Category: SemWeb

I will be giving a seminar on

The Nepomuk Project – about the upcoming Social Semantic Desktop Platform

Date: Thursday September 07, 2006 at 16:00:00
Location: EJ228 (Directions)
Artificial Intelligence Center, SRI International, 333 Ravenswood Avenue, Menlo Park, CA 94025-3493

webpage: www.ai.sri.com/seminars/detail.php?id=159

please come to this seminar, I want to knit new connections between people in the Europe and California Semantic Web scene. If you come, write a short notice to leo.sauermann@dfki.de and perhaps to Neil Yorke-Smith, (nysmith workingat AI.SRI.COM) who is organizing the event together with Jack Park.

Abstract

Different research institutes are working on a vision titled “Semantic Desktop”, a semantically enhanced desktop computer that allows us to access semantic web data and desktop data in a uniform way. The European Union Integrated Project NEPOMUK (http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org) started in 2006 and intends to realize and deploy a comprehensive solution – methods, data structures, and a set of tools – for extending the personal computer into a collaborative environment, which improves the state of art in online collaboration and personal data management and augments the intellect of people by providing and organizing information created by single or group efforts. NEPOMUK brings together researchers, industrial software developers, and representative industrial users. In this talk you will get an introduction on the theory behind the Semantic Desktop, ontologies, databases, user interfaces and projects that work on this topic. Details about the current open-source implementations are presented and a demo is given. The lecture will finish with a discussion, where similarities and differences to the OpenIRIS project by SRI will be an important question.

Bio for Leo Sauermann

Leo Sauermann studied Information science at the Vienna University of Technology. Under the project name “gnowsis” he merged Personal Information Management with Semantic Web technologies, resulting in a master thesis about “Using Semantic Web technologies to build a Semantic Desktop”. Working as a researcher at the DFKI since 2004, he continued the work and now maintains the associated open-source project gnowsis. His research focus is on Semantic Web and its use in Knowledge Management. In autumn 2003 he started to give talks about his work and he is publishing frequently on the topic. From 1998 to 2002 he has been working in several small software companies, including the position of lead architect at Impact Business Computing developing mobile CRM solutions. He is an experienced programmer in both Delphi and Java. At the moment he is working on the EU integrated project Nepomuk.

Note for Visitors to SRI

Please arrive at least 10 minutes early in order to sign in and be escorted to the conference room. SRI is located at 333 Ravenswood Avenue in Menlo Park. Visitors may park in the visitors lot in front of Building E, and should call extension 2592 to be escorted to the meeting room. Detailed directions to SRI, as well as maps, are available from the Visiting AIC web page.

The simile team has published another nice reusable component: timeline visualization.

The advantage of this visualization is that it is programmed completly in Javascript, reusable like the google maps API.

In their words:
Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It is like Google Maps for time-based information.

This is their nice logo:

A introduction howto program it is here:
create-timelines

A first glance at it convinces me: this looks easy to use. They published the code in a SVN repository, so packaging it with something else is possible.

Danny Ayers pickes up the idea, and blogged a nice vision of how to combine GEO-data together with photo annotation and timelines, read here.

some say WinFS is dead but who knows, according to the blog post by some Microsoft dude, it is changing plans.

So if you want a semantic file system, join SemFS!

http://semfs.ontoware.org/

yes, we hope that SemFS will integrate with Nepomuk.

Dazzled by the craze for the soccer wm in Germany, I was wondering what to do with soccer. Then, yesterday night it struck me and I knew: the world is a soccer ball! We are living on a big leather ball, floating through space.

So behold: the ultimate Google Earth hack: The world is a soccer ball!

Click to see yourself (you need to have installed Google Earth first):
howgermansseetheworld.kml

The full story:
a KML overlay for google earth, created in painstaking work by Leo Sauermann,

This is how many people view the world these days. It is the biggest soccer ball that has ever been sighted. yes, very big, even bigger then the one spotted by Google previously.

How this was done?

First of all, it is important to know what a soccer ball is. A soccer ball is a “cut-away icosaeder”. I read some details this webpage:
mathematische-basteleien.de/fussball.htm.

Then I looked for a way to model it in KML. As I have never done KML before, I had to look for tutorials and docu first.
Ok, the easiest way is to assume the center of the world as center of the soccer ball.
I needed the coordinates of the corner-points, these I found in a Java snippet that creates a rotating soccer ball.
This snippet of java helped me.
I copied the code and fumbled around for three hours until I could convert the xyz coordinates to lat/lon coordinates.
Also, Google Earth gave me headaches as it discriminates on polygons, if you draw then clockwise or counter-clockwise the color gets changes
(argh! And I thought my stlye was wrong).
After the corner-coordinates were setup, I created a KML file with the corners numbered.
Then I had to find all six-corner and five-corner objects and added them to an array.

Finally, I added all real soccer stadiums for the WM
and the previous biggest soccer ball
to the KML, as sugar on top – for you users.

Still open is how to put the FIFA logo on the ball…

enjoy, if you have questions:
leo@gnowsis.com

Leo Sauermann 2006

Sources

The source code and all needed to go on is on my homepage:
soccer.zip.
Also in SVN in the fuzzbutt project.

Copyright notice

This KML is licensed under creative-commons Attribution license
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/

inspiration and code taken from:

• http://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-279086.html
• http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2006/05/worlds_biggest.html
• http://www.mathe-online.at/mathint/wfun/i.html#bogenmass
• http://earth.google.com/kml/kml_tags.html
• http://www.jjam.de/Java/Applets/3D_Effekte/Fussball.html

Man Luo’s Diploma Thesis on Semantic Meeting Annotation is published. She developed a prototype, based on Gnowsis alpha 0.8, to manage Meetings semantically, identifying problems in PIM and solving them using Jena and Java.

You can download:

• Diploma Thesis: Man Luo, Semantic Meeting Annotation
• The sources of the java project
• Browse the sources online

The treasures for you Semantic Web hackers:

• She cites many of you guys out there, from Dennis Quan to Xiao & Cruz.
• A nice application prototype came out.
• Jena was used to transform one RDF vocabulary to another, like Leigh Dodds did here. Her Java/Jena code on that is here. And she uses these rules.

Abstract
Nowadays, the personaldesktop contains an enormous amount of information, which we use, process, and search in our daily work. Facing so much information, people pay more attention to Personal Information Management (PIM), which enables people to gather, organize, and synthesize information with flexibility and speed.

A significant use for PIM is in business environments, for instance, categorizing business-partners contact information; arranging the agenda; retrieving business information in internet and so on. Among the business actions meetings are important components, and accordingly the management of meeting is treated as a cornerstone of PIM. It assists people to annotate meeting information, collect related materials, and manage different meeting notes, etc.Using current PIM tools, we still face the problems of filing information and information overload. In order to exceed today’s state, this thesis presents a meeting management tool based on the Semantic Desktop environment– Gnowsis, which is an extension of desktop computers using Semantic Web techniques.

We call this tool Semantic Meeting Annotation. It builds on a Meeting Ontology that defines all the elements and relations in the meeting domain using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). The ontology binds with the annotation application to provide the user a semantic annotation environment, that is, the user can annotate meeting information with all kinds of data, and create links between a meeting and the related data according to the semantic relations defined in the meeting ontology. Other applications (e.g. Microsoft Outlook) based on the Semantic Desktop technology are integrated.

Additionally, the semantic meeting annotation is used to infer new knowledge, based on existing annotation information and rules, by this the user’s effort to enter information is reduced. The implementation is using the Jena inference engine and a series of inference rules.

We think that, using semantic meeting annotation will enable the user to annotate a meeting effectively and semantically.

Honda has published a history of their Asimo robot series, very interesting and a nice background on research: boys, it takes time to make something good.

read ASIMO here!

that inspired me te brushup the image by them and compare it to current semantic desktop proceedings. If we compare the state of ASIMO with semantic desktop, it would look like this:

robotics is sometimes as ambitious as semantic web. It hink the current Semantic Desktops look like early ASIMO prototypes while end-users expect them to look like Microsoft Software, like people expect robots to look like Enterprise’s ‘Data’ and robots look like metal with motors.
there is hope though, that we will be faster with semantic desktop than with humanoid robots

On 17th May, Jean Rohmer gave a talk on Artificial Intelligence and his Semantic Desktop implementation, Ideliance, at DFKI.

See the previous blog entry. Now we have the slides of his talk to be published. Note that the Ideliance slides are similar to the slides he presented at the ISWC2005 workshop on the Semantic Desktop.

• ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE: My point of iew
• Lessons for the future of Semantic Desktops
  learnt from 10 years of experience with IDELIANCE

The second slides show a nice screenshot of Ideliance (page three), how Jerome Euzenat and Ireland are connected. You will find many known names there.

The lovely task of gathering metadata, like honeybees we wander our files to generate sweet data for the semantic web.

So, I updated my publications page:
publications

That is an interesting task, it works like this:

1. (install rdf homepage, if you haven’t done yet)
2. I look at my publications page, what misses
3. I update my bibtex file, adding all I need
4. When I don’t know how to do bibtex, I look into Svens or Heikos rdf homepages
5. I generate bibtex/RDF from it, using some tool we always use for RDFhomepage
6. I look again atpublications , this time I see what links miss to other people. You see the nice links to all my co-authors? Guess where they come from…
7. my foaf file. So I have to update my foaf-file, because rdfhomepage compares the bibtex/rdf against my foaf file to find the correct co-author homepages.
8. But hey, why write your foaf yourself, copy friends-of-friends from foaf-files of friends like Sven and Heiko
9. I upload the foaf file to niij.org, where Michael hosts my personal website. thx to Michi for that ;-9
10. I press refresh on my publications page and am delighted.
11. I go to my “About” page and see that my friends from my foaf file are also there 🙂

this all rocks so hard that Gunnar has written a paper on it, together with some buddies at DFKI, as you can see on Gunnar’s RDF homepage.

So whoops, I forgot to add this paper to my bibtex file…. 🙂

… will do that on monday 🙂

and and by the way, Heimwegehas painted this rocking logo for RDF Homepage, which I cannot hide from you:

Yesterday we had two great happenings at DFKI:

1. Jean Rohmer giving a talk on Ideliance and AI
2. Gunnar Grimnes celebrating norwegian day

The second will be blogged soon on my private blog, the first is interesting for the Semantic Web out there.

Jean Rohmer, who published a paper last year on Lessons for the future of Semantic Desktops learnt from 10 years of experience with the IDELIANCE Semantic Networks Manager visited us to give a similar talk and discuss about Nepomuk.

More background knowledge about Jean Rhomer: He is a key person in spreading AI in France, as he was responsible for AI at Bull Computers in the 70ies and 80ies, a company that had ~70k employes in its best times, around 200 on AI. He lead the AI department there, google for him.

I will sum up the most witty remarks of his talk:

• In the 70ies, prolog was the thing and as you didn’t have internet, you really had to look for it.
• In the 90ies, when investment in AI declined, the AI Winter started
• I survived the AI winter by continuing AI and making a product out of it
• 90’s AI apps didn’t look different from procedural apps for end-users.
• AI was then an expensive way to save money, which only few could afford
• AI kept fighting and losing against software engineering.
• The Semantic Web is a compromise between Natural Language Processing and AI.

In the 70ies there was a stop in innovation on the hardware side, IBM machines where all the same for years. So software was the key for innovation. We see a similar situation today: the operating systems do not change much (windows 2000 is the same as XP, Linux evolves steadily) and the hardware is always the same, just getting faster and bigger. So software makes the difference (as we see in the hype of web services).

So Software can make the next innovation.

Then this happend during Jean’s talk and demo of idealance: a bug when clicking a link on ideliance web interface. His reaction was tremendous:

• alt-tab to server/switch debug on/switch to code editor
• (all we saw was weird symbols that looked like compiled byte code)
• scroll down two lines
• mutter something like “ah, ok”
• enter two weird greek symbols
• alt-tab back to demo, it works
• all this in less then 15 seconds

So what he did was, that during a talk before audience, he had a bug, didn’t get nervous, found the bug, fixed it and didn’t even had to restart. I have never seen something like this before, and the secret behind is:

A Programming Languages
In a session after the talk, we discussed programming languages for the Semantic Desktop, also we wanted to know how he did that bugfixing magic and what these weird symbols were. We were flattened about the statement that Ideliance was completly programmed using APL (A programming language).

We asked him to show us code, and he replied that he will instead teach us how to code APL. behold, this is what Jean Rohmer has written on a Flip-Chart:

The explanation is: that code selects all classes CS of an instance X, for each class C in CS, selects all other instances CI, for all these instances I select all triples, from the triples select all properties.

Then group these properties in a matrix, sort them and only return top X of them.

To do this in SPARQL, you would roughly do:
SELECT p WHERE x rdf:type C. I rdf:type C. I p o.

But then you would need some sorting, merging, splicing.

APL is the weirdest thing I have ever seen, but it has many pieces of code in it that are very useful for handling RDF, though. Jean Rohmer and Gunnar Grimnes are both Prolog fans and they chatted about the relations between ADL and prolog.

*Epilogue*
Using Java to program Semantic Web applications surely is hell when you have to do things like set operations. At the moment I program bits and pieces of the rebirth-machine, for example this code would be much nicer in APL. So we seriously think about combining SPARQL and prolog into some nice semantic web scripting language.

ESWC2006, a conference that aims at the semantic web, has a registration system that does not support firefox. In our group we base all our extensions and plugins on firefox and I am using it right now, so I feel “uncomfortable and unwelcome” (cite: movie “your studio and you”). So, the positive view is that they decided not to invest much into the web interface to invest more into the conference. Horray. Here is the quote from the website:

Quote: Firefox is not supported at this time. Recommended browsers are below.
Online Registration System best used with the following browsers:
Internet Explorer (version 4.01 or higher and Netscape 4x-7)

Definition of the Semantic Web:
The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries.

1. Firefox is a boundary of the semantic web
2. How can a web-application be programmed so badly it only supports one browser? Oh, ASP 🙂
3. Don’t they see that all this is obviously wrong?
4. The world is imperfect.

and otherwise, the conference rules.