Welcome!

Flink is presentation of the scientific work and social connectivity of Semantic Web reseachers, in particular the community of researchers who have contributed their work to the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) series.

Flink is also built on Semantic Web technology and has received a 1st prize at the Semantic Web Challenge in 2004. All the information displayed on these pages has been extracted automatically from web-accessible information sources (including web pages, FOAF profiles, email lists and publication archives) and has been aggregated using semantic technology. For more information, please see the about section.

News

• September 5, 2005 - The data set has been updated to include all authors of ISWC 2005. There are also a number of improvements to the system:
  
  • Improved methods for extracting research interests of individuals.
  • Changes to the data extraction process and identity reasoning result in better recall and higher precision for finding matching individuals.
  • The Google Scholar importer now takes into account all sensible variations of a person's name, resulting in better precision and recall for publications, in particular for individuals who use different variations of their name (e.g. Natalya Noy and Natasha Noy, Jim and James Hendler).
  • The publication and message lists in the profile pages are now sorted by date

• July 8, 2005 - A good part of Flink has become open source under the name Elmo, bundling also other goodies in the package. Below is the official release note:

  Initial release: Elmo 0.1.1; an ontology API for Sesame

  We are proud to announce the first public release of Elmo: a toolkit for developing Semantic Web applications using the popular Sesame storage, query and inference facility.

  Elmo provides a dedicated API for a number of well known web ontologies including Dublin Core, RSS and FOAF. The dedicated API makes it easier to work with RDF data for the supported ontologies. The API is extensible and is expected to cover a larger set of existing web ontologies in future releases.

  Elmo also offers a set of tools related to the supported ontologies, including an RDF crawler, a FOAF smusher and a FOAF validator.

  Elmo is open source software and is distributed under the LGPL license. Download pointers and support for Elmo are available at http://www.openrdf.org

  Feedback on this first public release is highly appreciated. The Elmo discussion forums can be found at http://www.openrdf.org/forum

• June 21, 2005 - Flink is recovering after a long downtime due to the crash of the server that is hosting it (both hard disks failed at the same time). The bottom line: your software can be only as good as the hardware running it.
• May 13, 2005 - A number of improvements both to data extraction and visualization. Some of the visible changes:
  
  • It is now possible to view changes in statistics, shown both on the individual profile pages and the statistics page. (The date of the current statistics and the date of the baseline statistics are shown on the statistics page.)
  • Update to the latest JUNG API (1.6), including the use of the new zoomable graph panes.
  • New mailing list added to the sources: semantic-web@w3.org
  • Improved methods for social network extraction from emails.
  • Improvements to the FOAF output.
  • More network measures added.
• December 17, 2004 - A number of improvements in functionality, including
  • The amount of data handled by the system has been scaled up significantly. Two new mailing lists have been added (www-rdf-interest@w3.org, public-swbp-wg@w3.org). We now also extract relevant publications from Google Scholar. The amount of FOAF data scuttered also increased ~100 times.
  • All publications and emails have links to the original source on the Web. This means that Flink has also become a more conveninent way to browse Google Scholar for Semantic Web related publications.
  • The FOAF export has been cleaned up
  • Flink now treats foaf:knows relations as undirected links. The web mining component has been adjusted accordingly: it now also returns relations that are significant for one person but not for another (e.g. student - professor relationship).
  • A guestbook has been added. All feedback are welcome!
• November 11, 2004 - Flink has received first prize at the Semantic Web Challenge Award 2004 for best application of Semantic Web technology. For more information about the award, please see the website of the Semantic Web Challenge.