cypher by monrai


The Cypher™ alpha release is a program which generates the .rdf (RDF graph) and .serql (SeRQL query) representation of a natural language input. With robust definition languages, Cypher's grammar and lexicon can quickly and easily be extended to process highly complex sentences and phrases of any natural language, and can cover any vocabulary. Equipped with Cypher, programmers can now begin building next generation semantic web applications that harness what is already the most widely used tool known to man - natural language.

So, a company is going on the market! Horray. Best wishes to them, and I sure want to check if that baby can help gnowsis.

In the latest SVN version of gnowsis, we have various improvements on handling ontologies, validating them and so on.

All information about that is here:

• http://gnowsis.opendfki.de/wiki/PimoService

Managing Domain Ontologies

Adding ontologies, removing ontologies, updating ontologies is implemented in the PimoService. A convenient interface to these functions is implemented in the web-gui:

• http://127.0.0.1:9993/gnowsis-server/ontologies.jsp - ontology management interface in your gnowsis

A list of ontologies that work with gnowsis is at DomainOntologies.

The implementation of Domain Ontologies is done using named graphs in sesame.
read on at Named graphs in Pimo.

Domain ontologies are added/deleted/updated using methods of the PimoService.
You can interact directly with the triples of an ontology in the store, but you have to care for inference and the correct context yourself then.

Validation of PIMO Models - PimoChecker

The semantics of the PIMO language allow us to verify the integrity of the data. In normal RDF/S semantics, verification is not possible. For example, setting the domain of the property knows to the class Person, and then using this property on an instance Rome Business Plan of class Document creates, using RDF/S, the new information that the Document is also a Person. In the PIMO language, domain and range restrictions are used to validate the data.
The PIMO is checked using a Java Object called PimoChecker?, that encapsulates a Jena reasonser to do the checking and also does more tricks:

• source:branches/gnowsis0.9/gnowsis-server/src/java/org/gnowsis/pimo/impl/PimoChecker.java

The following rules describe what is validated in the PIMO, a formal description is given in the gnowsis implementation's PIMO rule file.

• All relating properties need inverse properties.
• Check domain and range of relating and describing properties.
• Check domain and range for rdf:type statements
• Cardinality restrictions using the protege statements
• Rdfs:label is mandatory for instances of ”Thing” and classes
• Every resource that is used as object of a triple has to have a rdf:type set. This is a prerequisite for checking domains and ranges.

Above rules are checking semantic modeling errors, that are based on errors made by programmers or human users.
Following are rules that check if the inference engine correctly created the closure of the model: –

• All statements that have a predicate that has an inverse defined require another triple in the model representing the inverse statement.

The rules work only, when the language constructs and upper ontology are part of the model that is validated. For example, validating Paul’s PIMO is only possible when the PIMO-Basic and PIMO-Upper is available to the inference engine, otherwise the definition of the basic classes and properties are missing. The validation can be used to restrict updates to the data model in a way that only valid data can be stored into the database. Or, the model can be validated on a regular basis after the changes were made. In the gnowsis prototype, validation was activated during automatic tests of the system, to verify that the software generates valid data in different situations. Ontologies are also validated during import to the ontology store. Before validating a new ontology, it’s import declarations have to be satisfied. The test begins by building a temporal ontology model, where first the ontology under test and then all imported ontologies are added. If an import cannot be satisfied, because the required ontology is not already part of the system, either the missing part could be fetched from the internet using the ontology identifier as URL, or the user can be prompted to import the missing part first. When all imports are satisfied, the new ontology under test is validated and added to the system. A common mistake at this point is to omit the PIMO-Basic and PIMO-Upper import declarations. By using this strict testing of ontologies, conceptual errors show at an early stage. Strict usage of import-declarations makes dependencies between ontologies explicit, whereas current best practice in the RDF/S based semantic web community has many implicit imports that are often not leveraged.

I will be giving a seminar on

The Nepomuk Project - about the upcoming Social Semantic Desktop Platform

Date: Thursday September 07, 2006 at 16:00:00
Location: EJ228 (Directions)
Artificial Intelligence Center, SRI International, 333 Ravenswood Avenue, Menlo Park, CA 94025-3493

webpage: www.ai.sri.com/seminars/detail.php?id=159

please come to this seminar, I want to knit new connections between people in the Europe and California Semantic Web scene. If you come, write a short notice to leo.sauermann@dfki.de and perhaps to Neil Yorke-Smith, (nysmith workingat AI.SRI.COM) who is organizing the event together with Jack Park.

Abstract



Different research institutes are working on a vision titled "Semantic Desktop", a semantically enhanced desktop computer that allows us to access semantic web data and desktop data in a uniform way. The European Union Integrated Project NEPOMUK (http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org) started in 2006 and intends to realize and deploy a comprehensive solution – methods, data structures, and a set of tools – for extending the personal computer into a collaborative environment, which improves the state of art in online collaboration and personal data management and augments the intellect of people by providing and organizing information created by single or group efforts. NEPOMUK brings together researchers, industrial software developers, and representative industrial users. In this talk you will get an introduction on the theory behind the Semantic Desktop, ontologies, databases, user interfaces and projects that work on this topic. Details about the current open-source implementations are presented and a demo is given. The lecture will finish with a discussion, where similarities and differences to the OpenIRIS project by SRI will be an important question.


Bio for Leo Sauermann



Leo Sauermann studied Information science at the Vienna University of Technology. Under the project name "gnowsis" he merged Personal Information Management with Semantic Web technologies, resulting in a master thesis about "Using Semantic Web technologies to build a Semantic Desktop". Working as a researcher at the DFKI since 2004, he continued the work and now maintains the associated open-source project gnowsis. His research focus is on Semantic Web and its use in Knowledge Management. In autumn 2003 he started to give talks about his work and he is publishing frequently on the topic. From 1998 to 2002 he has been working in several small software companies, including the position of lead architect at Impact Business Computing developing mobile CRM solutions. He is an experienced programmer in both Delphi and Java. At the moment he is working on the EU integrated project Nepomuk.


Note for Visitors to SRI



Please arrive at least 10 minutes early in order to sign in and be escorted to the conference room. SRI is located at 333 Ravenswood Avenue in Menlo Park. Visitors may park in the visitors lot in front of Building E, and should call extension 2592 to be escorted to the meeting room. Detailed directions to SRI, as well as maps, are available from the Visiting AIC web page.

The simile team has published another nice reusable component: timeline visualization.

The advantage of this visualization is that it is programmed completly in Javascript, reusable like the google maps API.

In their words:
Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It is like Google Maps for time-based information.

This is their nice logo:


A introduction howto program it is here:
create-timelines

A first glance at it convinces me: this looks easy to use. They published the code in a SVN repository, so packaging it with something else is possible.

Danny Ayers pickes up the idea, and blogged a nice vision of how to combine GEO-data together with photo annotation and timelines, read here.

some say WinFS is dead but who knows, according to the blog post by some Microsoft dude, it is changing plans.

So if you want a semantic file system, join SemFS!

http://semfs.ontoware.org/

yes, we hope that SemFS will integrate with Nepomuk.

Dazzled by the craze for the soccer wm in Germany, I was wondering what to do with soccer. Then, yesterday night it struck me and I knew: the world is a soccer ball! We are living on a big leather ball, floating through space.



So behold: the ultimate Google Earth hack: The world is a soccer ball!

Click to see yourself (you need to have installed Google Earth first):
howgermansseetheworld.kml

The full story:
a KML overlay for google earth, created in painstaking work by Leo Sauermann,

This is how many people view the world these days. It is the biggest soccer ball that has ever been sighted. yes, very big, even bigger then the one spotted by Google previously.

How this was done?

First of all, it is important to know what a soccer ball is. A soccer ball is a "cut-away icosaeder". I read some details this webpage:
mathematische-basteleien.de/fussball.htm.
Then I looked for a way to model it in KML. As I have never done KML before, I had to look for tutorials and docu first.
Ok, the easiest way is to assume the center of the world as center of the soccer ball.
I needed the coordinates of the corner-points, these I found in a Java snippet that creates a rotating soccer ball.
This snippet of java helped me.
I copied the code and fumbled around for three hours until I could convert the xyz coordinates to lat/lon coordinates.
Also, Google Earth gave me headaches as it discriminates on polygons, if you draw then clockwise or counter-clockwise the color gets changes
(argh! And I thought my stlye was wrong).
After the corner-coordinates were setup, I created a KML file with the corners numbered.
Then I had to find all six-corner and five-corner objects and added them to an array.
Finally, I added all real soccer stadiums for the WM
and the previous biggest soccer ball
to the KML, as sugar on top - for you users.
Still open is how to put the FIFA logo on the ball...
enjoy, if you have questions:
leo@gnowsis.com
Leo Sauermann 2006

Sources

The source code and all needed to go on is on my homepage:
soccer.zip.
Also in SVN in the fuzzbutt project.

Copyright notice

This KML is licensed under creative-commons Attribution license
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/
inspiration and code taken from:

• http://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-279086.html
• http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2006/05/worlds_biggest.html
• http://www.mathe-online.at/mathint/wfun/i.html#bogenmass
• http://earth.google.com/kml/kml_tags.html
• http://www.jjam.de/Java/Applets/3D_Effekte/Fussball.html

Man Luo's Diploma Thesis on Semantic Meeting Annotation is published. She developed a prototype, based on Gnowsis alpha 0.8, to manage Meetings semantically, identifying problems in PIM and solving them using Jena and Java.

You can download:

• Diploma Thesis: Man Luo, Semantic Meeting Annotation
• The sources of the java project
• Browse the sources online

The treasures for you Semantic Web hackers:

• She cites many of you guys out there, from Dennis Quan to Xiao & Cruz.
• A nice application prototype came out.
• Jena was used to transform one RDF vocabulary to another, like Leigh Dodds did here. Her Java/Jena code on that is here. And she uses these rules.

Abstract
Nowadays, the personaldesktop contains an enormous amount of information, which we use, process, and search in our daily work. Facing so much information, people pay more attention to Personal Information Management (PIM), which enables people to gather, organize, and synthesize information with flexibility and speed.

A significant use for PIM is in business environments, for instance, categorizing business-partners contact information; arranging the agenda; retrieving business information in internet and so on. Among the business actions meetings are important components, and accordingly the management of meeting is treated as a cornerstone of PIM. It assists people to annotate meeting information, collect related materials, and manage different meeting notes, etc.Using current PIM tools, we still face the problems of filing information and information overload. In order to exceed today's state, this thesis presents a meeting management tool based on the Semantic Desktop environment-- Gnowsis, which is an extension of desktop computers using Semantic Web techniques.

We call this tool Semantic Meeting Annotation. It builds on a Meeting Ontology that defines all the elements and relations in the meeting domain using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). The ontology binds with the annotation application to provide the user a semantic annotation environment, that is, the user can annotate meeting information with all kinds of data, and create links between a meeting and the related data according to the semantic relations defined in the meeting ontology. Other applications (e.g. Microsoft Outlook) based on the Semantic Desktop technology are integrated.

Additionally, the semantic meeting annotation is used to infer new knowledge, based on existing annotation information and rules, by this the user's effort to enter information is reduced. The implementation is using the Jena inference engine and a series of inference rules.

We think that, using semantic meeting annotation will enable the user to annotate a meeting effectively and semantically.

Honda has published a history of their Asimo robot series, very interesting and a nice background on research: boys, it takes time to make something good.

read ASIMO here!

that inspired me te brushup the image by them and compare it to current semantic desktop proceedings. If we compare the state of ASIMO with semantic desktop, it would look like this:


robotics is sometimes as ambitious as semantic web. It hink the current Semantic Desktops look like early ASIMO prototypes while end-users expect them to look like Microsoft Software, like people expect robots to look like Enterprise's 'Data' and robots look like metal with motors.
there is hope though, that we will be faster with semantic desktop than with humanoid robots

On 17th May, Jean Rohmer gave a talk on Artificial Intelligence and his Semantic Desktop implementation, Ideliance, at DFKI.

See the previous blog entry. Now we have the slides of his talk to be published. Note that the Ideliance slides are similar to the slides he presented at the ISWC2005 workshop on the Semantic Desktop.

• ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE: My point of iew
• Lessons for the future of Semantic Desktops
  learnt from 10 years of experience with IDELIANCE

The second slides show a nice screenshot of Ideliance (page three), how Jerome Euzenat and Ireland are connected. You will find many known names there.

The lovely task of gathering metadata, like honeybees we wander our files to generate sweet data for the semantic web.

So, I updated my publications page:
publications

That is an interesting task, it works like this:

1. (install rdf homepage, if you haven't done yet)
2. I look at my publications page, what misses
3. I update my bibtex file, adding all I need
4. When I don't know how to do bibtex, I look into Svens or Heikos rdf homepages
5. I generate bibtex/RDF from it, using some tool we always use for RDFhomepage
6. I look again atpublications , this time I see what links miss to other people. You see the nice links to all my co-authors? Guess where they come from...
7. my foaf file. So I have to update my foaf-file, because rdfhomepage compares the bibtex/rdf against my foaf file to find the correct co-author homepages.
8. But hey, why write your foaf yourself, copy friends-of-friends from foaf-files of friends like Sven and Heiko
9. I upload the foaf file to niij.org, where Michael hosts my personal website. thx to Michi for that ;-9
10. I press refresh on my publications page and am delighted.
11. I go to my "About" page and see that my friends from my foaf file are also there :-)

this all rocks so hard that Gunnar has written a paper on it, together with some buddies at DFKI, as you can see on Gunnar's RDF homepage.

So whoops, I forgot to add this paper to my bibtex file.... :-)

... will do that on monday :-)

and and by the way, Heimwegehas painted this rocking logo for RDF Homepage, which I cannot hide from you: