So, after many months of setting up a company, we have our second public appearance: gnowsis.com is going to show up at CeBIT. We will be giving demos of our first product "cluug.com" and give away alpha accounts for selected users. There will also be a great video about it.

We have been working many months to get a minimum viable product running. That means, we are going to offer first the core feature of semantic personal information management: links. From the vast amount of things we learned from the NEPOMUK EU project, the first thing that is commercially available from us are links between websites. That gives you the chance to try out the thing online and us the chance to give you more features every month.

So, to learn more: come to CeBIT 2010. I and Martina Gallova are going to be at the gnowsis.com booth as part of the DFKI booth in Hall 9, booth B45. We will also be giving a future talk on Thursday, 4th March, at 17:00 in Hall 9. And we hope to be able to show people what we do at Bitkom's innovator pitch (you can also wish us good blessing for winning a price there).

I am very happy with the forthcoming of the company so far. Everything took a bit longer as expected, but the results are nice. Between December and January, we rehauled the user interace (kudos to Bernhard Schandl and the development team for leading this). We are negotiating partner deals with interesting companies to bring the semantic desktop and cluug.com to you as soon as possible.

So, I won't go into details, this leaves plenty of things to talk about at our booth at CeBIT. If you want to meet us - please please write me a mail before. We are going to be very busy and it would be good if we can make an appointment beforehand. I can also organize you a free entry ticket for the meeting, if you need one.

Especially if you are a journalist of professional blogger, it is always better to plan meetings beforehand. At the DFKI booth there is always press around and politicians creating buzz, if you want a calm moment, maybe take care and book one.

Of course, there will be Mozart Choccolate Balls at the booth for you (my traditional talk give-away), we also give away some buttons, but most important - very very rare Alpha User invitation codes.

(btw: ESTC 2009 and getting a price at innocation camp there was our first appearance)

I submitted a short proposal to speak at LIFT-Austria and got my acceptence mail!

See you there on March 18–20 in Vienna, its going to be interesting. My talk will be about something around "tools for thinking - how semantic personal information management is going to change our way of thinking"

Looking forward to the event and to meet others in the field, and to drink a beer. If you are also going, ping me.

There are activities towards updating the RDF standard.

Here are my thoughts on what problems and solutions we have:

Leobard's thoughts about needed changes to RDF.

Problems:

1) Reification is not an aesthetically appealing model because it forces the triple/statement structure on quads. Therefore it is not used much and discouraged by some "named graph" enthousiasts. Nevertheless, the need to identify and annotate single triples and their values is there.

2) rdf:value, datatype, language, and reification all address the same need and are redundant.

3) The relation between a web resource (i.e. a web page in html) and the RDF document (named graph) containing the RDF data of the web page can NOT be expressed with the RDF standard. There exist various, scarcely documented methods such as the HTML Header tag "" or 303 redirects, or content negotiation. Some of these methods are described in "Cool Uris for the Semantic Web"). This has been causing personal bellyaches for me since editing "Cool Uris for the Semantic Web". It is not aesthetic as this central feature of linked data and RDF can't be represented in RDF.

4) Statements about reified triples must be possible for sets of triples.

Suggestions for Solutions: [syntax: problem->solution]

1)->S1) On the core level of RDF, add an URI identifier to a triple. Let Serializations allow to add this URI to the triple. Add a triple identifier to the core of the spec and APIs.

2)->S2) Deprecate rdf:value.

3)->S3) In RDFS we already hint at HTTP dereferenciation and linked data in rdfs:seeAlso and its subproperty rdfs:isDefinedBy. In foaf we have foaf:homepage that links a resource to its web page. In SKOS we had skos:isSubjectOf (but it was removed) I propose """ rdfs:describes a rdfs:Property; rdfs:domain rdfs:Resource; rdfs:range rdfs:Resource; rdfs:comment "The subject RDF resource is metadata for the object document." """ . This solution seems to add problems though, as the relation between document and resource is dynamic and ever changing.

3)->S3.1) Leave it as is. The problem of linking between HTML and RDF representations is on the level of HTML and not on RDF.

The german city "Mannheim" is suing the twitter user "Mannheim", a guy living and working in Mannheim. CAN YOU HAZ TWITTER?

read the original post:

Mark has now received a letter via registered mail from the City of Mannheim, which says that he must sign the letter and give up the Twitter account, or suffer the full force of a city’s legal team as they try to drag our a**es through the courts.

In my opinion, the city of Mannheim can fuck off. If they forget to register their own name on twitter, they are clearly years behind. And they will always be too late in all the good services, so if they start doing this with Twitter, where will it end? The german legislation allows you to sue for DOMAIN names, which is kind-of-ok, but with web 2.0 accounts? Anyway, I am with the small David here against Goliath.

In the NEPOMUK EU project, we have created standards and implementations for the semantic desktop. Based on which assumptions?

To get an understanding what people do at various companies and what support they need, a set of personas was created. Based on interviews with real people, a persona is a fictitious person that represents a user group.

Here is Claudia, she and her colleague Dirk were the two most popular personas within our project group:


The personas helped us to think about what the software must do for the users, demo the software, create prototypes, and create test data for unit testing. As they helped us, maybe they can also help you, so I asked around in the consortium if we could publish them, and we could, so here they are:

• NEPOMUK personas.zip
• NEPOMUK testdata (this was public before, both is related, so having the link here will help you)

A definition was given by the authors from the Human Computer Interaction Group at KTH:
A persona is a fictitious person that represents a user group. They are based on users studies on real people.

Personas are a detailed description and a visualisation of the users. They have a life, goals and scenarios where they fulfill their goal. They help us to focus on the users during the design and give all stakeholders in the project a clear picture of the users' needs and requirements. Everyone in the project has the same view of the users and personas are also a constant reminder of the users.

When personas are used in the design work and they make it easier to design for them. They "depersonalise" discussions on functionality and allow the designers to focus on designing for the personas.

you can also find the personas in the list of deliverables:
nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main1/Deliverables

p.s. The personas were so good, we continued using them at the NEPOMUK KDE Workshop. There, the story continues with news on Claudia's private life. In fact, she is having a wedding with her long-term friend Berit in Holland! Read the fascinating news and N3 files yourself...