Planet Semantico

Encontraba hace poco en el tumbelog de tic616 esta interesante presentación, de la empresa Cisco, acerca de 5 tendencias sobre el futuro de la colaboración. Os las dejo, ampliadas e interpretadas en el contexto de la web, porque creo que aportan alguna novedad, sobretodo si las pensamos en clave interdisciplinar y amplia en nuestros respectivos ámbitos de interés:

1. Las redes de colaboración serán a las empresas lo que las redes sociales son a los consumidores.

2. No se trata de crear sistemas, productos, servicios, educación “a demanda” sinó de mejorar la experiencia de usuario.

Aunque se refiere principalmente al software, creo, como os decía al empezar, que es en la interdisciplinariedad (hoy, en un entorno de conocimiento fluido) donde reside en ocasiones la innovación y que el precepto es aplicable a los sectores mencionados y a los que queráis realizar el ejercicio proyectivo de extrapolar.

Es la tecnología (Deep web) la que debe adoptar mayores grados de complejidad (web semántica, cloud computing) para poder satisfacer de forma simple las necesidades de los usuarios. La filosofía de “La caja de google” que nos de la forma más simple posible al lugar preciso, conociendo nuestro contexto, (web contextual) sigue siendo una apuesta para el futuro. Lo decía incluso  Tim Berners Lee en la inauguración del 18 Congreso Internacional www2009: el futuro de la red pasa por la simplicidad.

3. La innovavión será redefinida por la Excelencia operacional

4. Las organizaciones sin límites dirigirán la próxima ola de productividad

Y añadiría que no sólo a nivel de firewalls corporativos. A nivel humano, las organizaciones que sean capaces de intercambiar conocimiento de forma fluida, sea a nivel corporativo o a través de sus profesionales,  con comunidades externas de conocimiento, sin miedos a la falta de control o el posible deterioro de su “imagen de marca” tomarán una ventaja evidente en gestión del conocimiento sobre las que no sepan hacerlo.

5. Las tecnologías de la información evolucionarán hacia la producción de información:

Creo que este ha sido el punto que ha motivado este post,  completado con la lectura de un artículo sobre predecibilidad de la web que os comentaré en unos días:

Un informe reciente de Deloitte nos habla de la sobrecarga cognitiva: Se estima que la cantidad de información a nivel mundial se dobla cada 18 meses, los archivos corporativos se doblan cada 3-5 años. Más de 35 billones (americanos, 1 billón=mil millones) de mails son enviados cada día. Si pensamos en Twitter, Mensajería instantánea, SMS, llamadas de teléfono, reuniones, etc… parece evidente que vivimos una sobrecarga informativa importante.

Además, son varios los estudios que demuestran que demasiada información desordenada es peor que no tener la suficiente información.  Si añadimos a ello el estrés de tener que tomar decisiones en un entorno que cambia contínuamente, parece claro que el futuro no es sobre la gestión de la información sinó sobre la provisión de información adecuada en cada momento y para cada necesidad (Gestión del conocimiento).

La base tecnológica de todo ello está en la web de los datos (Linked data web), de la que hemos hablado con anterioridad y que consistiría en los motores de búsqueda siendo capaces de analizar la información “dentro” de cada documento y no sólo la que determinan sus títulos, keywords y demás microformatos que son capaces de leer hoy (web semántica)

Pero en Cisco se refieren también a la conexión entre comunidades, que pueden aumentar la relevancia y acelerar los procesos de toma de decisiones para aportar valor real a los servicios, negocios, etc…

Leía hace poco sobre Netbase, un buscador vertical semántico que parece estar reportando resultados interesantes en este sentido.

Y creo que leeremos pronto, en otros términos, sobre entornos de información personalizada específicos para sectores, que faciliten el desarrollo profesional y mejoren el desempeño del negocio o el servicio:  Colaborativos, participativos y  basados en flujos de información sobre temas, sobre etiquetas, además de sobre fuentes personales (networking)….

¿Será entonces el futuro más predecible?  De eso hablaremos pronto.

Os dejo la presentación:

Compártelo:

Spanish

We’ve made a new release candidate for Pellet 2.0 available for download. Pellet 2.0 RC6 improves on RC5 by resolving some correctness and exception generating bugs and by improving support for the RDF/XML serialization of the OWL 2 specification (which is now in its last call period). All of these changes are documented more fully in a Pellet Trac report.

We have also updated the Pellet Reasoner Plug-in for Protégé 4. Existing users with the RC5 based plug-in should be prompted for an automatic upgrade. All other Protégé 4 users should follow the installation directions as if the plug-in is a new install.

Many of the changes in this release were made in response to user identified problems, and several were prepared specifically for our support customers. Please continue to send your bug reports to the Pellet users mailing list and if you have a particular problem that you’d like to motivate us to fix, you can contact us to start a support relationship.

English, OWL 2, Pellet 2, Protege

Google has produced a special Mexico Flu Trends page to aggregate flu-related search queries from users in Mexico and various states within Mexico.

“We’ve created experimental estimates of flu activity in Mexico using aggregated search data. Unlike Google Flu Trends for U.S., this data has not been validated against confirmed cases of flu. After conferring with US and Mexican health officials, we’ve decided to share these initial results to provide additional information on the evolving epidemic.”

An article in the New York Times, To Aid Mexico, Google Expands Flu Tracking, quotes one expert on the limitations of the Google data

Dr. Henry L. Niman, a biochemist in Pittsburgh who runs Recombinomics, a Web site that tracks the genetics of flu cases worldwide, said that Google’s service appeared to provide only limited advance warning. “I am not saying that it is not useful. It probably works to complement other sources of surveillance and data,” he said.

English

Antes de que caigan sobre mi las iras de los que no están de acuerdo en “versionar” la web, comentar que se trata de un simple ejercicio de representación, con algún añadido de buenas intenciones que deberían basar el futuro del conocimiento en la web que entre todos vamos construyendo.

No voy más allá de considerar el término 3.0 como el que define la tercera década de la web y creo que lo importante, más que la numeración, que seguro que caricaturiza en exceso las profundas implicaciones de lo que representa, son los conceptos.

Excelentes me parecieron los que John Moravec reflejaba en el gráfico que he traducido y ampliado, como extensión de la transparencia que dejábamos el otro día al hablar de Entornos Personalizados de Aprendizaje.

Sobre conocimiento y educación 3.0, creo que es una tabla bastante acertada. En negro traduzco las ideas de Moravec, en granate tenéis los que añado, que provienen del ejercicio surgido al conceptualizar, para otra presentación reciente,  la web 3.0.

Aprovecho para anunciaros el nuevo Miniblog de El caparazón. Será que compartir se está volviendo adictivo pero he decidido ir anotando las cosas (notas, imágenes) que me parecen interesantes y que creo que pueden ayudarme a transmitir algunos conceptos, en un nuevo espacio, de fácil y rápida edición en Tumblr.

Allí dejaba también este gráfico, inacabado, así que si queréis modificarlo o sugerir cambios, vuestra opinión será bienvenida.

Relacionados:

La escuela en 2018: Penélope (un desvarío posible…)

Compártelo:

Spanish

Guido van Rossum has been blogging about the lack of support for optimizing tail recursion in Python (he’s agin it). His most recent post, Final Words on Tail Calls, includes this paragraph near the end.

‘And here it ends. One other thing I learned is that some in the academic world scornfully refer to Python as “the Basic of the future”. Personally, I rather see that as a badge of honor, and it gives me an opportunity to plug a book of interviews with language designers to which I contributed, side by side with the creators of Basic, C++, Perl, Java, and other academically scorned languages — as well as those of ML and Haskell, I hasten to add. (Apparently the creators of Scheme were too busy arguing whether to say “tail call optimization” or “proper tail recursion.” :-)’

I’ve not yet been able to track down any sources calling Python the ‘Basic of the future’ — all I could find is one person who referred to Java this way and another referring to Javascript. But for a programming language, it is a great slur, or maybe, to take Guido’s stance, a great compliment.

English

Sometimes I hate marketing. Most often you can feel it in your heart whether issues are authentic or not. Whatever medium you are consuming these days – the web, the newspapers or your mailbox - anyone seems to discover a new killer-application called ethics. This seems to be everyone´s cure – be it a seminar, a conference or a book: Ethics is hype.

That´s more than annoying for me who´s been trying for years to establish ethical aspects in my work as a journalist, as a pr-person (believe it or not!) – as a human-being. Being sensitive for the special challenges connected with discussing ethical issues in a diverse global economy I´ve always been trying to publish and talk about the philosophical approach to these matters.

Therefore I ´m happy to come across Tim Berners Lee´s request at the current International World Wide Web Conference in Madrid: Clean the web! He – which is not at all surprising - is claiming a clean web. The user has to know which data he can trust and may pass on. Also privacy must be protected he postulates one more time. All these arguments deal authentically with ethics. But not only. They concern the future. The future of us all.

English

While we can use Twitter for news or reports on unfolding events from the field, it’s a noisy channel. As usual, Randall Munroe captures it well. I especially like its highlighting how Twitter’s search page lets you know there have been dozens of new matching tweets since you searched a moment ago. It seems that the flu-related tweets are arriving faster than anyone can read them.

English

This year’s keynotes at the I-SEMANTICS / I-KNOW conference taking place from September 2 - 4, 2009 in Graz / Austria have been fixed.

The scientific keynotes will be provided by Paolo Traverso, Director of the Center for Information Technology - IRST, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy, and Professor Eric Tsui, Associate Director of the Knowledge Management Research Centre, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China.

The industry keynote will be held by Peter Kropsch, CEO of the Austrian Press Agency.

Further details will follow.

English

I just realized that, in addition to the discount code for the Web 3.0 Conference in New York next month, which I already shared in my previous post, I also have a discount code for the Semantic Technology Conference taking place in San Jose, California, June 14-18, 2009. As a speaker, I have been authorized to share a coupon with you for up to $200 off your registration fees. Details on the conference and registration are at www.semantic-conference.com. To receive this discount, register by May 29, 2009 and use the COUPON CODE: ST9SPKR.

English, Semantic Technology Conference, Semantic Web, Semantics Incorporated, discount code, semweb

Google has had a special “flu trends” site up for many months that provides “up-to-date estimates of flu activity in the United States based on aggregated search queries.”

They have found that how many people search for flu-related topics is a leading indicator for reports on how many people actually have flu symptoms. They believe that this metric “may indicate flu activity up to two weeks ahead of traditional flu surveillance systems”. Click on the flash video below to see the relationship between the flu searches and flu symptoms.

So, is Google magic? The explanation for why changes in in the level of flu searches precedes changes in the level of flu symptoms is more mundane.

“So why bother with estimates from aggregated search queries? It turns out that traditional flu surveillance systems take 1-2 weeks to collect and release surveillance data, but Google search queries can be automatically counted very quickly. By making our flu estimates available each day, Google Flu Trends may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza.”

You can get the details in a recent article in nature:

J. Ginsberg, M. Mohebbi, R. Patel, L. Brammer, M. Smolinski and L. Brilliant, Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data, Nature 457, 1012-1014 (19 February 2009).

Of course, such leading indicators may not correlate well if there is a “black swan” flu epidemic or even if there is an unfounded fear of one. Sometimes the crowds are wise, but often not. Remember when we all thought technology stocks real estate was a good thing to invest in?

The Google site also allows you to look at the data by state as well. Click on the image below to try it out.

English

Over the last few years OCLC the US based not –for-profit cataloguing cooperative has been acquiring many for-profit organisations from the world of library automation such as PICA, Fretwell-Downing Informatics, and Sisis Information Systems. 

About fifteen months ago, Andrew Pace joined OCLC, from North Carolina State University Libraries, and was given the title of Executive Director, Networked Library Services.  After joining OCLC Andrew, who had a reputation for promoting change in the library technology sphere, almost disappeared from the radar.  

Putting these two things together, it was clear that the folks from Dublin were up to something beyond just owning a few non-US ILS vendors.

From a recent post on Andrew’s Hectic Pace blog, and press releases from OCLC themselves, we now know what that something was.  It is actually a few separate things, but the overall  approach is to deliver the functionality, traditionally provided by the ILS vendors (Innovative, SirsiDynix, Polaris, Ex Libris, etc., etc.), as services from OCLC’s data centres.   This moves the OCLC reach beyond cataloguing in to the realms of acquisitions, license management, and even circulation.

The idea of braking up the monolithic ILS (or LMS as UK libraries refer to it) is not a new one – as followers of Panlibus will know. Equally, delivering functionality as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has been native to the Talis Platform since its inception.  It is this that underpins already established SaaS applications Talis Prism, Talis Aspire and Talis Engage.

Both OCLC, with WorldCat Local, and Talis with Prism have been delivering public discovery interfaces (OPACs) as SaaS applications for a while now, ‡biblios.net have recently launched their social cataloguing as a service [check out the podcast with Josh Ferraro], but I think this is the first significant announcement of circulation as a service that I have been aware of.

The move to Cloud Computing, with it’s obvious benefits of economies of scale and the removal of need for libraries to be machine minders and data centre operators, is a reflection a much wider computing industry trend.  The increasing customer base of Salesforce.com, the number of organisations letting Google take care of their email, and even their whole office operation (such as the Guardian) are testament to this trend.  So the sales pitch from OCLC, and others including ourselves here at Talis, about the total cost of ownership benefits of a Cloud Computing approach are supported and validated industry wide.

So as a long time predictor of computing transforming from a set of locally managed and hosted applications to services delivered as utilities from the cloud, mirroring the same transformation for electricity generation and supply from a century ago,  I welcome this initiative by OCLC.   That’s not to say that I don’t have reservations. I do. 

The rhetoric emanating from OCLC in these announcements is reminiscent of the language of the traditional ILS vendors who are probably very concerned by this new and different encroachment on to their market place.  There is an assumption that if you get your OPAC from WorldCat (and as a FirstSearch subscriber, with this on the surface ‘free offer’,  you are probably thinking that way), you will get circulation and cataloguing and all the rest from a single supplier – OCLC.

The question that comes to mind, as with all ILS systems, is will you be able to mix and match different modules (or in this case services) from different suppliers, so that libraries can have the choice of what is best for them.  Will OCLC open up the protocols (or to be technical for a moment, the hopefully RESTful APIs) to access these application/service modules so that they can not only be used with other OCLC services but with services/applications from Open Source and other commercial vendors.  Will they take note of, or even adopt, the recommendations that will come from the OLE group [discussed in last month’s Library 2.0 Gang], that should lead towards such choice.

Some have also expressed concern that a library going down the OCLC cloud services route, will be exposing themselves to the risk of ceding to OCLC control of how all their data is used and shared, not just the bibliographic data that has been at the centre of the recent storm about record reuse policies.  Against that background, one can but wonder what OCLC’s reaction to a library’s request to openly share circulation statistics from the use of their OCLC hosted circulation service would be.  

This announcement brings to the surface many thoughts, issues, concerns and technological benefits and questions, that will no doubt rattle around the library podcasting and blogosphere for many months to come.  I also expect that in the board rooms of the the well known commercial [buy our ILS and a machine to run it on] providers, there will be many searching questions being asked about how they deal with the 500lb [not-for-profit] gorilla that has just moved from the corner of the room to start dining from their [for profit] table.

This will be really interesting to watch…..

The composite image was created using pictures published on Flickr by webhamser and Crystl.

English

View H1N1 Swine Flu in a larger map. Pink markers are suspect. Purple markers are confirmed. Deaths lack a dot in marker. Created and maintained by niman.

Click graph to see an updated Google Search trend for ‘flu’


Click graph to see an updated Blog Pulse for ‘flu’

Trend for ‘flu’ on Twitter. Follow CDCemergency for authoritative news from the CDC or check the Twitter flu chatter to see what people are saying.

English

“Conservatism and cognitive ability are negatively correlated”. How’s that for a provocative opening sentence in an academic paper! Lazar Stankova of the National Institute of Education in Singapore reports this finding in a paper published earlier this year in the Elsevier journal Intelligence.

Lazar Stankova, Conservatism and cognitive ability, Intelligence, v37, n3, pp. 294-304, May-June 2009.

I’ve only scanned the paper, but it looks like a serious study. Here’s the abstract:

“Conservatism and cognitive ability are negatively correlated. The evidence is based on 1254 community college students and 1600 foreign students seeking entry to United States’ universities. At the individual level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with SAT, Vocabulary, and Analogy test scores. At the national level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with measures of education (e.g., gross enrollment at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels) and performance on mathematics and reading assessments from the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) project. They also correlate with components of the Failed States Index and several other measures of economic and political development of nations. Conservatism scores have higher correlations with economic and political measures than estimated IQ scores.

The paper describes a meta-analysis based on data from three studies that employed the same set of psychological measures. Twenty-two of these measures were selected, drawn from four domains: personality, social attitudes, values, and social norms. While the paper finds strong support for the hypothesis that low cognitive ability is associated with high conservatism it doesn’t make any statements about causality.

There is room for disagreement about the definition of conservatism and it’s projection to the 22 measures. The following narrative definition of conservatism is given, which is broad and dominated by personal and social aspects. It’s clearly not limited to the political or economic domain.

“The Conservative syndrome describes a person who attaches particular importance to the respect of tradition, humility, devoutness and moderation as well as to obedience, self-discipline and politeness, social order, family, and national security and has a sense of belonging to and a pride in a group with which he or she identifies. A Conservative person also subscribes to conventional religious beliefs and accepts the mystical, including paranormal, experiences. The same person is likely to be less open to intellectual challenges and will be seen as a responsible “good citizen” at work and in the society while expressing rather harsh views toward those outside his or her group.”

If you can’t access the paper on Elsevier’s Science Direct digital library, you can look at three key tables here: Table 1, Table 2, and Table 3.

English

English

Tenemos ya la tecnología necesaria. Vamos acostumbrándonos al rol de prosumidores al que la red nos ha elevado.

Con los entornos personales, de información, de relación, de investigación, de colaboración, de participación, de aprendizaje no tenemos ya excusa para no crear, para no innovar.

No sólo somos propietarios de algunas fuentes, socios o beneficiarios de otras, sinó que podemos agruparlas, crear, a partir de su naturaleza distribuida, diversa, nuestros universos de conocimiento.

Trabajo en varios proyectos que los tienen como denominador común. Espero, como muchos, los resultados de algunas investigaciones (Stephen Downes y el National Research Council de Canadá) que en poco tiempo arrojarán luz sobre las condiciones  ideales en las que distintos grupos de personas aprendemos y contruimos en la red.

Otros dirán que deben ser libres, distintos unos de otros como nuestro propio ADN, reflejo de nuestra individualidad al servicio de lo comunitario.

El conocimiento no es algo que pueda limitarse a un tiempo, ni a un lugar definido, lo cual convierte este ecosistema, dinámico y ubicuo, la red, en el lugar ideal para alimentar nuestros intereses:

Hay que habitar los lugares en los que se generan los temas que nos apasionan, seguirlos de cerca, participar, convivir en ellos.

Os dejo una presentación, hecha de muchas otras,  preliminar sobre los Entornos Personales de Aprendizaje,  muestra  de la revolución creativa de la que aquí seguiremos hablando:

Compártelo:

Spanish

A graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison has developed a system that allows a person to send tweets just by thinking.

Researchers use brain interface to post to Twitter
In early April, Adam Wilson posted a status update on the social networking Web site Twitter — just by thinking about it. Just 23 characters long, his message, “using EEG to send tweet,” demonstrates a natural, manageable way in which “locked-in” patients can couple brain-computer interface technologies with modern communication tools.
…

English

NUI Galway’s College of Engineering & Informatics is now offering a new course titled “Engineering Innovation - Electronic“. This course will provide graduates with specialised multi-disciplinary skills to start their own business, centered on the development of innovative, niche, market-led, electronic products. The programme is composed of three multi-disciplinary strands, with the formation of an Electronic Engineer at its core. The three strands are:

• Electronic Engineering
• Business & Finance
• Design & Innovation

You can view our brand new brochure for GY412, and find out more about the course from the NUI Galway course page for GY412. The course is being run by the Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering in collaboration with the Department of Industrial Engineering and the Cairnes School of Business & Economics.

Education, English, Galway, Innovation, NUI Galway, electronics

My mother, Mary Breslin, died two weeks ago today. It was a terrible shock to all of our family, but I wanted to say a few words about her so that you would have an idea about what an influence she was on my life and the lives of many others.

Firstly, Mary was a loving and caring wife and mother, who amongst other things made sure I always had the best of everything, protected me from any perceived harm or injustice, and nurtured and encouraged my love for learning. She was a formidable woman, and always strived for perfection for both herself and her family. She was the kind of customer that you would either love or hate to have in your establishment, as any flaw or deficiency would be exposed!

She had a huge network of friends that she helped through both actions and words. She was one of those people that you could always call on if you were in trouble and needed help, advice or information.

Mary was an extremely intelligent and organised woman, and showed throughout her life how she was able to adapt herself to new situations and take on a variety of challenges. Having being forced to give up her civil service job in the tax office when she married (a regulation at that time), her jobs included homemaker, senior administrator in a car rentals agency, and part-time book keeper for local businesses.

She was also very modern and took to technology very easily. I remember when I was in Virginia in 1996, we used to communicate via a precursor to internet chat (VMS Phone) as international phone call prices were exhorbitant at that time. She used the Web for buying books, paying bills and internet banking, but also mastered services like boards, blogs, Skype, PayPal and eBay with ease (she racked up more positive feedback in a few months on her eBay account than I managed for many years!).

Mary loved many things, including: her family, her two grandchildren, her home and village, being beside the sea, Elvis, the comedian Dave Allen, holidays in San Francisco, Cyprus and Rome, Pope John Paul II, Hummel figurines, “The Past is Myself” by Christabel Bielenberg, Bjorn Borg, repeating baby stories about John, the Royals, TV soaps, the Thorn Birds, QVC, style and fashion, making greeting cards, the odd sherry, Italian food, the burned bit at the end of a roast, dolphins, gardening, the colour turquoise, and much more. We loved her too, and we always will.

Ar dheis D? go raibh a h-anam.

Though we need to weep your loss,
You dwell in that safe place in our hearts,
Where no storm or might or pain can reach you.
May this dark grief flower with hope
In every heart that loves you.
May you continue to inspire us:
To enter each day with a generous heart.
To serve the call of courage and love
Until we see your beautiful face again
In that land where there is no more separation,
Where all tears will be wiped from our mind,
And where we will never lose you again.

- John O’Donohue

English, General

The SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities) team recently solicited feedback about what the semantic web community wants or needs in regards to the SIOC ontology and project.

This brainstorming phase is still going on for one more week, so you can chip in with ideas about
- new applications you would like to see
- new ontology terms or integration with other ontologies
- features / bugfixes are you looking for in existing applications
- better explanations of SIOC terms or answers to puzzling questions needed

View the wishes on this wiki page and add your own.

English

Today, the 18th WWW conference started in Madrid, Spain. In his opening talk, Tim Berners-Lee outlined the status quo of the current Web and focused on areas for ongoing research.

According to Tim Berners-Lee the Web is still static and consists mostly of archived HTML and PDF documents. There is still a need for a read/write Web and the standards are still not used to a sufficient extend. Changes in the Web are the ‘move to mobile’ and the climb up of ‘advertizing to being a science’.

Beside the still existing challenges of the current Web, additional ones arrived. Web Applications as well as Open Social Networking and Open Linked Data count to the area of current interest.

Web Applications are supposed to become new computing platforms and need a serious clean trust system. In the future Web Applications could offer a decentralized modular installation like a webized Debian.

Open Social Networking has become a great application in the Web. Currently it suffers from the ‘Social Silo Problem’. Users have often accounts in several platforms like Facebook or MySpace. The platforms, however, are separated from each other like in a field of silos. The challenge of the Semantic Web Community is now to interconnect the silos via RDF, OWL, HTTP, and SPARQL. A further requirement of Tim Berners-Lee are to focus on a Secure Web id.

Open Linked Data attracted the attention of Tim Berners-Lee most of all. Being one of the chairs of the co-located workshop ‘Linked Data on the Web’ he stressed that “we need data on the Web to work better together” in government, enterprise, and science. Open Linked Data could be a wizard for users of existing relational database systems. As query language he proposed a federated/delegated SPARQL.

Finally, Tim Berners-Lee described the role of researchers in those challenges. Researchers should ‘build a platform for others that follow’. Thereby, one should not assume what people will use the platform for.

(Report by Christoph Wieser / Salzburg Research)

English

The OWL Working Group has published new Working Drafts for OWL 2, a language for building Semantic Web ontologies. An ontology is a set of terms that a particular community finds useful for organizing data (e.g., for data about a book, useful terms include "title" and "author"). OWL 2 (a compatible extension of OWL 1) consists of 13 documents (7 technical, 4 instructional, and 2 group Notes). For descriptions and links to all the documents, see the OWL 2 Documentation Roadmap. This is a "Last Call" for the technical materials and is an opportunity for the community to confirm that these documents satisfy requirements for an ontology language. This is a second Last Call for six of the documents, but because the changes since the first Last Call are limited in scope, the review period lasts only 21 days. For an introduction to OWL 2, see the four instructional documents: an overview, primer, list of new features, and quick reference.

English

The 4th annual UMBC Digital Entertainment Conference will be held 10-6 Saturday, April 25, 2009 in Lecture hall 2. This event is organized by the UMBC Game Developers Club and is free and open to the public. This year’s conference will feature speakers from local studios who will talk about programming, game design and art in game development, including:

• Justin Boswell, Senior Programmer, Firaxis
• Barry Caudill, Executive Producer, Firaxis
• Dave Inscore, Studio Art Director, Big Huge Games
• Eric Jordan, Programmer, Firaxis
• Martin Kau, Concept Artist, Big Huge Games
• Jon Shafer, Designer/Programmer, Firaxis

You can find more information and RSVP on the FaceBook DEC page.

English

OWL 2 is in the final stages of becoming a W3C recommendation - as announced today. This means that the revision 2 of the Web Ontology Language should basically be stable now, only final fixes are expected. The OWL 2 Document Overview is the general entry point.

Pascal Hitzler

English

The yearly organized Linking Open Data Triplification Challenge awards prizes to the most promising triplifications of existing Web applications, Websites and data sets. Chaired by Michael Hausenblas (DERI) and patroned by Tim Berners-Lee the challenge is open to anyone interested in applying Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies. This might include students, developers, researchers, and people from industry. Individual or group submissions are both acceptable.

The call is still open till the end of May 2009. For more information please visit http://triplify.org/challenge

English

2009 seems to be a year of government library reviews. Whilst many local authorities would rely on the outcomes of such reviews to shape their future, it is refreshing and inspiring to see North Yorkshire County Council release a 15 year library strategy, ‘New Look, No Shush’.

This strategy comes across as one based on a commitment to deliver achievements, as it is all too easy to fall into the trap of producing a strategic library plan lacking real substance and passion. However, as a 15 year plan, one can’t help but raise questions of sustainability. As the ambitious plans are closely aligned to current government library policies (e.g. Strong and Prosperous Communities, Framework for the Future and the Library Modernisation Review), a change in government could potentially throw the strategy way off course.

It may also be argued that an opportunity to share stories demonstrating real outcomes has been missed. For example, highlights of successes achieved by volunteer groups and local projects initiated by the library service could have further encouraged citizen engagement and built on the appreciation of North Yorkshire’s rich local history and collections, bringing the value of the library to life.

Nevertheless, the recognition of the need for change must be applauded, as not only does this provide a sound basis for moving forward the library services of North Yorkshire, it is also encouraging for other local authorities to follow suit: recognise their Achilles’ heel and do something about it. For North Yorkshire, it is now about managing expectations, attractions, innovating and most of all engaging.

Hopefully, the strategy will prove to be a positive step for North Yorkshire and its library service. At the moment, the strategic plan appears to cover a lot of ground, with many broad objectives such as “maximising the use of technology”, “innovative use of ICT” and “increase the number of people that use the service and borrow from the library”. It would be great to see further exploration of why such goals are important, how they will take shape and be implemented. I imagine this is something that develop in time, and look forward to following the progress as it happens.

English

No os dejo, hace tiempo ya y en parte “por culpa” de mi cuenta en Twitter, ideal para este tipo de cosas, recomendaciones. Tenía muchas cosas que contar hoy, así que vuelvo a este formato:

• Escribía ayer un párrafo de presentación sobre El Caparazón en Tu blog en mi blog, una iniciativa de divulgación de blogs en el sector educativo que creo que puede interesaros. Os dejo extracto:

“El conocimiento no es algo que pueda limitarse a un tiempo, ni a un lugar definido, lo cual convierte este ecosistema en ideal para alimentar nuestros intereses. Igualmente, su evolución se produce de forma constante y distribuída: Hay que convivir, habitar los lugares en los que se generan los temas que nos apasionan, seguirlos de cerca, participar en ellos.”

“No olvido que sólo 1 de cada 5 habitantes del planeta estamos haciendo uso, en una u otra forma, de todo esto. Me gusta creer que la evolución, el éxito de mi blog, desde esas 20 visitas diarias con las que me conformaba entonces, a los 2300 lectores actuales, es el éxito de la red en general. Que son muchas las personas que van llegando cada día a este paraíso del conocimiento, de la igualdad de oportunidades, de la colaboración y la participación.

Lo que espero, a diario, cuando escribo el blog, es que en El caparazón se sientan cómodos.”

• Actualizada la presentación de esta tarde, sobre Web 3.0, la tercera década de la web en Slideshare. Me he prometido convertirla en Slidecast (acompañarla de audio) este fin de semana. A ver si hay tiempo….
• A Telling Map of Job Losses es algo que descubría esta misma mañana. Interesante, no sólo por la tecnología sinó porque el resultado refleja de forma fiel la problemática laboral que se vive en el mundo. Empleo que se generó en EEUU en 2006, empleo que se perdió en 2008:





• Neil Postman: Cinco cosas que necesitamos saber sobre el cambio tecnológico: Un texto para reflexionar. La tecnología no es neutral… “Cada tecnología tiene una filosofía que es expresada en la forma en la cual hace que las personas usen su mente, en lo que hace a nuestros cuerpos, en cómo codifica el mundo, en cuáles de nuestros sentidos amplifica, en cuáles de nuestras tendencias emocionales e intelectuales ignora.”

  “Por eso debemos ser cautos frente a la innovación tecnológica. Las consecuencias del cambio tecnológico son siempre vastas, a menudo impredecibles y ampliamente irreversibles.”

• Finalmente, para recomendaciones, el semanal de Mikel Rodríguez en Los sueños de la razón. Descubro allí, como tantas otras cosas,  The world of 100, conjunto de ilustraciones sobre diferentes distribuciones estadísticas en un mundo de 100 personas. Curioso…:

Compártelo:

Spanish

Recently the SWC took a thorough look at Triplify, a tool for mapping the contents of a relational DB to RDF, in the course of which we could convince ourselves of Triplify’s ease of use and its potent capabilities.
We take this opportunity to given an account of the philosophy behind Triplify, how it is used and also had the chance to interview the creator Sören Auer.

A common objection from critics of the semantic web is that regular users or webmasters won’t go to the trouble of marking up their content or whole web sites with RDF.
While it is obvious that nobody is going to decorate their web pages with hand-carved RDF triples, it is also apparent that a lot of the current web’s pages are generated by transforming information from relational databases to HTML pages, which are perfectly suited for human consumption, but which suffer from a big loss of machine-readable semantics.

As the information in the relational databases is highly structured and contains rich semantics, it is only natural to also use the already existing structured data to generate RDF representations of the same information.

Triplify is all about this approach of bootstrapping data for the semantic web. It does this for web applications which are built on PHP and MySQL.
Triplify consists of a lightweight PHP script and a configuration file. The latter is used to do the mapping of the columns of an application’s relational database to appropriate RDF classes and properties.

In many cases a site administrator who wants to export her site’s content as RDF, only has to save Triplify with a premade configuration file for her site’s application into the right folder, as for many popular applications like Wordpress, Joomla! or phpBB all the work has already been done.
Once installed, Triplify can be used to generate a dump of the site’s complete RDF graph, or to generate Linked Data, as each of the site’s main concepts’ RDF graph is provided under its own URL, e.g. the semantic description of a user with the ID 123 can be accessed under http://yoursite.com/triplify/user/123.

If no configuration for an application exits, it is fairly easy to create one by yourself.
All one has to do is to look at the app’s database schema, find appropriate classes and properties from well known ontologies and create MySQL queries that grab the data from the relational database and map them to RDF classes or properties.
An example for a query that takes the data from a table describing the user of a CMS:
"SELECT id, name AS 'foaf:name', url AS 'foaf:homepage', short_description AS 'dc:abstract' FROM user_table",

Triplify’s creator Sören Auer kindly gave us the opportunity for an interview:

Triplify is very easy to configure for web developers. For which scenarios would you recommend to use Triplify, and in which situations other approaches of semantifying your data might be more suitable?

As you already mentioned Triplify was primarily developed for Web applications developed in PHP. These usually have a relatively small and simple set of tables. Triplify creates complete RDF exports, Linked Data or JSON, but does not include SPARQL endpoint functionality. When SPARQL is required you are better off with D2R Server or Virtuosos RDF views.

Triplify creates semantic representations of the data in relational databases. Do you think there would also be benefit in the inverse approach i. e. creating an application that parses triples and writes it to a relational DB according to a mapping file?

In certain scenarios this might make sense, but for the most cases I think the database schema has to be developed separately. Database schemata contain more storage and retrieval oriented information, such as for example about data indexing. Vocabularies and ontologies on the other hand represent information on a conceptually higher level and are more flexible with regard to evolution of the information structures than databases.

Are there plans for further development of Triplify?

Sure. We want to add SPARQL support and possibly port Triplify to other scripting languages such as Ruby and Python.

Thank you Sören, we will stay tuned about the news from your great application and look forward to the Triplification Challenge 2009!

English

Markus Luczak-Rösch and his team from FU Berlin have published loomp, a WYSIWYG annotation tool especially designed for inhouse use. loomp is aiming at the Corporate Semantic Web market, providing a semantic application with low entry barriers and high usability designed for non-techies.

When asked about the concrete application area Markus says:

We have found various use cases especially in knowledge and content intense domains. The most interesting one is the journalists use case. Consider journalists which research and write articles and editors which revise and publish the work of journalists.

Journalists research specific topics on demand and access various information sources for this purpose, e.g. websites, books, related articles, and human informants. Only few journalists use digital devices for this task and even fewer apply information management systems. To transfer the finished article to the responsible editor at the publishing house the people use free text documents and email communication. Finally, an editor revises and releases the articles for his department. loomp can help journalists to manage their notes, interview logs, references, addresses, etc. loomp helps to link an article to its information sources.

Read the full interview here.

English

The RIF Working Group met for the 13th and final time at MIT's Stata Center in Cambridge, Mass., on April 15-17. The meeting was extremely productive, closing all critical path issues and forming a concrete plan to bring all rec-track drafts to last call by May, 2009. Among the notable decisions made, RIF will release a very minor change to the Basic Logic Dialect (BLD) - adding lists and removing a restriction on functions and predicate with multiple arities - as a second last call; a new version of RDF+OWL Compatibility (SWC) will be released also as a second last-call, due mainly to the addition of OWL-2; the rdf:text spec will be published, jointly with the OWL WG, as last call; the XML schema datatypes supported by RIF will be the same as those supported by OWL-2; all RIF dialects will support lists as part of the syntax and semantics. The last call documents for RIF Core, PRD, BLD, FLD, DTB, and SWC will be released in late May.

English

Tengo la impresión, cuando me acerco a estos temas, de estar pisando terreno resbaladizo, generando expectativas exageradas, similares a las que protagonizó la Inteligencia artifical en los 70 -80.

Más desde que conozco la teoría de Taleb sobre el “cisne negro”, perfectamente aplicable en un sentido positivo, al fenómeno de internet:  Nuestro conocimiento, basado en la experiencia, suele ser insuficiente para generar grandes innovaciones. Los avances, muy al contrario, se producen acompañados de las siguientes características:

1. Nada en el pasado apuntaba esa posibilidad.
2. Tiene un impacto extremo, positivo o negativo.
3. Sólo es predecible en retrospectiva.

Así, quería presentaros algunas cosas, hoy curiosidades, sin tener una certeza absoluta sobre su alcance o sobre si serán o no “cisnes negros” para el futuro, en positivo, de internet y la humanidad en general:

Cantidad, Relevancia, Utilidad de las conexiones como uno de los hitos en el futuro de la red…

Se predice que en 2017, las redes supondrán en la sociedad digitalizada alrededor de 1000 dispositivos por persona (laptops, teléfonos, mp3, juegos, sensores, etc…). Es lo que también se conoce como la “red de todas las cosas” y trabajan en la investigación para  su sincronización distintos proyectos de Redes personales inteligentes (PNs) y red personal global adaptativa (MAGNET Beyond)

Se trata de las redes 4G (de cuarta generación) y significará servicios personalizados, dispositivos ubicuos y conectividad de banda ancha en todo lugar y momento.

Pero también la calidad parece que se verá afectada:

Es la conclusión a la que llegaremos tras conocer otro de los ámbitos de la investigación europea, la Comunicación más allá de las palabras:

Que la web semántica pueda llegar a entender el lenguaje natural parece un objetivo alcanzable. Podrá ser capaz de entender de forma lógica los conceptos, de crear una web de datos enlazados (linked data) en lugar de la actual red de documentos, pero resulta imposible imaginar que capte determinada información contextual importante en la comunicación humana. Cosas como la ironía, el humor, la emoción y algunos otros matices,  parece que no serían alcanzables por las máquinas.

Pues bien…parece que en el caso de algunas claves no verbales de la comunicación, estamos cerca de poder trasladárselas, a la vez que de enriquecer la comunicación en internet.

Lo que hemos intentado suplir desde hace tiempo con emoticones, smileys, avatares, etc… ahora parece que puede ser transmitido, por un sistema de realidad aumentada capaz de interpretar el contexto y el “humor” en las comunicaciones por voz o textuales a través de la red.

Trabaja en ese sentido el proyecto PASION (Psychologically Augmented Social Interaction Over Networks, Interacción social psicológicamente aumentada en redes):

Desde sensores simples para indicar estados fisiológicos en base a la tasa cardíaca para redes sociales y juegos, hasta aplicaciones para trabajadores del conocimiento (integradas en MS Outlook, iGoogle, Skype, Thunderbird, etc..).

Incluso se ha desarrollado un prototipo que trabaja en un teléfono móvil y proporciona información para coordinación de equipos de trabajo ( disponibilidad, indicadores y visualización que ilustran la posición social de un usuario en el grupo).

En sectores específicos, la tele-psiquiatría promete: software para analizar expresiones faciales y variaciones en la voz podrían ayudar al tratamiento psicológico a través de internet.

En cuanto a la formación, claves no verbales sobre “arousal” (excitación) o sobre dinámicas de interacción en el grupo pueden ser útiles para moderadores online o formadores en aplicaciones de e-learning.

Internet para todo, desaparición de fronteras entre lo real y lo virtual, llamémoslo o no web 3.0, parece que cada vez estamos un poco más cerca.

Fuentes:

• The Network of Everything
• Communicating with more than words

Compártelo:

Spanish