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

gnowsis.com homepage relaunch

leobard — 2009-11-26T19:19:00Z

gnowsis.com has a new homepage. And a new corporate identity. I like it, makes me proud to lead this as CEO.

background info:
Gnowsis.com is a European startup developing a product for personal information management.

Information is stored in many different applications, but you can´t look everywhere. You know there is something you are looking for but don´t know exactly where. Gnowsis makes your data accessible in an easy and effective way!
Save hours of wasted time whenever you´re trying to re-find a thought because you don´t know what the information is related to or where it is filed. Be sure things don´t get lost and have all relevant information immediately at hand.

Gnowsis talks to your applications and relates documents with your information. Just like human thoughts, a network of projects, people, topics, events, and others is created. This is presented in a standardized format (semantic web) to lower integration costs with enterprise information management systems and SaaS solutions. Users can create semantic wiki pages to take notes. Via plug-ins, the semantic automated gnowsis recommendation system is available in everyday office applications, to go beyond what is offered today. The product is based on results of the Integrated European Project NEPOMUK, the EPOS Project, and the gnowsis project initiated at the DFKI.

psst: product is currently in private alpha, to stay informed I can recommend you sign up for the newsletter.

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

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...

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

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...

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 :-)

NEPOMUK code statistics

leobard — 2009-06-19T14:15:00Z

Out of curiosity, Gunnar Grimnes compiled the size of the NEPOMUK codebase.

For the dfkinepomuk branch, where we mostly work on, the stats are:

lines of code (loc): 539485 (including blank, comment, licenses)
java files: 1725
generated loc by rdfreactor: 202113
largest file generated probably: 30k loc in one file

phd step7: Defending the PhD

leobard — 2009-06-08T14:38:00Z

On Friday, 5th June 2009, I defended my PhD on "The Gnowsis Semantic Desktop approach to Personal Information Management". I defined the PIMO ontology, an architecture built on gnowsis 0.9, and evaluated it. My conclusion is: the Semantic Desktop, as I define it, supports users in filing, finding, and thinking about information.

On Friday, I defended the thesis in a 30 minute talk. I concentrated on one story-line "knowing more than you can remember" and knowledge articulation. Thomas Roth-Berghofer passed on a tip by Professor Richter: have one slide in the presentation that is really complex, to show that you did something challenging. So I drilled down on the dropbox application to show the innards of the system. There was a misunderstanding between one Professor and the School of Informatics about the date, so we had to wait a bit until he finally arrived, but luckily everything went excellent. After the talk the Professors debated about the grade and then called me in, this raises the anxiousness effectively. They decided to grade me "sehr gut", which translates to "magna cum laude" and is the second-best grade (after "summa cum laude").

For preparation, I collected the major arguments that needed to be in the presentation, cut away all the details, took a lot of my slides from my previous 85 talks about the topics, and changed everything to give one coherent story with coherent examples. I also used a few structuring tricks, such as "in-between" slides to separate areas and nice rounded corners. Here is the presentation on slideshare:

The Gnowsis Semantic Desktopapproach to Personal InformationManagement - Dissertation defence talk

View more OpenOffice presentations from leobard.

Our tradition here goes on to meet at the institute, drink some sparkling wine and give cheers to the candidate. Professor Andreas Dengel, my supervisor, gave a very nice speech about my work and my personality. I gave thanks to my peers, God and Jesus, and to Ingrid, my wife. Then the tradition is to give the candidate a doctoral hat that is built by his peers. Here is the moment:

My hat is awesome, it has a burning man in the middle, is made of tape sculpture, and glows in blacklight:

click the picture to read the details.

We then ate good food from the catering company "Klein-Partyservice" who are locals from Kaiserslautern. I also brought three crates of beer, which was more than enough for the 30 guests. Part of the celebration was opening a bottle of Barolo wine from my best friend Ebo, which tasted excellent. In the night, a few of us went to the frohlocker.de party in Kramladen and we had a lot of fun with the crew there, like bringing some good wine. And the robot:

Max and Heiko slept in Kaiserslautern and we all had breakfast together at my place, great:

This is the last important step of my three-year enterprise to blog about doing a dissertation on Semantic Desktop at DFKI (on that page you find trackback links to all steps).
The finishing step will be publication as book and then receiving the title.

phd step6: preparing the presentation, last minute panic

leobard — 2009-06-05T11:16:00Z

Today I will defend my Phd, which is another point in the long story I blogged about doing a phd.

Things to do 2h before going to the defence:

test your talk again. do it before good friends who you trust and who will give you positive feedback. In my case: Thomas Roth Berghofer and Olaf Grebner
but 3 crates of beer and 12 bottels of sparkling wine into the office refridgerator
use a lot of axe deo-spray to fight cold-sweat-of-panic
print your presentation slides in case armageddon happens and no beamer is available and you have to give your talk without beamer (thx to Olaf for the tip)
blog

Then, at 4pm, go and defend your thesis. To put it in starcraft-speak: The attackers will watch you build your base while they have enough time to go for resources and then do a zergling rush. So put your arguments into bunkers and use your tanks for cover fire. Anyway, they are not in for winning, its the joy of attacking you, remember that.

see you on the other side....

Interview on webinale

leobard — 2009-05-29T13:53:00Z

Back from Berlin! On webinale.de, I was interviewed by three Journalists/Bloggers about my Semantic Desktop idea and startup. I also gave a talk about Semantic Web, which was one of the more visited talks. Two journalist/bloggers have put their reports online already, read more on our blog
http://www.gnowsis.com/about/node/8

At this years "webinale" web 2.0 conference in Berlin, Leo Sauermann gave a talk about Semantic Web and had the time to talk about gnowsis.com.

Viktoria Trosien from tiburon-tv interviewed Leo Sauermann about the core idea about our startup, read Viktoria's article and watch the video.

For more information about Semantic Web and Semantic Desktop, there is also an interview with Leo Sauermann on Sian-Ru Lai's blog.

Part of this is information about gnowsis.com, in German:

Sian: Du hast ja auch dein eigenes Start-Up. Worum geht es dabei?

· Menschen beim Erinnern helfen. Heutzutage haben wir so viel Information, dass man sich gar nicht mehr alles merken kann. Computer verhalten sich aber immer noch wie Bene-Ordner, also wie starres Paper wo ich Zettel einordne. Wie kann man aber Ordnung in E-Mails, Dateien, Webseiten, Projekte und Kontakte bekommen? Mit gnowsis.com bauen wir gerade eine Firma auf, die mit Web 3.0 Technologien dieses Problem angeht. Man kann sich damit ein persönliches Wissensnetz bauen, dass dann in jeder Anwendung verfügbar ist. Ich sehe dann, woher ich eine Person kenne oder welche Dinge ich zum Urlaub einpacken wollte. Das schwierige ist jetzt, die bestehenden Texte zu lesen und dieses Netzwerk automatisch zu bauen, da sind wir dran. An sich ist das Thema sehr spannend, wir haben da aber schon 6 Jahre dran geforscht und werden bald mit einer einfachen Version auf den Markt gehen. Bin schon gespannt wie sich das entwickelt.

Austrian Science Minister publicly announces to leave CERN - mountainfolks withdraw...

leobard — 2009-05-12T08:34:00Z

The Austrian Science Minister Johannes Hahn wants to free 20mio EUR budget per year by leaving the CERN consortium. This would allow him to move the money directly to his buddies at local universities to support "european research".

Well, then please also close down your WWW servers at http://www.bmwf.gv.at/ because we are currently celebrating 20 years of this CERN invention.

In their own words: "Durch die frei werdenden CERN-Mittel bieten wir den Universitäten eine europäische Forschungsperspektive". - "By freeing funds from CERN we offer the Universities a european Research Perspective". Well, I wonder why the Universities are currently cut off from EU funds - because they are not writing enough proposals? And CERN is international, its not Europen. Even better to stay there.

Here is the press release (7.5.2009).

Here is the protest platform:
http://sos.teilchen.at/

"Der wissenschaftliche Output ist unbestritten, aber die Sichtbarkeit kleiner Staaten in Experimenten mit über 2.000 Mitgliedern eher gering." - meaning: with over 2000 scientists, the Austrians don't always appear in front row, and this is not enough great publicity for my ministry. What the fuck? Its about science, not about a minister showing off in front of cameras. Be happy if you can send your students to meet the other 2000 top phycicists in the world, in a highly competitive atmosphere.

So, lets leave the underground caves in switzerland, filled with mysterious magnets, to go back to our own caves at the Austrian Research Centers, a political wonderland of science funding.

Annotating files - but where to store the metadata?

leobard — 2009-04-22T14:52:00Z

An interesting thread about file metadata for KDE got my attention: Portable Meta-Information. I waited a month until it cooled down and re-read it to draw my own conclusions.

The author, zwabel, correclty identified the problem that the Semantic Desktop must be compatible with the past - and with the future!.

I think, for the future, we need to find a way to keep the users data together, so it is as persistent and approachable as the files themselves:
- When the user copies his photo archive or backs it up to a CD, no matter what application he uses, meta-information like ratings, comments, or tags, have to move together with the photos
- When the user has a fresh install, and copies his photo archive from a CD to the disk, the meta-information for the photos should be just there
- User-generated meta-data should _never_ be lost just because a file/directory was renamed, a mount-point changed, or whatever
- User-generated meta-data should not be lost when a file completely unrelated to the item is damaged or deleted(Database)
- In 20 years, when KDE4 is history for a long time, and I find an old photo backup CD, the meta-data should still be readable

zwabel then suggested to store the metadata additionally to the central store (which NEPOMUK needs for the search engine and is essential anyway) in a multitude of ".meta" files, which are stored in the same directory as the files. For the file picture1.png, the metadata would be in picture1.png.meta. I think this is a pragmatic idea and would say:

Lets store it in picture1.png.rdf

As serialization, I suggest the W3C RDF standard, which we use in the central NEPOMUK store anyway (in the database) and which has a well-readable standardized serialization format in either XML or a plain-text format. To achieve linux-geek compability, I suggest the plaintext format. For example, to add authorship information about picture1.png, it would be:

@prefix dc: .
@prefix rdf: .  
<>  dc:creator "Dave Beckett";
dc:date "2002-07-31";
dc:publisher "ILRT, University of Bristol";
dc:title "Dave Beckett's Home Page" .

Note that the <> is a known shortcut for "this", the equivalent rdf/xml is: rdf:about="".

Sebastian Trüg also argues in a way that also leaves both ways open for the future, database and filesystem:
"you need a database anyway. Thus, in the end, the only solution I see at the moment is a kind of copy wrapper that makes sure metadata is copied with the file. Then one could also send information like a person or a project to a friend and the system would pick up all interesting metadata."

So - how do we format the metadata inside the files? The same way we do as in the RDF repository of nepomuk. There we use the NIE and NAO ontologies. But Pushing Dublin Core is also a good way to do, but do it the W3C way, standardized.

Using the RDF encoding of Dublin Core and for example Turtle/N3 as serialization format gives a rock-solid W3C industry standardized (or at least well implemented) way.

Because the world is not perfect and needs many possible ways to evolve, we can store the metadata in redundancy now in as many places as possible - but in one format. For freedesktop and nepomuk RDF is the best choice, in my (not so humble) opinion. It is serializeable, it can be stored in a database, it can be hosted on the web. No other standard has this. It is embedded in PDF already in the XMPP format.

I propose ".turtle" files to indicate that its RDF/Turtle serialization, but if you insist, ".rdf" is also fine with me (but implying RDF/XML storage, which is a bit sluggish), and ".meta" is also fine with me if you store RDF/turtle inside. Making up a new micro format would be stupid.

My Summary:

storing it in the filesystem is nice, but not a killer-argument. It works (tm) by just storing it in the central nepomuk repository for 90% of all use cases, so start hacking applications that help the users save time and improve their user experience with what is there today.
do not store it in .meta, but in .turtle, which is the rock-solid industry standard by W3C and human-readable and a simple microformat-like text format (smoother than xml)
do also store it however possible in the files themselves, not to block out others. Use EXIF fields, use XMPP fields in PDF, use ID3v2 fields, use those metedata!
do also index it in the central search engine, be it nepomuk or beagle++ (beagle++ is the rdf-enabled beagle, check it out if you are not aware of it)
storing it in metadata file attributes (xattr/channels/...) is the goal, but I propose to extend these standards with RDF to achieve cross-system compability. What worked for the web, may also work here.