Year: 2005

Morning waking up motivated. Today we had an internal meeting in the morning. I went with some people with whom I am going to work together to a nearby restaurant. We did not have the lunch vouchers for this day and therefore headed to lunch outside. Again interesting talks, this time about real use cases in biology science. Afternoon I sneaked into the Semantic End User Applications Workshop. Hm, interesting discussion, but a little too high for me. I had to do my slides for thursday, anyway, so I started with them. I now really had the plan to completely change my presentation style, inspired by Dick Hardts talk I saw two days ago with Stefan really changed the way I saw powerpoint now. Powerpoint can be art. Don’t narcotise your audience with bad slides.

So, the scientific day was a great inspiration for me hacking on my slides.

In the evening, we went out together. What I remember is that we went to an indian restaurant. Michael is an expert on indian restaurants and was informed beforehand. We met the Rudiversum later on in a pub. One short beer there, but I knew that the big crowd should be at Mac Swiggans. So I asked Malte if he wants to join and we decided to reduce it to one beer with the Rudiverse and later move on. So, a couple of people went on to Mac Swiggans, where we found – nobody. We looked around, had a peek the stairs up, but didn’t find nobody. Hm, whatever, it was a 10minute walk from the other pubs away and this motivated us to stay and go for a few beers. Later we went home. I sold one gnowsis t-shirt to Francisco and gave him a demo of gnowsis.

The next day I learned from Libby and Uldis the interesting background info: sem-webbing people were upstairs and there were hundreds of them upstairs. argh, these pubs can really be big.

The day of the first Semantic Desktop workshop. My first glance of the community I live and work in.

For all my pictures of the workshop, click here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/leobard/tags/semdeskws2005/

For pictures by me and others (hopefully they use the same tag) click here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/semdeskws2005/

I had an intensive day, Stefan did much of the organizing, Jack Park organized the social event and Brian helped also very much. The day worked and we had an ignition of the community. Especially the social event in the evening and the poster session brought people together.
Here a pic from the poster session

here a pic from the social event:

We had much work preparing this workshop, but in the end every hour was worth it. I first met Jack Park and was surprised what a positive person he is.

In the night, I was last man standing at the bar, together with two other austrians and a german guy, many beers, many good conversations. more about this day in a seperate blog entry.

getting up, having breakfast at great southern. Hm, good tea there. Then to buseireann to get to galway. There, arrived, I headed for our bed&breakfast reception, to get the keys to our appartment.

Some DFKI members decided to take an appartment together, increases sociality. I had the task to get the keys, because the others arrived there at night. So, 11:00 and being at b&b. Greeted there by Christine. She is Austria, as I am and lives now for a year in Ireland, working. At a b&b. And now the final surprise – she blogs. Here is Christine’s blog. She also mentions our arrival in her blog. The blogosphere works.

Ok, after chatting I headed for Stefan Decker’s office at DERI to prepare the Semantic Desktop Workshop with him. DERI isn’t so easy to find, they have recently moved and when I visited them last, they were somewhere else. So when I finally found the building I stumbled through offices until by accident stumbling into some W3C meeting taking place there. Whoops. I found Stefan’s office and found him busy as usual. Ok, first I talked long with Eyal Oren about his semperwiki, he gave me a demo and I instantly saw the resemblance to the ideas I already hacked 2003 for gnowsis, but now with a different approach. Funny, that I learned to use wiki technology at www.monochrom.at.

Stefan and I had the whole afternoon to talk about architecture, upcoming projects and other stuff. Nice to get something done, looking forward to next year when we work together more closely. He insisted to show me the identity 2.0 talk by Dick Hardt and I was baffled. If you haven’t seen it, go watch it. And do it like Lawrence Lessig said: “Dick Hardt is brilliant. Watch (and copy) the style. Learn tons from the substance. (My pride is tied to the style only).”

So a thought started in me: I have to copy this style.

In the evening, when I came home, Bertin Klein was already there, funny thing. He came before the others. We decided to go eat something and instantly stumbled across Gerald Reif, who was my Diploma Thesis mentor and since 2003 is a very good SemWeb friend of mine. So we headed to get a beer and had our first semdesk discussions great. At the evening, I saw “Dude where is my car” on local telly, never saw this one before but was surprised how funny the movie is.

ISWC!!!! ISWC!!!! my first big conference and my first chance to meet the community I live in. Great. Astonishing. Zoot! Pimp my life at the ISWC. From my arrival on the green island until our departure, it was a good time. Networking, Discussing, bringing the semantic web alive, architecture discussions, planning open source stuff….

so, my pics are on flickr, justr clickr thisr:

And most important: I met all those people whom I only knew as CVS commit names or as mailinglist posters. The community is great and 99% percent of the people there were interesting. My biggest feeling after this event: these people think similar to me, have ideas, have plans, great projects, nice lives, are moving around, work here and there, make photos, etc.

In this blog entry, I am going to just writeup my personal notes of the trip and how I felt my being at the ISWC, follow ups will come for the Semantic Desktop Workshop and my talk on thursday and everything else.

I arrived on Friday night, at about 23:00 in shannon airport. There, I met another guy from DFKI who took the same plane as I but whom I never have seen before. Funny thing when you work in a company with over 200 artificial intelligence researchers + hundreds of students. Hotel was great, here is a pic of my room.

It helped me to have a productive day on saturday.

I always forget the swig chatbot command syntax, so here a little example just scratched from here:

summary:

url - add a new comment
answer: A: ....
A:|title
A:comment
A:->keyword,keyword

complete communication:

dajobe - http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2005/HPL-2005-171.html
dc_swig - M: http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2005/HPL-2005-171.html from dajobe
dajobe -  M:|Note on database layouts for SPARQL datastores, Richard Cyganiak
dc_swig - Titled item M.
dajobe  - M:caution: PDF
dc_swig - Added comment M1.
dajobe  - M:->swig,sparql,rdf,jena
dc_swig - Set keywords for M.

To get a pointer from the current logger:
logger, pointer?

DFKI members sitting at Shannon airport, surfing using free wifi. ISWC2005 is over. Was really nice, met many people and learned much.

more to come tomorrow (or sunday)….

we will annotate you!

Tomorrow is the first Semantic Desktop Workshop and I suggest to tag it using SemDeskWS2005.

see you tomorrow at the ISWC

Today I am getting up up and away to the ISWC2005. I propose that all that happens at this conference will be tagged heavily with ISWC2005.

You can see me at the workshop I co-chair on Sunday, the first Semantic Desktop Workshop.

We have a nice evening event on Sunday, going to Harbor Restaurant at about 20:30. See more in the program of the workshop.

So, I will back my pack now and try to get to the airport asap, to fly away. In my hands only 5 printed papers that are hopefully vouchers for a flight, a hotel, a second hotel and a bus. Hope all this works well, at least I trust good old numbers printed on papers. see you in Galway!

Ok, folksonomies are the super-simple way allowing people to annotate their documents. And when we use tags in blogs, flickr, wiki, ets, the world is better and way cooler. Websites like technorati can show us what is hip at the moment and I can customize these services to work together. I can even add a photo to flickr and then press the “blog this” button there and it will blog here. Cool, they use web-services, they provide their services in standardized interfaces and it works.

But then …

people find out that the tags aren’ so really good, because they miss stemming.

A stemmer is a computer program or algorithm which determines a stem form of a given inflected (or, sometimes, derived) word form — generally a written word form. The stem need not be identical to the morphological root of the word; it is usually sufficient that related words map to the same stem, even if this stem is not in itself a valid root.
wikipedia – stemmer

So all these tags aren’t right and people use different word forms for tags. One uses “book” the other chooses “books”. Or “surfing” “surfed” “surfs” etc. which all mean similiar things. So horray for the programmer that added stemming to services like technorati.

Then people see that they mean the same things with their tags, they use “surfing” and “browsing” to reference web browsing. This is the problem of synonyms.
Synonyms (in ancient Greek syn ‘συν’ = plus and onoma ‘όνομα’ = name) are different words with similar or identical meanings and are interchangable.
wikipedia-synonyms

And the next thing would be that two words have different contexts – surfing can be the watersport or web surfing. These are Homonyms.
Homonyms (in Greek homoios = identical and onoma = name) are words that have the same phonetic form (homophones) or orthographic form (homographs) but unrelated meaning.
wikipedia-homonym

Ok, and if I search for “surfing” and I mean the watersport, then it might be good to include terms like “bodyboarding” and “surfspot” and “surfer” and “bigwavesurfing” into my search terms. Or if I search for “surfboard” I might also want items tagged with “longboard” “shortboard” “bodyboard” etc.

To structure terms that belong to each other, we use something called taxonomies. The homonyms and synonyms are usually in a thesaurus. The stemmer is a basic tool used before we start. Alltogether, we would like a dataformat to exchange and store those taxonomies and thesauri. Hey, there is one, its called RDF and you can even store Ontologies with it. I know, its hard to learn and you can’t really do everything you want, but its a start and there are tools out there that work with it.

So what will happen? 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. The good thing in all this is the learning approach: If someone knows what tags are, really knows what tags are because using them for a year, really knowing what the problem of synonyms, stemming, taxonomies are, because the somone has tried searching for something, than this someone will understand what the semantic web is about.