Semantic Digital Libraries Bringing Libraries to Web 3.0

• Sebastian Ryszard Kruk, Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway
• Stefan Decker, Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway
• Bernhard Haslhofer, University of Vienna, Austria
• Predrag Knežević, Fraunhofer IPSI Institute in Darmstadt, Germany
• Sandy Payette, Cornell University, USA
• Dean Krafft NSDL, USA

• Sebastian Ryszard Kruk, Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway
• Bernhard Haslhofer, University of Vienna, Austria
• Philipp NuŸbaumer, ARC - Research Studios, Austria
• Sandy Paytte, Cornell University, USA
• Tomasz Woroniecki, Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway

Sebastian Ryszard Kruk is a lead researcher (Semantic Infrastructure Lab at e-Learning Cluster in DERI Galway) and project manager (Corrib.org) affiliated with DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway and Gdansk University of Technology (GUT). His main areas of interest covers Semantic Web technologies, digital libraries, information retrieval, security and distributed computing.

In 2002, together with prof Henryk Krawczyk he came up with an idea of the semantic digital library which was implemented first at GUT as Elvis-DL. At the moment he continues work on this system under JeromeDL project (since 2004), established as a joint project between DERI and GUT. To improve the quality of JeromeDL system he started MarcOnt Initiative and the FOAFRealm project. Since 2005, both are supported by DERI and GUT under the hood of Corrib.org. He initiated the work on the lightweight implementation of HyperCuP protocol, that was later transformed into an independent project. In 2005, as a part of (that time) FOAFRealm project, he envisioned and delivered first prototype of Social Semantic Collaborative Filtering, a unique bookmarks sharing solution. In 2006 he delivered JOnto component, unified API to access different taxonomies (used in e.g. JeromeDL and FOAFRealm). He initiated work on the Didaskon, which delivers a framework for assembling a curriculum from existing learning objects provided by e-Learning services; the selection of learning objects will be based on the semantically annotated specification of the user's current skills. He also delivered TagsTreeMaps component for efficient filtering tagged information space; and HexBrowser for representing information space using HoneyComb paradigm. In 2007 he prototyped the MultiBeeBrowse component, a solution for collaborative faceted navigation on unstructured metadata; MBB together with other components constitutes the social semantic search and browsing cycle (S3B). Based on the S3B components, together with Adam Gzella, he set up notitio.us - a social semantic information sources discovery and sharing service.

He contributes to Open Source community with a number of other projects, including all aforementioned Corrib.org solutions. As an active member of the semantic web research community, he works together with Stefan Decker, Daniel Schwabe, and Henryk Krawczyk. He published a number of scientific articles in international conferences and journals.

Stefan Decker is a professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway, director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (leading a research institute employing over 100 people) and Cluster Leader of the Semantic Web Cluster within the institute. He obtained in 1995 a masters in Computer Science at the University of Kaiserslautern (awarded with distinction). From 1995 to 1999 he worked towards a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at the University of Karlsruhe (awarded 2002 with distinction). From 1999-2002 he worked as a Postdoc and Research Associate at the Computer Science Department of Stanford University and established one of the first Semantic Web research groups. From July 2002 to July 2005, he worked as a Computer Scientist and Research Assistant Professor at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California, USA. Since October 2003 he was involved in setting up a new Research Institute, leading the Semantic Web research group as a Senior Research Fellow and Adjunct Lecturer responsible for 10 group members within the Institute and the National University of Ireland.
His current research interests include the Semantic Web, metadata, ontologies and semi-structured data, web services, and applications for Digital Libraries, Knowledge Management, Information Integration and Peer-to-Peer technology. He published around 70 papers as books and journal, book, conference, and workshop contributions. CiteSeer ranks him at 1035 in their list of most cited computer scientists (see http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/allcitedn.html). He co-organized around 35 scientific workshops and conferences and has edited several special issues of scientific journals. He was editor-in-chief of Elsevier's Journal of Web Semantics, editorial committee member of the Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (ETAI) (the Semantic Web), the Journal on Internet Research and the Journal on Web Intelligence and Agent Systems (WIAS) and is recognized as one of the most widely cited Semantic Web scientists. His dissertation work was quoted as one of the inspirations for the DARPA DAML program, which span the Semantic Web effort.

Dean Krafft received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University in 1981. He is currently the Director of Information Technology for Computing and Information Science at Cornell University, and he is the Principal Investigator on the NSF-Funded National Science Digital Library Project at Cornell. He led the effort over the past two years to convert the NSDL core infrastructure to a web-services digital object repository architecture based on the Fedora repository middleware. The project's current technical efforts focus on extending open-source collaborative applications to create content and context around the resources of the NSDL, using semantic web technologies to represent the relationships among the underlying objects and to support search and discovery within the library. Krafft has been working on digital libraries since 1992, when he worked on the Dienst and NCSTRL projects. He has been a researcher with NSDL since the program's inception in 2001.

Predrag Knežević received his Ph.D. at Fraunhofer IPSI Institute in Darmstadt, Germany in 2007. He holds diploma in computer software and engineering from the School of Electrical Engineering, University of Belgrade. Since 2001, as a member of OASYS and i-Info divisions, he was/is a lead software architect in a few EU and national projects like TeachwareOnDemand, MGN, and BRICKS. Before joining Fraunhofer IPSI, he has spent five years working as system and network engineering at broadcasting company B92, Belgrade. His main interests are: peer-to-peer storages, replication protocols, and decentralized systems.

Mariusz Cygan is a research assistant affiliated with Digital Enterprise Research Institute since 2005. He is currently a developer and a lead software architect of the JeromeDL project. His main area of interest concerns introduction of semantic technologies into production environments. His current work focus on delivering JeromeDL as a production system. Mariusz Cygan received his M.Sc in Informatics from Gdansk University of Technology in 2006. He specializes in distributed applications and Internet systems. His publications concern ubiquitous search and browsing, as well as heterogenous networks of digital libraries.

dr. Sebastian Ryszard Kruk is the co-founder and CEO of KnowledgeHives.com, a Web 3.0 startup. Previously, he was a PhD student, researcher (Semantic Infrastructure Lab at e-Learning Cluster in DERI NUI Galway), and project manager (Corrib.org) affiliated with DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway and the Gdansk University of Technology (GUT). His main areas of interest cover Semantic Web and social networking technologies, digital libraries, knowledge management, information retrieval, security and distributed computing.

In 2002, together with prof. Henryk Krawczyk he came up with an idea of the semantic digital library which was implemented first at GUT as the Elvis-DL project. In 2004, together with prof. Stefan Decker he transformed Elvis-DL into an open source project called JeromeDL, which was established as a joint initiative between DERI NUI Galway and GUT. In 2006 he delivered JOnto component, a unified API for
accessing different knowledge organization systems; recently published OpenVocabulary service builds on the ideas researched in the JOnto project. Together with Adam Gzella, he set up notitio.us - a social semantic information sources discovery and sharing service. His company has released the digi.me service, which grew out of ideas researched in the notitio.us.

In 2008, together with Bill McDaniel he edited a book, and contributed to most of the chapters, on Semantic Digital Libraries (published by Springer). He was invited to give five tutorials (at ICSD, JCDL, ESWC,WWW) on Semantic Digital Libraries and one on tutorials on Web 3.0 (Autumn Meetings of PTI). In 2007, he organized the Irish Digital Libraries Summit and co-organized a Workshop on Web Archiving and NKOS
Workshop (at ESWC 2006).

He contributes to the Open Source community. He received the best paper award for the paper "Semantically Enhanced Search Services in Digital Libraries" at the International Conference on Internet and Web Applications and Services, 2006.