Author: leobard

This popped up on the mailinglists (thx to Danny and Heiko for forwarding)

Every Triple is Sacred
(with apologies to Mony Python)

There are DB designers in the world.
There are OO programmers.
There are Lispers and even logicians, and then
There are those that use ML, but
I’ve never been one of them.

I’m a true blue RDFer,
And have been since before I was born,
And the one thing they say about RDFers is:
They’ll take implementors as soon as they’re warm.

You don’t have to be a six-footer.
You don’t have to have a great brain.
You don’t have to have any math knowledge. You’re
An RDFer the moment Tim came,

Because

Every triple is sacred.
Every triple is great.
If a triple is wasted,
Tim gets quite irate.

RDF COMMUNITY:
Every triple is sacred.
Every triple is great.
If a triple is wasted,
Tim gets quite irate.

AUTHOR #1:
Let the others spill triples
On academic ground.
Tim shall make them pay for
Each triple that can’t be found.

FOAF IMPLEMENTORS:
Every triple is correct.
Every triple is bright.
FOAF USERS:
Tim will let no triple
ALL FOAF:
Away from his oversight.

RDF COMMUNITY:
Every triple is wanted.
Every triple is good.
Every triple bears truth
In a graph’s neighbourhood.

AUTHOR #2:
DLs, logic, OOP,
Spill syntax just anywhere,
But Tim loves only RDF, which treats its
Syntax with more care.

RDF COMMUNITY:
Every triple is useful.
Every triple is fine.
STARTUP’S EMPLOYEES:
Tim needs everybody’s.
IMPLEMENTOR #1:
Mine!
IMPLEMENTOR #2:
… And mine!
USER:
…… And mine!

W3C TEAM MEMBER #1:
Every triple is beautiful
W3C TEAM MEMBERS #2 AND #3:
Every triple is wed
W3C TEAM MEMBER #1:
To its eternal meaning
W3C TAG:
In the Semantic Web!

W3C COMMUNICATIONS HEAD:
Let the unbelievers produce syntax
For languages complex or plain.
W3C PUBLICATION TEAM:
Tim shall strike them down for
Each triple that’s wasted in vain.

EVERYONE:
Every triple is correct.
Every triple is bright.
Tim will let no triple
Away from his oversight.

Every triple is wanted.
Every triple is good.
Every triple bears truth
In a graph’s neighbourhood.

Every triple is beautiful
Every triple is wed
To its eternal meaning
In the Semantic Web!

Every triple is sacred.
Every triple is great.
If a triple is wasted,
Tim gets quite iraaaaaate!

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Sperm_Is_Sacred

OMG I forgot to blog this for three years. Alas, here it finally is.
I was addicted to ultima online seriously, from about 1999 to 2001. I bought the game in New York and then played it intensively all my waking moments. Whenever I was at work or at the University, the main thoughts running through my head were: more strength, going to the woods for lumberjacking and hunting (= in ultima).

Obviously, a perfect ground for a hack later on.
In 2004, freshly joined at DFKI I made a mashup of beloved ultima online with beloved Semantic Web, resulting in a few e-mails exchanged with some ultime hackers (including tensor from ultima-iris.de, now called iris2, we even had plans to bring this to a higher level 🙂 and a python script to extend wolfpack, a free clone of the ultima online server software.

The result was, that within medieval magic world, you could go up to some characters and ask “news?” and be rewarded with the character reading the news from planetrdf.com for you, ingame. Second, more interesting, it would take all your contacts from your outlook address book via Gnowsis and put them into the game – as rabbits. In many demos I had to kill Libby and Dan to free the plains from too many white rabbits to follow 🙂

Alas, here is the screenshots that rotted on my harddisk.

It all was done according to another great plan from us, probably Sven Schwarz and me discussed it.

But the goal was completly different, the typical semantic web idea: what if we could manager our photos, MP3 files, documents, communication with friends, and meet in a 3d virtual environment? What if we could see others that are at the same “place” as us, and exchange information with them? In Ultima, it is possible to hack objects that they can have links to the web – we would have used this to support the gnowsis protocol (back then, still a great idea) and HTTP. Tensor and I also planned to make it possible to exchange MP3s via P2P and Ultima Online as interface.

The difference in knowledge work when having a 3d environment around you is: you see who else is having the same problem as you, when you search for some documents, the people have to go where the document is. I would guess that this implies similar outcome as do communities of practice or coffee-corner KM techniques. The MP3 people? they hang out in Jhelom, But christian pop you say, folks listening to this usually hang out in Buccaneers den. You wanted to search for SemWeb hackers? Why not look in the prism of light dungeon, their link collection is on the walls there and several grandmaster mages have to keep the doors of inference shut 24/7 to save the planet, etc.

I cannot be bothered to get it running again, to repeat the glory you would need Ultima Online, wolfpack, rdflib for python, and these scripts:

• banker.py
• rdftext.py

The second one shows how you can trigger ingame events using python and RDF.

The conclusion of this story is, though, that Dan Brickley was quite right when he thought loudly about buying an island on second life and hack SemWeb stuff into SecondLife, all your triples are belong to SL. Anything going in this direction is going to be awesome, I would guess. Web 3.0 in 3d, that has even the same numbers: Web 3.0d. Sounds like a patch to Web 3.0

Sebastian Trüg has published a first screencast of the NEPOMUK-KDE project, which brings the power of RDF‘s resource annotation to the KDE desktop environment for Linux (wikipedia).
The first feature is annotation of files with text, rating, and tags. The same is possible for e-mails, websites, and everything else you can think of. Underlying is not a simple model of tags-as-strings, but RDF. Thus, you can easily rename tags and do other nice things, such as semantic desktop search.

The screencast as such is a bit too long and without sound, not very brushed yet. But I bet that once more features are implemented, there will be nicer presentations.

Using RDF on the desktop opens now possibilities to improve publishing data on the web, tags and annotations added to files can easily be added to websites, and vice versa, data downloaded from the web to the desktop can be linked to additional information from the web.

A little background: The NEPOMUK-KDE project is supported by the European Union and helps building a platform for other semantic applications to build upon. This is part of the Lisbon Goal of the EU to become “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-driven economy by 2010“. The know-how to do these things is currently developed in the union, companies and solution providers may then build upon this.

A EU project supporting users in collaborative work.

inContext will develop a novel scientific approach focused on a new blend of human collaboration and service-oriented systems that explores two basic research strands:

1. efficient and effective support for human interactions and collaboration in various teams through dynamically aggregated software services;
2. use of human-to-human or human-to-service interactions in applying intelligent mining and learning algorithms that can detect interaction patterns for pro-active service aggregation.

It has both science and application, look at this awesome presentation video of the project on youtube:

whoa, I wish there was such a video for tabulator or nepomuk.

Thomas Roth-Berghofer, our colleague, is workshop chair at the KI2008, here is the call for workshop submissions. Artificial Intelligence people: go for it! 🙂

====================================================================

KI 2008 — 31st German Conference on Artificial Intelligence
23 – 26 September 2008, Kaiserslautern, Germany
http://ki2008.dfki.uni-kl.de

====================================================================

KI 2008 is the 31st edition of the German Conference on Artificial
Intelligence, which traditionally brings together academic and
industrial researchers from all areas of AI. The technical programme
of KI 2008 will comprise paper and poster presentations and a
variety of workshops and tutorials.

We invite proposals for workshops to be held at the beginning of
the conference. Eligible topics include all subareas of Artificial
Intelligence, as well as their foundations and applications.

——————————————————————–

How to Propose a Workshop

Proposals should be about two (2) pages in length. They should be
prepared in PDF or plain ASCII and sent by email to the KI 2008
Workshop Chair Thomas Roth-Berghofer (trb@dfki.uni-kl.de).

The proposals should be written in English and must arrive by
January 25, 2008. Each workshop proposal should contain the
following:

– A description of the workshop topic. This description should
briefly discuss why the suggested topic is of particular
interest at this time.

– A brief description of the workshop format, regarding the mix
of events such as paper presentation, invited talks, panels,
demonstrations, and general discussion.

– An indication as to whether the workshop should be considered
for a half-day or one-day meeting.

– The names and full contact information (email and postal
addresses, fax and telephone numbers) of the organising
committee (three or four people knowledgeable in the field)
and short descriptions of their relevant expertise. (Please
specify the main contact.) Strong proposals include organisers
who bring differing perspectives to the workshop topic and who
are actively connected to the communities of potential
participants.

– A list of potential attendees.

———————————————————————-

Workshop organisers will be responsible for:

– Producing a call for participation. The call is due February 20,
2008. This call will be posted on the KI 2008 website. Organisers
are responsible for additional publicity such as distributing the
call to relevant newsgroups and electronic mailing lists, and
especially to potential audiences from outside the KI conference
community. Organisers are encouraged to maintain their own web
site with updated information about the workshop.

– Coordinating the production of the workshop notes. The KI 2008
Workshop Chair coordinates the collection, production, and
distribution of the working notes for the workshops. Workshop
papers and abstracts must be received by the KI 2008 Workshop
Chair no later than August 17, 2008, and volumes are limited to
a total of 200 pages.

The KI 2008 conference organisers will provide logistic support,
and meeting places for the workshops, and will determine the
dates and times of the workshops. The KI 2008 conference
organisers reserves the right to drop any workshop if the
organisers miss the above deadlines. All workshop participants
must register for the KI 2008 conference.

———————————————————————-

Important Dates

Proposal deadline: January 25, 2008
Notification of acceptance: February 4, 2008
CFP for the workshops due: February 20, 2008
Proceedings due for printing: August 17, 2008
Workshop: September 23, 2008

——————————————————————–

KI 2008 – Workshop Chair
Dr. Thomas Roth-Berghofer (trb@dfki.uni-kl.de)

====================================================================

People with a good memory (who aren’t hooked on semantic systems like me) may remember that I started roughly a year ago to blog about my PhD. In Step 1 I described the general idea around Semantic Desktop and PIMO, in Step 2 I described my struggle for a research question and the actual scientific goal. Now, that was a year ago and something should have happened in the meantime…

Doing a PhD is a permanent struggle against yourself, god, life as such. If not true, this is at least a view that excuses a student to feel overwhelmed by the task, sit back, open (a can of beer|a bottle of wine) and yearn for life before and after the PhD. In the last year, I did struggling, being overwhelmed, and working on the PhD. I did entagle myself being involved in a lot of other things (such as aperture, nepomuk, burning man decompression, sweo, sesame, my 30th birthday) , which somehow ended up being a lot of things and some of them suffering from diminuished attention. Overwhelmed, we come back to the better reaction than the alcoholic beverage: finishing the PhD by writing it, then improve quality in the other tasks.

The core of the problem is that writing a PhD involves the task of writing. In general, a student can write one page of quality work per work-day. Given the fact that I was involved in a gazillion of things, this drops to one page a week. Oh, a 150 page PhD will then be written in three years. But as I started last year and want to get finished SOON, things had to speed up.

If you do the math for your own work, you can easily finish a PhD by cutting down the pagecount to a reasonable length (less than 100 pages would be excellent). But this means that the pages have to be really good. If you are really good, try writing a PhD in 82 pages like the web-shaking Human Computation by Luis von Ahn. He was able to say the following in his abstract (in my eyes a ticket to finish the PhD right after the first page and get graduated)
In addition, I introduce CAPTCHAs, automated tests that humans can pass but computer programs cannot. CAPTCHAs take advantage of human processing power in order to differentiate humans from computers, an ability that has important applications in practice.
The results of this thesis are currently in use by hundredszillions of Web sites and companies around the world, and some of the games presented here have been played by over 100,000 people. (strikethrough and correction of numbers by me)
Basically, this translates to: my work is pure innovation, or shorter: I rule.

So, not witty enough, I aimed for doing a larger 150 page thesis with the typical parts

• introduction: state of the art (web, knowledge management, ontologies, semantic desktop), problem
• my idea (PIMO + Semantic Desktop for PIM)
• my implementation and algorithms and ontologies
• evaluation
• conclusion: this work is pure innovation, may I rule?

The main parts of the work have been published before in other papers I did on my own and with others, see my publication list for a glimpse of what I refer to.
I took the argumentation, the citations, and the key results from this work and integrated it into one view.
Before, I had a time of “writing it from scratch” and “planning the layout in sections”, I even made a MindManager mindmap of the whole structure.
I ended up having a 200 page document which I called “PhD draft”, but which was actually a copy/pasted frankenstein of my papers, croaking “Pease kill me, Every moment I live is agony!“.
So instead of finishing early, this approach made it actually a bit longer.

The real tricky part was “finishing something”, I then started by finishing the introduction. I wrote it, improved it, printed it, thought about it, sent it to my mother (who has a phd in International Business plus a degree in english translation) to check the english (Mom, thank you so much and I am really lucky to have you!), check it by my colleague Thomas Roth-Berghofer and then by my Professor Andreas Dengel.
And alas, everyone was ok with it. Away frankenstein, welcome results. I was motivated to continue.

This was in August and knowing that I am on the right track, the rest was easy … sort of.
I plowed through section after section, improving the content, adding missing bits, removing redundancy. Today I have a 250 page version that contains most of the things that must be in, missing are a few parts I wanted to do on literature and software engineering lessons learned.
From time to time I talked with my Buddy Sven Schwarz, who is on a similar quest as me, exchanging our status and talking helped to get organized.

So, the next sections can go into review, looking forward to get it done … soon. A good motivation to speed up is the fact that Gunnar has also reached the equilibrium of “its done, only minor changes now”.

When constructing ontologies, labels are needed for properties. This is a crucial part of the work, the names will form the XML namespace and are visible as labels in the user interface.

We had a discussion at work about names for predicates. To illustrate it, a bad example (in N3):
:isKnowingperson a rdf:Property; rdfs:Range :Person.

The name is too long, contains a verb (“is”), has a mixed uppercasing (the “p” should be uppercase to ease reading) and contains too much information (Person can be removed, its also in the range.

The practical community preferes nouns (part, location,
topic, related) there is a slight one-sentence reco towards using nouns in the swap primer.

The popular ontology (=foaf) use nouns for literal properties and a verb for knows. Similar relations can be modelled: loves, hates.
SKOS [2], also uses isXOf for inverse that were hard to define, as is
rdfs:isDefinedBy.

It seems that the trend is toward shorter forms, gerunds, verbs or nouns.
My summary is: as I want to define inverses, I will try to use nouns
without verb-prepositions whenever possible. When this does not capture
the semantics in a satisfying way, I will use “isXof” and “hasX” or
search for a gerund. In practice the guideline is: use “name” instead of
“hasName”.

For NEPOMUK’s PIMO ontology, this would result in:

• part – partOf
• location – locationOf
• related
• topic – topicOf

I would appreciate feedback based on published guidelines on building
ontologies or on other ontologies that had similar problems.

Aperture is a Java framework for extracting full-text content and
metadata from various information systems (e.g. file systems, web sites,
mail boxes) and the file formats (e.g. documents, images) occurring in
these systems.

http://aperture.sourceforge.net/

Today, on 12th November 2007, we publish the first beta release, marking the point where aperture is being applied in projects. The new version number is 1.0.1.

This release bears the mark of the Nepomuk Social Semantic Desktop – a major intiative combining research institutes and commercial companies from around Europe. Aperture is used as one of the pillars of a next-generation platform that changes the way people can organize and use the data stored on their computers. The input from the Nepomuk Community drove us to implement a host of new features that make Aperture more useful, more flexible and more powerful.

New Features

• Aperture has been migrated to use the newly developed
  Nepomuk Information Element Ontology framework. This
  added a new level of precision and expressiveness to the
  output of Aperture components. The ontology itself
  is endorsed by the Nepomuk Consortium, well documented
  and maintained.
• The output is now thoroughly tested with an extensible
  rdf validator for compliance with the ontology. This
  allowed us to fix a number of bugs that made certain
  properties appear in places they didn’t belong
• the data source configuration API has been overhauled and
  is now much more easy to use
• A new facility that allows clients to implement dynamic
  GUIs for data source configuration.
• New JpgExtractor that extracts EXIF annotations from JPG
  files
• four new experimental crawlers (Flickr, Bibsonomy,
  del.icio.us and Apple IPhoto).
• host of small improvements and bug fixes

Another improvement is a public wiki for documentation,
tutorials and FAQ.
http://aperture.wiki.sourceforge.net/

Updated dependencies

• Sesame 2.0 beta-6 (was beta-4)
• RDF2Go 4.4.6
• RDF2Go driver for sesame
• A metadata-extractor-2.4.0-beta-1 library used by the
  JPGExtractor
• POI has been update to 3.0-FINAL
• flickrapi-1.0b4 used by the FlickrCrawler
• DFKIUtils 2.0 some XML-related utilities are used by the website crawlers
• nrlvalidator-0.1 the validator used by the unit tests
• infsail-0.1 and unionsail-0.1 dependencies of the
  validator

Download here.

Best regards
Antoni Mylka
Christiaan Fluit
Leo Sauermann