In this post i collect some sources I am going to present in 5 minutes to my friends.

• http://del.icio.us/leobard
• youtube playlist

The last two weeks, Ingrid and me went to the burning man festival, together with Lars Zapf and a friend of him, Holger Rath. It is a weird task to explain the event to others, but I will do an attempt using a mashup of videos, photos, reviews, blog posts, google maps, and personal experiences.

if you never heard of it, just look at the pictures to get an impression:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=burningman&s=rec

here is a brief attempt to explain
http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/

To generate an open and relaxed atmosphere, we will drink beer and move this event to the evening, and go to a nicer location than 372 (at the coffee corner or, if possible, outside?)

thursday, 18:00

We want to order pizza for this, if you want to have pizza, we will order together at pizza attack.

if you can, please bring some beer, and contact me about how much you can contribute.
all Hiwis, friends, relatives welcome.

I am back from burning man. No way to describe it. I will try to compile some words about the experience and the community there and how I experienced it, will take a few days. In the meantime, I already uploaded some videos:

http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=leobard

update: there are also pictures (added this link in 2010....)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/leobard/sets/72157594286473194/

I am off to burning man 2006!

The Man burns in 9 days

Ingrid & Lars & Holger & I are going to be there. see you all on the other side. I am back online on 13th September.

Getting up and reading news this morning, and still thinking about yesterdays ramblings how we could benefit from our ideas, TRB's greetings reached me at the right moment:

Welcome to the Nepoverse, by Thomas Roth-Berghofer
Yesterday morning I woke up with this greeting on my mind, a greeting to all those who are interested in the goal of the Nepomuk project: the Social Semantic Desktop. And it got even better: the Nepoverse did not exist in the Googleverse. Until now!
As you may know, we–the Nepomukians–strive for providing you with new tools for better working with (your) knowledge. We want to change the way we, as knowledge workers, live in and with the digital world, not only by providing cool Nepomuked applications and a feature-rich toolbox, but by building a community around the Social Semantic Desktop. Thus, we are shaping our own universe, don’t we?

Yes Thomas, you are right. We want that, and I need that. I don't feef exactly like "our own universe" but would put it more like Stefan Decker often tells the story: Nepomuk is a seed of a community, it starts at one point and gets bigger in circles, bigger, bigger, circling, ...

As I said yesterday night:
Our discipline is a crossover, we need results from artificial intelligence, web 2.0, usability, personalization, databases, data integration, software engineering . . .

And what I should have said then was: we got Nepomuk. There are many people in this project that make exactly this crossover possible, through their different characters and backgrounds.

If you now wonder what we are all blogging about,

• read the Nepomuk Website
• look at the gnowsis beta, a prototype of parts of nepomuk
• checkout the Semantic Desktop search engine Beagle++
• read some blogs that use Nepoverse
• and join the mailinglist

, see the

A short note to myself and the community:

Stop fumbling around with the semantic web, make quality science.


A prototype for a search engine with a bad user interface, an implementation of a rdf database that only works half, an ontology that is never used, we all know these projects.

Our discipline is a crossover, we need results from artificial intelligence, web 2.0, usability, personalization, databases, data integration, software engineering . . .

So - science would be to concentrate on one aspect and then improve that, for example to fix yourself on a scaleable rdf database. You develop a scaleable algorithm and prove in a test setup that it works - voila. But then, it takes YEARS until you yourself or others can use this result in their other projects. Saying "we need named graphs" is far away from having an RDF store that supports them in a scaleable way, but the distance is often underestimated by us.

so, I should concentrate on writing down the good ideas we have and wait -YEARS- until I can benefit from my own ideas using software written by somebody else. Like TimBl using a Firefox.
;-)

We took some photos in Strasbourg when we were there weeks ago. They are on flickr, my favorite is this here:



here i made it to ARTE! the great, entertaining, cultural TV station showing quality tv documentations and movies. etc...

At the moment we need a SPARQL conformant interface to Sesame2, and as there is none I know of, the power of open source allows us to write one.


My first question is: did somebody already write a Servlet that does map Sesame2 servers to the SPARQL protocol?

At the moment sesame2 does not support full SPARQL querying, but it will soon. We don't have to insist on SPARQL as query language, we can pass in SERQL queries and treat them like they were SPARQL, but we have to start with a conformant servlet :-)

Then some longer questions I also asked on the Sesame developer mailinglist:

We think that a SPARQL protocol conformant HTTP servlet is most important for any use of Sesame2 and are willing to invest 10 hours a week into this, more precisely, a clever student worker. We hope to get this done until the end of September.

We would implement a SPARQL protocol conformat query server and a SPARQL protocol conformant query client (issue tracker) for the reading operations of a HTTPSail. For updates of the model, we would stick to the current implementation of the latest CVS of sesame2.

want to know what the sparql protocol is?

I understand that these are MANY questions, I tried to think of all the calamities we are going to face in the next months. And I expect that some hackers out there already handled half of these questions, so don't hesitate to write me, or comment here, or to the sesame devel list.

* The org.openrdf.sesame.server.http.RepositoryServlet is not conformant to the SPARQL protocol,
as defined in the WSDL, or?
http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-protocol/#query-bindings-http
the protocol described at org.openrdf.sesame.server.http.protocol.txt does not say anything about sparql

* If not, does anybody know how to generate stubs for the servlets automatically (so that they strictly conform to the protocol)?

* If not, we would examine the Jena / Joseki implementation, as it serves as reference implementation.

* When we implement a SPARQL conformat servlet - can we put it directly into the package org.openrdf.sesame.server.http.SparqlReadServlet, directly in the latest CVS, to have the best uptake and feedback possible?

* If yes, is there also a parser for query results, that can be used on the Client side HTTP sail to read results written by the server?

* What is the status of the HTTP Client? Did anybody do since we last mailed? if yes, please add comments to this ticket:
http://www.openrdf.org/issues/browse/SES-205

* Is the query string already part of the Query object? Jeen said this is a prerequisite for this hack. If not, Jeen: could you do this? This is such a core thing that I don't want to touch it and for you its probably only 50 lines of code.
I mean the solution 1) suggested here:
http://www.openrdf.org/issues/browse/SES-205#action_10533

* Can Sesame2 serialize Query results according to the SPARQL protocol?
I see the QueryResultFormat.SPARQL which would indicate that.

* last but not least: any news about SPARQL query support?

* Do you have a debug environment to test the existing servlets from org.openrdf.sesame.server.http?

* Does the WebClient work? (the code looks SOOO COOL! spring rocks)
- I cannot find any code in the webclient project that actually *changes* triples... hm.

* When Sebastian starts hacking, whom can he jabber/icq for help?