Like four years ago, on the 8th August 2006, I ask the question:

Ok, who from the Semantic Web guys and girls is going to Burning Man this year?

I am too busy preparing my art project "God Sees" to do all the semantic web querying - last time Dan Brickley connected me to Tom Longson. This resulted in this photo


and a fucking awesome video where we explain semantic web to Mad Max (watch or skip to the end!):


and greetings to Dan Brickley:


this time I await more answers! Semantic Web and Burning Man have grown.

You go to Burning Man?
please contact me via Facebook or my email adresses,

• Look for "leobard" and "Leo Sauermann" in "The Playa Directory".
• Our camp is around Baghdad and 5:30.
• Also look for the balloon going up and down saying "God Sees". Thats our art project.

Btw: We have 2 beds in our RV for rent. Its a fair deal sharing costs, but you may need to adjust your travel plans. If you want cosy RV space, contact me.

You are not going to Burning Man but now you want? Do it. Don't move it to next year (although, 3 weeks before the event, thats usually too late to organize everything, but anyway, next year you may be dead and talking to your maker - if that happens - only Jesus can save you - so- logic or not - be there once in your life).

This is gonna be great, I know it will, as I was there 2006 (click for one line report) and 2008 on Nowhere in Spain. I love you all!

Yesterday I started a blog series about the visonary path of the Semantic Desktop from Idea to product.

Here the start: Why I see the Semantic Desktop and PIM as visionary?


Why did I tag this blog post series as visionary?

For me, it started because I was having the problem of not remembering things. I could not remember the name of the girlfriend of my best friend.  Greeting her "Sonja" when her name is "Anna" caused trouble for me, and my best friend, because she would ask "Who is Sonja?". To be honest -  I am also too lazy to remember everything. But with many things in life, like appointments, birthdays, or telephone numbers - everyone wants to be lazy and not remember everything, or?. In November 1996, I started taking notes and writing important facts down in both a digital diary with entries such as "Party on Friday" (I wrote my diary using AskSam, a flexible user-adaptable text database) and a detailled address book with contacts and phone numbers ("Anna", "Sonja").
But back then, technology was inherently broken, the tools at hand were: text files, databases, file systems, and the web. Using only this broken technology from 1996, it was not possible to "remember things by writing them down". You think my requirements are sky-high? They are.
What I was looking for was the following: In my AskSam Diary I want to write "Today I met Anna, she is the new girlfriend of David, they met at a party of Georg on Friday". From that moment on, the fact that Anna and David are a couple must show both in Anna's and David's address book entry (in Outlook), and the party at Georg must be a new event connected to both the new love relationship and Georg. That would be cool, and only that would also be satisfying. I knew information technology because I started my master courses that year (1996), and I was not aware of any standard technology to achieve this. I also had the intention to access these notes whenever I needed them - from my Palm mobile, from home, from the web. So I had a real urge to fix this and invent something we later called Semantic Desktop.
To not set the goal too easy, I knew that the overall goal must not be just a system to remembe things by writing them down, but a Cyberspace:
“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. . .”
William Gibson, Neuromancer, 1984
Why Cyberspace? It's a 3-dimensional interface, and as humans are built by God via Evolution* to interact in 3D environments, the Cyberspace is intuitive to use by people. Cyberspace is like architecture: built by humans to serve humans. To contradict myself: building Cyberspace is of course a romantic and naive goal, and I am well aware that future information technology will look more than an Apple product than what William Gibson and Vernor Vinge described, also this is not our goal at Gnowsis.com and our product Cluug is not Cyberspace. 
Still, Cluug and Gnowsis are in the world of Information Technology now and back then in 1996, if you wanted to build a global IT system like Cyberspace, you need:

• all computer services accessible through standard interfaces
  (already known as HTTP protocol, since SOAP and REST a de-facto standard
  for computer interaction),
• all information in the world in a coherent data model (HTML did not
  do that, 1999 RDF started),
• 3D coordinates for everything for positioning and information space
  architecture (not here yet, but
  XML3D are working
  on a RDF based representation of it and repurposing the upcoming
  mobile/augmented reality standards is a good start)
• and a nice rendering for each thing (damn!).

In
Vienna I was able to find the right friends in every area. To the right a
picture showing how interesting that time was - we tried out how wearable computing may work with low-tech infrastructure.

• Johannes Grenzfurthner from the Vienna based international art
  collective Monochrom, running a
  Cyberpunk fanzine since 1993.
• Michael Zeltner who helped us use plone-based wikis at Monochrom
  around 2002 (and back then,
  nobody
  knew about wikipedia)
• Gerald Reif from the TU Wien who introduced me to RDF and the
  Semantic Web in 2002.
• My school friend Markus Igel who gave me a good dose Cyberpunk
  literature in my life early on.
• And folks like Bernhard Schandl whom I finally met around 2007 - he
  also works on Semantic Personal Information Management.

So, inspired by these great people and based on a good faith that God
wanted me to spend my time tinkering with computer architectures, I started thinking how I can take my contacts from my address book and glue them together with my diary and my files and my websites. Other people like Professor Stefan Decker had the idea at the same time and already had a name for it "Semantic Desktop".
Similar minded, he found me on the web and got in touch. I went to conferences to talk about Semantic Desktop and met Ansgar Bernardi from DFKI, who later directed the EU project. In the following years I met many other people with similar ideas and enjoyed mingling with them.

Our journey to realize the Semantic Desktop began ... to help me remember the name of my best friend's girlfriend.

Follow these blog posts to learn more why we are sure that Cluug is the best and only way people can really remember information by writing it down. If you read so far, you may now have guessed why I love to call the tag this visionary.

* my stubborn believe in ancient christian scripture and historic figures makes Johannes Grenzfurthner call me the CyberChrist - I am proud enough of that to share it here.

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Programming/Other-Programming-Files/Aperture.shtml

Aperture, the useful File-to-RDF conversion framework, is now on Softpedia. We love this, it gets us more exposure.

Watch this video at G4TV on games and the future:


From my research perspective in personal information management and semantic web and a thourough knowledge of the literature in the area I can confirm that everything Jesse says is possible and right (well, besides the adword tattoo part, but its still inspiring).
During an interesting discussion with Cedric Mesnage and Gunnar Grimnes on 9.2.2008 at lake Lugano in Switzerland, I had the revelation that personal information management can also be seen as such a game.

• It has to be based on Semantic Desktop Data integration, as was my 2005 Ultima Online PIM Game prototype.
• It will help you remembering, as we have discussed here before.
• It has to look amazingly great, like the Feltron reports do (I bought one last year, it pays off)

If you are interested in working on this, join our startup gnowsis.com.

at the competition for semtech 2010 :-)

http://vator.tv/competition/semtech

If you vote for us, we can to bring the semantic desktop to you quicker!

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

also on kateray.net.

well done, good work, good interviews, nice editing, good music. I like it. The opening gives me personal chills as its a similar approach I used to open my master thesis in 2003 (self-citing me):
We should no longer ask whether we have enough information, we should ratherask if we can manage the information we have.

As Philosopher Daniel Dennett puts it, "a scholar is just a library's way of making another library"
Jeff Hammerbacher tells us how facebook.com analyses 55 terabytes of new data per day, but telling it within the background of Business Intelligence Systems, Information Platforms and Brains, and the profession of the Data Scientist. Read his chapter in "Beautiful Data" and all the others if you are working in a business that crunches 0s and 1s. You can peek into the chapter "Information Platforms and the Rise of the Data Scientist" at Google books.

Why is this book and this chapter relevant to the Semantic Web? Because in data warehousing and data analysis, a convergence between relational data, temporal data, and documents happens already. And the solution is still underway to be built. With RDFa and RDF and the Linked Data principles, we have a data format that can bridge between documents and structured data.

For semantic personal information management, what we do over at Gnowsis.com with Cluug, the same is valid: how can we turn a personal information model into a tool that can be used by you to analyse your own data? A direction into this analysis is given in the "Total Recall" book, where you can learn how individuals will manage their data. With the Semantic Desktop standards we have a technological basis to start, but it will turn into "Beautiful Data" when this has been done a few years. I expect to see a mixture of data in personal semantic web systems:

relational data	db, rdf
temporal data	clickstreams, logfiles, ...
documents	html, pdf, rdfa

And we will need the same technologies as company data warehousing and business intelligence use to wrestle it:

• map/reduce analysis,
• temporal analysis, trend detection,
• facetted browsing,
• information retrieval and text retrieval,
• and social tools: exchange of good tools and useful statistics between the community of semantic personal information management practitians

Luckily, this already happens and I can be part in it, so I am happy to be able to read Beautiful Data to learn more on what we need to do.

I met Michael Holakovsky, one of the authors of the collaboratively edited "Enterprise 2 punkt 0 web log about Enterprise 2.0". Its an well-informed circle of Enterprise computing practitioners with a touch for pragmatic solutions.
They use the blog to keep each other and us informed about Enterprise 2.0 events btw: Enterprise 2.0 is the software formerly known as "Knowledge Management". Attention: German!

Its interesting: Michael and I talked about NEPOMUK during lunchbreak at the LIFT@Austria conference, and he surprised me by

1. knowing about NEPOMUK, especially all the details what it means to store RDF in a central store and not as RDF embedded in files
2. had the strong impression that the desktop is yesterday and it must move into the SaaS area, where strong players such as FAST or Autonomy are already lurking.

As one of the NEPOMUK initiators, I was happy to learn new aspects and views on the Semantic Web business which shine an interesting light on the community.

Der Blog ist deutschsprachig, entsprechend vor allem für meine deutschsprachigen Leser interessant. Die Autoren sind keine Journalisten, sondern selber alle knöcheltief im Enterprise Software Geschäft, der Ansatz gefällt mir.

We have been at CeBIT this year to present Cluug.com - the semantic personal information management system that helps you link everything.

Here is the long story:
http://www.gnowsis.com/about/blog/2010/03/25/it-was-great-cebit-2010

Short:

• its a semantic web startup and you don't see RDF in the GUI! Also, the product does something useful - helping you write down your associations and save time when finding stuff. We did something right
• pictures
• it was awesome. nice parties, excellent business connections
• and Bernhard Schandl and the team got Cluug.com running on time
• and Martina Gallova made all the marketing activities happen like a charm!

Thanks to you who visited, I wish God blesses our company and we can go on providing this product to you for the next years.

Thats it - we are up and aliveb in the area of the Semantic Web. The company Semantium from Germany is offering MSemantic, a GoodRelations based Search Engine Optimziation (SEO) tool for the Magento web shop system.



This means that you can now pay someone to help you get higher google ranks using Semantic Web technology. Yeah! Although my personal view on SEO is "the modern way of spam", I see that companies need it and are willing to pay for it. And also, its a good indicator that a technology is accepted when it can be used for SEO.

I wish Uwe Stoll a good start with Semantium.