Author: leobard

and its fast!

As you can’t blog enough about it, I am copying a story from this announcement email:
(following Text by Josh Tauberer)

Hi, everyone. (This is a revised/combined reannouncement for what was
originally posted on the Linking Open Data list.)

Last November, Chris Bizer wrote, “[T]he DBLP server increases the size
of the Semantic Web by around 10 percent ;-)” [1] Based on the same
logic, I have recently increased the size of the semantic web by 200%!
(in terms of the number of triples; and of course I’m also just joking
here w.r.t. size of the semantic web)

I’m announcing here a new U.S. 2000 Census dataset of 1 billion triples,
accessible over SPARQL and browsable by linked data [2] principles, and
re-announcing my U.S. Congress dataset which is newly browsable with
linked data principles. These two datasets are interconnected, and the
Census dataset is linked up via owl:sameAs to Geonames [3].

I like the Census data set a lot for three reasons— first, if you live
in the U.S. it has something for you, since it has detailed statistics
on geographic entities down to the level of small towns/villages, and
everyone lives somewhere; second, it meshes up with two other data sets;
and third, it’s rich enough on its own to support a wide array of
interesting and real-world useful queries (if, say, you were doing
research).

The OpenLink guys were kind enough to host the data set previously, but
I wanted to push the limits of my own semweb C# library [4] and I wanted
to be able to revise the data set as needed, so I’ve wanted to host it
myself, which only recently I was able to do (even though I’ve had the
triples laying around for nearly a year).

A complete description of the data set and how it was constructed and
exposed is here:

http://www.rdfabout.com/demo/census/

Some features of the data set:

Data on 3,200 U.S. counties, 36,000 “towns”, 16,000 “villages”, 33,000
ZCTAs (something like zip-codes), and 435 congressional districts.

Each of those locations contains around 10 thousand population
statistics, as well as a dc:title, a basic hierarchical structure
between regions, and latitude/longitude.

Very basic geographic/name/lat-lng data (1 million triples) can be
downloaded in N3.

All of the 1 billion triples are accessible via SPARQL. See:
http://www.rdfabout.com/demo/census/sparql.xpd which has a few sample
queries. An example query is “List the states in the United States that
have more students in dorms than prisoners.”

The URIs for the geographic regions are dereferencable http: URIs. (The
URIs for the predicates in the data set will be updated to be
dereferencable in the future.) For example, you can visit the URI for
New York State:

http://www.rdfabout.com/rdf/usgov/geo/us/ny

(Some URIs return very large pages that take Firefox quite a while to
render. That one’s OK.)

The dereferencable URIs return 303’s to SPARQL DESCRIBE pages describing
those URIs.

There is a sitemap.xml file based on the latest draft circulated [5],
referenced from robots.txt: http://rdfabout.com/robots.txt

And, source code to generate the triples from the Census download files
are posted. It’s too large for me to provide the whole RDF myself, for
now at least.

The U.S. Congress data set, which I originally made SPARQL-accessible in
December 2005 but is now revised to follow the new linked data
principles, has 12 million triples containing brief biographical data
for all members of Congress, and mainly data for federal legislation and
voting records going back a number of years. Here are two example
dereferencable URIs:

http://www.rdfabout.com/rdf/usgov/congress/people/M000303
(= Senator John McCain)

http://www.rdfabout.com/rdf/usgov/congress/109/bills/h867
(= a bill in Congress)

Some example Congress-related queries are posted here:
http://www.govtrack.us/sparql.xpd
And dump files are here:
http://www.govtrack.us/data/rdf/

An example I like to use is that one could fairly easily create a table
using SPARQL aligning votes on a particular bill by congressmen with,
for instance, the median commuting time to work of their constituents,
as reported by the Census.

Thanks to those who gave feedback on the LOD list — I haven’t been
able to address all of it yet (like how to deal with backlinks on the
dereferenced pages).

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2006Nov/0008.html
[2] http://linkeddata.org/
[3] http://www.geonames.org/
[4] http://razor.occams.info/code/semweb
[5] http://sw.deri.org/2007/07/sitemapextension/

—
– Josh Tauberer

http://razor.occams.info

The web 2.0 is getting richer based on the proprietary walls.
There is an often asked question: why is FOAF out there for years but nobody made a business model out of it? Easy: because when you open your service to be replaceable, you are replaceable. Imagine a world where you could switch your community website like you can already switch your newsreader today (thanks to OPML): Venture capitalists would sweat like a drunken grad student in final exam.

This post is partly inspired by this. There is a mix up of cause and effect: FOAF as a standard is making Web 2.0 services interoperable and standardized. Orkut, facebook, linkedin, studivz, (++) would all have the same API and an extensible data format if they used FOAF and RDF.

But wait – who is the venture capitalist behind these web 2.0 walls? Maybe you. So you suddenly realize that when your little nerds in the computer room switch the lever towards standards, your money may go down the well, because then your precious closed community of people, and that is what you sell and own: data about people, will be open for anyone else to copy. So you would do your best not going for standards but instead making the BEST social service EVER so that everyone DIGGS it and invites all HIS FRIENDS into closed walls. Capitalism is ok, but we have to name it what it is.

Like Dick Hardt from SXIP said in his well-known keynote: its your data, not theirs. FOAF and RDF is a way to get back your data from the web 2.0 companies that own you at the moment, make them give you back the data you have entered. Switching from Flickr to another photo community should be as easy as switching newsreader (thx to OPML) or Office Application (thx to OpenDocument).

Microsoft does not go crazy for a standardized OpenDocument format, which would help us get free from the monopoly that takes your money when buying a computer and invests it to sell XBoxes to your kid. Why should it be different with web 2.0? But thanks for pointing us to the VC view.

Update from last post, I am in Hannover engaged in Research. Julien Gaugaz from L3S and I are working on the topic of Current work Context of a user for Nepomuk. This is tricky, as first of all, there are about 600 definitions of “context” (there is a paper about analyzing 66 of them using text analytics, context buzzword word that everyone uses with its own interpretation!) and second, we have multiple existing ontologies and implementations to integrate.

btw, this is the room for the Hiwis and guest researchers where I sit at the moment:

I will blog about our extensive literature research on context later this week.

In the meantime, Cedric Mesnage from Lugano interviewed all DFKI and L3S members about what they are working on in the project, to improve the architecture of Nepomuk and communicate it better, a good task.

We drank beer and looked at the rainy (no, its not raining, its only dripping, Hannoverians have 100 words for rain) city of Hannover.
To Heiko Haller I said in a chat, that we will probably end up in a Fiasko, but actually we started there:

Besides, Cedric can not only do great art, he can also do photographs (bummer that the autofocus didn’t get this one perfect):

I am currently guest researching at the L3S lab in Hannover. L3S does research on Semantic Web, e-learning, search. They are partner in the NEPOMUK project, and I will be working on the ideas of the context a user currently works in, to guess what somebody is doing based on observations done. This is important to give support to people, showing them information that is related to the task you are doing at the moment. (for example: you are reading this blog-post, and related information is l3s, dfki, nepomuk, leo sauermann, context).

I will be at L3S for three weeks, from 24.9.2007 to probably 14.10.2007.

Here is the building where I am sitting at the moment:

Its the L3S offices at KBS, Appelstraße 4, 30167 Hannover. I am sitting in room 232. If you want to use this occassion to meet me, skype or jabber me first (check my foaf for how to).

I am living not far from that in an appartment room, where I have access to a kitchen and a bed, and free wifi for 90 minutes per day, great, what else do you need.

Members of Stanford University, together with media people, created viral marketing videos, which are irresistable.

the other videos of the campaign, the klystron tube (microwave) and FM synthesizer, are also a must-see.

via CaptSolo

Schmap.com is a website providing dynamic travel guides. Instead of using boring stock photos, they also use flickr photos to illustrate their guides. I was contacted by them if they could use one of my photos for their guide (thanks to CC this all works).
Update (27.9.2007): As the photo wasn’t CC licensed (Thanks Maggi for pointing it out), I have to add that they asked me if they could do it. Hm, I wonder if they look for good pictures or for CC pictures.

Now, their guide is updated and here is the section where they use my photo (taken during ISWC 2005, of the conference dinner 🙂

They have a schmaplet to embed the post in blog-posts, but it seems that my blog-provider doesnt allow i-frames, so
click yourself.

This is the way to go: web 2.0 business!

SUN researcher Nicole Yankelovich presents an open-source 3-dimensional virtual environment, that can do many tricks, including application sharing in a like-VNC way.

Its called project wonderland, and builds on darkstar, an open source gaming server platform. Underneath, there is looking glass, an open source 3d platform.

Its a business-oriented, knowledge-work oriented environment, published open source. Unlike secondlife, which is closed-source and leisure-oriented.

With systems like this and all data represented as RDF on a Semantic Web, using Semantic Desktop applications, users could intuitively place their work in a virtual environment and share their ideas. Looking forward to see how this integrates with Semantic Web.

thanks to Henry Story for the link and his story on wonderland.

Mike Bergman blogged about a new release of Microsoft Astoria, where they announce support for Atom, JSON (who-hoo), and Web3s.

I doubt that this can be taken as a signal from the whole Microsoft Corporation but is rather the view of project members of this one project. Nevertheless, its going to be interesting what Microsoft will do: bunker themselves in (terran style) and hope that their customers will never hear of open standards? I doubt, and therefore I do not fully agree with Mike:
This is yet another stunning and lame attempt by Microsoft to replace open standards with proprietary ones. Get a clue, Redmond!

They probably got their clue already, but for big companies it always takes time… HP (Jena), IBM (SLRP) and SUN are faster this time.