Leobard's blog

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.