Category: SemWeb

Tomorrow is the first Semantic Desktop Workshop and I suggest to tag it using SemDeskWS2005.

see you tomorrow at the ISWC

Today I am getting up up and away to the ISWC2005. I propose that all that happens at this conference will be tagged heavily with ISWC2005.

You can see me at the workshop I co-chair on Sunday, the first Semantic Desktop Workshop.

We have a nice evening event on Sunday, going to Harbor Restaurant at about 20:30. See more in the program of the workshop.

So, I will back my pack now and try to get to the airport asap, to fly away. In my hands only 5 printed papers that are hopefully vouchers for a flight, a hotel, a second hotel and a bus. Hope all this works well, at least I trust good old numbers printed on papers. see you in Galway!

Ok, folksonomies are the super-simple way allowing people to annotate their documents. And when we use tags in blogs, flickr, wiki, ets, the world is better and way cooler. Websites like technorati can show us what is hip at the moment and I can customize these services to work together. I can even add a photo to flickr and then press the “blog this” button there and it will blog here. Cool, they use web-services, they provide their services in standardized interfaces and it works.

But then …

people find out that the tags aren’ so really good, because they miss stemming.

A stemmer is a computer program or algorithm which determines a stem form of a given inflected (or, sometimes, derived) word form — generally a written word form. The stem need not be identical to the morphological root of the word; it is usually sufficient that related words map to the same stem, even if this stem is not in itself a valid root.
wikipedia – stemmer

So all these tags aren’t right and people use different word forms for tags. One uses “book” the other chooses “books”. Or “surfing” “surfed” “surfs” etc. which all mean similiar things. So horray for the programmer that added stemming to services like technorati.

Then people see that they mean the same things with their tags, they use “surfing” and “browsing” to reference web browsing. This is the problem of synonyms.
Synonyms (in ancient Greek syn ‘συν’ = plus and onoma ‘όνομα’ = name) are different words with similar or identical meanings and are interchangable.
wikipedia-synonyms

And the next thing would be that two words have different contexts – surfing can be the watersport or web surfing. These are Homonyms.
Homonyms (in Greek homoios = identical and onoma = name) are words that have the same phonetic form (homophones) or orthographic form (homographs) but unrelated meaning.
wikipedia-homonym

Ok, and if I search for “surfing” and I mean the watersport, then it might be good to include terms like “bodyboarding” and “surfspot” and “surfer” and “bigwavesurfing” into my search terms. Or if I search for “surfboard” I might also want items tagged with “longboard” “shortboard” “bodyboard” etc.

To structure terms that belong to each other, we use something called taxonomies. The homonyms and synonyms are usually in a thesaurus. The stemmer is a basic tool used before we start. Alltogether, we would like a dataformat to exchange and store those taxonomies and thesauri. Hey, there is one, its called RDF and you can even store Ontologies with it. I know, its hard to learn and you can’t really do everything you want, but its a start and there are tools out there that work with it.

So what will happen? I predict, that major tools that build today on what we know as folksonomies will include the core elements of the semantic web, and at a certain point in time, the necessarity for RDF and the good stuff will be obvious to the masses of developers and users out there. The good thing in all this is the learning approach: If someone knows what tags are, really knows what tags are because using them for a year, really knowing what the problem of synonyms, stemming, taxonomies are, because the somone has tried searching for something, than this someone will understand what the semantic web is about.

yeah, cyberspace has started!

netrunners, here we come: we tag the real world with links to cyberspace and back. this is by far the coolest thing available today: print links to wikipedia on physical places!!!

then use your mobile phone (your ono sendai 2005) to surf the matrix. oh, i am hot now.

Our goal is to connect the virtual world with the physical world by bringing the best information from the internet to the relevant place in physical space.

We do this by combining the physical annotation technology of semacode with the availability of high quality information using the free encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Imagine your cellphone as your smart travelguide. The promise is to provide free relevant ad-hoc high quality information to mobile users in the real world.

http://semapedia.org/

link

Features of the gnowsis gui framework are

Version 0.8.3

• supports Jena framework
• bind Jena models to swing components
• tables and trees
• text-edits
• lists, JLists
• Drag-Drop
• simple editing of complex RDF resources

Download: in the gnowsis download page
or use the direct link to gnogno_gui_dist_0.8.3.zip

A small documentation can be found inside the distribution or in the online tutorial

source is included in the distribution or can be received via SVN from the main gnowsis project svn

questions can be asked on the gnowsis yahoo group:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gnowsis-dev/

100o blessing points to Leigh Dodds for writing a little showcase of the Jena 2 inference engine.

This one helped me today to get grip of the inference engine and some thoughts about forward chainer I had. At the moment I have to drill the engine up so that I can decide if it queries the local model or a SPARQL source, nasty work.

Extending this thing looks easy, but when you want to create more than one variable binding in a BuiltinRule… whatever, I hope I can blog the solution soon.

Kendall Clark writes about WEB 2.0 and its relation to RDF and SPARQL, especially pointing out (to the wide world) that SPARQL is good for ATOM-like apps and can be a key feature.

Yes, thats right. Sparql will be the SQL of the next century. The nice hack he pointed out is to use XML/RPC and AJAX clients to integrate SPARQL features to websites. Boy, this idea is new and good. I think I ready implemented it last week in the gnowsis project and am right now in pimping up the CSS with dominik heim. More poeople will come up with similiar stuff and integrate RDF into html pages as active information.

In gnowsis_retrieval search engine we use the AJAX thing to “show related” information about an item. Ideal thing, this information is hard to get for many items, so loading it on demand is exact the thing we needed.

Funny that we are ahead, that’s what research is about, isn’t it?

I googled for semantic web and all I found were powerpoints.

don’t know who said this, but it is lovely anyhow

Back in Kaiserslautern, I finally got some time to blog the events of the last three weeks. We went to Argentine, where my cousin Robert married Luciana in Santiago del Estero. To use the time there, we also visited Buenos Aires for a few days.

Before the journey, I thought to myself: how to meet with SemWeb people in Argentine? and blogged this. Dan Brickley answered and mentioned someone called “Inkel” who might be in Argentine. I contacted Inkel (aka Leandro Mariano López) and yes – he lives in Buenos Aires and we agreed to meet on Monday, 15th August 2005 at 17:00 in our Hotel.

And thats what happened: Ingrid and me were a little late, because we spent so much time sightseeing, but when we came to the Hotel 5 minutes after 5 pm, two Semantic Web hackers were already waiting in the comfy hotel lobby chairs. Ingrid and I didn’t know if all this would work, but it did. We chatted a little about how its in Buenos Aires and then went to a little restaurant to eat – here a pic while we are on the way.

In the cafe the talk was first about the work that Inkel and Daniel represent. Inkel came to the Semantic Web a few years ago and found the foaf idea, but he missed translations to spanish. So he translated a foaf primer. After a little chit-chat, the moment of truth came:

On this day I deliberatly dressed the SWAD-Europe t-shirt underneath my sweater, to impress the SW guys a little. I announced a surprise, stood up in the restaurant and showed the t-shirt. Inkel, not hesitating, pulled up his black pullover and also wore – underneath- the SWAD-Europe t-shirt. The moment was perfect – two semantic webbers trying to impress each other by wearing the same t-shirt.

Connected together by the bounds of foaf and the same cotton on our bodies, sympathies between us went up +10. Inkel works as programmer in a company at the moment and he explained us how he plans to connect the people in Argentie, Chile and other south-american countries. He also wants to motivate people to translate SemWeb literature to spanish, so that it can gain ground there. A problem is that most people don’t speak english there, and scientists don’t publish in spanish. Daniel, the friend of Inkel, also translated a few texts and published them.

I told them about the upcoming Semantic Desktop Workshop and showed them a few papers. I had all papers of the workshop with me in printed form to read them and to know the stuff deeply. They were interested to see that we have one spanish contribution to the workshop and perhaps this may connect people a little better. I explained them our upcoming Nepomuk project and the idea of the Semantic Desktop. Actually, I used my own paper for the workshop as a walkthrough to give a little exaplaination/mini talk. I gave my copy of it to inkel, so that he can use the links and references.

Daniel has to write diploma thesis in the next months and perhaps our Jena-based GUI thing from gnowsis could help him. We have to write some documentation for it, anyhow.

After a while we moved on to a coffe-house at the other side of town (south of Av 9 Julio), a coffee house that looks exactly the same as the coffee houses we used in vienna to meet with Michael Schuster or eaon or geri all the other SemWeb guys in vienna. Astonishing how the grass-roots culture is always the same.

We sat together and talked about possible business connections. Acutally, through the weak Peso (the currency in argentine), it is quite cheap to hire Argentine programmers for Semantic Web stuff.

Ingrid ordered a “submarino”, hot milk where you put chocolote in to make hot chocolate.

The situation in Argentine is far from the ongoing work in Europe. They don’t have the big budgets for Semantic Web and most people can only do this as a hobby. Also, university professors don’t get paid very well and university research is not as good as in Europe. We are quite lucky to have the 4th, 5th and 6th framework programme of the EU with big amounts of SemWeb money. For example, the t-shirts that connected us were a deliverable of a EU project, SWAD.

Finally, after five hours of permanent chatting, I got a little achein my throat (a starting cold) and we decided to part ways again. It was a very fruitful discussion about deep topics and networking. Nice to meet Inkel and Daniel and best wishes to these guys!