Planet Semantico

At Semantic Technology 2009 we formally announced PelletDb, our new product that integrates Pellet with Oracle’s Semantic Database system, including the Oracle RDF query engine and OWL reasoner. We’re excited about PelletDb since it makes Pellet available to Oracle users, including its sound and correct OWL 2 reasoning, unique reasoning services like SPARQL-DL and explanations, etc. But we’re also excited because it makes Oracle’s enterprise-class information management facilities available to Pellet users and apps.

Today we’re releasing an extensive PelletDb whitepaper (PDF) that explains in detail what PelletDb is, how it works, who should use it, etc. It includes customer benefits, sample code, and a basic roadmap for future development. If you’re curious about how we’re fusing Pellet and Oracle, check out the whitepaper.

The PelletDb limited beta is on-track to begin 15 July, so please get in touch if you want to participate.

BizApps, Business, English, PelletDb

Short version: If the Web knows I like a TV show, why can’t my TV be more useful?

So I have just joined a Facebook group, “Spaced Appreciation Society“:

Basic Info
Type: Common Interest – Pets & Animals
Description: If you’ve ever watched (and therefore loved) the TV series Spaced, then come and pay homage to the great Simon Pegg and Jess Stevenson. “You f’ing plum”
Contact Details
Website: http://www.spaced-out.org.uk/
Location: Meteor Street

That URL is (as with many of these groups) from a site whose primary topic is the thing the group’s about. In this case, about a TV show. It’s even in the public page for that group:

<tr><td class=”label”>Website:</td>
<td class=”data”><div class=”datawrap”><a href=”http://www.spaced-out.org.uk/” onmousedown=”return wait_for_load(this, event, function() { UntrustedLink.bootstrap($(this), &quot;&quot;, event) });” target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow”>http://www.spaced-out.org.uk/</a></div></td></tr>

If I search Google (Yahoo BOSS might be wiser, they have APIs) with:

link:http://www.spaced-out.org.uk/ site:wikipedia.org

It finds me:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced

Although “link:http://www.spaced-out.org.uk/ site:dbpedia.org” doesn’t find anything, some URL rewriting gets me to:

http://dbpedia.org/page/Spaced

“Spaced is a British television situation comedy written by and starring Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson, and directed by Edgar Wright. It is noted for its rapid-fire editing, frequent dropping of pop-culture references, and occasional displays of surrealism. Two series of seven episodes were broadcast in 1999 and 2001 on Channel 4.”

dbpedia-owl:author
* dbpedia:Jessica_Hynes
* dbpedia:Simon_Pegg

dbpedia-owl:completionDate
* 2001-04-13 (xsd:date)

dbpedia-owl:director
* dbpedia:Edgar_Wright

dbpedia-owl:episodenumber
* 14

dbpedia-owl:executiveproducer
* dbpedia:Humphrey_Barclay

dbpedia-owl:genre
* dbpedia:Situation_comedy

dbpedia-owl:language
* dbpedia:English_language

dbpedia-owl:network
* dbpedia:Channel_4

dbpedia-owl:producer
* dbpedia:Gareth_Edwards
* dbpedia:Nira_Park

dbpedia-owl:releaseDate
* 1999-09-24 (xsd:date)

dbpedia-owl:runtime
* 24

dbpedia-owl:starring
* dbpedia:Jessica_Hynes
* dbpedia:Simon_Pegg

There are also links from here to Cyc (but an incorrect match) and to Freebase (to http://www.freebase.com/view/en/spaced).

Unfortunately, the Wikipedia “external links” section, with the URL for http://www.spaced-out.org.uk/ (marked “offical, fan-operated site” is not part of the DBpedia RDF export. I guess as it is not in an infobox. Extracting these external-link URLs at least for the TV, Actor and Movie related sections of Wikipedia might be worthwhile. And DBpedia would be useful for identifying the relevant subset to re-extract.

This idea of using such URLs as keys into Wikipedia/dbpedia data would also work with Identi.ca groups and others. In fact the matching might be easier in Identi.ca – I’m not sure how the Facebook APIs expose this stuff.

Anyway, if a show is about to be broadcast that includes eg. an interview with dbpedia:Jessica_Hynes or dbpedia:Simon_Pegg I’d like to hear about it.

So… is there any way I can use BBC’s /programmes to get upcoming information about who will be on the radio or telly, in a way that could be matched against dbpedia URIs?

Edit: I should’ve mentioned that Facebook in particular also has a more explicit “is a fan of” construct, with Products, Celebs, TV shows and Stores as types of thing you can be a fan of. Furthermore these show up on your public page, eg. here’s mine. I’m certainly interested in using that data, but also in a model that uses  general groups, since it is applicable to other sites that allow a group to indicate itself with a topical URL.

English, General

Two weeks ago at Semantic Technology 2009 conference Evren and Mike presented a 4 hour tutorial about building OWL-based applications with Pellet 2. About 50 people attended, which was a surprising turnout given that it was at the rump end of the conference, a notoriously difficult time slot.

After some polishing based on feedback, we’re making the tutorial materials, including sample code, slides, and a bundled download of Pellet, available for use in learning (or teaching others) how to use Pellet, both interactively and programmatically.

Enjoy!

English, Pellet 2, Talks

Should the nations of the world work toward a treaty banning or at least limiting cyberwars? If we don’t, might we fall into an arms race that could be bad for everyone? Would A war in cyberspace be less dangerous for people than traditional wars? Or maybe worse?

John Markoff and Andrew Kramer have an interesting article, U.S. and Russia Differ on a Treaty for Cyberspace in Sunday’s New York Times.

“The United States and Russia are locked in a fundamental dispute over how to counter the growing threat of cyberwar attacks that could wreak havoc on computer systems and the Internet. Both nations agree that cyberspace is an emerging battleground. … But there the agreement ends. Russia favors an international treaty along the lines of those negotiated for chemical weapons and has pushed for that approach at a series of meetings this year and in public statements by a high-ranking official.
    The United States argues that a treaty is unnecessary. It instead advocates improved cooperation among international law enforcement groups. If these groups cooperate to make cyberspace more secure against criminal intrusions, their work will also make cyberspace more secure against military campaigns, American officials say. “We really believe it’s defense, defense, defense,” said the State Department official, who asked not to be identified because authorization had not been given to speak on the record. “They want to constrain offense. We needed to be able to criminalize these horrible 50,000 attacks we were getting a day.”

Russia has some specific proposals that it would like to have considered. But there are complications that arise due to cybercrime and Internet censorship.

“In a speech on March 18, Vladislav P. Sherstyuk, a deputy secretary of the Russian Security Council, a powerful body advising the president on national security, laid out what he described as Russia’s bedrock positions on disarmament in cyberspace. Russia’s proposed treaty would ban a country from secretly embedding malicious codes or circuitry that could be later activated from afar in the event of war. Other Russian proposals include the application of humanitarian laws banning attacks on noncombatants and a ban on deception in operations in cyberspace — an attempt to deal with the challenge of anonymous attacks.
…
But American officials are particularly resistant to agreements that would allow governments to censor the Internet, saying they would provide cover for totalitarian regimes. These officials also worry that a treaty would be ineffective because it can be almost impossible to determine if an Internet attack originated from a government, a hacker loyal to that government, or a rogue acting independently.”

The article makes the interesting revelation that this is not the first time that cyberspace arms control have been discussed between the US and Russia.

“In 1996, at the dawn of commercial cyberspace, American and Russian military delegations met secretly in Moscow to discuss the subject. The American delegation was led by an academic military strategist, and the Russian delegation by a four-star admiral. No agreement emerged from the meeting, which has not previously been reported. Later, the Russian government repeatedly introduced resolutions calling for cyberspace disarmament treaties before the United Nations. The United States consistently opposed the idea.
…
John Arquilla, an expert in military strategy at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., who led the American delegation at the 1996 talks, said he had received almost no interest from within the American military after those initial meetings. “It was a great opportunity lost,” he said.

English

This week the BBC had a story about the UK’s cyber security programs, UK ‘has cyber attack capability’, with this video interview with Gordon Brown.

The article leads with this surprising discussion of the UK’s offensive capabilities.

“The UK has the ability to launch cyber attacks but does not use it for industrial espionage like some other countries, minister Lord West has said. He refused to be drawn on whether it was used for military purposes.
…
He told BBC Radio 4’s PM programme the UK faced coordinated Huber attacks “on a regular basis” from other countries including Russia and China. And he confirmed that the British government had approached the Russian and Chinese governments to ask them to stop the attacks. “We have had a dialogue with them in the past and I wouldn’t want to go into what goes on in terms of debate at the moment,” he told the BBC.
…
Pressed on whether Britain used cyber attacks itself, he said: “We do not go and attack other nations to try and find from them their industrial secrets.” But he added: “I think it would be very silly of any nation not to have an ability to use cyber space for the safety and security of its nation.” Pressed further on Britain’s cyber warfare capabilities, he said: “We have an ability to do things and we have got very good and very talented people who have worked on this.”

The article also quotes Lord West, the UK’s first cyber security minister, as saying that they had recruited “a team of former hackers for its new Cyber Security Operations Centre” at GCHQ.

“They had not employed any “ultra, ultra criminals” but needed the expertise of former “naughty boys”, he added. “You need youngsters who are deep into this stuff… If they have been slightly naughty boys, very often they really enjoy stopping other naughty boys,” he said.

English

The Journal of Web Semantics will publish a special issue on Data Mining and Social Network Analysis for integrating Semantic Web and Web 2.0 in the spring of 2010. The special issue will be edited by Bettina Berendt, Andreas Hotho and Gerd Stumme and initial abstracts for papers must be submitted via the Elsevier EES system by September 21, 2009.

The special issue, invites contributions that show how synergies between Semantic Web and Web 2.0 techniques can be successfully used. Since both communities work on network-like data structures, analysis methods from different fields of research could form a link between those communities. Techniques can be - but are not limited to - social network analysis, graph analysis, machine learning and data mining methods.

Relevant topics include

• ontology learning from Web 2.0 data
• instance extraction from Web 2.0 systems
• analysis of Blogs
• discovering social structures and communities
• predicting trends and user behaviour
• analysis of dynamic networks
• using content of the Web for modelling
• discovering misuse and fraud
• network analysis of social resource sharing systems
• analysis of folksonomies and other Web 2.0 data structures
• analysis of Web 2.0 applications and their data
• deriving profiles from usage
• personalized delivery of news and journals
• Semantic Web personalization
• Semantic Web technologies for recommender systems
• ubiquitous data mining in Web (2.0) environment
• applications

English

BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos has broken the 10% barrier, a feat that may have won them the $1M Netflix prize. We’ll know for sure in 30 days.

“June 26, 2009: Today our team submitted our solution to the Netflix Prize, resulting in a score of .8558, which corresponds to an improvement over Netflix Cinematch algorithm of 10.05%. This is the first submission in the competition to break the 10% barrier and sets off a 30 day period where all competitors are invited to submit their best and final solutions.

The prize is the award by Netflix for an open competition that started in October 2006 for the best collaborative filtering algorithm predicting user ratings for films from a database of previous ratings. Today the BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos team submitted an entry that improved on the existing algorithm by 10.05%, exceeding the 10% improvement threshold required of a winner. The team is a collaboration between people from Pragmatic Theory, Commendo, Yahoo and AT&T.

“The Netflix Prize seeks to substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences. Improve it enough and you win one (or more) Prizes. Winning the Netflix Prize improves our ability to connect people to the movies they love.”

English

Wired’s Threat Level has another example of how social media are being used by Iranian citizens trying to promulgate their cause in Google Maps Track Iran Protests.

“As the protests in Iran continue for the second week, a Google user named Xárene Eskandar is following the activity on a Google Maps page, logging the events each day as they’re reported.

The latest map from Wednesday tracks events by the hour and shows the movement of special forces vans and military helicopters as they close in on protesters, as well as the location where protesters have reported seeing or hearing gunshots.”

English

This is not your father’s Macbook.

English

Some new releases around Apple´s iPhone family, like the new OS3.0 or the new 3G S have stimulated another big hype around this “little darling”. I took a look at another facet, namely: Has the Semantic Web entered the iPhone realm yet (or vice versa)? Experts have been talking about the need for semantically enhanced mobile applications for years, so let´s see, if they are in place already.

Searching for “semantic web” in the AppStore delivers six results, one of them called “SemanticWb” is obviously an interesting match. The application “extracts current life sciences and health care knowledge and place them conveniently at your fingertips on your iPhone”. The application offers search suggestions and moderated search and retrieves articles from PubMed or genetic disorders which are related to the search term. Good start, this is a neat iPhone application which should be interesting for medical doctors and related professions.

Another application on the iPhone which is related to the semantic web is the “English wordnet dictionary” based on WordNet from Princeton University.

So, not much semantic web on the iPhone so far - I thought until Evriverse was released some weeks ago. The iPhone version of evri.com offers a new way to find connections between all kind of things. Similar to OpenCalais Evri can extract people, places, organisations, products etc. from unstructured information like news or blogs. The innovation around Evriverse is the way how complex search queries around “anything” can be formulated by just touching the screen. For example, if you are looking for information about “Tim Berners-Lee” the application not only offers auto-complete but also suggests related people, organisations etc. to refine any search query. Such relations are updated constantly and are based on the semantic analysis of news and blogs.

Evriverse offers the most comfortable way to do news research on the iPhone today. It shows how semantic technologies can enhance user experience on a mobile device and it will path the way to more semantic (web) apps on the iPhone.

Apple, English, Evri, Health Care, Life Sciences, Mobile Computing, Princeton University, Semantic Web, Tim Berners-Lee, WordNet, iphone, semantic web applications

Facebook se ha convertido, en cierto modo, en la bestia negra, el objetivo de muchas de las críticas a la web. Entornos cerrados, propietarios, un formato atractivo para menores, los usos que hacemos de la plataforma para compartir información privada, su popularidad (200 millones de usuarios que pasan unos 20 minutos diarios en ella), la participación de Microsoft (1.6%) en la compañía, lo cierto es que le exigimos más, sobretodo en cuestiones de seguridad, que a otros entornos.

Parece, a juzgar por sus nuevos anuncios, que sigue la lucha por el dominio de “todo” en Internet. Convertirse en canal de difusión masiva, adoptar características de la popular (gracias a twitter), web en tiempo real, etc…

Estaban probablemente en jaque debido al anuncio de Google sobre el lanzamiento de Google Wave, una propuesta que pretende ganar terreno en el ámbito de lo social, cuyo dominio sigue siendo de FB.

Así, el lanzamiento de una beta de Publisher—(el lugar principal desde el que compartir fotos, vídeos y updates de status en el perfil y la página principal de cada usuario) con distintas opciones en cuanto a privacidad de lo que compartimos, es el inicio de una estrategia de Facebook para entrar en su terreno y convertirse también en canal de difusión.

Como precaución, como usuarios, está siendo bastante polémico el hecho de que si nuestro perfil es público, estamos entrando de forma directa en la beta. Si no queréis que todo el mundo pueda ver vuestras actualizaciones, cambiad las opciones de privacidad pronto.

Han pasado horas desde el lanzamiento de la nueva beta de Publisher y FB sorprende con otra actuación: Live Stream Box o una caja en forma de widget que podrá instalarse en sitios para retransmitir videos o conciertos en tiempo real, discursos, eventos deportivos, webcasts, Tv, juegos “multiplayer”, presentaciones, webinars, etc….

Como decíamos al principio, es posible que tanto movimiento durante los últimos tiempos responda a la tradicional rivalidad entre Facebook y Google, sus distintos modelos en cuando a la red, su estructura, su diseño, su utilidad.

De hecho, la ausencia de modelo de negocio en Twitter , así como su utilidad casi pública, llevan a pensar como probable una adquisición final y no muy lejana por parte de Google. Y ese puede ser, con la citada amenaza de “wave”, el motivo de la revolución en FB que vivimos.

Microsoft-FB contra Google-Twitter podría ser un escenario probable en breve. Y es que de hecho, las visiones de Google y Twitter parecen coincidir en la concepción de un mundo global, progresista, abierto y estar bastante alejadas de la visión local, elitista, con distintos niveles de privacidad y confianza que propone FB.

Si durante la última década, la web ha dependido de los algoritmos de Google, rigurosos, eficientes y desapasionados, la apuesta pública de Facebook es por una web más “humana” en la que el contexto social es la fuente principal de información (y la que determina nuestras decisiones de compra), siguiendo la lógica que ha basado FB desde siempre: la semejanza con el mundo offline.

Es una visión romántica que se desvirtúa a poco que la analicemos. Y el objeto de la lucha, vista de un modo más amplio, es entre distintos modelos sociales en la web.

En otros términos, disculpad la simplificación, pero creo que se trata de la contraposición entre el Grafo Social Local y el Grafo Social Global:

Grafo Social Local:

-FB propone un modelo social local basado en lo actual fuera de la red: influencias, amiguismos, parentesco, vecindad, son los factores que influyen en las decisiones de compra, filtrado de contenidos, etc…

Nos quejábamos de élites y esta línea puede conducirnos a las mismas oligarquías de las que pretendíamos huir. Su universo,ahora tan cerrado como deseemos, nos cede espacios para crear redes igualmente cerradas.

Grafo Social Global (Grafo Global Gigante de Tim Berner Lee)

-Es el modelo de Google, de Twitter y afortunadamente similar al que proponen Tim Berners Lee y el w3c en la web. La apuesta es por un escenario global y diverso, dependiente en mayor medida de nuestros intereses que de prejuicios o vínculos emocionales, que puede conectarnos en redes sociales (mejor llamarlas, en este contexto, redes de intereses) a personas diversas, lejanas, según el criterio más objetivo posible de relevancia: que compartan nuestra pasión por profundizar y seguir aprendiendo en determinadas materias.

Tienen sentido aquí, en tecnología, la web de los datos abiertos y enlazados y en cuestión de personas, la transparencia (porque importa en menor medida quienes seamos que lo que sabemos o compartimos), la reciprocidad, la democracia, etc…

Imagen: Tecnoretales.

Relacionados:

• Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network’s Plan to Dominate the Internet — and Keep Google Out

Control social, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Planeta educativo, Redes sociales, Spanish, Tim Berner Lee, cibercultura, comunidades, cultura 2.0, filtrado de contenidos, ggg, google wave, grafo social global, grafo social local, lifestreaming, medios, novedades facebook, publisher, redes intereses, tendencias web, twitter, web 2.0, web3.0

For the past few months, there have been a variety of calls for feedback and suggestions on how the US Government can move towards becoming more open and transparent, especially in terms of their dealings with citizens and also for disseminating information about their recent financial stimulus package.

read more

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, DERI, English, FOAF, Federal government of the United States, Linked Data, Linked Open Data, Open Data, SIOC, Semantic Web, Tim Berners-Lee, US, United States, Web, internet, social media, social software, web 2.0

For the past few months, there have been a variety of calls for feedback and suggestions on how the US Government can move towards becoming more open and transparent, especially in terms of their dealings with citizens and also for disseminating information about their recent financial stimulus package.

read more

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, DERI, English, FOAF, Federal government of the United States, Linked Data, Linked Open Data, Open Data, SIOC, Semantic Web, Tim Berners-Lee, US, United States, Web, internet, social media, social software, web 2.0

For the past few months, there have been a variety of calls for feedback and suggestions on how the US Government can move towards becoming more open and transparent, especially in terms of their dealings with citizens and also for disseminating information about their recent financial stimulus package.

As part of this, the National Dialogue forum was set up to solicit solutions for ways of monitoring the “expenditure and use of recovery funds”. Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal on how linked open data could provide semantically-rich, linkable and reusable data from Recovery.gov. I also blogged about this recently, detailing some ideas for how discussions by citizens on the various uses of expenditure (represented using SIOC and FOAF) could be linked together with financial grant information (in custom vocabularies).

More recently, the Open Government Initiative solicited ideas for a government that is “more transparent, participatory, and collaborative”, and the brainstorming and discussion phases have just ended. This process is now in its third phase, where the ideas proposed to solve various challenges are to be more formally drafted in a collaborative manner.

What is surprising about this is how few submissions and contributions have been put into this third and final phase (see graph below), especially considering that there is only one week for this to be completed. Some topics have zero submissions, e.g. “Data Transparency via Data.gov: Putting More Data Online”.

This doesn’t mean that people aren’t still thinking about this. On Monday, Tim Berners-Lee published a personal draft document entitled “Putting Government Data Online“. But we need more contributions from the Linked Data community to the drafts during phase three of the Open Government Directive if we truly believe that this solution can make a difference.

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, DERI, English, FOAF, Federal government of the United States, Linked Data, Linked Open Data, Open Data, SIOC, Semantic Web, Tim Berners-Lee, US, United States, Web, internet, social media, social software, web 2.0

Сергей Щербак (Sergey Shcherbak) has published a Russian translation of the SPARQL Query Language, under the title “Язык запросов SPARQL для RDF”.

English

In the wake of SemTech09 conference, I thought this title would do justice to those mischievous readers who happened to have the good fortune to stumble across this blog posting. The conference was great, neatly organized, carefully secluded in San Jose, California. One of the highlights was the Semantic Search Keynote Panel with all the players on stage (Ask, Bing, Google, hakia, TrueKnowledge and Yahoo!) as seen in the picture below.

Bear in mind that semantic technology to “any” audience can be as heavy and stifling as what the topic of stem-cell research can be to the high-school students. Thanks to Carla Thompson from Guidewire who did a terrific job to come up with discussion topics and moderating the panel, everyone survived the ordeal without any sign of dozing.

Despite the positive outcome, some responses from the panelist made me wonder if we should go back to the basic question of “What is semantic search?” Or, better to discuss: what is NOT semantic search? Here is my list:

Structured data. Folks, structured data is NOT semantic technology. A database that can pull out a list of beer brands, their manufacturers, and their contact information, given the query “social drinking”, has nothing to do with semantics. I say this because some people seemed to be under the illusion that there must be some kind of semantic technology if a search engine brings such structured data in SERP. It is a trick as old as the ancient Egyptians who used beads on strings to organize harvesting information. Organized information is not semantics.

Morphology. If a search engine is robust (brings the same results) to a query “top ten” versus “top 10″ by recognizing “ten=10″ it would be a stretch of imagination to call it semantic. Anyone can come up with such a replacement list without a drop of linguistic knowledge. Similarly, distinguishing the name Fisher from the noun fisher by detecting the capitalization of the first letter does not go beyond the application of simple linguistic rules. These capabilities are not semantic search capabilities.

Syntax. It is true that certain level of semantic information can be salvaged from syntax. Unfortunately, if syntax was enough to detect the meaning of text, then an 8 year old kid who developed a perfect reading skill (syntactically parsing strings of letters and words in English) would be expected to understand the meaning of Shakespeare’s works. The difference between reading and understanding is the difference between syntax and semantics. Former requires the skill to parse things out, whereas the latter requires vast amount of associative knowledge.

Statistics. An infinite number of monkeys with a keyboard would eventually type the complete text of the declaration of independence. This is statistically correct. However, if a search engine is expected to become semantically apt using statistical algorithms, one has to wait until the monkeys finish their job. There is no place for statistics in semantics. For example, let’s take this sentence: “Polar bears don’t eat alligator eggs before dawn.” I am sure you have never seen this combination of words before in your life. But, the fact that you can understand what it means is simple evidence that semantic brain does not need statistical sampling. Meaning does not emerge from statistics. It emerges from associative knowledge.

Scalability. Scalability is the narrow bridge between science and technology. What you can carry from the science side to the technology side over this bridge determines the level of capabilities in real world. The science of semantics is huge stemming from the basics of philosophy. But, Web search is a highly particular problem with stringent constraints (narrow bridge). Designing semantic algorithms to drive a Web search engine is like walking on egg shells and requires a completely new approach. Therefore, a semantic algorithm can be very sophisticated but it does not mean it is a semantic search algorithm suitable for the Web.

The five issues I addressed above explain what is NOT semantic search and should guide the interested readers to question emerging technologies in SemTech10. Structured data, morphology, syntax, statistics, and scalability are the key questions to discuss. Obviously, no one would be afraid to ask these questions unlike what the title suggests, but if you understood the title, it was your semantic brain in action. That was my last example to “what is semantics” in this article.

English, Technology

The NYT reports in New Military Command for Cyberspace that the DoD has put NSA in charge of a unified U.S. Cyber Command to oversee the protection of military networks against cyber threats.

“Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Tuesday ordered the creation of the military’s first headquarters designed to coordinate Pentagon efforts in the emerging battlefield of cyberspace and computer-network security, officials said. Pentagon officials said Mr. Gates intends to nominate Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, currently director of the National Security Agency, for a fourth star and to take on the top job at the new organization, to be called Cybercom. The new command’s mission will be to coordinate the day-to-day operation — and protection — of military and Pentagon computer networks.”

CYBERCOM will be a subordinate unified command under the US Strategic Command.

English

The “XSPARQL” specification has been published as a W3C member submission, co-authored by experts of Asemantics S.R.L., DERI Galway, Fundación CTIC, INRIA, Ontotext, OpenLink Software Inc., Profium, Talis Information Ltd., and the University of Innsbruck. This specification defines a merge of SPARQL and XQuery, and has the potential to bring XML and RDF closer together. XSPARQL provides concise and intuitive solutions for mapping between XML and RDF in either direction, addressing both the use cases of GRDDL and SAWSDL.

English

The latest version of Tagaroo is available here.

Below are some of the new and important features of this new release

• Social tags are suggested as tags and appear at the top of the tags list in bold.
• Document categories are suggested as tags and appear at the top of the tags list.
• Many new entities and events are also suggested as tags. We have changed the descriptive text (what you see as a suggestion) for events, which unifies the suggested tags, so that, for example, 'Trial', 'Conviction' and 'Arrest' appear as 'Judicial Event' instead of as three separate tags.
• Entity tags are sorted by their relevance scores. You can control the 'Relevance Score' threshold from Tagaroo's settings, so that entity tags with a lesser relevance score do not appear as suggestions.

Check out the newly released Tagaroo and see how it can enrich your Wordpress blog.

English, Official Blog

Wired has an interesting article on Facebook vs. Google, Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network’s Plan to Dominate the Internet — and Keep Google Out.

“Today, the Google-Facebook rivalry isn’t just going strong, it has evolved into a full-blown battle over the future of the Internet—its structure, design, and utility. For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google’s algorithms—rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg’s vision, users will query this “social graph” to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire—rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search. It is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that places Facebook right at the center. In other words, right where Google is now.”

This is definitely a David and Goliath match, what with Facebook not having turned a profit yet. The article does a good job of pointing out how their services are different and complement one another.

At the risk of evoking discredited stereotypes, maybe Google is from Mars and Facebook is from Venus.

English

M-Libraries: Information use on the move is a report from Keren Mills of the Arcadia Programme based at Cambridge University Library. With an eye on developments in mobile technologies and increased adoption, there is concern to assess the requirements, avoiding the expenditure of considerable resources before there is a real need.

The analysis and recommendations of the report are rooted in a survey carried out by the Arcadia Programme, in which staff and students from Cambridge University and Open University were questioned about their use of mobile phones. In the survey, most respondents said that they currently use their phones primarily for phone calls, SMS and photos. Only a small number had read e-books or journal articles on their mobile phones – for example, 91.5% of Cambridge students have never read a journal article on their mobile phones, and there’s a similar (slightly higher) figure for reading eBooks.

These seem fairly predictable findings, but I don’t know whether it follows that:

These results suggest it is not worth libraries putting development resource into delivering content such as eBooks and e-journals to mobile devices at present.

I’m not sure whether that really stands up on its own. It would imply that development of technologies should be demand-driven, and I’m not sure whether that’s true.

The report refers to other successful developments such as the Athabasca University Library’s Digital Reading Room in Canada “which allows readers to access full eBooks and journal articles through their library’s subscriptions on any mobile device.” However the report dismisses the possibility of similar developments in the UK right now partly because of the low usage figures encountered in the survey.

The other reason for not going down the Athabasca Digital Reading Room route is that the technology to make mobile e-journal access possible without such purpose-built platforms is now just around the corner:

… the key difference between the iPhone and previous web browsing mobile phones is that the iPhone can comfortably access websites intended for larger screens. As this type of device becomes increasingly available it will no longer be necessary to develop mobile-ready websites. Several manufacturers have announced that they intend to release touch-screen phones similar to the iPhone in 2009.

The report makes the point over and over again that the iPhone is revolutionising the mobile phone market. For example, although extremely low numbers of respondents had accessed e-resources on their phone:

iPhone users are already more inclined to read eBooks on their phones, according to comments from the respondents to this survey.

The report also comments on the increased uptake of mobile phone applications since the launch of the iPhone (2009 findings from ComScore), although in its own survey only 21% of respondents had downloaded applications to their phones and would do so again.

Thus the report gives us a combined reason for hanging back from M-Library developments at this stage – demand isn’t strong and more suitable technology is imminent without the library world having to develop its own bespoke solution. I think this is a fairly rational position.

The problem that I do have is that the recommendations made are strikingly conservative. Text alerting services, text reference services, audio tours and mobile OPAC interface all seem to me to be excessively anchored down by the current library offering, rather than using shifts in use of mobile devices, accelerated by the iPhone, to re-imagine the library and its services. The following quotation is enough to make you feel that you’ve gone back in time to the print-only era:

… a significant portion of respondents currently use text alerting services in some form, and would be in favour of receiving text alerts from the library to let them know when reserved items are ready for collection, when books are due for renewal or are overdue.

I’m very sympathetic to Lorcan Dempsey’s take on the report: this is a rapidly changing area, and is very difficult to capture. It reminds me of all the years I’ve spent at Silverstone trying desperately to capture Formula One racing cars as they fly past me at 100+mph. Who knows how respondents will be describing their mobile phone habits in even 12 months time. But I do feel that even at this point in time we could be formulating a much more exciting vision of transformed library services that widespread take-up of smart phones might bring out.

English

Semantic Technologies are considered amongst the most important tendencies in most of the forecasts by consultant companies. Other companies are considering that kind of technologies in the portfolio of technologies to take into account in the short run.

So, firms like BT are putting to work these technologies. The adoption of semantic technologies by Telecomm Operators must be seen as a fact of great importance because they are usually big companies, which manage a great deal of information, with cutting edge information systems, and resources to do expensive investments… These companies play a key role in the IT value chain at any country, so they can enhance the dissemination of these technologies within other companies.

Telefónica has joined too this tendency so these technologies should be consider in its new developments, I hope others join soon.

The vision of the telecomm operators is:

SEMANTIC INFRASTRUCTURE

Semantic technologies are based on the separated codification of data meaning and computing content in a way that will allow machines, besides persons, to understand, share and rationalize information in a similar way as persons do. From this process it is possible to build a semantic infrastructure through taxonomies, ontologies or “rationalized software” that allows to obtain comprehension of stored data in information systems.
An initial use of this technology is done to improve management information systems for companies and available as web services. With Semantic Infrastructure it is possible to offer a solution for one of the main problems in computing: semantic interoperability of data (what is known as Semantic Web Services or SOA).
Later on it will be used to support semantic web services. There are initial examples in services such as semantic search engines who might compete with the current web search tools (Powerset, Hakia or TrueKnowledge), semantic wikis (Freebase) or semantic social networks (Twine). In the longer term they will be used as a basis to the so called semantic web. In the way towards the semantic web, two trends will come together: “the bottom-up”, based on the use of micro formats as principal elements, implying user involvement when information is edited; and other one, ” the top-down”, based in the use of formal recognition representations (ontologies).

WHEN?

It is not expected the appearance of “killer applications” but, rather, a smooth introduction of these technologies in traditional applications in order to improve presentations in relation to other applications.

WHAT WOULD BE THE CONSECUENCES?

These technologies would allow computers to begin to solve problems, apparently simple for persons, but still now complicated for machines because it was necessary some information treatment based on its meaning. So far, this type of problems were only solve when it was an easy task or it was necessary to request people’s network that work together in services as Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk”. With these technologies a bigger number of tasks would be performed by computers.

English, Spanish, Trends

The New York Times has an article on the etiquette of using your smart phone in meetings, At Meetings, It’s Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners.

“As Web-enabled smartphones have become standard on the belts and in the totes of executives, people in meetings are increasingly caving in to temptation to check e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, even (shhh!) ESPN.com. But a spirited debate about etiquette has broken out. Traditionalists say the use of BlackBerrys and iPhones in meetings is as gauche as ordering out for pizza. Techno-evangelists insist that to ignore real-time text messages in a need-it-yesterday world is to invite peril.”

Professors have been dealing with this for several years, since most of our students come to class with their laptops. Maybe they are taking notes. But why is he smiling? Now he’s laughing! Was my comment on hill climbing really that funny?

Of course, the dynamics of this is different outside the classroom.

“In many professional circles, where connections are power, making a show of reaching out to those connections even as co-workers are presenting a spreadsheet presentation seems to have become a kind of workplace boast. Mr. Brotherton, the consultant, wrote in an e-mail message that it was customary now for professionals to lay BlackBerrys or iPhones on a conference table before a meeting — like gunfighters placing their Colt revolvers on the card tables in a saloon. “It’s a not-so-subtle way of signaling ‘I’m connected. I’m busy. I’m important. And if this meeting doesn’t hold my interest, I’ve got 10 other things I can do instead.’ ”

English

Sylwia Tesarska has published a Polish translation of the OWL Guide, under the title “OWL Język Ontologii Sieciowej Przewodnik”. Also, Dorota Szwarc has published a Polish translation of the OWL Web Ontology Language Reference, under the title “OWL Język Ontologii Sieciowej Referencja”.

English

程龚 (Gong Chen) has published a Simplified Chinese translation of the RDFa primer, under the title “RDFa入门”.

English

The W3C Ubiquitous Web Applications Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of Delivery Context Ontology. A "Delivery Context" is a source of information that can help create context-aware applications, thus providing a compelling user experience. The Delivery Context Ontology specification provides a formal model of the characteristics of the environment in which devices interact with the Web or other services. The Delivery Context includes the characteristics of the Device, the software used to access the service and the Network providing the connection among others. Comments are welcome through 07 July.

English

The W3C Ubiquitous Web Applications Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of Delivery Context Ontology. A "Delivery Context" is a source of information that can help create context-aware applications, thus providing a compelling user experience. The Delivery Context Ontology specification provides a formal model of the characteristics of the environment in which devices interact with the Web or other services. The Delivery Context includes the characteristics of the Device, the software used to access the service and the Network providing the connection among others. Comments are welcome through 07 July.

English

The W3C Media Annotations Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Ontology for Media Resource 1.0. This specification defines an ontology for cross-community data integration of information related to media resources, with a particular focus on media resources on the Web. The ontology is supposed to foster interoperability and counter the current proliferation of video metadata formats by providing full or partial translation and mapping towards existing formats.

English

On June 10, I gave an invited dinner speech at the ICAIL 2009, the Twelfth International Conference on ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE and LAW in Barcelona. I never gave an invited talk during dinner at a conference, and the speeches I have seen at other dinners where more funny (and much work to prepare) than serious. However, Dr. Pompeu Casanovas, the Conference Chairman, assured me that at ICAIL people were used to serious dinner speeches.

A few months ago I changed responsibilities from technological strategy to user modelling and profiling, so I was thrilled to have the opportunity to talk to an audience of experts in both informatics and law, or, in other words in “privacy”. From a technological point of view, semantic technology is a hot topic at ICAIL and Pompeu asked me to talk about that. I also was aware that the conference attendants were mostly academic researchers from universities and research institutions, and less from industry, and therefore I decided to focus more on the business side than on the technology side.

English, Events, Spanish

Por si no habéis podido acceder via Sclipo, os dejo la videoconferencia que he desarrollado para la Fundación Chandra esta tarde. El tema era la evolución del conocimiento en la web pero hemos hablado bastante (os dejo una hora, aprox.) sobre web social, brecha digital, periodismo ciudadano y otros temas.

Gracias Kike (Enrique), Flip, Marta, Arancha, Nadia, Paloma, Silvia, Núria, etc… por vuestra atención e intervenciones.

2009, Activismo, Aprendizaje, Evolución, Knowledge Management, Nuevas Tecnologías-Internet, Planeta educativo, Sociedad de la conversacion, Spanish, TRABAJOS DESTACADOS, Videotutoriales, Web 3.0, Web Semántica, blogging, brecha digital, cibercultura, colaboraciones, conferencias web, cultura 2.0, desarrollo-web, evolución web, filtrado de contenidos, futurismo, innovación, inteligencia colectiva, multimedia, periodismo ciudadano, software, video-documentales, videoconferencias, web 2.0, web social, web3.0