semantic weltbild 2.0 (Building the Semantic Web is easier together)

15 years of a free web

leobard — 2008-05-05T21:12:00Z

Happy Birthday, Free Web. On April 30 1993 (well, I am a week late to gratulate, but anyway) CERN published the software and standards of the web as free software.

"CERN's decision to make the Web foundations and protocols available on a royalty free basis, and without additional impediments, was crucial to the Web's existence. Without this commitment, the enormous individual and corporate investment in Web technology simply would never have happened, and we wouldn't have the Web today."

Tim Berners-Lee, Director, WWW Consortium

(10 years of web)

The original announcement says "CERN relinquishes all intellectual property rights to this code, both source and binary form and permission is granted for anyone to use, duplicate, modify and redestribute it."
Signed by W. Hoogland and H. Weber.

Through my HTTP and HTML based weblog, I can only say: thanks Mr W.H. and H.W. !

read on at wikipedia.

Translations for semweb cool uris available - more needed

leobard — 2008-04-23T09:05:00Z

Jean-Jacques Solari provided a French translation and Yakura Masataka a Japanese translation of the Cool URIs for the Semantic Web note.

http://www.w3.org/2005/11/Translations/Query?titleMatch=Cool+URI&lang=any&search1=Submit

Excellent!

do you miss the document in your language? Create a translation (and get in touch with W3C, I am not responsible for putting the translations on the site)

What are the Benefits of the Semantic Web? A list based on Case Studies

leobard — 2008-04-23T07:29:00Z

We need some facts about what the Semantic Web can be used for. The SWEO case studies provide a great start, listing deployed corporate Semantic Web applications. I added them up, identifying some key benefits: profit, data integration, querying, and taxonomies.

Read my notes.

At ISWC2005, one talk presented a slide about "what are the key reasons to use Semantic Web". Sadly, I lost the reference and the paper did not list them (do you know which paper this was? It was presented in the industry track).
Interestingly, there is not much data available about the actual benefits of deploying Semantic Web technology. To create such overviews, we can either do interviews and questionnaires or look at documented case studies.

The Semantic Web Education and Outreach SWEO Interest Group of the W3C did collect and publish 27 case studies and 10 use cases (numbers as of 22.4.2008). The case studies report of deployed systems, therefore I concentrate of them. As methodology, I copy/pasted all key benefits into a spreadsheet and mapped them to classifications I made up on the run. I added explanatory text about the categories by copy/pasting statements by the authors. Then I sorted the results, showing the top-named benefits first. One argument from a use case could map to multiple of my categories (i.e. when a benefit touches both a business profit and is about data integration, it will be added to both categories).

Read the whole report with the data.

The correct scientific method to do such study would be to use questionnaires and to check if the statements given by the authors are true, so the scientific value of this note is questionable, but I love controversy.

POSCCaesar Semantic Days 2008 Stavanger

leobard — 2008-04-23T07:23:00Z

Du er nå på Internett.

I am currently attending the Semantic Days 2008 in Stavanger. From the speakers, you recognize it's a melting pot of Defence (Rear Admiral Morten Jacobsen and Major General Arnvid Løvbukten), Oil&Gas (StatoilHydro, DNV, NOV, Epsis) and Semantic Web. For the last subject, amongst others, Ora Lassila and Ian Horrocks presented. I also fall in the last subject.

The conference is located at Clarion Hotel Stavanger, in the city center. From my room I have a great view of the sourrounding sea and town, but there is not much time to go there.

My presentation contains some new data about the use of semantic web technologies, but I will blog that extra, as it deserves some more space.

Download my slides here.

Photos from CHI 2008

leobard — 2008-04-16T18:45:00Z

I visited CHI2008 last week, and finally found time to upload the pictures and videos.

The sleeping phone:

Naturalinteraction.org table:

my pictures from the set:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/leobard/sets/72157604570968864/

Join us at the Semantic Web Days 2008 in Stavanger

leobard — 2008-04-16T16:16:00Z

The Semantic Days 2008 Conference will be next week, Stavanger, 21-23 April 2008. From Monday 21 to Wednesday 23 April 2008 at the Clarion Hotel, Stavanger.

Official website

In the words of the organizers:

Semantic Days is an annual conference that has become a meeting place for industrial use of Semantic Web technologies with significant contribution also from research institutions and universities.

My talk will be on Semantic Web in use on the first day.

Some Social Math Numbers

leobard — 2008-04-14T22:26:00Z

For the interested social researcher:
I let xing.com check if people from my desktop address book are on xing, and if I am connected with them (a feature that linkedin had before them, I think).

623 contacts in my address book have email addresses and can be compared
105 (17%) of them are Xing members
I am already connected with 52 (8%) of them

Does this say anything scientifically? Hm....

and, you 53 people, expect to get mass-mailed soon...

Springer Buch "Semanic Web-Wege zur Vernetzten Wissensgesellschaft" for...

leobard — 2008-04-14T21:31:00Z

For the german readers....

Springer hat Kapitel aus einem Buch bei dem ich beigetragen habe online, aber nur für Springer Abonnementen (und eigentlich ein alter Hut, aber vielleicht doch für jemanden interessant)

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/3-540-29325-6

" Semantic Web - Wege zur vernetzten Wissensgesellschaft"

Glowing Tape Sculpture for Nowhere2008

leobard — 2008-04-13T18:26:00Z

What participatory Art project do you bring into the desert to Nowhere2008 festival? It has to glow, it has to look amazing, it has to be less than 5kg and 5 liter space to fit in the luggage in the airplane?

You have to bring an idea. The idea is combining Led lights with TapeSculpture.org, a form of street art developed and perfected by Mark Jenkins.

The core of the idea is that the ingredients are cheap and can be bought virtually everywhere:

clear packing tape
plastic wrap
scissors or a knife
and an object you'd like to cast

Read the tutorial or watch the video by Mark Jenkins:

An technique that can be easily tought and copied. Excellent. Mash it up with LED Throwies (I use AA batteries) and we have lighted art.

Here is my first real piece, the Rabe:

Its a great piece of DJ art to give light to your labels:

And a second one, appearing magically today in Kaiserslautern:

Triplify to let users creatively work with your data (and win a MacBook Air)

leobard — 2008-04-10T08:01:00Z

Why should you provide the data of your website in RDF? To let the users use it! If you got news on your page, you may already have an RSS feed, but if you got calendar items, people, friend networks, tags - triplify them! Then the users can mashup the data they created.

And you can win a MacBook Air :-)

http://triplify.org/Challenge

The
I-Semantics Conference
includes a Linking Open Data Triplification Challenge which will award three prizes to the most promising triplifications of existing Web applications, Websites and data sets. The prizes are:

MacBook Air or Euro 1.000 (1st prize)
Asus EeePC or Euro 300 (2nd prize)
iPod Touch or Euro 200 (3rd prize)

For the success of the Semantic Web it is from our point of view crucial to overcome the chicken-and-egg problem of missing semantic representations on the Web and the lack of their evaluation by standard search engines. One way to tackle this problem (some might say the only one) is to reveal and expose existing structured (relational) representations, which are already backing most of the existing Web sites. The Triplification challenge aims to expedite this process by raising awareness and showcasing best practices.

Semantic Search Against Animal Experiments

leobard — 2008-04-09T13:18:00Z

Imagine you could avoid an animal experiment if you would find the result of the experiment online?

Press Release/Transinsight:
the knowledge-based semantic search engine www.Go3R.org is now available online. It enables information transparency for the prevention of animal testing.

In only four months development time, Transinsight from Dresden, Germany, succeeded in making available online Go3R, the worldwide first knowledge-based search engine for alternative methods to animal experiments. Via www.Go3R.org, scientists from all over the world can take advantage of the benefits of semantic searches for the area of alternative methods in accordance with the 3Rs principle. The Search engine can from now on used as Beta version.

The so-called 3Rs principle developed by Russell and Burch in 1959 stands for Replacement, Reduction and Refinement. It describes scientific methods that can either replace animal experiments, or reduce animal numbers or refine the suffering of the animals during the procedures. In the European Union, compliance with the 3Rs principle is legally required. In accordance with the EU Laboratory Animal Directive, just as with the German Animal Welfare Act, animal experiments may only be performed if the scientific goal pursued cannot be achieved by any other means, i.e. in totally non-animal procedures, or in methods using fewer animals or entailing less animal suffering.

In practice, however, this legal requirement oftentimes is not met, because the scientists and the responsible authorities are unaware of 3Rs alternatives that would exist to the respective foreseen animal experiment. Queries for alternative methods are time consuming and cumbersome, and this situation has possibly even become worse in the era of the internet. Additionally, at the end of a search, it remains unclear whether all relevant information sought for was indeed retrieved. This is where the search engine Go3R sets in.

photos of PIM 2008 online

leobard — 2008-04-09T12:39:00Z

News from the PIM 2008 workshop. I made some pictures, Manas Tungare uploaded them here.

look great on black :-)

Great workshop, nice to meet all the people I have been citing for long.

Bandholz: Cool URIs in a RESTful World

leobard — 2008-04-09T12:24:00Z

Thomas Bandholtz blogs about cool-URIs in a RESTful World.

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/04/cool-uris-rest

He summarized literature about URIs, SOA, and REST into something combined:

RESTful SOA may argue that this mainly fits for a provision of fix document files. A dynamic SOA server can easily implement this "generic" URI concept without any redirection, just by rendering the content in the requested format on demand. This view satisfies content provision, while the redirection architecture better supports linkage and reference. It also leverages resource management and governance, be it in the Semantic Web, or in RESTful SOA. And may be these two application areas are not so distinct from each other.

CHI2008 surprise: Video Browsing by Direct Manipulation

leobard — 2008-04-07T15:54:00Z

If you look at one paper from the CHI2008 conference, look at "Video Browsing by Direct Manipulation". The conference is the place where innovation in computer-human interaction is presented each year.

Video and more documentation available at
http://www.aviz.fr/dimp/

A small video is available here:
http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~bonzo/index.html

The idea of this system was developed by four groups in parallel, without being aware of each other (in the beginning) ... the other paper was "DRAGON: A Direct Manipulation Interface for Frame-Accurate In-Scene Video Navigation"

Abstract:
We present a method for browsing videos by directly dragging their content. This method brings the benefits of direct manipulation to an activity typically mediated by widgets. We show that this method can out-perform the traditional seeker bar in video browsing tasks that focus on visual content rather than time.

~~I wish they would put the system demo video on youtube. I have both the paper and the video on the proceedings, but its up to the authors to publish this.~~ - just saw the project homepage

Cooler URIs for the Semantic Web

leobard — 2008-04-01T16:00:00Z

Get to know how cool URIs can be, for the Semantic Web.

Everything needs to be identified, being it a person, a web document, an image, or a mythical unicorn. The Semantic Web and RDF are based on the assumption to identify them all using URIs. But these need to be cool, so read "Cool URIs for the Semantic Web" which was published on 31.3.2008 as a W3C Working Group Note.

http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/

The official statement is:
2008-04-01: The Semantic Web Education and Outreach (SWEO) Interest Group has published an Interest Group Note Cool URIs for the Semantic Web. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) allows users to describe both Web documents and concepts from the real world people, organizations, topics, things in a computer-processable way. Publishing such descriptions on the Web creates the Semantic Web. URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) are very important to the Semantic Web, providing both the core of the framework itself and the link between RDF and the Web. This document presents guidelines for the effective use of URIs in the context of the Semantic Web.

The note was edited by Richard Cyganiak and myself, and it took us from November 2006 (ISWC, where we had the idea to write it) until yesterday, the 31st March 2008 to finally finish it. Max Völkel was also with us at the beginning and helped us to stay motivated. I am happy about this event - we have finished it! Excellent! Horray!

Read some comments from reviewers that also made us happy:

"... I think this is quite an important note..." Harry Halpin
"... I thought it was good before, but now it's excellent!..." Susie Stephens
"I think this is an important document. It contains a large amount of very valuable material, ... " Tim Berners-Lee
"... a few places which are confusing, and a small number places which are, I believe, actively misleading. There are also one or two places where I disagree about the recommendation it makes. On the whole, though, the document is important and I hope energy is found to incorporate these comments. " Tim Berners-Lee, about an earlier draft. And all these issues have been answered, Horray! :-)

Alltogether, we had a hard work to get it right and there have been some last minute changes on 20th March 2008 incorporating much feedback from the W3C Technical Architecture Group.

Many thanks to Tim Berners-Lee who invested much time and helped us understanding the TAG solution by answering chat requests and contributing many emails with clarifications and detailled reviews of this document. Special thanks go to Stuart Williams, Norman Walsh and all the other members from TAG, who reviewed this document and provided essential feedback in June 2007 and September 2007 about many formulations that were (accidentially) contrary to the TAG's view. Also special thanks to the Semantic Web Deployment Group's members Michael Hausenblas, Vit Novacek, and Ed Summers' reviews and their review summary sent in October 2007. We wish to thank everyone else who has reviewed drafts of this document, especially Chris Bizer, Gunnar AAstrand Grimnes, Harry Halpin, Xiaoshu Wang, Henry S. Thompson, Jonathan Rees, and Christoph Päper. Susie Stephens reviewed the document, managed SWEO, and helped us to stay on track. Ivan Herman did much to verify that the W3C requirements are met and submitted the note.

The work was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education,
Science, Research and Technology (BMBF), (Grants 01 IW C01, Project EPOS: Evolving Personal to Organizational Memories; and 01 AK 702B, Project InterVal: Internet and Value Chains) and by the European Union IST fund (Grant FP6-027705, Project Nepomuk).