Year: 2010

We have been at CeBIT this year to present Cluug.com – the semantic personal information management system that helps you link everything.

Here is the long story:
http://www.gnowsis.com/about/blog/2010/03/25/it-was-great-cebit-2010

Short:

• its a semantic web startup and you don’t see RDF in the GUI! Also, the product does something useful – helping you write down your associations and save time when finding stuff. We did something right
• pictures
• it was awesome. nice parties, excellent business connections
• and Bernhard Schandl and the team got Cluug.com running on time
• and Martina Gallova made all the marketing activities happen like a charm!

Thanks to you who visited, I wish God blesses our company and we can go on providing this product to you for the next years.

Thats it – we are up and aliveb in the area of the Semantic Web. The company Semantium from Germany is offering MSemantic, a GoodRelations based Search Engine Optimziation (SEO) tool for the Magento web shop system.

This means that you can now pay someone to help you get higher google ranks using Semantic Web technology. Yeah! Although my personal view on SEO is “the modern way of spam”, I see that companies need it and are willing to pay for it. And also, its a good indicator that a technology is accepted when it can be used for SEO.

I wish Uwe Stoll a good start with Semantium.

KOffice has an extension for supporting RDF in its ODF format. As all is XML, this is an excellent way to go. Read Ben Martin’s post about it.

http://monkeyiq.blogspot.com/2010/01/koffice-and-rdf-say-it-with-style.html

Some excerpts:
The ODF document format lets you store RDF/XML data inside the document file, which in turn lets both a human reader and a computer know about things that comprise an office document. You can refer to a person, place, or time and have the computer know what you are saying without having to resort to heuristics.

Of course, you can drag and drop items from the RDF docker into kaddressbook and korganizer. These pieces of information should be able to be moved into and out of an ODF file using KOffice without thinking about it. You want to add Fred to the text, pick him up from your kaddressbook and drop him into the RDF docker. Your default contact stylesheet is then used to insert some text into the document at the current cursor location showing you the Fred contact. Quick and simple… Lets make RDF something everybody uses but nobody needs to learn about (unless they want to).

It also features a (silent) video:

KOffice and RDF: Say it with Style… from Ben Martin on Vimeo.

So, after many months of setting up a company, we have our second public appearance: gnowsis.com is going to show up at CeBIT. We will be giving demos of our first product “cluug.com” and give away alpha accounts for selected users. There will also be a great video about it.

We have been working many months to get a minimum viable product running. That means, we are going to offer first the core feature of semantic personal information management: links. From the vast amount of things we learned from the NEPOMUK EU project, the first thing that is commercially available from us are links between websites. That gives you the chance to try out the thing online and us the chance to give you more features every month.

So, to learn more: come to CeBIT 2010. I and Martina Gallova are going to be at the gnowsis.com booth as part of the DFKI booth in Hall 9, booth B45. We will also be giving a future talk on Thursday, 4th March, at 17:00 in Hall 9. And we hope to be able to show people what we do at Bitkom’s innovator pitch (you can also wish us good blessing for winning a price there).

I am very happy with the forthcoming of the company so far. Everything took a bit longer as expected, but the results are nice. Between December and January, we rehauled the user interace (kudos to Bernhard Schandl and the development team for leading this). We are negotiating partner deals with interesting companies to bring the semantic desktop and cluug.com to you as soon as possible.

So, I won’t go into details, this leaves plenty of things to talk about at our booth at CeBIT. If you want to meet us – please please write me a mail before. We are going to be very busy and it would be good if we can make an appointment beforehand. I can also organize you a free entry ticket for the meeting, if you need one.

Especially if you are a journalist of professional blogger, it is always better to plan meetings beforehand. At the DFKI booth there is always press around and politicians creating buzz, if you want a calm moment, maybe take care and book one.

Of course, there will be Mozart Choccolate Balls at the booth for you (my traditional talk give-away), we also give away some buttons, but most important – very very rare Alpha User invitation codes.

(btw: ESTC 2009 and getting a price at innocation camp there was our first appearance)

I submitted a short proposal to speak at LIFT-Austria and got my acceptence mail!

See you there on March 18–20 in Vienna, its going to be interesting. My talk will be about something around “tools for thinking – how semantic personal information management is going to change our way of thinking”

Looking forward to the event and to meet others in the field, and to drink a beer. If you are also going, ping me.

There are activities towards updating the RDF standard.

Here are my thoughts on what problems and solutions we have:

Leobard’s thoughts about needed changes to RDF.

Problems:

1) Reification is not an aesthetically appealing model because it forces the triple/statement structure on quads. Therefore it is not used much and discouraged by some “named graph” enthousiasts. Nevertheless, the need to identify and annotate single triples and their values is there.

2) rdf:value, datatype, language, and reification all address the same need and are redundant.

3) The relation between a web resource (i.e. a web page in html) and the RDF document (named graph) containing the RDF data of the web page can NOT be expressed with the RDF standard. There exist various, scarcely documented methods such as the HTML Header tag “” or 303 redirects, or content negotiation. Some of these methods are described in “Cool Uris for the Semantic Web”). This has been causing personal bellyaches for me since editing “Cool Uris for the Semantic Web”. It is not aesthetic as this central feature of linked data and RDF can’t be represented in RDF.

4) Statements about reified triples must be possible for sets of triples.

Suggestions for Solutions: [syntax: problem->solution]

1)->S1) On the core level of RDF, add an URI identifier to a triple. Let Serializations allow to add this URI to the triple. Add a triple identifier to the core of the spec and APIs.

2)->S2) Deprecate rdf:value.

3)->S3) In RDFS we already hint at HTTP dereferenciation and linked data in rdfs:seeAlso and its subproperty rdfs:isDefinedBy. In foaf we have foaf:homepage that links a resource to its web page. In SKOS we had skos:isSubjectOf (but it was removed) I propose “”” rdfs:describes a rdfs:Property; rdfs:domain rdfs:Resource; rdfs:range rdfs:Resource; rdfs:comment “The subject RDF resource is metadata for the object document.” “”” . This solution seems to add problems though, as the relation between document and resource is dynamic and ever changing.

3)->S3.1) Leave it as is. The problem of linking between HTML and RDF representations is on the level of HTML and not on RDF.