides of our presentation.
This is a short report of the panel on the blog of Randy Fenstermacher
The [http://ia301205.us.archive.org/3/items/wikimania_2006_semantic_web/wikimania_2006_semantic_web.mp3

audio file of the panel session] is available online

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WiktionaryZ

This is a project concerned with overcoming the limitations of language-dependent wiktionaries. The idea is to store concepts rather than words directly, and associated words (in different languages) to stored concepts.

redundant effort for one meaning across different languages

index on the meaning rather than the string in a given language

translations will create articles that point back to a given meaning

example: "mayor". language in en and spanish definition of english, take that and translate the definition to spanish

Problems:

multiple definitions possible for the same concept (intension/extension)
apparently they are currently treated as different concepts linked to the same extension
this triggers the issue of differentiating sense distinctions (like definition of bank1 and bank2 and different definitions of the same concept)

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Semantic MediaWiki Workshop

Denny and Markus ran a really nice workshop on how to exploit semantic annotation done with SMW in applications. Nice little examples in Python, HTML. Remember to get slides.

Longwell (rdf visualiser)
for Python programming get RDFLib from rdflib.net and ask Denny Vrandecic for SMW lib

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Organizational uses of Wiki Technology

Experience at Intel and McKinsey

sharing best practices
simplicity and attraction : an expert feels like to fix mistakes or simply to enhance the content of the wiki page about the domain he/she is expert of
experts finding experts
technology is very important -> drives the logic

wysiwyg very important..that's why they don't use media wiki

the more they are like emails the better
- macro structure useful
- some standard structure useful
most edited page: the welcome page: "I want to be part of the core staff"
light touch monitoring system: scanning contribution, no client names are mentioned, just to now how things are going on
experience of zero needs of arbitration
intelpedia -> wiki for sharing information inside intel intranet
- no top-down structure

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