Semantic Web Irony

I am at the Extended Semantic Web Conference (n.d./) I haven’t published or been to this conference for quite a while (Lord et al. 2005) so I was interested to see how things have changed in the meantime.

The first talk that I went to was from Yvew Raimond from BBC R&D on the Music Ontology (Raimond and Sandler 2012) They are using this to drive parts of their website. He was talking about how to evaluate this ontology. Very interesting. Worth reading the paper, I thought.

So, I decided to look it up. A short piece of Googling later, got me through to the paper on the web. Unfortunately, the conference organisers have decided to publish with Springer, so no access there. Of course, I might have access at my home institution. Fortunately, I knew how to deal with this virtue of my colleague Jon Dowland in a quick and easy way, at least on linux. For general interest, the solution is here:

ssh -D 1080 username@hostname

And then FoxyProxy to reconfigure Firefox to use a local SOCKS proxy. Sadly, that didn’t work either. So, it looks like no access there either. Apparently my University doesn’t subscribe, or Springer uses something more complex than IP authentication.

At this point, I remembered the USB pen attached to my geek badge, which has the conference proceedings on. Great. So, I take a look at this. Hmmm. No “index.html” or similar to that. Let’s try listing the directory contents. The somewhat elided output looks like this.

> ls -lR
-rw-r--r-- 1 phillord phillord 168K 2012-04-30 17:32 eswc2012_submission_301.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 phillord phillord 1.2M 2012-04-30 17:33 eswc2012_submission_303.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 phillord phillord 468K 2012-04-30 17:35 eswc2012_submission_304.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 phillord phillord 343K 2012-04-30 17:36 eswc2012_submission_312.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 phillord phillord 217K 2012-04-30 17:36 eswc2012_submission_315.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 phillord phillord 730K 2012-04-30 17:37 eswc2012_submission_316.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 phillord phillord 527K 2012-04-30 17:37 eswc2012_submission_321.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 phillord phillord 651K 2012-04-30 17:38 eswc2012_submission_322.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 phillord phillord 2.3M 2012-04-30 17:38 eswc2012_submission_323.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 phillord phillord 308K 2012-04-30 17:34 eswc2012_submission_325.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 phillord phillord 374K 2012-04-30 17:39 eswc2012_submission_331.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 phillord phillord  44K 2012-04-30 17:40 eswc2012_submission_349.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 phillord phillord 333K 2012-04-30 17:40 eswc2012_submission_351.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 phillord phillord 400K 2012-04-30 17:40 eswc2012_submission_357.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 phillord phillord 115K 2012-04-30 17:41 eswc2012_submission_363.pdf

Not very handy for discovery or navigation. But, it’s okay, because there is some organised metadata. I found this in the following files:

-rw-r--r-- 1 phillord phillord  56M 2012-04-23 13:55 978-3-642-30283-1_Book_PrintPDF.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 phillord phillord 3.2M 2012-04-23 13:55 978-3-642-30283-1_Cover_PrintPDF.pdf

As far as I can tell, the PDF is not linked, nor does it tell you the submission numbers. Still, I do know it is on page 255. So I can probably buy a copy of the paper proceedings and find the article. 95 euro and a brick to take home. Still, the cover page looks nice.

Epic Fail conference organisers. The proceedings are not open, they are not linked and apparently have no machine computational semantics. Perhaps the organisers should go to a semantic web conference at some point to find out about metadata.

If Springer cannot do the job — and evidentally they cannot — then use someone else. I managed all of this with Bio-Ontologies. A conference on semantics, the web, and linked open data should be able to also.