joining the Nepoverse

Getting up and reading news this morning, and still thinking about yesterdays ramblings how we could benefit from our ideas, TRB’s greetings reached me at the right moment:

Welcome to the Nepoverse, by Thomas Roth-Berghofer
Yesterday morning I woke up with this greeting on my mind, a greeting to all those who are interested in the goal of the Nepomuk project: the Social Semantic Desktop. And it got even better: the Nepoverse did not exist in the Googleverse. Until now!
As you may know, we–the Nepomukians–strive for providing you with new tools for better working with (your) knowledge. We want to change the way we, as knowledge workers, live in and with the digital world, not only by providing cool Nepomuked applications and a feature-rich toolbox, but by building a community around the Social Semantic Desktop. Thus, we are shaping our own universe, don’t we?

Yes Thomas, you are right. We want that, and I need that. I don’t feef exactly like “our own universe” but would put it more like Stefan Decker often tells the story: Nepomuk is a seed of a community, it starts at one point and gets bigger in circles, bigger, bigger, circling, …

As I said yesterday night:
Our discipline is a crossover, we need results from artificial intelligence, web 2.0, usability, personalization, databases, data integration, software engineering . . .

And what I should have said then was: we got Nepomuk. There are many people in this project that make exactly this crossover possible, through their different characters and backgrounds.

If you now wonder what we are all blogging about,

, see the

stop fumbling the semantic web, do science

A short note to myself and the community:

Stop fumbling around with the semantic web, make quality science.

A prototype for a search engine with a bad user interface, an implementation of a rdf database that only works half, an ontology that is never used, we all know these projects.

Our discipline is a crossover, we need results from artificial intelligence, web 2.0, usability, personalization, databases, data integration, software engineering . . .

So – science would be to concentrate on one aspect and then improve that, for example to fix yourself on a scaleable rdf database. You develop a scaleable algorithm and prove in a test setup that it works – voila. But then, it takes YEARS until you yourself or others can use this result in their other projects. Saying “we need named graphs” is far away from having an RDF store that supports them in a scaleable way, but the distance is often underestimated by us.

so, I should concentrate on writing down the good ideas we have and wait -YEARS- until I can benefit from my own ideas using software written by somebody else. Like TimBl using a Firefox.
😉

making sesame2 SPARQL protocol conformant

At the moment we need a SPARQL conformant interface to Sesame2, and as there is none I know of, the power of open source allows us to write one.
openrdf

My first question is: did somebody already write a Servlet that does map Sesame2 servers to the SPARQL protocol?

At the moment sesame2 does not support full SPARQL querying, but it will soon. We don’t have to insist on SPARQL as query language, we can pass in SERQL queries and treat them like they were SPARQL, but we have to start with a conformant servlet 🙂

Then some longer questions I also asked on the Sesame developer mailinglist:

We think that a SPARQL protocol conformant HTTP servlet is most important for any use of Sesame2 and are willing to invest 10 hours a week into this, more precisely, a clever student worker. We hope to get this done until the end of September.

We would implement a SPARQL protocol conformat query server and a SPARQL protocol conformant query client (issue tracker) for the reading operations of a HTTPSail. For updates of the model, we would stick to the current implementation of the latest CVS of sesame2.

want to know what the sparql protocol is?

I understand that these are MANY questions, I tried to think of all the calamities we are going to face in the next months. And I expect that some hackers out there already handled half of these questions, so don’t hesitate to write me, or comment here, or to the sesame devel list.

* The org.openrdf.sesame.server.http.RepositoryServlet is not conformant to the SPARQL protocol,
as defined in the WSDL, or?
http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-protocol/#query-bindings-http
the protocol described at org.openrdf.sesame.server.http.protocol.txt does not say anything about sparql

* If not, does anybody know how to generate stubs for the servlets automatically (so that they strictly conform to the protocol)?

* If not, we would examine the Jena / Joseki implementation, as it serves as reference implementation.

* When we implement a SPARQL conformat servlet – can we put it directly into the package org.openrdf.sesame.server.http.SparqlReadServlet, directly in the latest CVS, to have the best uptake and feedback possible?

* If yes, is there also a parser for query results, that can be used on the Client side HTTP sail to read results written by the server?

* What is the status of the HTTP Client? Did anybody do since we last mailed? if yes, please add comments to this ticket:
http://www.openrdf.org/issues/browse/SES-205

* Is the query string already part of the Query object? Jeen said this is a prerequisite for this hack. If not, Jeen: could you do this? This is such a core thing that I don’t want to touch it and for you its probably only 50 lines of code.
I mean the solution 1) suggested here:
http://www.openrdf.org/issues/browse/SES-205#action_10533

* Can Sesame2 serialize Query results according to the SPARQL protocol?
I see the QueryResultFormat.SPARQL which would indicate that.

* last but not least: any news about SPARQL query support?

* Do you have a debug environment to test the existing servlets from org.openrdf.sesame.server.http?

* Does the WebClient work? (the code looks SOOO COOL! spring rocks)
– I cannot find any code in the webclient project that actually *changes* triples… hm.

* When Sebastian starts hacking, whom can he jabber/icq for help?

lost in spam bei twoday

Comment und Trackback spam nervt genauso wie der Spießrutenlauf durch eine Fußgängerzone gefüllt mit Abo-Keilenden Greenpeace Activisten.

Worum gehts? Irgendwer will eine Porno Seite bewerben, und um im Google rank nach oben zu hopsen wird nun ein Haufen von etwa 100 links auf die Seite in meine Kommentare reingestellt, darüber steht die freundliche Meldung “Tolle Seite. Das Himmel ist Grün”, also irgendwas das den Anschein ehrlicher Bewunderung meines bloggens zeigen soll. Die links zeigen am Anfang auf irgendwelche Weblogs oder unscheinbaren seiten (bei Trackback Spam ist das so), diese Seiten werden aber irgendwann entfernt und durch Porn ersetzt.

Alsdann, irgendwie kommt in meinem Blog immer noch Comment Spam und Trackback Spam durch und solange twoday.net das Problem nicht löst muss ich mir selber helfen.

Dazu hab ich mir eine seite gebaut, wo ich alle Kommentare in einer Liste sehe (der RSS feed) mit praktischen Links zum löschen der Kommentare.

http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/~sauermann/2006/08/twoday/

falls du ein ähnliches Problem hast, vielleicht hilft dir das.

going to burningman-who will be there?

Ok, who from the Semantic Web guys and girls is going to Burning Man this year?

I am going, and we are blogging here about that:

I tried to find you guys by using search engines, but I am not witty enought to get the right results, so blogging and asking this question is probably ok for today.

Here is the story how I tried to find you:

This time I swoogled the semantic web to find out who lives near SFO, which indicates that they may go to burningman.

My first try was to go to swoogle.com, a very interesting website where you may lose hours during your office time. Then I found the search engine at swoogle.umbc.edu.

I tried to search for:

  • ns:foaf SFO but this broke. Internal Server Error in /work/swoogle/www/swoogle/3.1/components/com_frontpage/writer.search.php on line 61
  • perhaps not search documents, search ontologies instead. SFO – no results
  • just entering francisco returned too much.
  • refining to ns:foaf francisco, zero.
  • at this point, I registered for an account at swoogle, perhaps then more. Hm, no.

Ok, perhaps the search syntax is wrong. Lets go to Intellidimension’s Semantic Web Search engine at www.semanticwebsearch.com.

ok, change of tactics: shoot straight at the target of burning man.

  • semanticwebsearch for burningman. Brings some RSS feeds. Ok, that are bloggers. I need semweb bloggers though.
  • perhaps some foaf person said something in interests or so? search, nothing.
  • with “burning man” we get two livejournal users.

ok, lets see what the market leader does.

ok, so I didn’t hear of these guys before and I see that this use case is interesting. Anyway:

Ok, who from the Semantic Web guys and girls is going to Burning Man this year?

spam poetry – wife you say?

e-mail spam, who doesn’t know them.

while deleting the spam in my dfki-work inbox, this e-mail survived the 10milliseconds of fame and made it here:
subject: Re: jovedVzlAGRA
… [some viagra price list now] …
… [a web link i won’t place here and I would never click]….

and then a personal note from the spammer:
wife you say? Can anything be done about that? Let me think-yes-
something can be done. Out there, in those so-called civilized planets
nothing could be done. Here it can. For I am Svinjar – and Svinjar can

I can really learn from him.
Here it can!!!! For He is Svinjar, Svinjar the Spammer!!! He, not from the civilized planets, but from “there”, where HE can!

For I am Svinjar – and Svinjar can. Could say that forever.

Luckily I believe in Jesus, and not investing my illegally earned spamming revenue in hallucinogenic drugs to write weird messages in my spam. Hey, Viagra sellers – you hire morons to make your mass e-mails, ever thought about that your money invested in spam marketing is going to Svinjar?

macosx: the lost menu icons

I am sitting in front of my beloved 12″ iBook, called “Eden”.
iBook

I love it so much that I installed and use a billion of productiveness and communication tools, like plazes, iTunes, bluetooth, wireless, VPN, Adium, … and … hm … weren’t there more? Where are those icons?

Yes, macOsX has a design flaw: when you have many apps running and they place icons in the icon-bar to the upper right – the icons get lost. Applications like safari have such a big menu that the icons are all hidden, bad appl.

Thanks to iBlogging.de story on this problem which uses a good-googleable language, I was able to find a nice solution: the application “no menu bar”. This app has only one goal: nothing. So that I can refind all those icons I didn’t see for months, ah, there is plazes…. finally gets those precious pixel spaces on my screen it deserves.

nomenubar