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Archive for January, 2010

Raptor 1.4.21 released – Raptor 2 GIT work

January 30th, 2010

I just released version 1.4.21 of my Raptor RDF parsing / serialising library to the world. This release is just bug fixes:

  • RDFa parser buffer management problems were fixed.
  • The Turtle parser and serializers now use QNames correctly as required by the specification.
  • The RDF/XML parser now resets correctly to detect duplicate rdf:IDs when a parser object is reused.
  • A few other minor bug and build fixes with made.
  • Fixed reported issues: 0000318, 0000319, 0000326, 0000331, 0000332 and 0000337

This is the first release since switching to GIT as the source control for the Redland libraries. The above release is on branch ‘raptor1′ in the new Redland GIT.

In parallel to this is the ongoing Raptor 2 ABI/API updating which is cleaning up 10 years of API and internal cruft. GIT is really helping speed up the ease of this work with the branching, staging/index and stash concepts it supports allowing false paths to be managed. The results can be seen on branch ‘master’ of raptor.

The updating is going well in the sense that make distcheck test suite passes, but there are still things to decide including:

  • Rename all raptor_CLASS_copy copy constructors to something else: either raptor_new_CLASS_from_CLASS (also used in raptor – Doh!) or to raptor_CLASS_addref which signifies better that it just adds a reference to the object, it’s a shallow copy, not a deep one.
  • Unify raptor_world, rasqal_world and librdf_world – which might help share classes between the libraries. Not sure if this is a good idea yet.
  • Add a graph term to the (subject, predicate, object) triple returned from parsing. I am probably going to do this.
  • Turn the raptor_locator object into a more of a log (like librdf_log) or exception object, with inner log/exceptions.
  • Improve the callback interface that passes error, warning etc. messages to user code.

I need to decide at what point to roll out an alpha release of Raptor 2, which will probably be numbered 1.9.0. Some of the above possibilities might be worth putting in a later alpha release.

This can all be seen in the GIT repository which includes instructions for checkout at git.librdf.org.

English, comment

UMBC global game jam live video feed

January 30th, 2010

Via Marc Olano: The Global Game Jam is into its second day at UMBC with 41 registered participants working on seven games. Keep up from home with our live video feed and games list.

English, GAIM, Games, UMBC, social media

New SW Use Case by the BBC

January 29th, 2010
The BBC has provided a W3C Semantic Web Use Case on how Semantic Web Technologies are used on some of the BBC’s Web Sites. The main characteristics of the BBC’s approach is to use the Web as a Content Management System. Sites like the BBC Music, BBC Programmes, or the BBC Wildlife Finder rely on external, publicly available datasets like Musicbrainz or Wikipedia; the BBC sites themselves show an aggregated view of this information, put in a BBC context. Furthermore, the BBC also creates Web identifiers for every item it has interest in; RDF representations of these Web identifiers allow developers to use the BBC’s data to build applications.

Activity news, English

Global Game Jam at UMBC, January 29-31

January 28th, 2010

UMBC will be the Baltimore site for the Global Game Jam. This is a 48 hour event, where teams from around the globe will work to each develop a complete game over one weekend. Last year, the UMBC site fielded five teams as one of 54 sites in 23 countries. This year promises to be even bigger, with 124 sites in 34 countries.

The Baltimore site and open to participants at all skill levels. It is not necessary to be a UMBC student to register. Thanks to generous support by Next Century , there is no registration fee for the Baltimore site, but you must register for this site in advance at www.globalgamejam.org. The jam will start at 5PM on Friday, January 29th in the UMBC GAIM lab, room 005a in the ITE building. At that time, the theme for this year’s games will be announced, and we’ll brainstorm game ideas and form into teams. Teams will have until 3pm on Sunday, January 31st to develop their games. We’ll have demos of each game and selection of local awards, wrapping up by 5pm Sunday.

Last year’s theme was “As long as we’re together there will always be problems”, and we had games developed using a combination of XNA, Flash, Maya, Photoshop, and the Unity Engine.

For more information, visit http://gaim.umbc.edu/jam/.

English, GAIM, General, UMBC, social media

New SPARQL drafts published

January 28th, 2010

The W3C SPARQL Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of SPARQL 1.1 Property Paths, which defines a more succinct way to write parts of basic graph patterns and also extend matching of triple pattern to arbitrary length paths. The group also published six updates, namely:

Activity news, English

Semantic Technologies can be profitable, of course

January 26th, 2010
In the latest posts we have reviewed the present situation of Semantic Technologies for enterprises from several points of view: providers, technologies, demand. Undoubtedly we can claim that these technologies are mature enough to go to market, there is a big number of providers with interesting solutions, and there is demand for these technologies in lots [...]

English, Spanish, Uncategorized

Book launch for “The Social Semantic Web”

January 25th, 2010

We had the official book launch of "The Social Semantic Web" last month in the President’s Drawing Room at NUI Galway. The book was officially launched by Dr. James J. Browne, President of NUI Galway. The book was authored by myself, Dr. Alexandre Passant and Prof. Stefan Decker from the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at NUI Galway (sponsored by SFI). Here is a short blurb:

read more

DERI, Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Education, English, FOAF, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Representation, NUI Galway, National University of Ireland Galway, SIOC, Semantic Web, data, social media, social networks, social software, web 2.0

Book launch for “The Social Semantic Web”

January 25th, 2010

We had the official book launch of "The Social Semantic Web" last month in the President’s Drawing Room at NUI Galway. The book was officially launched by Dr. James J. Browne, President of NUI Galway. The book was authored by myself, Dr. Alexandre Passant and Prof. Stefan Decker from the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at NUI Galway (sponsored by SFI). Here is a short blurb:

read more

DERI, Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Education, English, FOAF, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Representation, NUI Galway, National University of Ireland Galway, SIOC, Semantic Web, data, social media, social networks, social software, web 2.0

Book launch for “The Social Semantic Web”

January 25th, 2010

We had the official book launch of “The Social Semantic Web” last month in the President’s Drawing Room at NUI Galway. The book was officially launched by Dr. James J. Browne, President of NUI Galway. The book was authored by myself, Dr. Alexandre Passant and Prof. Stefan Decker from the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at NUI Galway (sponsored by SFI). Here is a short blurb:

Web 2.0, a platform where people are connecting through their shared objects of interest, is encountering boundaries in the areas of information integration, portability, search, and demanding tasks like querying. The Semantic Web is an ideal platform for interlinking and performing operations on the diverse data available from Web 2.0, and has produced a variety of approaches to overcome limitations with Web 2.0. In this book, Breslin et al. describe some of the applications of Semantic Web technologies to Web 2.0. The book is intended for professionals, researchers, graduates, practitioners and developers.


Some photographs from the launch event are below.

Dr. John Breslin, Prof. Stefan Decker (DERI), Dr. Alexandre Passant (DERI) Dr. Alexandre Passant (DERI), Prof. Stefan Decker (DERI), Dr. John Breslin Dr. James J. Browne (President, NUI Galway) Gerard Cahill (DERI), Dr. Kieran Loftus (Executive Director of Operations, NUI Galway), Dr. Sharon Flynn (CELT, NUI Galway) Dr. John Breslin, Ina O'Murchu (Social Bits) Ina O'Murchu (Social Bits), Dr. Gabriela Avram (University of Limerick) Prof. Ger Hurley (Electrical and Electronic Engineering, NUI Galway), Dr. John Breslin Sheila Kinsella (DERI), Liga Besere, Julie Letierce (DERI), Dr. Uldis Bojars Liam Moran (DERI), Dr. Paul Buitelaar (DERI) Dr. John Breslin, Dr. James J. Browne (President, NUI Galway), Prof. Stefan Decker (DERI), Dr. Alexandre Passant (DERI)
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DERI, Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Education, English, FOAF, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Representation, NUI Galway, National University of Ireland Galway, SIOC, Semantic Web, data, social media, social networks, social software, web 2.0

RDF Syntaxes 2.0

January 24th, 2010

I’ve been diligently ignoring the RDF 2.0 threads on the semantic-web interest list, especially on Syntax since I’ve been there before (Modernising Semantic Web Markup). Firstly I’d endorse what Jeremy Carroll says about the features.

I think I’m qualified as an expert on RDF graph serializations / syntax since:

and I implemented all of the above plus GRDDL, RDFa (via librdfa), Atom and RSS*es, RDF/JSON, … in Raptor

People moan about RDF/XML and have for years. I even wrote down in great detail the flaws in Modernising Semantic Web Markup. Over all that time nobody has come up with a credible and complete XML syntax alternative that stuck, even myself. Let me summarize the ones I know:

  • TriX: had little takeup
  • RXR: ditto
  • GRIT: new, but flawed since it can only represent trees (no named bnodes)

The fundamental problem I think with using XML to write down graphs is:

People looking at XML expect they are looking at a hierarchical Tree.

So writing a Graph in an XML Tree is just going to always fail the simplicity test. This might come from using the XML DOM or looking at HTML, XHTML, but it’s pretty embedded in the mind.

Right now I’d dismiss any XML format for any “simple” or “obvious” way to write down RDF graphs that will be accepted by new users.

(Aside: There’s also a technical argument that no XML format can ever represent all RDF graphs since RDF allows Unicode codepoints that are not allowed in XML).

Now this isn’t a problem just with XML, it’s also true of other non-XML formats that are serial hierarchical documents. That means formats like JSON, which cannot even out-of-the-box represent anything that is not a tree, since it has no ID/REF mechanism.

Of course, apart having dealt with the RDF/XML I also invented Turtle (based on the N3 syntax, simplified) and although it’s a non-XML syntax, does seem to be in the sweet spot for users understanding it, without having the hierarchical document expectation. Yes, Turtle is close to JSON/python in syntax design space but this doesn’t seem to have been a problem.

So I’m happy with how Turtle turned out and that should be the focus of RDF syntax formats for users. It does need an update and I’ll probably work on that whether or not a new syntax is part of some future working group – I have a pile of fixes to go in. Adding named graphs (TRIG) might be the next step for this if it was a standard.

It may be there is a need for a better machine format, but please don’t mix them. Also, machines can read Turtle RDF :)

Consider this stream of conciousness RDF syntax thoughts as the basis of my position paper for the W3C RDF Next Steps workshop.

English, RDF, comment, grddl, raptor, syntax, turtle

Vídeo: Realidad Aumentada (con parodia incluida) :)

January 23rd, 2010

Ha sido una de las noticias, en mi opinión, más significativas de la semana. Bruce Sterling, renombrado escritor cyberpunk y bloguero de Wired (su blog es Beyond the Beyond)  presentará la primera conferencia comercial sobre la Realidad aumentada de la esfera web.

El Augmented Reality Event, signo de que las predicciones que conceden importancia al fenómeno de la RA en 2010 son del todo acertadas, será el 2 y 3 de junio en Santa Clara.

Dejo como muestra de todo ello la ficción que nos recomendaba hace un par de días Bruce en Wired, con las palabras que su autor, un estudiante de arquitectura, le dedicaba. ¿Es hora de crear al fenómeno una historia, un lenguaje, una cultura ya? Parece que sí…

“La última mitad del siglo XX vio como el entorno físico y el de los medios se mezclaba, con la arquitectura adoptando nuevos roles entorno al consumismo, la imagen, el branding. La realidad aumentada podría recontextualizar consumismo, arquitectura y la forma en que interactuamos con todo ello…”.

Mucho de Hyper-realidad aumentada posible con un matiz de parodia, de clara prevención ante lo excesivamente comercial en que puede derivar el tema que hoy nos resulta tan atractivo:

Feliz fin de semana.

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2010, Planeta educativo, Spanish, Web 3.0, ra, realidad aumentada, video-arte, video-documentales, web3.0

Entornos de información, Content Curators en organizaciones, presentación

January 23rd, 2010

Si la evolución de la web es, como hemos visto en muchas ocasiones aquí, fundamentalmente, hacia la personalización, si aparecen contínuamente herramientas o mejoras que se pensaron con el objetivo de ofrecernos una experiencia de usuario más personalizada, si se va demostrando un entorno ideal (y único) para el aprendizaje informal, autónomo y permanente, en un contexto en el que la Inteligencia competitiva es un elemento esencial para la mejora y supervivencia de empresas y organizaciones (la transparencia favorece la excelencia, hemos expresado en otras ocasiones), creo que va llegando el momento de proponer cosas como los Entornos Profesionales de Aprendizaje, planificados o gestionados por Content Curators (Intermediarios críticos del conocimiento).

Veréis reflejados en la presentación que os dejo los PLN (Redes personales de Aprendizaje) de Guadalinfo, las nuevas abundancias, algunas ideas nuevas y viejas acerca del aprendizaje informal, propuestas innovadoras que datan de 1971 ;) , justificaciones teóricas muy recientes acerca de la naturaleza del conocimiento y cómo determina todo lo que planteamos, además de propuestas concretas sobre posibles herramientas de manejo de todo ello.

De la misma abundancia de opciones de abordaje de las cuestiones que ofrece la www, parte también una idea relevante:  la de la necesaria interdisciplinariedad de los enfoques de la formación en organizaciones (Business Intelligence y teorías sobre Entornos de Aprendizaje personalizado, social y abierto en la web que derivan del mundo de la educación).

Trabajaremos en ello, con Jesús Martínez (algunas de las ideas en la presentación, de esta nueva perspectiva aún en curso,  han surgido de conversaciones con Jesús y entorno al programa) y el motivado equipo de e-moderadores del programa Compartim (programa de CoPs del CEJFE – Dpt. de Justicia de la Generalitat de Catalunya),  el próximo martes 26 en Barcelona.

Creo que en el enfoque abierto a la interdisciplinariedad, consciente de la complejidad y las posibilidades del nuevo entorno, acompañado del valor y el esfuerzo de los participantes (y seguidores, como yo misma), del Compartim se basa, en gran medida, su avance contínuo y sin las típicas excusas hacia la Sociedad del Conocimiento.

Se trata, en este caso, de una sesión interna, pero que será la primera de una serie de actuaciones en este sentido durante 2010.

Continuaremos, de hecho, hablando de ello, con otros expertos y en sesión abierta al público en el próximo seminario de Gestió del Coneixement, Coneixement en Acció el próximo 22 de febrero.

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2010, Business Intelligence, Knowledge Management, PLEs, Planeta educativo, Spanish, Videotutoriales, Web 3.0, colaboraciones, comunidades, conectivismo, content curator, content curators, e-learning2.0, empresa, empresa 2.0, entornos personales, entornos personales de aprendizaje, entornos personalizados, filtrado de contenidos, innovación, inteligencia competitiva, ple, pln, web 2.0, web personal, web3.0

cfp: two special issues of the Journal of Web Semantics

January 23rd, 2010

The Journal of Web Semantics has announced two new special issues. Heiner Stuckenschmidt and Jeff Heflin are editing a special issue on web-scale semantic information processing with a deadline of 1 July 2010 for submissions. Grigoris Antoniou, Mathieu d’Aquin and Jeff Z. Pan are editing a special issue on semantic web dynamics with submissions due 31 May 2010.

AI, English, KR, Semantic Web

Value-it. First deliverables main results. Demand Driven Report (Key findings)

January 22nd, 2010
Value-it “Demand Driven Report”  is very rich in data, conclusions, results, undoubtedly a reference document for people who want to know about Semantic Technologies possibilities. But a one hundred pages document is perhaps too much document for people who only want to have a high level picture. For this reason it is worth to highlight the [...]

English, Spanish, Uncategorized, demand, semantic technologies

Well, Ouch, One Step Backwards - Reverting to 4.2 for a day or two

January 21st, 2010

We released OpenCalais 4.3 a day or so ago - and we’ve run into a few issues as we’ve rolled it out into production. We think we have a handle on the fixes needed – but to play it safe we’re going to roll back to Release 4.2 for at least the weekend.
 
Sorry for any inconvenience – but we’d rather play it safe and take a day or two to get things totally in shape.
 
Tom

English, Official Blog

Value-it. First deliverables main results. Demand Driven Report

January 21st, 2010
Of course, the main important point when you try to sell something is the existence of “Demand“. It doesn’t matter we are speaking about a product, a service, or why not, a technology. For this reason I think that “Demand driven report” is a fundamental document for those who are interested in semantic technologies. Lots of [...]

English, Spanish, Value-it project, demand report, sematic tehcnologies

“RDF Next Steps” Workshop organized by W3C

January 20th, 2010

W3C is organizing a Workshop on the Next Steps for RDF around June 2010; we will announce the exact dates and location as soon as possible.

Since its publication in 2004, the Resource Description Framework (RDF) has become the core architectural block of the Semantic Web. The standard is now widely deployed in terms of tools and applications. Due to this wide deployment, additional R&D activities, and the publication of newer standards (e.g., SPARQL, OWL, POWDER, and SKOS), a number of issues regarding RDF have come to the fore. Workshop articipants will discuss these issues and help determine whether it is time for a new version of RDF. W3C Membership is not required to participate in the Workshop, but each participant must be associated with an accepted position paper. The deadline for position papers is 29 March 2010; see the Call for Participation for more information.

Updates (including the exact date and location of the Workshop) will be added to the Call for Participation and will be announced on the Semantic Web Activity News Blog.

Activity news, English

Web semántica y reutilización de datos gubernamentales abiertos en UK y US

January 20th, 2010

Comentábamos hace un tiempo la participación de Tim Berners-Lee, el inventor de la World Wide Web en sendas iniciativas, norteamericana y británica, de apertura, puesta a disposición del ciudadano (también, mediante APIs abiertas, de desarrolladores de aplicaciones, investigadores, etc…) de determinados datos no privados (accidentes de tráfico, pasajeros de aviación, agricultura, resultados escolares, etc…) que podrían ser de interés.

Se trata de una derivación de la Web semántica, la Web de los datos enlazados, que hemos analizado en varias ocasiones durante los últimos tiempos:

Data.gov.uk es el sitio británico, con 3 veces más volumen de datos de los que el sitio de US, más antiguo, ofrece hoy. Concretamente, The Data.gov.uk contiene acerca de 3,000 “data sets” (conjunto de datos), en contraste con los 1,000 data sets de US.

No me ha extrañado el compromiso británico con la innovación, que comenta Kirkpatrick. UK ha sido uno de los primeros países en recomendar desde el gobierno, en legislar hace poco más de un año, sobre cosas como el uso de twitter en educación.

Volviendo al tema, el gobierno de UK tiene una legislación tradicionalmente más adecuada a compartir este tipo de datos (The Freedom of Information Act). Además, se ha demostrado claramente entusiasta de las posibilidades de innovación que ofrece el trabajo con este tipo de datos públicos. Prueba de ello es que esponsoreaban hace poco un concurso, Show Us a Better Way, remunerando las mejores ideas sobre posibles mashups para aplicaciones o visualización de datos, en caso de tener acceso a los datos gubernamentales adecuados.

De aplicación más restringida en el caso de US, el sitio de UK incluye data sets militares cuyo carácter público puede resultar polémico o extraño. Los datos sobre  Suicidios en las fuerzas armadas son un buen ejemplo de ello.

Se aplica también a esta Nube de los Datos Enlazados el problema que Vinton Cerf, co-creador de los protocolos TCP-IP destacaría hace unos meses sobre los sistemas de Cloud Computing en general: que los proveedores de servicios en la nube más importantes, como Amazon, Google o IBM no se están preocupando por la interoperabilidad, generando una situación en la que empresas o organizaciones pierden la capacidad de migrar libremente de uno a otro proveedor.

No existen estándares “inter-cloud”, derivándose una situación similar a la de falta de comunicación y familiaridad entre redes de computadoras que vivimos en 1973.  Según Vint Cerf, los usuarios pronto querrán tener múltiples clouds que interactúen entre sí para sacar partido de la capacidad de computación que pueden ofrecer tales entornos combinados. “Hay mucho trabajo de investigación por hacer y muchos protocolos por diseñar y estándares por adoptar para permitir a los usuarios gestionar sus activos en la nube”.

Aunque  Cerf,  vinculado a Google (empresa tradicionalmente ajena a la evolución de la Semweb), no apunte en esta dirección, la Web semántica, la estructuración de los datos bajo sus formatos es una buena solución, como estándar independiente de marcas proveedoras de servicios en la nube.

Es algo que sabían en UK cuando contrataban a Berners Lee para la tarea, pero que parece que no arraiga con tanta fuerza en US. Si bien la administración Obama se muestra afín a utilizar técnicas de computación en la nube para conseguir mayores niveles de eficacia y de comunicación interdepartamental, no lo hace tanto a la hora de adoptar estándares semánticos.

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2010, Google, Linked Data, Planeta educativo, Resource Description Framework, Semantic Web, Spanish, Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Web 3.0, Web Semántica, cloud computing, cloud computing-web 4.0, data cloud, e-goverment, gov, herramientas semánticas, linked data cloud, talleres, vinton cerf, web3.0

Dolor en tiempo real.

January 20th, 2010

Vuelve a temblar Haití. La Real time web es angustia en tiempo real, alimento para la necesidad devoradora de información del ciudadano que se implica en el mundo.

Seguro que nos hemos vuelto más impacientes en cuanto a la información.  Las que no están claras son las implicaciones de su flujo constante en lo emocional, en lo fundamental.

Podemos seguir  el sufrimiento en el mundo, en vivo y en directo. Pero en contra de cualquier intuición o teoría simplista, conductista, del comportamiento, creo que no nos habituamos en absoluto. Menos que a nada…. al contraste, casi la desfachatez de seguir hablando de Realidad enriquecida, aumentada, mientras en otros lugares luchan por tener una realidad.

Nos calma quizás, calma la impotencia que sentimos en días como hoy, viralizar el dolor. Otra vez los beneficios de  compartir.

Podemos verlo también desde un punto de vista mucho más holístico: El superorganismo, el planeta, la madre Gaia es capaz de sentir de forma distribuida y global, en directo, un dolor que ya no será nunca más solitario.

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2010, Activismo, Anuncios generales, Planeta educativo, Psicologia, Redes sociales, Spanish, comunidades, derechos humanos, sociología, web3.0

OpenCalais 4.3 debuts with key updates to Tagaroo, SemanticProxy & Gnosis

January 19th, 2010

Big News!

To kick-start 2010, we have updated virtually every tool we have in the OpenCalais arsenal. Check them out and let us know your thoughts.

  • Version 4.3 of the OpenCalais service features enhanced Social Tags for categorization; improved disambiguation; new entities, facts and events in English; and an entirely new feature called News Names.
  • By popular demand, the improved Tagaroo plugin for WordPress gives users more control over the tagging process.
  • Our URL submission tool, SemanticProxy, has been normalized to ensure that its results are identical with those you would get by programmatically submitting content to OpenCalais via the API. Additionally, we are now supporting JSONP. You can now specify a callback function when requesting results in JSON.
  • Our Gnosis plugin for Firefox now includes categorization of processed Web pages in the sidebar and can sort entities by alphabetical order or according to frequency or relevance.
  • And finally, we have published the OpenCalais Schema in OWL, enabling OWL enthusiasts to apply ontology based tools on OpenCalais metadata.

Below please find further details on OpenCalais 4.3, Tagaroo and SemanticProxy.

New in OpenCalais 4.3

Improved ‘Social Tags’: We are expanding on our popular Social Tags categorization technique by adding more generalized, aggregate tags.

For example, if a blogger is comparing the racing performance of sports cars like the Ferrari 308 GTB and Porsche 959, OpenCalais 4.3 will suggest auto racing and motorsport as Social Tags, in addition to the more obvious sports cars.

NEW! ‘News Names’: We are instituting a process of name normalization that represents a first step toward our more robust vision for person disambiguation. Whenever a partial or extended name appears in content, OpenCalais 4.3 will return the names it finds as usual, but will now also suggest the most commonly used form of that same name.

For example, for articles containing Barack Obama, Obama or Barack Hussein Obama, OpenCalais will suggest not only the partial or extended name it found, but also the more frequently used Barack Obama.

New Entities, Facts and Events in English, including:

  • New Natural and Manmade Disaster attributes that reveal these disasters’ effects
  • Supporting data for upcoming events that will enable OpenCalais to recognize new Movies, Music Albums, etc., as well as anticipated Medical Treatments
  • More Political Events and new items such as Diplomatic Relations, Political Endorsements, Poll Results and Voting Results
  • Enhanced Person Career extraction that includes political party affiliations where those are included in the text.

The 4.3 release also features improved Simple Format and Microformat outputs, as well as several extraction bug fixes. For technical details, please see the full release notes here.

 

Tip Top Tagaroo!

By popular demand, we have also made two key improvements to our Tagaroo plugin for WordPress.*

Tagaroo no longer suggests tags while you type (which many users had found disruptive). Instead, you simply click a button when you are ready to see tag suggestions, and then select the tags you want.

We also added the ability for you to select / highlight a portion of text in your post and get tag suggestions for that text alone, in the event that you don’t want to tag the whole post.

*Note: You must have a hosted site – or your own server – where you have access to install WordPress plugins. Blogs hosted on WordPress.com won’t work with Tagaroo.

 

SemanticProxy Support for JSONP

Finally, we have also made two important changes to our URL submission tool, SemanticProxy.com.

First, we normalized the service to ensure that the results it returns are identical to those you would get by programmatically submitting content to OpenCalais via the API. This entailed discontinuing the HMTL cleaning that SemanticProxy did on its own, which had occasionally caused the service to return false content-type errors.

Second, we added the ability for you to specify a callback function when requesting results in JSON format. Callbacks are useful for web service requests in client-side JavaScript and provide a relatively simple way to invoke web service requests across domains.

To use it, specify the callback function name followed by the JSONP output format. For example: http://service.semanticproxy.com/processurl/licenseid/jsonp:processresul...

The JSONP output format wraps resulting JSON output text in parentheses and the provided callback function name. For the request above, wrapped results would be: processresults({"doc":{"info":...json output...”} );

As JSON is native to JavaScript, you can access the elements inside the returned output, similar to passing a JSON object reference to the processresults function. In other words, if your JavaScript has a processresults function which takes a JSON object as input and manipulates it, this function will be invoked automatically.

Please see the attached demo html to see this in action.* 

*Note that the demo will not work in IE. Also, we have restricted the volume for this demo key.  If it does not resolve, please plugin your own OpenCalais API key.

Jump in!

Let us know what you think about these updates. We appreciate your feedback and look forward to any suggestions you may have.

English, Official Blog

Social media y Realidad aumentada: Interesante experiencia de Nike.

January 19th, 2010

Una web cada vez más caótica pero también más predecible nos llevaba a determinar, hace tiempo, que la realidad aumentada sería una de las tendencias más significativas en esta tercera década de la web.

Son ya muchas las referencias, es mucho ya el hype alcanzado por el término en lo que llevamos de año y parece que comienza a ser un recurso popular en las campañas publicitarias de firmas ávidas en demostrar su “status”, su potencial innovador.

Si a eso le añadimos que lo que el potencial consumidor valora en la web social es la posibilidad de participar, esta vez en  la construcción de las nuevas capas de la realidad y el crecimiento espectacular en la potencia y el uso de dispositivos móviles, tenemos los ingredientes de la nueva campaña de Nike que os presento.

Es lógica la vinculación actual de la AR con departamentos de I+D de Universidades o Empresas potentes antes de que pueda considerarse una tecnología popular y nos devuelva experiencias menos publicitarias, menos “marketingueras”, más colaborativas y afines al espíritu de desarrollo “per se” de la Inteligencia colectiva.

Creo, además, que el espectacular aumento (200% en los últimos 3 meses, según datos recientes) del uso de dispositivos basados en Android como SO libre (recordemos también el reciente lanzamiento de Nexus One de Google, que impulsará enormemente su crecimiento) ,  será positivo también para el desarrollo de aplicaciones más desvinculadas de marcas, “amateur”, de Realidad Aumentada.

En e-learning llevamos meses observando las posibilidades de la Realidad Aumentada en lo que hemos llamado Pedagogía de la Imaginación. Añadir capas de información, de conocimiento, a la realidad es añadir posibilidades al aprendizaje informal, enriquecerlo. Más desde la perspectiva de la potencia de la vivencia, de la simulación, en cuanto a la creación o reconfiguración de conexiones neuronales.

Hablaremos mucho de ello en 2010, pero mientras este tipo de desarrollos va conviertiéndose en commodity, veámos lo que hacen son empresas punteras, como Nike, que nos ofrecen experiencias de usuario como la que vemos en el vídeo.

Se trata, en este caso, de una nueva aplicación para iPhone, True City, destinada a ofrecer nuevas visiones (deporte, vida, cultura, son los términos sobre los que trata) de seis ciudades Europeas desde las experiencias y opiniones de sus habitantes.

Algo así como guías de las distintas ciudades, creadas a través del etiquetado social constante, en tiempo real, por los propios habitantes de Londres, Berlín, Amsterdam, Milán, París y Barcelona. Diseñada por AKQA, puede descargarse de forma libre desde UK, así que muchos tendremos que conformarnos con el vídeo:


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2010, AKQA, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Campañas, Evolución, London, Marketing, Net-art, curiosidades en la red, Paris, Planeta educativo, Spanish, Vídeos, Web 3.0, aprendizaje informal enriquecido, cibercultura, city map, comunidades, curiosidades, dispositivos, futurismo, innovación, inteligencia colectiva, iphone app, lifestreaming, milan, multimedia, móviles, periodismo ciudadano, realidad aumentada, social media, true city, video-documentales, video-publicidad, videos-creacion, web 3.0 social, web social, web3.0

The Next Web to Be User-Centric (Thoughts on David Siegel’s Pull Book)

January 18th, 2010


Tell me, how much time do you waste searching for stuff on the web, or filling up forms with similar information over and over? For all its might, utility, and growth, what we have today is a scattered web, a web of destinations, on which finding information requires a whole expedition across loosely-connected archipelagos of data, each with its own information requirements*, rules of engagement, and gravitational attempts at capturing your time and money. So, when David Siegel contacted me to review his upcoming book Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business, I was immediately attracted by his core premise, the creation of a web that would automatically wrap around us and serve us based on the actual characteristics and needs of our lives.

David Siegel, English, Linked Data, Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business, Semantic Web, Tim Berners-Lee, Unmet market needs, Web 3.0, Web trends, data web, next web, semantic technologies

Value-it. First deliverables main results. Technovision Report (Market and Technology blockers)

January 18th, 2010
One of the most relevant results of  Technovision report is the identification of blockers to move semantics from laboratory to market.  We all know that the introduction of new technology trends is usually a difficult task. Although there is a big consensus about the acceptable maturity level of STE, it is not easy to measure beforehand [...]

English, Spanish, Value-it project, blockers, drawbacks, marketing blockers, semantic technologies, technological blockers, technovision, value-it

Value-it. First deliverables main results. Technovision Report (Pilots data)

January 18th, 2010
Among the data that this document edited by Value-it team includes I would like to highlight the data about pilot implementations. The main conclusions are: USA is in front of the classification Still public sector is the “big client”, if we add up defense, public sector and healthcare, the results account for almost of half of the pilot [...]

English, Spanish, Value-it project

Test blog post from posterous

January 18th, 2010
Hmmm, a reply

English, Random Stuff

The Solution!

January 17th, 2010

Test blog post from posterous

January 17th, 2010
This is a simple test!

English, Random Stuff

A new Semantic Web journal – with an open review process

January 16th, 2010

SWJ-logoA new journal was launched yesterday, called “Semantic Web – Interoperability, Usability, Applicability.” The publisher is IOS Press, who is already active in the Semantic Web area, e.g. by means of their journal “Applied Ontology,” their book series “Studies on the Semantic Web,” and a considerable number of Semantic Web publications in their series “Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications” (and, not to forget, a frequent physical presence at major Semantic Web conferences).

Since I am one of the editors-in-chief (the other one is Krzysztof Janowicz), I prefer to refrain from discussing the rationale behind launching (yet another) Semantic Web journal. Let’s just say that a growing community requires a growing communication infrastructure, and let history deal with the rest …

But I’d like to point out that we have made a very conscious decision to run the journal under an open and transparent review process: with non-anomyous reviews which are made publicly available on the journal homepage.  And any researcher – not only those explicitly asked to review – can add reviews to submitted papers and thus influence the transparent decision process. We’ve already received a lot of positive feedback about this set-up, and we’re looking forward to seeing it in motion.

Besides the types of papers one usually finds in journals, such as traditional research papers and surveys, the journal will also sport short papers on ontologies, tools, and applications.

We’re looking forward to your contributions to this new and exciting endeavour!

Pascal Hitzler

English, IOS Press, Literature & Publications, Semantic Web journal, journal, open review

Value-it. First deliverables main results. Technovision Report

January 15th, 2010
This document, that you all can download here,  tries to bring us nearer the STE supply vision. To achieve this, TechnoVision Report provides a vision of the STE products, services, technologies, and expertise that play and will play a key role in configuring and further consolidating the Supply of STE products and services from the [...]

English, Spanish, Uncategorized, Value-it project, semantic technologies, supply side, technovision

Value-it. First deliverables main results. Inception Report

January 15th, 2010

As explained in our website,  Value-it is a European Union FP7 Support Action, this is,  our intention is to foster innovation and accleariting adoption of Semantic Technologies for the Enterprise. This means that our main output is not a new product or even a business model. Our output is to help to fill the gap between STE suppliers and prospective users what implies a two-way dialogue between these two different (and I dare to say opposite) areas. Establishing a bridge between them is a tough but amazing goal. For this reason, Value-it team has passed through all possible moods: illusion, disillusionment, concern, illusion again… Now we are very glad that we have the first year deliverables available, and we are proud to share them with you. We don’t have any economic objective and for that reason our impartiality is guarantee.

The first document of our project is the Inception Report. This document more than an analysis with its own conclusion, must be seen as a kind of guide of Value-it project and a high level state of the art of semantic technologies in a wide sense. For this reason I recommend it for everyone who see our project interesting, or for people who need to get a high level understanding of  Semantic Technologies.

As it happens in most conferences, work papers…, defining semantic technologies is the first barrier to cross, because it is not clear when one application can be defined as a semantic application and when not. For us, this was not clear too (and I’m not sure that it can be perfectly delimited), for this reason in the first part of the document there is an important effort to define it.

At last our definition of Semantic Technologies for the Enterprise is: “a set of technologies that enable Intelligent Enterprise Applications and services based on the meaning and use, of the terms and concepts, which define those applications and services. STE provide a “semantic infrastructure” to support semantically-enabled applications and services using taxonomies, ontologies, and reasoning software”. This definition means that semantic technologies are usually not applications in themselves.

The most relevant contents included in the deliverable are:

  • Description of enterprise areas where semantic technologies have a say: Content and knowledge management, search, social computing, system interoperability, data integration…
  • Different stakeholders in the supply side: providers, decision makers, research centers, … and a list of the most outstanding companies in each group
  • Sectors in which semantic technologies can be useful: manufacturing, finance, media, ICT products and services, energy and utilities… and the most relevant companies on each group
  • Description of contents of the document Supply Side (WP2). Includes a review of current STE, description of types of ontologies, state of the art in the languages and standards (OWL, OWL -S, SPARQL, GRDDL…), tools (ontology deployment, ontology annotation, semantic web services), semantic browsing, semantic user interface, semantic wikis…
  • Analysis of STE maturity, because when we hear about semantic, very different technologies are involved, some are quite mature and others are supposed to be in the future.
  • Description of the different field works in the project, kind of interviews…
  • Description of contents of the  document  Demand-Driven Mapping (WP3). Studying the functions that can be improved by means of these technologies as search and user interface…, assessing the market impact, and describing the fieldwork design for this work package.
  • Description of contents of  document Matchmaking and Outreach (WP4), describing the methodology it will be used to try to bring closer the laboratory and the market.
  • A collection of 17 use cases of successful implementations of semantic technologies in different sectors. Each use case includes: description, target customers, scenario before, scenario after, benefits…

Summarizing, this document can be considered an initial step for everyone who want to learn what are STE about, and the starting point to read the rest of deliverables of the project. For this reason I encourage you to get it!!!.

English, Spanish, Value-it project, deliverables, inception report, ste definition