Planet Semantico

Just like Freddy Kreuger, botnets are hard to kill.

In a series of posts on his Security Fix blog, Brian Krebs provides a good explanation of how the Srizbi botnet was able to come back to life after being killed (we thought!) earlier this month.

“The botnet Srizbi was knocked offline Nov. 11 along with Web-hosting firm McColo, which Internet security experts say hosted machines that controlled the flow of 75 percent of the world’s spam. One security firm, FireEye, thought it had found a way to prevent the botnet from coming back online by registering domain names it thought Srizbi was likely to target. But when that approach became too costly for the firm, they had to abandon their efforts.”

In a example of good distributed programming design, the botnet had a backup plan if its control servers were taken down.

“The malware contained a mathematical algorithm that generates a random but unique Web site domain name that the bots would be instructed to check for new instructions and software updates from its authors. Shortly after McColo was taken offline, researchers at FireEye said they deciphered the instructions that told computers infected with Srizbi which domains to seek out. FireEye researchers thought this presented a unique opportunity: If they could figure out what those rescue domains would be going forward, anyone could register or otherwise set aside those domains to prevent the Srizbi authors from regaining control over their massive herd of infected machines.”

Unfortunately, FireEye did not have the resources to carry out its plan and was forced to abandon it, but not before seeking help from other companies and organizations with deeper pockets.

“A week ago, FireEye researcher Lanstein said they were looking for someone else to register the domain names that the Srizbi bots might try to contact to revive themselves. He said they approached other companies such as VeriSign Inc. and Microsoft Corp. After FireEye abandoned its efforts, some other members of the computer security community said they reached out for help from the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, or US-CERT, a partnership between the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector to combat cypersecurity threats.

File this one under opportunity, lost.

English

Hace tiempo que está en el mercado, a pesar de que no la conocía demasiado: Semantic MediaWiki.

Se trata de una extensión de Mediawiki (la base de Wikipedia) que semantiza los contenidos. Merece la pena visitarlo e instalarlo si tenéis algún entorno que corra con el cms para wikis que utilizan, entre otros célebres lugares, Wikipedia.

Pero no es ese el motivo de este post sinó la existencia de un entorno parecido, pero pensado ya en clave semántica exclusiva:  Kiwi es un entorno colaborativo de gestión del conocimiento potenciado con tecnología semántica.

Vale la pena leer su presentación, que aporta claves algunas claves importantes al ámbito del knowledge management:

Wikis y software social han revolucionado las formas en que creamos y distribuimos conocimiento. La web semántica ha transformado también la forma de mantener descubrir y compartir conocimiento a través de distintas plataformas.

El proyecto KiWi - “Knowledge in a Wiki” - supone una nueva aproximación a la gestión del conocimiento que combina la filosofía wiki con la inteligencia y los métodos de la web semántica.

La forma sigue a la función  y la tecnología ha llegado ya  a un estadio evolutivo en el que apoya al usuario en lugar de forzarle a seguir “los dictados de distintos sistemas”. Es lo que significa el término sinónimo de web semántica: “la web de la gente”.

Es también algo a lo que aún no ha llegado la gestión del conocimiento en algunas empresas:

Hace más de una década ya que  la gestión del conocimiento  es una cuestión clave en la empresa, pero su implementación no ha logrado, en muchas ocasiones, superar los métodos tradicionales o ir más allá de la cultura de cada marca.

Así, la gestión del conocimiento (KM) ha sido malentendida en ocasiones como gestión de la calidad (QM). Los  empleados son obligados a menudo a rellenar interminables campos y formas, en lenguajes de metadatos afines al sistema,  reproduciendo en lugar de remodelar, rígidas jerarquías dentro de la institución.

Este “imponer el sistema”, o formas asociadas a rígidos protocolos en la empresa da lugar a un popular malentendido, que puede ser entendido como resistencia a cualquier esfuerzo en la gestión del conocimiento de una empresa:

-Los beneficios de la gestión del conocimiento son, de forma principal, para la empresa. Los motivos de muchas empresas para aplicar estrategias de KM son a menudo el temor de perder el conocimiento si un trabajador se enferma o abandona la empresa. “Si desvelo todo lo que sé, me convertiré en prescindible y podré ser despedido”.

La gestión del conocimiento que se realiza correctamente no tiene por objeto extraer  y almacenar sabiduría: Su objetivo es facilitar el intercambio de conocimientos y la colaboración entre los miembros de un grupo determinado, ya sea empleados, directivos o investigadores.

En lugar de obligar a la gente a adaptarse a las normas del sistema, un buen sistema de KM debe centrarse en las necesidades, las preferencias y la estructura de los conocimientos a la que la gente sea afín.

En lugar de “el conocimiento es poder”, la cultura organizativa del futuro, por tanto, debería decir “compartir es poder”.

No tengo claro que el formato wiki sea el más adecuado como plataforma básica de knowledge management en la empresa u organización (sí como complemento). En mi opinión y como lo demuestran los últimos informes de consultoras tan relevantes como Gartner, (gracias, Ernesto),  la comunidad es y será durante los próximos años la herramienta central para la participación y la proyección externa de la “marca”. Eso es lo importante y relativamente independiente de su soporte o plataforma, probablemente “Mashups” de las mejores herramientas en cada momento.

Pero sí que conviene adoptar este enfoque: “The Wiki Way: Not a Technology, but a Philosophy” (modo wiki, no una tecnología, sinó una filosofía). Estas serían algunos de sus principios:

Todos pueden participar (en la imagen, la metáfora felina: Incluso los gatos pueden editar)

En el mundo wiki no deben existir las jerarquías. Deben crearse entornos abiertos al caos.

¿Quien controla el caos? La sabiduría de las multitudes, la inteligencia colectiva. Lo diría Linus Torvalds en una frase célebre: “Si están disponibles los suficientes ojos, todos los errores son superficiales “.

En la era de la economía de la atención, una de las mayores motivaciones para que los usuarios contribuyan a los medios de comunicación social es recibir atención y reconocimiento.

Y eso es lo que se debe potenciar desde una visión “wiki” actual de la gestión del conocimiento.

Relacionados:

2008: El año de los Community managers.

FOC08 (1): Del grupo a la comunidad, principios básicos.

Spanish

Edinburgh’s Scottish Storytelling Centre was a great venue for the 3rd SLIC FE Conference on Friday, well organised by Catherine Kearney and chaired by Charles Sweeney. 

With such topics as LMS, Web 2.0 and IPR in digital repositories on the agenda, you might think the day might have been disjointed.  Far from it.  The day hung together very well, with yours truly setting the context of the wider waves of technology and innovation that have been and will continue wash across the wider web, influencing the world of academia and libraries.  Although this is being seen in the Library systems world with the emergence of so called Next Generation OPACs, is this only just doing the same old thing but better – we need to extend the user interface and the underlying systems and data to integrate with the systems and organisations around us. [Presentation available on SlideShare]

The theme continued with Phil Bradley taking us through Web 2.0 usage and techniques applicable to everyone in general and libraries in particular.  Next on the bill was Charles Duncan, Intrallect CEO, taking us through the way repositories should be integrated in to institutions an the wider national and international landscape – Web Services are the key.

An afternoon of presentations: NewsFilm Online – a fascinating resource introduced by Vivienne Carr from EDINA; Intellectual Property Rights issues as applied to the output of, and material used by, e-learning; drawn to a close by the inimitable Dave Pattern, sharing his experience at Huddersfield University applying Web 2.0 principles to their OPAC.

The whole day was drawn to a close with a JISC sponsored round table discussion which I was invited to join, which served to reinforce my impression that libraries and educationalists over the last few years have found themselves in the unusual position of striving to catch up with the rest of the world. 

Traditionally they have been in the role of helping to introduce new technologies & techniques to their students and the wider world.  For a whole generation the OPAC was their first interaction with publicly accessible computing.   With the web and now so called Web 2.0 the boot is on the other foot.  We are in danger of making too big a deal out of it – many of our users are already more in tune with the things we are worrying about how to introduce.

English

Quoted without comment or speculation, from the Linux on the iPhone blog.

“I’m pleased to announce that the Linux 2.6 kernel has been ported to Apple’s iPhone platform, with support for the first and second generation iPhones as well as the first generation iPod touch. This is a rough first draft of the port, and many drivers are still missing, but it’s enough that a real alternative operating system is running on the iPhone.”

English

Discover magazine has named Jon Kleinberg as one of the 20 Best Brains Under 40 for his work on HITS and social networks.

“In the mid-1990s a Web search for, say, “DISCOVER magazine” meant wading through thousands of results presented in a very imperfect order. Then, in 1996, 24-year-old Jon Kleinberg developed an algorithm that revolutionized Web search. That is why today, that same search lists this magazine’s home page first. Kleinberg, now 37, created the Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search algorithm, which estimates a Web page’s value in both authority (quality of content and endorsement by other pages) and hub (whether it links to good pages).

Kleinberg continues to combine computer science, data analysis, and sociological research to help create better tools that link social networking sites. He envisions an increase in how we can see information move through space over time, in what he calls geographic hot spots on the Web, based on the interests of a particular region.

Our social network links and friendships depend on these geographic hot spots, Kleinberg says, which makes searching easier by “taking into account not just who and when, but where.” He is now studying how word-of-mouth phenomena like fads and rumors flow through groups of people, hoping to apply this knowledge to processes such as political mobilization.”

English

Here are some results of practical research from which many of us can immediately benefit.

Robin Goldstein et al., Do more expensive wines taste better? Evidence from a large sample of blind tastings, American Association of Wine Economists, Working Papers, April 2008, http://purl.umn.edu/37328

Individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine. In a sample of more than 6,000 blind tastings, we find that the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less. For individuals with wine training, however, we find indications of a positive relationship between price and enjoyment. Our results are robust to the inclusion of individual fixed effects, and are not driven by outliers: when omitting the top and bottom deciles of the price distribution, our qualitative results are strengthened, and the statistical significance is improved further. Our results indicate that both the prices of wines and wine recommendations by experts may be poor guides for non-expert wine consumers.

Jonah Lehrer compares this to an earlier Stanford study. One possible takeaway point: avoid wine training, it will only diminish your ability to enjoy wine. Another possible lesson to be learned: maybe going into engineering wasn’t such a great idea, after all. (spotted on daily dish)

English

The KiWi meeting is drawing to an end. Marek Schmidt and Pavel Smrz from Brno University of Technology have just given a really exciting presentation of their results in the area of information extraction - and it seems I have developed a case of tendonitis (a.k.a. “mouse hand”) and for the sake of my health will stop blogging for today. Instead of the usual comprehensive coverage, this photo must suffice as a proof of the magic Marek and Pavel’s system is already able to do - please marvel the complex tags that are the product of their information extraction (IE) module. The roles of IE as an enabling technology within KiWi will be in: automatic recognition of (new) terms, entity recognition, text classification and relation extraction.

KiWi team! In particular Klara Weiand who is about to start her presentation on Tags and Queries, please accept my apology! Thank you, good bye, and have a save trip home!

Related articles by Zemanta

• KIWI Project Partners, Pt.2: Brno University of Technology
• Integrating Information Extraction into the KiWi-System: a proposal from Brno

English

Here are my slides from last night’s joint talk for the Institution of Engineering and Technology and the Computer Society…

English

KiWi - Knowledge in a Wiki, Day 2 - Josef Holy from Sun Microsystems Prague led the first part of today’s use case presentation. With the KiWi semantic wiki system (or: wiki on steroids, as Josef Holy put it), they want to be able to increase the productivity of knowledge workers. Sun Microsystems have extensive experience with online and community collaboration and they want Kiwi to become a social wiki platform that is deployable in various contexts, i.e. that ties in with other platforms such as Netbeans or Zembly.

One of Sun’s further assumptions is that users will migrate to KiWi neither immediately nor completely – and that’s an insight anyone developing yet another social platform should take to their heart. What was true in Field of Dreams - “If you build it, they will come” – does not quite apply here. The network effect works in favour of existing communities, and instead of striving to replace an existing platform, one might be better off with mashable contents and services.

The particular benefit of a semantic wiki is that it allows moving from unstructured to structured information (relatively) easily. For KiWi @ Sun (and in favour of mashed information), this means that what is relevant will be structured, both by people and by machines - a process that is going to extend beyond company boundaries. People will bring in structure by creating links from KiWi documents to external systems as well as by writing new facts (which the KiWi system will represent as triples) about external information. What is not relevant, won’t be structured – and will be forgotten. After all, it’s forgetting that makes you remember the important stuff.

One note about the users of KiWi at Sun: Since this use case focuses on knowledge management for software development, it can be taken for granted that users will have an above-average level of web savvyness. Primary users will be software designers (i.e. the people who design for the users of the final product) and developers – learn more about the different roles in a software development project at Sun here.

Consequently, the User Interface (UI) concept Josef introduced also comprises a social networking unit – things such as a ‘My Contacts’, ‘My Pages’ list, but most importantly an activity feed, which will help users to collaborate, participate, discover activities that others are currently working, develop a mental ‘social map’ of the community. Such an activity stream (similar to Facebook’s News Stream) would contain items such as:

• Szaby wrote a blog post
• Josef rated document XUI specs: five stars
• Peter created document ToDoList KiWi-UI
• Stephanie is now a contact of Marek
• Klara shared a document with Sebastian

Considering the target group, it is also planned that the UI will be extensible through widgets that users are able to write themselves.

*coffee break*

Above: The KiWi-Team, hailing (officially) from Austria, the Czech republic, Denmark and Germany

After the break, Andreas Blumauer (Semantic Web Company, Vienna) followed up with a talk entitled “Open Ontology Management & Linked Data” which explored the uses of the Web of Data for the Sun usecase.

His argument was that content and topic-centred, open communities should have mechanisms at their disposal for relating content and activities to particular parts of a shared concept model, e.g. of an ontology. In particular in projects like NetBeans, where contents and related processes evolve over time, different NetBeans groups utilizing the KIWI system should be allowed to maintain and share their own concept models. The combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches would, for instance, come as the combination of free tagging (where people often use different labels to refer to the same, or the same label to refer to different things) and concept tagging.

Free concepts can be turned into controlled ones, too, by being inserted into an existing controlled vocabulary, as either a narrower or related concept of any existing controlled concept. Open Ontology Management done this way is a Learning system: Through the combination of a Free Extraction Model (FEM) and a Controlled Extraction Model (CEM), text extraction improves over time.

Andreas also revealed a first glimpse of a project currently in stealth mode, code name ‘PoolParty’, which is an Open Ontology Management System that can be used to enrich local knowledge with data from the web. PoolParty consumes Linked Data and provides Linked Data; in the context of the current use case, it will be able to communicate with the KiWi System. Please contact Andreas if you would like to be notified about the further development of PoolParty.

English

KiWi - Knowledge in a Wiki session, pt. 2: This afternoon, we turned to the Logica use case, which is dedicated to the development and optimization of KiWi as a knowledge management tool specifically tailored to the needs of project management.

Regarding the use case requirements: As Daniel Grolin, a process expert and business architect at Logica (formerly WM Data), pointed out, what is most required at the moment is an application for designing processes, i.e. for designing the ways that people do things. This can be a painful process, in particular if one group of people (consisting of process designers) thinks about the ways that another group of people (e.g. the project managers) are going to do certain things – a collaborative approach should be able to

1) alleviate this challenge
2) generate commitment among the involved parties.

The primary users will be on the one hand the process engineers, and on the other hand the project managers who are the recipients and users of these processes.

In his presentation, Daniel Grolin chose one of four scenarios in which KiWi would ideally be employed: the risk analysis process – which is a vital process for Logica, as the outcomes of this analysis influence the decision whether or not a project will be accepted. From an architectural point of view, KiWi is going to mediate between the process guidance column – which consists of process and workflow features – and the final work product, i.e the result of a process, in this case the report of the risk analysis.

In practice this means that if, for instance, a user has selected the risk analysis process, the Kiwi core system and enabling technologies will provide concepts related to risk analysis, supporting the user in the tagging process. Wiki technology is already being used in the industry, said Daniel, but what is lacking at the moment is the integration of structure, and this is also where he sees the potential of KiWi as a knowledge management tool, and as a means to move easily from unstructured to structured information (by the way, if you are interested in using wikis in the enterprise, I also recommend this article: Wikis for Knowledge Engineering, and in Global Businesses).

Karsten Jahn (Aalborg University) then gave us a preview of a possible user interface (i.e. not of the screen design, but the functionalities) which seeks to address one particular problem: Many companies use many different, sophisticated tools which operate fine on their own, but are not integrated (i.e. there is no communication or exchange of data between them). With KiWi, the aim is to develop a tool that is going to be able to cover all features and processes currently being taken care of by individual tools, to allow for an optimum of data integration.

To conclude, Rolf Sint (Salzburg Research) showed us screens of the current configuration of KiWi for Logica’s needs – the example below is related to the risk analysis process outlined by Daniel Grolin above.

English

I’m sat at the moment amongst such a collection of library UK geekdom that I’ve not experienced the like before.  I’m in the basement of Birkbeck College in London for the Mashed Libraries UK 2008 event sponsored by UKOLN and organised by Owen Stephens.

Apart from the acrobatics of trying to get on to the wifi, which I’m sure could be made more than a little simpler and less frustrating, the day has got off to a great start.  Rob Styles did a great, mostly command line driven, introduction to using Talis Platform stores.  He was followed by Tony Hurst sharing his experiences, tips, and tricks, for using online tools such as Yahoo Pipes and the spreadsheet elements of Google Docs. This was an excellent session – each time I return to Yahoo Pipes I am amazed anew and wondering why I don’t use it more.  

Next we had Timm-Martin Siewert from Ex Libris, who gave an overview of their Open Platform Strategy, and a peek in to EL Commons.  This was the subject of a recent Talking with Talis podcast with Oren Beit-Arie Ex Libris Chief Strategy Officer.  Like myself in the podcast, others today questioned why EL Commons, being  a commons, is not open to all.

A previous colleague of mine from way back, Mark Allcock  now with OCLC then gave us a brief overview of readily available APIs from them.  Finally Ashley Sanders talked about some API work at COPAC.

After an excellent lunch, small groups formed resulting in much chatting and coding.

The afternoon was punctuated by a presentation from Paul Bevan, of the National Library of Wales.  Paul took us through the issues in how they are taking their resources to the majority of visitors – online.

That brought us to the end of the afternoon and some short reports on what people had been working.  Unsurprisingly from the presentations that started the day,  there were several groups who had made great progress using Yahoo Pipes and the Talis Platform and in several cases both of these.  For example via Pipes one group were pulling book records from Amazon, adding Jacket images then augmenting them with holdings data from the Platform. Another plotted library locations for records from the Platform, on a Google Map by again using holdings data and also location data from the Silkworm Directory.

All in all an excellent day enjoyed by thirty plus people interested in using technology to improve libraries.  There is already talk of the next one.  Well done Owen for organising this one.

Update: Dave Pattern has uploaded several photos of the day to Flickr – the image above being one of them.

English

Semantic MediaWiki is being featured in issue 12/2008 of the German popular computer magazine iX in an article about wiki engines. It’s the only semantic wiki among those presented, and although it is an extension of MediaWiki (which underlies Wikipedia) - which is also in the article - it is discussed separately and thus receives quite some emphasis in the article. iX has featured Semantic MediaWiki before, more precisely in an article dedicated to it in 11/2007. It’s well-deserved, I think, considering the many sites which use Semantic MediaWiki.

It’s good to see that the visibility of Semantic Web is also growing outside academia and involved industry.

Author: Pascal Hitzler

English

From the latest IIA and AMAS State of the Net Issue 11:

Online Advertising

Online audience measurement in Ireland is dogged by a torrent of data. Some of it is irrelevant (such as hits on a website, which aren’t a true measure of online traffic) and little of it is directly comparable. This makes the job of media planners, the professionals who buy online advertising, a challenging one.

The arrival of a new mechanism to measure traffic on Irish websites is welcome, particularly as it offers a robust methodology and directly comparable data. The Internet Audience Measurement (IAM) is an initiative of Bluemetrix, the Irish company which measures online traffic in distant markets such as Japan and Scandinavia.

Its software was running on 38 Irish websites when the first tranche of data, on which our graph is based, was released in early November. Not all the big sites are signed up and some of those that are (such as Daft.ie and The Irish Times) did not have any stats available for the first monthly release.

But while, the top 10 table is limited in its scope, it enables like-for-like comparisons as the same measurement tool is used. This new measure will gain in importance over coming months, as more sites sign up and more data becomes available.

Source: Bluemetrix study of 38 Irish websites for October 2008 (www.irelandmetrix.ie)

English

Neologism is a simple web-based RDF Schema vocabulary editor and publishing system under development at DERI. It looks like a great lightweight tool for developing Semantic Web vocabularies and publishing them on the Web following current best practices. It’s goal is to “dramatically reduce the time required to create, publish and modify vocabularies for the Semantic Web.” The system is not yet open for use, but there is a good online Neologism demo as well as a screencast of how to use it.

English

It’s been five months since the last Joint Work Package (WP) meeting in the KiWi - Knowledge in a Wiki - project. This morning, we gathered in Vienna for the next round - focus this time around will be on the core system (architecture developed by the WP3 team, handing over and paving the way for WP 4 team) and the use cases (Logica, Sun Microsystems) where it is of particular importance that everyone involved in the project understands the requirements of the use cases.

In the first presentation today, Sebastian Schaffert from Salzburg Research gave us a tour of two different configurations of the KiWi system. The KiWi core system is oriented towards content versatility, meaning that content items can be displayed and used in various contexts and configurations. As a service to the user, KiWi uses Javascript-based WYSIWYG Editor TinyMCE enhanced with a few home-grown plug-ins which, for instance, make it easier to set links to other wiki pages. Memorizing wiki shorthand is sometimes a challenge, so this feature helps getting things done.

Using a different skin and interface, KiWi can take various forms and shapes – even shapes where you might not spot the wiki in it at first glance. TagIT is such an example of an adaptation of the KiWi core system: a geotagging platform targeting youth in Salzburg who can locate, tag and comment on places that matter to them.

Vice versa, KiWi in its wiki incarnation displays a little map, provided a content item is enhanced with geoinformation; technically, the map on the wiki page is an interpretation of a georelated tag (learn more about complex, structured tags proposed by the KiWi Enabling Technologies Work Package in this article: Usage Data Model Day in the KiWi Project).

Take a look at the screenshots below:

It is the same article that is being displayed, in the first example using the classic KiWi interface, in the second example using the TagIT interface with the article appearing as an info page.

This afternoon, we expect to see another configuration of the system, in a presentation about how the system is specifically tailored to the needs of Logica’s “Knowledge Management for Project Management” usecase.

N.B. The system is not yet publicly available, if you have questions, please contact Sebastian Schaffert.

Related articles by Zemanta

• KiWi Joint Work Package Meeting in Prague
• KiWi: Knowledge in a Wiki
• Usage Data Model Day in the KiWi Project
• Not a pipeline, but a graph: software development in the KiWi/Sun usecase

English

After several months of people asking for code downloads and reporting errata, we have finally created a website companion for Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist.  There's more to come, but so far we have the basics - downloads for all the examples in the book and a list of errata.  Now all the URIs in the book actually have a place to resolve to!

Uncategorized

"Ya estan aquiiiiii", decía la niña de Poltergeist.

Ya están disponibles Datos de la Web de los Datos. La WEB 3.0.
Datos para coger y usar. Para ser buscados, encontrados, consumidos, intercambiados, enlazados...

SINDICE nos los pone en bandeja: libros, eventos, música, personas, lugares, ciencia, proyectos, .........


Utiliza su API en tu aplicación y abusa de los datos.


Otra lectura de la noticia:

- Dale significado a los datos de tu Web cuanto antes. La competencia lo hace y los buscadores los premian: "Yahoo! announced that the existing SearchMonkey apps for CitySearch and Zagat are now available by default to all users of Yahoo! Search."


Otro día os hablo de Search Monkey y otras facilidades para "dar Significado" a los datos de tu aplicación Web.

Spanish

The winners of the SIOC (pronounced “shock”) data competition being run by DERI at the National University of Ireland, Galway have been announced. The competition ran from September to October 2008, and the brief was to produce an interesting creation based on a data set of discussion posts reflecting ten years of Irish online life from boards.ie, Ireland’s largest community website. The competition had about sixty registrants and there were eight final submissions of very high quality.

First prize

The top winning submission was entitled “SIOC.ME: A Real-Time Interactive Visualisation of boards.ie Semantic Data within a 3-D Space”. The entry illustrates how 3-D visualisations may be harnessed to not only provide an interactive means of presenting or browsing data but also to create useful data analysis tools, especially for manipulating the “semantic” (meaningful) data from online communities and social networking sites. The entry was submitted by Darren Geraghty, a user interface and interaction designer, and it was praised by the judges for the huge amount of effort that went into creating it. A video of the application may be viewed here and a demonstration of the tool can be seen at go.sioc.me.

Second prize

In second place was a visualisation application called “boardsview” by Stephen Dolan of Trinity College Dublin. This is an interactive, real-time animation where one can watch the historical content from many discussion forums changing in real or compressed time. In this application, you can zoom into a particular forum to see individual users posting messages or to see threads being created and destroyed.

Third prize

Third prize was awarded to the “Forum Activity Graph” by Drew Perttula from California. This entry was a visualisation showing the popularity of forums on boards.ie as represented by coloured rivers of information, which were then rendered and displayed using Google Maps.

Other final submissions included:

• “Forum Map Demonstration” by Tristan Webb and Ian Dickinson of HP Labs Bristol, a demonstration of self-organising maps applied to an information navigation problem in a big community site,
• “WebThere: Semantic APML Profiles” by Brian MacKay from Pennsylvania, a service for creating and maintaining profiles of user interests and attention preferences in social websites,
• “Find Something Interesting” by ITT Dublin’s Alexandra Roshchina and Aleksey Kharkov, an application to provide recommendations of the most interesting posts and threads based on interest-matching and graph-mining techniques,
• “ChartBoards” by Martin Harrigan of TCD, a tool for examining community trends via term frequencies, and,
• “Visualising the boards.ie Community Culture with Charts” by Eoin McLoughlin of TCD, where various graph types were used to simplify the huge amount of available community data to something that could allow someone to easily grasp its size and depth.

The competition was judged by an independent panel of three experts: Ian Davis, Chief Technology Officer with Talis; Harry Halpin, researcher at the University of Edinburgh and chair of the W3C GRDDL working group; and Peter Mika, researcher at Yahoo! Research Barcelona and author of the book “Social Networks and the Semantic Web”. The first prize is an Amazon voucher for $4000; second prize is a voucher for $2000; third prize is a voucher for $1000.

English

You have probably already heard about GoodRelations, “the web ontology for e-commerce”. Martin Hepp from Bundeswehr University in Munich recently created a webcast, giving a short introduction to semantic web-based E-Commerce and to the GoodRelations vocabulary - I want to see more of such introductions which aim at a wider audience in terms of style and intellectual accessibility!

Last week I had an an encounter with a social scientist (within an academic setting) who argued that discussing the Semantic web would not make sense for him (as a social scientist), because of the present lack of social practices in that field… (*jaw-dropping*) I could not persuade him with the argument that the Linked data cloud itself was the result of a social practice - the view he had of the semantic web (which I assume was not an uneducated one) even led him to denounce that developments like Dbpedia, Twine, Revyu, or the use of metadata in general had anything to do with the Semantic Web.

And this is a big challenge.

On the one hand, it is a good thing that there are social scientists who at least have a certain notion of the Semantic Web - on the other, it seems as if all the exciting ideas and developments that have taken place in the last few years have failed to reach those who have been sensitized for the SemWeb project when the idea was first conceived. I am not meaning to make a statement about social scientists here, but rather about the need to communicate what has further happened to the original idea outside also outside of one’s own community.

Btw: In its current issue, quarterly (German-language) magazine t3n is featuring a Web 3.0 and Applied Semantic Web topic as its opener. And that is a good sign, too!

English

Os dejo un vídeo que me ha parecido excepcional. Did you know? en su versión 2008-3.0 resume algunos datos sobre el contexto socio económico, demográfico y tecnológico que vivimos y viviremos. Lo he transcrito, traducido y dejado aquí para que lo interpretéis. Los datos, también por escrito después del vídeo, sin duda, lo merecen.

¿Lo sabías?  Si eres uno entre un millón en China… hay 100 personas que están como tú.

China será pronto el país con más personas que hablen inglés en el mundo.

El 25% de la población India con el IQ más alto es más que la población total de los Estados Unidos.

India tiene más niños a los que rinde homenaje que niños en total hay en América.

Los 10 trabajos con más demanda en 2010… no existían en 2004

Estamos preparando a los estudiantes para trabajos que todavía no existen… que utilizarán tecnologías aún no inventadas. Para resolver problemas que ni siquiera conocemos aún.

El departamento estadounidense de trabajo estima que un estudiante de hoy habrá pasado por unos 10-14 puestos de trabajo a los 38

1 de cada 4 trabajadores lleva en el mismo puesto menos de un año. 1 de cada 2, menos de 5 años. 1 de cada 8 parejas casadas en los US el último año se conoció online.

Hay unos 200 millones de usuarios registrados en MySpace. Si MySpace fuese un país sería el 5o más poblado del mundo (entre Indonesia y Brasil)

El primer país en penetración de internet de banda ancha es…Bermudas. US está en el número 19, en el 22 Japón.

Vivimos tiempos exponenciales….
Se realizan 31 billones de búsquedas en Google cada mes. En 2006 eran 2,7 billones.

¿A quién se preguntaban esas cosas antes de Google? (”BG”, “before Google”)

El primer mensaje de texto comercial fue enviado en diciembre de 1992. Hoy, el número de mensajes de texto enviados y recibidos cada día excede la población total del planeta.

Costó 38 años a la radio alcanzar una audiencia de 50 millones de personas. A la Tv 13 años, a Internet 4 años. Un iPod 3 años…Facebook 2 años…

El número de dispositivos para internet en 1984 era de 1000. El número de dispositivos para internet en 1992 era de 1.000.000. El número de dispositivos para internet en 2008 es de 1.000.000.000

Existen unas 540.000 palabras en el Inglés de hoy, 5 veces más que durante la época de Shakespeare.

Se estima que una semana de New York Times contiene más información de la que una persona era capaz de procesar a lo largo de su vida en el siglo 18.

Se estima que durante este año se generarán 4 exabytes de información única, más que en los 5000 años previos.

El volumen de nueva información técnica se dobla cada 2 años. Para los estudiantes que vayan a cursar un grado de 4 años esto significa… que la mitad de lo que aprenderán el primer año de estudio estará desfasado el tercero.

Las NNTT han probado con éxito un cable de fibra óptica que transporta 14 billones de bits por segundo en una sola línea de fibra.

Eso significa 2660 Cds o 210 millones de llamadas de teléfono por segundo se triplica cada 5 meses y se espera que siga haciéndolo durante los próximos 20 años.

En 2013 se construirá una supercomputadora que excederá las capacidades computacionales del cerebro humano.

Las predicciones dicen que en 2049, un ordenador de 1000 dólares excedera las capacidades computacionales de la especie humana.
Durante el tiempo que ha durado esta presentación han nacido 67 niños en US, 274 en China, 395 en India.

Y 518.201 canciones han sido descargadas de forma ilegal. Bueno…694.000

¿Pero qué significa todo esto?



Creado por Karl Fisch y modificado por Scott McLeod.

Spanish

We issued a shared use key for participants in the recent Mountain View mashupcamp to utilize. Over the next several weeks we'll be ramping down the volume limits associated with that key and turning it off entirely in about one month.

 

If you built something using the shared key - please take the time to register for your own key on this site and use it to replace the shared key. We want all of your cool applications to keep working.

Regards

English

We’re looking at some tough times for companies that have been supported by ad revenues, like newspapers, magazines, broadcasters, and Google. Google?!? Yes, Google.

It is being reported that Google is set to lay off about one-third of it’s workforce.

“Google has been quietly laying off staff and up to 10,000 jobs could be on the chopping block according to sources. Since August, hundreds of employees have been laid off and there are reports that about 500 of them were recruiters for Google.

By law, Google is required to report layoffs publicly and with the SEC however, Google has managed to get around the legal requirement. In fact, one of the ways Google was able to meet Wall Street’s Q3 earnings expectations was by trimming “operational” expenses.

Google reports to the SEC that it has 20,123 employees but in reality it has 30,000. Why the discrepancy? Google classifies 10,000 of the employees as temporary operational expenses or “workers”. Google co-founder Sergey Brin said, “There is no question that the number (of workers) is too high”.

According to this article, the bulk of these “temporary workers” have been working at Google for years and moved “from job to job every few months so that their status remains temporary”.

Update I 11/25: This note on CNet, Google cutting contractor workforce, says that Google announced its plans to trip their force of 10,000 contractors earlier in October, as reported by the SJ Mercury New.

Update II 11/25: Vint Cerf commented on Dave Farber’s IP mailing list that:

1. Google is still hiring but at a lower rate than before
2. for the past year, Google has been reducing the number of temporary staff and shifting jobs to employees.

Update III 11/25: Tim O’Reilly reports (also on IP) that WebGuild may not be the most reliable source of information on Google.

English

Jean-Jacques Solari has recently published French translations for two W3C Semantic Web related Working Group Notes:

1. “Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies”, under the title “Méthodes exemplaires pour la publication des vocabulaires RDF”
2. “RDFa Primer”, under the title “Introduction à RDFa”

English

Los datos son, de hecho, el Intel Inside de las aplicaciones de éxito de la Web actual: un único componente original en sistemas cuya infraestructura software es en gran medida software abierto o software que de algún otro modo se ha convertido en una commodity. Si por un lado los datos pueden requerir tecnología costosa para ser obtenidos, cómo es el caso de fotos de satelites para los mapas de Google o Yahoo, por el otro es posible aprovechar el trabajo colaborativo de millones de usuarios que cada día enriquecen las bases de datos de manera del todo gratuita.

Y si el valor añadido está en el trabajo de colaboración usuarios, ¿que hace que éstos dediquen su tiempo de forma gratuita para enriquecer una base de datos? La construcción del Empire State Building necesitó 7 millones de horas, el canal de Panamá 20 millones, mientras las horas dedicadas para jugar al solitario durante un año por la población mundial es de 9 billones.

Al parecer la gente se aburre mucho.

Son asombrosos los números reportados por Clay Shirky, profesor de la New York University, que a la Web 2.0 Expo de este año ha intentado contestar a la pregunta "¿Donde encuentra el tiempo la gente?". Se hablaba de Wikipedia. Shirky, calculadora a la mano, nos dice que si los americanos en lugar de mirar la tele (200 billones de horas) se pusieran a escribir la Wikipedia, en un año completarían una obra 2000 veces mas extensa que la actual (que ha requerido "tan solo" 100 millones de horas de trabajo).

Bien, es probable que el hombre/mujer medio prefiera ver un episodio del doctor House a escribir un artículo sobre los Sumerios pero la Wikipedia es una realidad y hay otros factores como el prestigio y el reconocimiento "social" de la comunidad que llevan personas comunes a dedicar su tiempo a proyectos como este.
Si luego le convertimos todo en un juego, tenemos la oportunidad de despertar el pequeño ludopata que se esconde en todos nosotros.

Luis von Ahn ya ha demostrado las potencialidades de los juegos útiles (Games with a Purpose): gracias al ESPGame se han etiquetado ya 50 millones de imagenes de manera totalmente gratuita gracias a un juego que aprovecha el aburrimiento humano. Google agradece y promete un servicio de búsqueda de imagenes mas eficaz del actual.

En Games with a Purpose se pueden encontrar diferentes juegos "útiles": desde Tag a Tune que te desafía a descubrir si estas escuchando la misma canción que el otro usuario a través de las etiquetas que los dos pueden teclear en pocos segundos para describir lo que escuchan. Resultado? clasificación manual y gratuita de centenares de miles de canciones y sonidos.

Tags, folksnomies, clasificación, semántica... a jugar!

Spanish

I first met my friend Robert - the founder of OneRiot - in November 2007. In all of our conversations Robert has carried a consistent message: the various groups involved with browser add-ons need to communicate more, share greater knowledge, collaborate further.

A few months ago Robert reached out to me and Dick Hardt from Sxipper with a new message: let’s do something to help.

From that call Add-on-Con was born.

For the first time, on December 11th, a diverse group of individuals involved in the add-on industry will get together to discuss the future of the browser platform.

Representatives from Mozilla, Microsoft and Google will join add-on developers, marketers, investors and thought-leaders to share knowledge, network, and strengthen the add-on community.

The one day, two-track, conference takes a deep dive into both the technical and business sides of the industry. There are two incredible keynote scheduled and the speaker roster is incredible.

Registration is only $100 with the discout code ‘adaptiveblue’. If you are involved with add-ons this event will be invaluable and you should definitely attend. I’m looking forward to seeing you there!

English

Algunos quizás recordéis la triste historia de Cuil. Ex-trabajadores de Google intentaban crear una alternativa mejor.

Pues bien…sigue mostrándonos una pantalla negra, sigue en activo, pero en mi caso, como me temo que en el vuestro, esta ha sido la segunda vez que lo he utilizado.

Y no es que se trate, ni de falta de calidad ni de la fuerza o la confianza que nos genere determinada marca.

Chrome vivió en mi ordenador un tiempo, pero no sobrevivió a un cambio reciente de equipo. Y eso a pesar de que valoré muy positivamente su velocidad…pero volví a Firefox.

¿Algún motivo para nuestra reticencia a los cambios? Pues podría elaborar muchos…y a veces dejarme llevar por algunos de tipo ideológico, pero la verdad es que creo que estaréis conmigo en que, en el fondo,  Internet reafirma lo que ya sabíamos sobre nosotros mismos: somos animales de costumbres.

Quería presentaros hoy una iniciativa de Adobe que dicen que amenaza (yo no lo creo) el monopolio de Google. Desarrollada por expertos investigadores de la Universidad de Washington, se trata de en un buscador que va un paso más allá de Google, mostrando resultados de la web en distintos períodos de tiempo:

Patrones en la nube de datos, historia de la información, me ha recordado la caducidad de los documentos digitales en su intento de parecerse en mayor medida a las ya olvidadas por muchos, bibliotecas de papel.

Su nombre, curioso si lo buscamos en wikipedia: Zoetrope: … “Un dispositivo que produce una ilusión de acción en base a la sucesión rápida de imágenes estáticas”. Algo así como los primeros dibujos animados.

Como the Internet Archive, los datos de Zoetrope proceden de un backup de toda la web, incluyendo páginas que han ido cambiando con el tiempo. Pero a diferencia del primero, parece que la forma de presentarnos esos contenidos será excepcional: cajas con cada contenido, conexión de datos entre sitios y gráficos de datos relevantes, todo presentado con un scroll en el que podemos avanzar o retroceder a través del tiempo. Y todo ello, como podéis ve ren el vídeo, con especial atención a una experiencia de usuario simple:

Recuerda la nueva API de visualización de Google, que permite a los desarrolladores la misma elaboración de gráficos, tablas, widgets…pero está pensada para los usuarios e investigadores casuales.

Como ejemplos de uso se propone, desde la búsqueda de ránkings históricos de equipos o jugadores en cualquier deporte hasta la evolución de la polución en el aire de Beiking.

Hacer que los navegadores sean una ventana a la web de todos los tiempos y no sólo a la actual, añadir la dimensión temporal a la experiencia de navegación…

En fin…que creo que si olvidamos titulares grandilocuentes sobre si desbancará o no al “monstruo” de la web, puede constituir un avance o una buena alternativa. Más si complementa su dimensión temporal con una mejora de la calidad en las búsquedas actuales o pasadas mediante la incorporación de ontololgías y demás mejoras que proporciona un acercamiento semántico al tema.

Saldrá al mercado web, libre, el próximo verano. Y no sé si por su calidad o por la marca que le sustenta pero creo que en esta ocasión sí valoraremos la calidad y cambiaremos de costumbres.

Noticia en: RRW

Spanish

1. Best Financial Services Website - www.irishdeposits.ie
2. Best Travel, Tourism and Hospitality Website - www.ireland-guide.com
3. Best Digital Media Website - www.tv3.ie
4. Best Sports and Leisure Website - www.imra.ie
5. Best Community and Charity Website - www.heartsplay.ie
6. Best Education, Research and Training Website - www.osi.ie
7. Best E-Business Website (exclusive to web business) - www.litriocht.com
8. Best Property Website (non portal) - www.chesterfieldblackrock.ie
9. Best Mobile Content or Application - www.sentrywireless.com
10. Best New Indigenous Website 2008 - www.movies.ie
11. Best Use of Film, Digital Animation or Motion Graphics - www.thebellatwylye.com
12. Best Blog - www.mulley.net
13. Best E-Government Website - www.osi.ie
14. Best Entertainment and Games-Related Website - www.redfm.ie
15. Best FMCG Website (fast-moving consumer goods) - www.lucozadesport.ie
16. Best Recruitment Website - www.prosperity.ie
17. Best Interactive Marketing Campaign - www.mrtayto.ie
18. Best Professional Services Website - www.rbk.ie
19. Best Web Design and Development Agency - www.webfactory.ie
20. Best Retail and Home Shopping Website - www.toyota.ie
21. Best Social Networking and Community Website (people’s choice) www.boards.ie
22. Young Designer of the Year - Naoise O Conchubhair
23. Internet Hero - Aodhan Cullen
24. Grand Prix - www.tv3.ie

English

Another new innovation from Google. They are so far ahead in the search game and every innovation basically accelerates them away from MS and Yahoo even faster. I’d characterise SearchWiki as a blending/blurring of search and bookmarking. They need to unify it with Google Bookmarks, Search History and Notebook which will probably happen over the coming 12 months. The outcome is the going to be a searchable bookmarking and annotation system backed by Google’s index of the web so you always find something and often it’s the best possible. An amazing display of personalisation at the largest scale.

English

During my Talking with Talis podcast conversation with Karen Calhoun and Roy Tennant about the new OCLC Record Use Policy, which has been causing such a furore in the blogosphere, Karen (Vice President WorldCat and Metadata Services) did not feel prepared enough in the legal aspects of  the issues at hand to answer a couple of the questions I posed.  She did offer to post replies on the OCLC Metalogue blog to these when she had chance to discuss them with OCLC’s legal backroom.

The first of these questions was about how OCLC can be both a not for profit and have activities which are commercial organisations.  This is the response she posted