Year: 2007

There is a problem of new ontologies popping up for things that have already been formalized. So much energy is lost by people reinventing the “wheel” (in this case, usually the “tag” or “person” classes).
But this wasted energy is missing at the other end – existing ontologies have bugs and problems and need continuing care. FOAF is a good example, every year an updated version is published.

Now Ivan Herman from W3C hinted me to look at this mailinglist at google groups:

http://groups.google.com/group/rdf-schema-dev

Description: A place for authors of RDF schemas to gather and talk shop. The focus is on smaller schemas that don’t already have an established community so discussion of improvements to FOAF, SIOC, DOAP and the like are off topic, although reference to those schemas and their designs is not.

But it seems this list is not very active.

My idea would have been to create a “ontology making discussion group“. I discussed it with Ivan Herman and others, this is a mixup of his thoughts and mine.

W3C would set up a public mailing list (public-ontology-announce@w3.org), anybody can sign up, archives and RSS feed are publicly. If somebody wants to do an ontology, he/she sends a mail to the list saying ‘this is what I want to do and this and this is where the discussions happen’ and people may react if such work is already available or somebody is already busy on this. Then, when the work is done, it is announced on that list. Discussions on the work is not supposed to happen on that list, only announcements.

Basically, it sums up to these rules:

• announce your work beforehand
• announce your work when its done
• allow feedback to your work and critique (using the discussion forum of your choice)

Then your ontology is listed on some W3C website, giving it an official blessing, or on a special section in schemaweb.info.

Although W3C says “we don’t do ontologies”, the GEO ontology having the W3C namespace, or SKOS, have higher weight than others, just because of having the ASCII characters “W3C” in their namespace.

Creating a discussion forum and listing ontologies that have been created according to this procedure would give non-W3C ontologies a similar weight.

This is to ensure that we do not duplicate work and that we begin to establish some formal process of doing ontologies, its meant as a crystallization point around which we can further improve the whole deal of making ontologies.

Any feedback? Does this exist already?

Are you interested in the Semantic Desktop and how I came to do it in the first place, come to this talk.

Talk “Semantic Desktop”,
or “how I stopped worrying and began loving science”
Friday 31.8.2007
Vienna, Metalab, 15:00

Adress:
Metalab
Rathausstrasse 6,
1010 Wien

I will give a talk on Semantic Desktop any my history –
how I came to the whole business, how Geri stumbled me upon the Semantic Web, and how my scientific career worked.

The reason why I give this talk is: most of my friends will be there, its my birthday party. If you want to come, but want to know more details, call me on my cell-phone, I will be travelling in the next hours and days. There is limited room and a guest-list, write me a mail beforehand to ensure we let you in.

I got victimized by flickr censorship. My photos are still there, but I cannot see the photos by Jake Applebaum anymore. Well, not only I, but anybody from China, Germany and Austria. Lucky me, in Hong Kong you get thrown into jail when you look at art photographs done by Jake.

A post by Xeni Jardin on BoingBoing.net explains how Jake got on the censored photos list:

… I blogged about the case of Oiwan Lam, a well-known blogger in Hong Kong (Links: 1, 2, 3, 4) who’s facing the possibility of a year in jail or a $HK 400,000 fine for having linked to an image deemed offensive by authorities. That image (a non-pornographic, artistic nude) was shot and published by none other than Jake Appelbaum, whose work has been blogged here on BoingBoing many times. …
Oiwan … blames the photo-sharing site’s recently implemented content rating/blocking system in part for the legal situation she now faces in Hong Kong.
Jake believes the program, as implemented, amounts to censorship…

Jake explained the background at said blogpost.

Think global, now the local trouble: I cannot look at the pictures of a person, whom I met personally sometime and who’s work I admire. Here is a pic I took of Jake when we were out eating with other friends in Vienna:

And now, when I click on Jake’s photos, flickr tells me
.

Aeeehhhhmmm. Well, ioerror indeed has photos available for me and I would be interested to see them. So, the social networking website flickr removed the social networking for me. But Gunnar, who sits in office in opposite of me, is not affected by the censorship, because he is Norwegian.
My flickr account will expire tomorrow, and I am so angry about this that I don’t plan continue it. But then you won’t see my sets and pictures anymore and, alas, out of anger nothing good can come.

Any suggestions welcome, I could shutdown my flickr account and move to zooomr (well, maybe not, its a one-man-show) or to smugmug, I could make a new flickr account using a fake id from Norway, etc etc… whats the right thing to do?

To be prepared, I already backed up my whole flickr account, including all comments and tags of the photos in RDF.

Harry Chen blogged about the article Flying machines, desktop software and Web 2.0 by Jay Larock, who compares web and desktop software.

Larock gives three reasons why we will continue using desktop computers and desktop software (abbreviated by me):

1. it takes time to port software and make the shift
2. we are not always online, but the desktop still runs
3. some software works better when eating your local cpu power

I copy all of these arguments, and add a fourth: some people don’t trust free services on the web, who may censor your work, suddenly go out of business, or be hacked, and therefore some people keep a copy of their data on their own harddisks and enjoy desktop apps.

Harry then comes to this conclusion:
We shouldn’t ask the question whether desktop software will survive in the age of Web 2.0 (yes, they will survive). But instead, we should ask: how can Web 2.0 applications (and Semantic Web applications) complement the existing functions of desktop software, so that the users can be made more productive?

This question was asked differently by me in 2003 and answered in this thesis:
http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/~sauermann/papers/sauermann2003.pdf

“If the goal is to have a global Semantic Web,
one building block is a Semantic Desktop,
a Web for a single user. “

After this, Stefan Decker and Martin Frank published their “Networked Semantic Desktop” paper, and you find several implementations that bring Semantic Web technology to the desktop, www.dbin.org, www.openiris.org, gnowsis.opendfki.de.

And lots more that are under the “radar”. So, the questions is good, but using the keyword “Semantic Desktop” you easily find an answer. There are many articles about it. If you have more questions, ask the people@semanticdesktop.org.

So yes, its indeed a good idea to combine web 2.0, semantic web and desktop computing 🙂

Dan Connolly blogged about units in RDF.

We have the same problem in Nepomuk, but for more practical things like measuring the size of a file (MB, KB, B, b) or the length of a song (1h, 3m 20s, 200s). Actually, we are searching for a solution that will work in normal KDE and doesnt require a PhD to understand, the typical KDE developer will take 10 minutes reading the FAQ and then start using it (note: 10 minutes for RDF, Turtle and the Unit ontology 😉

Will blog again once I have checked what our status is.

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 […]

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

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:

• http://www.aaronland.info/perl/net/flickr/backup/ – docu of Aaron Straup Cope’s flickr backup tool
• http://www.flickr.com/services/api/auth.howto.web.html – how to get a flickr key

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):

in the perl shell, install the backup module:

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)

runbackup.pl:

Now run the scripts:

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:

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