Planet Semantico

Just two memos: There is a talk tonight with Thomas Länger from the Viennese quantum encryption project (BBC article about the project), co-organized by quintessenz (an organisation devoted to civil rights in the information age) and Transforming Freedom (who are dedicated to documenting the discourse of the battle zones of digital culture; I volunteer for them). ORF wrote a German article about it, with information about the venue and start time. The key issue quintessenz want to raise with this talk is: Who is going to benefit? Will “unbrekable” quantum encryption become available to citizens, too? Quantum encryption cartridges for your PC, anyone?

Secondly: I published an “inaugural interview” Marion Fugléwicz-Bren did with two of my colleagues, Matthias Samwald and Thomas Schandl (not so inaugural for the former, as he already joined SWC in January). I’d like to extract this quote by W3C member Samwald regarding privacy on the (corporation owned) social web and the future (user-managed) social semantic web:

I also think that Semantic Web technologies will receive a lot of media attention when the first big, public breach in security / privacy happens in one of the websites that currently dominate the whole world wide web. At the moment, we all are uploading most of our private and business lives to web sites such as Google, Facebook, Flickr and others. It is just a matter of time until a big scandal happens, be it the companies themselves that misuse the vast amounts of data they have, or be it a government agency in an overzealous effort of crime prevention.

When this will happen, people will re-evaluate the trend towards massive centralisation on the web, and will search for opportunities to make the same feeling of being ‘in the network’ happen in a distributed environment, without selling ones soul to a multinational corporation. Then we will find that such an opportunity already exists — the Semantic Web.

Read the whole interview here.

English BBC, encryption, Google, Marion Fugléwicz-Bren, Matthias Samwald, media attention, Quantum Encryption, Semantic Web technologies, social semantic web, social Web, Thomas Länger, Thomas Schandl, unbrekable quantum encryption, W3C, Web technologies

Good morning from Vienna:) The Web of Data Practitioners Days really kicked off with a bang today - with Michael Hausenblas doing a strip! Only to expose the Semantic Web t-shirt he wore underneath his smart suit and tie, of course, but he really got the attention of attendees at 9:15 in the morning:)

First session - Web of Data 101 by Yves Raimond and Keith Alexander - explained the implications of the move from a Web of Documents to a Web of Data: With the Semantic Web architecture, data can be made explicit on the web. Data here means not only data contained in documents, but data describing persons, cities, bands, events, finally arriving at the “Web of Things” (see also this presentation by Dave Raggett, W3C, - PDF 2,7 MB). The Web of Data wouldn’t be a Web if the data weren’t interlinked - here is an overview of the principles of Linked Data:

• always use URIs as names for things
• more specifically, use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names on the web
• when someone looks up an URI, provide useful RDF information (RDF is the data model used for data on the web of data)
• include RDF statements that link to other URI (otherwise it wouldn’t be a web).

Please also watch out for what is already happening and is going to happen in the future on www.bbc.co.uk/music/beta. This beta site is powered by MusicBrainz, the open content music database that is also part of the Linked Data cloud. Yves is collaborating with the BBC in the Programmes ontology project, the aim of which is to provide a simple vocabulary for describing programmes.

Yves’ intro was followed by a Turtle hacking session led by Keith Alexander. Turtle is a serialisation format for RDF, i.e. a format in which you can write RDF statements. The Turtle session is documented here on Keith’s Talis website. Even though I copied and pasted most of the code, I didn’t manage to produce a piece of valid code in N3 right away (i.e. not valid according to this validator). It only worked after I had removed the statements about who I know or what I am interested in - without these connections, what remains is a bit boring, I guess. But this looks like I managed to post at least something to the test store!

EDIT: Problem was that I had terminated the statements to soon, with a dot where a semicolon should have been; the demo didn’t allow me to overwrite the first post to the store, but here is my FOAF self-description in Turtle:

@prefix foaf:<http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/> .
@prefix owl:<http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#> .
@prefix people:<http://api.talis.com/stores/wod-pd-sandbox/items/People/> .

people:JanaHerwig a foaf:Person ;
foaf:name “Jana Herwig” ;
foaf:nick “digiom” ;
foaf:homepage <http://digiom.wordpress.com> ;
owl:sameAs <http://dbtune.org/last-fm/jezobeljones> ;
foaf:knows people:MichaelHausenblas, people:YvesRaimond, people:WolfgangHalb ;
foaf:topic_interest <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Semantic_Web>, <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Web>, <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Popular_Culture>, <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Lolcat>.

Achieved with zero Semantic coding skills - the Web of Data cannot be so hard to achieve:)

EDIT: Did do the update, too - just posted my first SPARQL query to this endpoint. Are the results going to be preserved in this link? Here is the query “by foot”:

PREFIX rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>
PREFIX people: <http://api.talis.com/stores/wod-pd-sandbox/items/People/>
DESCRIBE people:JanaHerwig

English BBC, beta site, Dave Raggett, HTTP, Jana Herwig, Keith Alexander, Michael Hausenblas, Popular, RDF, Vienna, web architecture, Web t-shirt, www.bbc.co.uk/music/beta, Yves Raimond

None of the six bots that made the Loebner Prize Competition finals won the prize, but Elbot was declared the best of the lot, winning a bronze metal. Only five of the bots managed to start. Apparently the sixth was busy elsewhere, rumored to be furiously buying and selling Credit Default Swaps on the weekend market.

The Guardian reports that

“Elbot emerged as the winner, after scooping a 25% success rate at convincing the judges that it was actually human. That’s not enough to please the ghost of Turing, but it was enough to pick up Elbot’s owner, Fred Roberts, a cash prize. Fred’s invention had a few tricks up his sleeve, including trying to the judges off their game by explicitly referring to itself as a machine.

“Hi. How’s it going?” one judge began.

“I feel terrible today,” Elbot replied. “This morning I made a mistake and poured milk over my breakfast instead of oil, and it rusted before I could eat it.”

The BBC has a video on the competition.

English BBC, bronze metal, Fred Roberts, oil, The Guardian

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?”

Last.fm, are you listening? The full interview can be found here.

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

Other news of the day: Physicists can’t dance, but hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com?

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Uncategorized Adam Yauch, Alan Dix, Ansgar Scherp, B.B. King, BBC, Beastie Boys, Dana Centre, Danny Ayers, Finding Music, Keith Alexander, Leo Sauerman, music recommender systems, recommender systems, Richard Cyganiak, Sören Auer, Tassilo Pellegrini, University of London, Vienna, Web Thing, Yves Raimond

Whilst standing behind the yellow line on the platform this morning, waiting for a train to Oxford, I noticed an ant on the floor wending its way along the tarmac, within the bounds of the thick yellow paint. The little black speck stood out quite sharply against the bright yellow.

Obviously the ant wasn't following the line, but neither was it moving randomly. It was clearly following its own little invisible marker, an ant scent trail, that just happened to co-incide with the platform markings.

Last night BBC 1 showed Britain from Above an ariel view of Britain during a 24 hour period. The show had some great information visualisations of including traffic patterns for taxis, garbage collection, commuters, shipping, aircraft, as well as more static landmarks such as railway lines, electricity cables, water courses and telephone and network cabling. If you didn't catch it the programme is definitely worth a watch.

It was this birds eye view of the world that lead me to reflect on that ant and it's invisible trail. I wonder how many other layers of information could have been
added to the human-centric views shown in the programme? Animal migratory paths are an obvious one. Paths of dispersal, ranges and colonization are some others. It doesn't take long to come up with many, many more.

The combinations of different paths and layers are also interesting to explore. Are many of these chance overlaps, like the ant on the paint or are there dependencies or inter-relations? For example how are migratory routes affected by no-fly zones or shipping lanes? Do migratory pathways begin to align with man-made features like roads and railways? And where have features like fish ladders and toad tunnels been introduced to avoid clashes between competing uses for the same space?

It's doubtful that these kinds of questions will be answered in the rest of the series. Judging by the trailer for next week's episode there seems to be a more of a "Pop geography" focus. (I'll be tuning in regardless)

The truly exciting thing is that we can do this kind of exploration of layered information sources through map based visualizations ourselves using a huge, and growing, range of commodity tools and data sets.

Whilst watching the programme, what intrigued me more than the admittedly beautiful, animations were questions such as: how did they approach the
information holders in order to get permission to use it? What steps were made towards privacy and anonymity? For the BBC it's going to be very easy to get access to all kinds of data. Not least because they have resources to spend, but also because their reputation proceeds them and the result of the sharing of data is immediate: "don't you want to be on the telly"?

Open data advocates may do well to band together to form an organization that can become the focal point for activism and importantly trust. Such an organization could recommend best practices, including auditing of data for privacy results. It could also put together a showcase of the end results: creative visualizations of published data. It may be easier to approach data owners as a member or representative of such an collective, open, distributed, collegial organization than as an independent interested hacker.

But creating a compelling presentation is about more than just having the right technology and data. A good visualization tells a story. It's through stories that data, really comes alive. The open data movement needs the involvement of strongly creative people as much as (and perhaps more than) technology people.

You need do be able to do more than animate a little black speck against a yellow band: where was that little ant going?

Uncategorized BBC, Britain, commodity tools, electricity cables, Oxford, paint, technology people, thick yellow paint

As you may know, I’m a bit of a gadget freak. I haven’t gotten around to blogging about my Nokia 770 internet tablet (which I got cheap last year and happily use to check e-mail and listen to internet radio via radioten.com) or my little wifi-enabled Nikon S51c digital camera, but last week I acquired two new friends in my office, a Nabaztag and a Chumby.

The Nabaztag is a wifi enabled “rabbit”, that can read out text and RSS feeds, plays music, displays lights to represent different conditions (e.g. weather, new mail), and it has an RFID reader in its ears which can enable the detection of different objects (e.g. it could read an RFID-enabled book to you if you wave it by the ears of the rabbit). While some aren’t happy, I think it’s a cool device with many applications for those who may not want or need a video interface. My Nabaztag is called Babbitty.

The Chumby has been touted as an Internet alarm clock, but it’s much more than that. It has a touch screen which displays and allows you to interact with a set of multimedia widgets which can be grouped into channels. For example, my default channel shows my Flickr photos, tweets from my Twitter contacts, an NHK-style clock, and news from the BBC and the Onion. There’s even a talking Tim O’Reilly widget in there somewhere! I got it from international-orders.com, and named it after me (Cloud)!

You can see them both above. I haven’t gotten them to talk to each other yet, but many things are now possible…

English BBC, digital camera, Internet alarm clock, internet radio, internet tablet, Tim O Reilly

Building on last month’s announcement of OAuth for the Google Contacts API, this from Wei on the oauth list:

Just want to let you know that we officially support OAuth for all Google Data APIs.

See blog post:

You’ll now be able to use standard OAuth libraries to write code that authenticates users to any of the Google Data APIs, such as Google Calendar Data API, Blogger Data API, Picasa Web Albums Data API, or Google Contacts Data API. This should reduce the amount of duplicate code that you need to write, and make it easier for you to write applications and tools that work with a variety of services from multiple providers. [...]

There’s also a footnote, “* OAuth also currently works for YouTube accounts that are linked to a Google Account when using the YouTube Data API.”

See the documentation for more details.

On the YouTube front, I have no idea what % of their accounts are linked to Google; lots I guess. Some interesting parts of the YouTube API: retrieve user profiles, access/edit contacts, find videos uploaded by a particular user or favourited by them plus of course per-video metadata (categories, keywords, tags, etc). There’s a lot you could do with this, in particular it should be possible to find out more about a user by looking at the metadata for the videos they favourite.

Evidence-based profiles are often better than those that are merely asserted, without being grounded in real activity. The list of people I actively exchange mail or IM with is more interesting to me than the list of people I’ve added on Facebook or Orkut; the same applies with profiles versus tag-harvesting. This is why the combination of last.fm’s knowledge of my music listening behaviour with the BBC’s categorisation of MusicBrainz artist IDs is more interesting than asking me to type my ‘favourite band’ into a box. Finding out which bands I’ve friended on MySpace would also be a nice piece of evidence to throw into that mix (and possible, since MusicBrainz also notes MySpace URIs).

So what do these profiles look like? The YouTube ‘retrieve a profile‘ API documentation has an example. It’s Atom-encoded, and beyond the video stuff mentioned above has fields like:

  <yt:age>33</yt:age>
  <yt:username>andyland74</yt:username>
  <yt:books>Catch-22</yt:books>
  <yt:gender>m</yt:gender>
  <yt:company>Google</yt:company>
  <yt:hobbies>Testing YouTube APIs</yt:hobbies>
  <yt:location>US</yt:location>
  <yt:movies>Aqua Teen Hungerforce</yt:movies>
  <yt:music>Elliott Smith</yt:music>
  <yt:occupation>Technical Writer</yt:occupation>
  <yt:school>University of North Carolina</yt:school>
  <media:thumbnail url=’http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YFbSxcdOL-w/default.jpg’/>
  <yt:statistics viewCount=’9′ videoWatchCount=’21′ subscriberCount=’1′
    lastWebAccess=’2008-02-25T16:03:38.000-08:00′/>

Not a million miles away from the OpenSocial schema I was looking at yesterday, btw.

I haven’t yet found where it says what I can and can’t do with this information…

Uncategorized API, BBC, Elliott Smith, Google, media:thumbnail url=, North Carolina, United States, University of North Carolina, Web Albums Data API, YouTube

…but unfortunately due to a major review here next week, I have a lot of presentation preparation to do.

Anyway, if I were going to XTech 2008 tomorrow in Dublin, here’s what I’d go to see (thanks to the XTech 2008 personal scheduler):

9:45 Wednesday, 7 May 2008
Opening keynote
David Recordon (Six Apart)

11:00 Wednesday, 7 May 2008
Using socially authored content to provide new routes through existing content archives
Rob Lee (Rattle Research)

11:45 Wednesday, 7 May 2008
Browsers on the move: The year in review, the year ahead
Michael(tm) Smith (W3C)

14:00 Wednesday, 7 May 2008
Here Be Dragons: Knowing Where the World Ends
Leigh Dodds (Ingenta)

14:45 Wednesday, 7 May 2008
Linked Data Deployment
Daniel Lewis (OpenLink Software)

9:00 Thursday, 8 May 2008
OpenSocial, a standard programming model for the Social Web
Matthew Trewhella (Google)

9:45 Thursday, 8 May 2008
Creating portable social networks with microformats
Jeremy Keith (Clearleft)

11:00 Thursday, 8 May 2008
The Programmes Ontology
Tom Scott (BBC Audio and Music Interactive), Yves Raimond (Queen Mary, University of London), Patrick Sinclair (BBC Audio and Music Interactive), Nicholas Humfrey (BBC Audio and Music Interactive)

11:45 Thursday, 8 May 2008
Ni Hao, Monde: Connecting communities across cultural and linguistic boundaries
Simon Batistoni (Flickr)

14:00 Thursday, 8 May 2008
SemWebbing the London Gazette
Jeni Tennison (The Stationery Office), John Sheridan (The Office of Public Sector Information)

14:45 Thursday, 8 May 2008
Data portability for whom? Some psychology behind the tech
Gavin Bell (Nature)

16:00 Thursday, 8 May 2008
Google Data APIs on the move: innovation vs. Standards Compliance
Frank Mantek (Google)

16:45 Thursday, 8 May 2008
The attention economy is only just around the corner
Ian Forrester (BBC)

9:00 Friday, 9 May 2008
Data Portability with SIOC and FOAF
Uldis Bojārs (DERI Galway), John Breslin (DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway), Alexandre Passant (LaLIC institute (at Université Paris Sorbonne) and Electricité de France R&D)

(Here is the full schedule.)

English BBC, Daniel Lewis, David Recordon, Dublin, Frank Mantek, Gavin Bell, Google, Ian Forrester, Jeremy Keith (Clearleft), John Breslin, John Sheridan, Leigh Dodds (Ingenta), London Gazette, Mary, Matthew Trewhella, National University of Ireland, Nicholas Humfrey, Office of Public Sector Information, OpenLink Software, Patrick Sinclair, portable social networks, Rob Lee, Simon Batistoni (Flickr), Stationery Office, Tom Scott, University of London, Yves Raimond

I've just got back from another big trip. I've spent most of the last two weeks in New Zealand, thanks to Nat Torkington and the kind sponsorship of New Zealand Trade and Enterprise. Not only did I get to attend NZ Foo Camp, but NZTE's John Houlker arranged for me to meet with representives of Auckland and Wellington's media, software and archiving interests.

I learnt a lot about the current state of broadband and digital strategy in NZ. I'm very grateful to TV3, TVNZ, the National Library, the Film Archive, Telecom NZ, Catalyst and Serato for taking time to talk to me about my work with the BBC Archives, hardware prototyping and open data.

Foo Camp was tons of fun: the best of the three Foos I've been to, I think. There's no way I can list every one of the fascinating people I met, but check Planet NZTech for pointers. Special mentions to Jonathan Oxer and Phil Lindsay who stayed up late with me on Saturday night Bluetooth-enabling a toy car with Arduino.

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Uncategorized Auckland, BBC, Bluetooth, broadband, Foo Camp, John Houlker, Jonathan Oxer, National Library, New Zealand, NZ Foo Camp, Phil Lindsay, Telecom NZ, toy car, TVNZ, Wellington

People have, since it started, complained about the fact that there is junk on the web. And as a universal medium, of course, it is important that the web itself doesn't try to decide what is publishable. The way quality works on the web is through links.

It works because reputable writers make links to things they consider reputable sources. So readers, when they find something distasteful or unreliable, don't just hit the back button once, they hit it twice. They remember not to follow links again through the page which took them there. One's chosen starting page, and a nurtured set of bookmarks, are the entrance points, then, to a selected subweb of information which one is generally inclined to trust and find valuable.

A great example of course is the blogging world. Blogs provide a gently evolving network of pointers of interest. As do FOAF files. I've always thought that FOAF could be extended to provide a trust infrastructure for (e..g.) spam filtering and OpenID-style single sign-on and its good to see things happening in that space.

In a recent interview with the Guardian, alas, my attempt to explain this was turned upside down into a "blogging is one of the biggest perils" message. Sigh. I think they took their lead from an unfortunate BBC article, which for some reason stressed concerns about the web rather than excitement, failure modes rather than opportunities. (This happens, because when you launch a Web Science Research Initiative, people ask what the opportunities are and what the dangers are for the future. And some editors are tempted to just edit out the opportunities and headline the fears to get the eyeballs, which is old and boring newspaper practice. We expect better from the Guardian and BBC, generally very reputable sources)

In fact, it is a really positive time for the web. Startups are launching, and being sold [Disclaimer: people I know] again, academics are excited about new systems and ideas, conferences and camps and wikis and chat channels and are hopping with energy, and every morning demands an excruciating choice of which exciting link to follow first.

And, fortunately, we have blogs. We can publish what we actually think, even when misreported.

Uncategorized BBC, energy, evolving network, The Guardian, trust infrastructure, Web Science Research Initiative

It's nearly time to return to London for a pause and a stretch. Since I quit my job at the BBC almost exactly a year ago, I've spent 4 months snowboarding, attended 6 conferences and spoken at 3 (LIFT06, ETech, SXSW, XTech, Railsconf and Foocamp), worked on at least 5 freelance contracts, lived in 3 different countries (France, Holland and the USA) and spent time in at least 5 others (Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Finland). I've travelled more than 40,000 miles by air, taken a flight every 2 weeks on average, and probably met more people in one year than in all the previous years of my life put together.

Although it's no substitute for simply avoiding wasteful airtravel, after doing the calculations for this post I paid for a 15,000 lbs CO2 carbon offset from TerraPass.

My final stop on the current journey is the Near Field Interactions workshop at NordiCHI in Oslo. I'll be representing Thinglink along with Ulla-Maaria Mutanen.

On October 17th I'll be back in my own flat in Hackney, East London and considering my next steps. 2007 has a lot to live up to. Of course, the planning for XTech 2007 has already begun and I've just submitted my talk proposal for next year's ETech.

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Uncategorized Austria, BBC, Finland, France, Germany, London, Oslo, Spain, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Ulla-Maaria Mutanen, United States

UPDATE: video from the talk, expertly shot by Jyri Engestrom, is now available.

I'm heading to Helsinki in a few days for the next Thinglink workshop. My lovely hosts Ulla-Maaria and Jyri have organised a chance for me to give an Aula talk on "the Open Data Movement". I'm honoured to be part of a series that has included Ben Cerveny, Henry Jenkins, Joi Ito and Lawrence Lessig.

Here's the invitation:

OPEN DATA MOVEMENT - THE NEXT WAVE OF OPEN SOURCE

Matt Biddulph
www.hackdiary.com

Thursday August 17th at 18:00
Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT)
6th floor, Pinta-building, High Tech Center (HTC), Ruoholahti
Tammasaarenkatu 3, Helsinki

Tilaisuus on avoin ja maksuton. Luento on englanninkielinen.
Welcome - Tervetuloa!

* * *

The Wikipedia is only the tip of the iceberg of information that is becoming freely accessible on the internet. Following the success of open source, an open data movement is occurring online that seeks to gather, publish and enable the reuse of rich machine-readable datasets - like all programs ever broadcasted by the BBC.

By opening up these wellsprings of information, which were previously only accessible to large institutions, the open data movement has unleashed a new wave of creativity on the Web. Programmers, students, and companies are building mashups by overlaying photos, blog posts, and other objects to open datasets like the BBC Programme Catalogue, Wikipedia, Open Streetmap, and Thinglink.

As a case in point, Biddulph will describe how the BBC's database of programming from the 1950s to the present day was transformed from an internal green-screen application to a public Web 2.0 service using Ruby on Rails. Expect to see some playful examples of what you could do with it and other open datasets.

* * *

Matt Biddulph is a freelance software developer based in London. He previously worked at BBC Radio and Music Interactive as the leader of the software architecture team, aka Head of Plugging Things Into Other Things. He blogs on Hack Diary (www.hackdiary.com).

* * *
The event is organized by Aula (www.aula.org) in collaboration with HIIT. Aula is an open network that promotes the exchange of ideas across boundaries.

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Uncategorized BBC, BBC Radio, Ben Cerveny, freelance software developer, Helsinki, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, Henry Jenkins, High Tech Center, Information Technology, Joi Ito, Lawrence Lessig, London, Matt Biddulph, Open Data Movement, public Web, software architecture team, www.aula.org, www.hackdiary.com