Posts

Posted on

Timbl video

Danny Ayers blogged :
If you only watch one video this year, let it be this one: The Semantic Web of Data (streamed, 8mins 24secs)
I can only copy that, apart for my admiration for Tim Berners-Lee, this video has some very nice things to remember. Tim has the vision, he had all the ideas in the first place and he is professional enough to have no problem repeating himself, explaining the semantic web again and again.

http://www.technologyreview.com/video/semantic

The web in the first place was something which solved a particular frustration I had, it scratched an itch that ….we would make life a whole lotta easier. The web of data, Semantic Web, same thing, frustration that I cannot pull that data and pull that other data and connect them. … How do these publication fit in with these events. … Where is the nearest coffee place to that friend I want to take out for lunch.

So, he did the right thing: he solved a problem he had. Usually you would say that you must not use yourself as your reference customer, but it seems that there are exceptions… 🙂

The video was done by the technology review, an interview. It only features Tim, no commentary nor questions.

Posted on

successfull will be evolution: semantic web 2.0

We see the success of the web 2.0 buzzword everywhere, now we face the web 3.0 buzzword not exactly convinced who coins it and what it means. I will give my opinion on what the future is, namely the Semantic Web 2.0. A semantic web with the usability and round corners of the web 2.0, and a web 2.0 with the fantastic data integration features of the Semantic Web.

Tim O Reilly can be thanked for investing his time and his companies’ resources into the web 2.0 buzzword: its good for everyone. Finally we know what we like about the web, if you don’t know it yet, always read the original first.

Given this great success, namely that web 2.0 and its description really fit so well the reality we face in the web, people want to ride on with buzzwording and predicting the future. I happily join.

Today again I got an e-mail mentioning and advertising the web 3.0, which will, let me assure you, be the next big thing. Increasing the number by one and saying its the next big thing is the right approach, but it can be taken by so many. What we can’t copy is the fact that Tim O Reilly stated the obvious, was able to describe the existing facts in words that caught. Web 2.0 is a way of asserting ourselves what we do, giving us the satisfaction of undestanding why google, napster, flickr, bittorrent, etc are such successfull enterprises.

So, coming to web 3.0, what is it? At DFKI we have written a paper about web 3.0 being the convergence of web 2.0 and Semantic Web. The e-mail from semantic web school I got today goes into the same direction.
And there is this NYT article on web 3.0, that you can google now for yourself. Its all in the semantics, and with semantics we hope: Semantic Web.
But who says that this is the final view on web 3.0? Any C-Blogger can invent this word, or make a new one, and you can search for web 2.5, web 1.0, web 0.0, web 10.0, web 2007.0, or whatever comes to your mind, its an open field of invention, only limited by the amount of floating point numbers, which are, lucky C-Bloggers, infinite.

Now coming to my point: what I really anticipate, and perhaps you are with me, is the Semantic Web 2.0. As easy as it looks, its exactly what it is: a simple combination of the ideals of Semantic Web and Web 2.0. Semantic is the front word because its easier to pronounce this way, but they are equal partners and both needed. The Semantic Web is longing for Web 2.0. At the moment the semantic web is scientific driven, and as we have read in previous blog-posts, for a scientist everything can be a science. Hence, the Semantic Web as such is pretty easy to use and deploy (RDF is just XML, with URIs as sugar and ontologies being the cream), but scientists working on it at the moment are pushing these innovations further every day. So, enterpreneurs a
re needed that see how data integration using Semantic Web technology can save a customer money and time.

On the other hand, web 2.0 companies “be nice” but are usually working under capitalistic constraints, if not filling their own pockets, at least the shareholders’. A key in business is now to be open to data integration, like RSS feeds or Web APIs that allow you to manipulate your flickr photos, or the classical google maps API that we find useful everywhere.
The problem here is, that if you have a running system, never change it. The APIs are based on XML, and simple HTTP calls (REST). Why bother upgrading to Semantic Web?

So, there has to be a reason to extend a successfull web 2.0 business to run Semantic Web. What are the keys to open this door? Let us come back to concise words describing web 2.0 and focus on some of the points

  • the web is a platform
  • you control your own data
  • remixable data sources and data transformations
  • harnessing collective intelligence

What does Semantic Web 2.0 add to this:

  • the web is a database
  • data automatically integrated through ontologies and semantic web links
  • harness collective knowledge using semantic links

etc etc. you now know enough to go on yourself.

semantic web 2.0 !

Posted on

Creating Semantic Web integration

Frederick Giasson has written a tutorial article on using the semantic web to integrate data and make new use of data found on the web using semantic web technologies and approaches.

He shows the steps needed to create working applications, from data transformation to user interface. At the end, there is a working example that is available online.

read his post:
http://fgiasson.com/blog/index.php/2007/03/22/dynamic_data_web_page

This means that data only matters. In fact, the only thing one need now is to build a good data source. Once the data source is well built (remember, the data source can be anything here, from a search engine database to the products catalogue of a company, or even the personal web page of a 14 years old geek).

From that data source, everything can be generated for each web page (URL). If the content requested is a HTML page, then the data source can generate XML, run a XSLT skin template with and then send a HTML page: just like any other web page. However, from the same data source, a semantic web crawler could request the RDF/N3 data for the same URL. Then the DDWP would send the RDF/N3 representation of the URL.

So from one data source, you can get its data the way you want.

From that point a URL (or a web page, call it the way you want) become a presentation page web, a web service, etc; All-in-one!

Posted on

Microcultures and the WII

The dude behind Wired said in some interview I happened to see, that the culture is stretching out. Still, the big ones get 80% of the market, this won’t change, but the remaining 20% get split over a far bigger area and are increasingly important. I think he called it “the far end” or “the end of the curve”, whatever its called: Important is the fact that we are moving to microcultures.

When I visit a friend, we listen to a radio station only airing electro remixes of C64 songs, which you can receive on the net. See, its the dude from Kaiserslautern who enjoys electro remixes of C64 songs who is the market of tomorrow.

You will instantly see what I mean here and get a feeling for whats happening by watching it happen: I googled for videos on the nintendo WII and all I found was microculture:


So what do you do when you get hands on a WII controller and a DJ software? Nothing, if you are like me, but if you are DJ shift-1 and take your thing serious, you go for it. You remix it, you make a video out of it, you invest a few days of video editing and you happen to have a gig at bootiesf.com in may….

There is one thing in this for my own satisfaction: when I was dancing on any techno event years ago, I longed for this experience of controlling the music by dancing. So I am looking forward to the time this hits the markets and we have youths on festivals remixing and dancing their own music… not so far away, or? If it ever happens, drag me out of my adult life and force me to join it, perhaps I will be too conservative to dig it.

Next is a video demonstration of using a WII controller on a windows computer to play Halflife two:

At the same moment, the authors refers to a wiki of the www.wiili.org developer hangout and an IRC channel on freenode.net about wiili, and doesn’t forget to mention that the music we hear is from his DJ friend djsbx.com who happens to publish his trance/house music freely on the internet.

These dudes are good in what they do, they do the right thing in the right way, respect. The second video shows how this guy connects to his peers using a wiki and an IRC chat, and that he gives credit to the guy doing the music. All is done by namedropping a few web addresses. I like this. Its not much effort, it doesn’t take many people or money to do it, but it reaches out.

Posted on

Crosslounge 20.3.2007 19:30

Der Treff mit Tiefgang fĂĽr junge Erwachsene in Kaiserslautern.

An unserem ersten Treffen ist geplant

  • powerpoint karaoke
  • Musik
  • Gespräch bei Snacks und Drinks

Wann? 20.3.2007 19:30
Wo? Freie Evangelische Gemeinde Kaiserslautern, Pariser Str 300
Wer? – Jungendliche und Junggebliebene im alter 20-30.

Warum? Regelmäßige Treffen, wechselnde Locations. Crosslounge ist eine Veranstaltung der evangelischen Allianz.

Posted on

In own interest: selling netrunner cards, buying wii

After playing the good old Netrunner game from time to time, but not often enough, I want to pass it on. Netrunner is a trading card game designed by Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic: The Gathering. It is full of insider gags from classic cyberpunk (Neuromancer, etc). Words like “Wilson” or “Chiba” will trigger the right synapses. One player is the evil corporation trying to make big money, the other is a witty hacker trying to steal information from the company by breaking into their network.

netrunner

My favorite card is “Fortress Architects” because of its text:
“You want us to build that? Not even God has the money to afford that!”

“You’re working for Saburo Arasaka, not God.”

Ok, I will keep my favorite cards and enough for two players to gamble from time to time, but I sell the the worthy rare cards (and the others) on ebay. If you are interested in one or the other card or more, buy them. All revenue made goes into a good cause: I want to buy a Nintendo WII.

Posted on

Cool URIs for the Semantic Web

During practical RDF projects, one big challenge is always how to choose good URIs for your resources. The RDF standards say very little about this topic. There are some best practices and helpful recommendations, but they are scattered all over the web. Creating “cool URIs for the semantic web” is hard.

Richard Cyganiak, Max Völkel and myself have written an article about how to choose cool URIs, filled with practical knowledge and background information about the problem and solutions. We have collected what we have learned during projects such as Semantic MediaWiki, dbpedia, D2R Server, Gnowsis, and Nepomuk. We hope that this article is a help for you or your students to get started programming Semantic Web applications.

Read it

Abstract
The Resource Description Framework RDF allows you to describe web documents and resources from the real world—people, organisations, things—in a computer-processable way. Publishing such descriptions on the web creates the semantic web. URIs are very important as the link between RDF and the web. This article presents guidelines for their effective use. We discuss two strategies, called 303 URIs and hash URIs. We give pointers to several web sites that use these solutions, and briefly discuss why several other proposals have problems.

Notice: we have written the article late last year, but published it this year. You can republish or copy this article under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 License.

Posted on

geo markup of photos

I was on a sailing holiday at the beginning of February, ten people on a catamaran in the Carribean. Thanks to sailing, we had an Offshore Navigator on a laptop, recording the positions with a GPS mouse.

Using this GPS track and the photos taken with our two cameras, I was able to create a KML file from the journey. I used some custom PHP code I have written, a little MySQL/PHP/FlickrApi/GoogleMaps hack. It took two days to hack, which is quite nice. Included is a photo annotator to place pictures with some productivity tools (copying the position from one picture to another).

The first result is a Google Earth KML file. It shows the track of the boat and the pictures from Flickr. The other crew members don’t have flickr accounts… yet.
google earth view of the tour

Second, I wrote another script that sets the needed geo-tags on flickr based on the geocoding. See my flickr map.
flickr map of the tour

Now that I have the code, I would love to go on with these things. Is there an open source project which dedicates itself to such mashups? We could also use Chris Bizer and Richard Cyganiaks D2RQ to make a sparql-endpoint for geo positions. Who is in?

Is there an API for plazes.com? So many things to do 🙂

Posted on

Semantic Desktop Workshop 4, 12th – 14th April 2007, Berlin

Announcement:

The Semantic Desktop Hands-on Workshop will be an opportunity to learn about ongoing research and development effort in the area of Semantic Desktop, Semantic Web, and Personal Knowledge Management. It will consist of a scheduled program of talks, presentations and demos, and self-organized phases of active software development in small teams, going into hands-on development on concrete projects together.


Participants are practitioners, researchers, and interested IT persons; it is encouraged to contribute by presentations or demos of your work. Deadline for registration and submissions is March 28th.

Date & Place
April 12th – 14th, 2007,
Freie Universität Berlin,
Takustr. 9,
Berlin,
Germany

This is the perfect opportunity to meet Semantic Web people, visit Berlin, learn and do Semantic Web things. Registration, participants list, more details are all on the wiki page. Feel free to add your contributions there.
* http://www.semanticdesktop.org/xwiki/bin/view/Wiki/SemDeskHandsOn2007April