Category: SemWeb

when humans and chatbots join, things like julie’s web interface may be the result.

first eaon pointed me to it, now crschmidt himself and it is great:

http://crschmidt.net/semweb/rdfbot/online_users.cgi?channel=foaf&image=1

See the pictures of people in a chat room.
Based on foaf files, foaf:nick and foaf:img and the distributed web of foaf files

read more in crschmidt’s blog
here’s an excerpt:

lorebot, an IRC based bot who collects information from IRC services on who is online in different channels. Once this information is collected, it displays a “who’s online” information page, with links to further information provided by julie, a Redland bot who collects data from FOAF files. The lorebot page has pretty much all the documentation you’d need: if you’re interested in seeing how it works, you can stop by irc.freenode.net, #swig for a demonstration. For a version of what kind of data this spits out, see the: #swig online_users page.

the deperate need for a “I need a rdf browser, quick!” made me to install isavic, brownsauce and ifered and ideagraph in 30 minuntes and try them out on a big SKOS file. libby was on #swig and pointed me to some apps.

results:

brownsauce
is running good, but is not end-user friendly. It should put out a message in system.out saying “now open your browser to localhost:8080/brownsauce” and then perfect.

it is a rdf browser that uses a small web server (looks like jetty to me) and visualises rdf. great click-feel. fast.

isaviz
a graphical rdf tool. editing, …
requires some apis to install, but no big deal.
was doomed by my skos file, the visualisation was just a big blob of nodes. took 30sec to do it. The result was not really browsable

infered
graphical rdf editor from intellidimension.com. quite ok, but no real rdf browsing. only basic editing, no end user thing. but the right direction, easy installable.

rdfgravity
quite cool tool. can propose its usage. download it. uses aqua skin, like we do in gnowsis installer. quite cool look and feel. better than any of the above.
loading my skos, it completely draw pandemonia:

hm, so perhaps it is true what i said about the general rdf browser is not possible.

cheers Leo

btw:
logged on swig

Miltiadis D. Lytras posted questions about how the Semantic Web did in 2004.

in good spirit of public discussion, i hereby blog my answer to his questions.

1. What was the Key achievement for Semantic Web in 2004?
APIs. Forget the scientific glass-tower. Jena 2.0, Redland, Sesame, … that’s what counts and thats what makes things like Julie work. APIs enable developers to make products for people. Products that let people author RDF, publish RDF and use published RDF.

2. Which was the key technological achievement concerning SW for 2004?
Widespread FOAF usage. Even TimBl mentioned FOAF in interviews. That’s ontology work alive.

3. A title of a research paper published in 2004 with great impact
for SW Research.
hm. Nothing real new this year? Well, I quote myself: “Using Semantic Web technologies to build a Semantic Desktop”

4. An event (during 2004) that you evaluated of great importance for
SW.
FOAF Camp, Enschede, Holland. August.

5. A project / project deliverable that you evaluated as of critical importance for SW, in 2004.
http://www.foaf-project.org thats where we come together.

6. Which is the Key obstacle that you anticipate as the ‘battlefield’ for the evolution of SW?
Hot air coming from people that talk about “inference” while there is no widespread data available they can do their inference on. For me it sounds like “inferiour” than inference. Forget inference and OWL, stick to low tech RDF-S and procedural programming to get the SW lift off the ground.

Ontologies written by people that do not code. They are crap. Without a reference implementation, OWL or RDF-S ontologies are useless. You hit the nerve only when you build a useful application that makes its data available in the ontology. Only an application shows how the ontology should be used correctly. See DubliCoren: half of the terms are vague and are used wildly.

URL discussions. Much hot air on RDF-IG about what a URL denotes and why we should use URIs but no solution. As long as some people wait for the “perfect” system that uses unambigous URIs, nothing will be built at all. Gnowsis on the other hand goes the practical way: use changing URLs to identify stuff and begin coding SW today.

btw: there is no inference engine that can work in a global, distributed, semantic web. i.e.

?x <rdf:type> <foaf:Person> 

would take an hour on my machine….

7. A Business case that SW proved its capacity to solve real world problems.
Vendor independent social networking solved by foaf (isntead of orkut, friendster, etc).
News aggregation by RSS. that was real a kicker.

8. How did you saw the AIS SIGSEMIS Activities? What would you like from us the next year?
Peer review. Part of the articles was very simple. I.e. “component requirements for a universal Semantic Web Framework” – without a reference implementation this is rather speculative. We gnawed on this in practice (www.gnowsis.org). So I would like two things:

• peer review
• theories proved by reference implementations

as part of the project Silver Fire we had our first Silver fire to the roböxotica in vienna.

we where virtual guests.
I made an interview with one of the organisers of the even, Magnus Wurzer. Interview is here:

http://www.gonium.net/digitalcouch/cgi-bin/weblog/archives/2004/11/roboexotica_200.html#more

interview was done through www.sightspeed.com video conferencing software. We had great interaction like drinking and smokiung in vienna and kaiserslautern / dfki
use babelfish to get this to english, if you need. german!

quite a fail.

The Silver Fire project (created by me) is to use ideas from a science fiction novel to create a global party.

the prototype project to this was Gargoyle –

The first step to this vision is to use videoconferencing software to attend parties as a virtual person.

The virtual guest sits somewhere home or in a remote clubbing area (like www.kaiserslautern.de) and wants to attend a party at another physical location now called SilverFireParty.

On the SilverFireParty, another person has a laptop running with WLAN, a Webcam, Microfone and a Video-conference software. The person at the silverFireParty is called PhysicalGuest.

The physical guest plays host to the virtual guest. The physical guest carries his/her laptop to locations of the party, hence the virtual guest is moved there. the virtual guest can attend the SilverFireParty throgh this laptop, the laptop is an Avatar in real world for the virtual guest. The avatar laptop belongs to the physical guest, but is “owned” by the virtual guest as a mean to attend the party.

So the virtual guest sits, bound to his/her avatar laptop, at the party and can drink beer, smoke cigarrettes and talk to people on the party. A global party is possible!

First try:
http://www.monochrom.at/roboexotica/

the outcome of the first try for this project was quite a fail. The chosen webcam by creative did not work on MAc OSX. The WLAN connection at the party was crap and we had netsplits.

The major problem was that the physical guest did not setup the videoconferencing software properly and we needed 90 minutes of ICQ’ing and messing around with drivers when we should be partying. Hence the physical guest should be experienced in Video Conferencing and be also willing to “play host” to the virtual guest. If the physical guest is not dedicated to this, the virtual guest is helpless and alone.

So we can recommend that physical guest and virtual guest have made several video-conferences before and that they both:

• have a laptop
• with good battery
• with WLAN / Wifi 801.11g – fast
• both have webcams
• Physical guest needs microphone
• physical guest needs good loudspeakers
• virtual guest needs headset
• both need a good WIFI spot available, if the wifi connection is to a bad or restricted hotspot, it will failf (firewall, ports, netsplit, etc)
• most important: both need to be dedicated to the SilverFire!

but I was attending as a virtual guest, so it was quite cool.

how about coding the rules of christian theology as RDF inference engine?

I imagine some funcitonal programming like

class Leo {

run() {
try{
doLive()
} catch (ShitHappens shit) {
God.pray();
}
}

/**
* if i die, i join god until eternity, god never finishes running
*/
die() {
God.join();
}

}

more to come-

the goal is to have an engine, that can interpret the bible and inferences the locigal outcome of events,
f.e.
if (KingDavid.stealsWife(bethseba)
shitHappens()

In the fabolous effort to build something called semantic web (or often known as “the topic with the uri http://www.w3.org/2001/sw”), we have gone a step ahead.

Benja Fallenstein from the fenfire project is a visiting scientist at the DFKI at the moment. He came on tuesday and will go back home tomorrow.

The goal of his visit is to discuss ontologies, discuss mutual working together and bringing gnowsis and fenfire closer to each other.

For short:

fenfire kissology:kissed gnowsis

The Idea

Fenfire is a research project developing an RDF-based desktop environment, including a great RDF browsing and editing tool. see screenshots. At the moment fenfire uses RDF files (f.e. in Turtle) to get the triples.

Wouldn’t it be great if fenfire would display gnowsis RDF from the Semantic Desktop instead? And if we could press a button and – from the fenfire graph browser – open the displayed resources in their corresponding hosting applications?

The Hack

Benja and me sat together today (18 Nov 2004) and joined our Notebooks in a little Lan. Benja hacked the fenfire part, I added a little forwarding mechanism to gnowsis, bugs in both projects were found and fixed.

10:00 – booting
12:00 – fenfire read gnowsis data and visualised it
13:30 – Benja and Leo run to the Mensa to get something to eat
14:00 – fenfire can open gnowsis resources
15:00 – email hacking begins, we switch to emails as raw data
16:00 – fenfire browses emails as graph!
16:30 – fenfire can open emails in Thunderbird through gnowsis

18:00 – bugfixing, brainstorming, ideas….
19:00 – final fixes with linux & kde issues
20:00 – tireness comes up and we forgot to buy milk for tomorrows breakfast

20:30 – it is done, the proof of concept made

Gnowsis and Fenfire have met and another time, great Semantic Web developers (aka us) have proven that using ontologies, RDF and web protocols RULEZ. In just a day, two open source projects made substantial integration work.

HOOORRRRAAAAYYYYYYY !!!

this got slashdotted a few weeks ago:

http://hohle.net/scrap_post.php?post=23&m=full

a great article about the outcome when you enter the fabolous “crash youre system, yeir newbie” commands. It is written in a good way and easy to understand. The article is also a good example of doing a scientific experiment and documenting it.

great work.

http://www.semanticgrid.org/

“The Semantic Grid is an extension of the current Grid in which information and services are given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.”

to the witty Semantic Web insider, this sounds familiar to http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ says Uldis Bojars.

this inspired me to comment in his blog:

The Semantic President is an extension of the current president in which speech is given well-defined meaning, better enabling presidents and people to work in cooperation.

The Semantic Junk is an extension of the current Junk in which advertisment is given well-defined meaning, better enabling Junk and people to work in cooperation.

eh schon alt, aber immer noch gut.
das fit-it programm in österreich zur unterstütztung von Semantic Web projekten.

http://www.fit-it.at/

freut mich dass es sowas gibt!

for the english speakers:
This is the page of the federal support for Semantic Web projects in austria. Cool thing to have, a state driven effort to do semantic web stuff.

acutallly, semantic web is only a sub-interst here, but there are a few million euros for it.