Leobard's blog

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.