Planet Semantico

English

Twitter founder Evan Williams gave a TED talk this earlier this month on how Twitter’s growth is driven by unexpected uses. His eight minute talk touched on twittering during dramatic events, political uses, services enabled by their API and the emergence of conventions like @reply and #hashtag.

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Ian Davis, CTO of Talis, posted the slides from his code4lib2009 keynote talk on slideshare. If you love something… set it free gives a very nicely done description of the motivation behind and hopes for the Semantic Web.

Code{4}lib is a conference series and community focused on the intersection of libraries, technology, and the future. code4lib2009 was held this week in Providence, hosted by the Brown University Library.

Ian’s talk contained three conjectures, the first of which I especially liked:

• Conjecture 1: Data outlasts code
• Conjecture 2: There is more structured data in the world than unstructured
• Conjecture 3: Most of the value in our data will be unexpected and unintended

(h/t Danny Ayers)

If you love something… set it free

View more presentations from Ian Davis. (tags: opendata data)

English

We're going to keep this very simple and fast:

Write a web-accessible mashup using the new NYT newswire API @ http://bit.ly/11amDC and Calais. Do something cool and do it fast.

(Update: Use of the other new NYT News API's is also eligible)

Entries are due Friday 3/6. Send entries to team@opencalais.com with "NYT Mashup" in the title so we don't lose them.

Depending on the number of entries we may 1) puzzle over them that weekend and announce a winner), or 2) come up with some community voting mechanism (anybody know a good off-the-shelf option?).

U.S. Residents only (sorry - but the Kindle is not much use elsewhere anyway).

Will have to add a couple basic big company rules later - but they won't get in the way. Start building!

Tom

English, Official Blog

As always, a slightly shorter day for the last day of the conference but no less stimulating.  Talis CTO Ian Davis provided the keynote for the day, entitled if you love something…    …set it free.

He provided a broad view of how the linking capability of the web has changed the way things are connected and with participation have caused network effects to result.  But that is still at the level of linking documents together.  The Semantic Web fundamentally changes how information, machines, and people are connected.  Information semantics have been around for a while, but it is this coupling with the web that is the difference.  He conjectured that data outlasts code, meaning that Open Data is more important than Open Source; there is more structured data than unstructured, therefore people that understand structure are important; and most of the value in data is unexpected or unintended, so we should engineer for serendipity. 

He gave a couple warnings about being very clear about how you licence your data so that people know what they can & can’t do with it, and about how you control the use of some of the personal parts of data.  He made it clear that we have barely begun on the road but the goal was not to build a web of data, but to enrich lives through access to information.  Making the world a better place.

Edward M. Corrado of Binghamton University gave us an overview of the Ex Libris Open Platform strategy.  This was the topic of a previous Talking with Talis podcast with Ex Libris CSO  Oren Beit-Arie.  Edward set the scene as to why APIs were important to get data out of a library system He then explained the internal (formalised design, documentation, implementation and publishing of APIs) and external (publish documentation, host community code, provide tools, and opportunities for face to face meetings with customers) initiatives from Ex Libris.  The fact that you needed to log in to an open area raised, as it has before, some comments on the background IRC channel.

The final two full presentations of the day demonstrated two very different results of applying linking data to services. Adam Soroka, of the University of Virginia, showed how Geospatial data could be linked to bibliographic data with fascinating results. Whereas Chris Beer and Courtney Michael, from WGBH Media Library and Archives showed some innovative simple techniques for representing relationships between people and data.

The day was drawn to a close with a set of 5 minute lightening talks, a feature of all three days.  These lightening talks are one of the gems of the Code4lib conference a rapid dip in to what people are doing or thinking about.  They are unstructured and folks put their name on a list to talk about whatever they want.  The vast majority of these are are fascinating to watch.

During the conference the voting for Code4lib 2010 was completed so we now know that it will all take place again next year in Asheville, NC.  From the above picture, I can’t wait.

English

Macworld reports, in Google blocks paid apps for unlocked G1 users, that Google made a recent change in the capabilities of the unlocked G1 Android phone.

“People who bought an unlocked version of the Android G1 phone are no longer allowed to download new paid applications from the Market, after a change Google made late last week. Google is prohibiting users of the unlocked phones from viewing copy-protected applications, including those that cost to download.”

Gizmodo describes the reason, or a least one very plausible one.

“The problem lies in the phone’s full software permissions. Consumer Android phones download paid content to a private, hidden apps folder, inaccessible to the user. Thing is, as is stands, this normally inaccessible folder is accessible on the dev phones. Not only does this let people flat out copy and redistribute apps—it enables a sort of app laundering scam, in which someone buys an app, copies it to another location, and gets a refund for the app (as per the Marketplace’s 24-hour return policy), only to reinstall the copied version later.”

We purchased an unlocked G1 last month and are using it in several research projects. Not being able to access the paid apps should not be a showstopper, but it would be nice to try some out, so I hope a solution to this problem can be worked out soon.

English

Today we had an interview date with Markus Mooslechner from ORF (Austrian Broadcasting). The TV-Show “Newton” will discuss next Saturday how social media affects our lives, especially how one can make sure that private data won´t be used improperly, e.g. by certain internet providers.

My colleague Tassilo Pellegrini gave some nice examples how some providers like Facebook explicitly state in their privacy policy that they are allowed to hand over all personal data to any other third party (”…our service providers may have access to your personal information for use for a limited time in connection with these business activities”).

It´s a shame that some fundamental rights regarding privacy have dissipated in just a few years.

Also today, I asked Chris Bizer, doubtlessly one of the key-players in the semantic web community, some questions for an interview. Among other things I was also wondering if he thinks that the Semantic Web could solve some privacy issues or if Linked Data will rather become a synonym for “transparent user” (Gläserner Mensch).

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Whilst drafting my Code4lib Conference blog post this morning, an advert for Kaplan University flashed past on the TV in my hotel room.  For me it just encapsulated the future we are looking in to for providing education. Still passionate but delivered in a very different way – take a look and see if you agree.

I was watching that only 36 hours after participating in an equally passionate conversation, in a Providence, RI, restaurant about the problem of getting reference librarians to engage with new technology – should they have their own personal laptops and take them home, so that they can really understand the technology their students have grown up with?

I said the Kaplan advert encapsulated the future.  To quote another advert – the future is here! – some need to wake up and engage with it.  Of course I don’t include most of the great gathering of library geekdom current convening in Providence.

English

Day 2 at Code4lib 2009 in Providence Rhode Island was kicked of with an excellent keynote from Index Data’s President and co-founder Sebastian Hammer.  He took as his inspiration the 11ft tall gold-covered bronze statue of Independent Man, originally named "Hope" which tops of the dome of the Rhode Island Capitol building opposite the conference hotel.

Libraries are independent but they need work together to engage with the rest of the world.  They need to cooperate and standards are key to this.  Standards do suck but they are necessary. Some say that bodies such as NISO are broken.  We need to fix or replace them for us to be successful.

Sebastian’s talk was a good scene setter for Timothy McGeary, of Lehigh University, who gave us a progress report on the Open Library Environment (OLE).  OLE are working to redefine library business processes, complementary to the DLF’s work on discovery interfaces with the ILS-DI.  They are looking beyond the traditional confines of the ILS business processes.  They are being heavily influenced by SOA in designing reusable modules.    They are geared towards higher education use cases, but it doesn’t mean public and Government libraries cannot join in.

Their objective is to raise the library to the enterprise level within the institution.  They are working towards a draft release for comment of the design document in June.  in the meantime they have an online survey for those with “library applications that are currently in development or production that might be related to the goals of the OLE Project”.   This initiative is something worth watching.

Bess Sadler, University of Virginia gave us an update on progress and up coming features for Blacklight OPAC, first shown at code4lib 2007.   They have been, amongst other things, been concentrating on specific indexing for specific groups.  eg. an instrument index for music so that a pianist and a violinist can find works to play together.  On a technical point she announced that they are standardising on Jangle for ILS connection.

LibLime’s Joshua Ferraro walked us through the functionality and philosophy behind ‡biblios.net, which was the subject of my Talking with Talis conversation with him last month.  There are three barriers to libraries sharing data – data in silos, licensing, and technology.  ‡biblios.net addresses all of these with a Software-as-a-Service, free, shared cataloguing system seeded with 30M catalogue records (including 5M contributed by Talis), all covered by the Open Data Commons licence which we funded in cooperation with Creative Commons.  In the Q&A at the end, Anders Söderbäck from the National Library of Sweden said that they will contribute their records to ‡biblios.net.

Chris Catalfo, took the next session showing how easy it was to extend the cataloguing client used by ‡biblios which itself is available Open Source from ‡biblios.org.

Other highlights from the day included FreeCite - An Open Source Free-Text Citation Parser – demonstrated, without much help from his internet connection, by Chris Shoemaker.  And ‘Freebasing for Fun and Enhancement’ by Sean Hannan of Johns Hopkins University – this Freebase thing and it’s APIs is very powerful we are going to see a great deal more of this I predict.

I also presented on Project Juice – an open source JavaScript framework for extending OPACs.  More on this in a later post.  In the meantime my slides are on Slideshare.  Slides from other presentation and eventually videos are starting to appear as links from the conference schedule.

English

In preparation for the new 4.0 release of OpenCalais on March 15th, the gang at Phase2 Technology has done some massive upgrades on the Drupal Calais modules.

While many of these upgrades were under the hood, there are also some pretty great user accessible features to make you smile.

You can read all about it on Frank Febbraro's agile approach blog.

English, Official Blog

We were protected from the bitterly cold wind whipping across the state of Rhode Island for day one of  the excellent Code4lib Conference 2009.  Cocooned in the warm expansive basement ballroom of the former Masonic temple that is the Renaissance hotel, the day kicked off with a thought provoking keynote from Stefano Mazzocchi of Metaweb, the folks behind Freebase.

His talk was based around the way we humans have been evolving communication over the centuries – from speech (instant, portable but transient) through cave paintings (needs tools, permanent, but not very portable) and on through writing on clay tablets, and fibre materials, to books.  with all these there is a cost – paint the cave, print the books, etc.  With the current online world the cost of a communication is virtually zero, which lead to questions such as “if it is zero cost, why do we need to keep it in a library?” – Libraries may start to evolve towards being museums of rare physical items.  If all goes on line, what happens to things like serendipitous discovery – do we loose the shelf-browse experience?

Stefano, despite some severe network difficulties, proceeded to demonstrate various aspects of Freebase, the data it holds and the way it provides answers to difficult questions.  He also demonstrated how humans interacting with Freebase are making the data better by saying if a person in an image is male or female, placing a place on a map, etc.

This great start was followed by a series of excellent speakers delivering 20 minute sessions.  Too many to mention all here but here are some of my highlights:

Anders Söderbäck, unfortunately without his colleague Martin Malmsten (previous Talking with Talis interviewee) from the National Library of Sweden described the value they gained by exposing their catalogue as Open Linked Data “Linked Open Data turns web into an API”

Anders was followed by our own Ross Singer describing how the open source project Jangle had matured to a version 1.0 state with connectors being produced, including one for Talis Alto.  He explained that Jangle followed the principles of the AtomPub standard as used by Google,Microsoft, IBM, etc. for transferring and updating data.  Ross explained how the architecture of a Jangle implementation looked.  His talk laid a great foundation for a breakout session later in the day.

Glen Newton of , CISTI, National Research Council talked about LuSql – a performant way to get large amounts of data indexed and in to Lucene.

We had an entertaining session from the National Library of Australia’s Terence Ingram who took us through their experiences in delivering REST based services – the pitfalls and the unexpected benefits of being able to link things together easily.

Ed Summers & Mike Giarlo, Library of Congress, with the help of a Light Sabre iPhone  App, spoke about SWORD – light-weight protocol for depositing repository objects.

Godmar Back, of Virginia Tech took us through the 2.0 developments of the LibX browser plug-in which will enable libraries to embed their services into other websites.  He also mentioned the building of an environment where these can be shared between libraries.

The day was brought to a close with a series of 5 minute lightning talks – agreed by many to be the best bit of Code4lib. 

Looking forward to another great day tomorrow.

Flickr photo of hotel by jdn

English

Ubiquity is a research project from Mozilla Labs that has a lot in common with Powerset: the goal of the project is to reinvent the user interface through natural language. Ubiquity uses a command-line interface to allow you to get tasks done quicker by typing in exactly what you want. If you’re a Firefox user, you can download Ubiquity here and try it out.

Powerset is excited to have written a few Ubiquity commands that you might find useful. To install the commands, you’ll need to first have installed Ubiquity and then go to Powerset.com and install the command using the install toolbar at the top of your browser.

Once you have the commands installed, you can just type in “powerset

” and you’ll get a full Powerset Wikipedia search of the topic you enter. Just like in a Powerset search, we’ll show you answers from Freebase, Factz that we’ve distilled from Wikipedia, and relevant Wikpiedia articles.

As a bonus, we’ve also included commands from Live Search. For example, try typing “live sean penn” to get Live Search results for Sean Penn. You can also type “live images sean penn” to get a list of images or “live xrank sean penn” to get Sean Penn’s xRank answer. It was really simple to do this thanks to the new JSON API offered by Live Search.

In case you don’t have Ubiquity and you’re wondering what we’re talking about, we’ve included a brief video below of the Powerset Ubiquity commands and the Live Ubiquity commands. Let us know what you think!

Powerset Ubiquity Command from Ian Collins on Vimeo.

Live Search Ubiquity command from Ian Collins on Vimeo..

Update: We learned from Twitter that our Ubiquity commands were being demoed today by Aza Raskin himself at the Future of Web Apps conference. Cool!

English

WindyCitizen.com is “a crowd-powered front page for the Windy City” that “brings Chicagoans the best of the local web by letting them share, rate and discuss their favorite local news, photos, videos and more.”

Their Windy City Twitter Tracker mashup uses Open Calais as a named entity recognizer to track Tweets about candidates in the special election to fill the US House seat for Chicago’s 5th district that that Rahm Emanuel vacated. Calais might be overkill for this, since there is a small set of known candidates, but it’s an impressive semantic mashup nonetheless.

“We’re searching Twitter constantly to keep you up to date with the conversation about the IL-5 special election. The graph above lets you track buzz about the candidates over the last two weeks.”

The Windy City Twitter Tracker is probably written to be easily repurposed, judging from the Web site, which describe it as currently tracking the “Race for the 5th”. The mashup is credited to Whattech.

English

“Facebook harms children’s brains.” That was the alarming meta-headline i saw this morning when I looked at the Gardian’s Web site.

The story, Facebook and Bebo risk ‘infantilising’ the human mind, starts off

“Social network sites risk infantilising the mid-21st century mind, leaving it characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity, according to a leading neuroscientist.

The startling warning from Lady Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln college, Oxford, and director of the Royal Institution, has led members of the government to admit their work on internet regulation has not extended to broader issues, such as the psychological impact on children.”

I wish Lady Greenfield would tell us what she really thinks.

I can remember when it was comic books that were corrupting the minds of a new generation. Then it was the music (it’s almost always the music), TV, birth control, hippie values, MTV, consumerism, texting and now this. And Professor Greenfield may not even be aware of Twitter!

I’d like to see some data.

English

Code4lib 2009 in Providence, Rhode Island, got off to a good start yesterday with a great selection of pre-conference workshops including LinkedData, OCLC Grid Services, XML in Libraies, Fedora, VuFind, Koha, Open Source GIS, and LibX.  With that lot to choose from, where to go was the first challenge of the week.  With two other Talisians helping to run the LinkedData Workshop, I plumped for OCLC Grid Services.

Since its first announcement the ‘Grid Services’ label for a collection of assorted APIs from an assortment OCLC products has always struck me as more a marketing wrapper than a coordinated initiative across development.  Nevertheless these services are starting to mature somewhat and are starting to deliver a useful set of functionality.

We were taken through a series of presentations in the morning describing what was available from each service set.

Worldcat Search API – a program with just a couple of developers behind it, delivers basically a SRU interface on to the WorldCat database, with an additional OpenSearch interface.  Authorised users get access to special indexes, to limit by holding library for instance, where everybody gets access to the indexes that drive  worlcat.org.   With the ability to sort by geographic location, and output in various citation formats, and in various data formats .  There is an evaluator interface for developers to see how their search URIs should be constructed making it easy to implement.

xID – The collection of xISBN, xOCLCNUM, and xISSN  simple FRBR lookup services out of OCLC’s New Jersey office are continuing to be usefully used to drive  many applications & enhance others.  With the ability to access for free from a a single ip address for up to 500 hits per day, they are seeing wide usage often with little understanding of exactly what for.  OCLC members have free access for much higher hit rates.

WorldCat Identities & Terminologies – (out of OCLC Research Group) Give powerful access to metadata that has been drawn from Worldcat in to a separate service with their own SRU based interface to return people and organisations and the works they are related to.  The Terminology service does this with taxonomies.  Both include fuzzy indexing to help return best guess results.

Registry Services – were the last service on the agenda.  The registry holds information about over 100,000 institutions.  Initially seeded from OCLC’s billing system it is maturing with input both from OCLC staff and general input from institution members.  Providing address (both physical and internet)  information, OPAC type etc. to institutions via this API has the potential to add value to many an application.

During the afternoon session, futures were discussed including:

• A metadata management service
• Access to some of the data cross-walks used inside OCLC
• Update APIs for WorldCat

More speculative were:

• Realtime update synchronisation between Worlcat and local catalogues
• A delivery resolver
• APIs for the Worldcat social features
• Server hosting for developers
• Hosted EZProxy
• APIs for ILL Services

It was also mentioned in conversation that there is upcoming an Open LinkedData implementation for the Identity service and latterly WorldCat itself  - but  not for the marc records.  Now those will be really powerful if they are really open. 

A very interesting and useful workshop.

Now on to the main conference which is looking good….

English

Me preguntaban ayer si prefería twitter a un lector de feeds. Y si bien hace un tiempo hubiera dicho que son cosas distintas, la verdad es que hoy somos muchos los que leemos prácticamente el mismo número de recomendaciones en twitter que artículos en nuestro lector de feeds favorito.
Son muchas las claves del éxito de twitter y preparo al respecto una entrada específica, pero quería presentaros hoy  MicroPlaza, nuestra agencia personal de microblogging, una nueva aplicación que me ha parecido distinta y útil de entre las muchas que aparecen cada semana relacionadas con el idiosincrático servicio.

Se trata de ofrecer un servicio de recogida de los enlaces que nuestros contactos añaden a Twitter. Y si bien la idea no es nueva, como no lo era la del lector de feeds Feedly, sí lo es, como lo era en ese caso, el nivel de personalización de los resultados que nos ofrece.

Similar a Techmeme pero no para feeds y blogs, basado en en ranking de enlaces, sinó registrando los sites e historias que enlazan nuestros contactos en twitter. La idea, en la línea de la Web contextual social de la que hablábamos hace un tiempo, parece muy atractiva para usuarios de twitter como fuente de noticias.

Creo que el valor de twitter, por no decir el de toda la blogosfera, está en nuestra afinidad con la red que seguimos. No existe una sola red, tampoco en el caso del microblogging, sinó múltiples redes a las que decidimos, por intereses afines o vínculos emocionales (serían los dos motivos básicos) afiliarnos. Así, el servicio nos ofrecerá los items más populares en nuestra red, potenciando nuestra participación en la microesfera particular,  pero también algunos de los más populares en otras redes, con las que podemos establecer nuevos lazos o descubrir nuevas fuentes.

A diferencia de Feedly y siguiendo el espíritu, en general abierto, de Twitter,  MicroPlaza tendrá un timeline público (similar al de TwitScoop), que nos permitirá ver cómo se configura para otros usuarios, lo cual puede ser una buena forma de descubrir fuentes interesantes fuera de nuestra red habitual (gente a la que sigue la gente a la que seguimos).

Los últimamente populares en el ecosistema twitter “Retweets” o la formación de “Tribes” o grupos son otras de las características que prometen.

He solicitado invitaciones, así que si me las hacen llegar, además de revisar Microplaza (muy buen nombre, por cierto, “la plaza de Twitter”), hablaremos con mayor extensión de ella. Eso sí, creo que tendrán que aumentar sus capacidades. Al tiempo que publicamos este post el servicio está ya colapsado.

Os dejo, finalmente, mi Twitter

Compártelo:

Spanish

Since most of our software is available under a dual-license open source scheme, it’s pretty easy to get up and running, do initial integrations or tests, and generally start coming to grips with it technically. When used in open source projects, we often don’t even know that people are using our stuff, which is fine: the more, the merrier. When used commercially, however, in most cases organizations are interested either in proprietary licensing or commercial support plans, or both. That’s fine, too, since the more customers, as opposed to users, means the better the software will become in the short and medium term.

The tricky calculation for us is how much free support to offer to users (that is, non-customers) and to potential customers; free support is, obviously, a cost, though it’s can be a part of an extended sales process. But sometimes we simply don’t have the available cycles to devote as much time to free support as some (including us!) would prefer.

In those cases we recommend our commercial support plans, since those customers get high priority attention with respect to support, training, bug fixes, etc.

As the man says, if you need this, you need it badly — and it’s worth paying for.

CandP, English

In this week’s ebiquity meeting (10:00am EDT Wed 2/25, ITE 325), Curt Tilmes will talk on “Persistent Identifiers for Earth Science Provenance“.

Historically, published scientific research could include a description of an experiment that an independent party could use to reproduce the experiment with the same results, confirming the research. Modern research in the field of earth science often depends on terrabytes of data captured from remote sensing instruments, complex computer algorithms that undergo numerous changes over the year. A single result could be the result of the work of hundreds of individuals over decades. The representation of the measurements, algorithms and all the other artifacts of experimentation leading to that result becomes a daunting problem. A key to handling this representation is a good scheme for persisent identifiers.

Persistent identifiers seem like a simple problem. Just make a good URL and don’t change it [1]. This sounds good in theory, but is difficult to maintain forever. Many other schemes have been proposed to attack various aspects of the problem of identification, with various advantages and disadvantages. I will introduce this topic and briefly describe some of the concerns with using identifiers specifically in the context described above, and some of the characteristics of various identifier schemes.

The presentation will be streamed live via ustream.tv

References and some identifier schemes

[1] Cool URIs Don’t Change
[2] Naming and Addressing: URIs, URLs, …
[3] Object Identifer (OID)
[4] The Digital Object Identifier (DOI) System
[5] Persistent Uniform Resource Locator
[6] A Universally Unique IDentifier (UUID) URN Namespace
[7] XRI (Extensible Resource Identifier)

English

In the US, we’re pretty much locked into a two party system. It’s not that the two parties are founded on two opposing political philosophies — they can and do switch positions — but that once a two party system takes hold, it’s hard to dislodge.

Game theory suggests that a two party system will promote partisanship, especially if there are party-run primary elections. As a result, each party is more likely to elect a more partisan candidate than a centrist.

Peter Norvig has an interesting post, Lieberman, Egg, Sausage and Lieberman exploring a simple simulation. He was motivated by an earlier post by Nate Silver, Land of a Thousand Liebermans, on the fivethirtyeight blog. He wrote some simple Python code to vary some of the assumptions in Silver’s simple model.

This is a great example of using simple programs in Python to explore ideas. We are switching our CS 101 course to Python in the fall and something like this could make an interesting project.

English

English

“Because most of the targeted employees were male between the ages of 20 and 40 we decided that it would be best to become a very attractive 28 year old female. We found a fitting photograph by searching google images and used that photograph for our fake Facebook profile. We also populated the profile with information about our experiences at work by using combined stories that we collected from real employee facebook profiles.” [...]

English, FOAF, Facebook, Project ideas, SocialWeb, crime, ggg, privacy, quotes

Presentábamos hace un tiempo We-Magazine, revista digital de calidad sobre cibercultura.

Pues bien: ha salido ya el segundo ejemplar de la revista, que incorpora los siguientes artículos, que enumero y en algunos casos extracto:

-Open Social Discourse And Web Culture (discurso Open Social y cultura Web) - Stowe Boyd:

Antes de la emergencia de la web, A.J. Liebling afirmaba que la libertad de prensa pertenece a los que tienen un medio de difusión propio. La autoridad es importante todavía, pero no deriva de los directivos de ningún medio sinó de la implicación en comunidades de otros participantes, que deciden si tus contribuciones son valiosas, que aportan comprensión al mundo y optan por enlazarte o seguirte en Twitter.

-The Emergence Of Open Design And Open Manufacturing (la emergencia del diseño y la fabricación abiertos) Michel Bauwens

Publicábamos hace poco resumen y presentación sobre el nuevo libro de Jeff Jarvis, ¿Qué haría Google?.

Algo similar, la aplicación de la filosofía, del espíritu de la web social, no solo a productos “intelectuales” sinó también a cuestiones como el diseño y la fabricación de todo tipo de productos es el tema de este interesante (para mi, el mejor de la edición) artículo.

Creo que, ante una web 3.0 aún por definir pero cuya aproximación principal sería la de extender la web (su tecnología pero también su filosofía) a todos los ámbitos y sectores productivos de la realidad, tendremos que tener en cuenta este tipo de planteamiento. Estoy preparando algunas presentaciones al respecto y sin duda, incluiré algunos de los puntos de Bauwens:

La naturaleza es limitada pero no los bienes inmateriales (aunque a veces aplicamos criterios de restricción a los productos intelectuales y pensamos infinitos los recursos naturales). Si somos capaces de darnos cuenta de ello, estaremos ante una nueva civilización, sostenible si está basada en los principios de la colaboración entre pares (”peer to peer”).

La idea típica en el ámbito open source es que las compañías utilicen dos tipos de estrategia o licencias: Además de ofrecer servicios derivados como formación, consultoría, integración, etc…, ofrecen habitualmente versiones premium o con ciertas características “extra”. La regla está en que el 1% de los clientes paguen por la disponibilidad del 99% de los productos (freemium) ofrecidos.

Aplicar todo esto a ámbitos como la producción o el márketing requiere de comunidades sobre diseño, software financiadas por las marcas y que compartan de algún modo sus beneficios con los participantes.

-Does Democracy Work? (¿Funciona la democracia?) Entrevista con Lawrence Lessig

“Queremos cambiar el congreso del mismo modo en que Obama ha cambiado la presidencia. En el sentido que la gente sienta que sus miembros están siendo auténticos”

-Sharism: A Mind Revolution - (Sharismo, una revolución de la mente) Isaac Mao. Os remito en este caso al extenso artículo que publicamos en El caparazón al respecto: Sharismo: la esencia de la web 2.0

-Empowering Voices (Dando poder a las voces) - Entrevista con Sami Ben Gharbia

-We Help Villagers Help Themselves (Ayudamos al pueblo a ayudarse a sí mismo) - Interview with Sonja Vucic

-Human Is Not Limited to Flesh (Lo humano no se limita a la carne) - Interview with Martine Rothblatt

-Spirits In A Digital World (Espíritus en el mundo digital) - Interview with A.K.M. Adam

-Erotic Enlightment Is The Key To Happiness In Society (La iluminación erótica es la clave de la felicidad en la sociedad) - Interview with Iris Brosch

Os dejo enlace para la descarga de We magazine en formato pdf.

Compártelo:

Spanish

IOS Press Amsterdam - in cooperation with AKA Verlag Heidelberg - has just launched a new book series called Studies on the Semantic Web. Publications within the series will be all kinds of Semantic Web related edited or authored volumes, and also excellent dissertations. The first three volumes are already in preparation.

The Editorial Board comprises some of the most prominent Semantic Web researchers word-wide and consists of Fausto Giunchiglia, Carole Goble, Asuncion Gomez-Perez, Frank van Harmelen, Pascal Hitzler (as Editor-in-Chief), Riichiro Mizoguchi, Mark Musen, Daniel Schwabe, Steffen Staab, and Rudi Studer.

If you are interested in publishing a book in the series, contact the Editor-in-Chief.

English

Shameless project promotion here. Calais is a contestant for Intranet Journal Semantic Web Application Product of the Year. You can cast your ballot here.

Many thanks to the editors of Intranet Journal, including Tom Dunlap!

English, Official Blog

Stimulus Watch is a new wiki-like site that is intended to “help the new administration keep its pledge to invest stimulus money smartly, and to hold public officials to account for the taxpayer money they spend.”

“We do this by allowing you, citizens around the country with local knowledge about the proposed “shovel-ready” projects in your city, to find, discuss and rate those projects. These projects are not part of the stimulus bill. They are candidates for funding by federal grant programs once the bill passes.”

The site lets you search for program by keywords or browse by geographic region of project type. When you find a program of interest, you can vote on whether you believe the project is critical or not; post a comment in the conversation about the project and even edit the project’s description and points in favor or against.

The most expensive project proposed is one that suggests building a new energy efficiency industrial zones on 100 acres in Cidra PR for $17.5B. That’s a lot of shovels, but only three percent of voters thought it was critical! The project currently most favored by the Stimulus Watch community is one suggesting that new nursing homes be constructed around the country for veterans. 78% of the voters thought that this was a good way to spend $4.3M and create 310 jobs.

English

El informe Above the Clouds. A Berkeley View of cloud Computing presenta un resumen bastante acertado para clarificar un poco toda la información que está saliendo últimamente sobre la computación en la nube: contendientes actuales (básicamente Amazón Web Services, Microsoft Azure y Google AppEngine), economías de uso, obstáculos y oportunidades.

Antes o después la Web 2.0 y 3.0 se tendrán que encontrar con la nube, aunque sólo sea como soporte para SaaS.

Spanish, cloud computing

In his recent interview Andreas Blumauer (SWC) asked Mario Lenz, from german-based knowledge management solution provider EMPOLIS, about their OS-Initative SMILA. As Lenz explained, SMILA acts within a domain of various approaches and already established solutions re. Enterprise Resource Planning Systems. So, he sees SMILA’s USP in: “a standardized way of representing, accessing and managing those unstructured data which not exist today. Rather, each vendor ships his own, proprietary solution. SMILA’s goals are to define and implement such a standard infrastructure framework and to establish a community bringing it forward.”

Besides an insight in many aspects of the initiative, the interview provides thoughts on how connected business-models, in providing services, could look like.

[read more]

English

I now have a crude Lucene index derrived from SKOS data. It is more or less a toy example, but somehow promising also.

Example below is a test against FAO’s AGROVOC. Each concept becomes a “document”, with a “word” field containing the prefLabel, and a “uri” field for the concept URI. I don’t index anything else yet.

The hope here is to have a handy prototyping environment for testing different indexing regimes. The code takes about 4-5 mins to index AGROVOC on my MacBook, running under Jruby.

The data I’m using is a SKOS dump from the FAO Web site, post-processed with “grep -v” to skip the Farsi lines, due to a Unicode error. The transcript below comes from running Lucli, a handy command line tool for Lucene.

Next steps with indexing? Not sure. Probably make sure altLabel is handled. But I’m also curious about possibility of including fields that pull in labels from nearby concepts, so they can be matched in weighted searches. Would be hard to evaluate the effectiveness though.

lucli> search uri:”http://www.fao.org/aims/aos/agrovoc#c_47934″
Searching for: uri:”http www.fao.org aims aos agrovoc c_47934″
1 total matching documents
————————————–
—————- 1 score:1.0———————
word:Pteria hirundo
uri:http://www.fao.org/aims/aos/agrovoc#c_47934
#################################################
lucli> search word:”Leiocottus hirundo”
Searching for: word:”leiocottus hirundo”
1 total matching documents
————————————–
—————- 1 score:1.0———————
word:Leiocottus hirundo
uri:http://www.fao.org/aims/aos/agrovoc#c_45393
#################################################
lucli> search word:”hirundo”
Searching for: word:hirundo
2 total matching documents
————————————–
—————- 1 score:1.0———————
word:Pteria hirundo
uri:http://www.fao.org/aims/aos/agrovoc#c_47934
—————- 2 score:1.0———————
word:Leiocottus hirundo
uri:http://www.fao.org/aims/aos/agrovoc#c_45393
#################################################

English, SKOS, Semantic Web, Technology, coding, foaf4lib, ggg

Please read this article which explains what Twine is, what makes it unique, and what it is for.

English, Knowledge Management, km, knowledge sharing, social bookmarking, social media, twine, twitter