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

Semantic Web Demozone

leobard — 2009-11-20T18:28:00Z

If someone asks me "what is the semantic web", I have a new answer: go look into the demozone.

http://demozone.semantic-web.at/

Gratulations to the team of the semantic web company for launching this, I see these guys now as the world premier semantic web consulting agency: in a vendor-neutral way, they show what semantics you can get.

Before this, I only had the W3C SWEO use case collection, now I have two answers. Good work!

(early adopters: yes, its out there since some weeks now, but I still think we should blog about it)

ESTC 2009 - business semantic web and gnowsis.com - special reduced fee - come to...

leobard — 2009-10-30T17:38:00Z

Hello readers, now one of the first blog-posts here about our work in the startup company www.gnowsis.com. People need tools to write down information, we are working on them and I will give a preview on what we do at the ESTC 2009 conference in Vienna - and you can get a special discount on the entrance fee to talk to us.

http://www.estc2009.com/
The conference is packed with top semantic web technology providers and consulting agencies able to help out, gnowsis is also presenting in a
talk and we can meet and I can introduce you to many people at the
conference.

We have a special reduced fee for gnowsis partners:

Normal Prices:
Early Registration: 270 EUR (available until 30th of October - that is TODAY)
Regular Registration: 320 EUR

With gnowsis partner code:
250 EUR.

Want one? please ask now, and I send you a coupon code (we got only 5 left!)
Mail me at info@gnowsis.com

Besides the reduced fee, staying in Vienna in December for a few days is
a good chance to buy charming christmas gifts at the Wiener
Christkindlmarkt.

best, Leo Sauermann

Japanese: Addicted to virtual girlfriend

leobard — 2009-10-27T19:25:00Z

An excellent blog post and interview over at boingboing about virtual girlfriends.

the game has got all men need: holding hands, kissing, telling "i love you" - on nintendo ds via mic and touchscreen. The article says the game is successfull because men are simple.

Our Winning Journey to the end of the night 2009-10-17

leobard — 2009-10-18T08:37:00Z

Yesterday night I participated at http://journeyvienna.at/. "Journey to the end of the night. Join us for a free street game of epic proportion; a pursuit across Vienna in multiple parts." Basically, its a game of "tag" done in the whole city of Vienna, spreading over many square kilometers and a rough distance of 10km and more. Its fun, its geek, its exercise, its social.

I wondered if I should participate because it started at 18:30 and I just arrived on 16:05 on Vienna International Airport coming from Thessaloniki from a meeting of organik-project.eu ad: organik is drupal+semantics for SMEs to help knowledge management, it pays my bills. So, when exiting the airplane I checked with some people I know if anyone else participates and Marius Kintel did, so I decided to go. First reason: exercise! I haven't been running or sweating for a week, so any reason to exercise is a good one for a geek like me.

I guess a lot of photos will pop up today, I made a view and I made some "live action" videos for you to enjoy. Below also a video of the award ceremony. To better show what happened, I tracked my route with walkjogrun.net/

My Journey: btw: when I usually speak of "war stories" (term I will use below) I mean the term in the meaning used in project management, when people talk about experiences, but here it also works well

(original walkjogrun.net track)

Arrived late at 19:00 at Werkzeugh where a big crowd already gathered. I guess you will get pictures of that soon. Didn't see Marius, but I didn't want to run alone, so I asked Richard if I can join his party. He introduced me to his group of 5 people, including Tim: an Australian living in Germany who just arrived for a weekend in Vienna and was invited to run by his friends - excellent. Spotting Marius, I chatted with him and was impressed by his geek preparations. He already scheduled all public transport on his iPhone and had a backpack of equipment with him, I thought my chances to win are higher with him, so I asked him and Daniel if I could join. So we began...

Fin announced the rules and started the game - off we went in south direction Zentagasse. Took a tram (together with 2 other runners with whom Marius, Daniel and I shared a small softdrink I brought - team! :-). Exited the tram directly in the safe zone at checkpoint 1. Prayed for my sins at checkpoint 1 (that was the task), then back to the tram. Chaser! Because we were sure to still be in the safe-zone on Paulanergasse, we discussed him away from us (ha, arguments can safe you, the pen is stronger than the chaser, etc.). Still, we wanted to cross the street to get on the tram again, and the tram station was not safezone. So while standing next to the baffled chaser who was occupied thinking about life, Marius, Daniel and I slowly moved towards tram station, when the tram arrived in the station and had doors open, we hit the tires and ran. The chaser suddenly realized his dumbfoddledy and was behind us, we split and entered the tram from three entries - safe zone on the tram. phew, nobody lost. Ok, getting off tram and to 13a to get to Südbahnhof. We planned to cross the park cleverly but got lost, and the cell-based tracking of Marius iPhone was not precise enough to tell us the truth of our fate. Although we used every bush and moved very indian-rogue-style, we ended up Arsenalstrasse again. Shit, ok, but instead of following original plan of "through the shadows of the park", we gave it a try and went down arsenalstrasse. Spotting some chasers, we went into the park again and went from bush to bush. Nearly in the safe-zone, we were walking behind someone who seemed to be a runner - but he didn't move as suspiciously as a runner (looking back every 10 secs, being nervous, etc) and we noticed too late when he turned around and chased us. I crossed the street, Marius and Daniel and I split, and I was on safe-zone at Arsenal, Checkpoint 2. Marius got cought here, which was his team sacrifice to make our team win at the end (see video below :-). I did not find checkpoint 2 and ran around arsenal uselessly but surely scared one guy walking his dog when I was hiding in the bushes. Found checkpoint 2, danced there, and met Tim again (whom I didn't recognize now as someone I knew already) and met Wolfgang. I asked Tim if I could join him, but his plan didn't sound convincing. Wolfgang's plan sounded much better - taking long extra walks to avoid chasers at all. Ok, so we went SOUTH-EAST of checkpoint 2, which took us really far down.
As far as this rotten fence in the middle of some military compounds, probably 800m south of checkpoint 2 (crazy).

We had to run south of the complex there and ended up on Landstrasser Gürtel and then went up Landstrasse Hauptstrasse. Our plan was to enter checkpoint 3 from the east side, through Barichgasse. We jogged the whole part up to Eslarngasse and once we saw the Juchgasse, we knew we were in chaser-area again. Everything went well according to plan, the park was safe-zone and we had to find "a LAZOR", I guess correctly that someone would have setup the lazor-bike and would lasertag on one of the ww2 bunkers in the park. Right, on the west side of the park we found a lot of chasers lasertagging.

Excellent, Wolfgang and I tagged and went on. None of the chasers followed us (ha!) and we ran into a group of 5-10 blue ones who said that the way we came in is safe - ok! So we exited through Barichgasse, but on Landstrasse Hauptstrasse a chaser was on us. We accidentially split and I ran down Messenhausergasse, following our plan of "run along the danube and then come to checkpoint 4 via Radetzkyplatz". I was alone, here is the moment on video:

And I took a wrong street and ended up at Siemens (oh shoots), but used the moment to call my wife Ingrid to say "everything is fine, it rocks". I stuck to Wolfang and my plan, running along danube, and expected to find him. But he was already ahead of me, as I later learned. I didn't want to go up Radetzkyplatz, as I didn't know the area too well. Wolfgang knew it and would have known some shortcuts. But I know the area around Strandbar Hermann good, so I went there to get up to Vordere Zollamtstrasse at the Strandbar ramp. That was really awful - going alone up there, sure to face a few chasers. No one in sight, I crossed the street, 50m to safe zone... chaser behind me! running... chasers in front of me (in the safe zone) ... running, avoiding the front chasers just out of instinct, falling into bushes, tagged, but on Zollamstrasse, which is safe zone and they accepted this. Ok, didn't find checkpoint 4 on the front, went around the building with two chasers who also looked for the checkpoint (this is so fun, that you can talk and socialize with chasers while in safe zones). At checkpoint 4 I met Wolfgang again! He was already finished safing the nucleus, so I asked him to wait for me which was fine with him. Here is the task "free nuclear science":

Wolfgang and I went with a bigger group who wanted to take the tram. Wolfgang said he knew a shortcut through the buildings and across the bridge, which would bring us cross the 200 meter to the "ring" safe-zone. As we didn't know how the "getting the tram" plan of the bigger group would go, we split from them and went across the bridge to ring. We met chasers at the ring, inside safe-zone, they asked us where to find runners (ha-never). We also met runners who asked for a safe passage and we passed on the route we took, which was probably not safe anymore. On ring we were safe, so we wanted to run along. Instead of running all, I suggested to jump one station on U4 to Schottenring, fine.

Entering and exiting the station is not-safe, so we were careful and stood guard while waiting for the tram, also we picked the waggon which would be right in the middle at the "stairs" exit so we would have three ways to run if trouble came - which did not. Anyway, the preparations are all the fun. Back on ring, we met Tim, who was a yellow "respawned" runner and I recognized him from checkpoint 2 and we asked him to join us. He recognized me also, he was with the group I initially joined but left for Marius. So, regroup of this team in the middle of the night. At checkpoint 5 we were sure to die, as we have been warned of many chasers south of it. We came in north, Neutorgasse, it was fine. Of course, every pedestrian, every couple, every guy-walking-dog peacefully could be a chaser, so it was tense... :-)

btw, you see guys-walking-dogs everywhere on the streets around game-time. If they were safe-zones, the game would be easy :-)

Checkpoint 5 was fun, we were greeted with the task to improve a theater play. The girl said she prepared some roles for us, one was "Astronaut", and I immediately said: then the others have to be Captain and Dolphin - which was true. I guess right - it was from mp3experiment two. I was the Captain, Tim the lovesick Dolphin, Wolfgang the astronaut. I centered my play around "searching for love" and we had a dance at the end, Disney would be proud of us. I want to see the video!

We went back the way we came, no chasers but again tense, and decided to stick together. Tim said it was his first time in Vienna and he had no clue about the city and show the instructions to strangers to find his way, awesome that he made it so far! He is really motivated. We met some chasers sitting on a tramstation on Ring, but that was safezone. Phew. Took the tram to Rathaus, walked next to metalab (whew, I thought we will meet some chasers there, just BECAUSE, but we were lucky) and into the backstreets to Lange-Gasse. Our plan was to approach checkpoint 6 from West, Burggasse, as this is opposite of the obvious entrance. We planned our entry to checkpoint 6 on my Nokia E70 with google maps (ah, E70 rocks (careful-explicit language behind that link)).

No chasers, but still used our proven approach: "gentlemen, it is an honor to know you. This could be the last time we see each other alive, if we have to run, run towards the safe-zone, good luck".

Inside safe-zone, we learned that 6 blues arrived before us (amazing!) but were drinking and partying with a wedding that was in the pub that was the checkpoint. We drank some shots and decided to win the game now and party later at the final checkpoint (you know, don't eath the marshmellow yet, our parents gave us the right values...:-).

Ok, Museumsquartier would be tough because that was the final point and chasers would be everywhere. Tim, Wolfgang and I decided to approach the back-entry at Breite Gasse through narrow side-streets and, if things go wrong, run south to Mariahilfer street to take the entry there. No chasers, we smoothly went throught the back-entry. Safe-Zone! Finished! To have a clear winner, I said to Tim and Wolfgang that we should stop and run down the stairs to the Electric Avenue, who is there first is the winner. We did so, I was first, but at Raum D where the finishing line was actually upstairs in the Quintessenz office, so I entered this after Wolfgang, who knew. We were happy! As we did the whole thing together and we also did the last sprint ex-equo, we said we were there at the same time, thanks to Wolfgang! We arrived at 23:08 (my watch).
Tim was also good in the field of respawned runners.

Here is the war stories Wolgang exchanged with his buddies:

I also exchanged war stories with Marius:

Fin came late to give the awards ceremony and Chris asked me to do the bar of Quintessenz for a moment, so I had a reason to drink - I would miss the last bus anyway, so I could also have a longer party now. We got our prices, gave our talks, had a lot of fun.

JourneyVienna - final price celebration from leobard on Vimeo.

Thanks to the organizers!!! you rock, and I hope you had as much fun as we did.

At the ceremony I met Christian "Twistie", a guy with whom I studied and whom I didn't see for years, so we had many things to talk about and catch up on things happening in our lives, like, for example, the vineyard church I would usually be at on sunday mornings when not blogging about jtteotn, or his work of improving the java jit-compiler. Wih his friend Geri we hang out at Cantina until 3am, and met Sophie and Susanne, who also raced, they were on the table next to us. Sophie made the winning shoe I and Wolfgang got.

(As childish as I am - I am very happy about keeping the shoe for us and will expose it at the www.gnowsis.com offices, Wolfgang was fine with our price being on exposé there).

upload your new russian girlfriends

leobard — 2009-10-12T14:32:00Z

a scam that has appeared some years ago and that is interestingly still alive - russian girlfriends.

they send a nice story and pictures of nice blond women. So please upload the pictures and stories to flickr and collect them here:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/mynewrussiangirlfriend/

I started with Maria, the new russia girlfriend of a blogger who documented the whole exchange.

Semantic Desktops from the past: John Breslin's lego animation

leobard — 2009-10-05T14:18:00Z

I have been tracking everything "semantic desktop" for the last years, but this beauty has evaded me until now. disclaimer: this may not help much to explain the ideas, and is a bit long, but the mystic sound and nice appeal make it mesemerizing to watch - if you can, enjoy this in a relaxing atmosphere....

Here's an animation I did a few years ago to explain the idea of the "social semantic desktop", using Lego visualisations I made in the LDraw CAD package. Music is by yours truly from http://johnbreslin.com/wiki/index.php...

Short uncanny note on the Polanski case

leobard — 2009-10-05T13:00:00Z

Roman Polanski was arrested for child molesting, he was on charge for that for years and avoided going to the USA because of the prosecution.

There was public outcry over his arrestment, which of course interfers with a lot of his movies and art going on and some people working for him will lose money and jobs and good press if he goes to jail. Anyway, this is one side - the other was him raping a child, which interferred a lot with this one life.

Two links:

Thoughts for Polanski apologists, by another woman raped at 13. - the article on the excellent blog boingboing which pointed me to the very uncanny side of this case
the transcripts from the actual rape as on court (allegedly, you never know, maybe this is a fake, don't trust the internet) - uncanny ... creepy ...

may be needful for you in discussions on the topic

Get my PhD

leobard — 2009-09-29T10:45:00Z

If you are interested in my PhD, you can now buy it on Amazon.
http://www.amazon.de/Semantic-approach-Personal-Information-Management/dp/3866244495/

as blogged before, I finished and published my PhD. Its a good reference on all topics related to the semantic desktop: personal information management, information extraction, pimo, application plugins, semantic wikis, and how people used them.

Now, my work did hit the Amazon store and can be bought by you together with other interesting books such as Founders At Work

P.s.: Disclaimer: If you buy it through the links on this page, you support me, I took this opportunity to join Amazon's affiliate program ;-)

Sebastian Trüg organises Social Semantic Desktop hands-on workshop

leobard — 2009-09-25T16:40:00Z

As I just also blogged on OSCAF. I will be there, see that you can join also.

Sebastian Trüg from NEPOMUK-KDE organises a social semantic desktop workshop, a practical meeting to bring pragmatic implementers together.

After the first Nepomuk workshop in June being a great success it is time
to start the planning for the next one. In fact there will be two workshops
before the end of the year: one dedicated to the open social semantic desktop
and one general Nepomuk hands-on coding sprint for everyone interested in
Nepomuk development.

The Nepomuk Open Social Semantic Desktop

techbase.kde.org/Projects/Nepomuk/OpenSocialSemanticDesktopWorkshop2009

This workshop will be focused on the discussion of social features in Nepomuk
and the integration with platforms such as OpenDesktop.

Today Nepomuk allows to handle local resources and data can not be exchanged
with other users. The next step needs to be the integration of such
functionality. It needs to be possible to define privacy parameters on Nepomuk
information, to share Nepomuk data with other users, to integrate information
from online sources, and to enrich online data with the information stored in
Nepomuk.

The goal of the workshop is to bring together experts from the semantic
desktop and ontology design as well as those from online services and peer to
peer communication. Together the theoretical (and hopefully also
technological) basis for an open social semantic desktop in KDE will be
created.

Important projects related to this topic include Telepathy, Kopete,
OpenDesktop, Silk, and OSCAF, the new desktop ontology project.

The workshop will take place in Freiburg, Germany again (it is just so
convenient for me ;)

If you are interested in participating please add your name, email address,
and the dates that are convenient for you to the Workshop wiki page.

Be aware that the e.V. is sponsoring the event for both travel and
accommodation expenses.

I am looking forward to seeing you in Freiburg.

Regards,
Sebastian Trueg

Ars Electronica: Headbanghero.com, Nemo Observatory, and drawdio

leobard — 2009-09-08T09:10:00Z

On the weekend we have been on the Ars Electronica Festival - the 30th anniversary version of this art&technology festival in Linz. Awesome.

I will blog and put pictures online in the next weeks, here a few previews:

Leobard doing the headbanghero.com game - its guitar hero with headbanging. röckers, you häve to dö it.

Here is Ingrid in the Nica-Award winning Nemo Observatory, its a "private tornado", you sit on a comfortable chair in the eye of the storm. Polystrene balls and ventilators build the storm:

And we visited the MIT exhibition, traditionally a place where the best interactive media art people in the world gather. Drawdio really cought us, a simple rep-rapped device using an electrical current going through your body and watercolor paint to create a musical painting experience, at (I would guess) a low cost of 10$ per device and electrical materials you have in your drawer at home. Googling for it, I instantly found that they published it on Instructables in a pencil-based version. Just enjoy the movies:

My Dissertation published

leobard — 2009-08-20T10:30:00Z

In October 2006 I started blogging about my PhD, here the aftermath: it is published!

Get your PDF version or printed version directly from the publisher:

http://www.dissertation.de/buch.php3?buch=5954

The ISBN Number is 978-3-86624-449-8

The bibtex is online at bibsonomy:
http://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/22b669dcf81fefda8ba233ded900aec9d/leobard

An online version is available here:
http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/~sauermann/papers/Sauermann2009phd.pdf

Alas, now you can finally cite it and it is free to take its place in science.
and I am free, too...

Going to Bratislava

leobard — 2009-08-14T07:08:00Z

Today I am going for a shortened summer-holiday to Bratislava. Ingrid found the Twin City Liner ferry boat going from Vienna to Bratislava, we already booked and are courious like Italian Lotto Players to see how its going to be on that boat.

So - holiday for a weekend!

awesome Touch&Write technology demo by DFKI

leobard — 2009-08-08T11:58:00Z

Working at DFKI is awesome, and now there is a video showing the work done by Marcus Liwicki to bring touch-tables and collaborative work to the next level. This is a peak outcome by the people from our km group, led by Professor Andreas Dengel. Saher El-Neklawy did part of the programming, many people contributed here.

Others say:
if youve ever had to sit down with people at the collaboration table, I think youll recognize how well this system matches that experience. I really appreciate the approach theyve taken, and I look forward to seeing where else it will go.

Our website says:
The touch&write pen-abled interactive touchtable combines infrared technology for the normal touching and moving with the digital pen technology for high resolution handwriting. This allows an intuitive switch between the modes object manipulation, and content editing.

Touch & Write is an innovative new platform for creating applications, that users find natural to use. It seamlessly integrates the paper world into the digital world. Editing, arranging and writing tasks can be easily performed in an intuitive way.

The construction of Touch & Write as a table top environment encourages collaborative settings. Users surround the table, discuss their ideas and work together. Since intuitive handwriting is allowed as an input metaphor, the creativity is furthermore supported.

Some of the shown parts in the demo are based on technology connected to things we do in the semantic part of DFKI, our department is a really nice environment to work in ;-)

NEPOMUK and Semantic Desktop in the midst of KDE and gnome integration

leobard — 2009-07-21T11:23:00Z

The co-located Akademy/KDE and GUADEC/GNOME "desktop summit" is over, and various bloggers report about the outcome. pro-linux news. Sebastian Trüg witnesses joint conference.

A summary statement on the KDE blogs by Richard Moore reports that NEPOMUK and the Semantic Desktop are key elements to build upon (also mentioning it before the new GUI) and distinguish the KDE desktop from others. During his keynote, Sebastian Kügler, board member of KDE Ev, announced that more funding will go into the Semantic Desktop area:
KDE e.V. will sponsor a series of developer meetings that focus on integrating these features into the desktop. We invite teams inside KDE to think about how their software can benefit from the semantic framework introduced in KDE 4. The semantic desktop has the potential of being a game-changer for the Free Desktop, as it provides a way to model the user's data closer to how the human brain does it. It will move the computer's user interface one step closer to the user. (copied from Richard Moore's post, I cannot cross-check if Sebastian really said that)

Most apparent and important for me: gnome and KDE people work in parallel, but with closer and closer cooperation. An interesting aspect on this merge and cooperation is our contribution from the Semantic Desktop side:
KDE's strigi library is getting closer to gnome's tracker. As Sebastian Trüg writes, tracker is now using RDF and sparql.

As a common ground, developers from both projects agreed in April on using the NEPOMUK ontologies, and this will for cooperation grew and grew since then. I am helping a bit from the side of www.oscaf.org, an organization that was founded as a place for standardization work by DERI, DFKI, and KDE. There I represent DFKI, and we had to rethink our process a lot to cater for the needs of open-source projects.

So, I am watching open-mouthed at how ontologies really help building a common model between domain experts (horrayy, they work) and cannot imagine what will happen soon in the KDE/Gnome community around NEPOMUK. I really can't, because with these many brains who now cooperate, innovation is speeding up by the minute, and its not predictable anymore what semantic desktop applications will be there in a year. Looking forward to it, though :-)

now my E70 is a hotspot

leobard — 2009-07-11T22:46:00Z

Giving praise to the Nokia E70 must never stop. Since it appeared on this planet in May 2006, it is the killer of all. As thebestpageintheuniverse says: "Your iPhone is a piece of shit and so is your face" compared to my E70, which could probably even revive Michael Jackson.

Here the grafik stolen from bestpage:

What I achieved today reaches a solid 1000 on my personal geekness scale. I bought joikuspot which is a - legen-waitforit-dary WIFI HOTSPOT for symbian os. Yes, it uses the builtin Wifi functionality of the E70 (rocking, eh? wifi in your phone 2006!) as a hotspot instead of a client. To be precise, as a wifi p2p connection.

Alas, I am now sitting with my Apple laptop here, my phone next to me and enjoying a zeroconf-like connection to the internet. No bloody bluetooth, no labyrinthesk setup of modem over bluetooth over serial over your grandmas bra. Just plain old "wifi network name, WEP key, GO". That includes you, my friend. next time you drop by and need web with your laptop but don't have one ready, I am there for you.

OMG OMG. I mean, the last years, all these days when we did street art and mobile clubbings, permanent breakfasts, etc - now with that access point - multiple people can upload shit to the web in parallel. everywhere. This was what I always wanted: a small battery powered device you put into a room, press a button, say "this room now got internet, welcome to the future". With no bloody WIFI UMTS usb dongle. Next thing, they will implement beaming for the E70.

Ok, but the reason for my enthousiasm is, that next, I am going to buy the amnazing http://www.eye.fi/. That is, a whopping SD card with Wifi client - get the picture? Take a picture, press "protect" on the cam, the SD card uses TCP/IP to connect to a service at eye.fi, which then uploads the pic directly from the fat32 filesystem of your camera to flickr. awesomeness, here I come...