Recognizing People, Places, Conferences and Events in the Web 2.0

Web2.0 consists of numerous user-friendly feautures that aim to enhance information sharing and collaboration among users. These concepts are realized by social network sites, folksonomies, wikis, etc. In spite of the Web2.0 developing and usage transperency, there are neither standars nor structure that could be used by web applications. The information systems need the cooperation between human and machine intellegence to reach a new step of Web evolution.

We apply machine intellegence concept to extract semantical data of handled objects, in our case publicly available information in Web 2.0 like wikis, blogs, podcasts, mailing lists etc. One of the services that can be used to achieve our aim is Open Calais, an attempt of Reuters Press Agency to create an appropriate Semantic Web API  for Web2.0. The application of the API solves a lot of Web 2.0 flaws like automatic tagging based on semantics, identity management, information compatibility. It gives the World Wide Web community a great utility hopefully leveraging the interoperability of information systems. The API is successfully used for WordPress blog, in Gnosis Firefox plug-in and many others.

The master/diploma thesis will focus on applying of Semantic Web technologies in the analysis of publicly available media. This analysis should be combined with existing multimedia analysis means already implemented using standards like MPEG-7 and MPEG-21. The task is to create an information system where you have apply the API on existing sources like the PROLEARN MediaBase or the GRAECULUS MediaBase to add meaningful semantics to largely unstructured collections of text and multimedia. In a second step, the enriched information should be connected to existing social network analysis data gained from a parallel analysis of the sources.

The applicant should be open for interdisciplinary work. She/he should be experienced in databases, XML and Java or the other object-oriented programming language and has a good mathematic background. The applicant should also be a good team player to cooperate with colleagues.  Informatik 5 offers an open-minded, congenial research atmosphere within different national and international research projects like the excellence cluster Ultra High-Speed Information and Communication (UMIC), the collaborative research centre "Media and cultural communication" and the Cairo University E-Learning Centre (CUELC).