Vuk Milicic has been invited to write a case study about Faviki and the idea behind semantic tags for the W3C Semantic Web Activity website.

The goal of W3C SW case studies is, primarily, to help the Web community at large understand and appreciate the advantages of possibly using Semantic Web technologies in real applications.

In the case study the benefits of using the semantic tags are shown and it is described how they are used in Faviki. The key idea of the case study is that the semantic tags, as an intersection point of Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web, have the potential to enable much faster evolution of the Web by providing a solid foundation from which the Semantic Web can grow soundly.

ReadWriteWeb, a popular blog about web technology, has started publishing its annual list of "10 Semantic Web Apps to Watch" last year. This year, Faviki made it to that list.

Faviki's idea of semantic bookmarking caught their eye back in May, when they wrote very positive review, and now it is included in this list, which is considered to be a prediction of success in this brand new part of the market.

It is an extreme pleasure to annonce that we have another PhD in our group - on Nov. 18, 2008, Violeta Damjanovic has successfully and brilliantly defended her PhD thesis, Ambient Intelligence in Adaptive Online Experiments. Conggratulations, Violeta!!!

The poster presenting early work on the Online Presence Project got into 3 best posters at the 7th International Semantic Web Conference in Karlsruhe, Germany. The OPO team would like to express special thanks to Uros for the unique and innovative poster design.

GPML and other Policy Languages

Jelena Jovanovic, Nikola Milikic, and Filip Radulovic attended the Web of Data Practitioners Days 2008, that took place last week in Vienna, Austria. It was intended to communicate the results of the past years' semantic systems activities to a broader audience, especially to practitioners from industry and academia. Its main goal was to show how semantic technologies can improve and enhance existing Web-based software systems and how the Web of Data will provide a completely new paradigm of managing globally interlinked information.

The event was organized by four major Austrian institutions: University of Vienna, Joanneum Research, Johannes Kepler University of Linz, and Semantic Technology Institute from Innsbruck.

Many experts gave talks about the subject, among them Yves Raimond,  Richard Cyganiak, Leo Saureman, Alan Dix, and others.

Blogosphere is embracing Synesketch!
 
A post about our project was published on the Information Aesthetics blog, a world's major weblog for data visualization and visual communication! The "Pointy Hair Dilbert" considered Synesketch one of the "5 Superb Visualizations of the Week".  It is even the subject of some Hungarian and Russian blogs.  

Our project Synesketch entered the selection of the Alternative Party's art exhibition in Helsinki, Finland, October 24-26. Alternative Party is an international festival of digital culture which gathers together creative people like researchers,  programmers, visualists, musicians, and designers.

We have launched a new project, Synesketch. 
  
Synesketch is a textual emotion recognition and visualization engine and Java library based on the concept of synesthesia , or in other words: "code that feels the words visually". Synesketch is able to dynamically transfer the text into animated visual patterns.
 
The emotional parameters are based on a WordNet-based lexicon of words with their general & specific emotional weights, for the emotion types happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, surprise. Demo visualization, done in Processing, is based on a generative painting system of imaginary colliding particles. Colors & shapes of these patterns depend on the type and intensity of interpreted textual emotions.

We have started a new project, Modeling Online Presence. The project addresses the issue of integrating and exchanging the data related to users' presence in the online world.

The core part of the project is the Online Presence Ontology (OPO) that can be used to represent instant messaging statuses, status messages, avatars and other elements that form the image of a user's presence in the online world. As a difference from FOAF that models more static and persistent user profile data, our goal is to model the dynamic and frequently changing aspects of user profiles.

All those dynamic aspects of online presence are currently published on different services (social networks, instant messaging platforms, Twitter-like and lifestreaming services) and the aim of OPO is to facilitate their exchange across those services.

For more information please see the project page.