It is our pleasure to announce that the Weizenbaum Journal of the Digital Society has seen the light of day. Besides Martin Emmer, Hanna Krasnova, Martin Krzywdzinski, Axel Metzger, and Lena Ulbricht, our research group lead Sonja Schimmler is part of its editorial board. The Weizenbaum Journal of the Digital Society is a new journal that is dedicated to interdisciplinary research on the conditions, forms and consequences of the digitalisation of society. Further information about the journal and its first issue can be found here: Webpage

On the occasion of the Berlin Science Week, we hosted a science slam today. The NFDI Science Slam was opened by York Sure-Vetter and moderated by Konrad Förstner and Sonja Schimmler. Thank you to Konrad and York! And thank you to our five slammers from different consortia! The Berlin Science Week provides scientists and organizations a stage to share insights into current topics and envision the future. Further details about the event can be found here: NFDI Science Slam

Our researcher Fabian Kirstein co-organized a tutorial at the renowned International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) in cooperation with Prof. Elena Simperl (King’s College London), Prof. Oscar Corcho (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) and Dr. Luis-Daniel Ibáñez (University of Southampton). The tutorial provided attendees with a review of the cross-link between Semantic Web and the public sector, introduced two current E-Government initiatives and how they are making use of Semantic Web technologies, and provided hands-on experience on the knowledge graphs created by them, that have the potential to be valuable resources for the community.

We are very happy, that our Paper “Blockchain for Trustworthy Publication and Integration of Linked Open Data” by our researcher Fabian Kirstein and director Manfred Hauswirth was accepted at the International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP). In the paper we present a blockchain-based approach for creating an integrated, traceable, and timely view on Linked Open Data. We use Linked Open Government Data (LOGD) as our case study to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach. We developed a prototype to address the specific requirements of LOGD publication and applied the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance algorithm at its core to enable a robust state replication.

At EGOV 2021, the scientific conference on e-government, open government, eParticipation and e-democracy, our research group succeeded in placing two scientific papers. With »Ronda: Real-time Data Provision, Processing and Publication for Open Data«, Fabian Kirstein, Dario Bacher, Vincent Bohlen and Sonja Schimmler presented a framework for the integration and provision of real-time data. The goal is to practically process the increasing amount of rapidly changing data, such as timetables or weather data, and make it available with a specialised user interface.