Hallo Kaiserslauterer,

der nächste Great Escape findet am 13.November 2006 im Glockencafe statt!!! nicht am Montag, dem 6.Nov.

sagt es weiter, bloggt, schreibt was ihr bringen wollt und ruft die Menschen zusammen. Es wird wieder projeziert, Möglichkeiten des Präsentierens usw.

lg
Leo für die Digitalcouch

a few days ago, I read this very well done article by New York Times on Bob Burnquist who build the worlds biggest skateboard ramp.

Basically, he build a 280.000$ ramp on his land in California. They say he build it in the backyard of his house, but given the dimension of the more-than-a-footballfield large construction, the house is rather in the backyard of the ramp.

If you don't have a login for NYTimes, click dontbuggme or get an account, this article is worth looking at.

and you must watch the video.

The DFKI Knowledge Management lab is proud to release Gnowsis version 0.9.2

Gnowsis is a tool for realising a Semantic Desktop - a desktop where all your data is inter-linked and related. Gnowsis gives you a tool for structuring your data as well as your thoughts! This release is part of the Nepomuk project, providing a prototype implementation of some core services.

To see what gnowsis looks like, watch the videos that Dominik Heim made:
GNOWSIS Videos

• http://gnowsis.opendfki.de/wiki/GnowsisUsage

Gnowsis has a range of features for helping you manage your personal information:

• Integration with Aperture for easy integration of the data in the applications
  you already use on your desktop! This release is based on the Aperture Framework
  Release 3, for more information about aperture see http://aperture.sourceforge.net

• A new approach to personal information management. We call it your PIMO.
• Integration with the Semantic Wiki Kaukolu, see http://kaukoluwiki.opendfki.de
  for information
• goodies for developers: AJAX support with XML/RPC
• Quick and easy full-text searching of all your data using Lucene.

Additional new added in this release include:

• Web2.0 Goodies: bookmarklets for tagging pages and creating things, geo tagging of PIMO Locations and showing these on a google-map, showing creation and modification of PIMO things on a Simile Timeline
• Many additional data-sources, both from aperture, and some additional web2.0
  sites, such as flickr, bibsonomy and del.icio.us!
• Support for PIMO synchronisation over SSH
• Many many bug fixes and minor enhancement

Download gnowsis here:

http://www.gnowsis.org/Download

And for additional information see

• http://www.gnowsis.org
• http://gnowsis.opendfki.de

Contributors to this release include Malte Kiesel, Benjamin Horack, Dominik
Heim, Sebastian Weber, Gunnar Aastrand Grimnes, Leo Sauermann, Antoni Mylka

We are pleased to announce the third alpha release of the Aperture framework.

Aperture is a Java framework for extracting and querying full-text content and metadata from various information systems (e.g. file systems, web sites, mail boxes) and the file formats (e.g. documents, images) occurring in these systems.

The most notable feature in this release is a new IcalCrawler. It works with
iCal files generated by many calendaring applications (Apple iCal, Korganizer,
Lotus Notes ...). It uses a ical-rdf mapping developed by the W3C Rdf
Calendaring group. Apart from that there are numerous small improvements and
bugfixes. The tutorial has been expanded with more code examples and UML
diagrams to facilitate learning for new users.

This the last release before the switch to the RDF2Go framework.
(The curious can already examine the RDF2Go branch in the cvs).

The project homepage:
http://aperture.sourceforge.net

Aperture 2006.1-alpha-3 can be downloaded from here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=150969&package_id=166878&release_id=460471

What's new in alpha-3?

- new IcalCrawler

- added MIME type detection for many formats:

- improved MIME type detection of MHTML files (web archives)

- introduced HtmlParserUtil, containing large parts of the HtmlExtractor
implementation, as HTML (fragments) may occur in other document types
as well (e.g. saved mails, see MimeExtractor)

- added ThreadedExtractorWrapper class, for catching and interrupting
hanging Extractors

- added RepositoryAccessData, an AccessData implementation storing its
information in a Repository

- added ability to specify a port number for an IMAP source

- set target platform to Java 5

Leo Sauermann
Christiaan Fluit
Gunnar Grimnes
Antoni Mylka

Two weeks ago I gave a talk at ZGDV.
Benjamin Nowack blogged about the ZGDV Semantic Web congress and was so polite to put his slides on the web. Also, he published the nice pictures of me having fun while giving my talk.

I can only copy that behavior and here they are, my slides on Semantic Desktop (in German):
www.dfki.uni-kl.de/~sauermann/2006/10/19/009_sauermann.pdf

I took the freedom to copy them to flickr, not to push his bandwith too much :-) here they are:

I will be blogging about my Semantic Web PhD for the next months, until I am finished. You will learn what I did in the last years and what I plan to do in the next months to write my thesis. Perhaps you can copy something for your own work or point me to information I missed - critique, positive and negative, is warmly welcome.

The topic of my PhD thesis is derived from my Diploma Thesis "The Gnowsis: Using Semantic Web techonologies to build a Semantic Desktop". The work I did in 2003 was to create a Semantic Web Server for a single user, on your desktop. So the desktop is turned into a Semantic Desktop. The abstract ends with:
Using the gnowsis prototype, which is a result of this work, applications have access to all important information stored in a single computer. Users are able to classify and structure their information in any way they want by creating bidirectional links between resources. A prototype information management tool GnoGno based on a wiki /weblog was built to explore this possibility.

So, what am I going to do for PhD? Continue! I got different remarks on that by others:

• That was a diploma thesis? After reading it, I thought it was your PhD
• Just write down, we will see then...
• You can never write a thesis about an implementation, thats not science

Note that I worked for 18 months on this diploma thesis, beginning June 2002 and finishing December 2003, which is far more time than any thesis student has here at DFKI, so it may contain enough to be accepted as PhD at some universities in the world. At least, I did publish a description of an implemented Semantic Wiki, a Semantic Blog and a way to extract data from Outlook using find(SPO) queries, using a mapping language like D2RQ. All these topics are still very hot, years after my work. Also, I published them piece by piece in peer-reviewed conferences or journals. Nothing to hide there.

So, I am positive that my work is science. Coincidence, I googled for websites that are like mine today, stumbling across Dennis Quan. His thesis made with David Karger at MIT on Designing End User Information Environments Built on Semistructured Data Models is a good example of the direction I want to go: describing how to build Semantic Web environments for the real world. And I interpret Dennis' thesis in a way that you indeed can write a PhD thesis about implementation matters, half his thesis is about Adenine, Ozone and the RDF bits and pieces he created (which are very good, btw).

So the research question I have is on the borders between Semantic Web, Artificial Intelligence, and Knowledge Management:

If Personal Information Management is the main use of Personal Computers, why is then not part of the Operating System of the computers? Why does it only handle files and folders, and not Persons, Projects and Topics?

We need a system int he spirit of the memex - a personal extension of the brain. A system then be used to write down notes in a "new" way. My diploma thesis ended with the idea that Users are able to classify and structure their information in any way they want by creating bidirectional links between resources. But "Any Way" has to be specified further. We miss an answer to: how to write down information the best way, on a Semantic Desktop?

So my PhD will contain a roundtrip on the Semantic Desktop - the idea of a central server and applications around it - and then go into the Personal Information Model (PIMO) we use to manage information. At the end, I will shine light how to automatically generate the PIMO, something that is addressed a lot in our group.

The way to answer these questions and challenges is (for me) clear: Personal Information Management cannot be handled by a single applaction like MindManager of Microsoft Outlook. It has to include all information items that come into our attention during every day, it has to include my web-browsing, my e-mails, my project management tools, my co-workers, my employees and students, my project and my tasks there, my SVN commits, my papers, travel to conferences, giving talks, powerpoints, blog posts.

So it has to include all the applications in this chain: blogging, flickr, powerpoint, e-mail, MS-Word, etc etc. And what we did in gnowsis and the EPOS project, was to look that all these applications can be enhanced with plugins so that they can capture the information behind. What we need is a unified tagging scheme for each person, a "personal Technorati". If I use the tag "burning man 2006" in delicious, I will also use it on flickr, and on my e-mails. so simple - I am always the same person, so independent of application, my PIMO is the same. Simple in theory, tricky in practice.

practice will follow.

I visited Jean Rohmer, working at Thales in Paris, to present Nepomuk and related ideas on the social semantic desktop.

Jean is an AI veteran in France, working at Bull computers and within his own company before, and is now employed by Thales to work on Ideliance, a Semantic Desktop. They sell it primarily to government and military customers, these are the primary Thales customers.

My presentation included the basics of my work, the current Nepomuk goals, and a few examples taken from the Gnowsis project.

Here are pictures of the audience:



And me presenting:


The presentation can be downloaded here:
gnowsis_nepomuk.pdf

I used the same outline I have been using since 2003, but unlike the last years, I found that one of the sentences from my 2003 presentations was missing: "if PIM is the main use of a PC –why is it not defined in the operating system?"

This is a central motivator for my work: making a Semantic Web layer on the desktop, that allows managing your files as easy as web resources, but with Sematic Web coolness. Meaning, your computer knows of people, projects, places, topics, and not only of files.

Last week we had several Nepomuk related meetings in Paris, one I attended myself. The Nepoverse came together to discuss user interface related things.

Yngve Sundblad and Bosse Westerlund from the HCI group at CSC from the Stockholm university were there, with their staff Rosa, Kikki, Sinna, Henrik and Christian, and more I think..

They presented our current state and many prototypes they did, mostly video prototypes. Also they start to identify features, we gave priorities to them and had to work on the ideas.

For example, this is such a user interface idea:

This is a still photograph of a video presentation, you will see the results of this interface in about a year in the open source implementations.

During the meeting, we:

* read e-mails


* watched presentations


and worked on prototypes. This point I did not photograph, because I had to work.

We also had dinner together, here are some pictures:






Alltogether a good meeting on the social semantic desktop features, we worked for three days, some people also had meetings before and after.

I wondered alot about the flower that I saw this year at the burning man festival.



The flower itself has a strong emotional power, wherever it goes, it strikes your heart. Through the flicker group "the flower" I got contact to the do lab people, and asked them via mail a few more things about it, here is more information about the flower. This text is taken from an e-mail and mashed by me with a few links and pics:

About the flower: the major groups that worked on it are the do lab, and abundant sugar's Patrick Shearn was the one who originally had the concept. These are both Los angeles artist collectives.


After someone from Lexus saw the flower at burningman '05, the do lab was hired to bring it out to Chicago for a few days for them. The visit of the flowers to Chicago is documented on the do lab's homepage:

http://www.thedolab.com/portfolio.html



But the work of creating the flowers for the playa was, indeed, done by a lot of dedicated and inspired people from the Los Angeles burningman community (editor: as you can find on the flower tribe from LA on tribes.com). They have brought the flower(s) to burningman for two years, and by the second we were awarded a grant from BMOrg, to help cover some of the costs, but the first year's creation, and even a great deal of 2006 (as there was twice the work with two flowers) was donated, fundraised, and loaned by the people invovled in its creation, and from a lot of incredibly gracious members of the community who wanted to see this vision come to life on the playa.




This community brought it to burningman all in pieces, and put it together there. The whole process of setup and breakdown kept them in the desert for 17 days, and in terms of pre-production and prep work, is a project that's spread out over the whole year.




As a burner, I can only say: blessed be the flowers and the do lab.