A colleague of mine wanted to do a simple number comparison in Sesame2, and couldn't make it out of the box. Because you may also want to query for "?blogposts nao:numericRating ?rating. FILTER (?rating > 8)":

• This won't work: FILTER (?rating > 8)
• This will: FILTER (?depth <= '5'^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#integer&gt)
• If you didn't guess it already: its single hyphens, double hyphens won't work!

A whole query is:

SELECT ?blogpost ?rating WHERE {
?blogpost nao:numericRating ?rating.
FILTER (?rating >= '8'^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#integer&gt) .
}

Thanks and kudos to Manuel Möller
What is NAO? An ontology used on the Semantic Desktop to rate things. So, if you give stars to something in KDE 4.0, its a NAO triple...

Its sunday and I wanted to really do shabatth/sabbath/a day of rest. So I looked it up, its 2Mose20, 8-11.

The rule is: rest. don't work. look back on what you did and enjoy. It doesn't say explicitly to give something to god on sunday, more to do it like god.

Interesting bit: the laws go on about the seven-day rule. Sticking to sabbath is a sign of the holiness and separation of Israel. On the seventh day, also animals and workers should rest. Also, every seven years, the fields should rest and be open for poor people to eat whatever grows there, and to the animals of the wild. This is especially interesting: the fields should recover from agriculture every seven years, and wild animals have a right to roam them every seven years. I interpret this in the meaning that different fields take sabbath in rounds, there is always a few fields on sabbath.

This also shows how god thinks about agriculture and sustainability, its built-in since Moses. More on this in the next days, I found another good rule: three festivities are required each year :-)

I have 65 invitation tickets for twine.com. Ping me via #swig on freenode, jabber, skypeto:leobard or comment your mail address on this blog post to get there.

You know the Semantic Web is mature when it is subject to gender studies.

Marion Fugléwicz-Bren (the public relations representative of semantic web company) interviewed Corinna Bath, a researcher and lecturer, about gender studies and Semantic Web.

The arguments are valid, going along the lines that social group and background influence the interpretation of reality. Its interesting to see what the problems are, and possible solitions, from her view:

three quotes I need for an argument:
Another line of thinking about gender and the Semantic Web is feminist epistemology, which questions traditional approaches in pointing out that there is no “real meaning”. According to these findings knowledge is always historically and culturally situated.
Hence, in contrast to its own agenda CYC ignores minority views, quieter voices, and allows the dominant voice to speak for everyone, which seems highly problematic.
Even the modelling concepts themselves should be questioned as Cecile Crutzen suggest, since e.g. the class concept and the inheritance concept lack to represent social processes, because of limited formal expressiveness for conflict, change and fluidity. Such an ontology abstracts from human sociality, situated action and real meaning construction processes.

The views are also supported by constructivistic philosophy (which I basically agree with and adhere to in my own work on Personal Information Models) with the core principle that reality is constructed inside the individual based on sensory input.

The suggestion to contextualize statements and ontologies is also right. Technial there are two problems: inference and identification. The problem is that inference as-is-now is already a hard problem, and using localized/contextualized ontologies as done by Stefan Decker and Michael Sintek in their 2002 Micro-Inference approach in TRIPLE (or by Nepomuk's NRL theory) makes the problem even harder.
Second, if a user would benefit from a contextualized ontology, the user would have to identify himself and give away information about his social context, gender, sexuality, nationality, preferences, which is a privacy problem.

So - who comes up with a solution? TRIPLE with FOAF and SIOC?

Marc Benioff wrote a short article about his view on Web 3.0 on TechCrunchIT. Besides tackling the move from desktop to the web (see below) his definition of web 3.0 starts like this:
Web 3.0 changes all of this by completely disrupting the technology and economics of the traditional software industry. The new rallying cry of Web 3.0 is that anyone can innovate, anywhere. Code is written, collaborated on, debugged, tested, deployed, and run in the cloud. When innovation is untethered from the time and capital constraints of infrastructure, it can truly flourish.

This adds to the marketplace plethora of web 3.0 definitions. Its tricky to define web 3.0, as anyone can make it up and anyone has the same authority to do so. (I co-authored one of these "the web 3.0" articles myself) Anyway, I stick to using semantic web 2.0.

Marc Benioff continued with an short and spicy overview on desktop-VS-web-VS-clientserver, pointing to various blog posts about the topic. Interesting to read. I hope desktop and web get closer in their programming models, but think that both will continue to exist for some years to come.

Thanks to James Gee for the link.