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semantic desktop bits and pieces: leaftag

Just forwarded to my by Frank Osterfeld:

http://www.chipx86.com/blog/?p=154

Announcing Leaftag, our desktop tagging framework. This is an evolution of the original prototype we created, originally named fstaglib (isn’t leaftag just so much better?).

The main part of Leaftag is a library called (oddly enough) libleaftag, which interfaces with the tag database. It’s GObject-based, and the API is quite small. It can tag anything with a URI.

There’s tagutils, a small app used for working with tags and files. It is able to tag and untag files, list all known tags, list all files with a specified tag, and manipulate tag properties (such as icons and descriptions). It also includes some symlinks that provide shortcuts to common tagutils functions (tag, untag, tagls, tags, and tagprop).

leaftag-python contains Python bindings for libleaftag. It simplifies the already simple libleaftag library.

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software design

There are two ways of constructing a software design: one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies; the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.”

by way of gunnar grimnes

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why “secondlife” is not cyberspace

One of my scientific goals is to be part of cyberspace, to make this possible. Cyberspace means for me, that the world as we know it extends seamlessly into the information world, and things I do here and there are mixed. I go order a pizza by walking (in cyberspace) to the pizza people and doing it, the pizza itself comes here real life.

So let us look at products like Second Life.
Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by nearly 100,000 people from around the globe.

  • From the moment you enter the World you’ll discover a vast digital continent, teeming with people, entertainment, experiences and opportunity. Once you’ve explored a bit, perhaps you’ll find a perfect parcel of land to build your house or business.
  • You’ll also be surrounded by the Creations of your fellow residents. Because residents retain the rights to their digital creations, they can buy, sell and trade with other residents.
  • The Marketplace currently supports millions of US dollars in monthly transactions. This commerce is handled with the in-world currency, the Linden dollar, which can be converted to US dollars at several thriving online currency exchanges.

I see that the technics are nice, but its not immersive. At the end, Ultima Online may be more immersive than Second Life (compared to interaction possibilities).

Key here is the business department: What kind of business we see in Second Life. There is no real life business there – Where is the sneakers shop in second life that has real life sneakers on the store window? You have this kind of shop in the cyberspace described in the book Otherland, and thats useful.

So – we learn that the 3d technologies are here and the community and customers do exist, but the cyberspace product misses.

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the game I always wanted

And now passively play!

Idle-RPG!

go here:
http://idlerpg.numist.net/oldlebot/

The idea of Idle-RPG is to idle. Idle means, doing nothing. Winner is, who can do nothing longer than the others. In between, while you idle, the game itself plays for you. Every few minutes, you may stumble into an opponent, fight, steal something, find items, etc. But you cannot control this, the game does it for you. So, the perfect use of waste of time. Horray for computers, finally a game I want to play for years.

Shunn those fancy 3d games, come to the chat room and idle. Lets do nothing for years, see how our characters evolve and the world spinning around us. My char-name: Bush And His Pony, evil Alignment.

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the great escape 5

am 6.2.2005, also gestern im Glockencafe. Diesmal warens zwei Worte die uns inspiriert hatten: Powerpoint Karaoke. Das hat als Inspiration völlig ausgereicht, zwei Worte. Also, frisch und fröhlich an die suchmaschine der Wahl und Anfragen dieser Art gestellt, und nach ein paar Stunden arbeit, redaktioneller Kürzung der Folien wars getan.

mehr blogging hier

Der Abend – ein großer, ein herzlicher, ein Cultural Hack. Nach unserer üblichen TheGreatEscape Einführung über Kaiserslautern im Netz gabs Karaoke. Die Themen der Folien waren in etwa:

  • Das Tourismuskonzept Bad Hindelang
  • Die Schweizer Sozialistische Partei
  • Sexual Mechanics and Glass Dildos
  • …

Nach insgesamt neun Vorträgen war der Abend perfekt. Die etwa 30-40 Gäste haben einstimmig das ganze als sehr gut befunden.

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Blogging and topics

Baumann blogs:
After 1 year of blogging I am meanwhile in a state of running 4 different blogs. 2 of them on my own, 2 of them in a joint authorship mode. And the one here is actually part of the node metablog. Some questions came to my mind which I have to fix and to share in hope for comments!

Answer here:
From the Philosophical point of view: You are a person, one person. All your thoughts and needs flow into each other, without border. Hence, You, one person = one blog, many aspects on different level (dimensions in the level are quality, reaching from emotional draft to scientific article and other dimension is topic, from very private to utter public, unpersonal comments on science topics).

From the technical point of view:
Tags and categories allow you to express the kind of levels you need in your blog: private (secret messages that are not public, but you want them to be searchable for yourself), friends, public etc. You can express these levels (of the various dimensions) as tags.

Then you aggregate these to more public blogs and the content streams over, is remixed and channeled in public newsfeeds etc.

Examples:
This blog entry here is my perspective on your problem, hence it is part of MY blog. Stefan, your post created reactions here. Thats what we call a trackback and what is best practice on the blogosphere. Next, this blog entry here is categorised as “nothing” being very generic. Other posts in this blog are tagged as “SemWeb”. The semWeb posts are available as seperate feed, which is available to look at here, and also as RSS feed for only my semantic web posts here. If I mark something as Sem-Web I am aware that it will be spread to the public via this integrator at planetrdf. PlanetRDF brings together my scientific and professional community and I want that these people primarily read the topic-related posts. Other bloggers are not so sensible and put their all-emotional-all-topic streams to planetrdf, but I have my filters. Fact is, I have to read the planetrdf blog to know what my community does. The circle closes here. Sites like planetrdf or planetfachschaft can be created withing 30 minutes effort, they are ready-made scripts.

So: have your blog, one password, one user, one living being. Stream your sayings to where they belong. Loog that others aggregate your thoughts like on planetrdf or planetfachschaft kaiserslautern.

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web 2.0 goes to sw (Its beginning) – aka “I am sooo excited about this”




I am sooo excited about this


Originally uploaded by Automatt.

automatt is happy about rawsugar. This flickr pic and the according text show why: rawsugar allows him to structure tags. As I predicted: folksonomies go towards semantic web.



Finally started to get into RawSugar. I imported all of my bookmarks from del.icio.us in about a minute, and now I can give my folksonomy some structure, and separate the tags I use for keeping track of stuff into different heirarchical categories or collections. And you can search your collections and your friends’ collections all at once!

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gnowsis at the cebit

We are going to present the current gnowsis alpha 0.8.x and the upcoming beta 0.9 at the cebit 2006. Hannover, 9. to 15th march.

I will be there from 9. to 12th March 2006. If you want to meet me, come during this time.

At the cebit: Halle 009, Stand B45

Features to expect there:

  • from the epos project:
  • context elicitation – what does a user do
  • workflow support – what do I have to do now?
  • miniqure, linker, lotsa features
  • from the gnowsis beta:
  • a complete new architecture, installer, components, database, … all is better in the beta
  • a clear and easy way to write your own ontology to get your things together. Express your thoughts!
  • desktop search as we always wanted
  • tagging of e-mails, web-sites, files, ontology elements. all mixed together and really nice

as we are still working on it, I am eager to see what we have then 🙂

here is some official text from our news people:
The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, DFKI, is active in the field of innovative information technologies as Germany’s leading business-related research institute. It carries out research and development in the areas of knowledge management, intelligent visualization and simulation, deduction and multi-agent systems, language technology, intelligent user interfaces, image understanding and pattern recognition, robotics, safe and secure cognitive systems and information systems. An important element of DFKI’s mission is to move innovations as quickly as possible from the lab into the marketplace. Only by maintaining research projects at the forefront of science DFKI has the strength to meet its technology transfer goals.