Mike Bergman blogged about a new release of Microsoft Astoria, where they announce support for Atom, JSON (who-hoo), and Web3s.

I doubt that this can be taken as a signal from the whole Microsoft Corporation but is rather the view of project members of this one project. Nevertheless, its going to be interesting what Microsoft will do: bunker themselves in (terran style) and hope that their customers will never hear of open standards? I doubt, and therefore I do not fully agree with Mike:
This is yet another stunning and lame attempt by Microsoft to replace open standards with proprietary ones. Get a clue, Redmond!

They probably got their clue already, but for big companies it always takes time... HP (Jena), IBM (SLRP) and SUN are faster this time.

As blogged before, I attended the Triple-I conference 2007.



Summing it up:

• There are pictures online from me, bblfish (Henry Story), and others.
• The four Keynotes were interesting, and gave insights both from scientific view (innovation, trends)
• as from the corporate view (buzzwords, trends, where to invest)
• DFKI contribute quite much in the field of Knowledge Management, we had several papers published on: the Nepomuk Social Semantic Desktop (with many co-authors), the PIMO personal information model, the ConTag tagging system, Philosophy and Cognitive aspects of Semantic Desktops, and E-Learning
• Martin Memmel also blogged about his trip to Graz

Papers were I contributed were:

• Danish Nadeem, Leo Sauermann: From Philosophy and Mental-Models to Semantic Desktop research: Theoretical Overview.
• Benjamin Adrian, Leo Sauermann, Thomas Roth-Berghofer: ConTag: A semantic tag recommendation system
• Leo Sauermann, Ludger van Elst, Andreas Dengel: PIMO - a Framework for Representing Personal Information Models.
• Tudor Groza, Siegfried Handschuh, Knud Moeller, Gunnar AAstrand Grimnes, Leo Sauermann, Enrico Minack, Cedric Mesnage, Mehdi Jazayeri, Gerald Reif, Rosa Gudjonsdottir: The NEPOMUK Project - On the way to the Social Semantic Desktop.

Keynotes:


The Triple-I is balanced between science, technology fair with customer contacts, and social networking event. For example, enjoy the social event:



Klaus Tochtermann and the Know-Center are the main organizers, the newly re-branded Semantic Web Company assisted, as did Salzburg Research. Hermann Maurer was omnipresent, as scientific father of many innovations.



Here is a short summary of the conference, extending my previous post.
Triple-I was this year not-so-organized during the paper submission phase (they changed paper length once) but on-site, its very well organized. The keynotes are at 09:30, leaving enough time to get your morning coffee. Between the sessions are long 1h breaks to knit your social network. I met many old and new aquaintances and friends. Fine conference.

At the evening of the first day, there was a welcome reception at Minoritensaal.

Second day I presented a haptic personal semantic network, a birthday present from my university friends:



In the afternoon of Thursday, the second day, the FFG and the Innovation Relay Centre Austria organised an International Cooperation Event. I represented DFKI at this Event and revived contacts with old partners and found new possible partners, alltogether a speed dating with 10 people, 20 minutes each. Exhausting, but worth it.

Friday Evening, Andreas Blumauer organized a dinner I was very happy to attend.

Andreas Blumauer:


Here is what they say about themselves:
The TRIPLE-I Conference series is a joint venture of the conferences I-KNOW, I-MEDIA and I-SEMANTICS. TRIPLE-I reflects the increasing importance and convergence of knowledge management, new media technologies and semantic systems. This unique concept aims at bridging the gaps between the various communities and their technology fields.

Building upon the reputation of the premium conference series I-KNOW and SEMANTICS the upcoming event addresses representatives from academia, industry and public administrations. TRIPLE-I will offer its participants a unique platform either to present latest and leading edge developments or to catch up with the developments of most innovative IT technologies, content applications, business models and emerging market opportunities.

What is the current status of Aperture, where are we heading, what needs to be done?

Aperture is a Java framework for extracting 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. At the moment, many people use Aperture and we try to compile a list of users on this wiki page:

http://aperture.wiki.sourceforge.net/ProjectsUsingAperture

If you are using Aperture, please give a link there.

We want to make a release in the next months, probably sooner than later, if you have free time and want to fix bugs, be our guest to quicken this ;-)

The next urgent things I would like to do are:

• fix bugs in aperture - there is one for everyone
• A better Lucene handler, allowing Lucene developers to use Aperture as framework
• Make e-mails openable in Thunderbird (in Outlook it works, but Thunderbird's programming model is an open secret only readable in C code). I already tried to understand Thunderbird's API, any new clues welcome.
• fix the IMAP uris, they were ok in gnowsis but are broken in Aperture, thats an old one.

Danny Ayers blogged about using a mork parser to extract the browsing history of Firefox.

I replied that we may want to have this also in Aperture.

The demork code is here: http://gnowsis.opendfki.de/browser/trunk/demork

Its also packed as JAR with aperture, and used in the ThunderbirdCrawler.

Anyone wants to take this code and improve it to crawl the browsing history? Write a note to Aperture Developers (have to register first)

At the moment I attend the Triple-I conference 2007 in Graz, Austria.



Triple-I was this year not-so-organized during the paper submission phase (they changed paper length once) but on-site, its very well organized. The keynotes are at 09:30, leaving enough time to get your morning coffee. Between the sessions are long 1h breaks to knit your social network. I met many old and new aquaintances and friends. Fine conference.

At the evening of the first day, there was a welcome reception at Minoritensaal.

Second day I presented a haptic personal semantic network, a birthday present from my university friends:



On the first day, I presented Danish Nadeems paper on Cognitive Semantic Desktop. There was a welcome reception at the evening.

The TRIPLE-I Conference series is a joint venture of the conferences I-KNOW, I-MEDIA and I-SEMANTICS. TRIPLE-I reflects the increasing importance and convergence of knowledge management, new media technologies and semantic systems. This unique concept aims at bridging the gaps between the various communities and their technology fields.

Building upon the reputation of the premium conference series I-KNOW and SEMANTICS the upcoming event addresses representatives from academia, industry and public administrations. TRIPLE-I will offer its participants a unique platform either to present latest and leading edge developments or to catch up with the developments of most innovative IT technologies, content applications, business models and emerging market opportunities.

There is a problem of new ontologies popping up for things that have already been formalized. So much energy is lost by people reinventing the "wheel" (in this case, usually the "tag" or "person" classes).
But this wasted energy is missing at the other end - existing ontologies have bugs and problems and need continuing care. FOAF is a good example, every year an updated version is published.

Now Ivan Herman from W3C hinted me to look at this mailinglist at google groups:

http://groups.google.com/group/rdf-schema-dev

Description: A place for authors of RDF schemas to gather and talk shop. The focus is on smaller schemas that don't already have an established community so discussion of improvements to FOAF, SIOC, DOAP and the like are off topic, although reference to those schemas and their designs is not.

But it seems this list is not very active.

My idea would have been to create a "ontology making discussion group". I discussed it with Ivan Herman and others, this is a mixup of his thoughts and mine.

W3C would set up a public mailing list (public-ontology-announce@w3.org), anybody can sign up, archives and RSS feed are publicly. If somebody wants to do an ontology, he/she sends a mail to the list saying 'this is what I want to do and this and this is where the discussions happen' and people may react if such work is already available or somebody is already busy on this. Then, when the work is done, it is announced on that list. Discussions on the work is not supposed to happen on that list, only announcements.

Basically, it sums up to these rules:

• announce your work beforehand
• announce your work when its done
• allow feedback to your work and critique (using the discussion forum of your choice)

Then your ontology is listed on some W3C website, giving it an official blessing, or on a special section in schemaweb.info.

Although W3C says "we don't do ontologies", the GEO ontology having the W3C namespace, or SKOS, have higher weight than others, just because of having the ASCII characters "W3C" in their namespace.

Creating a discussion forum and listing ontologies that have been created according to this procedure would give non-W3C ontologies a similar weight.

This is to ensure that we do not duplicate work and that we begin to establish some formal process of doing ontologies, its meant as a crystallization point around which we can further improve the whole deal of making ontologies.

Any feedback? Does this exist already?

Are you interested in the Semantic Desktop and how I came to do it in the first place, come to this talk.

Talk "Semantic Desktop",
or "how I stopped worrying and began loving science"
Friday 31.8.2007
Vienna, Metalab, 15:00

Adress:
Metalab
Rathausstrasse 6,
1010 Wien

I will give a talk on Semantic Desktop any my history -
how I came to the whole business, how Geri stumbled me upon the Semantic Web, and how my scientific career worked.

The reason why I give this talk is: most of my friends will be there, its my birthday party. If you want to come, but want to know more details, call me on my cell-phone, I will be travelling in the next hours and days. There is limited room and a guest-list, write me a mail beforehand to ensure we let you in.

I got victimized by flickr censorship. My photos are still there, but I cannot see the photos by Jake Applebaum anymore. Well, not only I, but anybody from China, Germany and Austria. Lucky me, in Hong Kong you get thrown into jail when you look at art photographs done by Jake.

A post by Xeni Jardin on BoingBoing.net explains how Jake got on the censored photos list:

... I blogged about the case of Oiwan Lam, a well-known blogger in Hong Kong (Links: 1, 2, 3, 4) who's facing the possibility of a year in jail or a $HK 400,000 fine for having linked to an image deemed offensive by authorities. That image (a non-pornographic, artistic nude) was shot and published by none other than Jake Appelbaum, whose work has been blogged here on BoingBoing many times. ...
Oiwan ... blames the photo-sharing site's recently implemented content rating/blocking system in part for the legal situation she now faces in Hong Kong.
Jake believes the program, as implemented, amounts to censorship...

Jake explained the background at said blogpost.

Think global, now the local trouble: I cannot look at the pictures of a person, whom I met personally sometime and who's work I admire. Here is a pic I took of Jake when we were out eating with other friends in Vienna:


And now, when I click on Jake's photos, flickr tells me
.

Aeeehhhhmmm. Well, ioerror indeed has photos available for me and I would be interested to see them. So, the social networking website flickr removed the social networking for me. But Gunnar, who sits in office in opposite of me, is not affected by the censorship, because he is Norwegian.
My flickr account will expire tomorrow, and I am so angry about this that I don't plan continue it. But then you won't see my sets and pictures anymore and, alas, out of anger nothing good can come.

Any suggestions welcome, I could shutdown my flickr account and move to zooomr (well, maybe not, its a one-man-show) or to smugmug, I could make a new flickr account using a fake id from Norway, etc etc... whats the right thing to do?

To be prepared, I already backed up my whole flickr account, including all comments and tags of the photos in RDF.

Harry Chen blogged about the article Flying machines, desktop software and Web 2.0 by Jay Larock, who compares web and desktop software.

Larock gives three reasons why we will continue using desktop computers and desktop software (abbreviated by me):

1. it takes time to port software and make the shift
2. we are not always online, but the desktop still runs
3. some software works better when eating your local cpu power

I copy all of these arguments, and add a fourth: some people don't trust free services on the web, who may censor your work, suddenly go out of business, or be hacked, and therefore some people keep a copy of their data on their own harddisks and enjoy desktop apps.

Harry then comes to this conclusion:
We shouldn’t ask the question whether desktop software will survive in the age of Web 2.0 (yes, they will survive). But instead, we should ask: how can Web 2.0 applications (and Semantic Web applications) complement the existing functions of desktop software, so that the users can be made more productive?

This question was asked differently by me in 2003 and answered in this thesis:
http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/~sauermann/papers/sauermann2003.pdf

"If the goal is to have a global Semantic Web,
one building block is a Semantic Desktop,
a Web for a single user. "

After this, Stefan Decker and Martin Frank published their "Networked Semantic Desktop" paper, and you find several implementations that bring Semantic Web technology to the desktop, www.dbin.org, www.openiris.org, gnowsis.opendfki.de.

And lots more that are under the "radar". So, the questions is good, but using the keyword "Semantic Desktop" you easily find an answer. There are many articles about it. If you have more questions, ask the people@semanticdesktop.org.

So yes, its indeed a good idea to combine web 2.0, semantic web and desktop computing :-)

Dan Connolly blogged about units in RDF.

We have the same problem in Nepomuk, but for more practical things like measuring the size of a file (MB, KB, B, b) or the length of a song (1h, 3m 20s, 200s). Actually, we are searching for a solution that will work in normal KDE and doesnt require a PhD to understand, the typical KDE developer will take 10 minutes reading the FAQ and then start using it (note: 10 minutes for RDF, Turtle and the Unit ontology ;-)

Will blog again once I have checked what our status is.

Danish Nadeem has finished his master thesis on "Cognitive Aspects of Semantic Desktop to Support PIM".

Here is his publishing post in full length:

The proper and immediate object of science, is the acquirement, or communication, of truth […]

Inspired by the quote here i intend to publish my Masters thesis. The title of my Masters’ Thesis is: “Cognitive Aspects of Semantic Desktop to Support Personal Information Management“. It is submitted now at the Institute of Cognitive Science.

Many thanks to Leo Sauermann for his close supervision, constant support and valuable inputs to realize the work.

The abstract :

This thesis examines issues on Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cognitive Science and Mental Models. The research provides a philosophical grounding for the researchers in Personal Information Management (PIM). An overview is given on various philosophical aspects of computer-based activities. Discussions on the theories relevant to understand the goals for the Semantic Desktop community are elicited. The ideas discussed in the thesis are intended to emphasize a theoretical foundation, with respect to the Semantic Desktop long term goals. The goal of this thesis is to examine the theories of Philosophy and to provide a conceptual idea to design user-intuitive Semantic Desktop applications. The challenges of the Semantic Desktop evaluation are highlighted and suggestions are made based on Gnowsis evaluation. The work tries to induce scientific curiosity among the Semantic Desktop researchers.

Download as [ pdf] size ~1 MB