Leobard's blog

Zack Rosen blogs about why RDF research sucks and has written a mail to the Simile mailinglist for comments. No comments from me, but a general agreement on his suggestions for a way out:

So what can we do about it?

1. Researchers need to stop thinking of themselves as researchers and start thinking of themselves as implementors.
2. Research institutes need to join forces with emerging businesses looking to adopt semantic technology. This breaks the current model of business / research institute collaboration since startups do not have money to contribute to fund research, but tough noogies.
3. Researchers need to build their tools in real-world development environments, i.e. as modules for LAMP web-publishing tools such as Drupal and WordPress. They need to find more organizational partners to deploy their solutions. They need to do something other than build widgets.

Getting up and reading news this morning, and still thinking about yesterdays ramblings how we could benefit from our ideas, TRB’s greetings reached me at the right moment:

Welcome to the Nepoverse, by Thomas Roth-Berghofer
Yesterday morning I woke up with this greeting on my mind, a greeting to all those who are interested in the goal of the Nepomuk project: the Social Semantic Desktop. And it got even better: the Nepoverse did not exist in the Googleverse. Until now!
As you may know, we–the Nepomukians–strive for providing you with new tools for better working with (your) knowledge. We want to change the way we, as knowledge workers, live in and with the digital world, not only by providing cool Nepomuked applications and a feature-rich toolbox, but by building a community around the Social Semantic Desktop. Thus, we are shaping our own universe, don’t we?

Yes Thomas, you are right. We want that, and I need that. I don’t feef exactly like “our own universe” but would put it more like Stefan Decker often tells the story: Nepomuk is a seed of a community, it starts at one point and gets bigger in circles, bigger, bigger, circling, …

As I said yesterday night:
Our discipline is a crossover, we need results from artificial intelligence, web 2.0, usability, personalization, databases, data integration, software engineering . . .

And what I should have said then was: we got Nepomuk. There are many people in this project that make exactly this crossover possible, through their different characters and backgrounds.

If you now wonder what we are all blogging about,

• read the Nepomuk Website
• look at the gnowsis beta, a prototype of parts of nepomuk
• checkout the Semantic Desktop search engine Beagle++
• read some blogs that use Nepoverse
• and join the mailinglist

, see the

A short note to myself and the community:

Stop fumbling around with the semantic web, make quality science.

A prototype for a search engine with a bad user interface, an implementation of a rdf database that only works half, an ontology that is never used, we all know these projects.

Our discipline is a crossover, we need results from artificial intelligence, web 2.0, usability, personalization, databases, data integration, software engineering . . .

So – science would be to concentrate on one aspect and then improve that, for example to fix yourself on a scaleable rdf database. You develop a scaleable algorithm and prove in a test setup that it works – voila. But then, it takes YEARS until you yourself or others can use this result in their other projects. Saying “we need named graphs” is far away from having an RDF store that supports them in a scaleable way, but the distance is often underestimated by us.

so, I should concentrate on writing down the good ideas we have and wait -YEARS- until I can benefit from my own ideas using software written by somebody else. Like TimBl using a Firefox.
😉