personal weblog of Leo Sauermann
eh schon alt, aber immer noch gut.
das fit-it programm in österreich zur unterstütztung von Semantic Web projekten.
freut mich dass es sowas gibt!
for the english speakers:
This is the page of the federal support for Semantic Web projects in austria. Cool thing to have, a state driven effort to do semantic web stuff.
acutallly, semantic web is only a sub-interst here, but there are a few million euros for it.
to everybody:
We are modeling our new, better version of gnowsis integration.
introduction: an adpater is a thing that converts existing metadata to RDF. see adapter javadoc
The questions are
– how to access adapters
– how does a adapter publish its metadata. Metadata of adapters are: What data do I contain?
– how to implement adapters (we have much experience from adapting outlook and mp3 and other stuff like imap)
– what messages should be passed back and forth?
our answers ´would be:
we call them adapters.
adapters are accessed through xml/rpc, soap, or pure http.
adapters publish their metadata as RDF model, rdf/xml
adapters can be implemented in any language, as long as they speak some http-speak.
messages would be RDQL and ChattyBoundedDescriptions
please send feedback to me:
leo@gnwosis.com
great zoot: a postcard that shows early photoshopping culture, made using analog tools.
I stumbled across jackalopes during the last weeks, on some newsfeed or whatever, don’t remember. And then Ingrid and I found this postcard on a flea-market, and I had to buy it.
On the back it says:
The Faboulous JACKALOPE of The Southwest.
Jackalope are the rarest animal in North America. A cross between a now extinct small deer and a species of rabbit, they are extremely shy and wild. None have ever been captured alive and this is a rare photo taken at their feeding grounds in the high country.
Hier in Kaiserslautern regnet es jetzt andauernd. Fast jeden Tag regnet es. Dazwischen scheint so ab und an die Sonne. Kalt wirds auch.
Manchmal schön, meistens der Planet des Ewigen Regens von Thomas D’s album reflektor falke.
I had this discussion already a year ago with Barbara Geyer from the FH Eisenstadt. Experienced in Knowledge Management Projects, she pointed me to “seperate concept from instances”
In my current gnowsis nightly build, this is not really done, but I have strong feelings towards it 🙂
The background: When I write a generic Semantic Web app, I have to make a User Interface also. The question is now, how to render an RDF graph, that has by itself no structure at all. RDF graphs are just graphs, based on RDF itself you cannot even identify classes and instances. So you need more information to display the stuff, for example you can use:
The thing with RDF is, that concepts are also instances, in the view of RDF resource instances. So you need to seperate the concepts somehow from the instances.
Example: how to render a FOAF file that contains facts about a Person, related Persons and facts about these related Persons?
Using above schemas, you can subclass some of the FOAF properties to express that things are only related and not part of the resource. (f.e. foaf:knows as subproperty of http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/relation)
You then could code your UI and your logic behind to show related stuff in a seperate window (f.e. sidebar window) and have “part of” stuff in the “main window”.
but more important, you can pass the knowledge behind on to the user. Its good to allow the user to “add new subparts” and to “add new relations”. So users have a guide what to put where.
more to follow when I have coded these ideas….
well, meine neue heimat ist ja doch recht groovy.
heute werde ich das alte leobardenfell auspacken und in den Hertzclub gehen
http://www.hertzclub.com/gb/index_02.htm
die haben opening, wird sicher geil. stephan und michael sind auch dabei.
Michael Zeltner has pointed me again to the obvious.
Foaf grows.
www.foafspace.com/
“FoaFSpace has indexed 1550126 documents. You can search by name, nickname, instant messaging ID, or mailbox.”
beta.plink.org/
“Welcome to PLINK, a new way to find friends, and friends of friends!
PLINK gets all its user data from ‘FOAF’ (Friend-of-a-Friend) files which anyone can add to their web site. “
what is see here is the growing of the real semantic web. not tiny semantic web, not light, the real thing. crazy. have to change the heading of my blog from “Building the Semantic Web was harder than I thought.” to
“watching as the semantic web grows”.
http://www.gnowsis.org
http://www.gnowsis.org/Download
Kaiserslautern, 28. September 2004
Hello all <foaf:Person>!
I have the pleasure to announce that we released an alpha version of the Semantic Desktop framework “gnowsis” today. It is published under a BSD compatible license.
gnowsis is a personal semantic web desktop server – for short: a Semantic Desktop. Like a local webserver, that can be seen only by you and that contains your own files, emails, friends and photos.
Some gnowsis features are:
Server Features
* Local RDF Database (Jena Model based)
* Data integration Hub. integrates different Data sources.
* Filesystem adapter
* MP3-ID3 tag adapter (using MP3 Library by Jens Vonderheide)
* Microsoft Outlook adapter
* Mozilla Thunderbird email adapter
* Mozilla Firefox bookmarks adapter
* XML/RPC API
* Java Client API
* full text indexing (using Apache Lucene)
* local webserver for experiments (using Jetty)
* Many RDFS vocabs used
Browser Features
* Browse the local Semantic Desktop
* shows related information for any resource
* Manage your projects using ordinary File Folders
* full text search
* Link anything with drag-drop
* annotate photos and persons
Framework features
* Handy RDF utilities: org.gnowsis.util.*
* Remote Models. Access your jena Models on remote servers like they are local, through the Jena model interface and XML-RPC magic. See org.gnowsis.util.remotemodel
* File backed models with convenience. Have your model save every X seconds to a file! See org.gnowsis.util.filemodel
Non-Features
* RDF data in Gnowsis is read only.
* Stability and performance. This is a research prototype. Don’t use it in commercial projects. This is alpha. Wait a few months and it will be beta.
Gnowsis was developed by me during the last two years. Full credits given here.
The release contains full source and build scripts for ant. Gnowsis was developed using Eclipse/Ant/Apache/…
Recently I blogged about “a generic rdf browser is not possible”. It was good to put this provocative, so some people thought about the idea, too.
Jamie Pitts wrote: “Leo Sauermann explained that a generic RDF browser needs a different display definition for each RDF-schema. This makes a lot of sense. I would add that browser-style applications which truly take advantage of RDF out there will also require something along the lines of a “useage template” for each useage scenario.”
Danny Ayers blogged with something very practical: “From a random snippet of RDF/XML you can still infer quite a few things – what are properties, what are classes. Barest minimum is that you know something is to be treated as a resource or as a literal. That’s infinitely more that you get with arbitrary XML alone (you may know the datatype of something thanks to a schema, but even then you won’t know what the something represents).”
(and Shelley quoted this)
That is similiar to what I do in gnowsis’ browser.
What I want to add is:
If you just have the information “this is a dc:title” than this is not enough. A snippet of RDF (an RDF chunk/subgraph/CBD) to render will most of the time describe one resource. And we have been building applications for many years now that do excatly this (Address books for persons, ERP for order management, photo finder for photos :-). Compiled applications, structured and immovable.
In the web scenario we use HTML to render this information and in the intranet scenario, many applications that were before compiled and client GUI are now intranet applications.
Building applications for certain purposes is a good thing and we should continue this tradition. One UI for photos, one for People, etc. The apple address book is loved by Mac-thusiasts, let them keep it. But RDF-ify it.
So I would continue writing web applications and normal C++ GUI applications BUT use RDF as data source and rendering source. “browsing” can then happen by clicking a “related” button and opening other applications. Same with the web browser.
Generic RDF rendering (as described by danny in short) is useful for NERDS but not for end users. I showed my generic rendering to test users and they couldn’t make anything out of it. Well, probably I am a bad programmer ;-]
I don’t want to build a generic “haystack” like architecture to force every hacker to code her/his UI in XSLT/haystack/XYZ. Keep your code, but make it RDF compatible.
so thats why I fumble around with gnowsis all the time, to see how application integration could work.
btw: 2 hours to alpha release.