Zack Rosen blogs about why RDF research sucks and has written a mail to the Simile mailinglist for comments. No comments from me, but a general agreement on his suggestions for a way out:

So what can we do about it?

1. Researchers need to stop thinking of themselves as researchers and start thinking of themselves as implementors.
2. Research institutes need to join forces with emerging businesses looking to adopt semantic technology. This breaks the current model of business / research institute collaboration since startups do not have money to contribute to fund research, but tough noogies.
3. Researchers need to build their tools in real-world development environments, i.e. as modules for LAMP web-publishing tools such as Drupal and Wordpress. They need to find more organizational partners to deploy their solutions. They need to do something other than build widgets.

Getting up and reading news this morning, and still thinking about yesterdays ramblings how we could benefit from our ideas, TRB's greetings reached me at the right moment:

Welcome to the Nepoverse, by Thomas Roth-Berghofer
Yesterday morning I woke up with this greeting on my mind, a greeting to all those who are interested in the goal of the Nepomuk project: the Social Semantic Desktop. And it got even better: the Nepoverse did not exist in the Googleverse. Until now!
As you may know, we–the Nepomukians–strive for providing you with new tools for better working with (your) knowledge. We want to change the way we, as knowledge workers, live in and with the digital world, not only by providing cool Nepomuked applications and a feature-rich toolbox, but by building a community around the Social Semantic Desktop. Thus, we are shaping our own universe, don’t we?

Yes Thomas, you are right. We want that, and I need that. I don't feef exactly like "our own universe" but would put it more like Stefan Decker often tells the story: Nepomuk is a seed of a community, it starts at one point and gets bigger in circles, bigger, bigger, circling, ...

As I said yesterday night:
Our discipline is a crossover, we need results from artificial intelligence, web 2.0, usability, personalization, databases, data integration, software engineering . . .

And what I should have said then was: we got Nepomuk. There are many people in this project that make exactly this crossover possible, through their different characters and backgrounds.

If you now wonder what we are all blogging about,

• read the Nepomuk Website
• look at the gnowsis beta, a prototype of parts of nepomuk
• checkout the Semantic Desktop search engine Beagle++
• read some blogs that use Nepoverse
• and join the mailinglist

, see the

A short note to myself and the community:

Stop fumbling around with the semantic web, make quality science.


A prototype for a search engine with a bad user interface, an implementation of a rdf database that only works half, an ontology that is never used, we all know these projects.

Our discipline is a crossover, we need results from artificial intelligence, web 2.0, usability, personalization, databases, data integration, software engineering . . .

So - science would be to concentrate on one aspect and then improve that, for example to fix yourself on a scaleable rdf database. You develop a scaleable algorithm and prove in a test setup that it works - voila. But then, it takes YEARS until you yourself or others can use this result in their other projects. Saying "we need named graphs" is far away from having an RDF store that supports them in a scaleable way, but the distance is often underestimated by us.

so, I should concentrate on writing down the good ideas we have and wait -YEARS- until I can benefit from my own ideas using software written by somebody else. Like TimBl using a Firefox.
;-)

At the moment we need a SPARQL conformant interface to Sesame2, and as there is none I know of, the power of open source allows us to write one.


My first question is: did somebody already write a Servlet that does map Sesame2 servers to the SPARQL protocol?

At the moment sesame2 does not support full SPARQL querying, but it will soon. We don't have to insist on SPARQL as query language, we can pass in SERQL queries and treat them like they were SPARQL, but we have to start with a conformant servlet :-)

Then some longer questions I also asked on the Sesame developer mailinglist:

We think that a SPARQL protocol conformant HTTP servlet is most important for any use of Sesame2 and are willing to invest 10 hours a week into this, more precisely, a clever student worker. We hope to get this done until the end of September.

We would implement a SPARQL protocol conformat query server and a SPARQL protocol conformant query client (issue tracker) for the reading operations of a HTTPSail. For updates of the model, we would stick to the current implementation of the latest CVS of sesame2.

want to know what the sparql protocol is?

I understand that these are MANY questions, I tried to think of all the calamities we are going to face in the next months. And I expect that some hackers out there already handled half of these questions, so don't hesitate to write me, or comment here, or to the sesame devel list.

* The org.openrdf.sesame.server.http.RepositoryServlet is not conformant to the SPARQL protocol,
as defined in the WSDL, or?
http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-protocol/#query-bindings-http
the protocol described at org.openrdf.sesame.server.http.protocol.txt does not say anything about sparql

* If not, does anybody know how to generate stubs for the servlets automatically (so that they strictly conform to the protocol)?

* If not, we would examine the Jena / Joseki implementation, as it serves as reference implementation.

* When we implement a SPARQL conformat servlet - can we put it directly into the package org.openrdf.sesame.server.http.SparqlReadServlet, directly in the latest CVS, to have the best uptake and feedback possible?

* If yes, is there also a parser for query results, that can be used on the Client side HTTP sail to read results written by the server?

* What is the status of the HTTP Client? Did anybody do since we last mailed? if yes, please add comments to this ticket:
http://www.openrdf.org/issues/browse/SES-205

* Is the query string already part of the Query object? Jeen said this is a prerequisite for this hack. If not, Jeen: could you do this? This is such a core thing that I don't want to touch it and for you its probably only 50 lines of code.
I mean the solution 1) suggested here:
http://www.openrdf.org/issues/browse/SES-205#action_10533

* Can Sesame2 serialize Query results according to the SPARQL protocol?
I see the QueryResultFormat.SPARQL which would indicate that.

* last but not least: any news about SPARQL query support?

* Do you have a debug environment to test the existing servlets from org.openrdf.sesame.server.http?

* Does the WebClient work? (the code looks SOOO COOL! spring rocks)
- I cannot find any code in the webclient project that actually *changes* triples... hm.

* When Sebastian starts hacking, whom can he jabber/icq for help?

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

I am going, and we are blogging here about that:

• http://burningman2006.blogspot.com/

I tried to find you guys by using search engines, but I am not witty enought to get the right results, so blogging and asking this question is probably ok for today.

Here is the story how I tried to find you:

This time I swoogled the semantic web to find out who lives near SFO, which indicates that they may go to burningman.

My first try was to go to swoogle.com, a very interesting website where you may lose hours during your office time. Then I found the search engine at swoogle.umbc.edu.

I tried to search for:

• ns:foaf SFO but this broke. Internal Server Error in /work/swoogle/www/swoogle/3.1/components/com_frontpage/writer.search.php on line 61
• perhaps not search documents, search ontologies instead. SFO - no results
• just entering francisco returned too much.
• refining to ns:foaf francisco, zero.
• at this point, I registered for an account at swoogle, perhaps then more. Hm, no.

Ok, perhaps the search syntax is wrong. Lets go to Intellidimension's Semantic Web Search engine at www.semanticwebsearch.com.

• ah, they have a combobox where you can select foaf files. Lets do that and search for SFO.. Hm, one result, a substring match. woah, they do substrings.
• searching for "francisco" I get one foaf file seven times. It is a livejournal user, joey-francisco.
• ok, now fumbling around with the airport thingy, I tweaked it so that I can finally find Dan Brickley, as an example. this search for a foaf:person with nearest airport EDDG.
• btw: it also works when you search for "any resource": search
• ok, now my SFO search. brought nothing.

ok, change of tactics: shoot straight at the target of burning man.

• semanticwebsearch for burningman. Brings some RSS feeds. Ok, that are bloggers. I need semweb bloggers though.
• perhaps some foaf person said something in interests or so? search, nothing.
• with "burning man" we get two livejournal users.

ok, lets see what the market leader does.

• google for burningman semantic web. 50.000 results. My own blog post on clothes is far on top, first page.
• hm, groucho marx said not to join a club that would accept you. So that high ranked blog entry of myself, hm. Ok, first ranked was a #rdfig scratchpad entry. But the nym user on #rdfig only pointed to a now dead website.
• I limit to 2006. limit to 2006, to get this years burners. My blog post again.
• Looking at the results, I find the blog of Peter Brown at http://www.blogsicle.net/

ok, so I didn't hear of these guys before and I see that this use case is interesting. Anyway:

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

Gunnar invested much time in the last week to improve his gnowsis experience - adding features he (and everybody else) missed.

read his post on everything that is now available in the gnowsis SVN!

a tag-cloud


a tagging bookmarklet


synchronising two gnowsis installations

Bullocks!

I googled for movie ontologies and all I got was powerpoints.

In what world am I?

then I found this:

• http://139.91.183.30:9090/RDF/VRP/Examples/moviedatabase.rdf# - hey, are you serious? an IP address as namespace?
• and the IMDB mapping for RDF which luckily my office mate Gunnar Grimnes

please, God, put me into the parallel universe where people do indeed make the semantic web.

There is a congres on "Semantic Web und Wissenstechnologien" in Darmstadt at ZGDV on 19th October 2006.

There are many interesting people from Germany giving talks there, Benjamin Novack from the hacker side, Georg Lausen, Andreas Kupfer, Michael Stollberg from Innsbruck, Torsten Priebe from Capgemini Austria, Holger Rath from Empolis, Achim Steinacker from intelligent views, and Leo Sauermann from myself.

If you are a student of university, reduced conference fee for academics is 120€/290€.

• download the Flyer!

We created a sample Eclipse RCP application that shows how to use sesame and a bit of gnowsis inside SWT and eclipse. We plan to see if we can benefit from Eclipse RCP in Nepomuk. more about this hack here on the gnowsis site.



This is what we did:
We started at 17:30 by downloading Eclipse 3.2 and slavishly following the Hello World Tutorial here.



ok, all worked, the empty "hello World" deployment thingy with .exe file and so on weights 7MB. wuff but ok.

Then Leo decided to rename the packages from "semanticdesktop" to "com.example.semanticdesktop" and that was the last time we saw our hello world. shoots, restart.

After Benny got the control, he changed the plugins first window from title "Hello World" to "Semantic Desktop".

Hours later....

ok, we try now the "mail demo" and extend it with a RDF view showing hte pimo tree. First problem: we don't want to import openrdf directly but instead import it as OSGI bundle (woa, cool). Hm, the best approach seems the wizard "plugin from existing jar archives". that generates useful output.

Result at 19:30: we managed to include Sesame and gnowsis as Eclipse OSGI bundles and were able to load the PIMO ontology language from a local file and display it in a tree. Its a lot of work but it looks cool. So, Beer now.

A nice little gadgy from mikecpeck: FlickrPapr

I just used it to create the new header design for my blog.


old but still good.