Year: 2005

Still, we don’t use the Semantic Web in broad and I think one problem is, that we don’t find the right uris to identify ideas/people/things – concepts from the real world. The discussion about the URI crisis does not happen in conferences and articles, but everytime somebody proposes a new uri scheme to identify books, lifescience terms, etc. Then masses of people flame each other on mailinglists.

There are nifty approaches about to cure the identity crisis (like this here) but they all fail the problem because the problem is much deeper.

I usually then write one email saying “uri crisis again” to point out that the problem is unsolved.

So, what is the Uri crisis about?

basically, this text TimBl has written describes it best:

it is part of the article “what do HTTP Uris identify?”

So we don’t have good uris to identify people, concepts, books, etc. Because a Uri has more than one meaning.

This is explained very good by David Booth’s article
“Four Uses of a URL: Name, Concept, Web Location and Document Instance” Coming to this conclusion
One point seems clear. In using URLs to identify concepts (such as “http://x.org/love”), we need conventions for denoting each of these four things: name, concept, Web location and document instance.

Then there was also an article how the semantics of Topic Maps could help by Steve Pepper, titled “Curing the Web’s Identity Crisis”.
In his introduction Pepper writes:

In an important recent article on XML.com entitled “Identity Crisis” [Clark 2002], Kendall Clark addresses the issue of “identity” as it pertains to the World Wide Web. Clark quotes the
description of the Web by the W3C’s Technical Architecture Group (TAG) in Architecture of the World Wide Web [Jacobs 2002], as a “universe of resources”, where “resource” is to be understood according to the definition given in [RFC 2396] as being “anything that has identity”. Clark points out that the concept of “identity” itself is nowhere defined and moreover is severely problematic.

He cites the Article “Identity Crisis” by Kendall Grant Clark. In his introduction to the problem, Clark says:
The Identity of Resources.
In the APW’s view, the Web is a “universe of resources”. So far, so good. But what is a resource? The APW adopts the definition of resource from RFC
2396, a definition which has always made me uneasy, though probably because I’m still more inclined to think of these things like a philosopher than like a programmer or software system architect.

So, it is a philosophical problem. Ah. Now we come somewhere. Sadly, every time leobard tried to get a philosopher on this track, saying things like “I think that URIs will change the way we identify abstract concepts, a change that is fundamental to our constructivistic worldview”, philosophers answer: you young nerd, read 10 kilos of philosophical books and come back. Sure – but I won’t spend no time on that.

So – face it. The meaning of what a URI identifies os not defined. Hence, when TimBl announces he has a URI now and a Foaf file – what does this mean?

That we should identify the concept “Person named Tim Berners-Lee” using this uri?

perhaps, and perhaps thats the way it works: you explicitly say to identify the concepts you have in your mind using the URI you find most approapriate. When other humans copy your behaviour (and copy/paste your uri), URIs will identify concepts. Hm, perhaps.

So, next time when I shout “You are facing the Uri crisis”, don’t answer “I never heard there was a crisis” or “are we out of uris?” and think of a solution instead.

Andreas Blumauer invited me to guest-blog on the semantic-web.at site, so I compiled a more serious summary of the ISWC, from my view.

my report at semantic-web.at

going home. just relaxing day in galway, making writeups of some ideas, photos, etc. At shannon âirport we had wireless, which explains this post. and this photo:

During the flight I had an idea for a nice paper, perhaps this will be on ESWC, we’ll see.

Arrived savely in Frankfurt Hahn Airport, Bertin joined me in my car and we had a nice drive going home. I think not a single semantic topic was raised during this car drive. relaxing. At about 00:19 I came to the train station where Ingrid arrived at 00:17, so our love is worldwide and brings us together timely, she just arrived from Vienna.

after all: got to see all these people from the community, love them all, many topics to do research and many places to keep on hacking the semantic web together. All these new foaf:knows triples should help me to include more projects to gnowsis and replace some of my work with work by others. Hope the semantic web goes alive soon. At least these blog entries have urls.

special greetings to stefan decker and his family.
greetings to captsolo for showing us town, Ina, danbri, libby, kao, chrisb, kim, jack, sibel, christine, york, danc, peter, alistair, sergio, stefano, haibo yu, alfredo, emmanuel, malte, ansgar, bertin, michael, dfki, and everybody else out there.

Finally, had to give my talk about the gnowsis adapter framework. Ansgar reviewed my slides in the morning. He was content with them (luckily he didn’t see the version of wednesday 6pm). We went to the Radisson, came late, missed a part of the keynote which was about UIMA, the IBM NLP framework that has been buzzing around for a longer time anyway.

ok, the final version of the slides is here.

10:30 – my talk started. I knew I had 20 minutes before our Aperture release, so everything decent. Only problem was that my Acer laptop fucked up and couldn’t display on the beamer anymore. Damn these laptops, the always brake when you need them most. Pressing fn+screen didn’t do anything, the laptop just refused to work. It was 10:28 and I knew there was no time for reboot now. I experienced this behaviour before and knew a hack-remedy: pressing the fn+screen combination hysterically often, like in a weird C64 game. After 10 seconds of hammering, it did the trick, the slides were on the beamer. But I couldn’t switch to presentation modus. I planed to use the powerpoint presentation modus to know what slides is next and read my notes. Without my notes, I was pretty blind then, so I decided to go in attack mode and switched to my “presenting by walking around and big gestures” mode, where I try to fill my memory gaps by walking and speaking freely. Again, it was my luck that I trained the talk two times before with my notes visible and I knew most of the information already by heart. Only problem was that I had to read the slides too much, which caused me to face away from the audience. Whatever, I think the talk was much better, informative and funnier than most of the other talks I have seen. Seriously, some other people were filling their slides with info-junk to an unreadable level. Slides were good, Science was good, hacking was good. As usual, questions were answered with information and a Mozartkugel. Some pretty good questions by the audience. Intersting question about “entailment”, where I would rather use the term inference. Hm, which fits here more? We published Aperture this day and that is important. The virtual graph approach was nice in the first place, but didn’t scale so good anyhow. Chris Bizer suggested later, to collect implementations of virtual graphs, aperture adapters and other adapters somewhere. He insisted to do this collection language-independent, which is probably the way to go.

Patrick Stickler and his napkin idea
All in all, nice talk, and I had a light heart again, relieved by the weight of having something important to do now. During the rest of the day, people walked up to me and I had many interesting conversations about the topic. Later on, Patrick Stickler came (who wasn’t in the talk but liked the idea of aperture anyhow) and presented an architecture about distributed URIQA, looked very well-though. Also the presentation media, a paper napkin scribbled with architecture is the medium of choice when you want to start something like Compaq or bigger.

Single most nice event of the day was the TimBl keynote. Some people around me said that timbl sounds somewhat fuzzy in his talking style. May be, but he is one of the guys that had this idea on his mind since 1980 and he is a coder, so I trust his ideas because he has a faint knowledge how to code this on a global level. In his talk, he dissed the foaf community a little that they don’t use URIs to identify people. Hm, thats one of these things thats still open. TimBl now has a foaf file and luckily, he has a uri for himself, so we can identify him now using this uri. If this is good or bad, we will see. He also focused on people that don’t put rdf files at the place where their uris point. Yes, its 2005 and we have year ~five~ of Semantic Web and people are still too dumb to know what a URL is. Its a locator, and when you use http in your namespace, you have to put a document there. And when you use these URIs in your documents, expect people to download something from there. I nearly laughed my head of during this part of his talk, as it shows how blue-eyed some people are stepping towards the semantic web. Luckily, all my ontologies are at http://www.gnowsis.org/ont/ which I hope to host rather statically the next years. In the questions of the talk I asked if the uri crisis is solved, but I should have asked “what does a URI identify and what is the uri of Love?” but was too dumb to to it. So timbl answered, but I meant something else. Argh, leobard, you nincompoop. Whatever, we will find out how to identify abstract concepts sooner or later, its just a 3000 year old philosophical problem that will be solved by informatics in the 21st century. hm. Timbl also discouraged us to use arbitrary XYZ identifiers, namely lifescience identifiers, which sounds a good idea, we’ll have to see how we cope with it. During the talk, I suddenly realised that I miss all the good stuff by not being online, so I went online and found a lot of people sitting in the room being online and chatting about the talk.

Augmented reality.

So things to do for myself are: change my foaf file so that my URI points to the URI where I am. perhaps I should also move my foaf file to a saver place, where I can withstand the years. argh, uri crisis. Use a seperate domain, use a subfolder, use a file extension? hm. Timbl didn’t use a file extension in his uri, so this may be a good indicator.

In the evening, I was really tired. really. Having sat, sun, mon, tue, wed each day discussions and exchange of info wholeday until 3am in the morning, I was zombie mode. We went to dinner in the place where we were lunching on monday (the hotel next to the tourist office, nice food there). Just the DFKI members, nice talking. Later, we went to wrapup the week in the King’s Crown. Chris joined us and I started to have an uri crisis discussion with Sören. Bad idea, I was tired and emotional and pragmatic about this. During all years of uri crisis discussion, I never found a solution to it, so also not on this evening. Whatever, no one can give an answer on what a uri identifies, so we remain at the beginning there. I still wonder what is the right uri for concepts like “love”, “Leo Sauermann”, “Microsoft” or “ISWC2005”. Hope to find a solution for this age-old problem soon. Hope that god stops me discussing this one. We went sleeping early.

Second conference day. I still had to work on my slides and I was a little over-ambitious with this idea. Well, this day I saw one or the other interesting talk, but the main business remains offline the talks. People coming together, decent fireplace talks in the lobby, etc. Every time I saw Stefan Decker somewhere he was preaching the Semantic Desktop to someone. I wanted to show my slides to Ansgar before the dinner, but he wasn’t available, so I asked Malte. We sat in the fireplace-lobby and I showed my status to him. This fireplace lobby was an awesome place, cosy, warm, enough power outlets, bar personal don’t bug you if you don’t order anything. Luckily, Gerald Reif stumbled by and sat with his suisse friends. I asked him if he could help me with the slides and listen to my test presentation. Luckily, he agreed. Geri was my Diploma Thesis mentor and he already checked my first gnowsis slides in 2003, so he knows the topic and I both trust and like him. Ok, during the first presentation I felt: what is this shit I wrote. It was still very different from the presentation I would give tomorrow. There were much too many much too dull jokes in it and the message was missing. I slightly panicked but both Malte and Geri just said, its ok, and if you do A,B,C then it will work. Thanks to Malte and Geri, they saved my sanity. Geri also measured the time it took me to give the talk using his stopwatch. Later, Malte reviewed the slides and corrected most typos and semantic bugs. Ok, I all this took from 6pm to 8pm and it was time for gala dinner now.

Knowing that at a conference there is no time, I already came wearing my nice jacket in the morning, so that I didn’t have to change clothing now. We went to gala dinner and it was beautiful. The hotel staff removed all of the walls in the conference avenue, even some walls we didn’t think were removable. Result was a huge room filled with many tables, every table nicely decorated and with candles burning. I flocked with a few hacking-oriented people and ended on a table together with Malte, Uldis Bojars, Peter Mika, John Breslin and others (hm, will remember this). Food was great, and my sorrows about my slides fainted away after the first glass of white wine.

Nice parts that happened now was that we were neighboured near to the buffet and got to eat fast and we were also next to some very animating people, I remember especially one great dancer, I think his name was Jerome. Part of the entertainment at this night was an Irish band, that were accompanied by Irish dancers (“riverdance style”) that gave a dancing show. On the second show, they gathered people from the audience to join in riverdancing. They caught me and Jerome, but we both got hold of Stefan and dragged him also to the dancefloor. Poor Stefan, afterwards I felt that this wasn’t so nice, but during our performance with the irish dancers it was funny. All well documented, expect some flickr pics with us.

Later on, I got lucky to dance with Kim, which was real fun. We were one of the early adoperts on stage. The evening transmogrified when they shut down the gala dinner around midnight. We grabbed one remaining wine bottle and accomodated us at one of the remaining tables. Conversation there has already switched to the level of “if you could choose between having children, money, or good health, what would you pick?”. I quickly evaded, based on my belief that such discussions can only be made in a theological mindset and not just based on ethics and moral – just too theoretic. Moved to the other side of the table where the usual crowd of hackers already opened their laptops. I had to refine my slides anyhow. Around 1am we finally made an exodus and went to the lobby, where a few geeks flocked. Talked to some people there, interesting topics but I forgot the details. Went home then.

Hm, not wise to stay up until 3am when you have to give a talk tomorrow, but I only live once and every convesation with peers is worth a billion.

First real conference day. During the day I attended one or the other session. Lunch in the Radisson was ok this time. In the afternoon, I chatted with Christiaan De Fluit, our co-conspirant in the sourceforge project aperture. I forgot to tell him that we had to release aperture in thursday, I somehow mixed up the conference timetable and thought I had my talk on friday. So we had to make the distro for Aperture and had some discussions on version numbers and about howto providing the download. Chris adapted to the changed deadline and said he will do the work. Good cooperation, gave me more time to think about the slides. We planed to make the first release of Aperture during my talk at the ISWC, will give aperture a good start in publicity.

Most interesting part of this day was the poster session in the big room. I made some photos there. And I met many new people during this poster session. Especially Patrick Stickler and Alistair Miles are people I first met there.

Afterwards, we flocked together and went to O’Neaghtaens ,Quaye street(hm, probably wrong spellt anyway). Patrick was there, a few Americans, later the Hannover group suddenly appeared for a few minutes. When this pub shut down, a flock of five headed for the appartment of someone and we got great liquor there. And had nice conversations. Thankfully, a good fairy drove us home and I had a nice sleep in the DFKI appartment. Topics this evening were about the censorship around the world, for example in Iran and China and how the semantic web relates.