Gestern abend haben ich in Begleitung einer weiteren Person die <a href="http://www.phatraake.de/index.php?sitemap">Phatcafer Laboratorien</a> besucht. Eine sehr interessante und vorallem auch sehr durch die musikalische Ader des <a href="http://www.phatraake.de/content/images/1_469_UpNpbD8HA3-190x.jpg">Herrn Becker</a> gepr�gte Umgebung. Kreativ waren wir in dem Sinne, als dass wir ein gemeinsames mindset entwickelt haben. Also auf in eine bessere Zukunft… #B4mad.Net fully supports phatcafer lab. <<blockquote>The developer(s) of every Web 2.0 app/service should seriously consider exposing their data with a SPARQL query service.</blockquote>- <a href="http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/8609">Kendall Clark</a> <The <a href="http://business2.blogs.com/business2blog/2005/11/google_base_is_.html">Business 2.0</a> blog made the mistake of inserting Paul Ford’s little Googlebot image (from the <a href="http://www.ftrain.com/google_takes_all.html">Google/SemWeb piece</a>) into their content, using the original <code>img src</code> but without any attribution. Soon after, the article on Google Base at <a href="http://business2.blogs.com/business2blog/2005/11/google_base_is_.html">B2Day</a> played host to a bunch of rather <a href="http://www.ftrain.com/gooooooglebase.html">rude stoats</a>. Thus <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0452286638/">Paul’s new novel</a> goes on my Xmas list ;-) Some worth noting economy news as of Dec. 1, 2005:<ul><li>Personal saving rate improved to negative 0.7% from negative 0.8%. The record low as in August at negative 2.2%</li><li>Personal incoming increased 0.4% in Oct.</li><li>Consumer prices rose 0.1% in Oct, which is lower than 0.9% in Sept.</li></ul>It’s good to see that personal incoming has increased while the prices of our daily goods haven’t increase too much. Increasing personal incoming could also less the chance of seeing depreciation in real estate values. There are signs that people begin to save some of their incoming. Nevertheless, to me negative saving is unacceptable.Source: <a href="http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story.asp?siteid=mktw&guid=%7BE64D8B24-3500-4C6F-8F5A-8C5372236994%7D&dist=bnb" title="Incomes, spending rise modestly">Incomes, spending rise modestly</a> I enjoyed the <a href="http://www.tomrafteryit.net/cork-geek-dinner/">Cork Geek Dinner with Robert Scoble</a> and all the other Irish geeks last night.Again, it was good to meet not only the guest of honour but the other friends and acquaintances: Ed, Piaras, Damien, James, Bernie, Tom, Antoin, Fergal and Sven of Blogwise who came over from the UK. Unofficial Fremont facts:<ul><li><a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/cmp/20051201/tc_cmp/174403132" title="Microsoft Readies Online Classifieds Service">It took a 5 people team (including the manager is 6) to development Fremont</a></li><li>Fremont is a copycat of Google Base, not an original idea by Microsoft — I think. Justification: <a href="http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/25/2042238&tid=217" title=" Google Developing Database Service">Google Base was first announced on Slashdot on Oct. 25, 2005</a>. It’s quite possible that Fremont was developed under the pressure of the Microsoft management. Using <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_Programming" title="Extreme Programming">Extreme Programming</a>, I can believe how 5 experienced developers can build something like Google Base.</li></ul> Today I finished packaging up some of the Java Code I did. I released a <a href="http://b4mad.net/2005/12/01/WITW-webservice.jar"><code>WITW-webservice.jar</code></a> which contains some classes to use with the <a href="http://norman.walsh.name/2005/02/is/goern">Where in the World (WITW)</a> web service of <a href="http://norman.walsh.name/">Norman Walsh</a>. The <code>.jar</code> contains the full source but no documentation jet…TODO: write documentation. <Dan Connolly <a href="http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/29">writes</a>:<blockquote>…the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security announced the result of an XML collaboration - version 0.1 of the <a href="http://niem.gov/niem01.php">National Information Exchange Model (NIEM)</a> which will be used for law enforcement, emergency management, etc. communities and the parties who exchange information with them.I hope to check it out. Better yet… I hope somebody else checks it out and writes a GRDDL transformation.</blockquote><a href="http://www.w3.org/2004/01/rdxh/spec"><abbr title="Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages">GRDDL</abbr></a> uses XSLT to allow translation of existing XML docs into RDF/XML, effectively making them transparently visible on the <a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/">Semantic Web</a>. I couldn’t resist having a quick look. The zip file they provide contains 54 XML Schemas, and an Excel spreadsheet.The material in the spreadsheet is very structural, e.g. <code> j:ActivityType extends c:ActivityType A structure that describes details about an activity or process that occurs. </code> It seems like it might be relatively straightforward to mostly machine-process it into an RDF/OWL ontology, maybe using those <a href="http://jroller.com/page/rickard/20051030">abusive</a> tricks.The XSD stuff, well, it’s XSD. But that could make a reasonable starting point for the XSLT. Sun have a <a href="http://www.sun.com/software/xml/developers/relaxngconverter/">RELAX NG Converter</a> which can eat XML Schema. A complication with the NIEM bundle is that it’s full of cross-references, looks like to do the conversions you’d need to dump the subdirectories in the package at the root of the filesystem. Then there’s another Java tool, <a href="http://www.relaxer.org/">Relaxer</a>, that can take Relax NG schemas as input and auto-generate identity XSLT transforms. The result isn’t wonderful, I seem to remember having to do search and replaces around the namespaces. But it does make a handy kind of template, and if the target structures aren’t that different from the source a lot of the work’s done.A related tool is <a href="http://www.thaiopensource.com/relaxng/trang-manual.html">Trang</a>, which can generate Relax NG schemas from XML instance documents. As Mr.C suggests, this job would make a nice student project, there’s bound to be some thinking & a fair bit of manual work in getting the ontologies and transformations right. But anyone does want to make potentially a lot of data more widely usable (and collect a few Connolly appreciation points), those little tools might help. <In parallel with all the developments around <a href="http://microformats.org">microformats</a>, the <a href="http://structuredblogging.org/">Structured Blogging</a> folks have been taking a slightly different strategy (XML embedded in <code><script></code> elements) to broadly the same ends: getting data on the Web with the help of existing HTML-oriented tools. In this <a href="http://bobwyman.pubsub.com/main/2005/10/erosion_of_powe.html">post</a> Bob Wyman talks of the “economy of information” this could enable. Good stuff:<blockquote>By providing the means for people and organizations to publish their structured data in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_web">Visible Web</a> rather than the Gray Web or the walled-garden’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_web">Hidden Web</a>, we’ll be taking a great deal of “power” away from the walled-garden search sites and giving it back to the users and publishers.</blockquote>Bob’s scenario is only a small step away from what we’ve got now, but it’s still quite a significant step towards a Web of Data. With most current systems the integration aspects of this will be down to individual services, there isn’t a common data model. However pretty much any well-defined data can be interpreted in the <abbr title="Resource Description Framework">RDF</abbr> model (Structured Blogging, microformats, RSS/Atom, virtually any other XML, plus material currently hidden in SQL DBs…). As Tim Berners-Lee puts it:<blockquote>If HTML and the Web made all the online documents look like one huge book, RDF, schema, and inference languages will make all the data in the world look like one huge database.</blockquote>(<a href="http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving/Overview.html">Weaving the Web</a>, 1999) <<img src="http://dannyayers.com/2005/11/eric-sparql.jpg" alt="hedgehog and cat" />Bit blurred I’m afraid, Eric trots off to find a dark place every time he’s out of his apartment. That’s his leg at the back. He seems to have long legs and heavy-duty feet, but is rather a nervous individual and it’s hard to have a close look - ping! He’s a ball. <I’d forgotten that was coming ;-)The <a href="http://www.croczilla.com/svg/samples/">Croczilla samples</a> (Tetris!) seem to work a treat. The last bit of <a href="http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/"><abbr title="Scalable Vector Graphics">SVG</abbr></a> I wrote was for <a href="http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/WroxTitle/productCd-0764570773.html">Beginning XML</a>, the main demo being a Tangram thing (here’s the <a href="http://dannyayers.com/archives/2004/08/06/new-book/">original code</a> plus some notes). Unfortunately it doesn’t work in FireFox (yet). For one thing I somehow managed to miss out the XLink namespace declaration (whoops!), but there are also a host of golden DOM incompatibilities. I found fixes for a lot of them <a href="http://svg-whiz.com/wiki/index.php?title=Cross-Platform_Authoring">here</a>, e.g.<code><del>event.getTarget();</del> <ins>event.target; </ins></code>Still haven’t got the dragging bit working (the half-fixed version is <a href="http://dannyayers.com/2005/11/tangram-cat.svg">here</a>). What’s puzzling me a bit is that although it was a rush-job, I’m sure I checked all the code with both the Adobe plugin and Batik. Ah well.Oh yeah, I guess it’s time to check out <a href="http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Canvas_tutorial"><canvas></a> too. <Gonna be offline for a bit, we’re having a new woodburning stove put in. The one we’ve got now is a stove in the US sense, a cooker, but we only used it for heating (did the living room and this office) and keeping soup warm. The new one will just be for heating, hopefully a lot more efficient (new chimney too) and less messy than the old one. It feels a bit strange, this is the kind of job we’d usually have done ourselves, but now way I’m getting on any loose-tiled roof until I’ve seen a local do it. <a href="http://dannyayers.com/archives/2005/12/01/grddl-job/">Danny Ayers</a> and <a href="http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/29">Dan Connolly</a> both report the release of a new XML model for exchanging information between the the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), and other government agencies. A final version of the NIEM is expected to be released in June 2006. The current NIEM 0.1 is initially based on components and elements identified in the Global Justice XML Data Model (Global JXDM), Version 3.0.3, that is used by the criminal justice (Justice) domain. <a href="http://niem.gov/library.php">NIEM documentation</a>, <a href="http://niem.gov/documents/niem-0.1.zip">NIEM 0.1 package (zip)</a>, <a href="http://niem.gov/niem01.php">more information</a> Heute abend habe ich zum zweiten Mal in meinem Leben versucht in einem <a href="http://www.rossmann.de/servlets/Compose/SID=AAAj8babnnw1/help/10/4/c_index.html">Rossmann</a> einzukaufen, leider ohne Erfolg. Keine der Kassen wollte meine EC Karte akzeptieren - was ich schon sehr seltsam fand - und keine der Angestellten war in der Lage mir mit klaren Worten zu sagen warum es nicht geht… “Die Karte nehmen wir halt nicht, ist ne Mastercard”. Mal davon abgesehen das da Maestro draufsteht…Ich mein… Hallo?? Ihr nehmt keine <a href="http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EC-Karte">EC Karte</a> der Deutschen Bank?Also raus auss’m Rossmann, 4m weiter rein in’n <a href="http://www.dm-drogeriemarkt.de/">DM</a> und alles wird gut. This week has been quiet busy with things in my day job… lots of communication and powerpointing. So, have not been able to hack a lot. :( TiVo is rolling out new features that will allow users to discover new music, enjoy podcasts, purchase movie tickets, and view shared photos! Most of these features work with services from Yahoo!. If they work well, it will give TiVo new competitive advantage to against Apple, Microsoft, Sony and many others who want to enter the living room entertainment market.<a href="http://www.tivo.com/4.9.11.asp" title="TiVo">See the new features described on TiVo.com</a>. If you are a TiVo user, <a href="http://research.tivo.com/onlineservices/" title="TiVo sign up">go sign up here</a> for a faster update of your TiVo software.<img src="http://a423.g.akamai.net/7/423/1788/0c2425970332c1/www.tivo.com/i/4.0/4.9.11.YWeather.sm.jpg" /> <img src="http://a423.g.akamai.net/7/423/1788/bc1990e2ebd2a5/www.tivo.com/i/4.0/4.9.11.YPhotos_02.sm.jpg" /> <img src="http://a423.g.akamai.net/7/423/1788/9c4b23ca20019a/www.tivo.com/i/4.0/4.9.11.YTraffic.sm.jpg" />Update: <a href="http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/02/2110234&from=rss" title=" Apple Enters Media Center Domain"> Apple Enters Media Center Domain</a> <7 reasons 2006 will be a big year for HTML (with apologies to <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/alexbarn/archive/2005/10/18/482515.aspx">Alex Barnett</a>)<ol><li>HTML will ride the RSS slipstream. 2005 has been arguably the year of RSS. Since RSS is now ‘out there’ and a firmly established part of the internet, it won’t take nearly as long for HTML to reach a <a href="http://doc.weblogs.com/2004/03/10#publishing20">tipping point compared to RSS</a> in terms of time-to-critical-mass (RSS was invented in 1997, HTML in 1989). However, as we’ve learnt with RSS, in order for HTML to become a ‘mass use’ technology, <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/alexbarn/archive/2005/07/19/440816.aspx">it will need to become ‘invisible’ to the user</a>.</li><li><a href="http://www.oreillynet.com/rss/">Developers familiar with RSS</a> will ‘get’ HTML in a snap. The number of developers familiar with RSS is growing and will continue to grow, therefore the number of developers that know how to leverage HTML will grow with it - RSS and HTML are very related. Large <a href="http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3515406">software companies are playing with RSS</a>, so they will collectively ‘get’ HTML quicker than they ‘got’ RSS. Existing RSS-enabled and RSS-enhanced services and products can quickly enhance their offerings further by providing support for HTML.</li><li><a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/alexbarn/archive/2004/09/03/225022.aspx">RSS is getting to the point of ubiquity</a>. Regardless of whether the users know they are using RSS or not, there appears to be a <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/alexbarn/archive/2005/10/08/478598.aspx">critical mass of RSS users</a>. Getting to the situation where users to use HTML without them knowing they are using HTML doesn’t seems to be a huge stretch of the imagination.</li><li>It looks like 2006 will be a healthy environment for start-up and internal project funding. <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/alexbarn/archive/2005/10/05/477634.aspx">There has been a recent spate</a> of RSS-related acquisitions and VC-backed RSS-enabled start-ups emerging cropping up. With a willing investment market hungry for new opportunities it is a good time for HTML-related start-ups to get a sympathetic ear from those looking to invest in emerging syndication technology and media markets.</li><li>There are two sides to the HTML coin: consumption and publishing. On the consumption side, there are <a href="http://allrss.com/rssreaders.html">more RSS readers you can shake a stick at</a> - most already provide some form of HTML support and extending that support to enable <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/alexbarn/archive/2005/10/12/480364.aspx">some simple but high value scenarios</a> won’t take to much effort for the feed reader developers. New <a href="http://www.taskable.com/">HTML browsers are appearing too</a>. On the publishing side, blogs have been the primary vehicle driving RSS. Adding additional HTML publishing support by the blogware developers to enable these new and interesting scenarios shouldn’t seem like a huge stretch of the imagination.</li><li>There are some <a href="http://www.cristianvidmar.com/compass/17/">really useful scenarios that could be enabled by HTML</a>. HTML is not in a situation where it is a solution looking for a problem to solve - some of scenarios outlined are genuinely useful and HTML makes these relatively easy to enable.</li><li>HTML is cool, is simple and it works :-)</li></ol>Bonus points for anyone with good links to substitute.See also: <a href="http://microformats.org/wiki/xoxo-brainstorming#Subscription_information">xoxo-brainstorming</a> <Elliotte Rusty Harold has <a href="http://www.cafeconleche.org/#news2005December3">posted</a> some slides/notes on syndication for a class he’s been teaching. Good stuff, and I’ve no doubt he covers a lot more than what’s in the slides, but here are one or two points I’d emphasize.Quick one, I’d tweak one point on RDF from:<blockquote>Tries to do to AI what the Web Did to Hypertext</blockquote>to<blockquote>Tries to do to Data what the Web did to Hypertext</blockquote>Right near the start, he’s got the question/answer:<blockquote><ul><li>Is this the Web?</li><li>It is HTTP; and it is XML</li></ul></blockquote>Right on. Personally I think I’d rant on about HTTP for a while, noting that the content server-to-client part of syndication is essentially RESTful, which in part explains how RSS has got as far as it has. Somewhere here I’d insert (maybe ERH does when presenting) something about the polling aggregators do.After some of the historical stuff he then leads onto Atom. It can be tricky to explain why it was needed when there is RSS to anyone that hasn’t spent time coding around the stuff. As I see it Atom has three key benefits over RSS 2.0: a clear, community-consensus spec; mandates the identifiers of the Web (URIs); the content model isn’t broken (apart from its general opaque messiness, escaped HTML in content is fundamentally flawed - check <a href="http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2004/05/28/detente">silent data loss</a>).After the formats there’s probably need to reference the XML-RPC based client-to-content server APIs used in many blogging tools. The RPC approach is a lot more tightly coupled than it needs to be, and using HTTP methods directly with XML documents is considerably less brittle (which in part explains how RSS has got as far as it has). When XML-RPC works, sure that’s fine, but when it doesn’t it’s <a href="http://geeks.opml.org/2005/12/03#a592">a devil to debug</a>. ERH says he didn’t have time to get to the Atom Publishing Protocol in his lecture - well, the protocol itself is taking rather more time than anyone expected… But as a way of unifying that side of publishing with RESTful HTTP+XML I think it will be significant in opening the door to a lot of innovation. Before we move to Web 2.0 we really should do Web 1.0 right.Heh, I can’t fault his coverage of OPML:<blockquote><a href="http://www.opml.org/spec">No good spec</a> and that’s a problem</blockquote>Sometime very soon I need to prepare some slides on how syndication ties in with Semantic Web technologies - which, by virtue of being Web-based it does pretty nicely (FOAF is very significant, then there’s microformats, Structured Blogging, Google Base, Ning and Microsoft’s sync/sharing extension, GRDDL and Atom/OWL). But for the background stuff, hopefully ERH won’t mind to much if I pilfer a little of his material ;-) <Melodramatic title, huh? Well it was either that or “Content Escaping Really, Really Sucks”. I just got a feed validator error from a <a href="http://dannyayers.com/archives/2005/12/01/users-in-charge/">post</a> of a couple days ago (and they will be another one here). The error goes like this: “description should not contain script tag”. Sounds reasonable. However I’m getting it because I have this: <script>, escaped in my content. I typed that into my WordPress posting form as &lt;script&gt; but that gets passed into a <description> element in my (RSS 1.0) feed, and that’s not allowed. I posted to the feed-validator list, curious how I should refer to <script>, and <a href="http://weblog.philringnalda.com/">Phil Ringnalda</a> responded: <blockquote>RSS 1.0’s <description> is in exactly the same state as both RSS 1.0 and 2.0’s <title> element: you quite simply cannot use the character “<” in them, because they are not HTML but virtually every consumer treats them as HTML. This very minute, there are consumers (at least one that I know of) which don’t use <content:encoded>, and which do treat <description> as HTML, and which don’t sanitize HTML, which are treating your entry as the start of a script element which never ends. As you yourself say, “see silent data loss.”</blockquote>Yup, I <a href="http://dannyayers.com/archives/2005/12/04/presenting-syndication/">mentioned</a> that only today, though didn’t expect to hit the issue the way I usually use this setup, not today anyhow ;-) I certainly hadn’t considered the endless script… There’s irony or something there. <Steve Gillmor, the guy who’s been plugging the notion of attention as a valuable resource, has dropped another term on the table. In <a href="http://blogs.zdnet.com/Gillmor/?p=189">his post</a> he talks of Gesture Banks, the Gesture Economy, GestureRank. It does sound very buzzwordy, and at first I thought it maybe just deserved a binary digital gesture, i.e. two fingers. As with attention, it’s not very obvious what he’s talking about.So here’s my reading of what he’s on about. The gesture as the unit of attention. They are (heavily context-dependent) events. Gestures are just our intensional, directed interactions with the software. These communication acts contain in themselves valuable information. That information could be used to assist the person in their activities (e.g. with predictive search) or it could be used by marketeers, in a way it’s like a very wide broadening of AdSense. It reminds me a lot of <a href="http://frot.org/devlog/">Jo Walsh</a>’s setup to capture all her interactions with the computer. That should be good, usefully mineable data, for both the individual as well as for anyone the individual chooses to share it with. I’m pretty sure there’s nothing new in the notion of gestures along with computers (I bet there are thousands of papers in the user interface domain for starters), but there’s little to suggest it’s been systematically exploited in the Web domain.Whether or not this is what Steve had in mind, I think there’s some practical use to this view. Take this point:<blockquote>Deriving GestureRank is therefore a function not only of who the gesturer is, but what is the nature (or type) of the gesture, and who or what group or domain it is directed toward.</blockquote>Like I said, Steve’s (probably intentionally) vague about what a gesture actually is. But if you take as an example clicking on a link, modelling the event usefully is non-trivial. Click action plus URI is simple in itself, then there’s the gesturer - to maximise the potential value you’d want that as informative as possible, FOAF’s probably a very good place to start. The group or domain could be modelled trivially as the URI being clicked, maybe that’s enough. But the nature (or type) of the gesture is where it gets a little tricky. Say the click is the user usubscribing from an RSS feed. That’s a kind of gesture of disinterest in the resource (and by extension things associated with the feed, like the person publishing the feed). In this case the type of the gesture will be statically bound to the URI - I wonder if that’s true in a more general case? This gesture stuff will be appearing in quite a heavily interconnected set of relationships. By talking of GestureRank, Steve’s going into analysis of the accumulated stuff, which would probably bring in numerics. This is fairly high-dimensional stuff, more GestureVector than GestureRank. At one point Steve’s talking of Google Desktop and suggests the gesture/attention as a user interface enhancement. Hmm, I have a question nearby. Because we’re good at learning repeated tasks, there’s some advantage in making user interfaces very predictable. This often outweighs the potential benefit of having a UI that changes dynamically to follow the user’s behaviour patterns. It may be faster to have a commonly-used menu item at the top of the menu, but the action of clicking on a particular item can’t be automated in a motory part of our brain if the menu order keeps changing. How much does this generalise? There’s obviously an advantage in using familiar tools. Does this also mean there’s an advantage in viewing the sea of information in a constant fashion?Anyhow, I’ve a feeling that the notion of gestures in the context of attention could be very useful indeed. When I next have chance to look at <a href="http://esw.w3.org/topic/Attention_RDF">Attention RDF</a> I’ll have a play, based on these 5 minutes thinking aloud it looks like the Gesture Ontology will largely write itself. There are smart proxies and recorders (<a href="http://simile.mit.edu/piggy-bank/">PiggyBank</a>!) available, so the collection side should be straghtforward. The rest should be interesting… Thanks to Damien for the cool questions <img src='http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':)' class='wp-smiley' /> <a href="http://www.mulley.net/2005/12/05/a-new-net-visioned-he-interview-with-john-breslin/">Damien Mulley?s Blog � Blog Archive � A new Net visioned he - Interview with John Breslin</a> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/politics/04strategy.html" title="Bush's Speech on Iraq War Echoes Voice of an Analyst">NYT reports</a> that a recent speech given by President Bush was actually written by Dr. Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University political scientist. This information was <a href="http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/?p=419" title="On the importance of metadata">discovered</a> by reading the RDF metadata of a PDF document. Not that I’m interested to learn about the real person that writes Bush’s speech, but I’m concerned about potential privacy issues that are associated with embedding metadata within digital documents. While Microsoft Word hasn’t yet started to embedded expressive metadata, such as RDF, in Word documents, its users already face <a href="http://wordprocessing.about.com/od/protectingyourprivacy/" title="Protecting Private Information in Microsoft Word Documents">many critical privacy issues</a>. I wonder what the world will be like once all our documents are tagged with semantic markups and ontologies? <The recent troubles at the Wikipedia are described in this <a href="http://news.com.com/Growing%20pains%20for%20Wikipedia/2100-1025_3-5981119.html?tag=st.prev">CNET News.com</a> piece, along with Jimmy Wales response. From now on only named editors can create pages, so this should prevent dodgy pages appearing unnoticed (which was apparently what happened with a page saying a bloke called John Seigenthaler was possibly implicated in the JFK assassination). This won’t do much to help ego-swamps like the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting">Podcasting</a> page. But there it seems <a href="http://weblog.burningbird.net/2005/12/04/podcasting-history/">Shelley</a>’s put on her editing boots on that one.One of the comments on the News.com piece caught my eye, <a href="http://lamammals.blogspot.com/">Len Bullard</a> says: <a href="http://news.com.com/5208-1025-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=12066&messageID=91326&start=-1">Use Semantic Web To Impute Importance for Notification</a>. As usual, the man has a point. <Of interest to masher-uppers -<a href="http://www.aggregateknowledge.com/">AggregateKnowledge.com</a> is a site currently with two main offerings, one is :<blockquote><a href="http://www.wsfinder.com/">WSFinder</a> - A wiki-based directory of web services and APIs that people are using to create mash-ups.</blockquote>The other is :<blockquote><a href="http://www.aggregateknowledge.com:8080/wsrelater/Welcome.jsp">WSRelater</a> - A recommendation web service that you can add to your website in less than half a day.</blockquote>I don’t know about the “half a day” bit, but it looks a relatively straightforward thing, GET/POST+API key, with XML result sets. The recommendation part seems to come through path counting in a subgraph. They’ve got an interesting approach, it’s a kind of RDF lite, presumably backed by a RDBMS.The nodes are strings, which are given one (or probably more) of 30+ types. There is only one relation: related. It’s directed.Here’s one of their examples:<blockquote>(PERSON: John, GROUP: Software Forum) — “The PERSON John is related to the GROUP Software Forum”</blockquote>The similarity bit is done like this:<blockquote>…if a developer wants to find a GROUP that is similar to another GROUP by looking at all the people in common, the following three types would be used. fromtype: GROUP totype: GROUP pivottype: PERSON</blockquote>I couldn’t actually try it out, not knowing what the database knows…if you see what I mean.Heh, this is funny:<blockquote>The key to make this system have a network effect across site is there must be a uniform naming of items across sites.</blockquote>Indeed. That’s why URIs are Cool.Oh, they’ve got a <a href="http://www.aggregateknowledge.com:8080/wsrelater/API.html#BestPractices">Best Practices</a> section, with some tips like:<blockquote>Always identify people with the following unique identifier SHA1SUM(”mailto:xyz@abc.com”)</blockquote>Ok, that sounds more like it. But it does mean I’ve given already them some junk data.~Oddly enough I was thinking about something quite close to this the other day, around the blather about outliners. I do like the outliner UI paradigm, but there’s a snag in its utility in that in the usual implementation, you only have one relation type, i.e. “childOf” (unless you made the relations nodes, I did that in the tree view for <a href="http://ideagraph.net">IdeaGraph</a> - ok, but it loses some of the intuitiveness of the tree). I’m still after the ultimate Getting Things Done tool, and naturally I’d go for an RDF backend. But for it to be useful I believe there needs to be a variety of relations, one task may be a subtask of another, a child of a task may just be further description etc. It occurred to me that within a specific domain, you could usually infer the relation type from the types of the source and target of the relation. The AggregateKnowledge folks mention this kind of thing:<blockquote> (PERSON: John, PERSON: Paul) — “The PERSON John is related to the PERSON Paul”Here “is related to” may mean “is a friend of” and be used in the context of a social network.</blockquote>In other words, if you know you’re in the context of a social network, then you can apply the rule: <code> X type PERSON Y type PERSON X isRelatedTo Y => X friendOf Y </code> For a project-oriented system like my GTD pipedream, the hierachical editor could have typed nodes, but no relation except childOf. The data could even be represented as HTML, with, e.g. <code> <ol class="project">Feed Eric <li class="task">get gloves</li> <li class="task">open his apartment</li> ... </ol> </code> Run that through XSLT to produce an RDF serialization, something like: <code> _:a rdf:type :Project . _:a rdfs:label "Feed Eric" . _:b rdf:type :Task . _:b :childOf _:a . ... </code> Then run that through a rules engine along with: <code> { ?x a :Project; ?y a :Task; ?y :childOf ?x . } => { ?y :subTaskOf ?x }. </code> (Dunno if I got that right, I haven’t done that part of the <a href="http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/doc/Rules">tutorial</a> yet ;-) Once that’s in the store, useful (SPARQL) queries and regular (RDFS/OWL) inference should be possible.(spotter: <a href="http://blog.broadbandmechanics.com/">Marc</a>) Because Wikipedia is editable by anyone, <a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/12/05/business/wiki.php" title="Wikipedia weakness: Open-source, and open to abuse">some people complaint about its reliability</a>. I think Wikipedia is a great but not perfect tool — like many other things on the Internet. Allowing anyone to edit an encyclopedia is like free speech. Think about the gossip world. I think all Wikipedia users should be aware of this fact. <<a href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287">RFC 4287</a>(spotter: <a href="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/12/05/RFC-4287">Tim</a>) <a href="http://www.boards.ie/">boards.ie</a> got its second mention on RTE Radio 1 last week; this time on Saturday’s “The Business” in a segment about broadband in Ireland.You can hear the <a href="http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/wp-content/20051203a.mp3">audio snippet</a> of this show.Links:<ul><li><a href="http://www.rte.ie/radio1/thebusiness/">RTE Radio 1 - The Business</a></li><li><a href="http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2054857947">Boards.ie on the radio again - boards.ie/vbulletin</a></li></ul> The day has finally come, long anticipated Needle - SemaNtic BackbonE for European Digitial LibrariEs starts up.Two European semantic digital library projects <a href="http://www.jeromedl.org/">JeromeDL</a> and <a href="http://www.brickscommunity.org/">BRICKS</a> gather together with joint initiative that aims to promote semantic web technologies in librarian network.In the first step, we would like to gather <a href="http://wiki.needle.corrib.org/">community</a> that would aggregate ideas and scenarios for Needle, and disseminate the semantic digital libraries research back to librarian community.Following the community building we will come with concrete actions for building European-wide open, semantic backbone for digital libraries. Dies ist mehr ein “nice to have” drop und einfach mal ein Versuch, ob das auch mit einem blog funktioniertIntranet Security SuiteEin Konfigmanagement Enforcer, welcher alle Tools innerhalb eines Netzes gleichzeitig bedient, die auf Netzwerkebene moeglich sind. Nicht nur die Firewalls ALLER verwalteten Maschinen werden zentral administriert, sondern auch * hosts.allow (soweit unterstuetzt) * hostfirewall (doppelt erwaehnt der vollstaendigkeit halber) * smb.conf (welches Netz,Host darf) * sshd_conf (kann auch host und user beschraenken) * Verwaltung ssh_keys * ldapserver (mit einem scheme den Zugang auf erlaubte Server beschraenken) * httpd.conf (RewriteRegeln fuer Zugriff von IP’s in vhosts includen (mehr als rudimentaer mittels hostgroups wird es vermutlich nicht gehen)) Das Deployment koennte mit cfengine geschehen. Ein entsprechendes Frontend mit der gewuenschten Intelligenz muesste noch geschaffen werden. Einfachster Ansatz ein subversion checkin in eine verkettete Tabelle mit anschliesendem Deploy mittels cfrun. <I needed a way of pointing from an arbitrary page on a website back to the homepage, the link communicating that relationship. The concept of homepage is pretty well time-tested, but there doesn’t actually appear to be a specified way of doing the markup. The particular use case was pointing from an archived blog post back to the front page. (This will would then be GRDDLed into triples, and associate the foaf:Person behind the foaf:weblog home URI as the foaf:maker/dc:creator of the archived foaf:Document…). So I <a href="http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2005-December/002293.html">pinged</a> the <a href="http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss/">microformats</a> list, if anyone would know, they would. From the suggestions, the best way of doing it would seem to be to use :<code> <link rel="home" title="Home" href="http://url/of/home/page" /> </code>This isn’t on the HTML <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/types.html#type-links">link types</a> list, but since everyone’s going rel-crazy with <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#h-7.4.4.3">Meta data profiles</a> that isn’t such an issue. It will be rendered as a button in the Opera browser, and the Mozilla site navigation toolbar has supported it in the past (anyone happen to know if it can be turned on in FireFox?). If all this wasn’t justification enough, Mark Pilgrim also suggests the approach in <a href="http://diveintoaccessibility.org/day_9_providing_additional_navigation_aids.html">Dive into Accessibility</a>. Works for me.~Remotely related tip: if you keep getting “timed out” pages (like I did) in FireFox 1.5, enter :<code>about:config</code>in the address field, load that pseudo-page, then enter :<code>network.http</code>in the Filter: field. Double-clicking on the values allows you to change them. I’m not sure which specific value made the difference, but doubling the values for max connections, keep-alive etc seems to have done the trick. <a href="http://dannyayers.com/archives/2005/12/06/this-weeks-semantic-web-4/">Danny Ayers, Raw Blog : This Week’s Semantic Web </a>: - Danny Ayers’s weblog. Sharing the information overload… � RFC 4287 : The Atom Syndication Format rel=?home? � This Week?s Semantic Web <Now I put my street cred on the line. I was born in 1964, and I think I had a happy early childhood. I can’t remember many events from then, but what I do remember are atmospheres. On my last Amazon book-buying spree a few weeks ago, on a whim I added a CD by the <a href="http://www.swinglesingers.com/">Swingle Singers</a>, a group that were around when I was a little ‘un. They’re described as being a jazz/classical fusion, they do a cappella versions of classical tunes: the (double) CD I got is Bach & Mozart. It’s not altogether traditional chorale, the sleeve notes refer to scat, the Jazz singing style, not (I don’t think) something toilet-related. Somehow the Bach is enhanced by their particular vocal treatment, it works. I’ve probably not heard their music for three decades, but the CD finally arrived today, and I just put it on. Back came one of those atmospheres. <img src="http://dannyayers.com/2005/12/champions.gif" alt="The Champions" title="his superpowers enabled him to pee over buildings..." />The Swingle Singers were one of those groups (like John Dankworth and Cleo Laine), that would appear in the musical interlude of shows like Morecome and Wise. But the atmosphere for me is more that of some of the other television programmes of the late 60’s/early 70’s: The Champions, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), Jason King, The Avengers, The Saint, The Prisoner. Something very cool, futuristic and stylish. There’s also something of the Hammer Horror Camp Gothic, merged with the clinical science of the BBC Radiophonics Workshop, and naturally Dr. Who (<a href="http://www.jonpertwee.com/">Jon Pertwee</a>). <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/episodeguide/seadevils/"><img src="http://dannyayers.com/2005/12/seadevil.jpg" alt="Sea Devil" title="quick! behind the settee!" /></a> Ok, this is no doubt a very personal interpretation, it is after all eight people going bee-po boo-pa biddy-peep… *There is one more angle, that Caroline noticed - because there are a few fairly traditional renditions, overall the things sounds very Christmassy. Which is a bit nostalgic in itself. Ah, the smell of Lego.* Brandenburg Concerto No.3 <The point made by <a href="http://www.ensight.org/archives/2005/12/05/web-20-companies-need-to-scale/">Jeremy Wright</a> <del>(currently 404ing)</del>, and supported by <a href="http://gigaom.com/2005/12/06/even-in-web-20-scale-size-matter/">Om Malik</a> on the need for Web 2.0 startups to consider scalability of their systems is valid, as far as it goes. But I believe the argument is, in part at least, misdirected and doesn’t goes far enough. Web 1.0 is the size that it is more because it has a scalable architecture than the performance of any local systems. The big issue isn’t that individual companies don’t build scalability into their own architectures, rather that they don’t tend to adequately exploit the scalability of the Web. Definitions of Web 2.0 vary, but I think two key aspects are The Web as Platform and The Architecture of Participation. For applications that exploit these paradigms to function, there must certainly be some forward-looking design locally, for example in setting up a distributed database on the company’s servers. But I believe more importantly there needs to be more work done at the edges, moving Web-common features to them, away from the application-specific aspect. If the Web is the platform, then as much of the data that isn’t entirely application-specific must be exposed in such a way to allow it to be devolved to other parts of the Web. Use of existing Web-based data (i.e. other people’s exposed stores) shouldn’t be the exception, it should be the rule. This mean that for the system to be robust, there will be more work on caching, and less on the construction of disconnected data silos. Caching is one of the key features that has enabled Web 1.0 to scale. The current caching architecture is agnostic - it works now for human-oriented documents, there’s no reason it shouldn’t work for machine-oriented data. Sure, in general there is still work to do on data interchange and caching, but there’s already a lot in place and a lot more on its way (I personally believe the Semantic Web technologies offer a good route to commodity stores and distributed queries). The mash-up is the prototypical Web 2.0 Service, but many current systems are much more enclosed, following the Web 1.0 walled garden pattern, jealously guarding parts of their systems which they perceive to be valuable, but which in the Web-wide marketplace have no distinguishing features. Things like identity management are best managed cooperatively, in general sharable data should be shared. For their to be real innovation in the Web space, startups and their developers should be free to concentrate on their Unique Selling Propositions, not reimplementing what is already widespread. The advantage in this approach is that they can be even more lightweight, there is significantly less work needed on infrastructure than in the Web 1.0 Pet Store mindset. For an example of what I’m talking about here, consider the FeedMesh. A little consortium of blog search-oriented companies which share ping data arriving from frequently-updated sites. A part of that system is closely tied to a specific protocol and model, the data input, the ping endpoints. But the transfer of data between members of the consortium is not tied to the specific data application in question, it’s just a stream of XML. What members of the consortium do with that data is entirely up to them. In this case I believe that on change notification, they each go and collect the data from the remote sites, populating their local stores. But it isn’t difficult to imagine the feed data from those remote sites as being the currency streamed between FeedMesh members, in fact their has been discussion of it being done that way. Right now the local databases of these companies are probably implemented in widely divergent ways, tailored to the particular service that the companies offer. However, given that they are all receiving, forwarding, processing and storing the same kind of data, there’s no reason that they couldn’t each use the same commodity software for the non-service-specific parts of their operations. Ok, right now most of the FeedMesh companies are probably building on Apache, PHP and MySQL. But there’s significant commonality of their systems on a layer above. There is a shared data model, in this particular case that of syndicated feeds. The data exchanged is based on standards (e.g. Atom or RSS). At this point in time the FeedMesh itself is a relatively closed system, and in that sense not Web-friendly. But in the same way Intranets inform decisions for the Internet, so to can systems like these which have desirable features (another example might be Google Base). So here’s how I imagine a possible future application architecture scenario. A startup’s software will consist of three parts commodity to one part unique. The commodity parts will be the bulk of their data storage, with standard interfaces. There are at least two architectures for this in the pipeline - for document/content/feed-related application, Atom Stores supporting the Atom Publishing Protocol should be eminently suitable. For more generic data, RDF stores with RDF/XML interchange and the SPARQL protocol and query language will be available (in fact an Atom Store could be built this way). The unique part of the startup’s system will be specific to their application, perhaps receiving data from other sources, user interface and processing this alongside the commodity data. They may well be generating new data, which would be fed back into the commodity store. For business reasons they’ll no doubt want to implement some access controls to ringfence some parts of the system. But for the most part, the commodity store and interfaces would be open to the rest of the Web, with data flowing to and from it freely. This would in effect be acting as a cache of Web data. The Architecture of Participation. Because this block of functionality would be something lots of people could use, the many-eyeballs mechanism of open source should ensure that robust scalability is built in. Managing expansion of the user base of the service will mean lower demands on system development (only 1/4 will need specialist development work), scaling up will primarily mean adding more commodity hardware.The fact that 3/4 of the system is commodity, and so could be available off-the-shelf will allow the company to innovate with the remaining 1/4. In other words, the Web is the Platform, let’s use it. See also: <a href="http://www.mnot.net/blog/2005/11/26/caching">Leveraging the Web: Caching</a>, <a href="http://www.tnl.net/blog/entry/Signs_of_a_Bubble">Signs of a Bubble</a> PS. Richard MacManus <a href="http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/?p=74">says</a> he found this post interesting (thanks!) and put in a nutshell a point I was trying to make :<blockquote>…because commodity data is such an integral part of many Web 2.0 services, then caching in effect acts as a storage mechanism for data.</blockquote> <Ok, a rant. Now I’m well into this Web 2.0 stuff, but there is one recurring idea that just plain irritates me. I believe it owes its current popularity to <a href="http://www.cluetrain.com/">the cluetrain manifesto</a>, a latter-day grimoire, that grants power to its readers not through direct interpretation but Gnostic contemplation. The manifesto is largely incomprehensible on face value, but in trying to make sense of it, Zen is achieved. And yes, like the New Age movement, cluetrain homogenises previously distinct religions (corporate public relations and Gonzo journalism), with similarly cheesy results. But back to that irritant. Here’s a prime example of the way in which this irritant appears, in otherwise coherent <a href="http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/7486.asp">material</a> from John Battelle :<blockquote>“Online marketing is driven by conversation,” Battelle explained in his speech. In order to leverage the conversation, marketers and advertisers need to know the degree to which consumers are involved online under Web 2.0.</blockquote>If we take the word conversation literally, then this clearly isn’t true - even podcasts are usually monologues. But even if we take it metaphorically, it’s still not much use as an analogy. Conversations tend to be verbal, informal, free flowing, real-time, one-to-one at the water cooler or over the telephone or garden fence. Or small groups around the fireplace or propping up the bar. The corporation and the individual rarely communicate with any of these characteristics online. Blogging is not this mode of communication. Wikis are not this mode of communication. IRC probably comes closest, but as evinced by recent <a href="http://www.dltq.org/?p=780">backchannel-triggered brawling</a>, these probably aren’t the kind of conversations that benefit marketeers. Ok, certainly something similar to friendly conversation may be approached, and is probably desirable in the kind of information-driven economy many of the pundits are talking about. But if markets are conversations, then there’s the danger of making the inverse true. Your online interactions are valued in dollars, and interpersonal communication becomes little more than a facade, a portal even, through which the exchange of currency and snake oil takes place.I guess my real grumble is that I think systems like the Internet are generally more valuable when profit isn’t the prime motivation. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with the notion of making money off the Internet, far from it, indirectly that’s how I’ve been making a living for the past few years. But hearing the Web analysed in purely commercial terms (albeit couched in non-commercial language) not only seems fundamentally flawed - to paraphrase the saying, knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing - but also broken on the surface. Viewing every person that uses the network solely as a passive consumer to be leveraged into being a paying customer, is just so <code>web.1.0.bubble.dot.com.wrong</code>.The path to sustainable financial profit through Web 2.0 isn’t that of search engine optimization via faux-conversation, but in building and joining together genuinely useful, interesting and entertaining systems. I think Ambrose Bierce pretty well <a href="http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/lit/humor/TheDevilsDictionary/chap3.html">foresaw</a> in 1900 the current hype-driven abuse of a perfectly good word.<blockquote>CONVERSATION, n. A fair to the display of the minor mental commodities, each exhibitor being too intent upon the arrangement of his own wares to observe those of his neighbor.</blockquote> I think that doesn’t mean that <a href="http://www.rsasecurity.com/">RSA Inc.</a> has <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/goern/71243277/"><img src="http://static.flickr.com/18/71243277_60dc3814f8_t_d.jpg" alt="RSA off" valign="top" /></a> been taken out of business… PS: This has been a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_token">Token</a> given to me by my employer to log onto it’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPN">VPN</a>. I was showing off my iPod nano (won at the <a href="http://simile.mit.edu/">Simile</a> ISWC 2005 semantic bank competition) at the Cork geek bloggers’ dinner recently: just got <a href="http://idoom.hyarion.com/index.php">iDoom</a> working yesterday (thanks for the link to it Brendan!) and was watching videos on it today after installing the latest kernel from <a href="http://ipodlinux.org/">iPodLinux</a>. The video functionality is pretty nifty (but requires large AVI files because it is uncompressed); was playing the Superman Returns teaser trailer and the latest episode of the Simpsons (very watchable).However, I have my first iPod nano screen scratch; I popped the nano out of its protective Jelly Belly box and was less than happy to see a small mark right in the middle of the screen. Hopefully the shop will take it back (I managed to retrieve the receipt, thanks Brian!). <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2005/TECH/12/07/silicon.valley.garages.reut/index.html">Many Silicon Valley companies started their business in a garage</a> — HP, Google, Apple. I wonder if garage really has some kind of mythic power in helping technology business to be successful. <I’m still trying to find/figure out nice ways of doing cross-site queries. One possibility that occurred to me that might be useful in fairly tightly-defined domains is something like this -A FOAFHelperServer is defined as being as a Web server which supports the following:1. (Mandatory) An endpoint URI which can answer queries of the form: <code> CONSTRUCT { ?subject ?predicate ?object . } WHERE { ?subject rdf:type foaf:Person . } </code>2. (Optional) An endpoint URI which can answer queries of the form: <code> SELECT ?endpoint WHERE { ?endpoint rdf:type x:FOAFHelperServer . } </code>~The fun bit. Say you wanted to answer the following <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/">SPARQL</a> query:<code> SELECT ?name WHERE { ?personA foaf:name ?name . ?personB relationship:collaboratesWith ?personA . ?personB foaf:name "Eric Vitiello" . } </code>The schema for the <a href="http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/">Relationship</a> vocab includes this:<code> relationship:collaboratesWith rdfs:label "Collaborates With" . </code>Google supports wildcard queries, and it’s not hard to imagine a bit of string tweaking to change the above into a call on the <a href="http://www.google.com/apis/">Google Search API</a> looking like this:<code> <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=*+Collaborates+With+Eric+Vitiello">* Collaborates With Eric Vitiello</a> </code>Now all you have to do is run a regexp against the result docs against the values of:<code> SELECT ?name WHERE { ?person foaf:name ?name . } </code> <a href="http://my.boards.ie/"><img src="http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/wp-content/20051208a.jpg"/></a>Launched <a href="http://my.boards.ie/">my.boards.ie</a> this past week… I hope that it will act as a personalised area for communities and users of boards.ie. It runs vBDrupal and shares our existing member registration system. Also, I’ll soon be able to adapt my <a href="http://rdfs.org/sioc/drupal/">SIOC Drupal</a> plugin for it. There are two main thrusts to the site:<ul><li>Community Portals: In this section, moderators can create articles about their communities on boards.ie.</li><li>User Blogs / Topics: We have also enabled free blogging for registered users (with a reduced feature set compared to subscriber system).</li></ul> <Standards are extremely good things for the network, but as a data producer on the Web it can be difficult to conform to specifications, especially when most of the Web data consumers (browsers, aggregators) are extremely liberal. Problem notification comes late, usually when things are really broken. But there are good online validation services, in fact since they set up a <a href="http://validator.w3.org/feed/">enhanced clone</a> of the <a href="http://feedvalidator.org/">feed validator</a>, all the validators I personally need in the foreseeable future are available at the W3C. The main things are this HTML blog content, the same data as a feed and whatever RDF/XML I want to produce. Right now (disregarding the fact that my <a href="http://dannyayers.com/feed/rdf/">feed</a> is enriched RSS 1.0) there’s not much RDF/XML from my “live” areas, and it’s relatively static: a <a href="http://dannyayers.com/misc/foaf/foaf.rdf">FOAF profile</a> and the site <a href="http://dannyayers.com/wp-sioc.php">SIOC</a> file. But before long I want to have something more dynamic online, along the lines of presence. This will probably build on the <a href="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/">FOAF vocabulary</a>, adding bits from <a href="http://crschmidt.net/semweb/menow/">MeNow</a>, <a href="http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/attentionxml">Attention.xml</a> (expresssed as a <a href="http://micromodels.org/">micromodel</a>). I’m already tooled-up for some of this with things like <a href="http://pragmatron.org/trac/file/pragmatron/xslt/opml2skosroll.xsl">opml2skosroll.xsl</a> being available to snag my subscription data from <a href="http://www.bloglines.com/export?id=dannyayers">Bloglines export</a>. Anyhow, the question is how to ensure all three kinds of data (HTML content, RSS/Atom feeds, RDF/XML presence) are valid. After dropping in a a little <a href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-validator/2005Nov/0115.html">tool request</a> to the relevant lists, it seems the W3C validators are almost at the point where it’s be straightforward to hang simple pass/fail services off of them, but right now would need a fair bit of work (the results are SOAPy for a start). I think for me the best way I think would be to either periodically run check (via cron) or trigger checks from actions (like posting to WordPress) and indicate the results on my blog itself as traffic light style buttons. The other main alternative would be to hitch these things into the WordPress editing UI, but that seems overly coupled to a single application (might make a nice plugin though…).But right now any of this would mean a good few hour’s work (and a bigger priority is to go through the site config to try and prevent the thing from going down so often). So for now I’ve bookmarked the test results pages for my URIs at the <a href="http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdannyayers.com%2Ffeed%2Frdf%2F">feed validator</a> and <a href="http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fdannyayers.com%2F">HTML validator</a> and put these into my “Daily” bookmark folder in FireFox. This is the folder I open in tabs in the morning, contains links to Gmail, Bloglines, Planet RDF etc. This will hopefully not be too intrusive on my workflow, yet maybe enough to raise the validity time proportion from probably 50% to something perhaps beyond 90%. <<blockquote>…I submit that the notion that “markets are conversations,” promotes bad hygiene.</blockquote><a href="http://homepage.mac.com/dave_rogers/GHD12-05.html#note_2495">Dave Rogers</a>(spotter: <a href="http://weblog.randomchaos.com/">Scott</a>) <h5>What’s the Geospatial Semantic Web?</h5>It’s part of the future Semantic Web that exploits geospatial technology to help people and computing machines to discover and share information. It’s also a web-centric information space that leverages Semantic Web technology for better dissemination of geospatial information.<h5>Why should we study the Geospatial Semantic Web?</h5>Breakthrough technologies often result from the cross-fertilization of different technologies. By studying the Geospatial Semantic Web, we can better understand the use of geospatial technology in Semantic Web applications and how Semantic Web technology can enhance the existing geospatial information systems. <Earlier I followed a Tim Bray <a href="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/12/08/Read-Write-Web">pointer</a> to Hal Stern, who <a href="http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/stern?entry=web_2_0_in_three">suggests</a> that Web 2.0 can be summed up as “read-write web”. I disagreed with part of this in comments (there is a lot it doesn’t capture…) but I must admit he’s got something in this line:<blockquote>Once you start creating and consuming, you’re worried about metadata, relationships, rights, derivative uses, attribution, distribution and location of your bits.</blockquote>Stern’s got one of those nice Roller blogs that provides email subscription to comments. <a href="http://www.redmonk.com/sogrady">Stephen O’Grady</a> just dropped in a link to a <a href="http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/dw_blog_comments.jspa?blog=351&entry=81961">similar definition</a> from James Snell which I think I blogged before, but like The New Avengers bears repeating. It doesn’t capture much more (ok, arguably execution is a pretty important aspect of services…), but wins hands down for geeky elegance:<blockquote><code>chmod 777 web</code></blockquote> <Article in Nature - <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051205/full/051205-8.html">Social networks of rappers differ from all other human networks</a>.Degrees of separation -Film actors (i.e. Kevin Bacon): 2.5 Company directors: 3.6 High-energy physicists (i.e. I forget his name): 5.9 Rappers: 2.9 GML is a language that attempts to provide standard vocabularies for sharing and exchanging geospatial information. The definition of the language is very comprehensive. GML can be used to express extremely complex geospatial concepts.However, GML falls short in being the right language for semantic representation. The root of the problem is that the expressiveness of GML is limited by the expressiveness of the XML language. For example, you can <a href="http://geoweb.blog.com/314091/">use GML to express a particular time instant</a>. However, it’s no easy to reference this defined time instance from a different context (e.g., in a different document).On the other hand, if you use <a href="http://www.isi.edu/~pan/OWL-Time.html">RDF/OWL to describe a time instant</a>. It’s very easy to reference the defined instance from a different document. This makes easy for extending the description. For example, in one document you define a time instance (e.g., <div class="codesnip-container" >urn-x:t1</div>), and in the other you describe the same time instant as an instance of some event (e.g. <div class="codesnip-container" >(urn-x:t1, rdf:type, evt:Event)</div>) and specify its a calendar/clock value (e.g., <div class="codesnip-container" >(urn-x:t1, tm:hasCalendarClock, “2005-12-02T12:09:93″)</div>).I believe the ability to represent geospatial semantics is of great importance when building geospatial applications. Not only it will enable applications to share information, but also it will allow applications to better reuse information. <US Air Force leaders have released a new mission statement:<blockquote>The mission of the United States Air Force is to deliver sovereign options for the defense of the United States of America and its global interests — to fly and fight in Air, Space, and Cyberspace.</blockquote><a href="http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123013440">Air Force Link</a>(spotter: <a href="http://linux.sys-con.com/read/161925.htm">Jeremy</a>) <I just had my first FireFox 1.5 crash (no obvious cause, Win2k, one instance with maybe a dozen tabs, several running scripts). Not something that bothers me overmuch, but this in the Quality Feedback Agent is just plain annoying:<img src="http://dannyayers.com/2005/12/quality.gif" alt="contradictory signals" />I’ve also still got a significant problem I had with the previous version of FF, when downloading a file the whole thing grinds to a halt for a minute or more… But wait, only *sometimes* - it just occurred to me to check if it was hammering the processor, so I fired up Task Manager and tried a download link. But this time it seemed to work ok, and there was no excessive processor load. Hmm, but MEM usage seems fixed at 260MB, is that ok? It says have only 256M on this laptop (that’s strange in itself, I thought I went to 512MB a couple of years ago), and have set a fixed disk cache - 512MB. Not so relelvant if it’s now working…There is what should be adequate swap space on all the partitions, so I’m at a loss as to the cause. I installed a download manager in the hope that would help, but it doesn’t seem to have made any difference. For now I have to remember to copy the URI and use wget. A <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/08/AR2005120802122.html" title="Spanish At School Translates to Suspension">kid got suspended</a> because he conversed with his friends in Spanish. This is completely ridiculous. Human languages are meant for communication. If people have the right to free speech, they should also have the right to choose whatever the language they wish to use to communicate. This kind of punishment reminds me of how native American Indian kids were forced not to speak their native languages in the American schools. <As you can probably tell from the style (and lack of animal references) this is intended to go somewhere other than this blog. But I thought I might as well throw this first draft out here anyhow.One of the biggest problems with current search technologies is that simple keyword-based queries often return vast amount of irrelevant information. The popular search engines index a huge information space, the Web, the indexing being based on text analysis. The index itself can be seen as a partitioning of the search space, with characteristic patterns found in the content determining the location of the divisions. In Google’s case the text analysis is augmented by exploiting page creator’s use of hyperlinks to infer relative importance of different pages (PageRank). With the index in place, queries are resolved by matching the terms they contain against the index. The indexing and matching takes place behind the scenes, all the user generally sees is a simple HTML query submission form, following by a list of the results. There are ways of making the search queries more explicit, for example using boolean combinations of keywords or restricting the search space to certain sites. But every new query is treating in the same fashion as the last and without any extra information than that provided in the query string. Search personalization is the idea that individuals tend to be interested in specific topic areas, and that knowledge of their interests can be used to improve the relevance of the results the search engine returns. This knowledge provides a context through which search activities can be interpreted. There are various ways in which this knowledge could be obtained. An explicit profile of the user and/or their interests can be created as a static set of data, for example containing their geographic location. This would enable searches for real-world services to be restricted to the person’s local geographic area. However this approach demands effort on the part of the service user in creating the profile, and requires indexes within the service corresponding to the facets described in profiles.A similar kind of information can be built up over a sequence of subqueries, each in turn narrowing the search space. Traditional directories, i.e. hierarchical taxonomic categorization, is one way through which the search space can be restricted. In the extreme case keyword matching isn’t needed, the classification allows narrowing of the information space through the user’s choice of sections and subsections of the topics of interest. This of course presupposes not only that the data is mapped by a classification scheme, but that the scheme used is appropriate for the user and their specific queries. Experience shows this to be a difficult problem, especially when an information space as large and as dynamic as the Web is to be considered. The choice of classification scheme is fairly arbitrary, and manual classification is prohibitively time-consuming. The editors of the Open Directory Project [<a href="#1">1</a>] are overwhelmed by the number of pages awaiting classification, and although Yahoo! had a relatively successful directory in the earlier days of the Web, the acceleration in the growth of the Web soon pushed them towards free-text search. A more ambitious approach to search personalization is to monitor and analyse the search client’s behaviour over time and from this infer information about the nature of the information the person is looking for. This approach is very attractive from the end user’s point of view, in that no preparation is required, and no drilling down through categories for every individual search activity. But this will be at least at the cost of increased complexity in server-side systems, being in essence an AI-style machine learning task. It has been argued that this approach to search personalization is a dead end [<a href="#2">2</a>], but there is a lot to suggest that when considered in concert with other techniques, there are side avenues that may potentially prove very rewarding. Perhaps part of the reason search personalization is described as a dead end is because it appears too hard to do usefully. To date, search and cataloguing systems have tended to take relatively narrow approaches, no doubt because integration of data across multiple indexing/classification schemes and user interface paradigms has traditionally been difficult. But techniques have been evolving in recents years, notably the Semantic Web technologies, and these can relieve many of the harder issues, especially with data that is sourced from the Web. There is no magic bullet, but these systems can help integration between text-oriented indexing and structured taxonomies. Perhaps more significant is the way these technologies enable easy integration of traditional search/catalog data with other sources of potentially very relevant information, such as “folksonomic” keyword tags, personal profiles and social relationships. With the addition of syndication technologies and IM, there is the prospect of continuous, real-time evolution of Web-based information systems. Techniques and tools for capturing certain aspects of user behaviour are becoming available. Specifically for search Google’s own Personalized Search [<a href="#3">3</a>] is an end-user tool which records the individuals search activity, allowing subsequent searches to be filtered and/or ranked with reference to prior activity. (In Google Labs there also appears to be a prototype profile-based system [<a href="#4">4</a>] where the user may select topics of interest, presumably to assist in the filtering/ranking of results). However Google’s tools do not appear to be openly available to developers.Outside of the search-specific arena, the term “Attention” is being used to described the focus of a particular person at a particular point in time. This has been recognised as potentially valuable information, to the extent that there’s an organisation, AttentionTrust, [<a href="#5">5</a>] devoted to encouraging practices which give the individual control over their own attention data. Examples of tracking techniques associated with this view of behaviour are include Attention.xml [<a href="#6">6</a>] a format specification which encapsulates a domain model in which user interaction with RSS/Atom feeds can be captured, and AttentionTrust’s Attention Recorder tool [<a href="#7">7</a>] (a FireFox plugin) which records user interactions with their Web browser. The data from the Attention Recorder can subsequently be uploaded to online services, for example Root Vaults [<a href="#8">8</a>] offers some basic tools for examining the data.But even assuming plenty of data surrounding the user’s behaviour is collected, the problems of personalized search based on machine learning of historical activity are still not trivial. Specific problems identified (paraphrased from [<a href="#2">2</a>]) include:<ol><li>People are not static The issue here is that people’s interests change over time, the topics in which they are interested is by no means a fixed list. Their interests while working will relate to their profession, in their leisure time they may have a multitude of fairly unrelated hobbies or interests. However, even if the set of topics is changing over time, a large proportion of an individuals search queries will be clustered around specific topics. This problem does not rule out the ability to recognise increased (or decreased) relevance of results found in particular domains. Things like homonym disambiguation are still possible. For example, if a person has previously used the keyword “rowing” in queries and visited sites relating to boats, then chances are they will be thinking of the same context when they use the word in future, rather than domestic disputes. What this problem does mean is that any system designed to track and make inferences from attention will need to take the dynamic nature of people into consideration. One important point here is that pages about topics of interest appear in clusters in the information space, and one area of interest may be totally distinct from another. Attempts to “average” or linearise results over time without taking this into consideration are not likely to produce useful results.</li><li>The surfing data used for personalizing search is weak The point here is that Web surfing behaviour often involves little commitment, a single click can take a user to a page, another click can take them away again. The contrast is made with buying a product at Amazon. But this doesn’t mean that this kind of data is useless, only that what’s collected will contain noise. There are well-establish statistical and engineering algorithms for extracting useful information from noisy data. What’s more, with enhancements to the tools they use, the user can easily make the data collected while surfing considerably stronger. For example, the <a href="http://simile.mit.edu/piggy-bank/">PiggyBank</a> Firefox plugin can assist the user in extracting explicit data from Web pages, and maintaining it in a personalised store.</li><li>Users interact based on limited information When a search engine user clicks on a result link, they are doing so not because of the material on the remote page, but based on whatever information the search engine has displayed. This is likely to be another source of noise, and the user behaviour may well be skewed by the way in which the results are presented. But again, number crunching can be used to circumvent noise and skew in data.</li><li>Computers tend to be shared A home computer, or even one in some office environments might be used by a variety of people. Clearly the mixing of attention/personalization data from different people would seriously reduce its utility, in fact it breaks the whole point of personalization. However it is already often in the interests of the individual user to identify themselves to the system to use for example a personalized desktop, in fact if authentication is required then self-identification may be obligatory. If one assumes personalized search has significant value, then it will be in the users interests to enable it, by somehow signing themselves in and out.</li><li>Queries tend to be short Short queries may provide little contextual information in themselves, but this is probably the strongest argument for collecting more user behaviour data, so that such queries can be contextualized.</li></ol>Aside from these issues, there are naturally the purely technical considerations. If we are talking in terms of accumulating user data from a variety of sources (their browser and aggregator use, for example) and using that alongside personal and topic-oriented profiles, in a system that needs to carry multiple index and taxonomic schemes, and from all this producing useful results, we are talking of what would traditionally be a data integration nightmare. As suggested earlier, it is likely that Semantic Web technologies will be very useful here, as they are designed to enable integration and inference over the kind of data the Web has to offer. There are many significant issues surrounding personalized search not touched upon here such as performance and privacy, and many of these issues are not yet resolved. But the issues raised above don’t convincingly negate the value of personalization, if anything they suggest why it would be valuable. The Vivissimo document from which this problem list was derived concludes:<blockquote>The best personalization is done by persons themselves.</blockquote>Absolutely. But there’s no reason the computer shouldn’t be able to assist them.[<a name="1">1</a>] <a href="http://dmoz.org">Open Directory Project</a> [<a name="2">2</a>] <a href="http://vivisimo.com/docs/personalization.pdf">Why Search Personalization is a Dead End</a> [<a name="3">3</a>] <a href="http://www.google.com/psearch">Google Personalized Search</a> [<a name="4">4</a>] <a href="http://labs.google.com/personalized/profile.html">Google Lab Profiles</a> [<a name="5">5</a>] <a href="http://www.attentiontrust.org/">AttentionTrust</a> [<a name="6">6</a>] <a href="http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/attentionxml">Attention.xml</a> [<a name="7">7</a>] <a href="http://www.attentiontrust.org/services">Attention Recorder</a> [<a name="8">8</a>] <a href="http://root.net/vaults">Root Vaults</a>See also : <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economics">Wikipedia : Attention economics</a><a href="http://www.ratcliffeblog.com/archives/2005/12/community_perso.html">Mitch Ratcliffe</a> :<blockquote>Meanings are refined by the community rather than defined by the community. Personalized search results are intricately linked to the evolution of the online community, so the individual’s attention to particular communities and information is essential to parsing available information to their interests.</blockquote> <[A quiet week…]<h4>Events</h4><ul><li>Streaming video from <a href="http://www.swap2005.org/">SWAP2005</a>, 15th and 16th December</li><li><a href="http://www.xtech-conference.org/2006/call.asp">XTECH 2006</a> “Building Web 2.0″, 16-19 May 2006, Amsterdam, Netherlands</li></ul><h4>Docs etc</h4><ul><li><a href="http://my.opera.com/chaals/blog/">Chaals has a blog</a>!</li><li><a href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2005Dec/0052.html">Call for contributors</a> to the “Semantic Web FactBook 2005″ & “SW @ your country reports”, from the editor of AIS SIGSEMIS Bulletin (<a href="http://www.sigsemis.org/newsletter/december2005/vol2-issue34.pdf/view">latest issue</a>)</li><li>Leigh Dodds has been <a href="http://www.ldodds.com/blog/archives/000261.html">looking at XMP</a>, where <a href="http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp/main.html">XMP</a> is Adobe’s embeddable subset of RDF (as found in the output of all their tools)</li><li><a href="http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office/200512/msg00009.html">Discussion</a> continues over the suitability of XMP for <a href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office">Open Document Format</a> metadata</li><li><a href="http://www.idea-group.com/jwsr">Journal of Web Services Research</a> (JWSR), with submission guidelines</li><li>CfP : <a href="http://www.globalintegrationsummit.com">Global Integration Summit</a> (GIS’06) “Integration For Everyone”, Boston US 22-24 May 2006</li><li>In the blogosphere #1, Chris Eidhof <a href="http://www.my-website.nl/weblog/2005/12/11/semantic-html-rdf-and-the-semantic-web/">discusses Semantic HTML and RDF</a></li><li>In the blogosphere #2, Nassib Nassar on <a href="http://www.etymon.com/wordpress/?p=7">Federated Databases in Science</a></li><li><a href="http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/semantic_typography_bridging_the_xhtml_gap/">Semantic Typography: Bridging the XHTML gap</a></li><li>Alongside articles on <a href="http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/12/07/catching-up-with-the-atom-publishing-protocol.html">Atom Protocol</a> and <a href="http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/12/07/handling-atom-text-and-content-constructs.html">Atom text handling</a> there’s the <a href="http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/12/08/2006-xmlcom-reader-survey.html">xml.com reader survey</a></li></ul><h4>Software and stuff</h4><ul><li><a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/35237098612@N01/discuss/86234/">Flickr2FOAF</a> : <a href="http://f14web.com.ar/inkel/2005/08/25/flickr2foaf.en.html">Python scripts</a> from <a href="http://f14web.com.ar/inkel/">inkel</a></li><li><a href="http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/proj/semnum/phoaf.html">PHOAF #1</a> - The SemNum Prototype, putting ENUMs on the Semantic Web</li><li><a href="https://gna.org/projects/phoaf">PHOAF #2</a> - PHOAF: a PHP library to get informations from FOAF files</li><li><a href="http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core/owl-dl/skos-core-owl-dl.owl">SKOS Core in OWL DL</a> - “unofficial”</li><li><a href="http://web2.wsj2.com/the_best_web_20_software_of_2005.htm">The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005</a></li></ul>Yep, a quiet week, perhaps time to take <a href="http://www.achewood.com/comic.php?date=08182003">a “me” day</a>… Sources include <a href="http://planetrdf.com">Planet RDF</a>, <a href="http://journal.dajobe.org/journal/2003/07/semblogs/">Semantic Weblogs</a>, <a href="http://swig.xmlhack.com/">Semantic Web Interest Group IRC Scratchpad</a>, <a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw">W3C Semantic Web Activity</a>, various emails etc - thanks!<a href="http://dannyayers.com/archives/category/virtual-world/semantic-web/sw-weekly/">other weeks</a> <a href="http://dannyayers.com/archives/2005/12/11/this-weeks-semantic-web-5/">Danny Ayers, Raw Blog: This Week’s Semantic Web </a>: - Danny Ayers’s weblog. Sharing the information overload… This Week?s Semantic Web <41 tasty papers - <a href="http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS//Vol-166/">CEUR-WS.org/Vol-166 - SWAP, Semantic Web Applications and Perspectives, 2nd Italian Semantic Web Workshop</a> <I’m off to Trento tomorrow, don’t know how online I’ll be for the rest of the week, not taking a laptop (battery’s dead, not insured). Problem is this Apache2 server seems to keep locking up on me. I haven’t time to delve deep, but as a workaround could do with maybe a twice-daily restart. For some reason <code>apache2 -k restart</code> doesn’t seem to do the trick, I have to <code>killall apache2</code> first. I’ll try and figure out the script I need to attach to cron later (I think it’ll need to check all the apache2 processes have gone before restarting), but I’m a bit pressed for time and not in the least 133t so if anyone has anything suitable on hand I’ll be very grateful. <img align="left" alt="Nuclear Facility Iran" title="Nuclear Facility Iran" src="http://www.geospatialsemanticweb.com/wp-content/images/arak.nuke.plant.jpg" />One picture is worth a thousand words. But how do you capture that thousand words in a machine processable format so that the knowledge can be reasoned over, shared, searched, and archived? In the intelligence community, analysts are faced with this problem everyday.At present, analysts rely on text reports to share intelligence information. Often this makes the sharing of intelligence information very difficult. Let’s take imagery analysis as an example. An analyst typically studies satellie images and analyzes the geographical features that are depicted in these images. Based on his/her knowledge, the analyst attempts to extract useful intelligence information from the analysis. For example, seeing the development of new military arm forces in a previously abandoned nuclear facility in North Korean, the analyst concludes that the country is attempting to reopen the nuclear facility.Now, let’s assume the analyst writes down his/her conclusion in the report, and passes on this report to some other analysts. Based on the report, why should these analysts believe the author? Why should they believe that there is new military arm forces in the target region? What exactly are those geographical features or changes depicted in the pictures that made the analyst to draw his/her conclusion?Even if we assume the author did write down a comprehensive description of his analysis, how easy would it be for this report and its content to be searched by different analysts in a later time?It’s clear that plain text is not the best format for building up machine processable knowledge. To better facilitate this kind of intelligence analysis, there is a need for image annotation tools.Some interesting image annotation tools and resources:<ul><li><a title="PhotoStuff" href="http://www.mindswap.org/2003/PhotoStuff/">PhotoStuff</a> — an application that allows the user to annotate different parts of an image with RDF descriptions.</li><li><a title="iPhotoRDF" href="http://www.holygoat.co.uk/applications/iphoto-rdf/iphoto-rdf">iPhotoRDF</a> — an Mac iPhoto plugin that allows the user add RDF annotations</li><li><a title="DOM Image Annotation Guide" href="http://rds.yahoo.com/_ylt=AsZlV_jh14p78SdmBA0x5NtXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTE2MW02Ym9kBGNvbG8DdwRsA1dTMQRwb3MDMQRzZWMDc3IEdnRpZANTTkdZMl8x/SIG=12cp3b8fc/EXP=1134514045/**http%3a//www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/annimg/annimg.html">DOM Image Annotation Guide</a> — a guide that reveals how Flickr builds its photo annotation capability using DHTML and Flash</li><li><a href="http://esw.w3.org/mt/esw/archives/cat_image_annotation.html">ESW Image Annotation Archives</a> — a list of image annotation tools that build on Semantic Web technology</li></ul> <<a href="http://norman.walsh.name/2005/12/12/vcard">Norm Walsh</a> has provided an ontology, a welcome update to the pretty obsolete <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/vcard-rdf">2001 vocab</a>. He also provides the <a href="http://norman.walsh.name/2005/12/12/examples/hcard2rdf.xsl">XSLT</a> suitable for use with <a href="http://www.w3.org/2004/01/rdxh/spec">GRDDL</a> that extracts vCard RDF from HTML marked up with the <a href="http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard">hCard</a> microformat. He mentions the ontology etc. going to live with the W3C, which makes sense. Hopefully it’ll get a stable namespace URI early on.This had been on my own to-do list for quite a while, at least the address bits. But I was hoping someone might get there first…thanks Norm! Now where is that <a href="http://tantek.com/log/2005/09.html#d18t1657">Avon Lady</a> data… Last week I constructed a <a href="/datenbrei/kontakt/">contact page</a> and enriched it with the <a href="http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard">hCard microformat</a>. Using the wonderful <a href="http://suda.co.uk/projects/X2V/">web service X2V</a> of Brian Suda anyone is able to retrieve a vCard file from my contact page. Now, yesterday the next wunderful Norman Walsh jumped in and reworked the vCard Vocabular and documented his work on <a href="http://norman.walsh.name/2005/12/12/vcard">Extracting vCards from hCard markup</a>. Norman’s work resulted in a <a href="http://nwalsh.com/rdf/vCard">RDF Vocabulary</a> and a <a href="http://norman.walsh.name/2005/12/12/examples/hcard2rdf.xsl">GRDDL transformation</a> (I have local copies of this in <a href="http://b4mad.net/2005/12/12/">here</a>). Having all this in place there are several ways to represent my contact data: as <a href="/datenbrei/kontakt/">XHTML with hCard</a> microformat, as <a href="http://suda.co.uk/projects/X2V/get-vcal.php?uri=http://b4mad.net/datenbrei/kontakt/">vCard</a> and <a href="http://www.w3.org/2000/06/webdata/xslt?xslfile=http%3A%2F%2Fb4mad.net%2F2005%2F12%2F12%2Fhcard2rdf.xsl&xmlfile=http%3A%2F%2Fb4mad.net%2Fdatenbrei%2Fkontakt%2F&transform=Submit">vCard RDF</a>. Thanks to all for the work! In the past, when the term “geospatial” is mentioned, people immediately think digitial maps. Today most people think Google Maps and Google Earth when the same term is mentioned. To me, seeing mapping technology as the sole component of geospatial technology is a nearsighted vision. Geospatial technology is more than just pretty maps. <a title="IDC Reveals Radical Changes in Spatial Information Management That Will Impact Most IT Companies" href="http://www.crm2day.com/news/crm/116683.php">A recent IDC study</a> shows that the spatial information management industry is undergoing radical technology changes, which is likely to impact many IT ecosystems.<blockquote>Fundamental shifts in the spatial information management industry include basic changes in the nature of geospatial work, and transitions in the broad IT environment toward easier integration and support for business processes.The study finds that geospatial data, and not the map, has become the raw resource for creating location-specific information. Therefore, efforts to convert paper maps to digital data have been replaced as geospatial data is used to generate new maps, decisions, and automated processes.</blockquote>Let me take things one step further. I think a wide adoption of geospatial technology in IT is only the begnning. Some of the most exiciting applications in the future will be the ones that exploit geospatial semantics, not just geospatial data. <a href="http://sciencecommons.org/data/neurocommons" title="The NeuroCommons">NeuroCommons</a> is a Creative Commons project that is aimed to build the largest online knowledge base of neurological research. The project attempts to address the problem of hidden knowledge in unstructured scientific publications. <blockquote>The backbone of the NeuroCommons is the scientific canon, or set of facts published in the neurological research. These connections - “this gene causes Huntington’s Disease” - represent the knowledge collected, reviewed, and published by scientists over decades of research. At the moment the vast majority of these facts are trapped in document formats that are readable only by individuals - PDF, Word, HTML - and in many cases, usage is constrained by copyright…</blockquote>I like the idea of building machine processable knowledge bases using Semantic Web technology. But I doubt that it’s feasible to use RDF to represent complex knowledge — such as the facts in neurological research. I think a more feasible approach, given today’s technology, is to annotate existing documents with ontological descriptions, and build intelligent applications on top of these metadata. As the size of the Web gets bigger and bigger, search engines such as Yahoo! and Google may be too general for building applications that focus on some particular domain of information. To solve this problem, <a href="http://www.alexa.com/" title="Alexa">Alexa</a> provides a web search platform that allows people to define their own search engine. Although you have to pay for the service, but it definitely looks promising. Alexa crawl works over 100 Terabytes of Web content spanning 4 billion pages and 8 million sites, and support a wide variety of types of content from the Web (jpgs, gifs, mp3s, movies. text/html, and even metadata). <a href="http://websearch.alexa.com/static.html?show=webtour/start" title="Alexa Quick Tour">How does Alexa work?</a> Three Star Trek stories caught my eye in the past day:<ul><li><a href="http://www.hollywood.com/news/detail/id/3467643">William Shatner Plans ‘Star Trek’ Prequel</a></li><li><a href="http://tcal.net/archives/2005/12/16/three-star-trek-captains-in-one-film/">Three Star Trek Captains in One Film</a></li><li><a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.12/startrek.html">To Boldly Go Where No Fan Has Gone Before</a></li></ul>Of these, the last is still the most interesting, especially if you’ve watched any of the fan-produced <a href="http://www.newvoyages.com/">New Voyages</a> episodes. Walter Koenig (Chekov from the original series) is playing an older version of himself in the next episode! As <a href="http://www.stefandecker.org/blog/">Stefan</a> recently blogged, we’ll be giving a tutorial at <a href="http://www.www2006.org/">WWW2006</a> as described below.<a href="http://www2006.org/tutorials/#T13">WWW2006 - Tutorials</a><blockquote>Semantic Web 2.0: Creating Social Semantic Information SpacesJohn Breslin, Stefan DeckerThis tutorial will give an overview of current proposals in the Semantic Web area for adding semantics to emerging and established communications media such as blogging and wikis. We will also cover the usage of Semantic Web technologies for community portals. We will discuss current standardisation activities as well as research prototypes. Additional topics to be covered include semantic search based on metadata and large scale data integration as well as semantics in digital libraries. Finally, we will discuss and present current approaches to realise the ideas of Vannevar Bush and Doug Engelbart on distributed collaboration infrastructures, which we term Social Semantic Information Spaces.</blockquote> Prof. Max Egenhofer has written a short paper, “<a title="Toward the Semantic Geospatial Web" href="http://www.spatial.maine.edu/~max/RC50.html">Toward the Semantic Geospatial Web</a>“, that discusses some key issues in building a new Web that can exploit geospatial semantics. He believes that in order for Semantic Geospatial Web (or geospatial semantic web as I call it) to take off, it will require the development of standard geospatial ontologies for representing data and standard query languages for accessing data.I believe standard ontologies and query languages only solve part of the problem. In real world geospatial applications, building standard vocabularies and queries langugaes are the easy part of the tasks. The hard part of the problem is how to integrate mass amount of geospatial data that already exists.<ul><li>How can we integrate existing geospatial data without needing to create new databases that basically replicate the existing ones?</li><li>How can we query the semantic knowledge that is fused from heterogenous data sources without needing to know the specific representations of these data sources ?</li><li>How can we track the pedigree and provenence of geospatial data in a Web-based information space in which anyone can say anything about everything?</li><li>How can we faciliate the sharing of different types of geospatial data (images, videos, maps etc) in a Web-based environemnt?</li></ul> The Consumer Price Index measures the cost of goods that typical consumers purchase to live their everyday life. It’s a tool for measuring inflation. The <a href="http://www.pncchristmaspriceindex.com/index.htm" title="PNC Chrismas Price Index">Christmas Price Index</a> look at the increasing cost of goods and services bought by the True Love in the holiday classic, “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”According to the index, the cost of seven swans a swimming has increased 20% over 2004. Similarly, six geese a laying is up 42.9%, and the partridge itself is up 12.9%. <a href="http://news.morningstar.com/doc/article/0,1,150214,00.html">Read more</a>.  <blockquote>This is a Web 2.0 Website! “Web 2.0 is an attitude not a technology. It’s about enabling and encouraging participation through open applications and services. By open I [Ian Davis] mean technically open with appropriate APIs but also, more importantly, socially open, with rights granted to use the content in new and exciting contexts.” — Ian Davis, 2005</blockquote>But from my point of view there is no such thing like Web 2.0, we got all the technology, all the tools, what I encorage is the attitude described above. <Got back from Trento last night, great conference (grazie!). More later, for now got a *lot* of catching up to do… <Comments. Oops. At least 6 of the comments in the moderation queue on this blog should’ve gone straight through. Apologies. Probably calls for a separate post to address them - when I’ve caught up a bit more.This comment I blocked, but still like it:<blockquote>You have a very talented and skilled writting.</blockquote>Gmail has a little feed agreggator, I’ve got mine set up just to show quotes of the day. After a few days offline getting this today seems rather apt :<blockquote> I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.</blockquote>- Isaac AsimovGolly, <a href="http://planetrdf.com/">Planet RDF</a> has been busy. My Bloglines account is stuffed to the gills too, but that’ll have to wait a while. Mail first, then I need to see what happened re. <a href="http://structuredblogging.org">Structured Blogging</a>, then? Dunno that’s probably the rest of today spoken for, but I should make some notes re. Trento. Oh, and there’s cleaning out Eric the hedgehog’s apartment. Caro weighed him again, he now looks like Cartman, doubled in weight in the few weeks we’ve had him. Need to find out if that means he can/should hibernate. It is very, very cold here right now though.Tabloid headline of the week : Nobleman Eats Dogfood Scríobh Conn (<a href="http3A2F2Fimeall.blogspot.com2F">An tImeall</a>) alt faoi Wiki Ireland d� hAoine seo caite…<blockquote>Eola� is ea John Breslin at� i mbun taighde �r ch�rsa� idirl�n in Ollscoil na h�ireann, Gaillimh. T� su�omh seolta aige a bhfuil s� de chusp�ir aige b�aloideas agus eolas �iti�il a bhaili� � phobail agus � cheantair uile na t�re. An m� bailitheoir b�aloidis agus saor HTML at� fostaithe aige chun an gaisce seo a chur i gcr�ch? N�l aon duine! An cuimhin libh an Wikipedia go rabhas ag tr�cht air an tseachtain seo chaite? Wiki is ea an su�omh nua seo chomh maith: Wiki Ireland, agus t� cead agus cuireadh tugtha ag John do aon duine ar mian leo leathanaigh an tsu�mh a leas� agus cur leis an st�r eolais at� d� th�g�il ann.Beart fadradharcach, nu�lach, sh�lfe�? Bheadh an ceart agat. N� nach ionadh gur thug Cumann Idirl�n na h�ireann duais “Aisling an Idirl�n” do John i m� na Samhna, ar mhaithe leis seo agus le obair eile at� d�anta aige.</blockquote><a href="http://imeall.blogspot.com/2005/12/62-ag-freastal-ar-dh-threo.html">Ar lean…</a> <Bob Wyman describes <a href="http://structuredblogging.org">StructuredBlogging</a> as<a href="http://bobwyman.pubsub.com/main/2005/12/structured_blog.html">…a thing you do — not a format</a>. Nice way of putting it, because the “new” bits of the system they’ve created (plugins for MT and WP) are bits designed for immediately doing stuff, like making <a href="http://incredibooks.com">pretty reviews</a>. The fact that this puts a bunch of machine-readable data (embedded in the HTML) on the web is secondary. But nice to have ;-)Here’s another little point of view: <code> xsltproc <a href="http://pragmatron.org/micromodels/sb-to-rdf.xsl">sb-to-rdf.xsl</a> <a href="http://incredibooks.com/index.php/2005/12/17/the-muffin-fiend/">the-muffin-fiend</a> > muffin.rdf rapper -c muffin.rdf rapper: Parsing file <a href="http://pragmatron.org/micromodels/muffin.rdf">muffin.rdf</a> rapper: Parsing returned 19 statements </code>there’s some sample input/output in the .html/.rdf files here:http://pragmatron.org/trac/browser/pragmatron/micromodels/(the Trac thing is just another view of the same directory as above)There’s an Atom feed which will, all being well, provide the URIs of these posts (in the <id> elements): http://atom.pubsub.com/43/4d/56d95e8ffc869368b3e6ebd6.xmlThis is actually a PubSub subscription for: “URI:structuredblogging.org/xmlns” The second annual competition of <a href="http://games.stanford.edu/" title="General Game Playing">General Game Playing</a> will be held in conjunction with AAAI-06 in Boston, Massachusetts, July 16-20.<blockquote>General game players are computer systems able to accept formal descriptions of arbitrary games and able to play those games effectively without human intervention. General game playing systems are characterized by their use of general cognitive information-processing technologies (such as knowledge representation, reasoning, learning, and rational behavior). Unlike specialized game playing systems (such as Deep Blue), they do not rely on algorithms designed in advance for specific games.The AAAI competition is designed to test the abilities of general game playing systems by comparing their performance on a variety of games. The competition will consist of two phases: a qualification round and a runoff competition. Once again, a $10,000 prize will be awarded to the winning entrant.See <a href="http://www.aaai.org/Conferences/National/2006/aaai06.html" title="AAAI-06">AAAI web site</a> for more information.</blockquote> Mobile computing is a big market for GPS navigation. According to <a title="GPS navigation moves to your palm" href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/12/14/business/ptbasics15.php">this IHT article</a>, as the price of powerful mobile devices descreses, the demand for GPS-enabled mobile devices will increase.Signal loss is a major problem for the existing GPS devices. In cities, tall buildings sometimes can break the links between the mobile devices and the satellies.TeleNav is working on a new technology to solve this problem.<blockquote>Hassan Wahla, senior director of business development at TeleNav, said the system calculates where a user is and then - based on speed, as determined by an internal accelerometer - indicates where the user is likely to be whenever satellite signals are interrupted.“If you lose signal while traveling under a bridge or because of a tall building, you keep navigating,” Wahla said. “The entire trip is downloaded in the first minute of a trip and is stored on your phone or BlackBerry as you’re driving. If the GPS goes off line, you will continue to be given guidance. It knows your last known location and speed.”</blockquote>Sometimes the easiest way to solve a network connection problem is by caching. Many people like to predicate the future, but none of them are really good at doing it. Nevertheless, it didn’t stop people from trying. In the IT field, people like to predicate, or at least to speculate, the future. Entrepreneur.com has <a href="http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/0,4621,325024-1,00.html" title="New Digital Dawning">an article</a> that speculates hot technologies in the next few years. Some of its speculations include * an improved Wiki called <a href="http://www.jotspot.com/" title="JotSpot">JotSpot</a> that will change the way how business people collaborate, * semantic search companies like <a href="http://www.fetch.com/" title="Fetch Technology">Fetch Technology</a> that will help users to find useful information fast, * AJAX — helping to build web applications that will behave more like regular desktop applications, * <a href="http://www.ambientdevices.com/" title="Ambient Devices">ambient technology</a> (e.g., Ambient Orb) that will bring about “the Third Wave” — a world in which thousands of mini computing devices are embedded in the everyday things such as watches or umbrella handles. The mighty Semantic Web vision may be a long term thing, but many little projects that are spawned off from this vision usually have some short-term objectives. Let’s take <a href="http://structuredblogging.org/" title="Structured Blogging">structured blogging</a> as an example. Its goal is simple — let’s put more information on the Web in a form that machines can exploit to provide more intelligent services to the users. Now the question is that who actually benefits from this the new technology? Is it really the end users or someone else?According to Red Herring — <a href="http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=14902&hed=Semantic+Web%2C+Here+We+Come" title="Semantic Web, Here We Come">Semantic Web, Here We Come</a>, while the end users can benefit from structure blogging, but the real winner is the companies that sets up the structured blogging infrastructure. <blockquote>For the foreseeable future, structured blogging is more likely to benefit the companies that have signed on to the initiative rather than the individuals making use of the “pretty posts.”The companies involved are primarily blog startups and firms that make tools for blogs such as RSS (really simple syndication) readers and search. Whether it’s advertising or premium subscriptions, the business models for the startups depend on lots of users and lots of user content, something they often expect to get for free.The companies working on the initiative are Attensa, BlogAds, Bloglines, Blogdigger, Blogg.de, Blogtronix, Bloqx, Bryght, CommerceNet, Cordance, Edgeio, eTribes, Feedster, 5ive Group, FreeRange, GoingOn, Indeed.com, IntelliCal, iUpload, iVillage, KnowNow, Meetup, NetVibes, NewsGator, OpenBC, Pheedo, Pluck, PubSub Concepts, Qumana, ReadSpeaker, Reger.com, RelevantNOISE, Rojo, Socialtext, Sphere, Sxip, Tribe Networks, Verisign, Yiibu, and Xanga.“This is a godsend for us and we support it 100 percent,” said Michael Arrington of Edgeio, a classifieds startup set to launch early next year.</blockquote>I think this makes sense. If no business can profit from a new technology, there is little incentive for any business to embrace this technology. If no business backs a technology, it’s unlikely that there is going to be a suitable infrastructure for the end users to enjoy the potential benefits of the technology. It’s basic economics. This desciption and tools follow very closly what <a href="http://norman.walsh.name/knows/who#norman-walsh">Norman Walsh</a> described in his <a href="http://norman.walsh.name/2005/12/16/pimExample">PIM Example</a> posting.First step was to put the right data in <a href="http://apple.com/">Apple</a>’s AddressBook, I added fields for my mother, father and partner and also a field for my birthday. The postal address is in my card anyway. Getting the data out of <code>AddressBook.app</code> wasn’t that easy, but I was able to base my work on some python script by <a href="http://www.holygoat.co.uk/">Richard Newman</a>, the result was <a href="http://b4mad.net/2005/12/18/ab-new.py.txt"><code>ab-new.py</code></a>The command line <code>ab-new.py -a -n http://b4mad.net/addressbook/people.rdf\# >people.rdf</code> extracts all persons that are part of the FOAF AddressBook group and writes out <code>foaf:Person</code> objects. Redland’s rapper validates them.Now on to some thinking… <code>cwm http://b4mad.net/2005/12/18/iCalRules.n3 --rdf people.rdf --think</code> will deduct some more relations between persons, given that Father, Partner or Mother relations are given in AddressBook <code>iCallRules.n3</code> will add some more statements to the output.This is it, now on to some daemon that act according to the data: birthday reminder! <While I was offline this blog went down, and the cron thing I had in place wasn’t enough to revive it. I’ve a good chance of getting to the bottom of the proximate problem (Apache2 locking up), and can live with similar things as they arise (in general no doubt caused by the half-baked junk I’ve got running on the same server). But I’ve also got Caroline’s <a href="http://languageinsight.com/corso-inglese/">latest project</a> hosted here too. That does need pretty high uptime. It’s a fairly regular Drupal setup, not big at all in terms of space or traffic, basically just a brochure for language courses. It does use cron (to trigger a little feed update) and a homemade PHP form/email thing for bookings but absence of those could be worked around. So I was wondering if anyone knew of any affordable, reliable service that might be suitable. Ian Davis asked <a href="http://internetalchemy.org/2005/12/transliteration-or-interpretation" title="Transliteration or Interpretation">the question</a>: <blockquote>When creating RDF schemas based on existing data formats you soon hit the inevitable decision point — should you simply produce an RDF description of the syntactic format or interpret it and produce a semantic model of the format?</blockquote>Here is what I typically do. I first map the syntactic format of the data into RDF, and then build external inference rules to produce a more expressive semantic model of the original data. For example, let’s assume I collected some personal contact information from a legacy database and the first and last name of a person is stored in a string.A direct mapping from the data source based on the original syntactic formation:<div class="codesnip-container" >(urn-x:p1, rdf:type, foaf:Person) (urn-x:p1, d1:name, “Harry Chen”)</div>If I want to separate the last and the first name of the person in two different triple, I would add a rule (plus a functor) to do the transformation.<div class="codesnip-container" >(?x rdf:type foaf:Person), (?x d1:name ?name), name\_parse(?name, ?fname, ?lname) => (?x foaf:givenname ?fname), (?x foaf:family\_name ?lname)</div>In the above example, the rule is expressed in Jena’s generic rule syntax, and the functor <div class="codesnip-container" >name\_parse</div> is a customized Jena rule functor. If you run the rule against the mapped RDF data, you should get new triples:<div class="codesnip-container" >(urn-x:p1 foaf:givenname “Harry”) (urn-x:p1 foaf:family\_name “Chen”)</div> People love <a title="Google Earth" href="http://earth.google.com/">Google Earth</a>, but their governments may not. New York Times <a title="Governments Tremble at Google's Bird's-Eye View" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/20/technology/20image.html">reports</a> that the growing popularity of Goolge Earth has many governments worried. For example,  <blockquote>India, whose laws sharply restrict satellite and aerial photography, has been particularly outspoken. "It could severely compromise a country’s security," V. S. Ramamurthy, secretary in India’s federal Department of Science and Technology, said of Google Earth. And India’s surveyor general, Maj. Gen. M. Gopal Rao, said, "They ought to have asked us."  </blockquote>I believe in the free use of information, including geospatial data. Should new technology enables everyday people to become GIS specialists, that would be great. If geospatial technology can solve many of our everyday problems, there is no reason to keep them behind the closed doors. Should new technology threaten national security, we will develop new solutions to overcome this problem. That’s how we as a society has advanced in the past, and I believe that’s how we will continue to do so in the future.    <div class='vcard'><h3 class='fn'>Harry Chen</h3>Job: Computer Scientist, at Image Matters LLCBlog: <a class='url' href='http://harry.hchen1.com'>Harry Chen Thinks Aloud</a>Blog: <a class='url' href='http://www.geospatialsemanticweb.com'>Geospatial Semantic Web Blog</a>Quote: Life is short, live for the moment.Tags: semantic web, agents, pervasive computing, blog, geospatial</div><script type="application/x-subnode; charset=utf-8">  <subnode xmlns:data-view="http://www.w3.org/2003/g/data-view#" data-view:interpreter="http://structuredblogging.org/subnode-to-rdf-interpreter.xsl" xmlns="http://www.structuredblogging.org/xmlns#subnode"> <xml-structured-blog-entry xmlns="http://www.structuredblogging.org/xmlns"> <generator id="wpsb-1" type="x-wpsb-post" version="1"/><showcase firstname="Harry" lastname="Chen" type="showcase/person"> <address city="Columbia" state="MD" country="USA"/><job employer="Image Matters LLC">Computer Scientist</job><blog url="http://harry.hchen1.com">Harry Chen Thinks Aloud</blog><blog url="http://www.geospatialsemanticweb.com">Geospatial Semantic Web Blog</blog><quote>Life is short, live for the moment.</quote><tags>semantic web, agents, pervasive computing, blog, geospatial</tags></showcase> </xml-structured-blog-entry> </subnode> </script> <div class='vcard'><h3 class='fn'>Santa Claus</h3><div class="photo"><img src="/upload/santa.jpg"/></div>Age: 1651Blog: <a class='url' href='http://www.forbes.com/lists/2005/fictional/01.html'>Forbes Fictional 15: #1 Santa Claus</a>Profile: North Pole’s tubby toy titan remains fiction’s richest character, despite ongoing strife with Elvish labor force. Elves bemoan low-wages, lack of health care coverage and union-busting tactics of “Claws.” Factory operations also dogged by several documented instances of child-labor. Santa retorts that “immortal” Elves don’t need health insurance, and says child-workers were being punished for being “naughty.” Analysts expect impact on toy and candy production to be minimal. Claus’ ultimate motivations for annual gift-giving orgy remain unclear. Speculated to be tormented by infinite wealth; embarks on annual around-the-world trip in a futile attempt to give it away. Others detect darker side, noting percentage of children receiving lumps of coal and ill-treatment of rare Finnish-bred flying reindeer. Claus himself plays it close to the vest, cryptically muttering “Ho! Ho! Ho!” Member since time immemorial. — Michael NoerContributions: Encourage people to do good.Quote: “Ho! Ho! Ho!”Tags: x’mas, gifts, santa</div><script type="application/x-subnode; charset=utf-8">  <subnode xmlns:data-view="http://www.w3.org/2003/g/data-view#" data-view:interpreter="http://structuredblogging.org/subnode-to-rdf-interpreter.xsl" xmlns="http://www.structuredblogging.org/xmlns#subnode"> <xml-structured-blog-entry xmlns="http://www.structuredblogging.org/xmlns"> <generator id="wpsb-1" type="x-wpsb-post" version="1"/><showcase firstname="Santa" lastname="Claus" age="1651" type="showcase/person"> <address city="North Pole"/><image>/upload/santa.jpg</image><blog url="http://www.forbes.com/lists/2005/fictional/01.html">Forbes Fictional 15: #1 Santa Claus</blog><description>North Pole’s tubby toy titan remains fiction’s richest character, despite ongoing strife with Elvish labor force. Elves bemoan low-wages, lack of health care coverage and union-busting tactics of "Claws." Factory operations also dogged by several documented instances of child-labor. Santa retorts that "immortal" Elves don’t need health insurance, and says child-workers were being punished for being "naughty." Analysts expect impact on toy and candy production to be minimal. Claus’ ultimate motivations for annual gift-giving orgy remain unclear. Speculated to be tormented by infinite wealth; embarks on annual around-the-world trip in a futile attempt to give it away. Others detect darker side, noting percentage of children receiving lumps of coal and ill-treatment of rare Finnish-bred flying reindeer. Claus himself plays it close to the vest, cryptically muttering "Ho! Ho! Ho!" Member since time immemorial. — Michael Noer</description><quote>"Ho! Ho! Ho!"</quote><contributions>Encourage people to do good.</contributions><tags>x’mas, gifts, santa</tags></showcase> </xml-structured-blog-entry> </subnode> </script> Today I found a wonderful <a href="http://adiumx.com/">Adium</a> plugin: <a href="http://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=xtras&xtra_id=2058">Gizmo Project VoIP Plug-In</a>. It enables Adium to connect to the Gizmo Project Network and initiate calls to other Gizmo users. Perfect! So I can remove the <a href="http://gizmoproject.com/">Gizmo Project</a> client off my <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM">RAM</a>. In addition to the plugin there is a <a href="http://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=xtras&xtra_id=2167">Adium Aqua Plus</a> icon set which gives all Gizmo accounts a nice little Gizmo icon. <I’ve been keeping fairly clear of the recent Wikipedia controversies, but coincidentally a week or so ago my brother let me know I had an entry. Well it seems along with fame comes responsibility, one should have a policy it seems. Scoble’s <a href="http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2005/12/19/my-wikipedia-policy/">got one</a> (“I have never been and never will never, never, edit…”), as has <a href="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/12/19/Wikipedia-Issues">Tim Bray</a> (“I destubbed but didn’t inhale…”). So here’s mine: I will use Wikis for the purpose they were intended.Yep, I inhaled - the entry was a couple of sentences long, covering something I was involved in back in 1980. So I added a couple more sentences to cover the last quarter-century’s accomplishments. How I invented tadpoling, curry, etc etc. Encyclopaedic, like. For what its worth, I reckon all these ego-paraders make way too much of this stuff - myself now included, as proven by this post. One irritation is that the folks slagging off the Wikipedia don’t seem to know the first thing about research. If you want reliable facts, you need to look at more than one source. Especially if the subject matter is controversial. Don’t believe everything… no, I really can’t be bothered… About here I ramble on about Knowledge Representation for a bit, then conclude with a pithy cliche. Or maybe not, I lied. A Mark Twain quote instead:<blockquote>The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.</blockquote>PS. Charles Miller does a nice job with <a href="http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2005/12/20/wikipedia_vs_britannica_apples_vs_oranges">Wikipedia vs Britannica</a> <a href="http://frogbrothers.net/blog/">Martin Feeney</a> wrote an interlinks utility for <a href="http://www.planetoftheblogs.com/">Planet of the Blogs</a> nearly two months ago, but I only got around to integrating it into the site today (<a href="http://www.planetoftheblogs.com/interlinks/">www.planetoftheblogs.com/interlinks</a>). I’ll be adding a graphical visualisation of this data shortly. For now, this picture may whet your appetite - it’s a graph of all the interlinked blogs as indexed by Planet of the Blogs.<a href="http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/wp-content/20051221a.png"><img border="0" src="http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/wp-content/20051221a.gif"/></a>Also today, <a href="http://www.irishblogs.ie/">irishblogs.ie</a> announced some cool new features, including (quote):<a id="more-362"></a><blockquote>1. Side-panel: We have made available the latest posts to be dropped into your blog template. For html code see: http://www.irishblogs.ie/panel.php. You can set the number of posts (max 10) and style of text. Links go directly to author’s blog.2. As the number of blogs has grown - it is now well over 1,000 - it is getting a bit more cluttered. You can add your blog to your “favourite blogs” and then view a page with just those favourites. It also comes with an RSS feed for your favourites, so you don’t have to wade through all those other ones.3. You add a post to “My posts” for future reference.4. Alerts - you can be sent a daily email when a blog contains certain keywords.5. Phrase search - you can now search for a phrase - just put quotes around phrase.6. Similar posts - attempts to generate posts with similar subject matter. Doesn’t work well on posts of just one or two lines, but otherwise works well on non-personal type posts.7. Claim your blog - this will allow you to edit or delete posts, of which you are the author. It involves inserting a piece of hidden (unless your blogger/blogspot who require “a href”) code in a single post. We pick that up the next time our aggregator scoots over to it and voil�, your authorised. I had an idea that the “claim your blog feature” could be used for a voting mechanism for a Bloggers’ Irish Blogger Award - where only bloggers can vote. It’s there anyway, if Damien or anybody else wants to use it for voting purposes, let me know.</blockquote> We used to believe that it’s difficult to “teach” computers to play good chess. With advancements in AI, it turned out that our old belief was false. It’s relatively easy to <a href="http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/aug05/1742" title="Rise of the Machines">build computers that can beat chess masters</a>. CNN.com runs <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2005/TECH/fun.games/12/20/chess.topalov.reut/index.html" title="The computer remains king of chess">an article</a> that describes the latest chess war between the humans and the machines. This is what Veselin Topalov has to say about his enemy:<blockquote>“I find it fun playing computers. The only problem is that the psychological duel does not exist. You cannot bluff. You cannot count on unforced errors. You have to find a special strategy completely different from what you would do against humans.”</blockquote>So just how good is our computer players? <blockquote>Experts say machines out-compute people by a rate of around 200 million moves per second to one…</blockquote> <Back in July I said here I was <a href="http://dannyayers.com/archives/2005/07/03/looking-for-funds/">looking for funds</a>. Although the euro hardly came fluttering from the Tuscan blue, I very soon found myself with enough work to support my jet-set rock’n'roll lifestyle*. At this point in time I’m very tardy with one commitment, got another one just starting, need to do some plan refactoring on a third and have just about reached a tickover maintenance point on a fourth. Basically I’m covered for the next few months, I won’t need to take on anything new in the near future (but might do anyway - got a couple of interesting possibilities in the pipeline). Thanks to everyone who’s helped.But the main point of this post is that now I seem to have a fairly constant flow of work offers, the majority being frustratingly interesting Semantic Web-related contracts. So if anyone’s actually looking for this kind of thing let me know and I can pass names along. (If you’re really desperate, I recommend putting together a job matchmaker service based on Semantic Web technologies to demonstrate your skills and save a few emails). I don’t know how general this is, but from where I’m sitting things look very positive from both a developer job market point of view and a here-come-da-SemWeb point of view. Funnily enough I think the only approaches I’ve had in the past few months that most likely wouldn’t be SemWeb-related were from Google (Zurich) and Microsoft (Seattle?). Both non-starters because I don’t want to relocate and probably couldn’t get an interesting position thanks to my total lack of qualifications. Thankfully, in theory at least, the web allows me to do exciting, bleeding-edge post-PhD R&D on 6 ‘O’ Levels. Incidentally, if anyone knows of any good tools for helping with time management for people doing very multi-task part-time/contract work please let me know. By the time I’ve finished procrastinating I’ve forgotten what I was meant to be doing in the first place, and drift into typing stuff like this. Doesn’t look like I’ll have time to work on my own Getting Things Done stuff in the near future either…* I’ve not had a proper holiday in years so let my hair down on the Trento trip, but aside from that I doubt my life could be any less rock’n'roll - unless 21st century pop stars go in for hedgehog care. Following on from my post yesterday, you can now view interlinks (and the corresponding graph) between blogs on a blog-by-blog basis, e.g. here’s the <a href="http://www.planetoftheblogs.com/interlinks/index.php?blog_id=1466">visualisation of Gavin’s blog</a>:<a href="http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/wp-content/20051222a.png"><img border="0" src="http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/wp-content/20051222a.gif"/></a>Edit: I’ve added a choice to view the graph in “force directed” or “radial” mode, and created a special page to show <a href="http://www.planetoftheblogs.com/interlinks/all.php">all of the POTB-crawled interlinks</a>. <This is a test post from the Performancing Firefox plugin. Pressing F8 made half the screen into a nice-looking WYSIWG editor. It took my WordPress XML-RPC details happily (in the About it mentions the Atom API - for Blogger?), but doesn’t seem to have automatically inserted the link to the page I was looking at. But drag-n-drop works:<a href="http://performancing.com/firefox">http://performancing.com/firefox</a>Ah, one snag, in the feed : Undefined named entity: nbsp A student lost her purse and a USB key with her only copy of the master thesis. <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/21/AR2005122102311.html" title="Student Finds a Stolen Thesis by Thinking Like a Thief">What does she have to do to get her thesis back? </a><blockquote>She was going to retrace his steps, go to every store he hit. She would talk to security guards, check lost-and-found, scour the parking lots.So that day, she drove to Greenbelt, and as soon as she parked she saw a big trash bin behind a Wendy’s. She started pulling out broken-down boxes. She didn’t care about the trash, even if it was greasy slop from a fast-food place. “No cockroach, no rat, no creature from the dark was going to keep me from my jump drive,” she said. “Nothing is as bad as the thought of rewriting that thesis.”And there, at the bottom, was her black leather purse. She unzipped it, reached in, and felt her fingers close around — her jump drive.</blockquote>Man, I’m glad I didn’t have to go through this like her. The current OWL language specification purposefully defines three different OWL sub-languages, OWL-Lite, OWL-DL, and OWL-Full. Each of the sub-languages has different usage limitations and has different expressive power. In general, I think this classification is helpful. For example, it helps reasoning engine developers to label their OWL reasoners, and it defines a clear guideline for the parser developers to create validators for a particular OWL sub-language. Nevertheless, this classification could create misconceptions that lead people to wrongly interpret the properties of different OWL reasoning. For example, a common belief is that when you build an ontology, you should attempt to stay within OWL-DL because OWL-DL reasoners is more efficient that OWL-Full reasoners. Some others believe that the use of OWL-Full will always cause intractable computation performance in a reasoner.It’s kind of like saying, “reasoning over OWL-DL is solving a problem with polynomial time complexity, and reasoning over OWL-Full is solving a NP problem”. I admit I was one of those people. This belief is flawed. There is little doubt that a highly optimized OWL-DL resaoner runs faster than a OWL-Full reasoner, especially if that reasoner is built on <a href="http://www.ai.sri.com/daml/owl/axiomatic.htm" title="Axiomatic Semantics of OWL">a first-order theorem prover</a>. However, in reality, solving many practical problems often does not require a general purpose OWL-Full reasoner, even if the ontology is OWL-Full. Here is an example, <div class="codesnip-container" >(urn-x:p1 rdf:type foaf:Person), (urn-x:p1 foo:reads bk:Comics), (bk:Comics rdfs:subClassOf bk:Book).</div>Say I want to deduce all people who read comics are <div class="codesnip-container" >foo:ComicsReader</div>. I define the following Jena rule:<div class="codesnip-container" >(?p rdf:type foaf:Person), (?p foo:reads bk:Comics) => (?p rdf:type foo:ComicsReader)</div>I’m quite confident that the performance of this rule is no worse than a rule that reasons over the subClass-superClass relation between <div class="codesnip-container" >bk:Comics</div> and <div class="codesnip-container" >bk:Book</div>.In summary, the classification of OWL sub-languages can be useful in guiding the development of OWL tools. However, the language reasoning support labels (i.e., DL, Full) could create misconceptions among the novice users of the OWL language. I’ve rewritten the <a href="http://www.planetoftheblogs.com/">Planet Of The Blogs</a> submission system so that (1) we can hopefully reduce the amount of spammy RSS links being submitted [over 800 pending at last count] and (2) we can easily review and approve / reject pending submissions. So apologies that the “<a href="http://www.planetoftheblogs.com/submit/">Submit</a>” section has been offline for so long, but I see some of you have started re-submitting links anyway so glad that it is working. If you want to help with reviews, let me know and I’ll send on the password to you…And, it is my last day at <a href="http://www.deri.ie/">work</a> for 2005 so I’ll say Happy Christmas and I hope 2006 is great for you all! <<a href="http://www.dehora.net/journal/2005/12/watch_that_space.html/">Bill de hOra</a> calls out a casual-looking post from Radovan Janecek entitled <a href="http://radovanjanecek.net/blog/archives/000316.html">RDF and RDBMS</a> in which the service maven appears to be opening an interesting crack in the WS wall -<blockquote>…there is no way to integrate disparate registries/repositories together than something like that.</blockquote>Janecek actually quotes from one of Bill’s posts on the subject:<blockquote>One of the advantages of storing an RDF representation in an RDBMS is that you’ll never (hardly ever?) need to make a schema change in the RDBMS - because the domain is not represented using tables - tables are solely used for storage of RDF triples.</blockquote> <Damn, I really didn’t think that <a href="http://dannyayers.com/archives/2005/12/22/work/">previous post</a> through. Now I know of two top-notch RDF/SemWeb people that are looking for contracts, and feel obliged to ask if anyone out there is looking for someone. Before this gets completely out of hand, I’d better narrow the field down a little. So let’s say that it must be possible to do the work remotely (save perhaps occasional face-to-faces). I’m not sure, but it feels like the best way of doing this would be for me to pass the potential employee’s details onto the potential employer and then leaving it to the employee to take it from there. So - who’s recruiting?~It’s got me thinking about how you would actually do job matchmaking as an automated service. The job description part shouldn’t be too difficult (or to be more accurate, shouldn’t be much harder than most other descriptive tasks involving people and time, but there are existing base vocabs). In fact I seem to remember danbri and/or libby used a job vocab as a RSS 1.0 extension demo, and since then I’m sure it’s crossed the <a href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/">semantic-web list</a> more than once. The access control is the first place it gets interesting, because of the potential for junk/spam. One way might be some kind of simple peer-review system, so e.g. to put your name in as a potential employee, you must get two existing users of the system to vouch, not for you, just that your request is reasonable. The other part where it gets interesting is the matchmaking itself. I’m fairly sure simple set theory style subsumption could cover a lot of the space, e.g. the group labelled “servlet programmer” is a subclass of the group labelled “Java programmer”. But that suggests fairly rigid hierarchies, boring drop-down menu sort of interface, unfriendly, and unlikely to be able to capture nuances. Folksonomic tagging might not only be trendy but very useful. I’m not certain, but I think you’d have to bring in numerics to do anything but trivial 1:1 matching. That needn’t be complicated - e.g. view the tags as vectors in n-dimensional space and calculate Euclidian distances. <Shelley’s photos really are gobsmacking (and Zoe’s cuuute). <a href="http://weblog.burningbird.net/2005/12/20/year-in-pictures/">Burningbird - Year in Pictures</a> <This evening, huddled around the fire cosy and warm, I can’t help but think back to a few years ago when we had an unusual encounter up on in the mountains. It’s a long story (well, couple of pages online, not worth printing), so make sure you’re cosy and warm yourself - I’ve called it “<a href="http://dannyayers.com/2005/12/xmas1.html">Number’s Up</a>” During this holiday season, while people are busy with holiday shopping and travels, companies and government agencies are busy with new geospatial applications for the everyday people. For example, both <a title="This just in..." href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/12/this-just-in.html">Google Earth</a> and <a title="NORAD marks 50 years of tracking Santa" href="http://edition.cnn.com/2005/US/12/24/tracking.santa.ap.ap/index.html">NORAD</a> provide interactive map services that track the journey of <a title="Santa Claus" href="http://harry.hchen1.com/2005/12/20/204">Santa Claus</a>.This is a healthy sign that shows geospatial technology is not only valuable to the secretive government agencies but also to the everyday people.Quick links:<ul><li>Google Earth <a title="Google Earth Santa KML" href="http://dev.keyhole.com/santa/SantaRadar.kml">Santa KML file</a>.</li><li><a title="NORAD tracks santa" href="http://www.noradsanta.org/">NORAD tracks Santa</a> (since 1955)</li></ul><a href="http://www.geospatialsemanticweb.com/wp-content/images/santa.jpg"><img title="santa" alt="santa" src="http://www.geospatialsemanticweb.com/wp-content/images/thumb-santa.jpg" /></a> <[Special Holiday Issue]Quote of the week<blockquote>So I have a blog</blockquote>- <a href="http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/38">Tim Berners-Lee</a><h4>Events</h4><ul><li><a href="http://www.sws-challenge.org/">Semantic Web Services Challenge 2006</a> - on Automating Web Services Mediation, Choreography and Discovery</li><li>CfP: <a href="http://www2006.org/">WWW2006</a> workshop on “<a href="http://multimedia.semanticweb.org/SWAMM06/">Semantic Web Annotations for Multimedia</a>” (SWAMM 2006), 22 May 2006, Scotland</li><li><a href="http://ekaw.vse.cz/">15th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management</a> (EKAW 2006) - “Managing Knowledge in a World of Networks”, 2-6 October 2006, Czech Republic</li><li>CfP: <a href="http://www.cs.uu.nl/~jurriaan/AMKM2006/">4th Workshop on Agent-Mediated Knowledge Management</a>, August 29, 2006, Italy</li></ul><h4>Docs etc</h4><ul><li><a href="http://www.swap2005.org/">SWAP 2005</a> : <a href="http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS//Vol-166/">Proceedings</a>; Tutorial - <a href="http://www.w3.org/2005/Talks/1214-Trento-IH/">Introduction to the Semantic Web</a>; (where’s Franconi’s??); <a href="http://www.economia.unitn.it/services/arc/2005/1215/home.html">videos</a></li><li><a href="http://www.markbaker.ca/2003/05/RDF-Forms/">RDF Forms</a> - updated draft, adds to the Semantic Web capabilities similar to those which HTML forms added to the early HTML based Web</li><li>The future of HTML? : <a href="http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-futhtml1/">Part 1: WHATWG</a></li><li>The future of OWL? : <a href="http://clarkparsia.com/weblog/2005/12/20/owl-11/">OWL 1.1</a> - preliminary <a href="http://www-db.research.bell-labs.com/user/pfps/owl/overview.html">overview</a> and <a href="http://www-db.research.bell-labs.com/user/pfps/owl/syntax.html">syntax</a> docs</li><li><a href="http://clarkparsia.com">Clarke and Parsia</a> <a href="http://clarkparsia.com/weblog/2005/12/19/interchange-format-vs-web-language/">reported</a> on the discussions around the new <a href="http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wg/charter">Rule Interchange Format Working Group</a> and followed up with a <a href="http://clarkparsia.com/weblog/2005/12/20/owl-11/">report</a> on the <a href="http://www.mindswap.org/2005/OWLWorkshop/">OWL: Experiences and Directions</a> workshop, where a (See also: <a href="http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wg/wiki/Use_Cases">RIF use cases</a>).</li><li><a href="http://www.semanticplanet.com/2005/12/spiral-mysql-schema">Spiral MySQL schema</a> discussion, release see below (see also <a href="http://www.bnode.org/archives2/49"> Pragmatic design considerations for a PHP-based SPARQL store</a>, <a href="http://copia.ogbuji.net/blog/2005-10-28/Addressing">Addressing the RDF Scalability Bottleneck</a>, <a href="http://www.dehora.net/journal/2005/12/rdf_and_db_schema_versioning.html">RDF - schema versioning and data typing</a>)</li><li>In the HTTP world, <a href="http://www.mnot.net/blog/2005/12/24/http_headers">mnot</a> and associates have joined the dots around <a href="http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3864.txt">RFC 3864</a> (Registration Procedures for Message Header Fields) filling out <a href="http://www.iana.org/assignments/message-headers/message-header-index.html">IANA’s Message header registry and repository</a> with info from <a href="http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4229.txt">RFC 4229</a> (HTTP Header Field Registrations). Aside from the web angle, there are a few bonus SemWeb points: <blockquote>The content was almost completely automatically generated, by <a href="http://www.mnot.net/sw/citation/">scraping the pertinent information</a> from the RFC citations, using <a href="http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/doc/cwm.html">cwm</a> [RDF processor] to infer some things about it, processing that n3 [RDF format] with a specialised <a href="http://www.ninebynine.org/IETF/Messaging/HdrRegistry/Intro.html">script</a> and then writing out the XML to feed into <a href="http://xml.resource.org/">xml2rfc</a>. Cool!</blockquote></li></ul><h4>Software and stuff</h4><ul><li><a href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2005Dec/0176.html">rdf-utils to diff and leanify rdf graphs</a> - leanify: Remove redundant statements (and anonymous nodes) from rdf-graphs; diff: Show the difference between to rdf-graphs</li><li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/cweb/">CognitiveWeb</a> has announced a beta release of a Sesame SAIL implementation for Oracle 10g</li><li><a href="http://www.semanticplanet.com/library/Spiral/HomePage">Spiral 0.33</a> RDF library for C#/.Net</li><li>the <a href="http://www.w3.org/RDF/Validator/">W3C Validator</a> graph problem is being <a href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2005Dec/0188.html">addressed</a></li><li><a href="http://www.appmosphere.com/pages/en-arc_sparql_parser">ARC SPARQL Parser for PHP</a> version 0.2.0, covers <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-rdf-sparql-query-20051123/">Nov 23 WD spec</a> (SQL rewriters in the pipeline)</li><li><a href="http://dome.sourceforge.net/">Distributed Ontology Management Environment</a> (DOME) version 0.2.0 from <a href="http://www.omwg.org/">Ontology Management Working Group</a> (OMWG) - available as standalone application, Eclipse update, source distribution</li><li><a href="http://www.aktors.org/crosi/deliverables/summary/cms.html">CMS</a> (CROSI Mapping System) <blockquote>The HP Jena-powered CMS is a multi-matcher, ontology mapping system which allows to combine different alignment algorithms for the purpose of ontology mapping</blockquote></li><li><a href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2005Dec/0120.html">NewsML 2 updates</a>, including <a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/newsml-2/files/Contributed-Tools/">NewsML2-to-RDF transform</a></li><li><a href="http://structuredblogging.org/">StructuredBlogging</a> - plugins for more machine-readable data from blogs, complete with <a href="http://structuredblogging.org/subnode-to-rdf-interpreter.xsl">sb-to-rdf</a> XSLT, getting <a href="http://www.w3.org/2004/01/rdxh/spec">GRDDL</a>able</li></ul><h4>Some novel search engines say…</h4><ul><li>Kinja: “<a href="http://kinja.com/lucky.knj?q=semantic+web&topic_submit=Search%21">semantic web</a>“</li><li>Google Base seems to think “<a href="http://base.google.com/base/search?q=semantic+web&btnG=Search+Base&nd=0">Semantic Web</a>” means books</li><li>Technorati Explore “<a href="http://kitchen.technorati.com/explore/Semantic%20Web">Semantic Web</a>“</li><li><a href="http://www.talkdigger.com/?dig_url=http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/">talkdigger, uri==http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/</a></li><li><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/physicalmetadata">Flickr: Photos tagged with physicalmetadata</a></li></ul>Podcast of the week <a href="http://connect.educause.edu/MacKenzie_Smith_Interview_CNI_2005">Interview</a> with MIT’s <a href="http://libraries.mit.edu/dlrg/people.html#ms">McKenzie Smith</a> about the <a href="http://sciencecommons.org/">Science Commons</a>, governance of <a href="http://www.dspace.org/">DSpace</a>, The MIT Libraries’ investigation of Semantic Web technology via their <a href="http://simile.mit.edu/">SIMILE</a> project, grid computing vis-a-vis the SDSC <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_resource_broker">Storage Resource Broker</a>, and digital preservation. Blog post title of the week<blockquote>Is Web 2.0 just like one big Unix box?</blockquote>- <a href="http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/8802">Paul Browne</a>Sources include <a href="http://planetrdf.com">Planet RDF</a>, <a href="http://journal.dajobe.org/journal/2003/07/semblogs/">Semantic Weblogs</a>, <a href="http://swig.xmlhack.com/">Semantic Web Interest Group IRC Scratchpad</a>, <a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw">W3C Semantic Web Activity</a>, various emails etc - thanks!<a href="http://dannyayers.com/archives/category/virtual-world/semantic-web/sw-weekly/">other weeks</a>Best wishes for… <img src="http://dannyayers.com/2005/12/foaf-2006.gif" alt="2006" /> In <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2005/TECH/12/23/john.bartelle/" title="The future of online search">a recent CNN interview</a>, Wired magazine co-founder John Batelle was asked the question “What is the next big thing on the Web?” His answer is the Semantic Web. <blockquote>The idea to create a semantic Web where everything is described not by one researcher and his team but rather by all of us as we root about the Web. The idea is that we might get to the point where everything in the world of value is in the index correctly, whether it’s your car, your child or whether it’s a media object like a page or an audio file or whatever, or in this case a picture. And then you create these vast semantic attachments to everything and that becomes the seedbed for the next generation of search to crawl and make sense of.</blockquote>I believe Semantic Web technology is more than just a new search technology. It will change the way we store, discover, and share information — among the humans and the machines. <My batteries weren’t included this year and I’ve spent most of the past week full of cold, snivelling and feeling sorry for myself. The silver lining is I’ve now a backlog of good-to-read stuff (I’m not going near the must-read stuff for at least another week ;-)In <a href="http://bobwyman.pubsub.com/main/2005/12/memex_the_first.html">How the read/write web was lost…</a> Bob Wyman picks up on TimBL’s <a href="http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/38">point of information</a> on the first browser being an editor too and gives a convincing explanation for how the writeability went away.He identifies a general phenomena nearby :<blockquote>Typically, those who first work on an idea or concept will see that it has a very wide scope of application, however, they are almost always forced to focus on one or another specific, limited scopes in order to present their idea in a relevant fashion to potential adopters who have specific issues addressed by the innovation. Often, in the process of this focused positioning to convince early-adopters to accept an idea or process, much of the full richness of the vision is lost or put aside. The cost of acceptance is thus often the loss of very important, even essential, elements of the vision. Sometimes, the loss is permanent and only the original thinker knows what paths were not traveled…</blockquote>There’s some history of Bob’s own (dark horse!), with hypertext on VAX, including some deployment at CERN, of all places. He finishes on a positive note, framing blogs, Wikis etc as the rediscovery of the lost writeability. <Niall Kennedy <a href="http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/archives/2005/12/google_reader_a.html">rev-engineers the Google Reader APIs</a>, then gets to <a href="http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/archives/2005/12/google-api-feeds.html">break the news</a> that they will soon be officially available for use by third-party developers. <blockquote>The new APIs will include synchronization, feed-level and item-level tagging, per-item read and unread status, as well as rich media enclosure and metadata handling.</blockquote>I’ve not read thoroughly, but they seem to be Atom format (<a href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287">RFC 4287</a>) based, with RESTful interfaces (but apparently not <abbr title="Atom Publishing Protocol">APP</abbr>) e.g. here’s this blog’s feed as Atom 1.0 : <a href="http://www.google.com/reader/atom/feed/http://dannyayers.com/feed/rdf/">http://www.google.com/reader/atom/feed/http://dannyayers.com/feed/rdf/</a>Interesting to see that they’re also doing subscription lists as Atom feeds (<strike>example</strike> - oops, insecure, I’ll post a copy later // check the <code><category></code> tag fans ;-). Attention in Atom? I don’t see why not. But it’d be nice to have <code>atom-subscriptions-to-attention.xml.xsl</code> and vice versa.This could make a wonderful piece of the mashup toolkit, though that might be let down by their terms of service. Given that the source data isn’t theirs, presumably the not-evil approach would be to allow any use - including commercial (they are making money out of our data). But the same argument more or less applies to the search API and Google Base, and they seem to be jealously guarding those. This might be a good chance for <a href="http://blogs.zdnet.com/Gillmor/">Steve Gillmor</a> and <a href="http://www.attentiontrust.org">AttentionTrust</a> to show us what they’re made of.<rantlet>It’s the 21st century, can’t some of the smartest people on the planet [e.g. Google] think of any better way of making a living than selling advertising?</rantlet> PS. Dare Obasanjo is <a href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=7e81f95e-06fd-4877-ad03-7343268d167f">contemplating</a> support in RSS Bandit, <a href="http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2005/12/27/google-announces-feed-api/">Scoble</a> derides his superiors for not having bought <a href="http://www.newsgator.com/">NewsGator</a> (yet).<a href="http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView?showComments=true&entry=3313155128">James Robertson</a>, creator of the (Smalltalk-built) <a href="http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/BottomFeeder/downloads.html">BottomFeeder</a> aggregator has given up on the BlogLines and Newsgator sync APIs for various good reasons, but is interested in Google Reader’s :<blockquote>With any luck, it won’t suck :)</blockquote> <<a href="http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1901886,00.asp">A Man and His Vision for the Browser</a> - interview with TimBLPhil Ringnalda spotted a slight glitch in the eWeek editing - <a href="http://weblog.philringnalda.com/2005/12/25/building-the-symantec-web">Building the Symantec Web</a>Nearby amusement (and <a href="http://weblog.philringnalda.com/2005/12/18/who-knows-a-title-from-a-hole-in-the-ground">useful research</a>) is to be found with Phil including angle brackets in his post titles so you [aggregator developers] only see them <a href="http://weblog.philringnalda.com/2005/12/18/you-can-have-my-titles-when-you-learn-to-behave">when you learn to behave</a>… The US economy is growing at a healthy rate. What should we as IT employees expect in 2006? According to <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/dec2005/nf20051222_6928_db016.htm" title="More Jobs and Better Pay in 2006">this BW article</a>, the insight is as the follows.<blockquote><ul><li>Shifts in the economy will continue to benefit highly educated workers at the expense of less-educated ones, who are more vulnerable to automation and competition from cheap foreign labor. Management consultants, architects, engineers, and the like ought to do well.</li><li>Employment and pay in high tech could accelerate in ‘06 as business finally gets over the late ’90s tech bubble.</li></ul></blockquote>This is excellent news. As big companies begin to replace their old IT solutions and adopt new ones, we expect people with IT careers to do well in 2006. Since Google has conquered the mapping of the Earth, it’s working on the mapping of Lunar surface. <a title="Google Moon" href="http://moon.google.com">Google Moon</a> is a project that maps the landing sites of our first travel to the moon on July 20, 1969.What’s more? <a title="Google's Copernicus Center" href="http://www.google.com/jobs/lunar_job.html">Google’s Copernicus Center</a> is hiring.<img align="bottom" alt="Google Moon" title="Google Moon" src="http://geospatialsemanticweb.com/wp-content/images/googlemoon.jpg" /> <<blockquote>Chandler is an interpersonal information manager that adapts to your changing needs.</blockquote><a href="http://www.sauria.com/blog/2005/12/20#1444">Ted Leung</a> : “We released <a href="http://chandler.osafoundation.org/">Chandler 0.6</a> today.” Their recent focus has been calendaring, the screenshots look good. Calendar sharing is via a CalDAV server (their own, Cosmo).Speaking of changing needs, those with a long memory may recall that initially it seemed like they were going to go for a RDF-based approach. That was soon dropped, it seems they then had something plain-XML. Now it seems they’ve dropped that, pushing the functionality back into Python itself. Marc Canter may have <a href="http://blog.broadbandmechanics.com/2005/12/lots-of-xmas-links">a point</a> :<blockquote>Three years later and at least $5M Chandler hits version .6. Man oh man what we could do with that sort of money!</blockquote>See also: <a href="http://wp.osafoundation.org/">OSAF blog</a> <Ok, I had a bit of a knee-jerk negative reaction to the <a href="http://clarkparsia.com/weblog/2005/12/20/owl-11/">OWL 1.1</a> post from Bijan (I assume it was he, as he responded to my grumbles in comments), and wasn’t very diplomatic. The things being discussed are interesting, and extensions to OWL will no doubt be useful. But I still have my concerns, the main thing being an uneasy feeling that it’s premature to be working on a new version of OWL when the current one hasn’t really been put through its paces on the web. But these guys are logicians and I doubt uneasy feelings carry much weight in such circles. So I’ve made a start on reading around the subject a bit. The blog post says: “RDF triples are a barrier to other useful extensions, like the K operator.”. There’s a pointer to a related paper <a href="http://www.mindswap.org/OWLWorkshop/sub7.pdf">Towards a Nonmonotonic Extension to OWL</a>. Basically the K operator allows queries to take the closed world assumption, ask whether things are actually known (I couldn’t get to the paper cited which describes K fully, so I’m going by what I found here). I was getting along fine with this, until I got to the bit about an OWL syntax for K. I don’t know what I’m missing here, so it was either tell the cat or dump it to the blog… The bit in question goes like this:<blockquote>The K operator (which is a kind of necessity operator) can be applied to a concept or role. … The K operator is quite simple from a syntactic standpoint: it can be applied to classes and properties. We outline several failed approaches to encoding K into the RDF/XML syntax of OWL. It is clear that the operator cannot be encoded as a class, for the simple reason that it applies to other classes and properties.</blockquote>So K can be applied to classes and properties. Broadly speaking, wouldn’t that mean that there would be sets of classes and properties on which the K operator had been applied? The two (failing) examples in the paper of how to encode K in OWL (as a property; as an annotation property) are both on the level of (for want of a better word) tagging the classes. But such tagging can also be expressed in OWL as simple class membership (no need to go into the whole classes as individuals thing).So what’s wrong in defining two new constructs, call them <code>KClass</code> and <code>KObjectProperty</code>. Any class/property that is subsumed by these is taken as having the K operator applied. There is an obvious side effect of this, in that any subclasses/subproperties further down will also be carrying the K. I’m new to this K chappy, so can’t really judge how much of a problem that might be. But doesn’t this get around the basic syntax issue? The K semantics are added to the OWL semantics, so we’re talking about additional reasoning whatever happens, there may be a way of excluding subclasses/subproperties beyond a certain point, a kind of cut. Bah, I wonder if my cold’s turned into flu and this is just delirium… I came across <a title="Folksonomy Extends Geospatial Taxonomy" href="http://www.directionsmag.com/article.php?article_id=1957">an article</a> that talks about the use of <a title="Folksonomy" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy">folksonomy </a>in geospatial applications. It reminded me of <a title="Jump-start the Semantic Web with tags" href="http://harry.hchen1.com/2005/10/27/129">a post that I have written</a>. Today folksonomy is in the roots of many interesting web applications, e.g., flickr and technorati. I agree with the authors on that future geospatial applications could explore similar ideas. For example,<ul><li>Geospatial folksonomies perhaps one day could help the standardization of FGDC (Federal Geographical Data Committe) metadata, which is aimed to improve the organization, search and sharing of geospatial information</li><li>Folksonomies may be used by geo-workers to annotate images and layers, so that information can be ranked and sorted.</li><li>RSS feeds could also exploit geospatial folksonomies. News items and blogs that are tagged with geospatial information can be used to develop location-based search engines and directory services.</li></ul>Few other thoughts that come to my mind.<ul><li>How to develop shared ontologies is a big problem in buliding geospatial semantic web applications. Different agencies use different vocabularies. It’s often difficult for them to agree on a shared ontology in the begining. Maybe folksonomy can help to solve this problem — build systems that can accomandate the evoloution of ontologies.</li><li>While folksonomy can help us to build better geospatial applications, geospatial technology can also help to improve the use of folksonomy. For example, geospatial reasoning can improve the quality of search results. Knowing the zip code 90210 is located in Los Angeles, CA., when a user searches for blogs in LA, blogs that are tagged with “90210″ will also be returned.</li></ul> <Sorry about any disruption, but my templates were in such a mess that when I discovered WordPress v.2.0 was available I thought I’d better do it. Did backups ok - mysqldump and tar-gzipped the static site content just in case. This made a 66MB file, which I think must be mostly the junk I;ve got in Redland (I dumped all the DBs just in case too).First hitch was that I did have the “Advanced Cache” plugin installed, so the upgrade began with file-not-founds. There was an include in wp-settings.php, deleting that made it seem like the upgrade was working. But that led to a blank page at the site root. So I’m now in the admin/post screen - a WYSIWYG editor came up, so it looks like that part’s worked. Now let’s see if this shows up…Ah, ok, when I went into “Presentation” it said “The active theme is broken. Reverting to the default theme.”. So I’ve now got a brand spanking new vanilla blog. So far so good.Ok, got it semi-acceptable. The HTML isn’t quite valid and I need to weed that sidebar, but I’m a bit bored with it now. Also need to get rid of the WYSIWYG - too slow on loading. Oh yeah, I also had a quick go with David Janes’ <a title="hAtom rewriter" href="http://www.trinityanne.com/tools/rewrite/">hAtom template rewriter</a>, but there was a very visible error right at the start of the results, so I guess I’ll leave that until everything else is in better shape. I’ve created a page with geospatial semantic web links. I hope readers of this blog will find these bookmarks to be useful.<a title="Geospatial Semantic Web Bookmarks" href="http://www.geospatialsemanticweb.com/bookmarks/">http://www.geospatialsemanticweb.com/bookmarks/</a>If you have other links to suggest, please let me know — <a title="Harry Chen" href="http://harry.hchen1.com/contact-me/">email me</a> or add comments to the page. People love blogs. It’s only a matter of time for companies to figure out how to exploit this exciting technology to increase their revenues. <a href="http://www.amazon.com" title="amazon.com">Amazon.com</a> is one of those smart companies. According to <a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/12/28/business/blog.php" title="Check out the book, then turn to the blog">this IHT article</a>, in Nov. 2005, Amazon.com begins a new program called Amazon Connect. In this program, it has recruited a group of about a dozen authors to blog about books and whatever they want to share with the readers. For example, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/id/A3JZTPVXXIUPTJ/102-3845298-7693700" title="Meg Wolitzer's Amazon Blog">Meg Wolitzer</a> has an Amazon Blog. I think Amazon Connect is a great program — it provides a new infrastructure for the authors to interact with their readers. Soon we will say hello to 2006, and bye-bye to 2005. It has been an exciting year for me and my family. 2005 event highlight:<ul><li>Joined <a title="Image Matters LLC" href="http://www.imagemattersllc.com">Image Matters LLC</a> — my first full-time job after finishing my PhD.</li><li>Bought our first house in <a title="Columbia MD" href="http://www.columbia-md.com/">Columbia, MD</a>.</li><li>Got serious about managing my personal finance — 401k, IRA etc. </li><li>Switched main research focus from <a title="ebiquity" href="http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/">pervasive computing</a> to <a title="Geospatial Semantic Web Blog" href="http://www.geospatialsemanticweb.com">geospatial semantic web</a>. </li><li>Switched my blogs from <a title="Blogger.Com" href="http://www.blogger.com">Blogger.com</a> to <a title="WordPress" href="http://www.wordpress.org">WordPress</a></li></ul>Interesting blogs in 2005:<ul><li><a title="New Job, New Life, and New Goals" href="http://harry.hchen1.com/2005/01/24/108">New Job, New Life, and New Goals</a></li><li><a href="http://harry.hchen1.com/2005/10/25/130">My asset allocation in 2006 will include China</a></li><li><a href="http://harry.hchen1.com/2005/10/25/131">SemanticWorks 2006 still needs some work</a> and <a href="http://harry.hchen1.com/2005/11/16/161">follow-up</a></li><li><a href="http://harry.hchen1.com/2005/10/12/136">The whole brain atlas</a></li><li><a href="http://harry.hchen1.com/2005/08/12/126">Japanese sorts their trash. Can we sort ours?</a> </li><li><a href="http://harry.hchen1.com/2005/11/16/163">My problem with President Bush</a></li><li><a href="http://harry.hchen1.com/2005/12/22/207">PhD Students Backup Your Thesis</a></li></ul>2006 outlook:<ul><li>Apple will announce iPod pico</li><li>Google Earth and Yahoo! Maps will feature semantic markups that allow users to query geospatial information</li><li>More people will know RDF is not XML</li><li>Microsoft will attempt to fight off an Ajax-version of the OpenOffice software by giving away MS Office for free</li><li>Problems in Iraq will continue to eat up US taxpayer money.</li></ul> To be continued… So Leude, ich bin raus aus 2005 und hier ist der Rest für das <a href="http://www.phatcafer.de">phatcafer lab.</a>: <a href="http://b4mad.net/hardBrot/?category%5B%5D=Podcast+War">der hardBrot Mixer</a>! Wem also <a href="http://www.brotkast.de/">phatBrotkasten Inc.</a> gef�llt, oder wem der hardBrot Mixer gef�llt: der gebe bitte eine Support Spende (ja, das ist ? 1,00) an Dani Poi. Prospectus2006!! <I’m still under the weather with this cold, don’t really want to attempt any proper work just yet, so am trying to clear up so old to-do list items. One of the oldest (at least 2 yrs old) is <a href="http://dannyayers.com/2004/03/sambuca/">Sambuca</a>, an RDF API for <a href="http://www.squeak.org/">Squeak Smalltalk</a>. I’ll probably have a couple of hours on it again tomorrow, but it seems like a good time to dump notes.I’ve had several plan iterations since I started :<ul><li>Plan A : straight build what’s needed</li><li>Plan B : ooh, Python’s fun, I’ll prototype there and then port</li><li>Plan C : this is a big job, I’ll start by interfacing to <a href="http://librdf.org/">Redland</a> then implement incrementally</li><li>Plan D : straight build what’s needed</li></ul>A got distracted by B, B drifted off… C was relatively recent, seemed like a good idea until I read of <a href="http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/1414">FFI</a> (the Squeak Foreign Function Interface) :<blockquote>FFI is dangerous, slow, and platform-specific.</blockquote>What’s more I’ve not done any C in about a decade so it’d also be very buggy. So onto D. By now I’ve forgotten the little I knew of Smalltalk, but fortunately the language itself is dead easy. But the environment does still takes a lot of getting used to. Anyhow I’ve got a load of classes in place, more or less just as placeholders, and now could do with a little data to play with. <a href="http://www.dajobe.org/2004/01/turtle/">Turtle</a> seemed the obvious RDF syntax to start with, and so I’m now looking at getting some kind of parser going. The <a href="http://www.refactory.com/Software/SmaCC/">SmaCC</a> parser generator seemed the easiest approach. The lexer/scanner bit of SmaCC takes EBNF-like syntax, so I’ve taken that of Turtle and tweaked it. I ran into problems with datatype strings (I think with quotes inside quotes) so cut those bits for now. I’ve got it compiling ok with enough of the EBNF to cover NTriples, which will be enough to get some data (up to the <comment> <a href="http://pragmatron.org/trac/file/pragmatron/squeak/smacc-turtle-no-datatypes.txt">here</a>). Coincidentally I got word the other day of another <a href="http://www.agilense.com/owl.html">Smalltalk OWL</a> project, led by a company (<a href="http://www.agilense.com">Agilense</a>, Steve Hunter is the contact) who want to add OWL capability to their “enterprise architecture management and governance solution”. This bit of my response is probably worth noting here: I must admit I hadn’t thought beyond very simple RDF model support, aside from perhaps using a Smalltalk Prolog engine to provide simple RDFS and/or smushing style inference. But assuming there was code in place for a basic RDF graph representation in Smalltalk, then one way of getting more complete reasoning quickly might be to implement the <a href="http://dig.sourceforge.net/">DIG</a> interface and connect to an external reasoner ( e.g. Pellet). This would involve quite a lot of work in syntax translation, but again I suspect considerably less than building an inference engine from scratch. My original motivation (heh) to (try and) do this stuff was because I wanted to play with RDF in Squeak - it’s just a marvellous UI for experimentation (especially UI experimentation). But I’ve been pondering the relational model a fair bit recently, and one thing I want to try is addressing the RDF statements as relations, i.e. something like: <code> name : predicateURI subject | object subject | object … </code> I’m wondering whether, if such a representation was easily available (and relatively quick), some of the traditional relational algebra stuff will be easily available (and useful…) I did also hear from someone else who was doing some RDF in Smalltalk for a student project (I think) a good while ago, but it didn’t sound like they’d got very far and/or weren’t thinking of making the stuff public. I am pretty amazed there isn’t yet a proper RDF toolkit in Smalltalk. I’m sure the core requirements could be covered in a couple of weeks, there’s so much prior art to draw on (although the nice bits might take a few years).Anyhow I’m keeping all the source <a href="http://pragmatron.org/trac/browser/pragmatron/squeak/">here</a>. <A mail this morning from the hosting company I use (<a href="http://www.bytemark.co.uk/index.html">Bytemark</a> - they’ve been very good) :<blockquote>A bug with our current User-mode Linux kernels means (in short) that we must reboot machines if the clock ever goes backwards. Since 2006 has a leap second inserted, this bug has been triggered on about 10 host machines on our network and resulted in highloads and sluggish response times.</blockquote>No wonder the Tardis keeps crashing. Which brings me to one of my highpoints of 2005 - a new Doctor Who series (only just started airing here) and he’s a northerner! Ok, criticism: there’s been some unnecessary messing with the theme tune, and the inside of the Tardis doesn’t look quite right to me. They maybe went a little bit overboard on the romance angle, soppy and/or weepy aren’t quite the emotions I’d associate with the programme, but they seem to have got away without ruining things, so mustn’t grumble. Overall it’s very much up to scratch. Single complete episodes works very well. The writing’s been great so far, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Eccleston">Christopher Eccleston</a> makes a great Doctor (Seems he’s a month younger than me. Yeek, older than Doctor Who…). Best line so far has to be: <blockquote>Rose: If you are an alien how comes you sound like you’re from the North? Doctor: Lots of planets have a North.</blockquote>(<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/check/doctorwho/ram/ep1clip?size=16x9&bgc=CC0000&nbram=1&bbram=1">clip</a> (RA))Oh yeah, and -Happy New Year! This is one of the many ideas I try to write down - and sometimes I get myself a little time and implement an idea. Here we go:What about an application that shows hiking or biking tracks on a map, with media annotation like photos/videos or sound per waypoint or per a region. The trancks themself may be edited online using a web application or a standalone client which reads in GPS data from some device. After the user finished editing the track a publish subscribe mechanism (xmpp?) is used to notify the aggregator that a new track is available for a user, maybe only available for the user’s client application or in a server centric storage - depends on user’s decision. If the user uses the standalone (local) client he may configure a access control system based on some web of trust or some friend of friend of friend relation.If some foreign web user selects a track of a user to be shown it is either stored on the server or only available via the user’s local client (which may be offline hmm.) Note: I want to put in SPARQL/XMPP here!! Maybe only the access control system resists on the user’s local client and is queried by the server based web application, with a default of “access” or “no access”.This needs work, just blogged to get it writen down… The <a title="UMBC Chess Team" href="http://sta.umbc.edu/orgs/chess/index.htm">chess team</a> of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County wins the “World Series” college chess for the seventh time. Baltimore Sun reports <a title="UMBC chess takes its place as a dynasty" href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-te.md.chess31dec31,1,2180013.story">the details of this event</a>.<blockquote>In basketball it’s UCLA. In hockey it’s Michigan. In baseball it’s Southern Cal.And now in chess, the dynasty, the champion of champions, is the <a href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/visitor/college/bal-hl-umbc,0,4382214.story?coll=bal-home-headlines">University of Maryland, Baltimore County</a>.The Retrievers earned a place in history yesterday by winning the Pan-American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship in Miami - the “World Series” of college chess - for a record-breaking seventh time.“It would be very difficult to have this same kind of run by a sports team at any level,” said Jerry Nash of the U.S. Chess Federation, the tournament organizer. “And especially when the competition is as fierce. This is the premier event - not just for the U.S., but for Canada and the Americas.”</blockquote>The team roster and scores are available <a title="Team Roster and Scores. 2005 Pan Am Intercollegiate" href="http://bocachess.com/2005PanAm%20Team%20Standings.html">here</a>. <img width="86" height="133" title="Sony Librie EBR-1000EP" alt="Sony Librie EBR-1000EP" id="image215" style="margin: 10pt 10px 10px 10pt; float: left; cursor: pointer" src="http://harry.hchen1.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/01/390px-Sony_Librie_EBR_1000.thumbnail.jpg" />I always think <a title="eBook Wiki" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebook">eBooks</a> are good idea. But somehow the technology never really take off in consumer world. A key problem is the poor quality of text displays in eBooks. Reading eBooks are hard for the eyes, especailly when reading under the sun.Sony has developed a new eBook called <a title="Sony Librie" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Librie_EBR-1000EP">Librie</a> that overcomes this problem. This new device uses the <a title="E Ink technology" href="http://www.eink.com/technology/index.html">E Ink technology</a> that allows digital texts to be viewable under a wide range of lighting condition, including direct sunlight. E Ink technology also requires no power to maintain an image. According to <a title="Curling Up with a Good E-Book" href="http://www.dottocomu.com/b/archives/002571.html">BusinessWeek</a>, with a single charge of the battery, Librie users should be able to read about 15 books.Additional user reviews can be found at <a title="First Look at Sony Librie" href="http://www.dottocomu.com/b/archives/002571.html">dotocomu</a>. <a href="http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMF2J8A9HE_index_1.html#subhead2"><img vspace="3" hspace="3" border="2" align="left" alt="Satellite map of affected Sri Lankan coast" src="http://www.geospatialsemanticweb.com/wp-content/images/bp_p5_galle_alti_S.jpg" /></a> Before Google had introduced <a title="Google Earth" href="http://earth.google.com">satellite imagery applications</a> to the general population, only few of us knew the true value of geospatial information. For example, most people know that satellite images are pretty pictures of the Earth. What they didn’t know is that the data extracted from these images can provide us with new information and intelligence that otherwise is impossible to obtain.ESA Portal has <a title="A year on from the Asian tsunami, satellites are aiding regional rebuilding" href="http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMF2J8A9HE_index_0.html">an article</a> that talks about how satellite images and geospatial technology are aiding the regional rebuild of 2004 Asian tsunami disaster. <Caroline’s put a batch of 243 photos online, showing scenes around this part of the world. The general idea is to help promote her <a href="http://languageinsight.com">Language Insight</a> Italian/English school project, add interesting things to the site. <a href="http://languageinsight.com/extra/imagesoftuscanymainlygarfagnana/index.html">Images of Tuscany (mostly Garfagnana)</a>All but one (a postcard, dunno how that slipped in) were taken by her or me, I guess the license is use as you like, link to <a href="http://languageinsight.com">Language Insight</a> appreciated. Heh, I notice there aren’t really any winter scenes, probably a bit of psychology there - right now it’s cold, wet and miserable with a few patches of snow visible through thick mist. <Danny has kindly invited me to be a guest contributor on his blog site. If you don’t know me, my name is Tom Passin, I have worked on conceptual modeling type things for some time now. I wrote the <a href="http://tm4jscript.sourceforge.net/">TM4JScript </a>javascript topic map engine, and I am the author of Manning’s book Explorer’s Guide To The Semantic Web.Like so many other bloggers, I have an active interest in photography, but I don’t have any cats. I’ll just have to leave them to Danny and Shelly. You can see some of my <a href="http://http://imageevent.com/artofthephoto/recent/">recent work</a>, if you like.I’ll be writing here from time to time, as things of interest come up. Thanks, Danny! <So Tom Passin mailed me some notes on experimentation he’s been doing, struck me as obvious blog material (aside from some commercially sensitive bits in the code, hopefully it’ll be publishable before long). So this blog now has a guest. Anyhow Tom only mentioned his book in passing, I reckon it deserves a better plug (I did a <a href="http://dannyayers.com/archives/2005/08/04/explorers-guide-to-the-semantic-web-2/">mini review</a> a little while ago). This is the one: <a href="http://www.manning.com/books/passin"><img src="http://dannyayers.com/2006/01/passin_book.jpg" alt="Explorer's Guide to the Semantic Web" /></a> <a href="http://www.manning.com/books/passin">Explorer’s Guide to the Semantic Web</a> (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1932394206">Amazon.com</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1932394206">Amazon.co.uk</a>). (A belated Happy New Year to one and all!)I’ve adapted <a href="http://frogbrothers.net/blog/">Martin Feeney</a>’s interlinks utility for <a href="http://www.gen.nz/">Generation Blog</a> (the New Zealand blogs aggregator) and integrated it at <a href="http://www.gen.nz/interlinks/">www.gen.nz/interlinks</a>. Here’s a graphical visualisation of all the interlinked kiwi blogs as indexed by Generation Blog.<a href="http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/wp-content/20060103a.png"><img border="0" src="http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/wp-content/20060103a.gif"/></a> <a title="OWL 1.1" href="http://www-db.research.bell-labs.com/user/pfps/owl/overview.html">OWL 1.1</a> is an extension to the existing OWL language. While it’s a work-in-progress, some of the described new features can be used to address immediate system development needs.Among all the new features in OWL 1.1, I especially like the ability to define a Resource that is both an individual and an class, and the ability of create user-defined datatypes (e.g., <div class="codesnip-container" >Datatype(over18 base(xsd:integer) minInclusive(”18″^^xsd:integer)))</div>Other related blogs:<ul><li><a title="Why not an XG for OWL 1.1?" href="http://clarkparsia.com/weblog/2005/12/24/why-not-an-xg/"> Why not an XG for OWL 1.1?</a></li><li><a title="`K, what's wrong with this?" href="http://dannyayers.com/archives/2005/12/28/k-whats-wrong-with-this/">`K, what’s wrong with this?</a></li></ul> I always believe that geospatial technology will find its way into consumer products and services one way or the other. When you see people begin hacking iPod to display maps, you know the time has arrived.<blockquote><a title="iPod-iWay" href="http://ipodiway.com/">iPod-iWay</a> is a powerful step-by-step directions saving tool that will export online driving directions from results by Yahoo Maps and import them into your iPod Photo.</blockquote>Source: <a href="http://tuaw.com/2005/12/31/ipodiway-yahoo-maps-on-your-ipod/">iPodiway — Yahoo Maps on Your iPod</a>For those who only use <a title="Google Maps" href="http://maps.google.com">Google Maps</a>, here is <a title="Putting Google Maps onto iPod" href="http://www.lifehacker.com/software/life-hacks/how-to-get-google-maps-on-ipod-photo-116288.php">a manual way</a> to put Google Maps onto your iPod. I use <a title="WordPress" href="http://www.wordpress.org">WordPress</a>, and I use <a title="Geo Plugin" href="http://dev.wp-plugins.org/wiki/GeoPlugin">Geo Plugin</a> to annotate my blogs with geographical information (i.e., latitude and longitude). If you look at the page source of my blog, you will discover the following markups in the head section of the HTML code:<div class="codesnip-container" ><meta name=”ICBM” content=”39.206133, -076.827537″ /> <meta name=”DC.title” content=”Geospatial Semantic Web Blog” /> <meta name=”geo.position” content=”39.206133;-076.827537″ /></div>ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) is <a title="ICBM address" href="http://www.hacker-dictionary.com/terms/ICBM%20address">a hacker term</a> for defining lat/long values. This term is used by different geospatial application on the Web, e.g., <a title="GeoURL ICBM Address Server" href="http://geourl.org/">GeoURL ICBM address server</a> and <a title="FreeMap.net" href="http://www.freemap.net">freemap.net</a>So is there any other way to geocode a blog or a particular location string in a HTML page? Yes, try <a title="Geo Microformat" href="http://microformats.org/wiki/geo">geo microformat</a>. A nice thing about <a title="About Microformat" href="http://microformats.org/about/">microformat</a> is that it allows you to add semantic tags to information that already existed on the Web, as oppose to asking you to define a separate version of the semantic information from scratch.Here is <a title="A geo microformat example" href="http://harry.hchen1.com/biosketch/">an example</a> how I’ve used geo microformat to annotate Columbia, MD — view the HTML page source.Do you know Google has patented geocoding? See “<a title="Google Awarded Geocoding Patent" href="http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050823-132945">Google Awarded Geocoding Patent</a>“ That’s what Michael Mandel at BusinessWeek <a title="Fasten Your Seat Belts in '06" href="http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/jan2006/nf200613_2198_db084.htm">suggests</a> me to do (implicitly). I’m not a big fan of market speculation. Everyone can say <a title="She's Bullish. Really Bullish" href="http://www.businessweek.com/investor/content/jan2005/pi200513_4778.htm">something about the future</a>, but only few can be right about what they said everytime.Michael speculates that in 2006:<ol><li>the housing market is going to crash</li><li>the share of the economy is going to technology</li></ol>My take? Stop speculating. Know your investment goals. Define a plan to achieve your goals. In general, your plan should help you to maximize your profit by taking the least possible risk. Tom Ashbrook at NRP has <a title="The New Sense of the Web" href="http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2006/01/20060103_b_main.asp">a special podcast show</a> that features geospatial web discussions. This show was aired on Tuesday, January 03, 2006 11-12PM ET.<blockquote>Just a decade after it became ubiquitous, the World Wide Web has made us blase about information. We assume we can learn almost everything about almost anything at the touch of a PC keyboard. But the digital revolution is hardly over.Now, the digital realm is exploding into the physical world. They call it the “geo-spatial web.” Already it means online maps loaded with information about the physical world, and someday soon, that physical world itself will be tagged and teeming with data for the asking: What is that building? Where is my dog? Who is that man?The implications are huge, exciting, and scary and the result will be a world alive with information.</blockquote>More links:<ul><li>Tom Ashbrook’s On Point podcast (<a href="http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=83279711&s=143441">itune</a>, <a href="http://www.odeo.com/channel/34791/view">odeo</a>, <a href="http://www.podnova.com/index_podnova_station.srf?url=http://www.wbur.org/listen/podcasts/onpoint.xml">podnova</a>)</li></ul> <My one New Years Resolution : get things done. Way too depressing looking at how little of <a href="http://dannyayers.com/archives/2004/12/31/resolutions-rebooted/">last year</a>’s (and the year before’s) I’ve actually managed, meantime the to-dos and the work-work have been piling up. May be a bit quiet here until I’m a little more on top of things, got a lot of catching up with that there work stuff (and trying not to get too distracted by play stuff). Will do a “Week’s Semantic Web” at the weekend though, whatever.It’s cause for concern when the Atom Protocol is progressing faster than yourself: <a href="http://bitworking.org/projects/atom/">draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-07</a>btw, Alex Barnett’s new <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/alexbarn/archive/2006/01/01/508497.aspx">resolution</a> : 1400 x 1050. Ho ho. Hello All, this is The Blirb the new face of B:\datenbrei!<img src="http://b4mad.net/2006/01/04/blirb.png" alt="The Blirb" /> <Set up by <a href="http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/">James Governor</a> apparently, a Squidoo Lense with <a href="http://www.squidoo.com/declare/">A Guide To Declarative Living</a> :<blockquote>Declarative Living is about publishing preferences to the web cloud, in the form of metadata that can be aggregated to create models of interest.</blockquote>Great coinage. Sounds very <a href="http://www.foaf-project.org/">FOAF</a>ish with a little <a href="http://menow.org/">MeNow</a> and <a href="http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/attentionxml">attention</a> for good measure. I’ll quibble about it being metadata - a persons preferences are data about them, not about other data. <a href="http://www.squidoo.com/declare/">Squidoo : Lenses : A Guide To Declarative Living</a>: Declarative Living is about publishing preferences to the web cloud… Maybe this is the marketing name for what I do with WITW and addressbook publication and jabber bots exposing my trust in other people/topics.?! I got my first iPod as an X’mas gift. Since then, I’ve been busy discovering new podcasts and managing my MP3 library. After reading <a title="Finding video made easy" href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/04/business/ptend05.php">this IHT article</a>, it seems that audio is not enough. Video clips, video blogs, and video search will be the next big thing on the Web.I’m not talking about those illegal movie videos that you can download from a P2P network. I’m talking about free legal video archives.<ul><li><a title="BBC internet video library" href="http://creative.bfi.org.uk">BBC internet video library</a></li><li>CNN video clips (of course)</li><li><a title="Movies at Internet Archive" href="http://www.archive.org/details/movies">Movies at Internet Archive</a></li><li><a title="searchforvideo" href="http://www.searchforvideo.com">Video blogs & search</a></li></ul>Some of my favorites:<ul><li><a title="The Little Match Seller" href="http://creative.bfi.org.uk/titles/504708.html">The Little Match Seller</a> (1902)</li><li><a title="The Exorcism" href="http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/1155743/index.html">The Exorcism</a> (1972)</li><li><a title="Opening Keynote - The Semantic Web" href="http://mitworld.mit.edu/play/234/">The Semantic Web</a> (2005) <img src='http://harry.hchen1.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':-)' class='wp-smiley' /> </li></ul> Over the last few weeks I have enhanced my skills in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUI"><abbr title="graphical user interface">GUI</abbr></a> design and programming, not good jet, but here is what I hacked: a <a href="http://thinlet.com/">Thinlet</a> driven GUI client for <a href="http://norman.walsh.name/2005/02/15/ws-wtf"><abbr title="Where In The World">WITW</abbr> webservice</a>. Feel free to <a href="http://b4mad.net/2006/01/05/WITW-20060105.tar.gz">download</a> and comment on the current version.The GUI is pretty simple, you may get or set the current position of a user. The username (and if available) the passowrd may be set in the Preferences dialog. It you get the current position of a user the landmark combobox is updated with the landmarks of the user. That’s it, not much but a start.next step: find foaf file location of user and display his menow status :) Good news, someone has made possible to <a title="Play video on iPod nano" href="http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2005Dec/bpd20051229034001.htm">play video on an iPod nano</a>. Bad news, it requires some hacking — e.g., putting linux on your iPod nano.Check out <a title="Play video on iPod Nano" href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6974467646937874348">this video demonstration</a>. <<a href="http://blog.davidjanes.com">David Janes</a> combines existing ideas and technology to produce -<blockquote> <a href="http://www.blogmatrix.com/tls/jahah/">JAHAH</a> is an AJAX-like technology for ‘mashing’ web pages together. <ul><li> It is easy for web page authors to include JAHAH documents </li><li> It is easy for content producers to create JAHAH documents </li><li> JAHAH documents can be included “cross-domain”, unlike most AJAX technologies </li><li> JAHAH documents are search engine friendly</li></ul></blockquote>See also: <a href="http://blog.davidjanes.com/microformatssemantic_web/index.html">Ranting and Roaring: Microformats-Semantic Web Archives</a>(It might offer a neat way around cross-site scripting issues, e.g. those of <a href="http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/blog/4">TimBL</a>’s <a href="http://www.w3.org/2005/ajar/tab">Tabulator</a>). I used to believe <a title="Microsoft" href="http://www.microsoft.com">Microsoft</a> has lost its ability to compete in the new digital market. Appreantly, I was wrong. After watching the video clips of Bill Gates at the CES 2006, I’m very impressed with the new Vista and what Microsoft could offer in the future. Two things worth mentioning: (1) new Windows Vista, (2) Bill Gates’s vision of the future digital life.What’s new in Vista:<ul><li>New translucent UI interface</li><li>Built-in RSS support. You can deck RSS feeds on a Windows sidebar</li><li>Application previews can show dynamic content</li><li>Active windows can be stacked and scrolled</li></ul>Bill Gates’s vision of the future digital life resemables what research people called Pervasive Computing. From walls with built-in large touch-screen displays to cellphones that knows when to download news that you want watch, Bill Gates talked things that pervasive computing researchers have dreamed for a long period of time — I’m sure many of his scenarios came straight from Microsoft’s research labs.In summary, I’m convinced that Microsoft has not lost its ability to compete with Google, Yahoo!, Apple and other big players. The new Vista will impress those who are skeptical about it. Based on Bill Gates’s CES keynote, as a pervasive computing researcher, I’m happy to see research results will finally made their ways into the consumer world.Related links:<ul><li><a title="Bringing Vista to Life" href="http://news.com.com/1606-2_3-6018907.html?tag=ne.vid">Bringing Vista to life</a> (video)</li><li><a title="The future is digital" href="http://news.com.com/1606-2_3-6018992.html?tag=ne.vid">The future is digital</a> (video)</li><li><a title="Gates shows off Vista in CES keynote" href="http://news.com.com/Gates+shows+off+Vista+in+CES+keynote/2100-1041_3-6018529.html?tag=nl">Gates shows off Vista in CES keynote</a></li></ul> I’m in the mood to play with <a href="http://crschmidt.net/semweb/menow/index">MeNow,</a> basically for the purpose to announce my mood. To have a common set of mood messages I have converted the <a href="http://www.jabber.org/jeps/jep-0107.html#wv-mapping"><acronym title="Jabber Enhancement Proposal">JEP</acronym></a>-0107 moods into an <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-owl-guide-20040210/#Namespaces"><acronym title="">OWL</acronym></a> Class via <code>xsltproc <a href="http://b4mad.net/2006/01/05/jep-0107.xsl">jep-0107.xsl</a> <a href="http://b4mad.net/2006/01/05/jep-0107.xsd">jep-0107.xsd</a> | xmllint –format - ><a href="http://b4mad.net/2006/01/05/jep-0107.owl">jep-0107.owl</a></code> I was listening to <a title="NPR Podcast Show on Geospatial Web" href="http://www.geospatialsemanticweb.com/2006/01/04/npr-podcast-show-on-geospatial-web">Tom Ashbrook’s podcast on Geospatial Web</a> (or GeoWeb). An important issue was brought up by a caller on the show — the standardization of geospatial data. Experts speculate that as the interest in geospatial technology increases, soon the use of geospatial data will be central to many everyday applications. If there is no standardized data, it will be difficult for different vendor applications to interoperable and share geospatial information.The caller also speculate that without standardized geospatial data, some application vendors could monopolize certain GeoWeb applications because the vendors control the data. As an result, this forces consumers to pay premium for services and discourage innovation.The caller suggests that the government should take on the responsibility to standardize geospatial data and make it free for the public to use. I completely agree with him. In addition, I think Semantic Web languages can help to standardize geospatial data representation.In my experience, when building geospatial applications, data is always a problem — e.g., what data should I use? Where can I find the data? Will the new dataset be compatible with the old dataset? Creating and maintaining geospatial data can be time consuming and tedious. While vendors do sell geospatial data, but the quality of the data varies depending how much you pay. Data obtained from different vendors may be in different representation and format. Interoperability could be a problem.Not all people believe in data standardization. Typical objections include that standardization is expensive and time consuming, and standardized data doesn’t guarantee its usefulness in building real applications. While I acknowledge these problems, but I still think standardization of geospatial data is a good idea.In particular, I think that basic geographical information (e.g., <a title="CIA World Fact Book" href="http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/">CIA World Fact Book</a>) and its representation should be standardized. A practical example is the naming of a country. If you do a <a title="Swoogle Semantic Web Search" href="http://swoogle.umbc.edu/">Swoogle</a> search, you will find the country “the United States of America” is identified by different URI in different ontologies.<ul><li><div class="codesnip-container" >http://islab.hanyang.ac.kr/damls/Country.daml#USA</div></li><li><div class="codesnip-container" >http://www.daml.ri.cmu.edu/ont/Country.daml#UNITED-STATES</div></li><li><div class="codesnip-container" >http://tap.stanford.edu/data/UnitedStatesState</div></li></ul>In the Semantic Web, while it is normal for a resource to be identified by different URI, but in practice, naming a well known geographical entity such the USA with different URI adds an extra layer of complexity, which I believe it is unnecessary.Won’t it be great if there are standard URI for all countries and cities in the world? Standard URI will help different vendor applications to share information and interoperate. There is little overhead in understanding a standard URI <div class="codesnip-container" >http://www.nist.gov/country/usa</div> references the country the USA. No ontology mapping and ontology reasoning are required to deduce this information.In summary, geospatial data standardization is an important issue that deserves our special attention. The dissemination of non-standard geospatial data could hinder the application interopability, and encourage vendors to monopolize geospatial data and charge consumers to pay premium for their services. Government agencies such as <a title="National Institute of Standards and Technology" href="http://www.nist.gov">NIST</a>, <a title="National Geospatial Agency" href="http://www.nga.gov">NGA</a> and <a title="National Aeronautics and Space Administration" href="http://www.nasa.gov">NASA</a> are good candidates that can take the lead to standardize geospatial data and it representation. <Tim Bray posts about <a href="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/01/05/Calendar-Funnies">PHP Calendar Fun</a>, making a good prompt for me to note-dump. I’m running late with some things so haven’t got time to try any more to work on my own attempted solutions to time/project management/scheduling and generally Gettin’ Things Done (including <a href="http://dannyayers.com/?s=nextaction&submit=Search+Archives">nextaction</a> hacking, <a href="http://dannyayers.com/archives/2005/08/25/project-management-with-wordpress/">project management with WordPress</a>, aka <a href="http://pragmatron.org/blog/">PragBlog</a>, not to mention <a href="http://ideagraph.net">IdeaGraph</a>). So I’m kind-of looking at existing tools. I got some good pointers in <a href="http://dannyayers.com/archives/2005/12/22/work/#comments">comments</a> the other day, and Randy Klein very kindly mailed me the following list of related tools (sorry, raw URIs, not had time to investigate):<a href="http://www.formassembly.com/time-tracker/">http://www.formassembly.com/time-tracker/</a> <a href="http://www.rememberthemilk.com/">http://www.rememberthemilk.com/</a> <a href="http://reminderfox.mozdev.org/">http://reminderfox.mozdev.org/</a> <a href="http://voo2do.com/">http://voo2do.com/</a> <a href="http://myticklerfile.com/">http://myticklerfile.com/</a> <a href="http://www.allnetic.com/working-time-tracker/index.html">http://www.allnetic.com/working-time-tracker/index.html</a> <a href="http://www.monket.net/wiki/monket-calendar/">http://www.monket.net/wiki/monket-calendar/</a> <a href="http://www.punkey.com/pivot/entry.php?id=6971">http://www.punkey.com/pivot/entry.php?id=6971</a>What I did make a point of doing was taking a look at <a href="http://chandler.osafoundation.org/">Chandler 0.6</a>. It’s very nice to look at, and seemed to do what it sets out to do (basic calendaring) pretty well. But I ran into a snag right away. I’m working on 3 different work projects, each of which is meant to take about 2 days a week. For the past few months I’ve been hopelessly disorganised on this, I made the mistake of thinking that having the option to do A, B or C when I felt like it would make things more interesting, and thus I’d get more done. Fool. It just seemed to make it easier to either do D or E (i.e. messing about with something unrelated and unpaid) or procrastinate with blog-reading or whatever. Even when I was in the right frame of mind for getting on with A, B or C, I couldn’t remember where I was up to, what task was the next action.So my new plan goes roughly like Mon, Tue: job A; Wed, Thu: job B; Fri, Sat: job C. Sun: go for a long walk. Each workday I’ve divided up (on paper) into different sessions, first thing being half an hour’s planning for the day, couple of hours work, then check mail, sysadmin etc. Same basic timetable, but working on different work-jobs according to the day. I couldn’t see any obvious way of putting these two facets into Chandler. Then comes the specific tasks, and the hierarchy of subtasks (and there is some interelation between the three jobs, so cross-pollination is possible). This is just on the modelling side, not even started looking at UIs or sticking stuff on the Palm or my mobile phone (I just got a new Nokia 3220 - supports J2ME apparently). The more I look at this kind of info management, the more RDF looks best suited as the tech for enabling it, given the potential for representation of twisty/layered/multi-facetted data. But whichever way you look at it (to paraphrase libby on #swig), calendaring is hard. See also: <a href="http://www.w3.org/2002/12/cal/">RDF Calendar</a>bonus link: <a href="http://www.pbcs.org/pbcs_screenshots.php">Project Based Calendaring System</a> (PBCS) multi-user PHP system <This started as a response to a <a href="http://dannyayers.com/archives/2006/01/06/calendars/#comment-41890">comment</a> from <a href="http://www.sauria.com/blog/2005/12/20#1444">Ted Leung</a>, but I reckon it’s worth bumping up here. So here’s a story from A to Z, you wanna get with me you gotta listen carefully…The info I want to input is:<ol><li>regular recurring divisions of the day (planning; morning work session; email…)</li><li>recurring divisions of the week according to which project I’m working on that day (Wednesday: Project B)</li><li>one-off instance tasks/actions, e.g. “fix that scraper bug”</li><li>hierarchical groupings of the tasks/actions (e.g. that scraper bug is part of the web interface part of project A)</li></ol>[1 & 2 with exceptions: Sunday is a day off] The info I want out is: for a given moment in time, what I should be doing..?Ok, that’s the simple version. What I’d really like to be able to do is add raw to-do tasks, with the system helping me break these down into individual (next) actions, each associated with whatever groupings are appropriate. I’d like to be able to give parts (of whatever granularity) of projects different priority levels. I think a minimal choice like low/medium/high would probably be most useful. Given the structural, temporal and role knowledge of the projects (e.g. a particular task might be essential for Project A and be rather helpful for a subtask of Project B, but the deadline for the task is years away…), a more detailed priority ranking should be derivable (using e.g. DL inference/planner/rules + a bit of numerics on the priority values). Wherever possible I’d like the system to get its data automatically, but wouldn’t mind spending time inputting lots of details if it meant the system could reasonably accurately tell me the optimal task for me to do at a given moment in time.This is generally the kind of stuff that my <a href="http://pragmatron.org/">Pragmatron</a> efforts are meant to be exploring (and will, when I get a minute ;-) There’s another specific little aspect mentioned over there that I think could prove very useful. Any material authored by someone working on a project is obviously significant to that project (except perhaps the cat photos); research on the web is useful. This suggests a content management system (including RSS/Atom aggregator, bookmark management etc) linked up to the project management system. The project management side should be able to provide an ontological framework into which new material can be placed (e.g. folksonomic tags derived from categorizations within the task hierarchies). Material aggregated from the web can be filtered according to relevance to the project (not easy, but I’m sure doable, starting with explicit largely manual categorizations and followed by keyword extraction and matching). Another addition would be multi-user support, to mesh different people’s plans, and make the task allocations based on what the group/company/community as a whole is doing. Which introduces access control issues, and things get progressively harder…I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna really really really wanna zigazig ah… <A few days ago, Danny mentioned some experimentation I have been doing, and I’d like to tell you about it. I’m using RDF to help me develop the data design for a project at work. This approach is turning out to be much easier and faster than more traditional methods I’ve used in the past.In this post, I’ll talk about the basics of the project, and in following posts, I will give some details of the approach I’ve been using. I’ll also include a link to an XSLT stylesheet that gives a pretty good generic display of a useful subset of RDF/XML.As background, I have been promoting the use of RDF/XML in place of non-RDF XML formats, that is, when you want to create a new XML format anyway. I know that the XML syntax for RDF has a bad reputation, but please forget that for a few minutes. If you use a subset of the language, consistently use a few conventions, you can come up with a format that looks almost like “normal” XML. This format is reasonably easy to display using nothing more than an XSLT stylesheet.True, this approach won’t be good for all purposes, but it is just fine for many.Now for my project. I’m working on an “Enterprise Architecture” task. The enterprise has to “integrate” large numbers of independent systems and projects so that they can interoperate, and make environmental measurements and calculations needed by some or all of the others. The task for this phase, which has a short-ish time available, is to collect certain information about these systems, organizations, and projects - that is, about the “system of systems” as it is today. I created a high-level conceptual model that fit into the earlier architecture work. To plan for acquiring the data, and for storing it on some kind of database, I need to refine and extend the data model, and make sure it fits the actual domain well enough to do this preliminary work. I also have to come up with “templates” for the client to use in collecting data. Furthermore, these templates will probably end up being one of the primary communication devices for the client to assess the work we are doing - that is, are we capturing the “right” information.Well, you say, this is nothing more than the usual data and domain modeling you always have to do. And that’s right. In the past, I’ve developed relational data models using tools like ERWin and Powerbuilder (not exactly a data modeling tool, but it is helpful in displaying data from databases, and in tweaking them). The cycle for modifications can be painful, and significant reorganization can be difficult.This time, the data model is not at all cut-and-dried, because data from all these included organizations is very heterogeneous, and uses different vocabularies. Is such-and-such a “System” or an “Organization”? Is this text a “Mission” or a “Goal”? How structured does each of these items need to be? What data type should I use for this field? How many characters do I need to allocate for this string? Every time I mine data from a new web site, I find I need to extend what I have, especially by adding more structure to previous properties, and by adding new ones.It’s the structure of data items that is especially a problem with relational databases, and this is where RDF is really making my life easier. If you make a simple list of properties, and decide that you want to structure an item that used to be a simple value, it’s easy - you just indent one notch and carry on. Instant structure. But each of these expansions is painful in a relational database, especially if the depth may be arbitrary. It’s much easier with RDF.If I want, when I’m done I will be able to convert to a relational database, leave the data as RDF, or port it into an architecture modeling tool. One of the big commercial tools, Metis, is actually based on a triples model that is very close to RDF’s triple model, so it should be especially easy to port to.Next time, I’ll go into more detail, but for now, I’ll just say that I’m evolving the model 5-10 times faster than I have in the past (of course, that’s just a way to say “MUCH faster”), and it’s been much more pleasant too. And I’m automatically getting my templates for the customer as a byproduct.See you next time! <I now have 3 Amazon wishlists, presumably because I’ve screwed up in the past using different email addresses. So I asked if I could merge them - there are books on the old lists I’ve already bought. They said no. Their reply contained this little gem:<blockquote>We hope that, as an Amazon.co.uk customer for some time now, you will appreciate our efforts to protect your confidential information, even if those efforts restrict your own access to it.</blockquote>Grrr.This made me chuckle though: <a href="http://www.socialporn.com/">socialporn.com</a> - yup, a Web 2.0 smut service. Sadly it’s not that interesting in itself, no exploitation of domain-specific twiddly bits…the software’s Open Source as used at <a href="http://meneame.net/">meneame.net</a> from <a href="http://mnm.uib.es/gallir/">Ricard Galli</a> (actually the pr0n install has a use as a translation - it’s in English, the original is Spanish). I await the bad puns.Zeitgeist for for 2006 : Hot Wife Rio Bikini Carwash Beta. Nachdem ich die letzte Woche versucht habe ein gutes - im Sinne von: etwas ausführlicher als drei Schritte mit je einem Satz - Buch �ber die Herstellung von Pralinen zu finden, habe ich mich entschlossen mit dem was ich aus den B�chern beim testlesen behalten habe zu arbeiten.Also, man nehme zwei Teile Sahn und f�nf Teile <a href="http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kouvert�re">Kouvert�re</a>. Ich habe weisse Kouvert�re von <a href="http://www.valrhona.com/fr/menu/home-gen.php3?vlang=A">Valrhona</a> genommen. Als erstes muss man diese kleinhacken, dabei merkt man schon recht schnell das Kovert�re bei ca. 27 �C schmilzt, generell sollte man sie nicht �ber 33 �C erhitzen da sie dann zerf�llt (in Kakaobutter, Fett, Zucker, …). Gleichzeitig erhitzt man die Sahne bis sie fast kocht, mir ist sie aufgekocht, dass scheint aber nicht geschadet zu haben. Die kleingehackte Kouvert�re mischt man in einem kleinen Topf langsam mit der Sahne, unter st�ndigem und langanhaltendem R�hren entsteht dann eine glatte Masse, das sog. Interieur. Diese Masse muss man nun wieder erkalten lassen, was bei mir ca. 1 Stunde gedauert hat, man erh�lt eine gut formbare aber hitzeempfindliche Masse. <div style="display:block;float:left;padding:5px;"><script type="text/javascript"></script><script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"></script></div> Die Masse kann man jetzt mit weiteren Zutaten verr�hren: <a href="http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cointreau">Cointreau</a>, kleingehacktem Orangat, <a href="http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marzipan">Marzipan</a>, was auch immer man denkt… Die fertige Mischung l�sst sich jetzt mit den H�nden (hab ich nicht versucht) oder mit einem Ess- und einem Teel�ffel (habe ich gemacht) formen. Die Kugeln dann auf <a href="http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backpapier">Backpapier</a> zwischenlagern.Als �berzug f�r das Interieur habe ich einfach schwarze Kouvert�re verwendet, diese also auch erhitzen und darauf achten das sie nicht zu warm wird! Gleichzeitig einen tiefen Teller oder ein kleines Sch�lchen mit <a href="http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kakaopulver&action=edit">Kakaopulver</a> vorbereiten. Hier ist “echter Kakao” gemeint, kein Caba oder Nesquik.Als vorletzten Schritt tempiert man das Interieur, man �berzieht die Kugeln mit der schwarzen Kouvert�re. Trickreich ist dabei, dass die Kugeln beginnen sich zu verfl�ssigen wenn sie in Kontakt mit der warmen schwarzen Kouvert�re kommen: schnelles Arbeiten hilft hier einen schwarz weissen Schokobrei zu vermeiden. Wenn man es mag kann man die fertigen Pralinen mit Kakaopulver bedecken indem man sie im Kakaopulver vorsichtig w�lzt. <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/goern/83794786/"><img src="http://static.flickr.com/42/83794981_9cc590da96_t_d.jpg" alt="erste" valign="top"/></a>Nachdem alles verarbeitet ist, heisst es noch: warten. Meinem Empfinden nach hat sich der Geschmack der Pralinen erst am n�chsten Tag als sehr gut rausgebildet.<a href="http://flickr.com/photos/goern/83795140/in/photostream/"><img src="http://static.flickr.com/43/83795140_e521e9c688_m_d.jpg" alt="mehr" /></a>Quellen:<ul><li>Tipps und Anleitungen bei <a href="http://www.bedello.ch/inhalt/pralinen/index.html">Bedello</a></li><li>Schokolade in Bonn:<ul><li>im Schokoladen von <a href="http://www.schokoschoko.de/valrhona.htm">Valrhona</a> und <a href="http://www.schokoschoko.de/bonnat.htm">Bonnat</a></li><li>der <a href="http://www.schokoschoko.de/">Schokoladen in Bonn</a></li></ul></li></ul> At CES 2006, <a title=" Google announces video expansion" target="_blank" href="http://edition.cnn.com/2006/TECH/biztech/01/06/google.video.ap/index.html">Google announced its new video cotent service</a>, which will allow content owners to set their own prices. It’s a clear sign that Google tries to ride the new wave that is created by Apple’s iTune and iPod video.This could confirm the speculation of some experts: <a title="The Next Big Thing on the Web" target="_blank" href="http://harry.hchen1.com/2006/01/04/218">video will be the hottest thing on the Web in 2006</a>. The <a target="_blank" title="ESRI Federal User Conference" href="http://www.esri.com/events/feduc/index.html">ESRI Federal User Conference (FedUC)</a> is January 31?February 2, 2006, at the Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. The conference supports those who deploy ESRI software for geoprocessing and analysis, integrated work flows, and intelligent collaboration across government. (<a title=" ESRI Federal User Conference" target="_blank" href="http://surveying-mapping-gis.blogspot.com/2006/01/esri-federal-user-conference.html">source blog</a>)Going through <a target="_blank" title="ESRI Federal User Conference Program Schedule" href="http://www.esri.com/events/feduc/docs/session_descriptions.pdf">the program schedule</a> (pdf), I see a lot of interesting application domain that could exploit Semantic Web technology. I think the use of ontologies and RDF can be useful in the following domains:<ul><li>Defense Installation Spatial Data Infrastructure: the Year of Alignment (page 3)</li><li>WMD Response in a Joint Civil and Military Environment (page 6)</li><li>GIS for Homeland Security and Emergency Management (page 8 )</li><li>Preserving GeoSpatial Data (page 12)</li></ul>I’m quite disappointed to see the word “semantic” is not mentioned anywhere in the entire 27 pages document. The word “intergration” is mentioned is 15 times. Do people really believe that knowledge integration problems can be solved without some kind of understanding of the semantics? <a href="http://dannyayers.com/archives/2006/01/09/this-weeks-semantic-web-7/">Raw: This Week’s Semantic Web</a>: This Week?s Semantic Web Posted by Danny January 9, 2006 <Sambuca’s developed an endearing little trick. It’s been cold out recently and every morning the office windows are misted up. So Sambuca licks -<img src="http://dannyayers.com/2006/01/sambuca-window.jpg" alt="Sambuca and window" />…and licks…<img src="http://dannyayers.com/2006/01/sambuca-window-2.jpg" alt="Sambuca and window" />…until she has a good view out.<img src="http://dannyayers.com/2006/01/sambuca-window-3.jpg" alt="Sambuca and window" />Meanwhile Sparql still doesn’t know what to make of Eric -<img src="http://dannyayers.com/2006/01/sparql-eric.jpg" alt="cat and hedgehog" />…not surprising, he is a funny creature. Here’s <a href="http://dannyayers.com/2006/01/HPIM1515.MPG">Eric, the movie</a> (mpeg, 7.6MB). According to <a target="_blank" title="On Blogging" href="http://geovisualisation.com/WordPress/?p=267">Jeff Thurston</a>, there are at least five different types of blog web sites:<blockquote><ol><li>Commercial Blogs: written with a financial view - sensitive to causing maximum financial return and oriented toward causing a stir to attract readers. Blogging for financial gain alone is different than blogging as a columnist, for example.</li><li>News Blogs: Basically scanning the news and re-writing what already exists. Original content is low. Regurgitated content is high.</li><li>Original Content Blogs: Strives for original content, links to existing content in exceptional circumstances to support original content. Opinionated. Perceptive.</li><li>Advert Blog: Sharply written to look like a blog but serving as advertisement. Usually easy to pinpoint over time.</li><li>Blog Aggregators: This is a special group, [which captures the blogs of a particular community or a specific topic].</li></ol></blockquote>Blog aggregators are great because they save me a lot of time on discovering new blogs. They also produce aggregated RSS feeds of all the blogs that I want to read.Two blog aggregator sites that I monitor closely:<ul><li><a target="_blank" title="Planet RDF" href="http://www.planetrdf.com/">Planet RDF</a> — blogs that talk about RDF, OWL and the Semantic Web</li><li><a target="_blank" title="Planet Geospatial" href="http://planet.spatiallyadjusted.com/">Planet Geospatial</a> — blogs written by GIS Professionals and Hobbyists</li></ul>The <a target="_blank" title="Geospatial Semantic Web Blog" href="http://www.geospatialsemanticweb.com/">Geospatial Semantic Web Blog</a> is a blog that combinds the two (sort of) … <img src='http://harry.hchen1.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':-)' class='wp-smiley' /> It’s the tax season again. This year, I hear people are <a title="Year-end tax pitfalls" href="http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/wellspent/archives/2005/10/year-end_tax_pi.html">talking</a> about AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax). I was wondering exactly what is AMT?<a target="_blank" title="Alternative Minimum Tax 101" href="http://forum.belmont.edu/cornwall/archives/004244.html">Dr. Jeffrey R. Cornwall</a> points us to <a target="_blank" title="What you should know about the alternative minimum tax" href="http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/13528456.htm">a Mercury News article</a> that talks about AMT in words that I can understand.<blockquote>Q: How is it calculated?A: Under the ordinary tax system, you figure your taxable income by adding up wages, interest and other income and then subtracting write-offs for personal exemptions, itemized deductions and tax credits.The tax you pay is then based on graduated rates. You pay tax on a set amount of income (up to $7,300 if you are single and $14,600 for married couples) at a 10 percent rate. Income above those thresholds is taxed at a 15 percent marginal rate.Once income exceeds the thresholds for the 15 percent bracket, it’s taxed at a 25 percent rate, then 33 percent, and finally 35 percent.The actual tax you pay is a blended rate, encompassing all the applicable “marginal'’ tax brackets. If you paid $10,000 on taxable income of $50,000, for example, your blended tax rate would be 20 percent.To figure the AMT, you start with the amount of taxable income reported on Form 1040 — the figure after deductions — and then you start adding certain write-offs back in. Personal exemption credits of $3,200 per person, medical and dental deductions, miscellaneous business expenses and write-offs for state income and property taxes, for example, all get added back to “alternative minimum taxable income.'’ Then, you subtract an “AMT exemption'’ amount and pay tax at just two rates — 26 percent on AMT income under $175,000; 28 percent on income over $175,000.The bottom line: If your blended tax rate is less than 26 percent and your income exceeds the AMT exemption threshold, you could owe AMT taxes.</blockquote>Should I be worried about AMT? Probably not since we don’t have a lot of special itemized tax deduction. The major first mortgage interest deduction is covered in both AMT and the traditional tax calculations. This year we should be safe. From time to time the GPG keys contained in <code>apt-get</code> expire or need to get renewed. To accomplish this simply use <code>gpg --export 010908312D230C5F -a | apt-key add -</code> Replace <code> 010908312D230C5F</code> with whatever key id is needed. If the key with key id <code>010908312D230C5F</code> is not in your gpg keyring you need to import it from a keyserver first: <code>gpg --recv-key 010908312D230C5F</code>PS: I am really unsure where the information that the keys need to be updated is announced. Maybe there is a feed or mailing list out there??References: <ul><li><a href="http://lists.debian.org/debian-user-german/2005/11/msg00006.html">debian-user-german mailing list</a></li><li><a href=http://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual.html#AEN464"">The GNU Privacy Handbook</a></li><li><a href="http://del.icio.us/tag/apt-get+gpg">del.icio.us cloud</a></li></ul> <Kendall <a href="http://clarkparsia.com/weblog/2006/01/09/is-northrup-grumman-smushing-kowari/">summarises</a> the story thus:<blockquote>Northrup Grumman refuses to allow open source developers to release a new version of Kowari Metastore, software that is licensed under the MPL 1.1.</blockquote>The big US defence contractor bought the company that had initiated Kowari, Tucana, when they had financial difficulties. The main product was Tucana Knowledge Suite, a scalable RDF database with all the trimmings. That was straight commercial closed-source, but in parallel the open source Kowari Metastore was developed (presumably sharing much of the same codebase, although TKS had things missing from Kowari).Northrup Grumman have told the Kowari lead, <a href="http://prototypo.blogspot.com/2006/01/resignation-from-kowari-due-to.html">David Wood</a> that any attempt to release Kowari version 1.1 could cause “irreparable harm” to their company. So David’s resigned from the project.In retaliation Alex Alishevskikh has <a href="http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=14420914">threatened</a> the forced removal of the <a href="http://sofa.projects.semwebcentral.org/index.html">SOFA</a> (Simple Ontology Framework API) pieces from any proprietary release. I’m only guessing, but it seems likely that these circumstances have arisen simply through Northrup Grumman’s lack of experience in the open source world. I can’t think of any compelling commercial or technical reason for them blocking Kowari. <a href="http://www.mysql.com/">MySQL</a> is probably the most successful RDBMS on the planet, and that has dual open/commercial branches, much the same as Kowari/TKS. With the company being involved in defence, they will no doubt be extra sensitive to security issues. But the evidence suggests that open source development offers increased security over typical closed-source systems thanks to the number of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds">eyeballs</a>, the usual examplar there being any Microsoft product and its open source equivalent. (It’s not hard to imagine considerably tighter security in closed source software than MS usually manages, although it seems likely that the cost/benefit ratio would get prohibitive before the security levels got close to those found in openly developed systems). Although Northrup Grumman can make life difficult for the developers that work for them as well as the os branch, clearly if the current Kowari is MPL’d they can’t stop other developers working on the system. A possible consideration is that by making the future of Kowari less certain, there’s a good chance there will be a knock-on effect reflected in perception of their commercial product. That’s not to mentioned the likelihood that they’d be blocking an obvious path for new customers - develop on Kowari first, move to the “pro” version later.Andrew Newman (open sourcing Kowari was his “hobby horse”) has <a href="http://morenews.blogspot.com/">more background</a> and will update as news arrives. My colleague Brendan Smith has started a new blog at <a href="http://speedie.galwaycity.com/">speedie.galwaycity.com</a> entitled “Insights on Galway Life”.It makes for interesting reading so far - the premise is that each week, Brendan will publish a photograph on different aspects of life in the city, with good, bad and unusual pictures each week!This week, you can read <a href="http://speedie.galwaycity.com/2006/01/10/traffic-gridlock/">Speedie?s ?Insights on Galway Life? � Blog Archive � Week 1- The Bad: ?Traffic Gridlock?</a>.And, I’ve set up <a href="http://www.galwaycity.com/">GalwayCity.com</a> for free blogs as well… <<a href="http://www.scripting.com/2006/01/09.html#When:3:56:48PM">Dave Winer</a>, explaining an earlier <a href="http://www.scripting.com/2006/01/09.html#When:12:00:58PM">post</a> :<blockquote>Suppose I have a blog about cars. That’s all I write about. When I go to Google to look up upholstery, it shows me pages about car upholstery first, not living room furniture. Why? Because they know I am especially interested in cars.</blockquote>This is absolutely spot on, but notably lacking in implementation details. It brings to mind the Jack Black/Ben Stiller film <a href="http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1808440472/info">Envy</a>, in which Black’s character invents the Vaporizer, a spray that makes dog poop disappear. Stiller’s character ridicules the scheme along the lines of how’s that going to work then..? But the Vaporizer did work somehow, and Dave’s improved search is certainly doable, in fact I posted re. <a href="http://dannyayers.com/archives/2005/12/11/search-personalization-and-attention/">personalised search</a> here not long ago. It requires that the system a) knows about the person’s interests; b) knows the subject matter of the target pages; c) can match one against the other. The easiest approach would be to use explicitly stated data at both ends. So for example Dave could have a file containing details of his interests, the system could harvest keyword/category tags from the source data. This would be very straightforward using <a href="http://www.foaf-project.org/">FOAF</a> for the profile and RSS 1.0 as the source data. The <code>dc:subject</code> values in feeds/entries could be matched against the <code>dc:subject</code> values of <code>foaf:Document</code>s that represented the <code>foaf:topic</code> of the <code>foaf:Person</code>’s <code>foaf:interest</code>(s). Attaching an aggregator/harvester or suitably directed <a href="http://rdfweb.org/topic/Scutter">scutter</a> to a <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/">SPARQL</a> -enabled store would give you virtually all this system off the shelf. To meet the usual search engine expectations you’d also need text-based search as well, but as tools like <a href="http://simile.mit.edu/longwell/">Longwell</a> demonstrate, regular search engines (in this case <a href="http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/">Apache Lucene</a>) can be integrated with RDF systems.But this is the simplest case, assuming the source data will already be in RDF/XML. But even with non-RDF sources, the same integration techniques can be used. On the user side, it is possible to use text analysis to get a fair idea of the subject of a web page/blog, perhaps extracted as keywords. Those keywords could be considered as in the domain of interest of the page/blog’s creator.Similarly, of the source data side, statistical keyword extraction could be useful. But it’s also worth bearing in mind that there’s also explicit metadata available from many data source, e.g. take the <code>category</code> elements from RSS 2.0 or Atom. There is also similar information embedded in many regular HTML pages thanks to old-fashioned <code><meta></code>, which can be interpreted in the RDF model using techniques like <a href="http://www.w3.org/2004/01/rdxh/spec">GRDDL</a> or in a semi-ad hoc fashion through scrapers such as those used by <a href="http://simile.mit.edu/piggy-bank/">PiggyBank</a>.Now as Alex Barnett <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/alexbarn/archive/2006/01/09/510900.aspx">suggests</a>, the same kind of trick could be used with OPML format data. But there’s a slight snag there. OPML doesn’t have a logical model through which the data can be integrated (and subsequently queried). By way of example, look at the data provided by <a href="http://toptensources.com/TopTenSources/home.aspx">Top Ten Sources</a>. It’s a great setup. The OPML files are categorised, but there’s no clear way for a third-party system to make use of the category information. In the short term OPML data which is clearly constrained, like that provided by Bloglines, is machine interpretable and potentially integratable when mapped to a logical model like that of RDF. But there’s still so much manual work needed (to say e.g. Bloglines OPML means this, Top Ten Sources OPML means that, Alex’s reading list means the other…) that such an approach is limited in its scalability across the web space.With RDF we have the specifications and tools for the kind of system Dave’s suggesting, it’s just a simple matter of programming (I’ve gone a <a href="http://pragmatron.org/docs/sparqlsphere.html">fair way</a> there myself). I’m sure it could be done using OPML-oriented systems, but some kind of integration model will still be needed, not to mention standardisation of the format. Lots more work. <a href="http://frogbrothers.net/blog/">Martin</a> has written a shortest path utility for <a href="http://www.planetoftheblogs.com/">Planet Of The Blogs</a>. Just read his post below; not sure how much I can say than wow Wow WOW!!!<a href="http://frogbrothers.net/blog/item/the_shortest_path.php">blog:mbf - The Shortest Path …</a> <<blockquote>The value of a markup language is proportional approximately to the square of the number of different software implementations that can process it.</blockquote>- <a href="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/01/08/No-New-XML-Languages">Tim Bray</a>(see also : <a href="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/01/09/On-XML-Language-Design">On XML Language Design</a>)PS. Corollaries!? I’ll let someone else do the sums (approximately).If you accept Bray’s Law above (why not? I don’t think he’s got one yet) and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_Law">Metcalfe’s Law</a> -<blockquote>The value of a network is proportional approximately to the square of the number of nodes.</blockquote>Now let iml be the number of different software implementations that can process a given markup language, nml be the number of different web nodes that can process that markup language, irdf be the number of different software implementations that can process a given markup language and nrdf be the number of different web nodes that can process RDF.For every mapping from a given markup language to RDF (RDF schema/OWL ontology plus translation, e.g. XSLT), by what (factor?) is the value of the markup language increased? By what (factor?) is the value of the Semantic Web increased? See also : <a href="http://micromodels.org">micromodels</a> <a target="_blank" title="PODZINGER" href="http://www.podzinger.com">PODZINGER</a> is a search engine that uses speed recognition software to transform the audio into words, making podcast content searchable by text. This engine is built on 30 years of speech recognition research developed at BBN Technologies, Cambridge Massachusetts.I wonder if popular subjects in technorati are also popular in the podcast world? Here is a quick comparison of the results:Date/Time: January 10, 2005, 11:31 AM -05:00<ul><li>Tag: Macworld</li><li><a target="_blank" href="http://www.technorati.com/search/macworld">Technorati</a>: 15,676 posts</li><li><a target="_blank" href="http://www.podzinger.com/results.jsp?q=macworld&s=&sname=">PODZINGER</a>: 220 posts</li></ul><ul><li>Tag: Howard Stern</li><li><a target="_blank" href="http://www.technorati.com/search/%22howard%20stern%22">Technorati</a>: 18,006 posts</li><li><a target="_blank" href="http://www.podzinger.com/results.jsp?q=Howard+Stern&s=&sname=">PODZINGER</a>: 343 posts</li></ul>I guess podcast is still behind blog in terms of its user base. <Hot on the heels of <a href="http://www.squidoo.com/declare/">Declarative Living</a>, James Governor’s now talking about <a href="http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/archives/001186.html">On The Emergence of Professional Tag Gardeners</a> -<blockquote>Tag gardening is about taking tags in the wild and tending to them, or identifying a wild tag that will do well in your south facing IT garden. I am talking about domestication here.</blockquote>I’m not entirely sure what this would entail in practice, but it does sound it might help the friends of the <a href="http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2005/12/12/tag_youre_gay.php">Ladies of Llangollen</a>… <In <a href="http://dannyayers.com/archives/2006/01/10/personalised-search-a-la-dave/#comment-41962">comments</a> <a href="http://icite.net/blog/">Jay Feinberg</a> points to Google’s Site Flavored Search. It discovers some (broad!) categories from the site you give it, then generates some antiquated markup for you to put on your site (I cleaned it up a bit here, dunno how it’ll come out in View Source, if it’s awful I’ll save it somewhere else - ah, just some extra newlines, not bad). The markup includes a reference to this page, not sure how much that influences the results beyond the already-determined categories.<form method="get" action="http://www.google.com/search"> <a href="http://www.google.com/services/siteflavored.html"> <img src="http://labs.google.com/images/gp/google_kaltix_site_flavored_searchbox.gif" border="0" alt="Google" /></a> <input type="text" name="q" size="31" maxlength="255" value='' /> <input type="hidden" name="site_flavored" value="on" /><input type="hidden" name="client" value="site_flavored" /><input type="hidden" name="hl" value="en" /><input type="hidden" name="interests" value="58|62|1221|61" /><input type="hidden" name="site_flavored_name" value="http://dannyayers.com" /> <input type="submit" name="sa" value='Custom Search' /> </form> Today I added a new page that collects podcast shows that discuss geospatial technology and the Semantic Web. Unfortunately, we haven’t yet seen shows that specifically focus on the cross-fertilazation of the two technologies. I hope this is going to change in the near future.<a title="Geospatial Semantic Web Podcast Page" href="http://www.geospatialsemanticweb.com/podcasts/">http://www.geospatialsemanticweb.com/podcasts/?</a> Who is afraid of Google? <a title="Who's Afraid of Google? Everyone. " target="_blank" href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.12/google.html">Everyone</a>. Why? Because Google is everywhere. Not only Google wants to the whole Internet and the computing world to itself, now Google wants the ad spaces of your local newspapers. Is the ubiquitous of Goolge a good thing or a bad thing?<blockquote>Google Inc., the new-media giant, now has a decidedly old-media partner: the Chicago Sun-Times.In a quiet and small-scale experiment, Google is running classified-like ads in the pages of the Sun-Times, which so far is the only newspaper participating in the Web-search behemoth’s test.</blockquote>See <a title="Sun-Times nets Google ad deal" target="_blank" href="http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=19053">ChicagoBusiness</a> for more details. <I just got this question via email and realised I don’t know what the state-of-the-art answer is : given some XML with DTD/XML Schemas, how best/easiest to convert it to RDFS/OWL? Seems like there should be some schema translation tools by now. Ok, ok, I know the syntax layer of XML schemas doesn’t naturally map onto the semantic layer of RDFS/OWL, but usually the XML structural pieces do correspond to entities and relationships, and some automation should be possible at least for the first pass.Here’s what I’ve got so far: I’ve generally used XSLT, usually created manually but there are some notes re. tools that can be useful <a href="http://dannyayers.com/archives/2005/12/01/grddl-job/">here</a> (Sun’s <a href="http://www.sun.com/software/xml/developers/relaxngconverter/">RELAX NG Converter</a>, <a href="http://www.relaxer.org/">Relaxer</a> and <a href="http://www.thaiopensource.com/relaxng/trang-manual.html">Trang</a>. The <a href="http://www.w3.org/RDF/Validator/">W3C RDF validator</a> is very handy… <a href="http://www.snee.com/bobdc.blog/">Bob DuCharme</a> has done “<a href="http://www.xml.com/lpt/a/2004/09/01/tr.html">A Somewhat Generic XML to RDF Converter</a>” and if the XML is close to what the stuff might look like as RDF/XML it might be possible to tweak it along the lines of <a href="http://www.xml.com/lpt/a/2002/10/30/rdf-friendly.html">Make Your XML RDF-Friendly</a> (Bob again, with <a href="http://mercury.ccil.org/~cowan/">John Cowan</a>).A trick for when the XML is close to RDF/XML already was suggested by <a href="http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/bblfish">Henry Story</a> (thinking Atom/RDF), add bits to the DTDs to fill in fixed default attributes, e.g. <code><!ATTLIST atom:entry rdf:parseType CDATA #FIXED "Resource"></code> So an DTD-friendly XML parser would see the missing bits. No idea if it works ;-)Other suggestions? <Jon Udell is <a href="http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/01/11.html#a1368">Moving forward with microformats</a>. He refers to both the <a href="http://microformats.org">microformats</a> and <a href="http://structuredblogging.org">Structured Blogging</a> initiatives:<blockquote>As gnarly as all appears, I see progress and even momentum. … Here’s hoping that somebody will take the next step this year and extend structured search — at least for a handful of well-known information types — across the whole blogosophere.</blockquote>In the past Jon has looked to XQuery for structured search. Like a lot of things in this space, I reckon it’s certainly doable but not the easiest route (because the web isn’t a tree). Once again I’ll point to <a href="http://micromodels.org">micromodels</a>.[ESW Wiki CSS problem has been reported] <Joe Gregorio’s having <a href="http://bitworking.org/news/Problems_with_HTTP_Authentication_Interop">Problems with HTTP Authentication Interop</a>:<blockquote>… C: Well, I was, uh, sitting in the public library on Thurmon Street just now, putting the two-point-oh on my web application, and I suddenly came over all unfettered. O: Unfettered, sir? C: Insecure. O: Eh? …</blockquote>Wonderful.(somehow this post got flagged as private, ah well) <Wonderful pressy arrived from <a href="http://www.bosatsu.net/">Brian</a> via Amazon this morning - <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262220695">Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming</a>. Looks great, emphasis is on kernel languages (something I know nothing about) using <a href="http://www.mozart-oz.org/">Oz/Mozart</a> in the examples (other things I know nothing about, except that they show up at <a href="http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/">LtU</a> a lot). The coverage is spot on for stuff I need to know more about (e.g. Ch4, Declarative Concurrency). The preface begins:<blockquote>Six blind sages were shown an elephant…</blockquote> Nothing can be perfect in this world. This includes iPod Video. While it’s easy to upload paid videos from the iTune Music Store, but it has proven to be difficult if you want to upload videos that you have recorded on your own.Declan McCullagh at CNet News.Com writes <a target="_blank" title="Why's it so hard to get 'Buffy' on my iPod?" href="http://news.com.com/Whys+it+so+hard+to+get+Buffy+on+my+iPod/2100-1041_3-6026753.html">an interesting article</a> that talks about his experience with iPod Video. Some problems that he has faced include (1) difficult to convert a recorded high-solution video into a low-solution video that works best on a iPod video, (2) copyright issues associated with uploading DVD movies onto a iPod Video.I see iPod Video is still a relatively new technology. Many end user issues are waiting to be addressed.Just a quick thought. Perhaps it’s a good idea for Apple to team up with TiVo. Maybe they can build a new framework that enables all TiVo recorded shows to be automatically converted to the right solution and obtain the appropriate copyright license keys. A sync in the iTune will upload all my selected TiVo shows onto my iPod. The <a title="Music Geonome Project" target="_blank" href="http://www.pandora.com/mgp.shtml">Music Geonome Project</a> attempts to create the world largest metadatabase of music that was made in the past sixty years. The basic idea is to get a group of musicologists (music ontologist I guess) to analyze each song using 400 distinct musical characteristcs.As a result of this project, it comes to the creation of <a title="Pandora" target="_blank" href="http://www.pandora.com/">Pandora</a> — a service that help you to discover new music you’ll love.<blockquote>For almost six years now, we have been hard at work on the Music Genome Project. It’s the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken. Together our team of thirty musician-analysts have been listening to music, one song at a time, studying and collecting literally hundreds of musical details on every song. It takes 20-30 minutes per song to capture all of the little details that give each recording its magical sound - melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics … and more - close to 400 attributes! We continue this work every day to keep up with the incredible flow of great new music coming from studios, stadiums and garages around the country.</blockquote>If this project becomes successful, it will prove the following:<ol><li>Ontologies are best to be defined by trained experts — at least for some well-known domains such as musics, movies, and books.</li><li>The ability to understand and model semantic relations are crucial to the development of intelligent recommendation services.</li></ol>Additional blogger comments — <a title="Metadata That Works For You" target="_blank" href="http://www.digitalearth.com.au/2006/01/12/metadata-that-works-for-you/">here</a>, <a title="Pandora" target="_blank" href="http://www.technorati.com/search/Pandora">here</a>. Few days ago, I saw <a target="_blank" title="how to explain to humans the term ontology" href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/semanticweb/message/2926">a post</a> on the semanticweb group that asks the question: “how to explain to humans the term ontology?” In a different context, I wonder how to explain geospatial semantics to humans?Let me give this a try.Geospatial semantics is the study of how humans perceive geographical concepts in their everyday life, and how to exploit this understanding to create useful computing systems to increase our productivity. The shared semantics of our natural languages enable us to communicate and convey ideas. When we reference geographical concepts in our everyday conversations, we also share a common understanding of the semantics of these geographical concepts (at least for most of the time if not all the time).For example, when a wife says to a husband, “Honey! You’re driving too fast!”, the husband puts on the break and slows the car down. In this scenario, we see that what contributed to the husband’s action is a common understanding of the term “fast” and its semantic relation respect to their current context. The context of this couple includes, for example, (1) their current driving speed and (2) the legal speed limit of the road that they are travelling on. The semantic relation between these factors contributes to the slowing down of their car. <a href="http://wordpress.org/about/features/">WordPress About: Features</a>: XML-RPC interface — WordPress currently supports an extended version of the Blogger API, MetaWeblog API, and finally the MovableType API. There seems to be a problem using ecto and the MT API to communicate with the blog if the google sidemap plugins is enabeld… need to check. Just finished trawling through a backlog of submissions to <a href="http://www.planetoftheblogs.com/">Planet Of The Blogs</a>: 835 rejected, 67 accepted, 0 pending! I think satellite radio has a lot of potential. XM Satellite Radio <a target="_blank" title="XM Satellite to debut two portable players" href="http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=businessNews&storyid=2006-01-04T051232Z_01_FLE418103_RTRUKOC_0_US-MEDIA-XMSATELLITE.xml">annouced</a> two new portable devices that can recieve satellite radio and play MP3.<img id="image232" alt="XM Helix and Inno" src="http://harry.hchen1.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/01/xm_players.jpg" />Say hello to <a target="_blank" title="helix" href="http://www.xmradio.com/helix/">Helix</a> and <a target="_blank" title="inno" href="http://www.xmradio.com/inno/">Inno</a>.Although I don’t subscribe to any satellite radio services, but I will consider a such service when the price comes down a bit. Pranam Kolari, a UMBC doctoral student, has <a title="Fighting spam sites - latest battle in the blog wars" target="_blank" href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/ideas/bal-id.blog15jan15,1,7234468.column">discovered</a> nearly 75 percent of blog updates that registered with weblogs.com are bogus (<a title="Welcome to the Splogosphere: 75% of new pings are spings" target="_blank" href="http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/?p=429">more technical details</a>). So why do people spam blog ping servers?<blockquote>The motivation behind splogs is the same as that for any other form of spam - it comes down to money.Sploggers set up sites with filler content and keyword-based advertisements. Their goal is to entice, coerce or con people into coming to their sites, where it is hoped viewers will click on profit-producing ads, offer up their credit card numbers or be redirected to other shady sites.With hundreds of millions of people online every day, a very small percentage of careless clicks can translate into big profits for splogs.</blockquote>I wish there are ways to prevent spams. The sad truth is that there is no effective way to do so. People love making money, especially easy money. The Internet is the place to conduct such business. Whenever a new communication medium, e.g., forums, discussion groups, email, and blogs, becomes popular, people will try to exploit it to make profits.Spams are like weeds. You kills them at one place, they grow back at the other. There are talks about <a title="WordPress to drop RDF / RSS 1.0" href="http://captsolo.net/info/blog_a.php/2006/01/16/wordpress_to_drop_rdf_rss_1_0">dropping RSS 1.0</a> from the WordPress development. RSS 1.0 is the only RDF version of the RSS feed format. I’m very disappointed to hear this news.I agree RSS 1.0 is an old technology, but it’s not a dead technology. People do use this format to build interesting and useful applications, e.g., <a title="PlanetRDF.com" href="http://www.planetrdf.com">PlanetRDF.com</a>. All blogs on PlanetRDF are aggregated from various RSS 1.0 feeds published by semantic web hobbyist.I acknowledge similar application can be built without using RSS 1.0 (i.e., RDF). For example, <a title="Planet Geospatial" href="http://planet.spatiallyadjusted.com/">Planet Geospatial</a> is a feed aggregator that uses feeds collected from Feedburner <strike>(I presume it’s using the RSS 2.0 format)</strike>. Update: see James Fee’s comment on how Planet Geospatial actually builds its blog aggregator. Reasons that I believe RSS 1.0 should not be dropped from WordPress:<ol><li>RDF and XML are two completely different technologies. They are two representation formats for solving different problems. Dropping RSS 1.0 (RDF) from WordPress will discourage developers from using WordPress as a platform for building the next generation Semantic Web applications.</li><li>Dropping RSS 1.0 can’t be justified just because all RSS readers today support both RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0. Granted that RSS readers today consume and process feeds of different formats pretty much the same way. However, it’s difficult to say whether this phenomenon will continue to hold in the future as people gain better knowledge about the use of RDF on the Web. Perhaps new Semantic Web technologies will open new doors to the consumption of RDF (RSS 1.0), which will enable us to build more smart web applications.</li><li>As a WordPress user, I like to have options. I want to be able to choose the format of RSS feeds that I publish. I don’t want to be told what format is the “standard” format and what format is the “right” format.</li></ol> Starbucks Center of Gravity is the exact place that can you stand in Manhattan and be closest to all Starbucks coffee shops in NYC.<blockquote>As if every single Starbucks was pulling you equally in its direction, this is the place where u could stand to feel the most Starbucks power…and not just within a few blocks radius, but for the whole Island! Think of it like being at the North Pole for overpriced coffee…The power center / death star if you will allow me to go that far….</blockquote>So what’s the answer? See this <a target="_blank" title="Starbucks Center of Gravity" href="http://beigerecords.com/cory/Things_I_Made_in_2005/starbucks.html">post</a> on Cory’s Web LOG. <a href="http://harry.hchen1.com/2006/01/16/234">Harry Chen Thinks Aloud: 3 Reasons Why WordPress Should Not Drop RSS 1.0</a>: Dropping RSS 1.0 (RDF) from WordPress will discourage developers from using WordPress as a platform for building the next generation Semantic Web applications. Very true, droping RSS1.0 support is no option!!  Technorati Tags: <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/B4mad" rel="tag">B4mad</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/datenbrei" rel="tag">datenbrei</a>, <a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/wordpress" rel="tag">wordpress</a> People often ask the question:<ul><li>Is geospatial ontology just a bunch of tags (e.g., XML tags, <a target="_blank" title="Technorati tags" href="http://www.technorati.com/tags/">technorati tags</a> or <a target="_blank" title="Flickr tags" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/">flickr tags</a>)?</li><li>Why is it so important to differentiate tags from ontologies?</li></ul>Before I try to answer these questions, let me say few words about the term “ontology” with respect to computing systems.<h5>What’s Ontology?</h5>The concept of <a target="_blank" title="Wikipedia: Ontology" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology">ontology</a> originates from the studies of philosophy. Today in computer science, especially in the field of Artificial Intelligence, ontology is a set of vocabularies and relations that people or computing machines must agree upon in order to communicate. Without sharing a common ontology, they won’t be able to share information effectively.<h5>Why I think Tags are not Ontology</h5>Let’s take the technorati tag “<a target="_blank" title="Technorati tag: cell" href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/cell">cell</a>” as an example. The term cell in our pop culture could mean cellphone, the smallest basic unit of an animal of a plant, or a small residential accommodation in a prison. Let’s say you tagged one of your blog post with the tag “cell”. This blog post was later discovered by a technorati search bot. Now the question is how much information can the search bot learn from the tag “cell”?No much. All it knows is that your post is tagged with an English word that spells ‘c’, ‘e’, ‘l’, ‘l’. It probably doesn’t even know your post is about cellphones, human cells or prison cells.A natural question to ask is that can we do better? For example, can we help the search bot to know more about the content of our blog? In other words, can we help computing systems to understand the semantics of information?I don’t know for sure, but I do believe it’s possible. In fact, many ongoing Semantic Web efforts in <a target="_blank" title="OGC to Begin Geospatial Semantic Web Interoperability Experiment" href="http://www.opengeospatial.org/press/?page=pressrelease&prid=220">OGC</a> and <a target="_blank" title="W3C: Semantic Web" href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/">W3C</a> are working to solve this kind of problems.<h5>Coming Back to Geospatial Ontology</h5>Once we understand tags are not ontology, we can immediately conclude that geospatial ontology is not just a bunch of tags. What makes geospatial ontology so interesting is that much of the information in <a title="Geospatial Semantics: Honey! You?re Driving too FAST!" target="_blank" href="http://www.geospatialsemanticweb.com/2006/01/13/geospatial-semantics-honey-youre-driving-too-fast">our everyday life</a> involves some kind geospatial ontology. If we are on the path to develop computing systems that could understand the semantics of our blog posts, for example, we must pay extra attention to geospatial ontology.In the near future, I will discuss geospatial ontology development and its usage in real world applications. In the past, I talked about the use of <a target="_blank" title="Wikipedia: Microformats" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microformats">microformats</a> to <a title="How to Geocode Your Blog" href="http://www.geospatialsemanticweb.com/2006/01/03/how-to-geocode-your-blog">geocode locations on the Web</a>. Microformats is a new approach that attempts to introduce meaningful markups in the existing HTML pages. In particular, it exploits the use of HTML attribute values.Norman Walsh has <a target="_blank" title="Inventing XML Languages" href="http://norman.walsh.name/2006/01/17/xmlLanguages">a post</a> that discusses different ways to encode the latitude and longitude information of the Eiffel Tower using microformat.There is also <a target="_blank" href="http://norman.walsh.name/2006/01/17/xmlLanguages#comment0001">an interesting comment</a> from Elliotte Rusty Harold that shows how the same information can be encoded in a more optimal representation.Just be warned. The described approach only works if the end user application (e.g., a browser) knows how to ignore the non-standard HTML tags. Otherwise, it may create problems during the page rendering process. Plan for retirement is a complex task. During the weekend, I was chatting with friends about retirement planning and investment. In the discussion, I was reminded again about some fundamental questions that are related to retirement investment strategy.Let me try to summarize my current strategy.Save as much as I can in 401K and IRA accounts.Build a portfolio that uses an S&P 500 index fund as the core. Without talking about anything else, the basic objective is to beat the market (i.e., S&P 500). The simplest strategy is to invest in an <a target="_blank" title="Wikipedia: Index Fund" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_fund">index fund</a> that tracks the movement of the broad market. Because the market tends goes north in a long term, buying into an index fund pretty much guarantees a positive outcome. In addition, historically majority of the mutual funds can’t beat a fund that simply tracks the market index (e.g., <a target="_blank" title="VFINX" href="http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=VFINX">Vanguard 500 Index Fund</a>). Therefore, it’s wise to put money in an index fund in case my other investment selections go bad.Exploit diversification and asset allocation in the rest of the portfolio. Diversification can be achieved by investing in mutual funds. When comes to asset allocation, I make sure that my assets are not invested in a narrow group of mutual funds. Currently I own a mix bag of large-cap, mid-cap, foreign stocks and specialties (metals and health care). While the underlying funds of these categorizes may change, but the asset allocation of the portfolio probably won’t change much.I track world economy news and developments. Some basic economic knowledge can be helpful in building my portfolio. Last night I drafted a Ubuntu Spec that defines a <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GeoLocDesktopService">desktop service for announcing user geo location</a> and also a component for aggregation of this announcements to be displayed on the user’s desktop. <Seth Ladd is asking what is the <a href="http://www.picklematrix.net/archives/000983.html">Best Reasoner Available?</a> There are some very good issues raised in his post, which more or less starts with: “ok we’ve got the RDF storage (Oracle 10g) - now what?”One big question is whether Semantic Web applications need reasoners. I’m sure this will vary from case to case. The first kind of situation that springs to mind is a ‘pure’ SemWeb app, one which depends heavily on the logic, e.g. an expert system using something like the <a href="http://www.schemaweb.info/schema/SchemaDetails.aspx?id=62">Wine Ontology</a>. At the opposite extreme there will be case where no inferencing is needed (or realistic), for instance when a company already has its data in a regular RDBMs, with the business logic being expressed through a combination of SQL and object code. The RDF/OWL expression of the data would then effectively be a view.But back to Seth’s situation, where you do have a triplestore. I honestly have no idea in the situation where you have a largish amount of data and want full inferencing. Coincidentally I was chatting about this over the weekend with <a href="http://www.langreiter.com/">Chris Langreiter</a>. I couldn’t think of any largish scale triplestore that had built-in RDFS and/or OWL reasoning, unless Jena’s OntModel can be persistent. (Hmm, using the <a href="http://dig.sourceforge.net/">DIG</a> interface to reasoners, presumably you’d have to tell them all the statements, which might be tricky if you’re talking millions of triple…) Around this space there are questions of whether the store should do eager or lazy evaluation of the inferences - <code>think</code> when you add triples or when you look for them. Eager would presumably be easiest to implement, but likely suffer from issues due to the increased number of triples present. I’m not really sure how one would manage lazy evaluation of queries in an efficient way that would still be complete. Can tableaux do this? Or maybe a graph path walking approach something along the lines of <a href="http://www.agfa.com/w3c/jdroo/">Jos De Roo</a>’s <a href="http://www.agfa.com/w3c/euler/">Euler</a> might do the trick. I can say from experience that a non-reasoning RDF store can be very useful, especially used an agile replacement for a regular relational DB. I’ve also found limited reasoning very valuable - just using MortenF’s <abbr title="Inverse Functional Property">IFP</abbr> <a href="http://rdfweb.org/topic/Smushing">smusher</a> with Redland made a huge difference to the capabilities (capabilities that can be considered built-in, rather than hanging off in separate arbitrary code). In the forseeable future on the Web at large I think it likely that non- or just minimal-inferencing RDF stores will make up the majority, analogously to the way most databases/filesystems behind current sites aren’t particularly smart. Seth also asks more generally about SemWeb app architecture. I guess we need a Patterns book… As it happens I’ve got a longish post in the pipeline for one such kind of setup (content-oriented).Anyhow, go read Seth’s post (and cc me with comments ;-) <While typing the last post I remembered something I want to try when I get a minute, thought I might as well dump here. I’m wondering if this might be a lightweight way of getting a bit of extra value from a ‘passive’ triplestore. Say you’ve got an otherwise non-inferencing but <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query">SPARQL</a>-capable triplestore. Running inference on the store’s data as a whole may be expensive, but without it many results for a given query may be missed (I’m not 100% sure about the current DAWG position in regard to queries being against the graph with all entailments - I assume this hasn’t been brought in). So now suppose you take a given query and fill in the variables from the store (i.e. tweak/run it as a DESCRIBE), and run complete OWL inference over that. Now cross-referencing between the original query and the DESCRIBE result, re-substitute variables in all the corresponding nodes in the inferred graph, and run this in the form of the original query. I’m not entirely sure how much sense this trick makes - the results wouldn’t be complete (the graph may contain uninferred connecting paths) but I believe sound, and maybe useful. <Dave Winer’s recently been promoting “<a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.scripting.com+reading+lists">Reading Lists</a>“, basically feed subscription lists that change over time. Ok, let me get the less positive bits of this post out of the way first (I’ll refrain from commenting on the OPML angle to keep it short ;-). There’s really nothing new in technical terms here, all it means is a periodic refresh of the data source in virtually the same fashion as feed polling, only shifted up a level. I’m sure a large proportion of web tools do this kind of thing already - e.g. every time you run a <a href="http://rdfweb.org/topic/Scutter">scutter</a> it’ll refresh all the interlinked (re)sources. Also Dave still seems a little reluctant to take on board some well-known web practices (“<a href="http://www.scripting.com/2006/01/16.html#When:9:17:07AM">…next week and the week after, when it’s history, all those aggregators will still be checking it…</a>“ - as pointed out on <a href="http://dev.upian.com/hotlinks">HotLinks</a>, this is covered by HTTP 410 Gone). But as Dave has done several times in the past, he’s identified a (social) angle where system functionality can provide immediate benefit for the end user. Along with evangelism he’s been proof-of-concept coding himself, something that has to be a plus. The <a href="http://toptensources.com">TopTenSources</a> folks have already implemented a Reading List style system, and one the benefits of this approach is neatly <a href="http://www.scripting.com/2006/01/17.html#When:8:40:04PM">summarised</a> by Dave as -<blockquote>It’s a way for readers to delegate the act of subscribing to experts in subjects they are interested in.</blockquote>Even the “Reading List” label itself is a great way of evangelising a small application behaviour shift that can potentially have huge benefit. It’s comparatively low-cost to update a local list of data sources by periodically polling a remote list (assuming the Last-Modified and ETag bits are in place). Forget one-off manual import/export, simply wire the services together.Incidentally, another positive thing I noticed from Mr.Winer is that there’s now a <a href="http://www.opml.org/guidelinesForValidation#subscriptionLists">quasispec</a> for subscription lists in OPML. See also: <a href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/palfrey/2006/01/17#a1039">RSS and Copyright, circa 2006</a> - John Palfry of <a href="http://toptensources.com">TopTenSources</a> on RSS republication and copyright etc. PS. Since this post Dave has had a <a href="http://www.scripting.com/2006/01/18.html#When:5:39:20PM">revelation</a> about a problem Reading Lists solves, but is being very secretive. My money’s on the import/export replacement thing mentioned above - he’s (rightly) grumbled about service lock-in a lot in the past, if you can get full subscription data from a URI there is no lock-in. PPS. <a href="http://www.scripting.com/2006/01/19.html#theAnswerToYesterdaysPuzzle">Near enough</a>. I love wireless. I think all gadgets should be wireless. <a target="_blank" title=" The i-Blue Bluetooth GPS Receiver" href="http://mobilitytoday.com/news/005986/mobility_buyGPSnow_i-Blue_bluetooth_GPS">i-Blue</a> is a cool GPS receiver that can communicate with your laptop or PDA via Bluetooth.<img width="128" height="94" id="image34" alt="i-Blue GPS Receiver" src="http://www.geospatialsemanticweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/01/i-BlueGPS.thumbnail.JPG" />Here is some highlights of its feature:<blockquote><ul><li>Longest operation time of 30 hrs per full charge. That is about 12 to 20 hrs longer than typical Bluetooth GPS in the market.</li><li>Smart Power Save Mechanism - When you use i-Blue PS-3200 for the first time, just power it up and place it under the windshield in your car. Anytime when you bring aboard your PDA or laptop computer with Bluetooth connectivity, i-Blue PS-3200 will enable itself for your navigating usage. Once you leave your car and take the PDA with you, i-Blue PS-3200 will go into sleeping mode.</li></ul></blockquote> <Mark Pilgrim :<blockquote>To sum up, the “photocasting” feature centers around a single undocumented extension element in a namespace that doesn’t need to be declared. iPhoto 6 doesn’t understand the first thing about HTTP, the first thing about XML, or the first thing about RSS. It ignores features of HTTP that Netscape 4 supported in 1996, and mis-implements features of XML that Microsoft got right in 1997. It ignores 95% of RSS and Atom and gets most of the remaining 5% wrong.</blockquote><a href="http://lists.apple.com/archives/syndication-dev/2006/Jan/msg00020.html">Unofficial documentation of iPhoto 6.0 photocasting feeds</a> I used to abhor ads on the Web. Now todays content ads don’t bother me as much as before. As you can see I have Google ads on my site, you know I don’t hate them. <img src='http://harry.hchen1.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':-)' class='wp-smiley' /> So the question is what has changed my mind about ads? Google AdSense. In the past, a lot of ads on the Web are pop-up ads with flashy images and logos. Most of the time, those ads are completely unrelated to the site that I was visiting. Remember those days when you visit a news site, an X10 ads would pop up right in front of your face…That was then. With Google AdSense, ads have been a lot more polite and less intrusive. I even hear my friends saying that sometimes Google ads are useful in finding services that they are looking for.Here is something that you might not know. Google AdSense is fueling is a growing market of entrepreneurs that profit displaying Google ads. According to <a title="Trickledown payoff from Google" href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/17/business/ecom18.php">this IHT article</a>, it’s not usual for a site with 15,000 user base to profit $10,000 a month from Google AdSense.Five to tens years ago, it was almost impossible for a person to make that much money just by working in a small office with a laptop (except day traders). If you think about it, Google AdSense has created a completely new occupation. The sole function of this occupation is to increase site traffic and serve more ads.If you think you have missed out on Google’s stock bonanza, perhaps you can start with Google AdSense. Make some money and then go buy its stocks.If you want to learn more about how Google AdSense has changed people’s life, read <a title="Trickledown payoff from Google" href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/17/business/ecom18.php">Trickledown payoff from Google</a> For those who are in the Geospatial Semantic Web field, this event may be of interest.Artificial Intelligence and the Web a special track of technical conference papers at AAAI-06 21st National Conference on Artificial Intelligence Seaport Hotel and World Trade Center, Boston, 16-20 July 2006The web has quickly grown from a modest hypertext system of interest to computer researchers to a ubiquitous information system including virtually all of human knowledge. Today’s Web provides ready access to not only text, images, and audio files, but also to structured and semi-structured information, services and people. It offers an open, decentralized (and uncontrollable!) environment in which anyone can publish information and services coupled with powerful search engines and agents to find and rank results. All of this is ubiquitously available from wired, wireless and mobile devices. Oh, and did we mention that it’s free?The special track on “AI and the Web” invites technical papers on the use of AI techniques, systems and concepts involving the Web. We are especially interested in receiving papers in two active research areas: (i) using text and language analysis to interpret and understand natural language text found on the web and (ii) developing and exploiting “Semantic Web” languages and systems that explicitly encode knowledge using languages such as RDF and OWL. Innovative papers in other areas describing research involving both AI and the Web are definitely encouraged also.<a target="_blank" title="Artificial Intelligence and the Web" href="http://www.cs.umbc.edu/aaai06/">See conference web for more detail.</a> Mash-up is a buzz word these days. Mash-up applications are applications that exploit two or more distinctive technologies provided by some existing applications and combined them to create new capabilities.Virtual NYC Tour is <a target="_blank" title="Tour New York with a Google-Wikipedia-GPS mashup" href="http://news.com.com/2061-10812_3-6028206.html">an interesting mash-up application</a> that exploit Google Maps and Wiki.<blockquote>The site, <a title="Virtual NYC Tour" href="http://www.virtualnyctour.com">www.virtualnyctour.com</a>, lets users choose from 17 different trails for a “walking tour” of locations such as Soho, Ground Zero and Central Park. A map pinpoints the user’s location while photos show what can be seen along that route (cars, trash bags on the sidewalk, people talking on cell phones, and, oh yeah, amazing architecture). Alongside that are historical and other summaries from Wikipedia.</blockquote> <In my <a href='http://dannyayers.com/archives/2006/01/07/rdf-for-rapid-development-of-a-data-model/'> last post</a>, I introduced my experiment at evolving a data model using RDF. This time, I’ll get to some particulars. I will illustrate using one of Danny’s RDF files - it describes a cat (what else!), Sambuca. You can see this page, before I modified it, <a href='http://semtext.org/pets/profile.xml'>here</a>. I’ve modified Danny’s original a little to point out some features.What do I mean by evolving a data model? In this case, most of the effort is in identifying new properties and relationships, and especially in learning that a property needs to be structured. This last is where the RDF approach is especially useful. Here’s an example.According to Danny’s data, Sambuca has a Primary Color of Brown, and secondary colors of White and Black. OK, so far there is a primaryColor property that has the literal value “Black”. Let’s say we learn that we need to specify a property specification, and still want to say that it is “Brown” too. The primaryColor has suddenly become structured - it has a color spec and a color name, like this: primaryColor:<ul><li>colorName: Brown</li><li>colorSpec: 3244044-3443-45445</li></ul>As long as we are just writing an indented list, this is easy to do - we just indent once more, and add as many entries as we want. But it’s more trouble in a relational database approach. In a relational model, the original literal was represented by a simple string field in the main pet table. The structured value needs to be captured in a separate table, and the main table must point to it using a foreign key. In RDF, we can have the property arc connect to a bnode, and both colorName and colorSpec will hang off it. The bnode may or may not be given a type, depending on your preferences. This is pretty easy, and it’s even easy in RDF/XML syntax. Here’s a fragment for the original, unstructured form:<pet:primaryColor>Brown</pet:primaryColor>Just assume that the namespaces are all declared properly somewhere off screen, if you would. Now, here is the newly structured way:<pet:primaryColor rdf:parseType=’Resource’>     <pet:ColorName>Brown</pet:ColorName>     <pet:federal-color-shade>3244044-3443-45445</pet:federal-color-shade> </pet:primaryColor>Of course, if the color is an RDF resource of its own, we would refer to that resource instead of using a literal, like this:<pet:primaryColor rdf:parseType=’Resource’>     <pet:ColorName>Brown</pet:ColorName>     <pet:federal-color-shade rdf:resource=’&color-specs;fed/3244044-3443-45445′/> </pet:primaryColor>Note how I use an XML entity as a shorthand for the entire URI of the resource. This is a very convenient trick. Of course, you to declare the entity in a DTD, which you can embed at the start of the RDF/XML document.There are two nice features of doing things this way. First, you can keep structuring properties as far as you like, and for each structuring, you can have as many subproperties as you like (only two here in this example). You will see more of this in the full example. Second, you don’t have to worry about the lengths of the string fields. Later you might, if you convert the model to a relational model, but by then you will have a much better idea of what your needs are. So you won’t have to go changing the field lengths.You also won’t have to keep inventing new tables and creating foreign keys for them. Yes, tools like ERWIN help a lot, but it’s still a pain to make these changes to a working relational database, and sometimes you can’t retrofit the changes but have to start again.Next time I’ll go into the subset of RDF/XML that I find useful and easy to work with, and also the XSLT stylesheet I use. If you want to peek ahead, Sambuca’s RDF file is <a href='http://tompassin.net/pub/rdf/cat_profile.xml'>here</a>, and the stylesheet is <a href='http://tompassin.net/pub/rdf/generic-rdf2html.xsl'>here</a>. I’ll close my answering an obvious question - why am I using RDF/XML instead of N3, Turtle, or something more readable like that? Well, two reasons, really. The main one is that I can use a stylesheet on the RDF/XML to make it nicely readable. This is really helpful during the evolution of the data model. It is also important for communicating with others, like your client.The second point is that the subset of RDF/XML that I use isn’t all that unreadable anyway, once you get used to it. In particular, its nesting mimics the indenting you would do just writing down the data in lists. I’ve been finding that a real help. Many of the alternative formats are intended to be written as a set of flat triples, which can truly become unreadable when your purpose is this kind of development.See you next time! <This Grauniad story brings out the nostalgia : <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1678307,00.html">Excuse me, weren’t you in the Fall?</a> - Dave Simpson tracks down everyone who has ever been a member of Mark E Smith’s band. I learnt the the three R’s * from their music. Nice to see the Blue Orchids getting a mention, I saw them in Blackburn supporting/backing Nico, they were fab. The only person I know (well, knew) fairly well who played for them isn’t mentioned. But oddly enough one of the founders, Tony Friel, now lives in Buxton, so had we stayed in the uk I’d probably have met him by now. * repetition, repetition, repetition <Just heard that <a href="http://www.talis.com/home/">Talis</a> have a podcast page -<blockquote><a href="http://www.talis.com/podcasts">Talking with Talis</a> Listen to conversations with thought-leaders at the interface between Web 2.0, Libraries, and the Semantic Web…</blockquote>Not had chance to listen yet but they’ve already got material from Ed Batista on Attention and Dick Hardt on Identity 2.0 (as well as a couple of library-related items I’m not qualified to comment on ;-) so it looks a must-<a href="http://talk.talis.com/index.xml">subscribe</a>. I like the new editor in WordPress 2.0, but unfortunately it doesn’t come with a spell check function. I used to use the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.coldforged.org/spelling-checker-plugin-for-wordpress/">Spell Checker Plugin</a> when I had WordPress 1.5. Unfortunately, the current plugin release breaks in WordPress 2.0.I find a work around solution that uses a browser extension called <a title="SpellBound" target="_blank" href="http://spellbound.sourceforge.net/">SpellBound</a>. This extension adds a spell check function in the context menu of the browser. SpellBound only works in Firefox and Mozilla. The installation is fairly simply.<a title="SpellBound" target="_blank" href="http://spellbound.sourceforge.net/">How to install SpellBound</a>Give it a try. So far it works well for me. Not that I’m recommending people to short sell GOOG, but I do think Google’s stocks are overpriced and <a title="GOOG is too risky for me" target="_blank" href="http://harry.hchen1.com/2005/11/17/158">too risky</a>. Analyst Scott Kessler has <a title="S&P Downgrades Google to Sell" target="_blank" href="http://www.businessweek.com/investor/content/jan2006/pi20060117_9999_pi010.htm">downgraded</a> Google’s stocks from HOLD (3 stars) to SELL (2 stars).<blockquote>Based on our forecasts of modestly stronger revenue growth and better operating leverage, we are raising 2005 and 2006 earnings per share (EPS) forecasts to $5.84 and $7.91, from $5.80 and $7.62. But our 12-month target price stays $428. We think Google still faces notable risks, including revenue concentration, rising competition, and click fraud. Google also announces the proposed purchase of dMarc Broadcasting, a provider of digital solutions for the radio industry, in a deal valued at up to $1.1 billion. Pending approvals, we see a first quarter closing. We think the deal reflects Google’s need to diversify.</blockquote> <<a href="http://lazyweb.org/">LazyWeb</a> request: Personal <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/attention" rel="tag">Attention</a> Aggregator. I want a little single-purpose tool to sync my attention data onto my server, running daily with cron [doesnt really matter too much where it runs, only server-side data would be more web-friendly]. In a handcrafted <a href="http://www.dajobe.org/2004/01/turtle/">Turtle</a> syntax file I want to give a list of URIs with labels, some of which will be associated with XSLT transformations (also URIs). These URIs will include things like my <a href="http://www.bloglines.com/export?id=dannyayers">Bloglines subscription list </a> (here’s <a href="http://pragmatron.org/trac/file/pragmatron/xslt/opml2blogroll.xsl">opml2blogroll.xsl</a> and <a href="http://pragmatron.org/trac/file/pragmatron/xslt/opml2skosroll.xsl">opml2skosroll.xsl</a>, not sure which would be best), my <a href="http://dannyayers.com/misc/foaf/foaf.rdf">FOAF profile</a>, the latest entries in my <a href="http://dannyayers.com/feed/rdf/">blog</a>, <a href="http://del.icio.us/rss/danja">del.icio.us</a> and <a href="http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=51035815526@N01&format=atom_03">flickr</a> feeds (<a href="http://pragmatron.org/trac/file/pragmatron/xslt/feed-rss1.0.xsl">feed-rss1.0.xsl</a> might help), my <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/registry/wishlist/ref=cs_nav_top_wl/202-5289208-1762244">Amazon Wishlist</a> (Amazon can run XSLT for you, here’s my current <a href="http://xml.amazon.co.uk/onca/xml3?t=webservices-20&dev-t=D1DL814D5WOP7D&WishlistSearch=31J4DB064WSNV&type=lite&f=http://dannyayers.com/2004/01/wishlist2rdf.xsl&locale=uk&page=1">wishlist as RDF/XML</a>, note that <a href="http://rdfweb.org/pipermail/rdfweb-dev/2004-January/012423.html">paging</a> is a potential issue). If I had any playlists/reading lists (who cares if they are <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/opml" rel="tag">OPML</a> ;-) then them too, along with the data in my (non-existent) <a href="http://attentiontrust.org/service/139">root vault</a>. You get the picture. Anyhow the tool will go and get these documents, transform as needed, then load them all into a single RDF model and dump the RDF/XML as a single file. Bonus points #1 - grab all the attention files of people appearing in my FOAF, merge and dump into a second file. Bonus points #2 - make a nice little renderer (SPARQL+XSLT might be sweet), Bonus points #3 - a little HTML form-based page to create the sources Turtle file. @@TODO suggest a property for FOAF to point to this kind of attention file.I welcome suggestions from critics of RDF on how one might merge this kind of information practically and meaningfully using any other technology.See also: <a href="http://crschmidt.net/semweb/menow/">MeNow</a>, <a href="http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/attentionxml">Attention.xml</a>Oh, and Just Fancy That! :<blockquote>Reading lists can be used to solve the problem of feed synchronization in a crude but totally “worse is better” way to make sure that my aggregator at home, the one at the office, the one on my traveling laptop and my cell phone are in synch, even if they’re made by different vendors.</blockquote>- <a href="http://www.scripting.com/2006/01/19.html#theAnswerToYesterdaysPuzzle">Scripting News, 2006-01-19</a><blockquote>Forget one-off manual import/export, simply wire the services together.</blockquote>- <a href="http://dannyayers.com/archives/2006/01/18/feed-reading-lists/">Raw, 2006-01-18</a>Synchronicity!See also : <a href="http://vrypan.net/log/archives/2006/01/19/delicious-as-fedd-manager/">del.icio.us as feed manager</a>, <a href="http://decafbad.com/blog/2006/01/19/use-delicious-to-build-share-reading-lists">Use del.icio.us to build & share Reading Lists?</a> After a short discussion with AndyS on #jena I reengaged on writing a C# application (using <a href="http://www.go-mono.com/">Mono</a>) that uses <a href="http://jena.sourceforge.net/">Jena</a>. Compiling all the <a href="http://jena.sourceforge.net/ARQ/FAQ.html">ARQ</a>-1.2 <code>.jar</code>s to <a href="http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Intermediate_Language">CIL</a> using <code>ikvmc</code> was an easy job:<pre><code>ikvmc commons-logging.jar log4j-1.2.12.jar -out:log4j.dll -target:libraryikvmc stax-api-1.0.jar wstx-asl-2.8.jar xercesImpl.jar xml-apis.jar resolver.jar -out:xml.dll -target:libraryikvmc antlr-2.7.5.jar arq.jar concurrent.jar icu4j_3_4.jar jakarta-oro-2.0.8.jar jena.jar -reference:xml.dll -reference:log4j.dll -out:arq.dll -target:library</code></pre>A short test if the Jena classes are working was derived from an example of the Jena documentatio and worked out just fine… replacing <code>import</code> with <code>using</code> and omitting the trailing <code>.*</code> gave quick working results.The hard part starts if it comes to <a href="http://jena.sourceforge.net/DB/mysql-howto.html">persistent Jena Models</a>. I am using MySQL, so I <code>ikvmc</code>ed the Java MySQL 3.2alpha driver and used the following code segment as learned from the docs:<pre><code> System.Activator.CreateInstance("mysql32alpha", "com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"); IDBConnection idbcon = new DBConnection("jdbc:mysql://db-server-2/jena23", "jdbc", "password", "MySQL");</code></pre><code>mysql32alpha</code> is the name of the assembly where the class <code>com.mysql.jdbc.Driver</code> is to be found. Compiling the code went well, running it resulted in <code>Exception: Failure to instantiate DB Driver:MySQL java.lang.NullPointerException</code>. So, I droppt the ikvm developers a line… awaiting an answer. Hang on for updatesUPDATE 1: With the devine intervention of “reinstall and configure your tool chain” I did that, currently running:<pre><code>goern@node-236:~/src/mono/ARQ-1.2$ ikvm -versionCLR version: 1.1.4322.2032 (32 bit)System: 1.0.5000.0IKVM.Runtime: 0.22.0.0IKVM.GNU.Classpath: 0.22.0.0ikvm: 0.22.0.0mscorlib: 1.0.5000.0GNU Classpath version: 0.19goern@node-236:~/src/mono/ARQ-1.2$ mono --versionMono JIT compiler version 1.1.13.1, (C) 2002-2005 Novell, Inc and Contributors. www.mono-project.com TLS: __thread GC: Included Boehm (with typed GC) SIGSEGV : normal</code></pre>Redoing the build process I got the ARQ and MySql <code>.dll</code>s and my binary, compiled just fine and runs fine. JDBC Connection is opned up, Jena Model gets opened and all the content dumped to Console. Having all the good tools in place two point araise:1. Determining the Language you use is hard! C# just looks like Java to me at the moment:<pre><code>using System;using com.hp.hpl.jena.rdf.model;using com.hp.hpl.jena.db;public class hodge { public static void Main() { IDBConnection idbcon = null; ModelMaker maker = null; Model model = null; System.Activator.CreateInstance("mysql32alpha", "com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"); idbcon = new DBConnection("jdbc:mysql://server/jena23", "user", "pass", "MySQL"); if (idbcon == null) Console.WriteLine("no IDBConnection"); try { maker = ModelFactory.createModelRDBMaker(idbcon); model = maker.openModel("pim"); } catch (Exception e) { Console.WriteLine("Exception: " + e.Message); } Console.WriteLine(model); // model.write(System.out); }}</code></pre>2. C# and Mono world seems to be open for Jena.PS: I have attached a <a href="http://b4mad.net/2006/01/20/jena-sharp.tar.gz">distribution</a> that contains a nant build file for the tasks above and the source code, just configure at top of <code>build.build</code>.PPS: I have not tested this under some MS Windows. <One hour by I was. <<blockquote><a href="http://www.markbaker.ca/2002/11/Resume/">Mark Baker</a> is an expert in, and a student of large scale distributed systems and software architecture in general. He has a special interest in application protocols and coordination languages, and in particular an in-depth understanding of the workings of the World Wide Web. He believes that, for the foreseeable future, the bulk of innovation in Internet scale systems will occur via additional architectural constraints applied to the existing Web.</blockquote>…and he’s actively <a href="http://www.coactus.com/blog/2006/01/hiatus/">seeking employment</a>. People can love and hate Google Earth at the same time.If companies want to put up big advertisement on a billboard down the street, they probably have to pay for it. Thanks to Google’s satellite aerial photo products such as Google Earth and Google Maps. Companies now have <a target="_blank" title="Google Maps get new agenda" href="http://www.t3.co.uk/news/general/general/google_maps_get_new_agenda">a new way to advertise</a>.<img align="bottom" title="Advertise on Google Earth" alt="Advertise on Google Earth" id="image38" src="http://www.geospatialsemanticweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/01/adgoogle_map_250.thumbnail.jpg" />Google Earth also reveals a lot of information that governments don’t want you to know. For example, what exactly was going on at Glasgow Prestwick airport the day the Google sat passed over? See “<a target="_blank" title="Google Earth fingers CIA rendition flights?" href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/19/google_earth_prestwick/">Google Earth fingers CIA rendition flights?</a>“ <‘nother quick link. I had to re-read the last few paragraghs of this post from Chris Dent a few times : <a href="http://www.burningchrome.com/~cdent/mt/archives/000430.html">Affinity for Categories</a>. He <a href="http://www.burningchrome.com/~cdent/mt/archives/000430.html#nidPXD">suggests</a>:<blockquote>All these things–tags, nicknames, WikiWords–are markers for conceptual categories. They are _not_ labels for classes.</blockquote>With a SemWeb hat on, they do look like <code>rdfs:label</code>s for <code>rdfs:Class</code>es. Chris provides his definitions for classes and categories, which (quite rightly) shifts things more towards <code>skos:altLabel</code>s for <code>skos:Concept</code>s. But I still felt I was missing something related to the description of these things as “ways of establishing affinity”. Until on about the 6th reading it hit me: it’s a kind of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_typing">duck typing</a>.Chris has a line which maybe coincides somewhat with the weak inverse functional properties Stefano <a href="http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/95/">describes</a>.<blockquote>Markers assume a measure of doubt, treasure it and get value out of connotation and suggestion. In other words, affinity.</blockquote> <According to (this site, according to) MENSA, if you get 19+ of the answers in this <a href="http://www.mensa-test.com/">test</a>, you are a “genius”. I got 24 in about 5 minutes with one eye on some test runs in another window. This says a lot more about (this site/) MENSA than about me. As does the fact that there are punctuation errors in the answers and at least 3 Bible questions (could be more - “23 P of C in the H B” looks suspicious) - cultural bias or merely lack of imagination? Probably what’s more personal is that I got bored with the puzzle after 5 mins, knowing that if I really needed all the answers Google or even comments in this blog could provide them… Moscow is experiencing the coldest winter since 1927. Temperature was recorded as low as minus 31 degree Celsius (minus 24 Fahrenheit). Forty people dead because of the cold weather. Kids stayed at home because schools are closed.While people are stocking up, zoo animals are also doing what they can to fight the cold. In a zoo nearby Moscow, monkeys are given wine three times a day to protect against colds.Should I call them “poor things” or “lucky guys”?Read <a target="_blank" title=" Russian freeze 'until February'" href="http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WEATHER/01/20/russia.cold.ap/index.html">the full story</a> on CNN.com <Since I’ve had it, every few months there’s been a little problem on this laptop (running Win2k). On returning after being away from the machine for a while, every time I pressed the “u” key an accessibility options manager window would appear. I thought the problem was occurring spontaneously, hardware glitch maybe, so in the past I simply rebooted. But this time there was something that looked mighty suspicious just prior to the problem appearing.<img src="http://dannyayers.com/2006/01/sambuca-laptop.jpg" alt="cat on laptop" />Bit of Googling on another machine revealed that the accessibility thing was enabled using the “Windows” key, a key I don’t think I’ve ever used. Like <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002119.html">Caps Lock</a> it seemed an appendix, but I wasn’t aware it was getting inflamed. Maybe I should remap it to launch Solitaire, give Sambuca something to do…She’s got the collar on because when we got back from Vienna she’d got a nasty little wound on her side. (Looks like a knee-graze, but when Primo had one very similar a while back the vet said it was a cat bite). Seems to be healing ok. Btw, turned out we needed 3 separate babysitters for the animals. Sparql didn’t reappear until the morning after we got back when Caroline went out calling despite it being well subzero outside. Eric had escaped and was loose in the kitchen. They can be a source of stress these 4-leggers. Poor <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/burningbird/search/tags:zoe/">Zoe</a> hasn’t been well recently, so poor <a href="http://weblog.burningbird.net/">Shelley</a> too.There’s something troubling Sambuca more than the injury/collar though. The cement around the chimney of the new woodstove needed replacing, the guy said yesterday to leave it a couple of days before firing up this time. Which means it’s not warm in the house, and Sambuca is a <a href="http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nesh">nesh</a> little creature. But laptop’s warm, and it’s alright in the sun too :<img src="http://dannyayers.com/2006/01/sambuca-roof.jpg" alt="cat on a warm tin roof" /> In order for computing machines to exploit the semantics of geospatial information, information must be explicitly represented. There are two ways to represent geospatial information: symbolic representation and geometric representation.In this blog, I discuss knowledge representation and different aspects of knowledge representation in the context of geospatial semantic web.<a id="more-40"></a><h5>Knowledge Representation</h5>People often ask the question, “What’s knowledge representation?” Knowledge representation, in computer science, is the study of how to represent knowledge and process the explicitly represented information in computing machines.The mind of humans are very good at knowledge representation, but computing machines are not. Programming is the way to “teach” machines knowledge representation.<blockquote>“The mind’s mechanism for storing and retrieving knowledge is fairly transparent to us. When we ‘memorize’ an orange, we simply examine it, think about it for a while, and perhaps eat it. Somehow, during this process, all the essential qualities of the orange are stored. Later, when someone mentions the word ‘orange,’ our senses are activated from within, and we see, smell, touch, and taste the orange all over again. Computers, unfortunately, are not as adept at forming internal representations of the world. … Instead of gathering knowledge for themselves, computers must rely on human beings to place knowledge directly into their memories. This suggests programming, but even before programming begins, we must decide on ways to represent information, knowledge, and inference techniques inside a computer.”(Source: <a title="Representation" target="_blank" href="http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/html/repr.html">Representation</a>, AI Topics, AAAI)</blockquote><h5>Symbolic Representation</h5>When it comes to representing geospatial information, symbolic representation is commonly used by humans to describe places in the physical world. For example, when I say “Iran is nearby Iraq”, you know the term “Iran” and “Iran” are two different middle-east countries. In a computer program, symbolic representation can also be used to describe similar geospatial information. For example, country(iraq), country(iran).Symbolic representation is great for enabling qualitative reasoning. For example, knowing nearby(iran, iraq), we can infer nearby(iraq,iran) — Iraq is also nearby Iran. More on <a target="_blank" title="Qualitative Reasoning" href="http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/html/qual.html">qualitative reasoning</a>.<h5>Geometric Representation</h5>Many GIS applications exploits geometric representation to describe and process geospatial information. In this representation, information is typically described by numerical values and formulas. For example, GPS latitude and longitude are geometric representation of coordinations on the Earth surface.Geometric representation is essential for geospatial modeling because some information is difficult to be described in a symbolic representation. For example, it difficult to describe the precious geo-political boundary of Iraq in a symbolic representation, but it’s rather easy to do so in a geometric representation, e.g., a bounding-box with GPS coordinates.<h5>Knowledge Representation in Geospatial Semantic Web</h5>In the context of the Geospatial Semantic Web, I believe we must explore the use of both symbolic and geometric representation. The symbolic representation of information will help us to enable qualitative reasoning, and the geometric representation of information will provide us with an accurate model of the physical world that is suitable for numerical computation. It’s clear that the red-hot real estate market is slowing down. Many people ask what they should do if they want to sell, buy or hold? Money magazine has <a target="_blank" title="http://money.cnn.com/2006/01/19/real_estate/homestrategies_money_0602/index.htm" href="http://money.cnn.com/2006/01/19/real_estate/homestrategies_money_0602/index.htm">some good advise</a> for people who are in either one of those situations.My thinking is that no one can time the market. If you have the money to buy a house and you need one, go buy it, and be sure that you are comfortable with the future mortgage payments. If you want to sell the house for some reasons, go ahead and sell. If you already have a house, don’t be afraid. Just because the market is slowing down, it doesn’t mean you are losing money. Protect yourself by getting a fixed-term mortgage and try to avoid taking out new HELOC to pay for that dreamed HDTV. One of the funniest things I’ve read in a long while, especially since I watched the first episode of Prison Break last week…I laughed so hard that I cried <img src='http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_biggrin.gif' alt=':D' class='wp-smiley' /> <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguide/columnists/story/0,,1691124,00.html">Guardian Unlimited | The Guide | Get into jail</a> Sorry for the downtime at POTB and other sites yesterday; after 13 days working in a row, I took the weekend off, and sure enough when I came back I found MySQL had died and didn’t restart yesterday morning. Anyway, trying to find the problem at the moment, but all looks okay so far… <div style="float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"> <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/cloudie/90182383/" title="photo sharing"><img src="http://static.flickr.com/28/90182383_4b2f4fb6c1_m.jpg" alt="" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" /></a> <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/cloudie/90182383/">P1000719</a> Originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/cloudie/">Cloudie</a>. </div>Now that things are returning to normality again, I have some time to work on SIOC again…Here’s the scribbles on my whiteboard as to how it aligns with FOAF and what has to be done in the future.Thanks to Hee-Chul Choi for the photograph. Most of my Semantic Web related discussions are between groups of Semantic Web hobbyists. While I enjoy talking to others who share my interests, but sometimes I think our discussions are limited because we all see the Semantic Web from a Computer Science research perspective. It’s kind of like a group of philosophers discussing hardest problems behind a closed door, and they never get a chance to hear what others (those non-philosophers) have to say about the problems.I find blogosphere to be the best place to hear what other non-Semantic Web hobbyists have to say about the Semantic Web. Technorati Watchlist is a good place to start.Here is a few favorite links on my Technorati Watchlist:<ul><li><a target="_blank" href="http://www.technorati.com/search/ontology">http://www.technorati.com/search/ontology</a></li><li><a title="http://www.technorati.com/search/folksonomy" target="_blank" href="http://www.technorati.com/search/folksonomy">http://www.technorati.com/search/folksonomy</a></li><li><a title="http://www.technorati.com/search/RDF" target="_blank" href="http://www.technorati.com/search/RDF">http://www.technorati.com/search/RDF</a></li><li><a title="http://www.technorati.com/search/semantic+web" target="_blank" href="http://www.technorati.com/search/semantic+web">http://www.technorati.com/search/semantic+web</a></li></ul>Here is <a title=" Assignment two - Semantic Web" target="_blank" href="http://thathsjustlife.blogspot.com/2006/01/assignment-two-semantic-web.html">a recent blog</a> from a mother of two kids who worked in the IT field for 7 years. In the blog she describes her understanding of the Semantic Web. <blockquote><a href="http://irvingwb.typepad.com/blog/2006/01/ibms_linux_init.html">Irving Wladawsky-Berger: IBM?s Linux Initiative</a>: By the summer of 1999 Linux was picking up steam in the marketplace.</blockquote>Hmm, would be nice the head how our top tech heads errrm… Vice President of Technical Strategy and Innovation sees the distribution of the success of Linux within IBM is. IBM Global Services is not leading the Linux business, from my point of view Linux and Open-Source is a key service enabler. IBM managed the make it a Hardware play and is putting all it’s Software ontop Linux. Most of the time the hardware brand is in the lead in projects I do, may be a Germany-only observation. <<a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/interest/">Semantic Web Interest Group</a> meeting at <a href="http://www.w3.org/2005/12/allgroupoverview.html">W3C Technical Plenary</a> Thursday, 2nd March, Cannes Mandelieu, France. This <a href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2006Jan/0241.html">heads-up</a> mail has the other details available at this time.Although it’s under the W3C umbrella, the SWIG is a a fairly informal group. If there is a definition of membership it would be subscription to the (public) <a href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/">semantic-web@w3.org</a> list. There’s no formal registration required for the meeting, but there will be a Wiki page (soon) to drop in your name (it’ll help with planning). <a href="http://danbri.org">Dan Brickley</a>’s the SWIG chair, but he’s globetrotting so can’t cover this meeting. I’m not really sure how this came about, but I’m down to stand in. Though the meeting’s not a formal do, the time is limited so there will be an agenda - hopefully I’ll have a first pass ready by tonight. Suggestions very welcome. I need to chat some more with danbri and the W3C folks, but one particular thing that seemed to work well at the meeting before last (I missed last year’s) was lightning talks on projects, tools, experiences, whatever : 10 mins show & tell. As it happens, the only tangible real-world outcome of this blog I know of was <a href="http://gmuer.ch">Reto</a> reading here a post about the 2004 SWIG meeting, discovering it was open to anyone interested, and turning up at short notice to demo his <a href="http://wymiwyg.org/knobot">KnoBot</a> SemWeb tech based content management system. Galileo is a new global navigation satellite system developed by the European Union (EU) and the European Space Agency to compete with the existing the GPS system, which is operated by the US military. Despite many critics argue that there is little scientific merit in developing Galileo, I believe the benefit of having a new system outweighs any political criticisms that are buzzing the media.<a id="more-41"></a>Problem #1: GPS is getting old. Galileo can serve as an alternative or a backup solution for global positioning.<blockquote>The system relies on a network of satellites, which cannot be repaired once launched and have a limited lifespan. Sixteen of the present 28 satellites were built to last seven and a half years, but are now between eight and 14 years old. Twenty-four satellites are required for full coverage.Source: <a title="GPS users must plan for outages" target="_blank" href="http://www.itweek.co.uk/itweek/news/2142864/gps-users-plan-outages">GPS users must plan for outages</a>, IT Week</blockquote>Problem #2: Monopoly is bad for the society. Like in many other businesses, when there is competition, the end consumers will benefit (e.g., cost reduced, service quality improved). Should there be two competing global navigation systems, the end consumers will benefit from the competitions between the two systems.Problem #3: The benefit of civilian users is not the first priority of the GPS system. Because GPS was intended for military applications, and it is still managed by a military organization, it’s difficult to say whether the US military will do everything they can to improve GPS so that everyday people can benefit, and not just the military.Some interesting reading: <a title="The new GPS accuracy: what the U.S. military isn't saying" target="_blank" href="http://www.exn.ca/FlightDeck/News/story.cfm?ID=20000502-53">The new GPS accuracy: what the U.S. military isn’t saying.</a>In summary, I’m happy see the development of Galileo, a new global navigation system that will compete with GPS. Not that I dislike GPS, I believe it will in the best interest of the World to have more than one satellite positioning system. As the technology progresses, <a title="News Analysis: Pinpoint targeting" target="_blank" href="http://www.brandrepublic.com/bulletins/data/article/534964/news-analysis-pinpoint-targeting/">applications of global navigation systems</a> is only limited by our imaginations.<blockquote /> <That’s <a href="http://jade.tilab.com/">JADE</a>, the Java Agent DEvelopment environment. If anyone’s used it I’d be grateful to hear of any cool stuff and/or gotchas, particularly from a SemWeb point of view.Ah, another little question - I notice JADE has stuff for J2ME-CLDC MIDP 1.0, my phone (Nokia 3220? not sure offhand, series 40 though) supports MIDP 2.0. Any tips on how to get the one on the other? According to <a target="_blank" title="Hybrids with Li-Ion in Their Tank" href="http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/jan2006/nf20060124_5834.htm">BusinessWeek magazine</a>, the next generation hybrid vehicles will feature lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries instead of the usual nickel metal hydride, or NiMH.What’s the big deal with Li-ion battery? It has lighter weight, and has higher energy density. In other words, hybrid cars will cost less to produce and will be more energy efficient.<blockquote>It’s easy to see the attraction of lithium-ion for auto makers. Li-ion cells are smaller, lighter, and more powerful than NiMH batteries. If manufacturers can bring prices down — a vital consideration since batteries account for over a third of the cost of hybrid systems — there’s every reason to believe that Li-ion will supplant NiMH as they have in laptops and other electronic gadgets.Sanyo has already produced Li-ion cells with power densities of 3,500 watts per kilogram — more than double today’s NiMH batteries. And while NiMH cells produce 1.2 volts, Sanyo’s Li-ion models pump out 3.7 volts, so a car would need only one-third the number of cells. In short, a Li-ion hybrid system would would take up less space and weigh less, which should help further boost fuel efficiency.</blockquote> <Little follow-up to Sambuca’s recent <a href="http://dannyayers.com/archives/2006/01/21/sambuca-explains-computer-problem/">sysadmin</a>. Yesterday I was happily working away on a machine to the left of this picture. Sparql was hovering, think she was after a Deli Bon. They’re dog treats, but it’s rare Basildog sees them. I ignore her. She hops on the laptop (through which the Internet is routed). Note the position of her paws. Dell laptops have slightly submerged off switches, presumably to prevent accidents. This shutdown was no accident…<img src="http://dannyayers.com/2006/01/sparql-shutdown.jpg" alt="Sparql shuts down" title="Sparql shuts down" /> People may think the present Web is ubiquitous because much of our daily activities revolve around the Web. But this thinking is not completely correct with respect to the kind of ubiquitous computing that <a target="_blank" title="Mark Weiser" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Weiser">Mark Weiser</a> had envisioned. W3C will host a <a target="_blank" title="World Wide Web Consortium To Hold Ubiquitous Web Workshop" href="http://www.w3.org/2006/01/ubiweb-pressrelease">workshop</a> to explore the synthesis of the Web and Ubiquitous Computing.<blockquote>What is the “Ubiquitous Web”?Ubiquitous means something that is often encountered and seemingly present everywhere. Ubiquitous computing, as described 15 years ago by Mark Weiser, postulates a world where people are surrounded by computing devices that are interconnected via networks, and which support us in everything we do. Despite the success of the World Wide Web on the desktop, we have only just begun to tap the potential provided by the increasing range of devices in use.The Ubiquitous Web seeks to broaden the capabilities of Web browsers to enable new kinds of Web applications, particularly applications that coordinate with other devices and adapt dynamically to the user, device capabilities and environmental conditions. Applications will be able draw upon network services to extend device capabilities. People will be able to focus on what they are doing rather than on devices. Application mobility will allow people to keep working or playing while seamlessly switching from one device to another.</blockquote> <I’ve only recently started using IRC on a regular basis. I still find it very distracting (same with IM, Skype, telephones…), the cost/benefit can suck. But work requirements have tipped me over, and I’m really glad I was on #swig today, there was a load of good stuff. Here are some bits snipped for future ref, I’ve edited typos etc but hopefully got the intent:<blockquote><iand> we have developed a versioned triple store that stores diffs as rdf in the triplestore … <libby> …did you see greg’s stuff on limiting picture access to your friends using foaf? … <AndyS> …jena has events on graphs so they can drive things off updates. … <timbl> Andys, any idea of how difficult it would be to add link-folllowing to Jena? <AndyS> timbl: it’s a per-store thing - easy to get basic functionality for, say, memory graphs … <AndyS> For any URI : do I know about it? If not, fetch and insert. The async fetch will be amusing - jena has events on graphs so they can drive things off updates. … <timbl> but if you do it on load, you should traverse the whole web. <timbl> That’s why people haven’t done it. <timbl> If you do it on query, then you only pull in data the user actually needs. … <timbl> Well, i think you should pull in predicate pointers — ontological closure — on load. <timbl> But subject and objet on query. … <timbl> A test case is select ?mbox, ?name where tim =foaf:knows [ foaf:name ?name, foaf:mbox ?mbox ] … <timbl> There is a simple theorem that if a SPARQL server follows links like that, and that anyone publishing data which are part of some large global distributed set of triples U publishes documenst so that if you dereference a uri x then you get a document which conatins all the outgoing links and ingoing links for x, then the SPARQL query server will be definitive for U in the sense it will return all triples in the graph U matching the query <timbl> So I’m trying to get people to (a) publish data with links and (b) follow them but not necessarily in that order … <timbl> So I get the feeling I should make my IRC entries into blog entries and my blog entries into DesignIssues notes into papers … but this involves doing more QA and that takes more time. <DanC> chuckle … <DanC> blog entries can be sorta iterative, too. I’ve heard you push this “if we arrange semweb data in the right way, we’ll be able to find it” idea a few different places. Once you’ve tried to explain something 3 times, I recommend you give it a blog item … <timbl> That was my criterion for a DesignIssues note. <timbl> Anything which needs a diagram has to be a DI note. … * DanC stares at a pile of SPARQL comments … <DanC> anybody wanna play comment-whack-a-mole with me? …</blockquote> <<a href="http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/71">TimBL</a> :<blockquote>Do you have a URI for yourself? If you are reading this blog and you have the ability to publish stuff on the web, then you can make a <a href="http://www.foaf-project.org/">FOAF</a> page, and you can give yourself a URI. …</blockquote>[That’s a http: URI with a # in it] <TimBL has some great <a href="http://www.w3.org/2005/ajar/About">notes</a> associated with his experimental Ajax SemWeb browser, <a href="http://www.w3.org/2005/ajar/tab.html">Tabulator</a>. It’s an outliner, but the data underneath isn’t necessarily hierarchical - the data model isn’t tied to the view. There’s another significant difference between this and most other outliners/browsers : <blockquote>The browser browses things, not documents. Of course some thing are documents, but the browser considers them first as things, and then as documents.</blockquote>The bit about directionality of links is must-read. In <a target="_blank" title="Give yourself a URI" href="http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/71">his recent blog</a>, TimBL advocates everyone who is able to publish web pages to publish a <a target="_blank" title="FOAF Project" href="http://www.foaf-project.org/">FOAF</a> document and a URI for themselves. Using URI to reference different kinds of resources (e.g., people, places, and things) is a fundamental principle of the Semantic Web.So what’s URI? How is it different from URN and URL? See this article — <a target="_blank" title="The future of the Web is Semantic" href="http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-semweb/">The future of the Web is Semantic</a>.In the Semantic Web, not only people should be given URI, geospatial things should also be given URI. I believe in the future there will be URI for identifying different kinds of geographical information (e.g., URI for a country, URI for a state, URI for a building, URI for a physical location, URI for a lake in the park).A natural question to ask is who should be the authority on defining these URI and managing them? My answer is <a target="_blank" title="Government Should Standardize Geospatial Data" href="http://www.geospatialsemanticweb.com/2006/01/06/government-should-standardize-geospatial-data">the governments</a>.BTW, for those who are interested in my FOAF profile and my URI:<ul><li>FOAF: <a title="Harry Chen FOAF" href="http://harry.hchen1.com/foaf.rdf">http://harry.hchen1.com/foaf.rdf</a></li><li>URI: http://hchen1.com/people/harrychen</li></ul><blockquote /> <<blockquote>robustification should proceed on all fronts</blockquote>- <a href="http://danbri.org">Dan Brickley</a>Ok, a bit of context - chatting on IRC about timbl’s <a href="http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/71">Give yourself a URI</a>, it arrived like this:<blockquote>… <danbri> we need widespread use of URIs <danbri> we need reference by description <danbri> we need RDF toolkits that can deal with the idea of things sometimes having multiple names <danbri> or no (known) names <danbri> robustification should proceed on all fronts …</blockquote> <<blockquote><a href="http://www.openiris.org/">IRIS</a> is a semantic desktop application framework … OpenIRIS will be released in January 2006…</blockquote>Release doesn’t appear to have happened yet, but I’m looking forward to when it does. Maybe it’s time to subscribe to their <a href="http://www.openiris.org/news/RSS">news feed</a>.Must read : <a href="http://dannyayers.com/archives/2006/01/26/iris/#comments">Jack’s update</a> - in short, it’s coming *very* soon, and will be *very* cool (but not for grannies yet ;-) <<a href="http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/blog/2">Dan Connolly</a>’s set up a <a href="http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/1/grddl-cfi/">survey on GRDDL</a> to canvas for community opinion. The answer options on the form are fine-grained, but it’s short - here are the basic questions :<ol><li>Are you interested in a meeting about GRDDL during the 2006 Tech Plenary?</li><li>What is your level of interest in GRDDL?</li><li>Do you see any issues with the GRDDL spec?</li><li>Should the GRDDL charter include a requirements/use-cases phase?</li><li>Is remote collaboration sufficient for finishing GRDDL?</li></ol> <I just put my name down for something I might well regret (no <a href="http://www.holygoat.co.uk/blog/entry/2006-01-24-1">prestige</a> to speak of either). Here: <a href="http://wordpress.org/development/2006/01/help-out/">WordPress Development Blog - Help Out Development</a>, I’ve gone under the feed stuff. I don’t know what happened to WP in this respect, it did seem pretty much feature-aligned with state of the art when I switched from MT. But they still don’t appear to have Atom (except 0.3 which isn’t really Atom), or a clue about RSS/RDF. I hope someone fixes the caching in WP 2.0 soon too - you may have noticed issues…PS. Just got to the point where I couldn’t launch emacs on the server without killing Apache first. Action time. I disabled the built-in cache (as described <a href="http://www.thinklemon.com/weblog/2006/01/15/wordpress-20-cache-is-broken/">here</a>), then installed <a href="http://mnm.uib.es/gallir/wp-cache-2/">WP-Cache 2.0</a> plugin (I did have an earlier version of this installed prior to upgrading WP, it worked well), seems much improved so far. My friend Ismael is all about how to simplify IT business and increase productivity. His view of the next generation business application suite is called <a title="Office 2.0" target="_blank" href="http://itredux.com/blog/office-20/">Office 2.0</a>. In a nutshell, Office 2.0 is a collection of interactive business applications that run on web browsers. He sees Ajax as the enabling technique that will revolutionize business applications. His favorite Office 2.0 application is Gmail.In this <a title="Rules for Office 2.0" target="_blank" href="http://itredux.com/blog/2006/01/25/rules-for-office-20/">blog</a>, he describes few rules that a good Office 2.0 application should obey:<blockquote><ul><li>No client application other than a web browser</li><li>No files on personal computer</li><li>Compatibility with the most popular web browsers</li><li>No browser extension or plugin</li><li>Collaboration features are good</li><li>Syndication is the way to go</li><li>AJAX is better</li><li>Competition brings alternatives</li><li>Data import/export is mandatory</li></ul></blockquote>Echoing what TimBL <a title="Give yourself a URI" target="_blank" href="http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/71">advocates</a>, the following is another rule for Office 2.0:<ul><li>All resources in an application must be identifiable by URI</li></ul> If you ask people “What’s Web 2.0?” Different people will give you different answers. In my mind, central to Web 2.0 is Ajax and semantic markups (i.e., microformats, RDF, or OWL).Question: How do I know if my website is Web 2.0?Answer: Do one of the following:<ol><li>Read what Tim O’Reilly has <a target="_blank" title="What's Web 2.0" href="http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html">described</a> — a laundry of list of Web 2.0 characteristics. Evaluate whether the technology that backs you site meets what he has described.</li><li>If reading is too much for you, use <a target="_blank" title="Web 2.0 Validator" href="http://web2.0validator.com/">Web 2.0 Validator</a> — an automated web tool that scores your site based on a set of Web 2.0 characteristics. Note that the tool does pay attention to whether a site (a) uses Semantic Markups, (b) mentions RDF and the Semantic Web.</li></ol>Here is how my website scored:<a id="more-249"></a>The score for http://harry.hchen1.com is 11 out of 43<ul><li>Uses python? No</li><li>Is in public beta? No</li><li>Uses inline AJAX ? No</li><li>Is Shadows-aware ? No</li><li>Uses the prefix “meta” or “micro”? Yes!</li><li>Refers to mash-ups ? No</li><li>Has favicon ? No</li><li>Uses Google Maps API? No</li><li>Appears to be web 3.0 ? Yes!</li><li>Mentions startup ? No</li><li>Uses Cascading Style Sheets? Yes!</li><li>Attempts to be XHTML Strict ? No</li><li>Mentions Less is More ? No</li><li>Refers to the Web 2.0 Validator’s ruleset ? No</li><li>Mentions Dave Legg ? No</li><li>Appears to use AJAX ? No</li><li>Makes reference to Technorati ? Yes!</li><li>Appears to be built using Ruby on Rails ? No</li><li>Refers to VCs ? No</li><li>Refers to Flickr ? No</li><li>Mentions Ruby? No</li><li>Mentions Cool Words ? No</li><li>Mentions The Long Tail ? No</li><li>Links Slashdot and Digg ? No</li><li>Mentions Nitro ? No</li><li>Appears to use MonoRail ? No</li><li>Has prototype.js ? No</li><li>Creative Commons license ? Yes!</li><li>Uses microformats ? Yes!</li><li>Actually mentions Web 2.0 ? No</li><li>Uses Semantic Markup? Yes!</li><li>Use Catalyst ? No</li><li>Mentions RDF and the Semantic Web? Yes!</li><li>Refers to web2.0validator ? No</li><li>Refers to Rocketboom ? No</li><li>Refers to del.icio.us ? Yes!</li><li>Validates as XHTML 1.1 ? No</li><li>References Firefox? No</li><li>Appears to over-punctuate ? Yes!</li><li>References isometric.sixsided.org? No</li><li>Appears to have Adsense ? Yes!</li><li>Mentions 30 Second Rule and Web 2.0 ? No</li><li>Uses the “blink” tag? No</li></ul> MarketWatch <a title="US GDP Slows in the 4th Quarter of 2005" target="_blank" href="http://www.marketwatch.com/news/newsfinder/pulseone.asp?siteid=mktw&guid={3EF6D3FA-3093-4142-A607-FB4951C546B9}&dist=bnb">reports</a> US GDP in 2005 4th quarter slows to 1.1%, the weakest growth in three years.Implications:<ul><li>The Fed may finally stop raising the interest rate</li><li><a title="CD Ladder with INGDirect" target="_blank" href="http://harry.hchen1.com/2006/01/21/243">CD investment</a> looks good if the interest rate won’t go any higher in the short term</li></ul> <The title of this post is <title>. <The <a href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/draft-obasanjo-feed-URI-scheme-02.html">feed:</a> URI scheme just came up on both Apple’s syndication list (<a href="http://lists.apple.com/archives/syndication-dev//2006/Jan/msg00045.html">post</a>) and the WordPress developers list (<a href="http://comox.textdrive.com/pipermail/wp-hackers/2006-January/004256.html">post</a>). It seems some people still consider it a good idea. The idea being that a href like <code>feed:http://example.org/blog.rss</code> will launch your feed reader. Ok, it was a pretty good effort at a workaround of RSS 2.0’s lack of a standard mime type. But workarounds aren’t always (!) the best approach. In this case <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/">WebArch</a>itecturally it sucks, TimBL <a href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2004Feb/0004">captured</a> the issue nicely:<blockquote>My feeling is that feed: is basically harmful in that it confuses the identity of the object with the way the user should treat it. “feed:” and “webcal:” are harmful in the same way, and “http:” should be used.</blockquote>If that reasoning isn’t clear enough, try Anne van Kesteren’s <a href="http://annevankesteren.nl/2004/08/finding-feeds">version</a> : “compare it to a jpg URI scheme”.Incidentally I’ve been cursing <code>mailto:</code> a lot recently. I’ve still got Thunderbird as the registered mail app on this machine, but am using Gmail. Links don’t tend to advertise their URI scheme. <Ok, this blog didn’t do very well on the <a href="http://web2.0validator.com/">Web 2.0 Validator</a>. But how about the <a href="http://www.webcredibility.org/guidelines/">Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility</a>1. Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site. Ok, not bad - I’m pretty good at linking to sources. 2. Show that there’s a real organization behind your site. Heh, heh. 3. Highlight the expertise in your organization and in the content and services you provide. Hmm, bit lacking there, though I do have a little <a href="http://dannyayers.com/misc/about/biog.htm">resume</a> linked from the front page. I really need to reorganise the sidebar asap, must bear this point in mind. 4. Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site. Check the <a href="http://dannyayers.com/2006/01/sparql-shutdown.jpg">photo</a>. 5. Make it easy to contact you. There are comments, and my email address is on the resume page, but I don’t have anything that clearly says “Contact”. Duly noted. 6. Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose). Conflicting demands! Anyhow I reckon it’s just about good enough (few tweaks needed). 7. Make your site easy to use — and useful. The former : there’s still a lot could be improved. The latter : er, ditto. 8. Update your site’s content often (at least show it’s been reviewed recently). Woo-hoo! Got one right! 9. Use restraint with any promotional content (e.g., ads, offers). Check the sidebar. Buy the book. 10. Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem. I personally get things wrong pretty regularly, but as opinion I guess that’s not really the kind of error they’re talking about. I’ve got more careful about markup recently, but am long overdue a sitewide check for 404s.Ok, I think this site just about scrapes through the Credibility GCSE, but with a very large Could Do Better. One of the most successful Semantic Web project is <a target="_blank" title="FOAF" href="http://www.foaf-project.org/">FOAF</a> (the Friend of a Friend project). The goal of this project is to create a Web of machine-readable homepages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.In this blog, I will show how to describe location information in a FOAF profile using latitude and longitude.<a id="more-44"></a>FOAF is not a social network system. It’s a language for expressing information that is essential for building social network systems. The current FOAF language specification is built on the RDF language. Details of the FOAF language is available here. If you are interested to create a FOAF profile for yourself, try <a target="_blank" title="FOAF-a-Matic" href="http://www.ldodds.com/foaf/foaf-a-matic.html">FOAF-a-Matic</a> — a web application that helps you to create a basic FOAF profile.My FOAF profile looks like this: <a target="_blank" title="Harry Chen's FOAF" href="http://harry.hchen1.com/foaf.rdf">http://harry.hchen1.com/foaf.rdf</a><h5>FOAF Contact Information</h5>In my FOAF file, these RDF descriptions describe my contact information:<div class="codesnip-container" ><div class="codesnip"><ol><li class="li1"><div class="de1"><foaf:Person rdf:about=“http://hchen1.com/people/harrychen”></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">  <foaf:name>Harry Chen</foaf:name></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">  <foaf:title>Dr</foaf:title></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">  <foaf:givenname>Harry</foaf:givenname></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">  <foaf:family_name>Chen</foaf:family_name></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">  <foaf:nick>hchen1</foaf:nick></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">  <foaf:mbox_sha1sum</div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">    >80368445d942c6e207c6694353355c3bd37f3e7a</foaf:mbox_sha1sum></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">  <foaf:homepage rdf:resource=“http://harry.hchen1.com”/></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">  <foaf:depiction </div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">      rdf:resource=“http://harry.hchen1.com/images/hchen-small.jpg”/></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">  <foaf:workplaceHomepage </div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">      rdf:resource=“http://www.imagemattersllc.com”/></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">  <foaf:schoolHomepage rdf:resource=“http://www.umbc.edu”/></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">  …</div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1"></foaf:Person> </div></li></ol></div></div><h5>FOAF Social Network</h5>FOAF also allow we describe my social network (i.e., people that I know):<div class="codesnip-container" ><div class="codesnip"><ol><li class="li1"><div class="de1"><foaf:Person rdf:about=“http://hchen1.com/people/harrychen”></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1"> </div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">  <!– Harry knows Tim Finin –></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">  <foaf:knows></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">    <foaf:Person></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">      <foaf:name>Tim Finin</foaf:name></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">      <foaf:mbox_sha1sum</div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">   >49953f47b9c33484a753eaf14102af56c0148d37</foaf:mbox_sha1sum></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">      <rdfs:seeAlso </div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">         rdf:resource=“http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~finin/foaf.rdf”/></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">    </foaf:Person></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">  </foaf:knows></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1"> </div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">  <!– Harry knows Anupam Joshi –>  </div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">  <foaf:knows></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">    <foaf:Person></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">      <foaf:name>Anupam Joshi</foaf:name></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">      <foaf:mbox_sha1sum</div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">  >de4984eb69b9610f133321ac8b1fc38de56661e3</foaf:mbox_sha1sum></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">    </foaf:Person></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">  </foaf:knows></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1"> </div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">  …</div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1"> </div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1"></foaf:Person> </div></li></ol></div></div><h5>FOAF Geo Information</h5>The core FOAF vocabulary specification does not include vocabularies for describing location information using latitude and longitude. However, it’s quite easy to extend the core vocabulary to include this capability. In fact, W3C Semantic Web Interest Group published a a set of basic geo vocabulary (or ontology for short).In this ontology, the notion of point is used to represent location in the physical world. A point object has two properties: latitude and longitude. The following roughly describes where I live and where I was born:<div class="codesnip-container" ><div class="codesnip"><ol><li class="li1"><div class="de1"><foaf:Person rdf:about=“http://hchen1.com/people/harrychen”></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1"> </div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">  <!– Harry lives somewhere in Columbia, MD –></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">  <foaf:base_near></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">    <pos:Point></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">       <pos:lat>39.206133</pos:lat></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">       <pos:long>-076.827537</pos:long></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">    </pos:Point></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">  </foaf:base_near></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1"> </div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">  <!– Harry was borned at Shanghai, China –></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">  <fam:born-at></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">    <pos:Point></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">       <pos:lat>31.14</pos:lat></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">       <pos:long>121.29</pos:long></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">    </pos:Point></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1">  </fam:born-at></div></li><li class="li1"><div class="de1"></foaf:Person> </div></li></ol></div></div> I think aloud. My blog discussion can span across different topics. Sometimes this can be confusing to readers who are only interested in a particular topic of my discussion.Today I added a <a title="Harry Chen RSS Feeds" href="http://harry.hchen1.com/rss/">RSS page</a> that lists RSS feeds that filter on a specific topic of discussion. Let me know what you think. <<blockquote>Are you any or all of the following?<ul><li>Good with RDF?</li><li>Experienced with Lisp or Perl?</li><li>An SBCL hacker?</li><li>Experienced with modern telephony?</li><li>A very fast learner?</li></ul></blockquote>- go and see <a href="http://www.holygoat.co.uk/blog/entry/2006-01-28-1">Richard Newman</a>Or fancy one of these (or similar) :<blockquote><ul><li>SPARQL Query Optimization</li><li>Federated Query</li><li>RDF Dataset Management System</li><li>RDF Storage</li><li>Semantic Blogging</li><li>Semantic Photos</li><li>Jena Knowledge Base</li><li>Eyeball RDF Repair Plugin</li><li>Information Management</li></ul></blockquote>- take a look at <a href="http://www.hpl.hp.com/semweb/student-work.htm">HP Labs Bristol</a> <<a href="http://inamidst.com/sbp/">Sean B. Palmer</a> has put together a little <a href="http://inamidst.com/proj/valid/">tool</a> to visually indicate the markup-validity of a page :<blockquote>Validation Status: <img src="http://dannyayers.com/2006/01/valid.png" alt="valid" />The image above comes from a service which validates the URI in the request’s HTTP Referer header and returns either a smiling green <img src="http://dannyayers.com/2006/01/valid.png" alt="valid" /> or a frowning red <img src="http://dannyayers.com/2006/01/invalid.png" alt="invalid" /> face depending on the results. So any page on this site which contains a link to that dynamic image will automatically let people see whether or not it’s valid.</blockquote>The validation is being carried out by the <a href="http://validator.w3.org/">W3C service</a>, Sean’s script does the magic to let you see the status at a glance. Coincidentally what this provides is very close to a nothing-to-lose <a href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2005Nov/0021">request</a> I sent off to the validator folks not long ago. Sean hadn’t seen that, so if I hadn’t sent the request he would still have created the tool (butterflies notwithstanding). Thus the LazyWeb is proactive, one might even say <a href="http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=memelist.html?m=1%23626">The Very Model of a Modern Singularity</a>…See also : <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logos">Logos</a> <Jim Hendler and associates in Maryland are <a href="https://www.mindswap.org/blog/2006/01/26/thnking-about-the-semantic-web/">Thnking about the Semantic Web</a> <I missed this first time around, Leo Sauermann <a href="http://leobard.twoday.net/stories/1099047/">reads the tags</a> :<blockquote>I predict, that major tools that build today on what we know as folksonomies will include the core elements of the semantic web, and at a certain point in time, the necessarity for RDF and the good stuff will be obvious to the masses of developers and users out there.</blockquote>Leobard’s <a href="http://leobard.twoday.net/stories/1480956/">pointing</a> to that because there’s evidence of some of those “core elements” to be found in <a href="http://www.rawsugar.com/index.faces">RawSugar</a>, a social tagging + structured directory site. See also : <a href="http://www.holygoat.co.uk/projects/tags/">Tag Ontology</a>, <a href="http://www.citeulike.org/tag/ontology">CiteULike “Tag Ontology”</a>, <a href="http://www.connotea.org/search?q=folksonomy">Connotea “folksonomy”</a>(Note to self : did I finish Moz bookmarks to SKOS converter? Easiest way to predict the future etc etc…) <Ok, finally posted the announcement for the <a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/interest/">Semantic Web Interest Group</a> open meeting at W3C Technical Plenary Thursday, 2nd March, Cannes Mandelieu, France. <a href="http://esw.w3.org/topic/SwigAtTp2006">Details</a>.Provisional Agenda :<blockquote>9.00-9.30 Welcome and Introductions 9.30-10.00 “DBin: an all round Semantic Web platform for user communities” Giovanni Tummarello 10.00-10.30 “Trust RDF to describe Web content?” Phil Archer (content label XG) 10.30-11.00 Coffee 11.00-11.20 Health Care and Life Sciences IG intro 11.20-12.00 Lightning talks (max 10 mins each) <ul><li>Cristian Morbidoni - “Semantic Web for the Humanities: RDF and OWL for Textual Encoding”</li><li>Michele Nucci - “Cooperative Semantic Web geotagging tools The Eclipse SW Map/GEarth” </li><li>Danny Ayers : Atom/OWL</li><li>Reto Bachmann-Gmuer (unconfirmed) : rdf-diff/rdf-patch </li><li>Tim Berners-Lee : “Browsable data”*</li></ul>12.00-1.30 Lunch 1.30-3.30 “Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages” Dan Connolly “GRDDL” - Dan Connolly Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages - getting RDF data out of XML and XHTML documents, e.g. microformats, using explicitly associated transformation algorithms, typically represented in XSLT. 3.30-4.00 Coffee 4.00-4.40 “WSDL RDF mapping” and “Semantic annotations for WSDL” Jacek Kopecky 4.40-5.00 Open discussion/lightning talks - topics : <ul><li>AndyS, libby - ad hoc</li><li>Outreach & Education (danja todo quick suggestion slides) </li><li> … </li></ul>* “Lightning speaker reserves the rights to change contents title and length of presentation at any time before during or after the presentation”.</blockquote>(I was hoping to get another <a href="http://dannyayers.com/archives/category/virtual-world/semantic-web/sw-weekly/">SW Weekly</a> together this week, but been very busy/distracted. Soon!) Smart investors understand the truth of investment: investment is a risky business, and investment is a long-term proposition. Being a non-professional investor how I protect myself from market extremes?Here is some advise from Sue Stevens at MorningStart.com:<ol><li>Invest for the long term, and don’t try to time the market.</li><li>Reaccess your risk tolerance. Stock market is a very risky place. For example, “One day we’re above 11,000 for the first time in four and a half years and within two weeks we have a “correction” that marks the biggest one-day decline since 2003.”</li><li>Don’t put your nest egg in one place. Diversify your investments. This is of great importance as we have more to worry about these days, e.g., terrorism threats, government’s intelligence tactics, and sky-high oil prices.</li><li>Save more and spend less.</li><li>Stick with your investment goal and don’t let the financial media scare you.</li></ol>Source: <a target="_blank" title="Advise on Coping with Market Extrems" href="http://news.morningstar.com/article/article.asp?id=154557">How to Cope with Market Extremes</a>, January 26, 2006. Apple is pushing iTunes and Podcasts to a new level. ABC News reports that Apple Computer Inc. has introduced “iTunes U,” a nationwide expansion of a service that makes course lectures and other educational materials accessible via Apple’s iTunes software.<blockquote>Apple’s service offers universities a customized version of the iTunes software, allowing schools to post podcasts, audio books or video content on their iTunes-affiliated Web sites. The iTunes-based material will be accessible on Windows-based or Macintosh computers and transferable to portable devices, including Apple’s iPods.Stanford University, which joined the pilot program last fall, gives the public free access not only to some lectures but also audio broadcasts of sporting events through its iTunes-affiliated site.Schools and universities have historically been major contributors to Apple’s computer sales. With iTunes U, Apple “is leveraging the ubiquity that we’ve established on campuses with iPods and iTunes,” said Chris Bell, Apple’s director of product marketing for iTunes.</blockquote>If we consider that online universities didn’t really work out for many higher education institutions, it’s possible that iTunes U may just be another hype. However, if you consider the following, Apple may just have a shot pushing iTunes and Podcasts to a next new level:<blockquote>Our students are digital natives.</blockquote>Source: <a title="Apple Offers College Lectures Via Podcasts" target="_blank" href="http://www.abc2news.com/news/new-site/06-01-30-apple-podcast.shtml">Apple Offers College Lectures Via Podcasts</a>, ABC2 News, January 30th, 2006. <Quick idea dump. Ok, a triplestore can be viewed as a cache of a chunk of the Semantic Web. At the light end you’ve got something like TimBL’s <a href="http://www.w3.org/2005/ajar/tab">Tabulator</a>, which (approx) does just-in-time traversing of the SW. This really is close to the intuitive cache, in that the model is (I believe) in-memory. At the heavy end you’ve have something that has persistence more like a SQL DB, e.g. an aggregator or FOAF scutter’s collection.I find the idea of navigating through SemWeb space through a command-line quite appealing, but so far have only looked at it from the point of view of a local model/store (sbp has implemented something along these lines : <a href="http://infomesh.net/pyrple/rdfe/">RDFe - A Schema-Aware RDF Editor</a>). But there’s no reason the command line UI couldn’t be used on live data on the web - conceptually just swap the icons and clicks of Tabulator for text and keystrokes. Now there’s a qualitative difference between the RDF model being built up and the data in most caches in that it can contain merged/selected/filtered info from multiple sources rather than a direct copy of a single chunk of info.Which leads to the idea of using a command-line tool for harvesting info from the SW, not necessarily for immediate consumption.The nearest existing analogy I can think of is ftp. So imagine a shell-like interface which supported graph navigation commands. But then you have two data spaces - the “remote” web and a local triplestore. You could browse the remote space, when you encounter something of interest you could issue an ftp-like command to copy a bunch of remote statements locally. I’m still not sure how you’d actually distinguish/handle the difference between local and remote, the distinction is artificial. They’d look the same. Aside from the local lacking 99.9% of the available info, but this would be an advantage for quick inference. Nope, I’m really not sure. Maybe the easiest way to experiment would be to link Tabulator to some long-term persistence. Anyhow, one for later. See also: <a href="http://www.masswerk.at/jsuix/">JS/UIX - Terminal</a>PS. title changed - was “rtp” (RDF-) but now “ttp” for triples- . I think “stp”’s already overloaded… Ah, I guess I should add that I’m not suggesting a new wire protocol here - that’s adequately covered by HTTP delivering RDF/XML etc (or HTML/XML GRDDLed on the fly) and <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/">SPARQL</a>. The “ttp” bit would just be the human interface protocol, a set of commands like those of ftp. Skype will be the first ever Voice-over-IP provider to sell ringtones. According to UK PC Pro News:<blockquote>VoIP pioneer Skype has signed a deal with Warner Brothers to offer ringtones featuring the company’s roster of best selling artists.The artists include some of the world’s biggest names including Madonna who will be leading the charge onto a phone near you with tracks from her latest album ‘Confessions on the Dancefloor’Each 30 second sound clip will cost $1.50 and follows similar deals that the music arm of Warner Brothers has made with the mobile phone industry. However, this is thought to be one of the first deals made with a VoIP company.Source: <a title="Skype signs up for Warner Brothers music" href="http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/83095/skype-signs-up-warners-music.html">Skype signs up for Warner Brothers music</a>, PC Pro News, January 31st, 2006.</blockquote><a id="more-258"></a>Personally I have never paid for a ringtone. Not sure if I will ever pay for a ringtone. However, I don’t represent majority of the consumers. I know some of my friends do pay for ringtones even it cost $1/download.It’s no surprise that “Ringtones have become big business for the music industry. It is thought that the profits made from ringtones now outstrip those made from CD singles.”I wonder few years from now will musical industry relax their rules about free music download and sharing because they have found a more profitable stream of incoming in music ringtones? It’s possible. Don’t you think so?<blockquote /> In business:<ol></ol><ul><li><a title="New Mouseketeer: Steve Job's Magic Kingdom" target="_blank" href="http://www.businessweek.com/mediacenter/podcasts/cover_stories/covercast_01_26_06.htm">New Mouseketeer: Steve Job’s Magic Kingdom</a> (Businessweek): interesting stories about Steve Job’s success and failure as Apple’s ex-CEO and CEO. Predications about Steve Job, Apple and Disney in three years from now…</li></ul><ol></ol>In science:<ol></ol><ul><li><a title="Born to Believe" target="_blank" href="http://www.newscientist.com/data/av/podcast/newsci-20060127-born-to-believe.mp3">Born to Believe</a> (New Scientist): why did human evolution find God? Is religious faith something that is built into our DNA?</li></ul><ol></ol> <Save on vet’s bills by doing the injections yourself! Just as <a href="http://images.google.com/images?sourceid=navclient-ffamp;ie=UTF-8amp;rls=GGGL,GGGL:2005-09,GGGL:enamp;q=site%3Adannyayers.com+sambuca">Sambuca</a> was able to take her collar off following her bite, <a href="http://images.google.com/images?sourceid=navclient-ffamp;ie=UTF-8amp;rls=GGGL,GGGL:2005-09,GGGL:enamp;q=site%3Adannyayers.com+neo">Neo</a> came down with something. He was meowing discomfort, not eating and had a cacky rear end. Caro took him to the vet’s the day before yesterday, I just got back - glucose drip plus antibiotics, anti-inflammatories. He’s on the mend, but for the next two days I’ve got to give him a jab at home. I’ve been doing this a while for our <a href="http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?_adv_prop=imagesamp;x=opamp;fr2=opamp;va=+amp;vo=sparql+sambuca+neo+primo+sassi+basil+frumpy+amp;vst=onamp;vs=dannyayers.comamp;vm=p">pack</a> and <a href="http://images.google.com/images?svnum=10amp;hl=enamp;lr=amp;safe=offamp;c2coff=1amp;rls=GGGL%2CGGGL%3A2005-09%2CGGGL%3Aenamp;q=site%3Adannyayers.com+longhair+OR+pelone+amp;btnG=Search">Pelone</a> next door. It’s half-an-hour’s drive to the vet’s, so timesaver too. I’m not by any means suggesting not going to the vet at all when an animal gets poorly. My best diagnosis for Neo (based on what I read in the book with scary pictures) was <a href="http://www.lifelearn.com/webdvm/addons/articles/analsac.htm">inflamed anal sacs</a> (not restaurant safe). The vet said throat infection. We live in a market-driven business world. Companies don’t usually develop new technology just because it’s fun, and consumers don’t usually buy products just because the companies have them in the stock. Market demand is what drives companies to innovate and consumers to spend.Let’s assume my theory is correct. Technologies of geospatial semantic web probably will share the same fate as other technologies in the world. If there is no market for them, sooner or later, they will disappear and be forgotten. If there is a market for them, they will prosper and make some of us rich.Today I ask myself: “is there a market for geospatial semantic web?”<a id="more-45"></a>My answer is “yes, but not today”. I speculate that in next 2-5 years, geospatial semantic web technology will see its market in e-governments, national security, pervasive and mobile computing, and electronic commerce.E-governments. Governments are like big businesses. They are interested in cutting costs and increasing productivity and efficiency. As government agencies moving from a paper-oriented business model to a digital-information model, there will be crisis of digital information management. Different agencies will have different databases and IT infrastructures. This raises the question of interoperability — i.e., can knowledge developed in one agency be shared by other agencies in a timely fashion? I think geospatial semantic web technology can help to solve part of this problem.National security. A key to better national security is better intelligence. The best way for a government to fight terrorism is to be able to acquire the most of accurate intelligence information using the shortest amount of time possible. Given the complexity of the world intelligence and the vast amount of information that the intelligence agencies collect everyday, it’s almost impossible for human analysts to process without the help of smart computer systems. I think geospatial semantic web technology can help analysts to discover, integrate, share, and reason over intelligence information.Pervasive and mobile computing. The future of our digital life style is pervasive and mobile computing. Computing services are available to us anywhere and anytime. To be able to process location information effectively will be central to many smart services. Not only these services need to be able to use sensors to track location and detect people’s presence, they must also be able to understand geospatial relations and reason about them. This is why I believe that geospatial semantic web technology can help.Electronic commerce. Knowledge about its customers is one of the most valuable assets of a E-commerce company. Companies spend a great amount of resources to study and discover customer behaviors. Among different types of customer information, geographical information is a valuable one. For example, knowing the physical location of a customer, a business can target its advertising and promotions. In the future, should geospatial semantic web technology becomes viable business solutions, companies will be able to acquire far more sophisticated knowledge about their customers — e.g., what’s distance between the home and the workplace of a customer? What’s the demographic of the neighborhood of a customer? What items have the female neighbors purchased in the past two week?I’m a geospatial semantic web optimist. I believe there will be more than one market for this technology. While I don’t think businesses are ready for it as of today, but I think give it 2-5 years it will be a whole different ball game. MarketWatch kindly informs us that <a target="_blank" href="http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story.asp?guid=%7B94AFEF33%2DF78D%2D4E87%2DAB25%2DBE7E00D89F01%7D&siteid=mktw&dist=">GOOG share fall as much 19% in after-hours trading</a>.<blockquote>Shares of Google (<a class="lk01" href="http://www.marketwatch.com/tools/quotes/quotes.asp?symb=GOOG&siteid=mktw">GOOG</a>) tumbled as much as 19% in Tuesday’s after-hours session following the Internet company’s lower-than-expected earnings report. The stock briefly changed hands at $352 vs. a regular-session closing price of $432.66. At last check, Google rebounded to $370.93.</blockquote>My feeling is that this marks the beginning of GOOG price reality check. Most of Google’s income comes from online advertising. There is little doubt that it’s adSense business is growing. But one must ask the question “can Google sustain this kind of profit growth in the years to come?” I’m skeptical about this, unless it comes out with some new killer-apps (e.g., <a title="Google at work on desktop Linux" href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/31/google_goes_desktop_linux/">Goobuntu</a>). <a target="_blank" title="Harry Chen" href="http://harry.hchen1.com/">Harry</a> picks mashup applications of the day:<ol><li><a target="_blank" title="If I dig a very deep hole, where I go to stop" href="http://map.pequenopolis.com/">Dig to the Other Side</a>: If I dig a very deep hole, where I go to stop? Pick a spot on the map and it shows you the opposite location on the globe.</li><li><a target="_blank" title="Brewster Jennings Protects America" href="http://www.brewsterjennings.com/">Brewster Jennings Protects America</a>: The classic game Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego lives on in this interpretation on a Google Map. Race around the globe as a government agent to stop a deadly terror attack.</li><li><a target="_blank" title="Bush History Map" href="http://www.mapyourancestors.com/bush/">Bush History Map</a>: See George W’s life history plotted on this Google Map.</li></ol> In Technology<ul><li><a target="_blank" href="http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/downloadtrial/worldservice/godigital/godigital_20060130-1500_40_st.mp3">Go Digital (January 30th, 2006)</a>: do you know the last week of January 2006 marks the 40th anniversary of the invention of fiber optics? Do you know how important is Wi-Fi to New Orleans people and gorillas in Africa? Subscribe to <a title="Go Digital" target="_blank" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/1478157.stm">BBC Go Digital Podcast</a>.</li></ul>In Business<ul><li><a target="_blank" title="There's Oil in Them Thar Sands " href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/news/inbusiness/inbusiness_20060126.shtml">There’s Oil in Them Thar Sand</a>: do you know Canada has the second largest oil reserve only after Saudi Arabia? The only reason why Canada hasn’t profit from their oil because it wasn’t economical to extract it. Now a barrel of oil costs around $50-$60, Canadian oil reserve becomes extremely attractive. How will this impact the local natural environment, native Americans, and world economy?</li></ul> To many consumers the Internet is no longer just another place to kill time, but it’s a place to get things done, to be entertained, and <a target="_blank" title="Attention College Students, Here Comes iTunes U" href="http://harry.hchen1.com/2006/01/30/257">to be educated</a>. As the Internet becomes an important part of our everyday life, businesses waste no time in finding new adventures in hope to increase their competitive advantages.Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft all have been buying new media companies to boost their Internet content services. Here is a chart of “who is buying what”:<a id="more-265"></a><img alt="Looking who is buying!" title="Looking who is buying!" src="http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2006/02/02/GR2006020200737.gif" />According to Leslie Walker at Washington Post, the Big-Three’s are heavily invested in the following technologies:<ul><li>Messaging technology with voice chat and calls from computers</li><li>Mobile data technology, e.g., DodgeBall.com</li><li>Broadcasting (radio, tv)</li><li>Internet telephony</li><li>Online social networks</li></ul>I think Leslie Walker has done a great job in <a target="_blank" title="Web's Big 3 Jockey for First" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/01/AR2006020102272.html">summarizing</a> the latest business strategies of Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft and their respective challenges. If you’ve been excited about the emerged technologies in the past 5 years, then prepare yourselves for what to come in the next 5 years. I guarantee you that they will be even more exciting. There are few different ways to listen to podcasts on your TiVo. TiVoBlog.com explains them in details.<ol><li>Use TiVo HME app (limited podcasts)</li><li>Use Galleon (requires a decent server machine)</li><li>Hack around iTune (requires some DIY effort)</li></ol>Source: <a target="_blank" title="How to Listen to Podcasts on Your TiVo (without Galleon or TiVo's app)" href="http://www.tivoblog.com/archives/2006/02/01/how-to-listen-to-podcasts-on-your-tivo-without-galleon-or-tivos-app/">How to Listen to Podcasts on Your TiVo (without Galleon or TiVo’s app)</a> <ol><li><a title="daddytypes.com" target="_blank" href="http://daddytypes.com/nyc_mens_room_changing_tables.php">daddytypes.com</a>: a Google Maps mashup that shows all known New York City men’s rooms with baby diaper-changing tables. This mashup was featured in a recent New York Times <a title="Changin' in the Boys' Room" target="_blank" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/fashion/sundaystyles/25DIAPERS.html?_r=1&oref=login">article</a>.</li><li><a title="Kayak Buzz" href="http://www.kayak.com/h/buzz/flights">Kayak Buzz</a>: a Google Maps and Kayak mashup that tells you where you can go for under a certain amount of money? It displays airfares under a user defined amount of money on a Google Map.</li></ol> Big Internet companies like AOL and Yahoo! process thousands and thousands of email messages a day. In order to protect users from spam messages, these companies set up message filters to guard against unwanted email messages. In doing so, sometimes it delays the delivery of legitimate email messages.To solve this problem and to help the respective company to increase revenue,� “AOL and Yahoo! say they intend to introduce a system that would guarantee speedier delivery to companies that pay between 0.25 and one US cent (0.15p to 0.5p) for each message”, <a target="_blank" title="Internet giants announce plans Internet giants announce plans" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1703192,00.html">Guardian Unlimited reports</a>.<blockquote>The Internet service providers would still accept email from senders who do not pay for preferential treatment, but the paid messages would bypass spam filters and other barriers which strip off pictures and other images to land more quickly in in-boxes.</blockquote>Does this mean that in the future there will be guaranteed speedier delivery of spam messages as long as the spammers are willing to pay $0.25 per message? I recently found <a href="http://www.cocomment.com/">cocomment web service</a> via <a href="http://dannyayers.com/archives/2006/02/05/comment-tracker/">Danny’s site</a>, it is a wonderful tool to track what you have left all over the blogosphere: your own comments. From my point of view this is <a href="http://www.attentiontrust.org/research#comment-4">attention data</a>. I am pretty sure it would make sense if cocomment gateways it’s data into <a href="http://root.net/people/goern">root.net</a> or some other attention data aggregator. I’m a regular user of <a target="_blank" title="SWOOP" href="http://www.mindswap.org/2004/SWOOP/">SWOOP</a>, a lightweight ontology editor and explorer developed by the MINDSWAP group. Today I downloaded a copy of Swoop v2.3 beta 3. After using it for few hours, I love it.I especially like the “Fly the Mothership” feature. It allows users to view ontologies in an intuitive graph diagram. The following is a screenshot of using this feature to view <a target="_blank" title="OWL-Time Ontology" href="http://www.isi.edu/~pan/OWL-Time.html">OWL Time ontology</a> and a use case of the time ontology:<a id="more-269"></a><img id="image268" alt="Swoop Screenshot" src="http://harry.hchen1.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/02/swoop2.gif" />In the picture, the top-left blue circle represents all concepts defined in the <a target="_blank" title="Time entry ontology" href="http://www.isi.edu/~pan/damltime/time-entry.owl">time-entry.owl</a> namespace. The smaller blue circle represents all concepts defined in the <a target="_blank" title="timezone ontology" href="http://www.isi.edu/~pan/damltime/timezone-us.owl">timezone-us.owl</a> namespace. The big red circle represents all concepts defined in the <a title="time entry case1" href="http://www.isi.edu/~pan/damltime/time-entry-case1.owl">time-entry-case-1.owl</a> namespace.Inside the large circles, the smaller circles represent individual OWL classes that are defined in the corresponding ontologies. If you click on one of the small circles, the corresponding OWL class will be highlighted in the left-side Class List tab.I think this graph representation of ontologies is more intuitive than the box-structured representation used in <a target="_blank" title="SemanticWorks 2006" href="http://www.altova.com/products_semanticworks.html">SemanticWorks 2006</a>. While the box-structured representation is appropriate for XML and RDF editing, the graph representation is more appropriate for viewing class relationships. <h5>Geospatial Semantic Web</h5>The most value asset in a GIS system is data. Without data, a GIS system is like a computer system with the best peripherals but only with an empty hard drive — it’s useless. If data is so important, it is necessary for us to understand the role of data in the future GIS systems — i.e., the Geospatial Semantic Web.<a id="more-52"></a>The Geospatial Semantic Web is more than a collection of web applications that know how to display pretty maps with interactive user interfaces. Applications of the Geospatial Semantic Web will help people and computer programs to discover and share information.<h5>Geospatial Data in Mashups</h5>I love mashups. They transform information that was previously difficult for people to comprehend to maps, a graphic representation of informatoin that everyone is familiar with.If we study the kind of data that is used in the map mashups, we find that they have one thing in common — all location information is expressed in terms of geographical coordinates (i.e., latitude and longitude).<h5>Different Kinds of Geospatial Data</h5>It’s clear that people’s understanding of the geographical world is more than a collection of coordinates. In fact, most of us don’t think in terms of coordinates when we navigate directions in the physical world. For example, when someone ask you for directions, you would hardly ever tell that person a list of coordinates that they should follow in order to reach the destination.If you follow this thinking, it should be easy for me to convince you that Geospatial Semantic Web applications need to be able process more than just location coordinations. So what’re other kinds of geospatial data?<ul><li>Location property: while coordinates can tell you the precise location of a physical thing on the Earth surface, location property can tell you geographical attributes and characteristics of that physical thing. For example, the US White House has a pair of lat/long coordinates (38.898748,-77.037684), it’s location property includes the following: (1) it’s a building, (2), it’s located in Washington, DC, (3) only people with special permissions can enter and live there, and (4) it’s a must-visit tourist spot in Washington, DC.</li><li>Spatial relations: humans understand spatial relations very well. We know traveling east is opposite to traveling west. We know if a person lives in the city New York City, then it’s also true that the person lives in the state New York and lives in the country U.S. Understanding spatial relations can help computer systems to reason about new location information based on facts that are already known.</li><li>Temporal-spatial information: things in the physical world change over time. As time passes, what we know today about a location may or may not be true tomorrow. Temporal-spatial information may describe the property changes of a fixed location over time, or location changes of a mobile entity over time.</li></ul><h5>Final Remarks</h5>I hope I have successfully convinced you that there are different kinds of geospatial data, in addition to geographical coordinates. The use of coordinates information in today’s mashup applications is only the beginning of a new wave of GIS web applications. In order to help people and computing machines to discover and share information, Geospatial Semantic Web applications must exploit other kinds of geospatial data such as location property, spatial relations, and temporal-spatial information. I’m off work with pneumonia. Thought it was just the flu or a chest infection at first but it’s a bit more serious, so the doctor says I have to rest up… I’m purely sick of being confined to bed, 14 days and counting. Haven’t been online much either. Why do bubbles form if a glass of water is left alone for a while?Here is an answer from a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:<blockquote>Atmospheric gases such as nitrogen and oxygen can dissolve in water. The amount of gas dissolved depends on the temperature of the water and the atmospheric pressure at the air/water interface. Colder water and higher pressure allow more gas to dissolve; conversely, warmer water and lower pressure allow less gas to dissolve.When you draw a glass of c old water from your faucet and allow it to warm to room temperature, nitrogen and oxygen slowly come out of solution, with tiny bubbles forming and coalescing at sites of microscopic imperfections on the glass. If the atmospheric pressure happens to be falling as the water warms, the equilibrium between gas molecules leaving and joining the air/water interface becomes unbalanced and tips in favor of them leaving the water, which causes even more gas to come out of solution. Hence bubbles along the insides of your water glass.</blockquote>Source: <a title="Why do bubbles form if a glass of water is left alone for a while?" target="_blank" href="http://www.sciam.com/askexpert_question.cfm?chanID=sa005&articleID=00000028-3D24-13E1-BD2483414B7F0000&topic_id=4">Ask The Expert: Chemistry</a>, Scientific American, February 06, 2006 <code>07:00:35 GMT, erd/G/eschoss:</code> mail is read, spam is deleted. rss feeds checked - only <a href="http://clockwerx.blogspot.com/">clockwerx</a> had an entry I needed to comment on. iTunes got all the new podcasts, my contact list is still sleeping.Time to get to work for money, have a nice day. So, there were a few hundred postings flying in my feed reader the last few days, some are left over to be read:<ul><li><a href="http://bokardo.com/archives/in-the-blogging-world-you-dont-have-sex-on-the-first-date/">dont have sex…</a> seems like a nice posting that helps understand how the web of trust in blogosphere works</li><li><a href="http://bokardo.com/archives/math/">mining user’s content</a></li><li><a href="http://www.jabber.org/jsf/ipr-policy.shtml">Jabber :: JSF :: IPR Policy</a> Jabber Software Foundation’s official policy regarding intellectual property rights</li><li><a href="http://bokardo.com/archives/dynamic-reading-lists/">dynamic reading lists</a></li></ul>Especially the last one attracted my attention… what about a dynamic readinglist that adjusts itself using statistics of my reading, tries to filter out over-updated feeds and lowers priority of feeds that doesnt seem to meet my current reading habits? <a target="_blank" title="Fourth Semantic Interoperability for E-Government Conference " href="http://colab.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?FourthSemanticInteroperabilityforEGovernmentConference_2006_2_0910#nid30QA">The Fourth Semantic Interoperability for E-Government Conference</a> was held today at the MITRE Corporation (McLean, VA). The purpose of this conference is to bring together semantic interoperability practitioners to discuss and showcase technologies that can help government agencies to improve information sharing, knowledge management and interoperability. The conference expects about 250 attendees from different government agencies, universities and industries.Colleagues and I represented <a target="_blank" title="Image Matters LLC" href="http://www.imagemattersllc.com/">Image Matters LLC</a> to showcase the company’s new product called KnowledgeSmarts. We had an exhibition booth set up during the networking lunch session. It was fun meeting people from different backgrounds who share a common interest in semantic technology.<a id="more-53"></a>Our KnowledgeSmarts product is a middleware system for knowledge integration. It exploits the use of Semantic Web languages (RDF and OWL) and ontologies to enable the dynamic integration of legacy data from heterogeneous data sources. A key feature of this system is its support for geospatial semantics. This includes the use of spatial and temporal ontologies, an integrated solution for geospatial reasoning and semantic query.Not that I believe KnowledgeSmarts alone can solve all semantic interoperability problems, though I hope it can, but I strongly believe that it’s trying to solve a critical problem — knowledge integration.Today many organizations share a common problem — too much data and too little time to process. For example, in government agencies such as NGA, there are tons of data collected over the years. Data collected from different sources during different time periods are usually stored in different data stores with different format representations. Today it’s extremely difficult to build software systems that can exploit this vast amount of data without spending a lot of time and investments to reconsolidate databases and format representations. From an economic point of view, such effort would require a great amount of financial investments and time. To agencies like NGA, this is an unattractive solution.One approach to solve this problem is to avoid database reconsolidation, but to enable dynamic representation and semantic reconsolidation. That is, leave the data in the persistent stores as it is, but enable its representation and semantics to interoperate. This is where Semantic Web languages and ontologies come to play.KnowledgeSmarts can unify data from heterogeneous data stores (databases, shapefiles, web contents etc.) into RDF. Known data types are dynamically mapped into ontology classes and properties. Once data is expressed in RDF and ontologies, we can then reason about it, manipulate it, and query it. We can even share the RDF data with other foreign systems as long as they share the same ontologies.For more information about KnowledgeSmarts, see <a target="_blank" title="Image Matters Product List" href="http://www.imagemattersllc.com/Products/products.htm">Image Matters LLC product website</a>. If you are attending SICOP 2006, tomorrow morning Dr. Yaser Bishr will give a presentation on KnowledgeSmarts. Yesterday I attended <a target="_blank" title="SICoP 2006" href="http://colab.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?FourthSemanticInteroperabilityforEGovernmentConference_2006_2_0910#nid30QA">SICoP 2006</a> (the 4th Semantic Interoperability for E-Government Conference). I was there with my colleagues to <a target="_blank" title="KnowledgeSmarts Showcased at SICoP 2006" href="http://www.geospatialsemanticweb.com/2006/02/09/knowledgesmarts-showcased-at-sicop-2006">showcase</a> Image Matters’s new product called KnowledgeSmarts.The purpose of this conference is to create synergy between the government agencies and the industry companies that share a common interest in semantic interoperability technology.Many agencies in the US government see the lack of semantic interoperability is a big problem. Without it, information can’t be effectively shared between different agencies. It’s often the case that individual agencies invest heavily on data modeling and data collection, but later they each found the effort is unnecessary only if they knew how share and interoperate in the beginning.<a id="more-272"></a>I see there are few challenges ahead of this semantic interoperability effort:<ul><li>The habit of change is not in the DNA of many government agencies. Top-level leaders usually don’t prefer change unless the situation presents an immediate threat (e.g., DHS is created only after 9/11).</li><li>The idea of collaboration doesn’t play well between some agencies. In a huge organization, it’s typical that different divisions don’t prefer to work with each other because individually they want to be the hero of the organization.</li><li>Many technologists in the government who want better semantic interoperability are often shot down because their boss’s boss doesn’t buy the vision.</li><li>Not enough follow-up from the agencies to use innovative technologies that were funded by the agencies themselves. Agencies invest heavily on semantic interoperability technology. Often they forget to review or don’t spend time to market the fruitful results of their investments.</li><li>In order to protect classified data, contractors who work on semantic interoperability projects don’t get to see the real data used in the agencies. Often the contractors weren’t even told about the exact work flow of the agencies. Without sufficient knowledge about the real world problem, it often hinders the contractors’ ability to devise adequate solutions to solve the problem.</li></ul>In order to facilitate better communication and information sharing, it’s in the best interest of the government to address the semantic interoperability problem now. Though I recognize many inherent research issues must be addressed before a full-scale deployment, but also I see many policy issues within the government must be addressed so that researchers and technologists can do their jobs better. Time: 2006-02-10T11:06.I was shocked to see some unusual links on Technorati. It’s clear that some porn sites figured out how to spam Technorati with massive tagged posts.I guess we are living in a world where we can escape from the spammers. <img src='http://harry.hchen1.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_sad.gif' alt=':-(' class='wp-smiley' /> <a id="more-275"></a><img border="1" alt="technorati got spammed" id="image273" src="http://harry.hchen1.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/02/technorati-1.jpg" /><img border="1" alt="technorati got spammed" id="image274" src="http://harry.hchen1.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/02/technorati-2.jpg" /> Forbes.com publishes a slide show of <a target="_blank" title=" The World's Most Corrupt Countries" href="http://www.forbes.com/2006/01/24/06caphosp_corrupt_slide.html?boxes=popslide&boxes=custom">the world’s most corrupt countries</a>. I have never heard of some of the countries — Equatorial Guinea, Turkmenistan, Cote D’ivoire,Some other interesting slide shows.<ul><li><a target="_blank" title=" Top Ten Worst Intersections" href="http://www.forbes.com/2006/02/06/cx_bm_0207trafficslide.html?boxes=popslide&boxes=custom">Top Ten Worst Intersections</a></li><li><a target="_blank" title=" Emerging Global Cities" href="http://www.forbes.com/2006/01/30/06caphosp_globalcities_slide.html?boxes=popslide&boxes=custom">Emerging Global Cities</a></li><li><a target="_blank" title=" Most Expensive Penthouses 2006" href="http://www.forbes.com/2006/02/02/cx_sc_0203homeslide.html?boxes=popslide&boxes=custom">Most Expensive Penthouse 2006</a></li><li><a title=" Top-Earning Supermodels" href="http://www.forbes.com/2006/01/27/cx_lr_topmodelslide.html?boxes=popslide&boxes=custom">Top-Earning Supermodels</a></li></ul> As the world countries compete to become leaders in a global market, technology advancement is a key to increase one country’s competitive advantage. The Korea Times reports that <a title="Korea Plans to Build `Mobile Paradise'" target="_blank" href="http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/200602/kt2006020817251110440.htm">South Korea plans to build a “Mobile Paradise”</a>.<blockquote>The special district is kind of a free technology zone that will create a new mobile environment. It will play the role of test-bed for up-and-coming wireless platforms.Included in the available techniques will be all mobile broadcasting systems like DVB-H developed by Nokia, Qualcomm’s MediaFlo and the home-grown digital multimedia broadcasting.In addition, citizens there will be free to use every next-generation telecom platform such as time division-synchronous code division multiple access (TD-SCDMA), WiBro and a global system for mobile communications (GSM).</blockquote>Not sure if this is just another policy hype from the South Korean government. But it does sound promising and exciting. I wish we can have similar “mobile paradise” in the US. According to USAToday.com, this year free tax-filing availability will <a title="Free tax-filing availability shrinks; savings still possible" target="_blank" href="http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/columnist/block/2006-01-23-free-file_x.htm?csp=N009">shrink</a>. I guess people are getting more comfortable with e-filing, and IRS figured that it is no longer necessary to create extra incentive to encourage filing online. However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t save money. You just have to do extra homework to find good deals.H&R Block is offering Free Premium Federal & Free State filing if you choose to put your returns into <a title="H&R Block Refund Visa� Prepaid Card" target="_blank" href="http://www.hrblock.com/taxes/partner/product.jsp?productId=31&otpPartnerId=1199&CID=222116&WT.mc_id=4_5_222116">a prepaid Visa Card</a>. It’s a $54.90 saving. This offer only includes the filing of one state return. If you file for a second state, you have to pay extra.I haven’t check if there are deals with TuberTax this year. If I find anything, I will let you know. I just discovered that IEEE Computer Society now <a title="IEEE Computer Society Digital Library RSS Feeds" target="_blank" href="http://www.computer.org/portal/cms_docs_cs/csdl/jsp/rss/index.jsp">offers</a> the availability of the latest magazines and transactions content through RSS. Now you can monitor your favorite IEEE magazines and journals the same way you monitor news and blogs.Some of my favorite IEEE RSS include<ul><li><a title="Computer RSS" target="_blank" href="http://csdl.computer.org/rss/computer.xml">Computer</a></li><li><a title="IEEE Intelligent Systems RSS" target="_blank" href="http://csdl.computer.org/rss/intelligent.xml">IEEE Intelligent Systems</a></li><li><a title="IEEE Internet Computing" target="_blank" href="http://csdl.computer.org/rss/internet.xml">IEEE Internet Computing</a></li><li><a title="IEEE Pervasive Computing" target="_blank" href="http://csdl.computer.org/rss/pervasive.xml">IEEE Pervasive Computing </a></li></ul> Apple may soon offer wireless iPod. How we do know? The chipmaker behind Apple’s music player will add Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support to its products, <a target="_blank" title="iPod chip maker plans Wi-Fi, Bluetooth support" href="http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/02/08/portalplayer_wireless_ipod_chip/">according to Reg Hardware</a>.<blockquote>PortalPlayer said it will integrate its PP5022 audio chip family with CSR’s UniFi Wi-Fi and Bluetooth controller. It will demonstrate a reference platform based on the combined technology next week at the 3GSM show in Barcelona.The company’s pitch is that the integration will allow PortalPlayer-based gadgets to use Bluetooth stereo headsets and reach out to computers’ music archives via the wireless networking technology, and to connect directly to music download services through Wi-Fi hotspots.Interestingly, Apple is believed to be hosting a music-related event later this month in the week after 3GSM takes place.</blockquote><blockquote></blockquote> Scientific American has launched its own <a target="_blank" title="Scientific American Podcast" href="http://www.sciam.com/podcast/">podcast</a>. The first two episodes are as the follows.<blockquote>Episode 1 In our first podcast, Scientific American editor-in-chief John Rennie reflects on the Korean stem cell debacle; the National Inventors Hall of Fame announces this year’s inductees; and evolution defender Eugenie Scott discusses the importance of the decision in the recent Dover evolution trial. Also: hear outtakes from the CSI show you’re never going to see on TV.Episode 2 In this episode, Scientific American staff editor Christine Soares talks about avian flu; Bruce Merkin discusses marijuana policy in the U.S. and England; and paleontologist Gregory Erickson describes the newfound long-lost cousin of T. rex. Also: test your science smarts with our quiz and hear how yesterday’s comics might have handled today’s news.</blockquote>Another science podcast that I recommend is the <a target="_blank" title="New Scientist Podcast" href="http://www.newscientist.com/podcast.ns">New Scientist podcast</a>. No wonder the US government is <a target="_blank" title="Semantic Interoperability in E-Government" href="http://harry.hchen1.com/2006/02/10/272">interested</a> in data interoperability. Reported in a Direction Magazine <a target="_blank" title="The Mandate for Seamless CAD/Geospatial Information" href="http://www.directionsmag.com/article.php?article_id=2104&trv=1">article</a>, “the cost of geospatial data non-interoperability in the US was reported to be about $14 billion/year.”In other words, every year $14 billion is wasted because we failed to avoid “redundant data collection, costly data conversion and inability to share data developed with different data models”. Most people have stopped arguing about why the Web needs semantics. However, a new debate is on the rise — what’s the right approach to bring semantics into the Web?At present, there are two schools of thinking: (1) the Semantic Web (the upper-case semantic web) and (2) the semantic web (the lower-case semantic web).<a id="more-55"></a><h5>The Upper-Case Semantic Web</h5>Supporters of the Semantic Web believe that the current Web is built easy for the humans to consume information but not so for the computing machines. In order to help machines to “understand” information on the Web, we must create a new representation of the existing web for machines to consume information.The current Semantic Web approach <a target="_blank" title="The Semantic Web: An Introduction" href="http://infomesh.net/2001/swintro/">suggests</a> that the semantics of web content should be expressed using knowledge representation languages such as RDF and OWL. Formal ontologies should be defined to facilitate knowledge sharing and logical inference. An example of this approach is demonstrated in the <a target="_blank" title="An Example of FOAF Profile with Geo Information" href="http://www.geospatialsemanticweb.com/2006/01/28/an-example-of-foaf-profile-with-geo-information">popular FOAF project</a>.<h5>The Lower-Case Semantic Web</h5>On the other hand, supporters of the semantic web (the lower-case semantic web) adopt a completely different philosophy. They believe that the Web is built for people, and any introduction of web semantics should be aimed to solve practical problems for the people, not for the computing machines. When developing techniques to express web semantics, developers should follow the “<a target="_blank" title="Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle" href="http://www.microformats.org/blog/2005/09/23/microformats-recycle/">Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle</a>” principle, and the “<a target="_blank" title="Worse is Better" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_Better">worse is better</a>” principle.<a target="_blank" title="Microformats" href="http://www.microformats.org/">Microformats</a> is a popular technique that follows these principles. This technique builds on the existing Web standards (XML, XHTML) as oppose to more research oriented standards (RDF, RDFS, OWL). The idea behind Microformats is rather simple. Take an existing HTML page. Annotate the web content with a set of predefined keywords using XHTML constructs (e.g., class, rel). Because every XHTML page is an XML document, software programs can easily parse the page and extract these annotated information. Examples of Microformats include the use of rel=”tag” in blogs and the XHTML Friends Network (<a target="_blank" title="XFN" href="http://www.gmpg.org/xfn/">XFN</a>).<h5>Concluding Remarks</h5>I’m a supporter of both the lower-case and the upper-case semantic web. I think the debate on RDF vs. Microformats is a healthy evolution of the Web. The strong points of the Semantic Web (controlled vocabularies, rich semantic expressiveness, logical inference etc.) reminds Microformats developers that a complete and rich semantic web maybe more than just a collection of XHTML annotations. The strong points of the semantic web (the worse-is-better and the reduce-reuse-recycle principle) reminds RDF and OWL developers that sometimes solving a practical problem maybe more rewarding than solving a theoretical one.Additional Reading:<ul><li><a target="_blank" title="Microformats: the Next (Small) Thing on the Semantic Web" href="http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MIC.2006.13">Microformats: the Next (Small) Thing on the Semantic Web</a>, Rohit Khare, IEEE Internet Computing, Jan./Feb. 2006</li><li><a target="_blank" title="The Semantic Web: An Introduction" href="http://infomesh.net/2001/swintro/">The Semantic Web: An Introduction</a>, Sean B. Palmer</li></ul> In fact, be really careful about what you say on the Internet. If not, you may end up in some unthinkable situation like the tale of lawyers William Korman and Dianna Abdala.The story goes like this. Korman offered a job to Abdala. After two meetings, Abdala tentatively agreed to take the job. Few days later, Abdala changed her mind, and wrote an email to Korman saying that “The pay you are offering would neither fulfill me nor support the lifestyle I am living.”<a id="more-282"></a>Korman was angry and upset. He was angry because Abdala didn’t tell him in person about changing her mind. He was upset because he had prepared many things for Abdala to start her job — ordered stationery and business cards for her, reformatted a computer, and set up an e-mail account.Korman wrote a message back to Abdala. She replied, “A real lawyer would have put the contract into writing and not exercised any such reliance until he did so.”After that, there was a back-and-forth email exchanges between the two layers.Not long after this incident, the story got public attention. How? Korman sent it to a colleague, who asked if he could forward it elsewhere. “You can e-mail this to whomever you want,” Korman responded.In summary, be really careful about what you say on the Internet.Source: <a target="_blank" title=" He said, she said, and their argument becomes fodder for the Internet" href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/02/16/business/email.php">He said, she said, their argument becomes fodder for the Internet</a>, Sacha Pfeiffer, The Boston Globe, Feb. 16 2006. Not all companies offer 401(k) plan. So how should you save for retirement if your company doesn