ANN: Linked Media Framework 2.0 Release

Dear all,

after months of work, we are happy to announce the general availability release of our Linked Media Framework 2.0 under Apache 2.0 License.

LMF Server
==========

The Linked Media Framework is an easy-to-setup server application that bundles central Semantic Web technologies to offer advanced services. In this release, the following modules are included:
- LMF SPARQL offers complete SPARQL 1.1 Query and Update support for modifying
  the triple store underlying the Linked Media Framework
- LMF LD Path offers user-friendly querying over the Linked Data Cloud based
  on the LDPath language
- LMF Semantic Search offers a highly configurable Semantic Search service
  based on Apache SOLR. Several semantic search indexes can be configured in
  the same LMF instance.
- LMF Linked Data Cache implements a cache to the Linked Data Cloud that is
  transparently used when querying the content of the LMF using either LDPath
  or the Semantic Search component. In case a local resource links to a remote
  resource in the Linked Data Cloud and this relationship is queried, the
  remote resource will be retrieved in the background and cached locally.
- LMF Reasoner implements a rule-based reasoner that allows to process
  Datalog-style rules over RDF triples; the LMF Reasoner is be based on the
  reasoning component developed in the KiWi project, the predecessor of LMF 
- LMF Text Classification provides basic statistical text classification
  services; multiple classifiers can be created, trained with sample data and
  used to classify texts into categories
- LMF Versioning implements versioning of metadata updates; the module allows 
  getting metadata snapshots for a resource for any time in its history and 
  provides an implementation of the memento protocol

LMF Client Library
==================

Accompanying the LMF server is a LMF Client Library, currently implemented for Java, PHP and Javascript, that allows simple access to the main functionalities of the LMF from several popular software development environments. The LMF Client Library is available as a separate download and can be used with local as well as remote LMF installations.


Download
=========

Version 2.0.0 of the LMF has been released today. It is available for download in several different forms:

- Standalone Installer (bundling Apache Tomcat, the LMF Server, and H2 db): 
  http://lmf.googlecode.com/files/lmf-standalone-2.0.0-installer.jar

  Run with java -jar (or double-click) and follow the instructions

- Java Web Application (for Jetty Tomcat and other Servlet containers):
  http://lmf.googlecode.com/files/LMF-2.0.0.war

  Deploy as usual in Tomcat or Jetty, but don't forget to set memory 
  parameters correctly (heap and permgenspace)

- Source Code (requires Mercurial and Gradle):
  http://code.google.com/p/lmf/source/checkout

- Build Environment for custom projects (requires Gradle):
  http://lmf.googlecode.com/files/lmf-buildenv-2.0.0.zip

  Unzip, run "gradle jettyRun" or "gradle idea" … and start
  implementing your own LMF extensions.

- Maven Artifacts:
  The core modules of the LMF are also available as Maven artifacts
  at our Maven repository at
  http://devel.kiwi-project.eu:8080/nexus/content/groups/public/


Documentation
=============

We have tried to provide as much documentation as was possible so far. Here are some entry points:

- Installation and Setup:
  http://code.google.com/p/lmf/wiki/InstallationSetup
- Introduction for Developers
  http://code.google.com/p/lmf/wiki/DeveloperIntroduction
- Java API:
  http://doc.lmf.googlecode.com/hg/api/index.html
- Webservice API:
  http://doc.lmf.googlecode.com/hg/rest/overview-summary.html

In general, the Wiki at Google Code (http://code.google.com/p/lmf/w/list) provides a good entry point.


Scenarios
=========

Why another Linked Data Server? We had a number of scenarios in mind where the Linked Media Framework can offer you immediate benefit:

1. Quickly setting up a Linked Data server 

Setting up the LMF can be done in 5 minutes; together with Google Refine+RDF Extension, you can publish legacy structured data very quickly. I can give you a quick demo whenever you want ;-)

2. Building Media + Linked Data applications

The LMF offers you to manage multimedia data (videos, images, etc) and the corresponding metadata (e.g. using Media Fragments URI and the Ontology for Media Resources). See our demo at WWW if you are interested.

A demo installation with content from our partner Red Bull Mediahouse is available under:
- http://labs.newmedialab.at/RedBull/video/redbull.html

Note that this server still runs a pre-release version of the LMF Server. We will update the server to the final release in the next weeks.

3. Implementing Semantic Search based on Linked Data

Another scenario we are working on is to facilitate Linked Data sources to improve full-text search over media content. For example, we are doing this together with Salzburger Nachrichten, one of the big Austrian news providers by interlinking news article content with Linked Data (GeoNames and others). As a side effect, we also have 1.1 million news articles published as Linked Data ;-)

The dataset will be officially deployed under http://search.salzburg.com in the coming days. In the meantime, you can have a preview on the application and data at:
- http://search-dev.salzburg.com/news/ (search interface)
- http://search-dev.salzburg.com/news/resource?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fsearch.salzburg.com%2Fnews%2Fresource%2Fsn%2Fnews%2Fnacht_01.12.2011_41-36427556 (sample resource, use with Firefox or some linked data client)
- http://search-dev.salzburg.com/news/meta/text/html?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fsearch.salzburg.com%2Fnews%2Fresource%2Fsn%2Fnews%2Fnacht_01.12.2011_41-36427556 (direct html link, any browser)



If you have any questions don't hesistate to ask me or any of the colleagues at Salzburg Research. Have fun!


Sebastian
-- 
| Dr. Sebastian Schaffert          sebastian.schaffert@salzburgresearch.at
| Salzburg Research Forschungsgesellschaft  http://www.salzburgresearch.at
| Head of Knowledge and Media Technologies Group          +43 662 2288 423
| Jakob-Haringer Strasse 5/II
| A-5020 Salzburg