Planet Semantico

UMBC is hosting a site for the Global Game Jam (GGJ) which was organized by Professors Marc Olano and Neal McDonald. The GGJ is a 48 hour event in which more than 1,750 people at 53 international sites work to design, test and implement computer games based on a few loose constraints. The event started at 5:00pm Friday (local time) and ends at 5:00pm Sunday.

On the UMBC GAIM blog, Marc reports that

“After three hours of brainstorming, we pulled together four good teams. You can watch our live progress on our ustream.tv feed.”

The final games must be uploaded to the GGJ central site by 3:00pm after which the four local teams will present and demonstrate their games in the game lab (ECS 005) and/or Lecture Hall 5 (ECS building).

Check out the feed to see the 22 UMBC participants at work and view their online chat or see some photos on Flickr. Visitors are welcome to stop by the ECS building Sunday around 4:00pm to see the final presentations and demonstrations (ECS LH5 and/or ECS 005a).

Free live streaming by Ustream
(visit usstream.tv for chat)

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Maybe I should turn off the Firefox Adblock plugin and enjoy this new form of machine humor.

From M. Turk via Time’s Swampland.

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The Google has flipped out. Starting a few minutes ago when I try to click on any Google search result, I am shown the Google malware page. The one below was the result when I tried to click through to http://google.com/, the first result for searching for “google”. It is obviously an error in Google’s software and one that surely will be fixed shortly, if it has not been fixed already. Since Google is highly distributed, it’s possible that only some of their sites are in error.

Once you get the “Warning - visiting this web site may harm your computer!” page, the only way to continue on to the page is by manually selecting the text of the URL from the warning page and pasting it into your browser’s URL field.

Through experimentation, the problem exists for the deafult search service as well as image search but not for searchers over blogs, news, video, scholarly papers or shopping.

I suppose this could be the world’s safest CYA disclaimer, but if so they may as well add Do not taunt happy fun ball.

Update: This seems to have been fixed around 10:15am GMT-5.

Update 2: Here is Google’s post about the problem.

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Kevin Kelly wrote an interesting post today, which cites one of my earlier diagrams on the future of the Web. His diagram is a map of two types of collective intelligence -- collective human...

Collective Intelligence, English, global brain, kevin kelly, one machine, the one machine

Next week the JHU Center for Language and Speech Processing will host a talk by Martin Kay of Stanford University, When is a Translation not a Translation? at 4:30pm Tuesday, 3 February 2009. From the announcement:

“A translation is generally taken to be a text that expresses the same meaning as another text in a different language. But the products of the best translators reflects a different, if more illusive, goal. I will seek a somewhat more adequate characterization of translation as it is actually practiced and discuss its consequences for machine translation.

Martin Kay is a professor of linguistics and computer science at Stanford University. For many years, he was also a research fellow at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. He made a number of fundamental contributions to computational linguistics, including chart parsing, unification grammar, and applications of finite-state technology, notably in phonology. He has been an intermittent worker on, and skeptical observer of, machine translation since 1958.”

For a preview of what he will probably talk about, you might look at a paper on Professor Kay’s web site that he describes as “some unfinished musings on the nature of translation“.

This a chance to hear someone who has made many important contributions to several areas of computational linguistics and computer science over a long career.

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Andreas Blumauer (Semantic Web Company) talked with Brian Donnelly about a new system on the market called “Semantic Discovery System” (SDS), which helps to do sophisticated queries across existing datasets. Also talking why complex scripts or triple stores should not be exposed to the end-users anymore.

SDS is doing, what semantic web enterprises promised for years: An application that allows users to formulate sophisticated questions on their datasets and getting back data without writing SQL statements or going down to OWL concepts.

SDS leave the data in its orignal format and doing no transformation into triple stores. And then give the user through a graphical desktop software - with the use of OWL and SPARQL - the possibility to formulate questions on this datasets. So this is a software engine that focuses “at business people with a tool as easy to use as Excel or Mind Manager - with zero need to know or care about OWL, SPARQL” as Donnelly explains.

The next times will show if Donnelly’s “Semantic Discovery System” may be a semantic web killer application. In any case it seems to be a good step in bringing semantic technologies out of the teccie’s corner onto the desktops of business users.

Read the full interview at www.semantic-web.at

English

Compártelo:

Spanish

The recent release of Open Calais v4 offers excting new possibilities by making a great contribution to Linked Data efforts.

Previous releases of Thomson Reuter’s Open Calais web service already produced promising results by extracting named entities, facts and events from user submitted contet - especially news articles. Now these extracted concepts come with an URI and are linked into the LOD cloud - specifically to DBpedia, Freebase, Musicbrainz, CIA world fact book and others.

On this occasion Tom Tague, vice president of the Calais creators ClearForest, answered questions the Semantic Web Company had about the goals of Open Calais. 

The latest release of Open Calais produces metadata conforming to linked data principles. You provide this great service free to everyone via your web service.
What led to that decision, which benefits are there for Thomson Reuters?

Thomson Reuters has the largest trusted content sources in the world - but we don’t have all the content in the world. We believe that the world is going to want to integrate highly managed and trustworthy content assets such as those provided by Thomson Reuters with the low latency, highly diverse content exploding on the web. Fundamentally what we’re trying to achieve is nearly effortless interoperability of content between any two partners - Calais enables this by extracting the semantic metadata buried in your content but then takes it a step further. By linking those semantic elements to the Linked Data cloud we are setting the stage for the dramatic enhancement of any content source - and we hope that many will choose Thomson Reuters as one of the methods for enhancing that content.

It seems with Open Calais you use a hybrid business model, which integrates end users in a form of enterprise collaboration into value creation.
Do you think such a business model is viable during the long run and what are your experience so far?

As of right now Calais isn’t truly a “Business”.  It’s a strategic initiative that’s setting at least a piece of the stage for the Linked Content Economy. Our goal is to understand how this new content economy is going to involve and to make certain that we have a leadership position as it moves from a concept to reality.

Apart from the thousands of users submitting content to Open Calais, there is also a community of developers making their own applications around your core app. How important are the social dynamics of the Open Source community for the success of Open Calais?

Extraordinarily important. Calais is a web service - which means it’s relevant to about 0.0001% of the population. We are absolutely reliant on the creativity, energy and domain expertise of our developer community to translate Calais from a technology to an end-user relevant capability. And - as a user-driven project we also rely on our developers and users to give us feedback on what they like, what they don’t and where they think we should head.
What are your plans regarding to offering your service in German?

We hope to get there in 2009. We’ve released basic French and are gearing up for additional languages in the coming year.

Thank you, Tom, for your answers! We look forward to more applications like Semantic Proxy and Linked Facts that demonstrate the great protential of the Calais engine.

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Two new services based on semantic technologies came up recently: Jinni a recommendation portal for movies and tv shows and BooRah’s Restaurant Reputation Report. Both are good examples how the semantic web may be monetized.

Jinni provides recommendations, answering a free given search. Based on semantic technologies Jinni uses Natural Language Processing on plot, mood, style, setting, soundtrack and more in combination with an ontology, created by film professionals (like Jinni says). When it launched in December, Jinni had 10,000 movie, TV and video titles.

In Jinni you don’t need to know about exact title, actor, director, place or year of production to get an result, you can enter simply a phrase describing the mood, genre or place the movie is about, and you will guided through a facilitated search to narrow your search and get at the end what you want. Or alternative, if you search for a movie and you have only a vague idea of the plot, you can formulate a plot’s description in free phrasing. As it also offers APIs for Internet and TV content providers you can make your way direct to an online store to download or purchase the movie.

Another idea how to develop business orientated semantic web services comes with BooRah. BooRah is a service targeting restaurant owners to provide them reports of positive and negative reviews of food, service and ambiance at their restaurants. For that the service monitors negative and positive trends across hundreds of online review sites. Now restaurant owners can subscribe to receive a PDF of their monthly reports for an introductory price of $15 and a regular price of $25 per month. This PDFs came with charts, trends, rankings, summaries and some quotes from users, month by month. The reports may enable those restaurant owners to react and improve their services in the specific field. A simple but straight forward way to make money with semantic technologies

Related articles

• BooRah Now Selling Semantic Yelp, CitySearch Report Cards
• Jinni: Wants to be Pandora for Movies

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This year’s Text Analysis Conference (TAC) has an interesting track focused on processing text to populate Wikipedia infoboxes, both for existing entities with missing values as well as newly discovered entities.

TAC has been run by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to to encourage research in natural language processing and related applications. As in the NIST sponsored MUC, TREC and ACE workshops, this is done by by providing a large test collection, common evaluation procedures, and a forum for organizations to share their results. The first TAC was held this year and included 65 teams from 20 countries who participated in three tracks: question answering, summarization and recognizing textual entailments.

TAC 2009 will include a new track on Knowledge Base Population coordinated by Paul McNamee of the Johns Hopkins University Human Language Technology Center of Excellence.

“The goal of the new Knowledge Base Population track is to augment an existing knowledge representation with information about entities that is discovered from a collection of documents. A snapshot of Wikipedia infoboxes will be used as the original knowledge source, and participants will be expected to fill in empty slots for entities that do exist, add missing entities and their learnable attributes, and provide links between entities and references to text supporting extracted information. The KBP task lies at the intersection of Question Answering and Information Extraction and is expected to be of particular interest to groups that have participated in ACE or TREC QA.”

This is an exciting task and doing well in it will require a a mixture of language processing, knowledge-based processing and (probably) machine learning.

The TAC 2009 workshop will be co-located with TREC and held 16-17 November in Gaithersburg, MD. If you are interested in participating, you should register by March 3.

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NSF has a press release out on the upcoming North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad. UMBC is hosting a site for the first rouund, which will take place on February 4. You can still sign up by February 3 is space is available.

“Early next month, high school students from across the United States and Canada will begin the first rounds of the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO). Although the competition aims to identify students to represent the United States at the 2009 International Linguistics Olympiad, it is also a chance for young people to explore their interests in linguistics, math or computer science and pick up some useful new skills.”

NSF has produced a nice video for NACLO that explains computational linguistics, NACLO and their relevance today.

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WWW2009 will include a workshop on Semantics for the Rest of Us: Variants of Semantic Web Languages in the Real World on 20 April 2009 in Madrid, Spain.

“The Semantic Web is a broad vision of the future of personal computing, emphasizing the use of sophisticated knowledge representation as the basis for end-user applications’ data modeling and management needs. Key to the pervasive adoption of Semantic Web technologies is a good set of fundamental “building blocks” - the most important of these are representation languages themselves. W3C’s standard languages for the Semantic Web, RDF and OWL, have been around for several years; instead of strict standards compliance, we see “variants” of these languages emerge in applications, often tailored to a particular application’s needs. These variants are often either subsets of OWL or supersets of RDF, typically with fragments OWL added. Extensions based on rules, such as SWRL and N3 logic, have been developed as well as enhancements to the SPARQL query language and protocol.
    In this workshop we will explore the landscape of RDF, OWL and SPARQL variants, specifically from the standpoint of “real-world semantics”. Are there commonalities in these variants that might suggest new standards or new versions of the existing standards? We hope to identify common requirements of applications consuming Semantic Web data and understand the pros and cons of a strictly formal approach to modeling data versus a “scruffier” approach where semantics are based on application requirements and implementation restrictions.”

Full papers and position papers should be submitted by 15 February.

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For the last few months I’ve been spending much of my spare hacking time learning to code iPhone applications. I’ve found Objective C to be a surprisingly pleasant language, and Cocoa is one of the best frameworks I’ve ever worked with. I’ve reached a point where I feel I can go fairly quickly from simple app ideas to sketching in real code.

I’m a web developer at heart, and a scripting language user by preference. Coding for the iPhone doesn’t feel as fluid in text handling or HTTP access as the environments I’m used to. Fortunately I’ve been able to find some fantastic open-source libraries and wrappers that make up the difference. Here are my favourites so far:

GTMHTTPFetcher from Google Toolbox for Mac

The iPhone’s native HTTP handling is capable, but low-level and verbose. Rather than handling the many callbacks, NSData objects and options I prefer this wrapper. It has a ton of convenience methods allowing you to specify POST data and basic auth, follow redirects automatically, keep cookies over a session, set headers, and have two simple callbacks for success and error handling. In many ways it’s comparable to jQuery’s $.ajax() one-hit function.

JSON framework

Having got some data over HTTP from a web API, chances are that it’s available in JSON format. This simple framework extends NSString with a JSONValue method to convert any legal JSON string to nested NSDictionaries and NSArrays. To go the other way, dictionaries and arrays gain a JSONRepresentation method.

libxml2 wrappers for XPath over XML and HTML

Perhaps your web API returns XML, or perhaps you’re getting your data by screenscraping HTML. Did you know that the iPhone ships with libxml2, which has high-performance XML and HTML parsing and a high-quality XPath implementation? Don’t struggle with Cocoa’s NSXMLParser or get bogged down in the complex libxml2 docs; use these two simple wrapper functions, PerformXMLXPathQuery and PerformHTMLXPathQuery, to pull out the structured data you need in a Cocoa-friendly representation.

RegexKitLite for regular expressions

Where would scripting be without regular expressions? Luckily they’re available on the iPhone, but buried deep within the ICU libraries. RegexKitLite extends NSString with core regex string handling, including ’split’ (known as componentsSeparatedByRegex) and a search-and-replace operator (stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfRegex and replaceOccurrencesOfRegex).

FMDB, an Objective C wrapper for sqlite

Every scripting language has convenient database driver wrappers. I was very happy to find that sqlite is available on the iPhone, but unfortunately its interface is all bare-metal C. The simplest wrapper I’ve found so far is FMDB. Apparently somewhat inspired by JDBC, it gives you connection and resultset objects, along with one-liner convenience functions allowing code like [db intForQuery:@"SELECT COUNT(*) FROM things"].

And there’s more…

I’ve used all of the above in a real project, but I’ve got yet more things to explore on my todo list. These include Matt Gemmell’s web-style templating framework MGTemplateEngine, ActorKit for Erlang-style messaging and thread management and the LLVM/Clang Static Analyzer for automatic bug detection. What else do you use?

English, iphone

Prof. Rafael Capurro, one of the world’s most renowned experts of Information Ethics, together with his colleagues Max Senges (Ex-Google Researcher) and Michael Nagenborg (Robotics & Privacy Expert) has set up a collaborative project to “explore and discuss the values of netizens”. Please participate by contributing to their survey! (See below, I simply copied the email text.)

Dear all

It is my pleasure to introduce you to Rafael Capurro and Michael Nagenborg both experts in Informationethics. Following a podcast interview i held with Rafael (available @ archive.org ), we pursued his suggestion to initiate a dialogue about what underlying values users care about in their online lifes?

We have developed a short questionnaire which we invite you to fill out and spread amongst your network @ http://internetrightsandprinciples.org/node/63

This survey is meant as first step to gather some empirical data so we can (a) deliberate and discuss these themes further in the forum (where we have setup a dedicated discussion thread @ http://internetrightsandprinciples.org/node/64 and (b) strategize & formulate our project (and funding) proposals based on empirical evidence.

Again, please invite your friends and peers to contribute to this exploration of what user really care about when online.

Looking forward to discuss with you
Rafael, Michael and Max

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After forcing the closure of the lcsh.info service, which was set up by, Talking with Talis interviewee, Ed Summers to demonstrate how the Library of Congress Subject Headings could be represented as a Semantic Web application using SKOS [as I reported last month], there has been speculation as to when and what LC itself would do.

The following quote from a presentation [¹]  at ALA Midwinter show that they have been thinking, and doing, something about it.

LCSH in SKOS. In 2008 the Library began a pilot to make a subset of LCSH freely available in SKOS format on the Internet. Making LCSH available in SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) will facilitate its use for data manipulation and other applications on the Semantic Web and elsewhere. The web site on which it resided, lcsh.info, was not on an LC server, and was taken down in December 2008 to be replaced by the official site, expected to appear as <id.loc.gov/authorities> within the next couple of months. The Library of Congress remains committed to providing LCSH freely through SKOS. The former lcsh.info site will redirect users to the new URI.

A visit to id.loc.gov reveals the following [on a page last updated on January 22nd 2009]:

This site serves as a placeholder for forthcoming web services that will enable both humans and machines to programmatically access authority data at the Library of Congress. The initial services offered are influenced by — and therefore implement — the Linked Data movement’s approach of exposing and inter-connecting data on the Web via dereferenceable URIs. We aim to make resources available on this site within 6-8 weeks. Check this site regularly for more updates as we continue to develop this service!

and:

Initially, within 6 to 8 weeks, the Library of Congress will release its first offering: the Library of Congress Subject Headings. This will be an almost verbatim re-release of the system and content once found at the popular prototype lcsh.info service. The primary exception will be that the URIs for the data values will no longer take the form http://lcsh.info/{identifier}. Instead, they will start with http://id.loc.gov/authorities/{identifier}. If you have used the legacy lcsh.info metadata in an application, we advise updating to the new URIs, as we cannot guarantee a permanent redirect from old lcsh.info URIs to the new URIs at id.loc.gov.

Great to hear, and great for Ed.  Both that his work has stimulated the LC in to action and also demonstrated how it should be done.

My only thought on this is why did they go through all the fuss and negative PR about taking down lcsh.info before the LC service that replaces it was up and running a couple of months later?

[¹]  http://www.libraries.psu.edu/tas/jca/ccda/docs/lc0901.pdf (page 5)

Traffic Squad Police (LOC) image published in the The Library of Congress’ photostream on Flickr

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Prof. Adrian Paschke, head of the Corporate Semantic Web Working Group at the Free University of Berlin, gave an extensive interview on promises and challenges of the Corporate Semantic Web addressing methodological, technological and economic aspects. He says:

Corporate Semantic Web addresses both the consumer and the produce side, where consumers and producers might be humans as well as automated services, e.g. in business processes and enterprise service networks. This also includes the adequate engineering, modelling, negotiation and controlling of the use of the (meta)data and meaning representations in a (collaborating) community of users or services in enterprise settings where the individual meanings as elements of the internal cognitive structures of the members become attuned to each others’ view in a communicative process. This allows dealing with issues like ambiguity of information and semantic choices, relevance of information, information overload, information hiding and strategic information selection, as well as positive and negative consequences of actions (e.g. in a decision making process).

But, CSW does not only address the technological aspect but also the pragmatic aspect of actually using Semantic Web technologies in enterprises, which includes learning and training aspects as well as economical considerations. Incentives need to be provided to encourage in-house adoption and integration of these new Corporate Semantic Web technologies into the existing IT infrastructures, services and business processes. Decision makers on the operation, tactical and strategic IT management level need to understand the impact of this new technological approach and its adoption costs and return on investment. Therefore, companies will have in mind the economical justifiability of the deployment of new technologies.

I think he addresses some really crucial aspects of this emerging application field. Read the full interview here.

Corporate Semantic Web will also be a major topic at this year’s I-Semantics Conference from Sept. 2 - 4, 2009 in Graz/Austria. Also check out the forthcoming Semantic Web Meetup in Berlin on March 20, 2009, which is organized by Adrian Paschke’s team and the Semantic Web Company.

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The NYT has a story on technology downsizing, $200 Laptops Break a Business Model . It leads with an anecdote, a common and effective hook.

“The global credit crisis may have caused the decline in consumer and business spending that is assaulting the giants of high tech. But as the dominant technology companies try to emerge from this slump, they may find themselves blaming people like David Title just as much as they blame Wall Street. Mr. Title, a 35-year-old new-media manager at a film production company in New York, has dropped his cable subscription and moved to watching most of his television online — free. While shopping for a new laptop for his girlfriend recently, he sidestepped more expensive full-featured computers and picked a bare-bones, $200 Asus EeePC laptop, also known as a netbook.”

While I’m not sure about the $200 laptop — I paid $400 for what I considered a usable Asus eee last year — this trend is real. My sense is that we are all looking around and asking “Do I really need this” and answering, in many cases with a negative. Whether this is good or bad for the economy I don’t know. But it is good for the soul. Less is more seems to be an idea that takes hold on a regular basis, probably as a natural corrective action. One that seems very appropriate now.

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There are lots of good systems, including excel and other spreadsheet tools, that can visualize your data in various kinds of graphs. it can sometimes by a little daunting, however, to figure out which kind of chart to use. The version of excel running on my laptop, for example, asks me to choose from more than 70 kinds of charts. Of course, many of the variations are obviously stylistic — 2D vs 3D bar charts — but there are still a lot of options.

A link to a great data visualization cheat sheet on How to choose a chart is doing well on Hacker News today. The graphic was created by Andrew Abela and posted on his blog in Choosing a good chart over three years ago.

“Here’s something we came up with to help you consider which chart to use. It was inspired by the table in Gene Zelazny’s classic work Saying It With Charts (p. 27 in the 4th. ed)”

Abela developed this aid as part of his Extreme Presentation method for “designing presentations that drive action”. Viewing his Extreme Presentation blog you can find versions of this chart aide that have been translated into other languages

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Сергей Щербак (Sergey Shcherbak) has published a Russian translation of the RDFa primer, under the title “Начальное руководство по RDFa”.

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The RIF (Rules Interchange Format) Working Group held its 12th F2F meeting on Jan. 14-15, 2009, hosted by Oracle Corp. in Portland, Oregon, soon after releasing several working draft updates including the widely anticipated RIF Core specification and a new Test Cases document. The F2F meeting focused mainly on driving the Production rules dialect (PRD) to stability and last call, and also addressed open issues with RIF Core and with OWL Interoperability. At the current time, RIF expects to release a new Last Call version of the RDF&OWL compatibility document, with updates reflecting changes to OWL in OWL 2 (which is also in Last Call). For more detailed information on these drafts, visit the RIF WG Home Page.

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‡biblios.net  - Is a free service for librarians to create, edit, and share bibliographic records backed by an equally free and open store of over 30 million library records available for all to access, search and download.

LibLime CEO Josh Ferraro joins me in conversation as he launches ‡biblios.net at ALA Midwinter in Denver. 

We explore how this is a really free and open service that has been made possible, not only by technology and open source software, but also by the availability of open data licensing in the form of Open Data Commons.  Josh also explains how the core software behind ‡biblios.net is itself open source.

 

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Bowker, part of the Cambridge Information Group, have acquired a minority stake in LibraryThing and in return get the exclusive distributorship of LibraryThing for Libraries, their “cool catalog-enhancement project. LTFL puts tags, recommendations and reviews directly into your library catalog”

Bowker join AbeBooks, themselves owned by Amazon , as a second minority stake holder.  LibraryThing founder Tim Spalding points out, in his blog post on the deal, still owns the majority of the company .

He goes on to say:

There is no downside whatsoever. Nothing else has changed. Member data stays with us, under the same rules. All our free, public or Creative-Commons data, including covers, stays as it was. Management and majority ownership stay with me. We stay small, quirky and in Maine.

LibraryThing for Libraries was already being used by Bowker to add value to it’s Aquabrowser product.  With Aquabrowser, ProQuest, Serial Solutions, RefWorks, Syndetic Solutions, and others, LibraryThing for Libraries is joining a significant stable of products for adding value to online library services.

The LibraryThing for Libraries service has so far been adopted by 150 libraries (65 of those via an Aquabrowser installation), I expect that this should ramp up once the Bowker Sales team (something LibraryThing doesn’t have) starts pushing it.

The injection of finance will go to add stability to LibraryThing and help them scale their servers and people.  Good luck and well done to Tim and his team.

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We’re happy to announce the first public release of the Pellet Reasoner Plug-in for Protégé 4, which makes Pellet available in what is, in our view, the best OWL ontology development environment available today. We’re also announcing support and custom development for Protégé (both 3 and 4, though 4 really is better for OWL) since we’ve become expert in these systems over the past few years, primarily by building extensions to Protégé for our friends at NCI’s Center for Bioinformatics.

We’re big fans of Protégé 4, particularly the very fine work Matthew Horridge and Nick Drummond have put into it. These guys really understand OWL and it shows in the tool. Markus Stocker and Evren Sirin did most of the work on our end to integrate Pellet with Protégé—thanks to them as well.

Installation is simple since Protégé contains a plugin installation and registry system; but we’ve got instructions on the plugin page just in case.

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One of the many ways that the election of Barack Obama as president has echoed that of John F. Kennedy is his use of a new medium that will forever change politics. For Mr. Kennedy, it was television. For Mr. Obama, it is the Internet. Obama´s Internet Campaign Changed Politics. “Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president. Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not have been the nominee,” said Arianna Huffington, editor in chief of The Huffington Post.

America´s new president Barack Obama didn’t go out and recruit on facebook, they came to him at first. Did the internet make Obama’s natural “viralness” quicker and more transparent? Obama’s huge victory on Tuesday night was celebrated in Austria and Germany, as it was around the world: German Press on Obama Victory: “The Dream is Alive“. Der Spiegel’s Gabor Steingart - who for months dismissed the notion that Obama had a real chance for the White House - writes about the Resurrection of the American Dream: “His base note is conciliatory, his overtone is exalted and the harmony is finely balanced. If anyone out there still doubted that the American dream was alive, he called out to his supporters in Chicago, “tonight is your answer.”

However things will happen or not and however the „Change has come to America“: The president´s new official website is online www.whitehouse.gov. And here users are really being involved. We all are involved. Obama means change. Let´s see in what ways this will concern the future of the internet.

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My guests for this Talking with Talis podcast demonstrate a great example of how openly sharing data will stimulate innovation.

Last month, Huddersfield University’s Dave Pattern announced that he was sharing usage data derived from circulation transactions held in their Library Management System

I’m very proud to announce that Library Services at the University of Huddersfield has just done something that would have perhaps been unthinkable a few years ago: we’ve just released a major portion of our book circulation and recommendation data under an Open Data Commons/CC0 licence. In total, there’s data for over 80,000 titles derived from a pool of just under 3 million circulation transactions spanning a 13 year period.

Within a matter of days Patrick Murray-John from Mary Washington University had taken a copy of that data, transformed the data to RDF and published it in a Semantic Web form.

In this conversation we explore the motivations behind Dave’s work and the benefits to the sharing process of the Open Data Commons license he chose to release the data under.   Patrick then takes us through how he worked with the data and demonstrated how simple it was to produce and RDF version.

We then explore how the principles demonstrated by their work could be expanded upon to add wide value to the library scene from recommender systems to a sales aid for Universities trying to attract students.

English

delicious, emweb web3.0, uoc

Because everyone expects so much from him, so probably he’ll disappoint. Like Semantic Web IMO.

English, Spanish

The following six OWL 2 specification documents were published as last call working drafts on 2008-12-02.

• Structural Specification and Functional-Style Syntax
  
• Direct Semantics
  
• Mapping to RDF Graphs
  
• XML Serialization
  
• Profiles
  
• Conformance and Test Cases
  

For each of these documents, the last call period is scheduled to end this Friday, 2009-01-23. Soon after this deadline, the group expects to issue the documents as Candidate Recommendations and call for implementations.

We believe that OWL 2 standardization is important and that insightful feedback from the community improves the quality of the working group’s deliverables. As the archives of public-owl-comments@w3.org show, the working group has not received many last call comments. So, if you are also interested in OWL 2, please take some time to review these documents and send feedback to public-owl-comments@w3.org. Doing so before the deadline guarantees that your comments will be considered before the next stage of standardization. As a working group member, I look forward to reading and responding to your feedback.

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(inspired by the ‘Yes we can’ powerpoint slides…)

We Will…

• act - not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth
• build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together
• restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost
• harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories
• transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age
• begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people
• work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the spectre of a warming planet
• [To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent], extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist
• [for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents], defeat you

We Will Not…

• give [those ideals] up for expedience’s sake
• apologise for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defence

English

Si el listado de usuarios de Twitter sobre web semántica (a los canales creados por las principales empresas del “sector”) me ha gustado, lo que más me ha sorprendido es la forma de presentarlo.

La herramienta, que lleva un tiempo en el mercado, es la base de una comunidad bastante fuerte, un portal al estilo Slideshare para compartir marcadores, webgrafías, suscripciones a feeds, etc…

Es una nueva forma de presentar enlaces, un nuevo tipo de bookmarking social que soporta, además, múltiples formas de visualización (Web slideshow, código para embeber en nuestros sitios, etc…) y socialización (grupos de usuarios).

Podemos, además, añadir nuestras propias sugerencias o suscribirnos a usuarios o sets para estar informados de nuevos enlaces añadidos.

Os dejo enlace al videotutorial creado al respecto en RWW y el magnífico listado de usuarios en Twitter sobre semweb, al que añadiré el canal creado para Planeta Semántico, como ejemplo (pulsad sobre “Web pages” para desplegar o encoger la aplicación):

Compártelo:

Spanish