our trainee for gnowsis, dominik, blogs

http://blog.heimwege.de/

great. another light switched on in the web.

a nice approach for identifying thigs with uris (known as the uri crisis) is the taguri.

http://www.taguri.org/

note that taguris are not wise to be used with things that have already a http:... uri. And in my opinion, using any existing wiki system to make a URI has the same outcome as taguri and is easier to handle for the lesser deamons. (we, the high arcane sorcerers of semweb, have a domain, know how to use a date and can live with a uri that points to nirwana on the http space. lesser demons enter uris into browsers)

but despite these flawbacks, taguri is a nice idea.

thanks to andy seaborne for mentioning it to me.

the plan: to remotely turn on and off lights in my appartment, I need to plug my 433Mhz remote light control to my DTMF phone.

why? When standing on the bar "21" we cannot identify our own house, so it would be nice to switch the lights on/off from afar. The 21 os located in the 21st floor of a high building in kaiserslautern, so theoretically we could see our flat (from our flat, we see the bar).

The hack: idea would be the use one of these babies (a DTMF decoder) and call my own phone, then transfer the DTMF signals to a manipulated remote control. Alternase tively we could place some 230V relais at the DTMF decoder. Hm, how to pick up a phone automatically? could use the answering machine for that.

alternative approach: have a friend sit at home and do the lights on call. Perhaps attach a beer to the friend.

an interesting thing happening in Austria is the Semantic Web School. The aim of this school is to preach the gospel of the semantic web to the masses, especially industry, government and end users.

www.semantic-web.at

The website has information about the school (in german) and the offered curriculum. They offer a set of one day workshops about several topics. The events are spread over several months (see navbar on left) and can be booked seperately. Cost is ok, compared to the quality of the speakers it is surely worth it (and regarding the good connections you get to the other industry & govn attendees :-) At the moment, courses are ongoing.

A very nice thing about the website is the good collection of information about the semantic web at large, they collect much info. They also asked their speakers to contribute there, so expect a quite well kept library of semantic web stuff.

Look at the right side of the nav bars to find the good links.


and yes, I am also giving a workshop there, about the dirty and good RDF tools: redland, jena, sesame, protege, gnowsis. I am looking forward to this, its on 25th may, you can still book to watch me.

http://www.hackaday.com/

hackaday writes about hardware and software hacks

Again gnowsis has advanced and the 0.8.2 release contains some interesting features, including a Joseki and SPARQL server and some bugfixes.

We are aware of the current movement towards sparql and have added SPARQL as a protocol to gnowsis using the ARQ/Joseki implementation. This can now be used in parallel to the existing URIQA interface, that has already been used by developers to talk to gnowsis.

Basically, gnowsis is a Semantic Desktop framework that integrates heterogenous data sources (files, outlook, imap servers, etc..) into a queryable and linkable RDF framework. It is programmed in Java and extends Jena. You can use it as a very big code sample of how to use Jena, install it and browse your own filesystem as an RDF graph, extract Concise Bounded Descriptions of resources and be happy with all the RDF.
Gnowsis is released under a BSD license and you are free to extend it.

The 0.8.2 release is mainly a bugfix and enhancement release of 0.8.1. We will now distribute gnowsis more frequently and move from our private cvs to a public visible subversion soon.

download gnowsis here:
http://www.gnowsis.org/Download

Changelog of 0.8.2:

* a new Joseki Server. Joseki is added using the hot joseki3 version from the latest CVS from sourceforge. Expect to make SERQL queries. documentation follows
* the service concepts has been improved
* gnowsis uses now Jena Modelmakers in central places. This allows to configure the search and central repository services to run either on database or on file models, in the future also NG4J
* Client interfaces made better.

What misses is decent documentation of the new features. If you are willing to contribute, please contact leo@gnowsis.com

If you are interested in gnowsis, don't hesitate to contact me,
may rdf:Resource be with you.

Leo Sauermann