Year: 2008

For the german audience, “Entwickler Magazin” hat in Ausgabe 2008.1 einen Artikel von mir über den Semantic Desktop veröffentlicht.

In vier Seiten wird dort erklärt, was die Grundlagen von Semantic Web und Semantic Desktop sind, und ein paar links auf Projekte gegeben.
Zu haben um € 6,50 im Zeitschriftenhandel in Deutschland/Österreich/Schweiz, eine der 20k Ausgaben können schon bald dein sein.

Einleitung:
Der Semantic Desktop macht den PC zum Denkwerkzeug. wink wink
Wir haben genug Platz, um all unsere E-Mails, MP3s, Photos, Videos und Dokumente am Desktop zu speichern. Das Problem ist, diese Information zu verwalten. Dateisysteme bieten nur starre Hierarchien an. Tim Berners-Lee und das W3C haben bereits weiter gedacht: Menschen denken in Konzepten, das Semantic Web bietet mit RDF und Ontologien einen auf HTTP, URIs und HTML aufbauenden Standard zur Annotation und Suche. Der Semantic Desktop bringt Betriebssysteme und Anwendungen damit weg von den Dateien, auf die Stufe der Gedanken.

Um dahin zu kommen, zuerst ein kleiner Crash-Kurs zum Thema Semantic Web,…
…

A storm-in-a-waterglass gathering more and more momentum, dataportability.org welcomes new members. Before they were heating up the storm, now individual corporate representatives of Scoble, Plaxo, and Facebook, are sitting on one virtual table.

As announced here, blogged here, and then slashdotted, people working for some interesting ventures have today joined dataportability.org.

In the last weeks, for those who missed the event that Robert Scoble used an un-released app “pulse” from plaxo to gather his contacts from facebook and got blocked by facebook after this. He contacted them and after a while, was back in, but the problem is obvious: social websites, and the companies running them, have one capital on their stock: data created by us. As “we” were “man of the year” in Time, the data of such a celebrity is worth a lot.

Scoble joined dataportability.org (DP) and blogged this, which made me curious to also look at their site and add a few notes about how RDF and Semantic Web may help them out instead of creating their own standards.
Now that people working for Plaxo, Google, and Facebook join the already impressive list of individuals at dataportability, they can really talk about the mission
To put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end Data Portability. To promote that design to the developer, vendor and end-user community.

My biggest fear was, that the standards created by DP were used-less as no big companies were present in their board (not like W3C, where nearly all big companies are onboard). This has changed now and I would expect that the effort indeed now is relevant to the future of the web.

An introductionary talk about the Semantic Web:

show it to your significant other to explain why you stare at the screen all day.