Book launch for "The Social Semantic Web"

We had the official book launch of “The Social Semantic Web” last month in the President’s Drawing Room at NUI Galway. The book was officially launched by Dr. James J. Browne, President of NUI Galway. The book was authored by myself, Dr. Alexandre Passant and Prof. Stefan Decker from the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at NUI Galway (sponsored by SFI). Here is a short blurb:

Web 2.0, a platform where people are connecting through their shared objects of interest, is encountering boundaries in the areas of information integration, portability, search, and demanding tasks like querying. The Semantic Web is an ideal platform for interlinking and performing operations on the diverse data available from Web 2.0, and has produced a variety of approaches to overcome limitations with Web 2.0. In this book, Breslin et al. describe some of the applications of Semantic Web technologies to Web 2.0. The book is intended for professionals, researchers, graduates, practitioners and developers.

Some photographs from the launch event are below.

Dr. James J. Browne (President, NUI Galway)

Gerard Cahill (DERI), Dr. Kieran Loftus (Executive Director of Operations, NUI Galway), Dr. Sharon Flynn (CELT, NUI Galway)

Dr. John Breslin, Ina O’Murchu (Social Bits)

Ina O’Murchu (Social Bits), Dr. Gabriela Avram (University of Limerick)

Prof. Ger Hurley (Electrical and Electronic Engineering, NUI Galway), Dr. John Breslin

Sheila Kinsella (DERI), Liga Besere, Julie Letierce (DERI), Dr. Uldis Bojars

Liam Moran (DERI), Dr. Paul Buitelaar (DERI)

Dr. John Breslin, Dr. James J. Browne (President, NUI Galway), Prof. Stefan Decker (DERI), Dr. Alexandre Passant (DERI)

Dr. John Breslin, Prof. Stefan Decker (DERI), Dr. Alexandre Passant (DERI)

Dr. Alexandre Passant (DERI), Prof. Stefan Decker (DERI), Dr. John Breslin

BlogTalk 2009 (6th International Social Software Conference) – Call for Proposals – September 1st and 2nd – Jeju, Korea

BlogTalk 2009
The 6th International Conf. on Social Software
September 1st and 2nd, 2009
Jeju Island, Korea

Overview

Following the international success of the last five BlogTalk events, the next BlogTalk – to be held in Jeju Island, Korea on September 1st and 2nd, 2009 – is continuing with its focus on social software, while remaining committed to the diverse cultures, practices and tools of our emerging networked society. The conference (which this year will be co-located with Lift Asia 09) is designed to maintain a sustainable dialog between developers, innovative academics and scholars who study social software and social media, practitioners and administrators in corporate and educational settings, and other general members of the social software and social media communities.

We invite you to submit a proposal for presentation at the BlogTalk 2009 conference. Possible areas include, but are not limited to:

• Forms and consequences of emerging social software practices
• Social software in enterprise and educational environments
• The political impact of social software and social media
• Applications, prototypes, concepts and standards

Participants and proposal categories

Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the conference, audiences will come from different fields of practice and will have different professional backgrounds. We strongly encourage proposals to bridge these cultural differences and to be understandable for all groups alike. Along those lines, we will offer three different submission categories:

• Academic
• Developer
• Practitioner

For academics, BlogTalk is an ideal conference for presenting and exchanging research work from current and future social software projects at an international level. For developers, the conference is a great opportunity to fly ideas, visions and prototypes in front of a distinguished audience of peers, to discuss, to link-up and to learn (developers may choose to give a practical demonstration rather than a formal presentation if they so wish). For practitioners, this is a venue to discuss use cases for social software and social media, and to report on any results you may have with like-minded individuals.

Submitting your proposals

You must submit a one-page abstract of the work you intend to present for review purposes (not to exceed 600 words). Please upload your submission along with some personal information using the EasyChair conference area for BlogTalk 2009. You will receive a confirmation of the arrival of your submission immediately. The submission deadline is June 27th, 2009.

Following notification of acceptance, you will be invited to submit a short or long paper (four or eight pages respectively) for the conference proceedings. BlogTalk is a peer-reviewed conference.

Timeline and important dates

• One-page abstract submission deadline: June 27th, 2009
• Notification of acceptance or rejection: July 13th, 2009
• Full paper submission deadline: August 27th, 2009

(Due to the tight schedule we expect that there will be no deadline extension. As with previous BlogTalk conferences, we will work hard to endow a fund for supporting travel costs. As soon as we review all of the papers we will be able to announce more details.)

Topics

Application Portability Bookmarking Business Categorisation Collaboration Content Sharing Data Acquisition Data Mining Data Portability Digital Rights Education Enterprise Ethnography Folksonomies and Tagging Human Computer Interaction Identity Microblogging Mobile Multimedia

Podcasting Politics Portals Psychology Recommender Systems RSS and Syndication Search Semantic Web Social Media Social Networks Social Software Transparency and Openness Trend Analysis Trust and Reputation Virtual Worlds Web 2.0 Weblogs Wikis