On Tuesday, the workshop on Ontology Modeling and Best Practices was held at Sookmyoong university in Seoul, South Korea.
The workshop was held in conjunction with the publication of the Korean edition of Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist, which became available the same week. Presentations included my Working Ontologist overview of the Semantic Web, a presentation about ontology reasoning technology by Young-Tack Park of Soongsil University, Ontology Evolution by Sang-Won Lee of Sungkyunkwan Unversity, and Semantic Technology in TopQuadrant Korea by Won Seok Oh. The event was attended by about 80 delegates from Korean industry, government and academia. In conjunction with the conference we also had a book-signing of the Korean edition. I am quite pleased with the
appearance of the book - the title fonts are sumptuous, and the hardbound cover artfully combines the original cover art with an image that is unique to the Korean edition. Even in Korean, I can do some proofreading. In one of the prefaces, my co-author Jim Hendler's name is misspelled (presumably a double-transliteration error). But overall, the book looks great; pretty surprising for such a quick turn-around. From Morgan-Kaufmann's contract with ScitTech publishers until the books hit the sales table was only six months, including translation, artwork, and all post production. Special thanks to Prof. Sung Hyuk Kim of Sookmyoong university for spearheading the project, and to Yoon Mi Chu for the translation.
After several months of people asking for code downloads and reporting errata, we have finally created a website companion for Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist. There's more to come, but so far we have the basics - downloads for all the examples in the book and a list of errata. Now all the URIs in the book actually have a place to resolve to!
For the past few weeks, Jim and I have been making webcasts (produced by Wilshire Conferences) as part of a series they call Semantic Universe. The next one is about a week away. All of them are being archived, so you can check them out later on. I hope that as more and more of us do things like this, we can focus the message about what the Semantic Web is and is for so that it isn't such a free-for-all.
It is official - the Korean translation of Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist is almost complete. It will be presented at a workshop in Seoul during the week of December 15!
Here are word clouds generated from the answers that US presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain gave to a set of 14 questions about science policy. Click on an image to see a larger size. Try to guess which is which and leave a comment. A link to the answer is after the word clouds.
“In November, 2007, a small group of six citizens - two screenwriters, a physicist, a marine biologist, a philosopher and a science journalist - began working to restore science and innovation to America’s political dialogue. They called themselves Science Debate 2008, and they called for a presidential debate on science. … Among other things, these signers submitted over 3,400 questions they want the candidates for President to answer about science and the future of America. Beginning with these 3,400 questions, Science Debate 2008 worked with the leading organizations listed to craft the top 14 questions the candidates should answer.
In case you want to save money on your ISWC registration, be reminded that the early registration deadline is approaching quickly (September 18th). For details please click here.
The NYT has an interesting article, Stuck in Google’s Doghouse, on the importance of search engines to many businesses. Or maybe it’s about ad arbitrage and the ways that some Web business models are based on gaming search engines and Web advertising. In any case, it’s especially relevant in the light of the recently announced Google-Yahoo advertising deal.
One of the most interesting aspects to the story, at least to me, is who gets the credit or blame for significant decisions and events on the Web — people or machines.
“When Mr. Savage asked Google executives what the problem was, he was told that Sourcetool’s “landing page quality” was low. Google had recently changed the algorithm for choosing advertisements for prominent positions on Google search pages, and Mr. Savage’s site had been identified as one that didn’t meet the algorithm’s new standards. (As Google defines it, landing page quality includes a series of attributes — loading speed, user friendliness, relevancy, originality and dozens of other characteristics — that it deems appropriately “googly.”)” source
“What made a six-year-old article about a bankruptcy filing by United Airlines reappear on Wall Street traders’ screens on Monday as if it were fresh news, prompting a sell-off that erased $1 billion in the company’s market value in a matter of minutes? The path the article followed from forgotten archive entry to present-day stock-killer has begun to emerge, and it raises some interesting questions about how news rockets around the Web. Both human error and far-from-foolproof technology seem to have played a role in the episode, which involved a 2002 Chicago Tribune report; the web site of the Sun Sentinel, a Florida newspaper owned by the same company; the Bloomberg News financial wire service; and Google, all apparently unwittingly.” source
The automation is inevitable, IMHO, and probably a good thing. Of course, I reserve the right to revise and extend my remarks if my own ox is gored.
So, Antstorm. After Appscout’s report that they had “never seen a service that brings social bookmarking and semantic search together the way AntStorm does,” and as I have this little project of listing all available semantic search engines, I thought I might as well check it out (yes, the list is in perpetual need for an udpate - those cementic developers are nearly too fast to keep up with).
Actually, Antstorm has very little to do with the semantic web, and a lot with the social web - but expect no folksonomies. First thing to do for you at Antstorm: They’re asking you to import your bookmarks; ideally, you would already have them in neatly arranged folders, labeled appropriately, and then Antstorm would convert these folders into what they call “trails”, which other users can follow. You can keep trails private, of course, but it doesn’t seem as if you can also keep selected bookmarks within these trails private. Hmpf.
And hey, wait: Is there anybody in the age of del.icio.us who still keeps her bookmarks on a computer? I don’t, except the ones that I need half a dozen or more times a day, e.g. the login to the corporate CMS or webmail, and these are not the links that anybody outside of my work context could benefit from. Importing bookmarks from del.icio.us is, however, not part of the AntStorm package - what you can do is to automatically add new links to del.icio.us as well by checking a box “Add to delicious” - but as you cannot add tags to a link on AntStorm, I wonder of what use an untagged bookmark could be on del.icio.us?
Things might get a little more interesting if you decide to add links to a group as well: A group on AntStorm is a community of editors who collaboratively manage trails related to the interests of their group. Any group member can suggest new links - the group decides by voting for or against it whether these will be added or not. Collaborative filtering, alright - I wonder, however, how many users you’d have to have in a group a.k.a. microniche to receive results that matter.
I failed to find out what the appeal of AntStorm could be - as all my bookmarks are either on del.icio.us, Bibsonomy (imported from del.icio.us) or CiteUlike (for all things academic), I don’t have any browser bookmarks left to get me started on AntStorm. AntStorm’s sales copy - “Have you ever needed a bookmark and realized it was on some other computer? Or have you ever wanted to save a bookmark, but you weren’t on your primary computer?” - would have convinced me in 2004, but I’ve already unleashed all my bookmarks. What they call trails looks all too suspiciously like yet another, difficult to manage folder structure to me. Of course I am biased, but I just don’t see how a collaborative link suggestion tool could work without tagging - or maybe I just didn’t find it?
Anybody with a few stationary bookmarks left - please set them free on AntStorm, maybe you’ll find out what they’re really good for. I clicked around a bit and skim-viewed their How-to-Video (9 min 18 sec!).
They promise that a share of the earnings generated by users will go to charity, and that’s always a good thing. Also, their logo is cute (even of not web 2.0 shiny) and I quite like the idea of a storm of ants.
This possibility was recently pointed out by Nima Arkani-Hamed. The laws of quantum mechanics allow anything to happen, albeit the probability may be exponentially suppressed for complicated (large entropy) objects. CERN officials maintain there is no imminent danger since the putative LHC dragons will be microscopic (small dragons have the smallest entropy, hence the largest probability to appear in particle collisions) and anyway they will quickly suffocate in the vacuum of the beam pipe. Some researchers, however, have expressed concerns that the dragons might survive, grow, burn ATLAS, kidnap ALICE and lock her in a tower. A more comprehensive study of the potential risks is underway.
I’ve seen the following attributed to Woody Allen:
Question: what’s a three syllable word beginning with ‘P’ that means you think that everybody’s against you? Answer: perceptive.
It’s fashionable in some circles to be paranoid about Google. If they ever do abandon their Don’t be evil informal motto then we are all in trouble. Search engines can gather a lot of information about a person’s interests. While Google is not the only search engine available, they have assembled quite an array of Web systems, including gmail, Google reader, Google groups, DoubleClick, Feedburner and many more. They would be in a good position to integrate a lot of information about a person’s behavior on the Web.
If you own the browser, you can get the full range of a person’s Web activities. What worries some is that each Google Chrome installation contains a unique ID, which could be used to identify its user. The German company Abelssoft has released UnChrome as an application that effectively makes your copy of Google Chrome anonymous.
“Regarding to Google, “Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier”. Unfortunately, each Google Chrome installation contains a unique ID that allowing identifying its user. Google doesn’t make it an easy job to remove this ID.
UnChrome helps you with this task. It replaces your unique ID with Null values so that your browser cannot be identified any longer. The functionality of Google Chrome is not influenced by this. You only need to apply UnChrome once.”
I think this is paranoia rather than being perceptive, but just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.
I’m starting a new kind of weblog post: a biweekly, short preview post on what’s coming up next on this weblog, which is meant to have two results: first, to give our readers some sense of what’s upcoming; second, to lock us into writing here more often, which is a good thing for everyone.
Evren Sirin and Mike Smith are working on some short posts about the upcoming Pellet 2.0 release, which will be our first major new release of Pellet with tons of changes—previews coming here first…
Mike Grove is working on a short post about the new jSpace UI, which will be hugely improved and quite sexy
Bijan Parsia and Markus Stocker are working on a series of posts about our policy management products
I’m working on a couple of posts about automated planning and our offerings in that space, which we don’t talk about as much as our automated reasoning products, but which are equally interesting and useful
Okay, now that I’ve opened my big mouth publicly about this stuff, we have to do it… :)
There's been plenty of commentary about the new Genius feature in iTunes. A recommendation engine is a nice new feature, but personally there's a couple of other features I'd like to see on my iPod, or in iTunes. These are more in the "reacquaint yourself with the music you already own" category rather than recommending new purchases.
For example, I use the shuffle feature quite a bit, usually when I just want some background music to blot out noise when commutting. But there's no context navigation available from the "now playing" view. If you're on shuffle, then you can only proceed to the next random track. But quite often I hear something and want to listen to the rest of the album, or more by the same artist. It'd be nice to be able to quickly switch from a random order to album order with a couple of clicks, rather than having to navigate back through all of the menus again. Similarly it'd be useful to be able to jump directly into that artist's music in my collection from the same screen.
And rather than having a "genius" in the software, why not a DJ? (And I don't mean in a cheesy voice over style!)
If listening to your collection on random is listening to your own personal radio station, then where are the other "feature programming" playlsits that you get from real radio stations? For example how about randomly programming a "Blue's Hour", a Second Summer of Love special, a Radiohead retrospective, or a Mercury Prize Nominee playlist?
There's plenty of metadata in iTunes and plenty more available from an increasingly wide array of sources, so why doesn't the software provide us with a better interface onto it? Supported by slightly more sophisticated software agents to help navigate or use it?
Implementing some of this might be possible through iTunes plugins, but some of the features it'd be nice to have on the device. The hackability of the iPhone suggests that this might be a better platform for exploration that the iPod.
This week I co-chaired a plenary session at the ALPSP International Conference.
The goal of the session, titled "The Web's Rich Tapestry" (abstract), was to discuss the continuing evolution of the web from a document-centric view of the world to one that was more data and link centric.
The first half of the session was presented by my friend and former colleague Geoff Bilder, Director of Strategic Initiatives at CrossRef. Geoff focussed on discussion the nature of the link and its implementation both on the web and in early hypertext systems. Geoff discussed some of the power that was evident in these hypertext environments and the growing need and awareness for features like stable, persistent links and multi-directional links not just in scholarly communication (where they're already very common) but more widely on the web.
I've explored this theme myself. It seems to me that what we're doing is slowly rebuilding many of the features of early hypertext environments but in a more distributed, open and scalable fashion.
In my half of the talk I focused on the evolution towards the Semantic Web. I've included my notes below. I don't normally write up talks in this way, but it proved a useful way to organize my thoughts on this occasion. They're reproduced below without much editing. The accompanying slides are on Slideshare.
(Note: this was a presentation for a non-technical audience, so may not be much new content here for Planet RDF readers)
I don’t really know if these are strange (read, “unusual” or “novel”), and there are probably 5 companies already working on each one, but anyway:
First, cheap, lightweight user studies for development groups based on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
IMO, there are only two ways to build excellent user-facing (that is, usable) software: either you get extremely lucky (or you’re just building a variant of something that’s known to be usable) or you user-test the crap out of what you’re doing, in an incessant cyle of test-refactor-retest.
But user tests are tedious to setup and manage, such that most development teams just skip them. That failure to overcome tedious inertia leads to a lot of unusable junk software.
So how about building a startup that gave development teams an easy way to arrange arbitrarily sized user studies by harnessing the person power at Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service? Cheap, easy, and willing are the watchwords of user studies; and 2 cents per task is not free, but pretty damn cheap. And from what I’ve read recently, Mechanical Turk workers sound better than the average user study participant.
Second, interactive fiction SDK (and associated cloud-based hosting, infrastructure, etc) for Web-based games. Three facts: (1) I stopped—dead, cold turkey, never to return again—gaming the day I discovered the Web in January, 1994. I can’t be the only one. (2) Lots of movies and TV series now use the Web as a kind of game canvas—reminiscent of interactive fiction games, back in the day—to extend their fictional worlds onto the real Web. (3) Interactive fiction SDKs and languages, like Inform 6 and 7, are still going strong.
Note: by Web-based games, I don’t mean Flash games that run in-browser. And I don’t mean MMORPGs. I mean games where the primary activity is browsing, much like the primary activity in interactive fiction is looking, moving, picking things up, and putting them down.
Conclusion? A startup that built an SDK and Web-based infrastructure, as well as browser plugins, to allow people to easily develop Web-based games similar to interactive fiction. People already occasionally turn the Web into theme-based scavenger hunt games, so different game forms are certainly possible.
Third, commodity UAV-based sensor networks with data fusion tools for disposable, dynamic airborne security. Build a startup to commoditize UAV technology—including hardware and software—for building lightweight, disposable sensor networks of UAVs, together with data fusion and command-and-control sofware platforms. This would be applicable for ad hoc event security, security for gated communities and other fixed-location high-value assets, as well as stuff like livestock management, population sampling scientific work, etc.
I refrain from judging the ethical or legal or regulatory viability of this last one and present it merely as a kind of thought experiment—I predict that it’s coming very soon, whether we want it or not.
The US congress is asking the four major mobile phone providers why their charges for text messages have gone up by 100% over the past few years. As Chris Gaylord notes in his blog on the Christian Science Monitor, “text messages cost about $1,310 per megabyte. That seems a tad high.”
“With text-messaging rates doubling over the past three years, Sen. Herb Kohl has started asking questions. The Wisconsin Democrat and head of the Senate’s antitrust subcommittee sent a letter to the four major cellular companies on Tuesday with some interesting points.
In 2005, the industry charged about 10 cents per text. Now it’s 20 cents. All four carriers upped their rates at about the same time. The number of nationwide competitors slipped from six to four. And the remaining big-timers are gobbling up regional carriers.”
US Senator Herb Kohl’s press release includes the letter to the telecos.
“Today, US Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI), chairman of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, asked the presidents and chief executive officers of the four largest wireless telephone companies to justify sharply rising rates for its customers to send and receive text messages. In a letter, Senator Kohl requested an explanation from Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile, which collectively serve more than 90 percent of the nation’s cellular phone users. The text of Senator Kohl’s letter follows below.”
Shortly before Yves Raimond, a researcher at Queen Mary University of London with a focus on metadata for musical resources, won the 2nd prize in the Triplification Challenge, he talked to us about new ways of finding music using the infrastructure of the web of data. If you ever catch anyone again complaining about the lack of persuasive showcases of the Semantic Web, please direct them to this interview with Yves! Quote:
I think there is something quite frustrating about music recommender systems at the moment though. First, they do not explain how a particular recommendation was derived. I would really like them to tell me “I recommended this track because the harmonies are similar to other tracks you liked according to such and such criteria”. I think I would place more trust in a recommender system that actually explains recommendations, like a friend would do.
Another frustration is that we now have a really huge music-related web of data, created within the scope of the Linking Open Data project, which is not used at all by current recommender systems.
We started some work with Alexandre Passant, driven by these two frustrations. Using all these interlinked data for recommendation purposes allows us to break free from the traditional ‘information barriers’, and use all sorts of data as a basis for a musical recommendation.
For example, using the datasets currently available and interlinked on the web, you can already provide recommendations such as “You’re interested in intentional living and the Beastie Boys? Did you know that B.B. King is a vegetarian, as is Adam Yauch, who is a member of the Beastie Boys?”
Yves is also going to be a keynote speaker at the Web of Data Practitioners Days, Oct 22-23, here in Vienna, where you’ll have the chance to discuss the issue of LOD-based music recommendation with him in greater detail.
Other highlights of the program: Web of Data 101 (interested SemWeb beginners: please attend!), an Open Hacking Session, and keynotes from Danny Ayers and Keith Alexander, Richard Cyganiak, Ansgar Scherp, Alan Dix, Leo Sauerman, Sören Auer and Tassilo Pellegrini. URL of the website is webofdata.info
Sorry for still writing about last week, but the TRIPLE-I conference had far too many interesting topics to offer for me to be already through with them - promise, this blog post about wikis will be the last TRIPLE-I post.
An interesting use of wikis was introduced with the Moki plugin for Semantic Media Wiki, developed as a side product of the APOSDLE project. APOSDLE (EU-project leaders love their acronyms;-) aims to develop an Advanced Process-Oriented Self-Directed Learning Environment, which in plain language is a platform to support the process of learning at work. In the course of this project, a model of the enterprise knowledge had to be developed that was to be the collaborative result of domain experts within the enterprise and external knowledge engineers. The APOSDLE image video below conveys a sense of the complexity of the knowledge to be represented.
But on to Moki: As wikis are an ideal, readily available tool for collaboration, the simple solution was to build a plugin (Moki) for Semantic Media Wiki that allow to structure and engineer the domain knowledge. Moki is a hierarchy builder that supports drag and drop so that categories and relations can easily be fitted in place - the special benefit of using Semantic Media Wiki was that the structure of the generated knowledge can be exported in Semantic Web compliant formats. Apart from the browser, no further software is required.
The APOSDLE website doesn’t yet offer any information about Moki, but a description can be found in the conference proceedings: Collaborative Knowledge Engineering via Semantic MediaWiki, by Chiara Ghidini, Marco Rospocher (who gave the presentation), Luciano Serafini, Viktoria Pammer, Barbara Kump, Andreas Faatz, Andreas Zinnen, Joanna Guss, Stefanie Lindstaedt.
For those looking for good arguments for setting up a wiki in a global business environment: Peter Kemper’s keynote was the perfect primer for that. Peter, a Knowledge Management portfolio manager at Shell’s IT-Department, gave some insights into the process of their conversion to wikis. Before there were wikis at Shell, they had global discussion forums, connecting 20,000 people around topics and questions, which were intensively used - the question whether wikis should be adopted or not alone generated 800 responses in these forums.
Instead of going for team wikis, Shell opted for the encyclopedic approach and a wiki that would be accessible to anyone at Shell, and for using MediaWiki - which was, interestingly, the first open source software ever used at Shell. Peter Kemper named scalability and the lean architecture as prime arguments for MediaWiki, and they have indeed not had any technical hiccups so far. It was also an asset that people, being used to Wikipedia, know how to use the MediaWiki interface.
Examples of uses case with which the feasibility of wikis within Shell were tested were: Drilling salt, Geology of the Atlantic Margin, and Production Chemistry. Before that, the main media for maintaining and passing on knowledge had been emails and Powerpoint - not exactly because these were considered appropriate for knowledge management, but because of the effects these media had had on the communication within Shell:
With the advent of email, People wrote less and less memos. Less and less reports were sent to the archive, because people kept powerpoint presentations. If that same information, previously locked in emails and powerpoint, went now into wiki, it would finally be accessible to everyone in the company.
Peter Kemper allowed us a glimpse of the information their wiki held, for instance, about the Atlantic Margin - as geological structures are described, most of the information relies on images. It would be a nightmare to maintain this kind of information in Powerpoint! No offense meant: Powerpoint is good for presentations but not for creating and maintaining a knowledge base. According to Peter, with wikis Shell achieved six times the productivity in comparison to using Powerpoint, in particular due to the linkability of content.
Wikis also turned out to be the superior solution for the integration of curricula from an internal learning environment, as wikis support the modular structure of a learning curriculum. Furthermore, they are also a good means to sustain communication in the time between workshops or team meetings.
At shell, they even use wiki for instance for the translation of contracts into the requirements of day to day procedures - a typical contract in the business that Shell is in has around 400 pages, and it is probably not very likely that a single person is going to read (and immediately understand) the entire contract. In this regard, the wiki also serves as a tool to translate lawyer-readable prose into transparent instructions (and there are probably many more ways in which wikis can be used to support business processes, a statement also put forward by Rolf Sint from Salzburg Research; see his 12 seconds statement below).
A noteworthy detail about the integration of wikis in Shell’s IT architecture: If a user logs onto the wiki for the first time and goes beyond the disclaimer, a new wiki account is automatically created that is identical with his or her windows account - this is not about checking on people, Peter Kemper said, but about creating organisational transparency.
On the one hand, this reveals whether there are organisational units within Shell where the wiki is not as intensively used as elsewhere, meaning that these units probably have specific needs which need to be addressed first. On the other hand, people can (and do) also contact each other via the wiki, e.g. one can contact the person who created an article if one is on need of further information.
About stimulating content production: 60% of Shell’s employees will go into retirement over the next eight years, and with them knowledge that is needed in the company. They even asked and paid former employees to come out of retirement to work on the wiki - that’s what I call commitment to content creation and knowledge preservation.
The Shell wiki already has more than 40,000 registered users (with 150,000 employees in the company, plus contract staff). What is interesting regarding user activation is that the number of active users stays relatively the same, even if the number of users in total increases. Peter Kemper’s account for this was that content comes in waves, meaning that users are activated in those areas where fresh knowledge is generated.
Kemper distinguished three types of users: content owners who create content from scratch; content editors who often just correct syntax or make things ‘look nicer’; and information consumers. Kemper rejected the term ‘lurkers’ for information consumers as looking for information is an activity in itself.
RIF Basic Logic Dialect (BLD) specifies an XML format for rules at an intermediate expressive power. The language is roughly Horn rules with URIs, datatypes, and builtins. This goes beyond datalog by having function terms but does not provide any kind of negation, including no negation-as-failure. Additional features, including negation, may be provided by future dialects which extend BLD.
“This is the time for people to read them and tell us about anything that doesn’t seem right. After this, if you don’t like something in the spec, it will be increasingly hard to get it changed. We would like comments by September 19 in order to consider them for our next set of revisions.”
The TRIPLE-I 2008 conference ended three days ago, yet there are a couple of loose ends I’d still like to tie up. First of all: Linked Data. Tom Heath was invited to give a keynote on “Humans and the Web of Data” - there are a variety of roles in which people may come across Tom and his LOD related work:
His keynote was not so much an introduction to Linked Data (I should expect that a conference like TRIPLE-I/I-Semantics would typically attract people who at least have an idea of what Linked Data is about), but rather a confirmation that the Web of Data is no longer a fiction, but a fact. One of the often cited proofs is the growth of the LOD dataset cloud over the last year, as shown in the image below (clicky for biggy, visualization created by Richard Cyganiak).
At the same time - and this was accordingly acknowledged by a later presentation given by Wolfgang Halb which had been prepared collaboratively by Tom, Wolfgang, Michael Hausenblas and Yves Raimond - it’s not just the sheer number of triples on the web that counts. Over the course of one year, the efforts of the Linked Data community (who seek to populate the web with open data, data in RDF) generated 4 billion triples - but only 3 million interlinks.
Their paper was an attempt to measure the size of the Semantic Web based on interlinks. A brief excerpt from the conclusion:
We have identified two different types of datasets, namely single- point-of-access datasets (such as DBpedia), and distributed datasets (e.g. the FOAF-o-sphere). At least for the single-point-of-access datasets it seems that automatic interlinking yields a high number of semantic links, however of rather shallow quality. Our finding was that not only the number of triples is relevant, but also how the datasets both internally and externally are interlinked. Based on this observation we will further research into other types of Semantic Web data and propose a metric for gauging it, based on the quality and quantity of the semantic links. We expect similar mechanisms (for example regarding automatic interlinking) to take place on the Semantic Web.
Another point raised by Tom in his key note was the issue of trust: According to his research, there are five parameters that have an influence on whether we trust a source or recommendation on the web or not: experience , expertise, impartiality (we don’t trust a travel agent, because we can’t help but believe that she is mainly going to recommend the offer of her ‘favourite’ clients), affinity, and track record, with experience, expertise and affinity being the most important ones. A semantic people search engine Tom presented, Hoonoh.com (currently in alpha), thus allows to weight search results according to these three criteria.
Tom’s concluding statement emphasized that Linking Data makes sense not for the sake of it, but for the sake of being at the service of humans: “A web of machine-readable data is even more interesting from a human than from a machine perspective,” for instance in search engines like Hoonoh.com
Sixteen US intelligence agencies are encourage their staff to use A-Space, a new social-networking site for analysts being developed by the US Government and slated for launch on 22 September.
“It’s a place where not only spies can meet but share data they’ve never been able to share before,” Wertheimer said. “This is going to give them for the first time a chance to think out loud, think in public amongst their peers, under the protection of an A-Space umbrella.” Wertheimer demonstrated the program to CNN to show how analysts will use it to collaborate.
“One perfect example is if Osama bin Laden comes out with a new video. How is that video obtained? Where are the very sensitive secret sources we may have to put into a context that’s not apparent to the rest of the world?” Wertheimer asked. “In the past, whoever captured that video or captured information about the video kept it in-house. It’s highly classified, because it has so very short a shelf life. That information is considered critical to our understanding.”
Material on A-Space is, of course, highly classified and compartmentalized, so there will be stringent access control procedures. To further prevent information from being inappropriately accessed or used, A-Space will employ additional mechanisms, including monitoring for anomalous access patterns.
“We’re building [a] mechanism to alert that behavior. We call that, for lack of a better term, the MasterCard, where someone is using their credit card in a way they’ve never used it before, and it alerts so that maybe that credit card has been stolen,” Wertheimer said. “Same thing here. We’re going to actually do patterns on the way people use A-Space.”
Rob Dubbin, a writer for “The Colbert Report”, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, Just Let Me Check One Last Thing…, on his attempt to last 24 hours without using any of Google’s services. The test was undertaken on the tenth anniversary of Google’s founding. It did not go well.
“I wish Google didn’t make me think of tentacles. It never did before I tried avoiding it for 24 hours — a doomed exercise that began as a challenge and morphed into a horror show.
This was supposed to be a birthday present to the Internet’s reigning brand — admittedly, an odd sort of gift for a company that so thrives on participation. Ten years ago today, on Sept. 7, 1998, Google was officially incorporated, beginning its historical march to ubiquity from a Silicon Valley garage. What better way to celebrate Google’s dominance — search, e-mail, chat, maps, news, calendars, Mars– than to abstain from its services entirely? ”
This year, ISWC will include a session of “Lightning Talks”. The session provides an opportunity for participants to present ideas, comments, calls for collaboration, scathing polemic criticisms,… controversy and discussion are positively encouraged!! We would particularly welcome observations or comments arising from material presented during the conference.
Talks should last no longer than 2 minutes and can include 1 PDF slide. There is no review process — if you are interested in presenting a lightning talk, please send email to lightning talks with your name, affiliation and a one sentence description of your talk. You have until 12:00 on October 30 to register your interest.
This last day of TRIPLE-I, the conference consisting of three events (I-SEMANTICS,I-KNOW, I-MEDIA) was probably my favourite one, even though I am of course a bit biased: It was Linked Data day, with a keynote by Tom Heath which I will cover in more detail on Monday, but we need to be heading home now.
The key issue for me still is the quest for making the Web of Data a reality, and I once again noted that the main question raised within the Semantic Web community continues to be: “We have such a great technology - why isn’t everybody adopting?” I guess that the answers somewhere are along the lines of this comment from Greg Boutin:
Things will get better as more and more folks get interested in it, and “translators” from the early majority (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_(business) ) start to kick in and explain what this is in plain language.
Defining a process for introducing Linked Data like a new product to the market - that is what I’d like!
The last keynote today was given by Dickson Lukose from the Research and Development agency MIMOS in Malaysia - the Malaysian government seems to be putting a lot of money into IT R & D at the moment. Anyone looking for a good place to get a startup funded might consider doing it in Malaysia!
This blog post concludes with a 12 seconds good-bye message from Michael Hausenblas, saying hello to the web of Data Practitioners Days in Vienna on Oct 22-23, the next SemWeb Community event here in Austria. See you there!
Congratulations! View a listing of all the nominees here, where you can also download the descriptions. Other good news: Roughly 80% (my guess) of the audience at this morning’s keynotes raised their hands when asked if they had not only heard about the term Semantic Web, but were also familiar with its concepts - not surprising probably for those interested in the I-SEMANTICS track, but good to get this feedback from the I-KNOW and I-MEDIA attendees. The Semantic breakthrough is nigh!
The challenge was called Triplification challenge as it was centred around Triplify and initiated by the Triplify Team. But what is Triplify? Sören Auer explains it in 12 seconds:
As you can see in the sidebar on the right, we have updates our information on the invited speakers and keynotes. Please click on the pictures of the speakers for title, abstract and a short biography.
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It’s fashionable in some circles to be paranoid about Google. If they ever do abandon their 
Shortly before ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=9de9eba8-32d6-4a22-8948-2669edbf1b0c)
For those looking for good arguments for setting up a wiki in a global business environment: ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=7b16d276-2e6b-4abd-bd58-97939cba58d2)
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