Archive
Archive for July, 2008
Delicious es más web 2.0
Pues parece que todo se renueva. Un servicio web 2.0 pasa a ser más 2.0 que antes…sunpongo que estaremos caminando cada vez más y con pasos más agigantados hacia la web 3.0. Bueno, al grano. El que se ha renovado ha sido Delicious. Ahora es más 2.0 que antes. Aunque el cambio solo es externo.
Estas son algunas de las mejoras puestas en boca de los chicos de delicious:
Velocidad: Nos hemos trasladado a una nueva infraestructura que hace cada una de las páginas más rápida. Esta nueva plataforma nos permitirá seguir con el crecimiento del tráfico, garantizando al mismo tiempo que Delicious responda bien y sea fiable. Tú no lo habrás notado, pero la otra infraestructura estaba algo castigada con las visita de más de cinco millones de usuarios.
Búsquedas: Hemos revisado completamente nuestro motor de búsqueda para que sea más rápido y más potente. Los registros utilizados para tomar las edades y mostrar los resultados, ahora son muy rápidos. El nuevo motor de búsqueda es también más inteligente, y más social: se puede buscar dentro de una de tus etiquetas, en marcadores públicos de otros usuarios, o su red social. Ahora es más fácil de aprovechar la experiencia y los intereses de tus amigos, por no mencionar la comunidad Delicious en general.
Diseño: Por último, hemos actualizado la interfaz de usuario para mejorar la usabilidad y añadir algunas,a menudo solicitadas, funciones. Nuestro objetivo ha sido mantener el nuevo diseño similar en espíritu al antiguo, con el fin de que todos los veteranos puedan ser capaces de saltar de versión sin ningún tipo de confusión. Al mismo tiempo, estamos esperando que para los recién llegados a Delicious sea más fácil de aprender.
La verdad es que la imagen de delicious ha mejorado considerablemente. Solo hay que echarle un vistazo.
Andy: “I Break Code”
Yesterday was Test Fest in the office. With Andy and Dom in from Maryland and Rochester, respectively, we had eight of nine team members in one room, a record for AdaptiveBlue.
Test Fest. An opportunity to follow Andy’s test plan and break the upcoming release. As Andy stated, everyone, including devs, participated. Through participation some of us learned to appreciate the challenges of testing and how tiring it can be.
My new job in Electronic Engineering! Will still collaborate with DERI…
Next month, I will begin a tenured lectureship position at the Department of Electronic Engineering here in the College of Engineering and Informatics at the National University of Ireland, Galway. However, I will still do joint research with the Digital Enterprise Research Institute, continuing (amongst other things) to work with the Social Software Unit (on SIOC, SCOT, etc.) and with the TripPlanr project. In my new role, I will also be researching with the NCBES Bioelectronics Research Cluster in NUI Galway.
For those of you who have just come across me and my blog as a result of my work with DERI, you may not know that my background was in electronic engineering, having studied it at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and I also lectured for four years full time in the Department of Electronic Engineering before joining DERI in 2004. When I joined DERI initially, I imagined that I would be working on some intersection between electronic engineering and the Semantic Web. In fact, I fell into the world of the Semantic Web and social software, after an interesting discussion about semantic social networks with Stefan Decker, who was a senior researcher in the Institute at the time. I realised that my “hobby” interests in creating community websites could be combined with interesting research challenges around the Semantic Web, and although I (and then director Dieter Fensel) was unsure about how I would fare in a new research area, I’m glad to say that it worked out okay! Now I’m back to thinking about the convergence between electronics and semantics again, with some social software thrown in the mix (e.g. wearable communities).
Below is a collage of some memories from the past four-and-a-half years: including the FOAF Galway workshop, a Semantic Web cluster meeting, ESWC and a DERI offsite meeting, Wikimania, DERI Stanford, BlogTalk, meeting timbl, BarCamp, DERI drinks, the ITAG awards, and our Social Software summer / christmas parties.
I’ve really enjoyed working with all the smart and cool people in DERI, and I shall continue to do so, while strengthening ties between the Institute and NUI Galway’s College of Engineering and Informatics through my new job. (It’s my last day before holidays, so if you’re in Galway this evening, we’re going out for a few drinks in the Westwood Hotel after work at 5:30…)
Some Missing Emails
Well, we've just discovered that an unknown portions of the emails that have been sent to *@opencalais.com have gone missing over the last couple of weeks. Obviously - we don't know what % never arrived.
If you've sent us an email and haven't heard back from us - we'd really appreciate it if you sent it along again. It was getting kind of quiet here.
Growth pains.
Tom
Open source community, social networks, educational tools
I´ve writen, on a basis of this english writen article an spanish revision about Open source community, social networks, educational tools. Here, Google automated translation:
Clones Redes sociales o comunidades institucionales, educativas, de código abierto | El caparazón
DERI, NUI Galway launches the boards.ie SIOC Data Competition
The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at NUI Galway is running a unique competition from 1st August to 30th September 2008 in conjunction with boards.ie, Ireland’s largest discussion forum site. The competition is an open contest in which entrants can win over €4000 in Amazon.com vouchers by submitting an interesting creation based on a data set of discussion posts from boards.ie over the past ten years:
- The first prize is an Amazon voucher for $4000 (~€2500)
- The second prize is a voucher for $2000 (~€1250)
- The third prize is a voucher for $1000 (~€625)
Read the rules and find out more information on the contest at:
The data set (approximately 9 million documents) has been represented in the Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC) open data format developed by DERI, NUI Galway for expressing the information contained in social websites (forums, mailing lists, blogs, etc.). Entrants may create whatever they feel is interesting based on this data: it could be a novel web application that makes use of the data set, a report on analyses performed on the data, a tool that allows one to visualise or browse the semantic structure, or whatever else the imagination can come up with!
The data reflects ten years of Irish online life, collected between 1998 and 2008 from boards.ie. boards.ie is one of Ireland’s busiest websites, with over a million unique visitors a month. The most popular discussion areas are ‘after hours’, soccer, motors, poker, and computers. Popular topic threads include one about a virtual pub (over 4000 pages), member discussions (2800 pages), poker stories (1800 pages), Liverpool rumours (1250 pages), recruitment in the Gardaí (800 pages long), and a freebie list (250 pages).
To enter the competition, go to data.sioc-project.org to access the data sets and view the guidelines. There will be three prizes for the top entries, as judged by an independent panel of three experts. The contest is open to anyone except current / former researchers with DERI and employees of boards.ie Ltd. One person may make multiple entry submissions. The closing date is the 30th September 2008.
The purpose of this contest is to generate interesting applications or creations that make use of community data represented in the SIOC Semantic Web format. All rights to these creations will remain with the contest participants (not including the underlying data, whose copyright remains with the creators). Neither DERI nor boards.ie Ltd. will acquire any commercial rights to these applications or creations as submitted through this contest. Up until now, this data has been publicly viewable, but it was difficult to leverage it without any added semantics due to the fact that it was embedded in heavily-styled HTML pages.
[DERI is a Centre for Science, Engineering and Technology (CSET) established at NUI Galway in 2003 with funding from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI). After five years of operation, DERI has become an internationally-recognised institute in Semantic Web research, education and technology transfer.]
PLEs o entornos personales de aprendizaje. O su paralelismo en términos “geek”, Escritorios virtuales o futuros sistemas operativos en la red.
¿Cómo será este nuevo-nuestro cerebro, nuestra razón en la red? Creo que en todo caso deberá ser virtual (seguir conectado). Debemos elegir, además, de entre las formas posibles que iremos viendo, no solo la que mejor se nos adapte sino la que comu
Virtual desktops, PLEs, e-portfolios: Internet brains
We are, fortunately, surpassing the debate-inferiority complex or the power struggles of “intellectuals” about whether what we read or write is or not relevant.
The information saturation (with a trillion pages according to some on the web yet) tries offset by various filters:
-Specialized networks, communities.
-The daily born of several startups that promise to improve search or filtering (socially, by interests, by popularity, by authority, by actuallity, by date, by semantic criteria, etc…) content.
-The emergence from chaos of attempts to organise the information temporarily (lifestreaming) more or less rigid or configured by the user (specialized for specifical groups)
From these three concepts (and some more) is emerging, on recent days on the network the so-called, in learning science, PLEs or personal learning environments. Or “geek” told, virtual desktops or future operating systems on the network.
We can read on Nova Spivack´s Twine and blog that we should not think of the virtual desktops as online versions of our existing PC desktops. Ubiquity is a growing need, in a unified area to collect the various plattforms due to our mobility and activity (laptop, mobile device, PC, etc…).
There is not a quick and efficient alternative. If any company it succeeds a good tool, will hold one of the Web 3.0 or organizated web basic features.
Future desktop will be our personal learning environment hosted on the Web. Be that as it determines how public with criteria probably becoming less restrictive.
So if our life before digital was located at our desks physical space (directories, folders, desks, etc…) interconnected (Connect) today stands at the temporary organization of data, which are updated continuously through constant interaction with the network that generates. (river of news, feeds, blogs, lifestreaming, microblogging, flowing constantly…)
Are we evolving, taking a step beyond Connectivism? (Connectivist theories are based on our similarity with the network to complete a theory of learning).
Are we inaugurating something that might be called digital constructivism and that part of the same similarity with the network to note that neither the network nor we are somewhat static but fluid?
Are we already prepared for the emergence of the PLE online or the beginning of organized or 3.0 Web?
Probably yes.
I saw a few days ago a lecture by David Brooks on the importance of the unconscious in our decisions, according to recent scientific advances: The conscious mind processes only 1% of the information captured. The rest are non-cognitive skills that would explain many things in economics, neuroscience, sociology, psychology and much other areas.
We are complex, unknown, chaotic, emotional, pre-programmed:
If the net is similar or tends to be pre-programmed, “emotional” (impredictible), even chaotic in their connections, theories about our net interaction need to integrate the study of change, organizational systems to take care of this, systematization flow tools.
Or put another way, if we are being “connected” (neurology, social) and the best way to learn is based on connections and social development on the ground of this new ecosystem, we are also “fluid” beings. And this is the argument for a “Rational control” of it all.
PLEs, enrichned virtual desktops (who accept images, video, etc.…), updatable, ubiquitous, interoperable, portable, sensitive to change, scalable to our virtual identities extent, self-organization able…these are to the chaos of the network as our “head” or rationality to control complexity, chaos in ourselves.
What will this new-our brains, our reason in the network would be like?
I believe that it must be virtual (remain connected). We must choose also from possible ways that we will see not only the best but that suits us better communicate, for sharing the broadest rich (multimedia) and free (GNU) possible contents ( We´ve learnt a lot about sharing, comunicating from web 2.0)
We´ll talk about it shortly…
References:
- Conferencia virtual de Martin Weller (grabación). Virtual Conference Weller Martin (recording).
- Nova Spivack, The future of the desktop Nova Spivack, The future of the desktop
- 5 competencias básicas del trabajador 2.0 5 core competencies of the worker 2.0
- Google nos hace estúpidos (menos a mi) Google makes us stupid (at least my)
- Conferencia de David Brooks (inglés) Conference David Brooks (English)
- Photo: Viomoi.
Alpha Testers
Alpha testers? Yes. Alpha testers. While we’ve traditionally rolled out betas at a later point in the development cycle, with an upcoming release we’re looking to get feedback at an earlier stage.
This means you’ll have to take the good with the bad (as well as the ugly). The trade off is the ability to participate in a greater way with shaping the direction of the product.
We’re looking for a few different type of individuals:
- hardcore fans of our products who actively use BlueOrganizer
- those who subscribe to this blog but have never used BlueOrganizer before
- individuals who regularly engage online with objects in the categories that we support
If this is you please drop me an email firstname@adaptiveblue.com and let me know which category you fall into.
Cuil - El buscador del que todo el mundo habla
Estos días no se habla de otra cosa, si quieres estar al día tienes que hablar de Cuil (bueno, también de Google Knol), el nuevo buscador, creado por una ex-empleada de Google, que dice ofrecer contenido relevante a las búsquedas.
Por supuesto, aún no tiene indexadas tantas páginas como Google, y parte de la cantidad de resultados que obtendrás viene derivado por ese motivo. Pero también está basada estar (supuesta) carencia de cantidad de resultados en que Cuil busca la excelencia en los mismos, no la cantidad.
La idea detrás del concepto es tratar de acercar la red al usuario, ofreciéndole resultados relevantes, semánticos, de contexto, en vez de cantidad de enlaces a páginas que a veces incluso decepcionan por lo que obtienes.
Mas que basarse en las etiquetas de cabecera de las páginas o su tagline (descripción del contenido) se apoyan en un análisis del contenido del sitio. Y es quizás por ese motivo por el cual aún no vas a obtener lo mejor de esta buena idea. Y es que aún se basa demasiado en contenidos de sitios anglosajones, y faltan muchos sitios por indexar.
Es mas, cuando realizas búsquedas por términos en español, aún te ofrece referencias angloparlantes acerca del término. Es mas fácil encontrar referencias a, por ejemplo, tu blog que tu blog mismo, y esto es debido principalmente al método y filosofía de búsqueda de Cuil.
Algo interesante es que el buscador “aprende” de las búsquedas, haciendo cada vez mas fácil encontrar lo que necesitas. Cada día que realizas la búsqueda descubres que se acerca mas al contenido en tu idioma, lo que parece denotar que necesita de la propia interacción y uso del buscador para aprender, para indexar mejor los sitios y el contenido.
Es un buen concepto, aún en desarrollo y con carencias pero que, bien orientado, puede resultar (por fin) en una digna alternativa a Google, que buena falta hace.
Integrity Constraints in Pellet
As people discover from time to time, OWL isn’t really a schema language; because of its semantics (open world assumption, etc), instance data that looks different from schema data doesn’t lead to the reasoner declaring a constraint violation. Rather, it may lead to the inference of new knowledge.
This is neither a good nor bad thing; it just means there are at least two Big Use Cases people want to use OWL for: inferring new knowledge (CHECK) and abstract, expressive schema language (FAIL).
But giving a new—alternative or supplemental—semantics to OWL is non-trivial, which is why when NIST put out an SBIR solicitation for R&D related to using OWL in Supply Chain Management, we submitted an integrity constraints proposal. (Also, a sidenote for OWL Haters: you can’t, by definition, get more practical or “real world” than SCM. Not possible.)
Happily, we found out recently that we were awarded this funding (with very strong technical evaluations—yay!) and work is beginning soon:
- We’re working on an OWLED EU paper, with Evan Wallace of NIST, that describes the design space; I’ll post links to the paper ASAP.
- We’re actively soliciting use cases and requirements for OWL integrity constraints: please get in touch if you have feedback.
- There will be some software released by early 2009 at the latest for experimentation.
SBIR Phase I funding will cover this work; but the follow-on, Phase II, is considerably larger and that’s where, if we can snag Phase II, we’ll push the prototype to production-grade, integrate it with the rest of Pellet and other OWL-based systems of ours (Owlgres comes to mind), and make a concerted “push to market”.
An industrial-quality Integrity Constraint subsystem for Pellet will open it up for use in new apps and, thus, in new markets. That’s exciting and, as always, we’ll be looking for commercial partners to work with us on those challenges.
Miracle of binary
The ultimate absurdity is now staring us in the face: a universal library of two volumes, one containing a single dot and the other a dash. Persistent repetition and alternation of the two is sufficient, we well know, for spelling out any and every truth. The miracle of the finite but universal library is a mere inflation of the miracle of binary notation: everything worth saying, and everything else as well, can be said with two characters. It is a letdown befitting the Wizard of Oz, but it has been a boon to computers.
– Willard van Orman Quine on the Universal Library
(via Borges’ Library of Babel indirectly found via Dan Connolly’s RDFization of the animals quote)
This somehow reminded me of a couple other links I found earlier on Turing Machines built in Conway’s game of Life: one from Paul Rendell, another from Paul Chapman. These machines also have a kind of strange beauty…
Matthew Buckland ‘Semantifies’ The Mail & Guardian Online
Matthew Buckland has written up his experience using the Calais API, Calais Tagaroo and other services to bring semantic intelligence to South Africa's Mail & Guardian Online.
EXCERPT: "It’s important to add semantic power to your content because it allows
your servers to find, extract, share, and re-use the information.
Tagging your content in the semantic sense will allow a computer to
“know” that Tony Blair or George Bush in your article or post are in
fact people, or that the United States of America is a country, and
Africa a continent.
It gives context to the tags in your articles — and
allows you to automatically do more with your content, such as build up
an index of people mentioned on your site or call up a map with the
locations referred to in an article. In a search sense, it helps search
engines deliver more relevant and accurate results."
Visit his blog for a number of interesting and insightful posts at MathewBuckland.com.
Calais is now integrated with MOSS 2007
Eran Steinmetz has integrated Calais into MOSS 2007, making it easy to automatically generate semantic metadata for your content pages on Miscrosoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 content management sites.
To learn more, please see the MOSS 2007 + Calais resource page on CodePlex, and see Amir Shevat's blog post in the integration.
You can also read more about Eran and the OpenUp initiative in Israel.
Many thanks to Eran!
The Future of the Desktop
(Brief excerpt from a new post on my Public Twine -- Go there to read the whole thing and comment on it with me and others...). I have spent the last year really thinking about the future of the Web....
Collaboration Tools, Collective Intelligence, English, Groupware, Knowledge Management, Mobile Computing, My Best Articles, Nova Spivack, Productivity, Semantic Blogs and Wikis, Semantic Web, Technology, The Future, The Semantic Graph, Trends, UX, Web 3.0, Web/Tech, artificial intelligence, desktop, futurism, futurists, knowledge networking, semantics, social networks, software, twine, user experience, user-experience design
RIF WG still expecting LC drafts
The RIF WG is still expecting to release the Last Call drafts of BLD (Basic Logic Dialect) and RDF+OWL Compatiblity shortly. In the final round of internal reviews, a few minor technical problems were found and resolved, as well as confusions about the role of data types and builtins that pushed the expected completion dates out further.
Currently RIF expects to release last call drafts of BLD and RDF+OWL, as well as WDs of UCR, DTB, and FLD, and the first production rule WD.
links for 2008-07-25
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A grounded, semirelational, peer to peer replicated, disconnected, versioned, property database with self-healing conflict resolution. Perl + svn + http
ISWC 2008 tutorial program announced
ISWC 2008 has selected a strong program of eleven tutorials that includes two full-day and nine half-day tutorials to be held on October 26 and 27.
- Introduction to Semantic Web (full day special tutorial)
- Reasoning for Ontology Engineering and Usage (full day)
- Formal Concept Analysis for the Semantic Web
- A Semantic Multimedia Web: Create, Annotate, Present and Share your Media
- Working Modularly with OWL
- Knowledge Representation and Extraction for Business Intelligence
- RDFa–Bridging the Web of Documents and the Web of Data
- RSWA 2008 - Realizing a Semantic Web Application
- How to Publish Linked Data on the Web
- Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Sciences
- Free Semantic Content: Using OpenCyc in Semantic Web Applications
The list of the tutorials and links to pages with more information is available on the ISWC 2008 tutorials page.
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