Archive
Archive for August, 2008
Reminder - Test your app with Release 3 Technology Preview!
Calais developers have built some great stuff - please make sure it doesn't break when we roll out Release 3!
Visit the R3 Technology Preview page to see what's coming and to learn how to test your application with R3. It's as easy as changing the domain name you point your application to.
R3 will go into production this coming week.
Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies Note Published
The Semantic Web Deployment Working Group has published the Group Note of Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies. This document describes best practice recipes for publishing vocabularies or ontologies on the Web (in RDF Schema or OWL). It is intended for the creators and maintainers of vocabularies in RDFS and OWL (vocabulary and ontology are used interchangeably in the context of this specification). It provides step-by-step instructions for publishing vocabularies on the Web, giving example configurations designed to cover the most common cases.
Last Call: SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System Reference; Primer Updated
The Semantic Web Deployment Working Group has published the Last Call Working Draft of SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System Reference. This document defines the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), a common data model for sharing and linking knowledge organization systems via the Web. The SKOS data model provides a standard, low-cost migration path for porting existing knowledge organization systems to the Semantic Web. SKOS also provides a light weight, intuitive language for developing and sharing new knowledge organization systems. It may be used on its own, or in combination with formal knowledge representation languages such as the Web Ontology language (OWL). Comments are welcome through 03 October. The group has also published an update of the companion SKOS Primer.
The Similarities Between a Book Release and a Product Launch
Our book widgets are especially popular with authors who are releasing a book due to the ability of the widget to offer a single promotion and transaction point. We’re constantly in communication with these authors and a recent email from Laurel Snyder had me thinking that the release of a book is similar to a product launch.
Here are some similarities that I noted:
1) Hard work and perseverance are required to reach the release date.
Laurel spent eight years “writing and revising and submitting and re-revising and workshopping and copyediting and agonizing.” Good things take time to create and hard work to polish. Transitioning from idea to release date requires a deep passion for realizing the outcome.
2) The work before the release expands beyond the core task.
Hard and required: writing the book or coding the program. Also hard and also required: editing, securing a publisher, marketing plans, tour itinerary, jacket art, … and debugging, marketing plans, UI designing, testing, …
3) The release date is only the start of the hustle.
The NextNY mailing list is constantly discussing best practices on landing press coverage, collecting end-user feedback, and any number of other data points following the launch of a product. There are bugs to correct, features to implement, and a business to be built. There are just as lively mailing lists for authors that offer advice on a wide range of tasks that need to be completed after the book’s released. The release date is simply a milestone and much work remains.
4) There’s an overwhelming sense of joy the moment it’s released.
The release date brings a joyous feeling that, as Laurel says, has you “dancing around in pajamas.”
[note: we’re still working towards the release and are happy for more individuals who want to see a preview of the product. If you want to, drop me a line fraser@ourcompanyname.com]
Putting Together A Personal Conference Schedule (triggered by: TRIPLE-I)
I do admit that I am probably a bit picky here but I whole-heartedly HATE the process of having to read my way through conference schedules, in particular through the ones that have four or more parallel tracks running. Me and my colleagues have been looking forward to the TRIPLE-I for quite a while, and my adhoc resolution for the NEXT i-Semantics (which is one of the three parts of the TRIPLE-I) is to initiate the development of an end-user oriented conference planning tool supported by faceted browsing: something that would allow me to sift through the pile of conference events quickly, changing perspectives as I wish, fading in and out not only tracks, but also topics, institutions and people.
Perspectives I’d apply would be for instance:
- What are talks or presentations that discuss visualization in an industry-applied context?
- The same thing in a scientific context?
- Which talks are addressing knowledge management and web 2.0 at the same time?
- Which talks are in English?
- Which presenters are Austrian/from the University of Trier/ from Overseas?
- Which are relevant for the Linked Data scope?
- etc. pp.
Such a tool would be a nice showcase for the conference itself, and - using Exhibit - shouldn’t be that difficult to put together (I think). In the meantime, I’ll have to keep studying the three pages Excel to PDF export of the detailed conference schedule (and yes, I am probably underestimating the cognitive value and more sustainable side-effects that studying such finely printed pages has:-). At first glance, these are the top three talks on each day that interest me most - for now, and disregarding German language presentation (results might change if I study the program again on Tuesday, which I will, so don’t be offended if you’re not on it:-)
Wednesday, 3rd of September:
- Semantic Search and Visualization of Time-Series Data
- Community Rating Service and User Buddy Supporting Advices in Community Portals
- Harnessing Wikipedia for Smart Tags Clustering
Thursday, 4th of September
- Seeding, Weeding, Fertilizing - Different Tag Gardening Activities for Folksonomy Maintenance and Enrichment
- A Model for Document Processing in Semantic Desktop Systems
- Non-linear Story-telling in a Mobile World
Friday, 5th of September
- Collaborative Knowledge Engineering via Semantic MediaWiki
- Building Ontology Networks: How to Obtain a Particular Ontology Network Life Cycle
- Improving Recommendations by Using Personality Traits in User Profiles
For more about the conference, go to the conference website.
And anyone who is planning to attend TRIPLE-I: I have just registered Semantic Web Company account on 12seconds, a platform for micro movies and I am looking for interview partners - it won’t take more than 12 seconds:-)
Artificial Stupidity: The Next Big Thing
There has been a lot of hype about artificial intelligence over the years. And recently it seems there has been a resurgence in interest in this topic in the media. But artificial intelligence scares...
La Web 3.0 no existe, es la Web Semántica
El título viene de la frase tan conocida de “papa noel (o los reyes magos) no existe, son los padres“.
La evolución que ha tenido la Web desde su creación hasta nuestros tiempos ha sido lineal en cuanto al destino: el usuario. Hemos pasado de una web completamente estática a la evolución que traía consigo generar contenido. La Web 1.0 ya era una web dinámica, cambiaba de contenido para informar, y ahora el dinamismo se ha extendido hasta llegar a un complejo sistema de interacción entre generadores y receptores.
Y dicen que esto seguirá evolucionando. La Web 3.0 se avecina, o no.
Yo creo que aún no hemos llegado al tope de la web en su versión “beta”, la 2.0. Cada día se crean nuevos servicios desconocidos para este tipo de web. Creo que como mucho llegaremos en un breve periodo de tiempo a algo llamado Web 2.5, donde todos los servicios llegan a su punto álgido de consumo por parte de los usuarios de la web.
La Web 3.0 será la aplicación del concepto de Web Semántica a todos estos servicios. Haciendo una analogía con la frase del principio, la Web Semántica será el padre/madre de la Web 3.0 en sus inicios.
No sé que opináis vosotros sobre estos temas, y este sería un buen punto de encuentro para comentarlo.
Mozilla Ubiquity
The are some interesting things going on at Mozilla Labs. Yesterday, Ubiquity was all over the mailing lists. You can think of it as “what the Humanized folks did next”, or as a commandline for the Web, or as a Webbier sibling to QuickSilver, the MacOSX utility. I prefer to think of it as the Mozilla add-on that distracted me all day. Ubiquity continues Mozilla’s exploration of the potential UI uses of its “awesome bar” (aka Location bar). Ubiquity is invoked on my Mac with alt-space, at which point it’ll enthusiastically try to autocomplete a verb-centric Webby task from whatever I type. It does this by consulting a pile of built-in and community-provided Javacript functions, which have access to the Web, your browser (hello, widget security fans)… and it also has access to UI, in terms of an overlaid preview window, as well as a context menu that can actually be genuinely contextual, ie. potentially sensitive to microformat and RDFa markup.
So it might help to think of ubiquity as a cross between The Hobbit, GreaseMonkey, Bookmarklets, and Mozilla’s earlier forms of packaged addon. Ok, well it’s not very Hobbit, I just wanted an excuse for this screen grab. But it is about natural language interfaces to complex Webby datasources and services.
The basic idea here is that commands (triggered by some keyword) can be published in the Web as links to simple Javascript files that can be single-click added (without need for browser restart) by anyone trusting enough to add the code to their browser. Social/trust layers to help people avoid bad addons are in the works too.
I spent yesterday playing. There are some rough edges, but this is fun stuff for sure. The emphasis is on verbs, hence on doing, rather than solely on lookups, query and data access. Coupled with the dependency on third party Javascript, this is going to need some serious security attention. But but but… it’s so much fun to use and develop for. Something will shake out security-wise. Even if Ubiquity commands are only shared amongst trusting power users who have signed each other’s PGP keys, I think it’ll still have an important niche.
What did I make? A kind of stalk-a-tron, FOAF lookup tool. It currently only consults Google’s Social Graph API, an experimental service built from all the public FOAF and XFN on the Web plus some logic to figure out which account pages are held by the same person. My current demo simply retrieves associated URLs and photos, and displays them overlaid on the current page. If you can’t get it working via the Ubiquity auto-subscribe feature, try adding it by pasting the raw Javascript into the command-editor screen. See also the ‘sindice-term‘ lookup tool from Michael Hausenblas. It should be fun seeing how efforts like Bengee’s SPARQLScript work can be plugged in here, too.
Google Traduce Semánticamente
Google ha mejorado su sistema de traducciones online añadiendo la posibilidad de que le pidas lo que te quiere traducir y, desde el primer enlace, llevarte a un diccionario online especializado.
El modo de uso es pedirle al buscador Google que te traduzca una palabra del modo “translate entrepeneur to spanish” y te ofrece un enlace a sitio especializado, desde el primer enlace, desde el que hacer traducciones en varias direcciones, con sugerencias, incluso imágenes relacionadas.
Lamentablemente no se le puede “hablar” en español, sino solo desde el inglés, y hacia unos cuantos idiomas: Francés, Alemán, Español, Italiano, Portugués, Chino, Coreano e Indi. Tampoco hay una dirección específica para ir directamente al diccionario, pero siempre puedes guardar la URL de un resultado y desde ahí usarlo para traducir otras expresiones en cualquier momento.
Invitation to September OpenCalais Presentations and Workshops
We hope to meet as many members of the OpenCalais community as possible. Toward that end, here is a list of the September events where we are presenting and/or holding workshops.
We would love to see you there, so let us know if you can make it!
- SDFORUM - Wednesday, September 3rd - 6:30 p.m. PT - Palo Alto, CA
- PAWS MEETUP - Thursday, September 4th - 6 p.m. PT - San Francisco, CA
- MESH SUMMER SCHOOL ON MULTIMEDIA SEMANTICS - September 1 - 5, Crete
- ONLINE NEWS ASSOCIATION (ONA) - September 11 - 13, Washington, DC
- MIT's EMTECH '08 - September 23 - 25, Cambridge, MA
Please find details (and some special Calais discounts) below.
SDFORUM - Wednesday, September 3rd - 6:30 p.m. PT - Palo Alto, CA
We're holding an interactive session on the Calais Web service at the SDForum Semantic Web SIG in a session titled "Emerging Semantic Ad Platforms".
Tom will focus on how Calais can be used to produce computable semantics from any text and feed them into any new search service, Semantic Web application or semantic ad platform.
All are welcome, and the fee for non-SDForum members is $15 at the door. There is no charge for members, and no pre-registration is required.
PAWS MEETUP - Thursday, September 4th - 6 p.m. PT - San Francisco, CA
Tom will provide a look at Calais' underlying technology, and offer insight into the Calais roadmap going forward, in a special 'field trip' Meetup of the Palo Alto Semantic Web (PAWS) group.
The Calais team is hosting the event at Thomson Reuters downtown San Francisco office at 425 Market Street. There are only 12 spots left for this free Meetup, so sign up today.
MESH SUMMER SCHOOL ON MULTIMEDIA SEMANTICS - September 1 - 5, Crete
On Thursday, September 4th, Barak Pridor, ClearForest CEO, will offer an overview of the Calais initiative and discuss the value it brings to publishers and journalists.
ONLINE NEWS ASSOCIATION (ONA) - September 11 - 13, Washington, DC
On Friday, September 12th, Tom will participate in the "Hello! Semantic Web!" panel alongside Tristan Harris, CEO of Apture, and Tiffany Shackelford, Semantic Marketer and consultant.
MIT's EMTECH '08 - September 23 - 25, Cambridge, MA
The Calais team will be out in force at the Emerging Technologies Conference @ MIT, with a booth, a developer luncheon, and discounted conference pricing for members of the OpenCalais community.
The luncheon takes place Thursday, September 25th, from 12:30 - 1:50 p.m. ET. Tom will share "Five Easy Ways to Add Value with Calais" to provide developers with helpful tips and ideas to kick-start their efforts.
Click on the OpenCalais community discounts page from MIT to register. The options are as follows:
- $49 if you want to enter the conference solely to attend the Calais developer luncheon on Thursday.
- 15% off on a one-day pass if you want to come for a full day of conference sessions on either Wednesday or Thursday.
- 15% off on the full conference pass.
We hope to see you there!
FOC08(2): Facilitating, moderating, or teaching
There is an important change between traditional learning basis and web2.0, 2.0 education ones. Vertical (up to down) comunication, tradicionallly “teaching” establishing estructured information have been progressively surpased by mentoring, tutoring, facilitating, horizontal ways (peer to peer) to show different paths to fluid, relative and sometimes chaotic information.
Facilitation has been defined as to manage ‘the communication of others online’ (Coghlan 2001).
In order to define the facilitator role, we must to answer to these question:
How are the skills different for each role?
Leigh Blakhall writes about this in Facilitate,not to teach:
“We are working with people who has been educated on a tradicional teaching based model. Online communities participants, are unprepared, not used to the facilitated and individually responsible and self motivated learning environment facilitator tries to encourage:
I can understand the expectation for a teacher in a course. Naturally a student who has enrolled in a formal course, following traditional administration channels, paying fees etc and who is of an age and professional experience that is very used to the idea of taught and instructed learning, would expect a similarly efficient, industrial strength, structured learning pathway within the course. But this is at odds with my understanding of facilitation and my principals around individual responsibility, networked learning, and a belief in the importance of deschooling.
Either I yield to the tradition of schooled learning and assume the role of teacher, instructor and assessor and forgo the role of facilitator, or I invest a lot more time with these courses and develop my skills as a communicator and become more sophisticated in ways of moving expectations towards a facilitated and individualised learning environment.(…)
Unfortunately frustrations are expressed from time to time that relate to the seeming lack of structure and direction in the facilitation of the course, and the apparent over whelming amount of information and technical skills needed to participate. I can’t help but think that a lot of this frustration can be attributed to the confusion between teacher and facilitator, and the expectation of instructed learning that the course admin has encouraged.
It is generally assumed that “facilitation” ethic emerges after a participant practices blogging and experiences networked connections. This is true for approximately 10 – 20% of the participants I have had contact with, so what of the 80 – 90%?
Perhaps this number will decrease as more and more people experience this type of expectation and meet others who have experienced it before.. a bit like the take up of email… or perhaps social networking sites like Facebook or Ecto will replace the idea of blogging and bring us back to group work, which seems to be what we are all schooled to being more comfortable with.. sadly.”
The last is an interesting point. Individual, self-conducted (but networked) learning as the better way to learn.
I´m going to end this post with the following, very clear scheme about the various moderation models now being presented to assist teachers understand the fundamental concepts of facilitation and as a basis for theorising:
* Salmon’s Five Stage Moderation Model
* Collison, Elbaum, Haavind and Tinker’s Facilitation model
* Paulsen’s Function model
* Hootstein’s ‘Four Pairs of Shoes’ Model
Salmon’s fives stages are
* Stage 1: Access and motivation
* Stage 2: Socialization
* Stage 3: Information Exchange
* Stage 4: Knowledge Construction
* Stage 5: Development
Each stage calls for different e-moderating skills requiring participants to master certain technical skills and steps learners through a logical process of induction before deeper level interactions occur. Students learn through participation and engagement. Motivation is the key, and so is the provision of a conducive structure and environment.
Collison, Elbaum, Haavind and Tinker’s model is based on techniques used by the moderator to guide and facilitate the learning. It is premised on the view that appropriate communication interventions by the moderator can move students forward and facilitate (but should not lead) their understandings.
Paulsen maintains that moderators should identify their preferred pedagogical style, based on their philosophical orientation, their chosen moderator roles, and their preferred facilitation techniques. Moderator roles can at times vary. Facilitation functions are classified under headings of organizational, social and intellectual facilitation.
Hootstein proposes a model in which the e-learning facilitator or moderator “wears ‘four pairs of shoes’ - acting as instructor, social director, program manager, and technical assistant”. In the instructor role the instructor guides the learning in a problem-centred learning environment, offering insights and assisting learners. As a social director they create and foster a collaborative environment. A program manager directs the agenda. And as a technical director they “assist students to become comfortable with systems and software and prepare learners to resolve … technical difficulties that may occur”.
Each model presents a different way of conceptualising the learning and facilitation interactions and provides useful techniques, and each has made a significant contribution to the research fields of online learning and computer-mediated communication.
References
- To Facilitate or to Teach - CC By Leigh Blackall with discussion in the comments.
- Wikibooks: Managing Groups and Teams/How Do You Build High-performing Virtual Teams?
- GROU.PS is a platform for social groups to get together. Use it for any purpose. Choose your template and pick all the modules that you want (wiki, blogs, photos, links etc). And get your group web site without waiting. No branding, it’s free!
- Effective Online Facilitation - Australian Flexible Learning Framework guide
- Five stage model for e-moderating- Gilly Salmon.
- Curatorial Teaching CC By George Siemens 2007 with audio recorded presentation and discussion
New start date for the boards.ie SIOC Data competition…
…will be the 1st September. I sincerely apologise for the delay; due to technical difficulties (we needed a signup mechanism in place), my holidays during the first two weeks of August, and settling into the new job.
To enter, you should sign up for a user account at data.sioc-project.org; we will ring to confirm your details; then after your account is enabled, you will be able to access the data sets from the 1st September. We will also have an entry submission system available from that date (in case you make something really cool on the first day)! You can make as many submissions as you wish, but use of the data sets is restricted to the duration of the competition and during the demonstration period in November…
Ser semántico con poca plata
Experiencias de semantización de contenidos con herramientas gratuitas. Tagaroo, OpenCalais, etc...
Time-Sensitive Discount on the Defrag Conference in Denver
The Calais team is heading to some great events this fall, including the Defrag Conference in Denver, Colorado, Nov. 3 - 4, 2008.
Time Sensitive Defrag Discount: The Defrag gang has kindly offered a special discount for the OpenCalais community.
The discounted rate -- $100 off the early bird registration fee (so $895.00) -- is only available through the end of this month.
Sign-up this week if you want to get the best price. You can register here by entering our discount code, "tr1" (t r and the number one).
What is Defrag all about? Data!
Producer Eric Norlin says, "As online data is growing and fragmenting at an exponential pace, individuals, groups and organizations are struggling to discover, assemble, organize, act on and gather feedback from that data."
"In the largest sense, we're all looking to augment the pace at which we achieve insights on raw data - to accelerate the 'aha' moment."
We will have a booth there to share demos, and Calais lead Tom Tague will be speaking on the 'Next-level Discovery' panel alongside Amit Kumar of Yahoo! Search.
Hope to see you there!
El Fin de los Sistemas Operativos
Cuando aún nos bombardean acerca de si es mejor Mac, PC o Linux parece ser que estas viejas discusiones son … eso, caducas y no son relevantes en la situación actual de la Web 2.0, y mucho menos lo serán en el futuro.
Todo apunta a que, por fin, nos dirigimos a una situación de computación online, donde lo importante son los contenidos, y no el continente ni la aplicación que lo creó. Con las cada vez mas abundantes aplicaciones web es difícil encontrar situaciones en las que se justifique instalar una aplicación de escritorio en el ordenador.
UPDATE: OWL Integrity Constraints Survey
Update—our OWL Integrity Constraints survey will conclude on 12 September 2008.
Please take the OWL Integrity Constraints Survey to influence the future direction of Pellet. For background information about Integrity Constraints in OWL, see Opening, Closing Worlds—On Integrity Constraints.
Pastures New
Its been 9.5 years since I first started working for Ingenta. Over those years I’ve been presented with some fantastic opportunities and worked on some great projects with great people.
From a technical perspective I’ve developed a deep appreciation for hypertext, web architecture, XML, and semantic web technologies. I’ve spent the last 18 months or so creating a publishing platform that has semantic web technologies at its core. This is something I’m particularly proud of as we’re putting these technologies into production use. Our early experiences are that their flexibility is really going to pay-off when it comes to building next generation publishing and research tools. Meeting the changing requirements for researchers and scientists means really embracing semantic web concepts like linked, open data. So I’m confident that this platform is going to serve the company well in the future.
But I also decided that its time for me to move on and explore other opportunities. While my role has always been varied and changing, I decided it was time to do something different, in a role that would let me continue to work with semantic web technologies.
So I’m happy to say that from 1st September I’m going to be joining Talis as Programme Manager for the Talis Platform. I’ve been really impressed with what Talis have achieved over the past few years: they’ve got a real strategic vision and a hugely talented team. I’m excited to be joining them to work on developing the Talis Platform and help them deliver on their vision for the future. Its a natural step forward from what I’ve been working on for the last few years.
But first, time to relax with my family before getting my teeth into the new role. Exciting times ahead!
Pastures New
Its been 9.5 years since I first started working for Ingenta. Over those years I've been presented with some fantastic opportunities and worked on some great projects with great people.
From a technical perspective I've developed a deep appreciation for hypertext, web architecture, XML, and semantic web technologies. I've spent the last 18 months or so creating a publishing platform that has semantic web technologies at its core. This is something I'm particularly proud of as we're putting these technologies into production use. Our early experiences are that their flexibility is really going to pay-off when it comes to building next generation publishing and research tools. Meeting the changing requirements for researchers and scientists means really embracing semantic web concepts like linked, open data. So I'm confident that this platform is going to serve the company well in the future.
But I also decided that its time for me to move on and explore other opportunities. While my role has always been varied and changing, I decided it was time to do something different, in a role that would let me continue to work with semantic web technologies.
So I'm happy to say that from 1st September I'm going to be joining Talis as Programme Manager for the Talis Platform. I've been really impressed with what Talis have achieved over the past few years: they've got a real strategic vision and a hugely talented team. I'm excited to be joining them to work on developing the Talis Platform and help them deliver on their vision for the future. Its a natural step forward from what I've been working on for the last few years.
But first, time to relax with my family before getting my teeth into the new role. Exciting times ahead!
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