Thanks to the CPAN Perl community, you can get all your Flickr pics as RDF-if you have linux, its just a few steps away.

The relevant documentation:

• http://www.aaronland.info/perl/net/flickr/backup/ - docu of Aaron Straup Cope's flickr backup tool
• http://www.flickr.com/services/api/auth.howto.web.html - how to get a flickr key

Perl documentation is excellent. I have seldomly seen such a clean
documentation as Aarons tool and the other tools used. It is minimal, it is simple, it doesn't miss one point.
He has example RDF output and example documentation, how to tie everything together was easy to find out using CPAN.org.

You will need a flickr API key and secret.
At this point, you need also the auth_token of the key, this is trickier to do.
I moved sidewards to get the token, as I coded with flickr before,
I had a PHP application running that I used to get the auth_token.
The php-flickr API was Dan Coulter's phpFlickr Class 2.1.0,
and it has this getToken.php file that you can tweak to do the right thing.
I am sure you can get the same with Perl. Once you got the key, secret, and auth_token, install the libs:

get Perl (well, a typical linux distro depends heavily on Perl, so you probably have it already).

get the CPAN module for Net::Flickr::Backup, I used the perl cpan shell for this (sudo is needed because it installs the perl modules in the shared libs):

in the perl shell, install the backup module:
Now, it asks you many questions. In my case, pressing return most of the time did a good job.

Once you have it installed (perl will say if it doesn't), you can run the Backup by writing a script.

I created two files, one for the config, one for the perl that runs:

flickrbackup.config: (note: the aaaaaa are used to hide my secret keys)

runbackup.pl:

Now run the scripts:

Lean back and watch the photos + RDF manifest in your filesystem magically. In this case, RDF as a file format is helpful becaue it allowed Aaron to mix different aspects of the metadata.

You may get an error because some XML library misses, my error message contained
"Can't locate XML/LibXML.pm in @INC"
Luckily, this mailinglist post tells you what to do:
This may fail with some weird message, I ignored this and run my backup script again.

I met a journalist from xml-magazin.de at the webinale 2007, and he interviewed me recently. Interview is in German!


http://xml-magazin.de/itr/news/psecom,id,36225,nodeid,68.html

I answer questions about Semantic Desktop, Semantic Web, and RDF, and often the question is "why is RDF not used?", well, ...

update: based on the comments, I learned that the original idea "creating standards is altruistic" was wrong. It seems that altruism plays a role, but vendors gain a market advantage when implementing a standard first. Making good products that spread is another way to create a standard.

so, this is wrong for now:

Creating standards, as for example the W3C or the ISO does, is an deeply altruistic behavior and I think a hint that the people involved are altruistic.

A definition of altruistic is "Benefiting others without regard for one’s own needs or safety."

Creating a standard is usually a process of endless and endless discussions, exchanging arguments, giving arguments for every decision, reworking drafts, fixing formulations, agreement, and discourse, and this process can last over years, and usually does last more than a year. The outcome is rather simple: a document describing the decisions in one simple manner. If you look at the HTML, HTTP and URI specs, you can read and understand them in a day. It took years from the first idea to write and improve them to their state, and it took a lot longer time, namely many years, to establish them as a standard.

Now, what is the benefit of creating a standard? For the author, nothing. The author doesn't get paid for it (unless you charge for reading your standard, what many organisations do). You don't get fame nor money, because you invested all your time into the standard, but not into your product, which can now by copied by everyone in the world by implementing the standard.

So, why do people do standards? I cannot say for you, but I work on them because I think that the world would suck very hard if we not had standards for some things. Think of having to switch to a different browser when looking at asian websites, like carrying around an platoon of power adapters so that you hopefully can suck electricity from whatever socket you are confronted with.

The opposite of making a standard is implementing the solution. Then you have it, your great solution, coded in executable binary, nothing can go wrong now. You are quick to do it, you don't have to care much for documentation, and your customer is happy.

But imagine looking at a website hosted by an Internet Information Server (Microsoft) would mean that you have to use a Microsoft Operating System, or a Microsoft TV, or a Microsoft Phone. At first, there is no problem. But after others did the same, I would have to carry around many phones. So, clever people (who are often altruistic and may work for market leaders like Microsoft Corp.) see these problems beforehand and decide to sit down to make a standard, once sitting you notice that there are others seated next to you who feel the same.

Some say "the good things about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from". This is not true, because for anyone in such situation of choosing, "good" is exactly not the way you feel, because you get this slight feeling deep inside, that your decision is shiny today, but sits down in some dark place and comes to bite your behind years later.

So, if you are stuck again while working on a standard, like me at the moment, and life is blackened by endless arguments and paperwork, think about why you started the whole thing.

And on the other hand, if you watch people like the W3C members sitting around in endless discussions about details, dissecting every piece of it and making a lot of seemingly useless paperwork, and you think to yourself "ha, I could do a better standard alone", think twice. First of all, open your cupboard and get out your beloved assortment of travel power socket adapters for a short personal meditation about the stupidity of man. Then, think of the motivation of people writing standards: not money nor fame can be the reason, there is neither of it in it, they do it for you.

p.s. HM, the Queen of Britain, has honored Tim Berners-Lee again by giving him the Order Of Merit, putting him in one league with Florence Nightingale and Mother Theresa. I think this does not only honor him but also everyone wasting his life away for the W3C and technical standards in general. People travelling as much as the royals do, seem to know the irony of power sockets that look a bit unfamiliar compared to the plug you want to put in them, and cars that have their gear switch on the left hand side of you, adding to the irritation of driving them on the "wrong" side of the road. Feel free to comment.

p.p.s. perhaps I don't get it because I am a complicated thinking Java programmer and not a witty Python hacker (like Gromgull), where the standard is set by best practice.

In the last year, I was involved in many discussions revolving about the question of "how to make a semantic desktop gui". Semantic Web guis in general have to be dynamic, adaptive, generic, because the ontologies are changing and data of two ontologies can be mixed. This causes friction in software development, when all our frameworks and developers are used to relational databases or compiled Java beans that hold the information.

To gather my own thoughts for our NEPOMUK project I have prepared some slides to get an overview, a document summing up my view, and a screencast showing one framework.

• creating rich semantic web guis - slides about haystack, dbin, fresnel, and some ideas for Nepomuk
• PSEWArchitecture connecting database, pimoservice and an Eclipse based user interface (PositionPaper) - a paper making the suggestion begun in the slides more precise, PSEW referring to the p2p semantic eclipse workbench.
• a screencast of myself using gnogno, our gui framework

If you are interested in Semantic Web guis on the desktop, have a look. If you have a similar itch to scratch and want to join our open source projects, contact me!

"Reification is the soul of the Semantic Web" is a good example of reification in the Marxist interpretation. Don't believe me? Then stumble yourself accross the wikipedia article on reification (marxism).

Reification (German: Verdinglichung, literally: "thing-ification") is the consideration of an abstraction or an object as if it had human (pathetic fallacy) or living (reification fallacy) existence and abilities; at the same time it implies the thingification of social relations.

More:
Ordinary examples of Reification

Reification occurs when specifically human creations are misconceived as “facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will”. [3]

Reification is very visible in advertising when the advertiser or designer deliberately tries to associate a commercial product with all kinds of desirable qualities or contexts, with the suggestion that if you buy the product, that you will have access to or experience those desirable qualities. The product thus acquires an deliberately contrived imaginary status in addition to its real status.

A very graphic visual example of reification is pornography in which sexual acts are separated out from the total human context in which they occur.

Reification also frequently occurs in language and any form of communication which involves the representation of things or relationships by symbols. For example, the sentence "Make your money work for you" contains a reification, because money does not do any work at all, people do. The power to do work is falsely attributed to money.

A characteristic of mental illness can be that the mentally-ill person reifies himself or parts of the world around him, misplacing the true context of things, or attributing powers to himself and to objects in the world which they do not really have.

Because of heavily copy/pasted from wikipedia, this blog post is under available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

Do you want to know what problems the Semantic Web solved?

The Semantic Web Education and Outreach (SWEO) Interest Group is pleased to announce the first set of Case Studies and Use Cases giving some examples of how the Semantic Web of machine readable data is used today. Applications are presented in areas ranging from automotive to health care, and from B2B systems to geographical information systems. The SWEO Interest Group will continue to publish new Case Studies and Use Cases in the future; an RSS feed for new submissions is available. A short overview is also available in Open Document Format, PDF, and HTML formats.

see the original post by Susie Stephens at W3C.

We are offering several open positions for projects in the Semantic Desktop area.

At the moment, the question is: how to support knowledge workers with the Semantic Desktop? Clever AI algorithms, text analysis, personal ontologies, flickr-mashups, many roads lead to the goal of smart computers.

This topic can be done by you as a diploma thesis (or internship, if you are not at the end of your studies yet):

• Metadata Alignment on the Semantic Desktop

I also search for assistants for implementing user interfaces and other things at hand.

• Implementing Social Semantic Desktop – Services

Requirements are:

• Java developing
• Basic Semantic Web knowledge (you shouldve created a few triples)
• You have your own homepage or show us by other means that you are capable of presenting your work
• Preferably you are near Kaiserslautern, or live in Germany, plan to move here

We offer a challenging task and a friendly work environment, as you can see, we expect well-thought work and qualitative results from you.

Apply to sauermann[ad]dfki.uni-kl.de.

http://aperture.sourceforge.net/

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.

The entire Aperture Framework has been rewritten to utilize the RDF2Go framework.
It is now completely independent from the underlying RDF store. Aperture registries
and factories can now be used in an OSGi environment as services. The
infrastructure allows for on-the-fly deployment of new extraction components.

download the new release:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=150969

Additional improvements include:

- the logging subsystem has been changed from Java Util Logging to SLF4J. This solves
some classloading issues that were encountered when using Aperture in
web applications.

- a set of OSGI BundleActivators have been added for embedding Aperture
in an OSGi environment. Additional ant target creates two OSGI bundles from
Aperture source code. The OSGi setup has been tested extensively
in the Nepomuk Social Semantic Desktop project.

Updated dependencies
- updated Sesame 2.0 from alpha-3 to beta-4
- updated the applewrapper library to version 0.2
- RDF2Go 4.4.1
- Sesame 2.0-beta4 RDF2Go Adapter revision 2682
- SLF4J 1.3.0
- osgi.core-4.0.jar - The reference OSGI jar file, necessary to compile activators.
- don't use apache commons-logging anymore, the RDF2Go depends on commons-logging
but this is now done with the jcl104-over-slf4j bridge
- removed the original commons-codec.jar and replaced with an OSGI-friendly
bundle org.apache.commons.codec_1.2.0.jar
- org.apache.httpclient_3.0.0.rc2.jar

best regards
Leo Sauermann
Chris Fluit
Antoni Mylka

When developing rich client applications for the semantic web, components for visualising and editing RDF data are useful.

The gnogno framework is an approach to bind RDF models from RDF2Go to Swing and Eclipse SWT widgets. It allows to edit text values, make lists, and program user interfaces using a clear design pattern. The RDF data can be taken from various frameworks, such as Jena or Sesame (RDF2Go wraps these). Inspiration for this project comes from the Borland DataSet components, part of Delphi.

• gnogno wiki page
• documentation

I made a 20 minute screencast showing some basic components



At the moment, gnogno is alpha and subject to change, but I would like to hear feedback from you about the principal idea, and if you want to use this project, you may want to join me developing it. Its free software/open source. Please add comments with feedback here to this blog-post.

Why did I do this? I was a professional Delphi programmer before I did Java and Semantic Web, therefore I dig these simple frameworks that bind data directly to the gui.

This week I attended the webinale 07 conference, which circles around Web technologies.

There were a lot of talks, where most of them had the word ajax in their title. Some of the talks where by experts on general topics, such as rapid prototyping, or by experts on very specific topics, such as their own product. I never heard anything uninteresting. It was a great place to socialize and to find possible vendors and customers. Even I, the semantic-web-is-no-business-yet freak, had some interesting lunchbreak meetings. Two students with whom I worked were also there, by chance.

The social event on tuesday evening - dubbed "webinale at night" - was organized perfectly, good food, professional DJ, enough alcohol. Only the rule of "have 50% women at an event" was severly broken, we need more women in information business and science. Very positive on the social event: no boring speech before the buffet was opened, it was all socializing.

My own talk was about - Semantic Desktop. I included a few slides about RDF and triples and RDFS and how simple and restful everything is up front, a one minute crash-course in Semantic Web. They are not perfect, but good enough to kickstart a few brains out there to think about the future of their data. Nepomuk was trimmed down to one slide this time, and I skipped most of the gnowsis slides while presenting. Maybe someone took pictures of my talk, add comments here if you did...

My slides are for download here:

• leobard's slides about Semantic Desktop/Web/PIMO for the webinale (an mb of pdf)

I met Benjamin Nowack at the conference, his talk was about Semantic Web and Web 2.0:


There were many cool people like Ben Ramsey:

and people with suits that know how to make serious money. I was specially impressed by Florian Müller from CTP who seems to have the skills to do projects professionally, quickly, without causing too much stress on everyone, and probably for serious money.


Christoph Janz from pageflakes.com held an, I would say, "oscar-nominated" powerpoint presentation about their website, with much humor and feature details.

.

Everyone wore crazy t-shirts, and was somehow working in it business.

Bengee gave his talk about RDF and stunned everybody with the great powers at hand (and with too much technical details, in my opinion)


The only real sucker at the conference was the laaaaaaaaaaaaaagging internet connection. A lame setup of about 10 different wireless networks, of which some may work, some not, but surely not for hours, made it a never-ending quest for online time.

being online on a random base sucked a for me only a litte, but much for the Microsoft Keynote speaker who wanted to present the new Microsoft Online Platform. Well, without web, thats a show-stopper. It took the admins a few minutes to get him online, after he was disconnected. Nevertheless, Paramesh Vaidyanathan is a professional keynoter and kept our attention during the lag.



So, if someone has a business for doing good wifi at conferences, here is your customer.

For me, the last talk was a "framework smackdown" where some major web frameworks were compared. Rails, JSF, GWT, Pylons, qooxdoo, Ruby-On-Rails, Flex, Zend.

The message for me was: they are all ok, the free ones are harder to use, and the big players don't care so much for web standards. Doing a whole website with flash seems perfectly ok for some companies.

Anyway, next year they are going to do the conference again, and if you are in the web business in germany, you may want to go there. Not only to know about the latest and best ROI web frameworks, all the big players in the web industry are there, but also to get connected to people you wouldve not expected.

Software and Support Publishing House also does other conferences in Germany, so you better check out their conference website. They are a major publisher of magazines, like the php magazine, eclipse magazine, .Net, etc etc. you hack it, they have it.