Just forwarded to my by Frank Osterfeld:

http://www.chipx86.com/blog/?p=154

Announcing Leaftag, our desktop tagging framework. This is an evolution of the original prototype we created, originally named fstaglib (isn’t leaftag just so much better?).

The main part of Leaftag is a library called (oddly enough) libleaftag, which interfaces with the tag database. It’s GObject-based, and the API is quite small. It can tag anything with a URI.

There’s tagutils, a small app used for working with tags and files. It is able to tag and untag files, list all known tags, list all files with a specified tag, and manipulate tag properties (such as icons and descriptions). It also includes some symlinks that provide shortcuts to common tagutils functions (tag, untag, tagls, tags, and tagprop).

leaftag-python contains Python bindings for libleaftag. It simplifies the already simple libleaftag library.

One of my scientific goals is to be part of cyberspace, to make this possible. Cyberspace means for me, that the world as we know it extends seamlessly into the information world, and things I do here and there are mixed. I go order a pizza by walking (in cyberspace) to the pizza people and doing it, the pizza itself comes here real life.

So let us look at products like Second Life.
Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by nearly 100,000 people from around the globe.

• From the moment you enter the World you’ll discover a vast digital continent, teeming with people, entertainment, experiences and opportunity. Once you’ve explored a bit, perhaps you’ll find a perfect parcel of land to build your house or business.
• You’ll also be surrounded by the Creations of your fellow residents. Because residents retain the rights to their digital creations, they can buy, sell and trade with other residents.
• The Marketplace currently supports millions of US dollars in monthly transactions. This commerce is handled with the in-world currency, the Linden dollar, which can be converted to US dollars at several thriving online currency exchanges.

I see that the technics are nice, but its not immersive. At the end, Ultima Online may be more immersive than Second Life (compared to interaction possibilities).

Key here is the business department: What kind of business we see in Second Life. There is no real life business there - Where is the sneakers shop in second life that has real life sneakers on the store window? You have this kind of shop in the cyberspace described in the book Otherland, and thats useful.

So - we learn that the 3d technologies are here and the community and customers do exist, but the cyberspace product misses.

automatt is happy about rawsugar. This flickr pic and the according text show why: rawsugar allows him to structure tags. As I predicted: folksonomies go towards semantic web.

Finally started to get into RawSugar. I imported all of my bookmarks from del.icio.us in about a minute, and now I can give my folksonomy some structure, and separate the tags I use for keeping track of stuff into different heirarchical categories or collections. And you can search your collections and your friends' collections all at once!

We are going to present the current gnowsis alpha 0.8.x and the upcoming beta 0.9 at the cebit 2006. Hannover, 9. to 15th march.

I will be there from 9. to 12th March 2006. If you want to meet me, come during this time.

At the cebit: Halle 009, Stand B45

Features to expect there:

• from the epos project:
• context elicitation - what does a user do
• workflow support - what do I have to do now?
• miniqure, linker, lotsa features
• from the gnowsis beta:
• a complete new architecture, installer, components, database, ... all is better in the beta
• a clear and easy way to write your own ontology to get your things together. Express your thoughts!
• desktop search as we always wanted
• tagging of e-mails, web-sites, files, ontology elements. all mixed together and really nice

as we are still working on it, I am eager to see what we have then :-)

here is some official text from our news people:
The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, DFKI, is active in the field of innovative information technologies as Germany's leading business-related research institute. It carries out research and development in the areas of knowledge management, intelligent visualization and simulation, deduction and multi-agent systems, language technology, intelligent user interfaces, image understanding and pattern recognition, robotics, safe and secure cognitive systems and information systems. An important element of DFKI's mission is to move innovations as quickly as possible from the lab into the marketplace. Only by maintaining research projects at the forefront of science DFKI has the strength to meet its technology transfer goals.

so, after three years of doing a semantic desktop and facing our move towards the gnowsis beta 0.9 - what is the heart of gnowsis? Whats this all about?

In natural science - like physics or mathematics - people try to understand what nature is like. They can experiment how matter behaves and how the earth universe and everything works. Gods natural laws, they can find them out. In information science and informatics, we are creating means to express information and means to handle information. Information is human created - language is human created. It isn't a natural law. So our work is more about psychology, philosophy and information science as such, and not about bits and bytes.

In the semantic desktop and our gnowsis implementation, I try to do what natural science tries for natural laws - I try to find a way to handle information that comes close the the "truth". How do people remember information? How do we think? How do we represent concepts in our mind? Do we abstract from impressions and does our brain conceptualize, generalize? So how would we store information in a computer?

I try to hit this truth using cross-discipline thinking. Linguistics tells me that people conceptualize and that we have mental representations for sensory input. Philosophy tells me that each human being has a different view on the world (at least constructivistic view). Basically, each of us has his or her own weltbild. Our view of the world, our understanding what is truth and what is important, what happens right now, etc. But our sensory input is mostly the web at the moment - web tv, web music, web news, web-sites of your enemies (p.c. = competitors) and friends. And our output is not only spoken word but - hey - blogs, text, appointments, offers, contracts, etc. And the laptop on my lap is the way I interact.

So my laptop has to allow me storing my information the best way, a way that is near to the truth what information is like. Information is individually percepted, it is always understood differently, it means to me X when it means to you Y. The semantic desktop learns your Xs and Ys and tries to stick all the information you have as sensory input to these Xs and Ys. You can also enter your own concepts, subjects, topics, ideas, web-sites, whatever you encounter. The semantic desktop learns what you associate with your Xs and Ys. It suggests to you where to look for, it suggests to you where to put this document now, where it fits. It allows multiple places to put it. And "it" is your e-mails, your files, your web-sites, your photos, your instant messages. whatever is important for you.

Coming back to the heart - all these information bits are like sensory input - what we call data - and have to be cleaned a little to get to the level of information. Thats what we call at DFKI "leveraging". Getting things together that mean the same for you. A person is a person, if it is on a photo, in an email or in an address-book, its always the same person. Gnowsis will go into this direction of connecting data bits from here and there to an information space for yourself. We published some papers about these ideas of ontologies and personal ontologies, where you express your mental model and link it to data.

I think that our approach is superior to others, because it tries to hit the truth behind personal information management. It ain't just data, its data with meaning to people. I don't know how long it will take to have a real semantic desktop and when we will be able to express our ideas on it, but I am sure that it will make life much easier when we can express and communicate ideas with it. I also expect that people's use of computers will change when they can express their personal mental models better. Image school children of the future, that are taught by their teachers how to organize their thoughts. Teacher: "Today kids, we will learn the aspect of places. What is a place? Can you give me an example? Ah: School. Ah: the park around the corner where I can play basketball. Ok kids, go to your 'places' tab in the semantic desktop and add theses places there. Now each of you has two or three important places entered. Watch as the semantic desktop searches for public identifiers. See that tab showing with information about 'Saint Franklins Elementary School'? Thats from wikipedia. So kids, now you will connect photos with these places. Have you got your phone-cams ready? ... Ok, lesson ends. On my peer-to-peer net I see that some of you have annotated our school building very nice, and especially those web-graffity look wonderful. See you tomorrow."

We should teach kids how to surf the web and how to remember stuff using computers. Isn't that an important side-effect of writing something down: remembering it? We should teach how to build good folder structures and how to name files or how to publish something on the web so that it will be found when needed (perhaps years later).

Ok, that was carried away a little - the heart of gnowsis is not school. But I hope you got the picture - I am not content when I have all my Addressbook as RDF. I am happy when I have this, but not content. I am happy and content when the information lives in both worlds - data in my Address book and flickr account and information in my personal ontology that integrates it. Thats basically where we are aiming at and walking towards. A "memory extender", not a bigger hard drive.

And by the way: we shouldn't replace teachers, robots suck.

web desktop. A nice buzzword that fits into our semantic desktop thinking. Actually, the semantic desktop was called semantic web desktop on the first run.

Clearly the HTTP end-points on desktop applications would be useful to invoke an arbitrary set of methods on each application. I envision a system in which we can remotely manipulate desktop applications through HTTP. The same idea that I pitched a few years ago on top of CORBA.

thats something Sven Schwarz and me are talking about since 2004. So we have to talk more about it!

the best keyboard shortcut in eclipse is

ctrl + shift + l

it shows all keyboard shortcuts!

In this article I am going to point out how the experiences made from piggy-bank and gnowsis could fit together and how all this code could be made compatible towards a better Semantic Desktop, creating a new semantic experience. First I will point out what inspired this article and some technical details, then I will describe some plans for the future.

I saw Eric Miller from the SIMILE team at ISWC and he suggested that I and Libby and others install Piggy-Bank, which was surprising to me as I have looked on this piece of software for a long time, but never dived deep into it.

So, when I first had a look at it, I found much interesting points. Then at ISWC we tried to annotate "this talk had a bad typo in the powerpoints" and I wanted to somehow make a comment or enter this information, but not as a tag. As Piggy-Bank does not support easy entering of random RDF, I first blogged the typo and then combined the blog post URI with some RDF from a file, and it worked. So the start is, that Piggy-Bank is primarily for scraping RDF from web-pages and surfing this RDF. Editing options are only reduced and even Eric and me had some mind-bending things to do before I could get to my goal - saying the funny typo in RDF.

During the last weeks I mailed with Stefano Mazzocchi from the SIMILE team and also Apache, talking primarily about Aperture. Aperture is a Java framework for extracting and querying full-text content and metadata from various information systems (file systems, web sites, mail boxes, ...) and the file formats (documents, images, ...) occurring in these systems.

So, editing any RDF is something we have tried to do again and again in gnowsis, and we have two major approaches to this task: first, the linker, a user interface that allows linking two resources with each other and then Enquire2, a user interface with more editing options (adding wiki text, editing any RDF using the ThingDialog).

I now took a deeper look at Piggy-Bank and my mind begins thinking how we can join Piggy-Bank and Gnowsis and I decide to publish some of my thoughts, according to the good principle that I try to write on my mind: " Building the Semantic Web is easier together".

So, some facts:

• Piggy-Bank offers great options to easily browse bigger amounts of RDF
• Piggy-Bank is seperated into several sub-projects, like longwell for browsing.
• Piggy-Bank team wants to extract more information from PDFs, etc.
• Piggy-Bank combines Java with Mozilla
• gnowsis extracts data from Mozilla.
• gnowsis has some plugins for Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird
• Gnowsis is written in Java against Jena
• Aperture is written in Java against Sesame (and planed for Jena)
• Gnowsis should move to Sesame2 as data store, I already entered a ticket for this
• Piggy-Bank uses Velocity for displaying their information as HTML. This is a nice framework anyways, but fattens the distribution by a few kilobyte (no problem).
• both use Jetty for their internal web-servers.
• Piggy-Bank stores their triples into your Firefox-Profile dir. There you find your native-SAIL sesame data. Example on my Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/xxxyyy.default/piggy-bank/my-piggy-bank
• Gnowsis stores its data into ~/.gnowsis/data using jena

Gnowsis and Piggy-Bank are - from the high-up view - near to each other and in principle compatible. They both base on RDF, are licensed under BSD, based on Java and integrate with Mozilla. They differ much because gnowsis is programmed against Jena, but that's not a problem in principle.

So what are possible benefits and pay-offs, wild ideas:

• Piggybank may profit from the thingdialog and other editing functions of gnowsis.
• piggy-bank and gnowsis can both integrate aperture to extract RDF from data sources and applications like address books
• gnowsis could grab much piggybank code for page-scraping
• gnowsis could use longwell as RDF browsing thing
• both could move on to the long-seeked "semantic Bus" architecture. more about this below. Basically, they would share their data stores together.
• piggy-bank has a nice development tutorial that gives much info on how it works inside.
• gnowsis has a development wiki that shows how to get started with gnowsis. and some outdated documentation that is still interesting.
• gnowsis docu could be improved

but hey - what is it worth to take code from piggy-bank and try to make it run in gnowsis (and vice-versa) when both projects could live together in parallel? Wouldn't it be the right thing to make connections between semantic applications; making them all talk to each other. Together they provide a semantic desktop architecture that is open, that is based on collaboration and web communication, distributed applications working hand in hand for a better user experience.


The Semantic Bus
So to bring these two desktop applications nearer to each other, they could both use a Semantic Bus a buzzword known also as Semantic Desktop or seen on some TimBl slides recently.
Basically, a Semantic Bus is a system that connects several services running on one machine, database, gui, datasources and adapters, web-browser, applications are all conntected via this semantic bus and use snippets of RDF and some kind of REST-ful api to talk to each other.

The bus is a fabled thing that will probably take a little longer to materialize, but its part of our upcoming NEPOMUK plans anyway and we will try to implement something and then standardize and align with others. The Simile project is also aiming at the same ideas and also Patrick Stickler had and idea in the direction of a semantic desktop integration bus.

For the piggy-bank VS gnowsis question, the Semantic Bus is important for Storage and Adapters (Aperture), and I think we have to move to a more federated architecture here.

Personal Semantic Storage
At the moment, the storage of piggy-bank is far from what we want: its hidden inside an obscure directory and it can be only accessed when Firefox runs. Thats bad. Same with gnowsis, its slow because of Jena and runs only when gnowsis runs (which is often, gnowsis is designes as a server).

For our mutual goals, we would have to decide a kind of neutral "personal sesame" edition and installer, that we ship both with Piggy-Bank and gnowsis0.9. It can be a requirement for both and is a kind of "basic" architecture. And it is the first cornerstone of a Semantic Bus.

So, Personal Semantic Storage using Sesame2 as server in a small Jetty bag would serve great as first cornerstone of the Personal Semantic Desktop / Semantic Bus. *yeah* *buzzwordsgalore*

Why is this plan so good? Because it speaks the language of two major Semantic Web projects - piggy-bank and gnowsis. They both say that Sesame is a useful storage. When we keep talking about Sesame we can also say that it contains a RESTful web server and a simple web-API for it. All running stand-alone inside Jetty, if you want.

So, if piggy-bank and gnowsis could be configured to use an external personal semantic storage - sesame2Personal - we have begun.

Problems
From my perspective - what are the problems we face here

• Sesame2 moves on to Java 1.5. The installation of piggy-bank is quite tricky already, under MacOsX dealing with Java 1.5 will be interesting, but solveable. If Piggy-Bank wants to use Aperture and Sesame2, they will probably have to move to Java 1.5. Gnowsis has this plans also and enough problems on itself.
• can the developers of both projects gather with Aduna and design a Personal Semantic Database as first cornerstone of the Personal Semantic Desktop? The task is to find a common standard how to deploy RDF applications on desktop computers and how to name those repositories - where to put piggy-bank treasures, where to put gnowsis links, where to store all this buffered RDF from Aperture?
• Adapters to local data sources. The aperture project gives easy access to local data stores, development is running at the moment. Can this be the project to integrate various local and remote data sources to the storage?

The Vision for a Semantic Desktop
So - what is the vision of a Semantic Desktop that comes here? You install your personal sesame2 server. You install Aperture and gnowsis, configure some datasources and let it crawl. You can use Piggy-Bank now and open it's faceted browsing interface on this vast datasources. Without storing anything from the web, your local gnowsis already contains around ~400.000 triples; extracted from your own files, emails, address books, bibtex files, etc. These desktop triples are ripe for piggy-bank or Autofocus.

You gather new data from the web using piggy-bank and its java-script written page scrapers. Here you can do all the nice things of piggy-bank. Store weblog's rss feeds. Tag all data related to a friend of yours. See the last hiking trip on google maps via piggy-bank. You view the stored info from your piggy-bank data using gnowsis and have the possibility to edit each literal or value. You create new instances of any class in gnowsis and store them into your personal semantic web store. For example, you want to create a new recipe in the style of epicurious. You have already piggy-banked some epicurious recipes from the web, and when you click on "new recipe" in Enquire2006 (the upcoming user interface of gnowsis0.9) you can create such a recipe for yourself. So, based on the existing recipes (a kind of ontology) you make up your new recipe and store it. Done. At the end, using piggy-bank, you could upload your recipe to a public piggy-bank and others can facet-search it there, tag it and be happy.

Also Patrick Stickler's URIQA approach would fit into this vision. Any application could use the personal semantic storage to quickly create concise bounded descriptions, or use Aperture to get fresh data from various sources.

2006 will be the year where we are closer towards contact - contact to the original use case of the semantic web. sharing cooking recipes!


Summary and Outlook
I had a look at two current Semantic Web projects, gnowsis and piggy-bank and played with ideas how they might mix together. Gnowsis and Piggy-bank have distinct features and disctinct use cases. But they both rely on storage like Sesame, and next year probably both will be based on Sesame2 native storage and lucene for indexing. So the different projects could integrate very good, if they both contact a Personal Semantic Desktop Data Server, a sesame2 thing running in the background. (have to find a name for that).

Piggy-Bank has perfected the integration of data of web-sites and gnowsis has a tradition of contacting local sources like IMAP or Microsoft Outlook, if both applications could decide on a common Sesame2 storage in the middle, and some little framework around for configuration etc, the Semantic Desktop at large would come nearer. Both might have reduced performance (adding another communication layer in the middle) but these can be overcome by pushing some of the velocity work to the server directly. I also wrote a little vision how usage of piggy-bank and gnowsis could be at the end of 2006.

as suggested on the swig scratchpad, we should search for examples.

ok, what we have is a SPARQL conformant query interface to 2mio triples that come from a community website (users, forums, photos, etc)

I did a little blind shots, not very amusing. By mistake, I did a full table scan on all instances once (* type *) and got a 100mb file with uris to play with. None of the uris has a DESCRIBE (argh, why isn't CBD in SPARQL yet).

so, this for example doesn't work:

PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>
PREFIX rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
DESCRIBE <http://my.opera.com/butchevans/homes/albums/10149/PA140033.JPG>


typical uris and types I found:
http://my.opera.com/_1/xml/foaf#_1
http://my.opera.com/Fietsy/xml/foaf#Fietsy
- these are of type foaf:Person

http://my.opera.com/masterpdc/homes/albums/2158/IMG_1557.JPG
http://my.opera.com/jessegoodwin/homes/albums/2156/DSCN0322.JPG
- these are of type foaf:Image

http://my.opera.com/shawncl/albums/show.dml?id=11201
this has got type gallery:
http://my.opera.com/community/xmlns/2005/gallery#Gallery

these are blogs:
http://my.opera.com/matthewserg/blog/
type: http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/Collection

a document:
http://my.opera.com/olli/blog/show.dml/2235
type: http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Document

groups:
http://my.opera.com/groops/xml/foaf#groops
http://my.opera.com/iran%20sayeha/xml/foaf#iran_sayeha
type: http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Group


ok, looking at the opera community site we see that there is a guy named Words who is member of the week, meaning he is very active. So sparqling for Words looks like this:

PREFIX rdfs:
<http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>
PREFIX rdf:
<http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
SELECT ?p ?o WHERE
{<http://my.opera.com/Words/xml/foaf#Words> ?p ?o.}

Well, this brought us his foaf:knows relations and his weblog uri. cool. Lets make a backlink search:


PREFIX rdfs:
<http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>
PREFIX rdf:
<http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
SELECT ?s ?p WHERE { ?s ?p
<http://my.opera.com/Words/xml/foaf#Words>.}

this brought some pictures he created, connected via dc:creator uri: http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/creator.

and much more....

ok, thsi should be enough to get people on the track to build guis and web 2.0 stuff on top of opera community.

thanks to opera: the users data is users data now, not theirs. cool move.

Rickard Öberg blogs here about "abusing" piggy bank to do something with spreadsheets. First of all, Jean Rhomer said that "Excel is the competition of the Semantic Web" which is exactly where we all are heading.

Second, I wonder if Aperture would help Rickard in his task - he mentiones to automatize the import of the excel sheets. In Aduna Metadata Server, using a DataSource, this would be possible. In Aperture (+Sesame2) it will be possible, soon.

The idea is to create a RDF datasource out of an openoffice XML file (a spreadsheet of people and how long they work) and use XSLT for translation to RDF (hm, sounds like obvious idea now buzzworded scioc?). Then this datasource is queried from time to time (doing the xslt magic) and stored to a server (piggybank or gnowsis or whatever).

http://jroller.com/page/rickard/20051030