Re: Silk - Link Discovery Framework Version 2.4 release

Paola,

As you can easily see in the Version History substantial development has
happened with SILK since the LOD2 project was started:

http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/silk/#history

You are right, SILK existed before LOD2 as did some other tools which
are further developed during the LOD2 project. However, there are also a
number of new developments such as DBpedia Spotlight [1], the Digital
Agenda Scoreboard [2] or LIMES [3].

The main development of LOD2 is actually an integrated stack of new
*and* substantially improved tools for Linked Data life-cycle
management. We are currently heavily working on the stack, which will be
released in September.

I understand your concern wrt. the efficiency of research, but as LOD2
coordinator I can assure you, that we do our best to give the European
taxpayer as much bang for the buck as possible. I fact you can easily
keep track of all the LOD2 activities on the LOD2 blog, publications and
deliverables posted at: http://lod2.eu

Best,

Sören

[1] http://dbpedia.org/spotlight
[2]
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/digital-agenda/scoreboard/graphs/index_en.htm
[3] http://aksw.org/Projects/LIMES/

PS: The two 2010 dates you spotted on top in the SILK version history
were clearly typos and are now corrected.

Am 01.06.2011 17:48, schrieb Paola Di Maio:
> Thanks Misha
> 
> I agree
> 
> I took a screenshot, attached, for future reference.
> 
> Since SILK according to the information provided in the link was
> released last year, and LOD2 funding started after the release date, I
> am just asking for a clarification (or clearer project information?).
> 
> It is important for these clarifications to be made in public fora,
> and that people concerned are kept in the loop, for the benefit for
> everyone involved
> 
> Look forward to learn more about SILK and LOD2!
> 
> Cheers
> 
> PDM
> 
> On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 4:35 PM, Mischa Tuffield <mmt04r@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
>> Hi,
>> I don't usually write to this list, and have no idea what SILK is about
>> (Sorry SILK people!), but I found the below email to be incredibly harsh.
>> Look at the git history of the project (which was 1 click way from the email
>> I am referring to below!), it does seem to be in active development, with a
>> number of committers:
>> http://www.assembla.com/code/silk/git/node/logs?page=1  (apache license 2.0)
>> And the page DOES seem to reflect this:
>> http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/silk/
>> Perhaps there was a bug in the HTML(?), I don't know - but I would give
>> people the benefit of the doubt before pointing fingers in public. I do
>> think a personal email to Robert would probably have sufficed, but perhaps I
>> am just that way inclined.
>> I have recently unsubscribed from a few of the SW based mailing lists
>> because of trolling and people being incredibly rude - and I hope I don't
>> have to remove myself from any others. The Semantic Web community is full of
>> a great number of nice, helpful, intelligent people, and I find it a
>> pleasure and an honour to be involved with this international community of
>> awesome....  Lots of people put lots of time and effort into writing open
>> specs and open-source code - and i don't see how finger pointing helps
>> anyone!
>> Mischa
>> http://mmt.me.uk/
>> On 1 Jun 2011, at 16:16, Paola Di Maio wrote:
>>
>> Robert
>>
>> thanks  lot for the update, I look forward to be trying it out
>>
>> I see from this page
>> http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/silk/
>>
>> that SILK V 2.4, announced on this list today was actually released
>> last year: See the snippet below
>>
>> 2010-06-01: Version 2.4 released including the new Silk Workbench, a
>> web application which guides the user through the process of
>> interlinking different data sources.
>>
>> I also seem to understand from the project page that much of LOD2
>> software are tools developed in previous years (ie, nothing new!)
>>
>> Am I reading something wrong?
>>
>> In the past decade or so, millions of euros of tax payers money have
>> been paid for projects for which the codebase had already been
>> developed, either by funded projects from prior calls( ie, for which
>> the tax payer had already paid ) or by other companies.
>>
>> In essence, as it has been already pointed out, the public has been
>> paying for the same semantic web tools to be rebranded over and over,
>> and each time it has costed lots of public money, and each time it has
>> not delivered the semantic web functionality the public is waiting for
>> (ie, a useable web based application layer)
>>
>> Since LOD2 has become a funded EU project in September 2010, I would
>> be grateful if you could explain what part of the tool/functionality
>> has been developed after September 2010, and for what part of this
>> development is the public funding being used for
>>
>>
>> Thanks a lot in advance
>>
>> PDM
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 3:35 PM, Robert Isele <robertisele@googlemail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> we are happy to announce version 2.4 of the Silk - Link Discovery
>>
>> Framework for the Web of Data.
>>
>> The central idea of the Web of Data is to interlink data items using
>>
>> RDF links. However, in practice most data sources are not sufficiently
>>
>> interlinked with related data sources. The Silk Link Discovery
>>
>> Framework addresses this problem by providing tools to generate links
>>
>> between data items based on user-provided link specifications. It can
>>
>> be used by data publishers to generate links between datasets as well
>>
>> as by Linked Data consumers to augment Web data with additional RDF
>>
>> links.
>>
>> Link specifications can either be written manually or developed using
>>
>> the new Silk Workbench. The Silk Workbench, is a web application which
>>
>> guides the user through the process of interlinking different data
>>
>> sources. It’s being shipped with the 2.4 version of Silk.
>>
>> The Silk Workbench offers the following features:
>>
>> - It enables the user to manage different sets of data sources and
>>
>> linking tasks.
>>
>> - It offers a graphical editor which enables the user to easily create
>>
>> and edit link specifications.
>>
>> - As finding a good linking heuristics is usually an iterative
>>
>> process, the Silk Workbench makes it possible for the user to quickly
>>
>> evaluate the links which are generated by the current link
>>
>> specification.
>>
>> - It allows the user to create and edit a set of reference links used
>>
>> to evaluate the current link specification.
>>
>> The Silk Link Discovery Framework includes three applications to
>>
>> execute the link specifications which address different use cases:
>>
>> 1. Silk Single Machine is used to generate RDF links on a single
>>
>> machine. The datasets that should be interlinked can either reside on
>>
>> the same machine or on remote machines which are accessed via the
>>
>> SPARQL protocol. Silk Single Machine provides multithreading and
>>
>> caching. In addition, the performance can be further enhanced using an
>>
>> optional blocking feature.
>>
>> 2. Silk Server can be used as an identity resolution component within
>>
>> applications that consume Linked Data from the Web. Silk Server
>>
>> provides an HTTP API for matching instances from an incoming stream of
>>
>> RDF data while keeping track of known entities. It can be used for
>>
>> instance together with a Linked Data crawler to populate a local
>>
>> duplicate-free cache with data from the Web.
>>
>> 3. Silk MapReduce is used to generate RDF links between datasets using
>>
>> a cluster of multiple machines. Silk MapReduce is based on Hadoop and
>>
>> can for instance be run on Amazon Elastic MapReduce. Silk MapReduce
>>
>> enables Silk to scale out to very big datasets by distributing the
>>
>> link generation to multiple machines.
>>
>> More information about the Silk framework, the Silk Link Specification
>>
>> Language, as well as several examples that demonstrate how Silk is
>>
>> used to set links between different data sources in the LOD cloud is
>>
>> found at:
>>
>> http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/silk/
>>
>> The Silk framework is provided under the terms of the Apache License,
>>
>> Version 2.0 and can be downloaded from
>>
>> http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/silk/releases/
>>
>> The development of Silk was supported by Vulcan Inc. as part of its
>>
>> Project Halo (www.projecthalo.com) and by the EU FP7 project LOD2 -
>>
>> Creating Knowledge out of Interlinked Data (http://lod2.eu/, Ref. No.
>>
>> 257943).
>>
>> Thanks to  Christian Becker, Michal Murawicki and Andrea Matteini for
>>
>> contributing to the Silk Workbench.
>>
>> Happy linking,
>>
>> Robert Isele, Anja Jentzsch and Chris Bizer
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>

Received on Wednesday, 1 June 2011 16:37:12 UTC