“Cognitive Aspects of Semantic Desktop to Support PIM” – published

Danish Nadeem has finished his master thesis on “Cognitive Aspects of Semantic Desktop to Support PIM”.

Here is his publishing post in full length:

The proper and immediate object of science, is the acquirement, or communication, of truth […]

– Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Definitions of Poetry, 1811

Inspired by the quote here i intend to publish my Masters thesis. The title of my Masters’ Thesis is: “Cognitive Aspects of Semantic Desktop to Support Personal Information Management“. It is submitted now at the Institute of Cognitive Science.

Many thanks to Leo Sauermann for his close supervision, constant support and valuable inputs to realize the work.

The abstract :

This thesis examines issues on Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cognitive Science and Mental Models. The research provides a philosophical grounding for the researchers in Personal Information Management (PIM). An overview is given on various philosophical aspects of computer-based activities. Discussions on the theories relevant to understand the goals for the Semantic Desktop community are elicited. The ideas discussed in the thesis are intended to emphasize a theoretical foundation, with respect to the Semantic Desktop long term goals. The goal of this thesis is to examine the theories of Philosophy and to provide a conceptual idea to design user-intuitive Semantic Desktop applications. The challenges of the Semantic Desktop evaluation are highlighted and suggestions are made based on Gnowsis evaluation. The work tries to induce scientific curiosity among the Semantic Desktop researchers.

Download as [ pdf] size ~1 MB

flickr::backup and RDF

Thanks to the CPAN Perl community, you can get all your Flickr pics as RDF-if you have linux, its just a few steps away.

The relevant documentation:

Perl documentation is excellent. I have seldomly seen such a clean
documentation as Aarons tool and the other tools used. It is minimal, it is simple, it doesn’t miss one point.
He has example RDF output and example documentation, how to tie everything together was easy to find out using CPAN.org.

You will need a flickr API key and secret.
At this point, you need also the auth_token of the key, this is trickier to do.
I moved sidewards to get the token, as I coded with flickr before,
I had a PHP application running that I used to get the auth_token.
The php-flickr API was Dan Coulter’s phpFlickr Class 2.1.0,
and it has this getToken.php file that you can tweak to do the right thing.
I am sure you can get the same with Perl. Once you got the key, secret, and auth_token, install the libs:

get Perl (well, a typical linux distro depends heavily on Perl, so you probably have it already).

get the CPAN module for Net::Flickr::Backup, I used the perl cpan shell for this (sudo is needed because it installs the perl modules in the shared libs):

> sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell

in the perl shell, install the backup module:

> install Net::Flickr::Backup

Now, it asks you many questions. In my case, pressing return most of the time did a good job.

Once you have it installed (perl will say if it doesn’t), you can run the Backup by writing a script.

I created two files, one for the config, one for the perl that runs:

flickrbackup.config: (note: the aaaaaa are used to hide my secret keys)

[flickr]
api_key=1025521456c3212a4f84032049cee7a1
api_secret=aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
auth_token=aaaaaa-aaaaaaaaaaaaaa
api_handler=LibXML

#[search]
#tags=cameraphone
#per_page=500

[backup]
photos_root=/home/media/photos/flickrbackup
scrub_backups=1
fetch_medium=0
fetch_square=0
force=0

[rdf]
do_dump=1
#rdfdump_root=/home/asc/photos

runbackup.pl:

use Net::Flickr::Backup;
use Log::Dispatch::Screen;
use Config::Simple;

my $cfg = new Config::Simple(filename=>”flickrbackup.config”);

my $flickr = Net::Flickr::Backup->new($cfg);

my $feedback = Log::Dispatch::Screen->new(‘name’ => ‘info’,
‘min_level’ => ‘info’);

$flickr->log()->add($feedback);
$flickr->backup();

Now run the scripts:

>perl runbackup.pl

Lean back and watch the photos + RDF manifest in your filesystem magically. In this case, RDF as a file format is helpful becaue it allowed Aaron to mix different aspects of the metadata.

You may get an error because some XML library misses, my error message contained
“Can’t locate XML/LibXML.pm in @INC”
Luckily, this mailinglist post tells you what to do:

>sudo apt-get install libxml-libxml-perl

This may fail with some weird message, I ignored this and run my backup script again.

Urban Hacking in Vienna

so it seems: 23:00, MQ vienna.

Tonight, some guys from the Vienna Metalab, in cooperation with Idontknowwhoelse, are going to do amazing urban hacking in vienna.

Once and for all: be there. At this moment they get their fuckin Laserguided Graffity System shit together, which is a hack/adaption of stuff done by the Graffitti research lab.

Also, it seems that 1000 throwies will find new plazes to stick and glow.

fuckit, and I am stuck in Kaiserslautern.


IMMMA CHARGIN MAH LAZER