Planet Semantico

Talis’ Keith Alexander and Danny Ayers will be presenting at the Web of Data Practitioners Day October 22-23 in Vienna. Topics covered will include “Web of Data 101″ and “Social Aspects in the Web of Data”.

English Danny Ayers, Keith Alexander, Talis Keith Alexander, Vienna

The Web of Data Practitioners Days are approaching - giving me the opportunity to do an advance interview with Danny Ayers, Semantic Web evangelist, Community Platform manager at Talis, Web of Things everything (I think). I’d just like to extract two or three points here - you can read the whole interview on our website. First something that’s noteworthy to me as it says something about the patterns of technological evolution in general:

Looking back a few years, I don’t think many people working on the Web could have predicted the remarkable rise of blogging, the revival of DHTML and ancient Internet Explorer tricks such as Ajax, online social networks, Wikis, the whole Web 2.0 thing. It’s worth noting that these developments have been consistent with Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Web as a system in which people are the key component.

Shifting to the Semantic Web perspective, for a long time I have believed this approach is on track simply because it offers improvements to the Web for which there are no obvious alternative techniques. Personally, I was relatively late to realise what those improvements really were - moving from a Web of Documents to a more general Web of Data. Expressed like that, and looking at existing Web architecture, the Semantic Web is the path of least resistance.

Remember? AJAX, when it cropped up and caused a big buzz in 2005, was nothing new, it was just a new term for an old thing, i.e. the Internet Explorer tricks Danny mentions (see also A Brief History of AJAX: “Browser asynchronous hacks have been possible since 1996, when Internet Explorer introduced the IFRAME tag, passing through a number of techniques such as pixel gifs, Netscape layers, Microsoft Remote Scripting, Java/JavaScript gateways, stylesheet hacks, image/cookies, and most recently the XMLHttpRequest.”)

Sometimes it takes a while until someone (society, industry, what have you) starts to notice that this or that, something, could actually be useful. Sometimes technologies that everybody thinks are silly become a huge sucess - think text messages!

And sometimes you have a great (piece of) technology and it just never really catches on, and if that is the case, then mostly because some forces in the market (trusts, monopolies, corporations who force you to use their software/technology and at ridiculous price, people who would do anyhing they can to undo the natural laws of the digital world) won’t let it happen. What happend to Video 2000 and Betamax? Nixed by JVC’s licensing strategies for VHS. Just wanted to make this point before moving on to the next quote. Danny:

Regarding possible obstacles, there are many ways the Web could suffer, probably most dangerous being interventions from national governments or commercial interests, tilting the table on which we build these systems - such as software patents and threats to net neutrality. The Web works because it’s more or less the same to everyone, everywhere.

So if you think that the Web should continue to be the same to everyone, everywhere, if you would like to liaise with other people interested in the SemWeb and the Web of Data, but most importantly, if you do not know a whole lot about the SemWeb yet but would like to learn more, then please come and do attend the Web of Data Practitioners Days in Vienna, Oct 22-23.

It is going to start with a “Web of Data 101″, i.e. a low-threshold introduction given by Keith Alexander (Talis, UK) and Yves Raimond (Queen Mary University of London, UK) to Semantic Technology in the context of the Web. Here is the full program - please mind that there is a deadline for the registration also (6 Oct 2008!).

Related articles by Zemanta

• What is Web 3.0
• Google may be displaced, says World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee
• Tim Berners-Lee talks on Radio 4
• What Comes After Web 2.0?
• Future of the Web Debate: Needs Your Votes!

English AJAX, ancient Internet Explorer, Danny Ayers, DHTML, Google, Internet Explorer, Java, Keith Alexander, Microsoft, Semantic Web, social networks, software patents, software/technology, Tim Berners-Lee, United Kingdom, University of London, Vienna, web architecture, Web creator, Web Debate, Web evangelist, Web perspective, Yves Raimond

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?

Related articles by Zemanta

• How Do I Get Into That Cementic Web Thing?
• Sorted Sound at the Dana Centre
• BBC - Taking the Proms to the Semantic Web

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

I had a nice productive week in San Jose / San Francisco last week, where I attended the Semantic Technologies Conference 2008 (SemTech 2008) and some other nearby events. SemTech 2008 had a record attendance of over 1000 people, and it was great to meet up with old friends and new (some of whom I had often conversed with online but not in real life).

• Arriving on Sunday afternoon, Uldis, Stefan and I prepared for our SemTech 2008 tutorial. On Monday, we gave the tutorial entitled “The Future of Social Networks on the Internet: The Need for Semantics“, inspired by our IEEE Internet Computing article from last year. You can get the slides here. We talked about how a combination of FOAF and SIOC could be used to represent and interlink people and social objects within and across social websites. The tutorial was well received and we had some interesting questions afterwards…
• On Tuesday morning, I chaired a late-breaking DataPortability interest group session, where I quizzed Chris Saad on the initiative and we had a good discussion with Daniela Barbosa, Danny Ayers, Ian Davis, Henry Story, Uldis and others. Afterwards, I attended the keynote talks by Nova Spivack and Eric Miller. You may already have seen my reports here and here respectively.
• On Tuesday afternoon, I met with Sanjay Sabnani, CEO of CrowdGather and friend Chris. CrowdGather is a big network of medium to large message board sites that includes the huge General Mayhem community. (Disclaimer: I am on the CrowdGather Inc. board of advisors.) That evening, we met Ashely and went along to the SF Beta event (”The San Francisco Web 2.0 Mixer”), where I saw some interesting demos including Hitchsters (share taxi trips to the airport). After dinner, we had drinks with TouristR’s Conor Wade, LeFora co-founder Vinnie Lauria and friend David. Unfortunately, I was pretty much “wiped” with jet lag by then.
• On Wednesday, I took it easy. From the lovely Hotel Kabuki in Japantown, I wandered up Fillmore to see what old breakfast haunt Galette had become (it’s now La Boulange). I skipped on to another breakfast favourite, Ella’s, and had something of a mammoth breakfast (yes, those three plates of food in the picture!) that kept me going for the day. After a spot in Kinokuniya, where I picked up the latest in the Alita: Last Order manga series, I walked on and drove over the Golden Gate Bridge, and then headed back south again for an evening spent with family in the locality.
• On Thursday, I attended some more SemTech 2008 talks in the morning including Steven Forth et al. from Monitor presenting about Team Learning on Semantic Mediawiki and also part of the FISHBOWL SemTech Reflections discussion session. In the afternoon, a team of us DERI researchers headed up to Radar Networks in San Francisco where we presented some of our work and brainstormed on things we could do together.

And I flew back on Friday, arriving back in Galway on Saturday. San Francisco is still a very special place to me, and I look forward to a proper family holiday there in the next year or three. Funnily enough, on Sunday I was driving behind a car with a California license plate on a Galway road - it was a long way from home!

Now, it’s catch-up time again. We’ve had a busy few weeks here in DERI what with our major funding review (which was held on-site a fortnight ago), so a lot of stuff went by the wayside (if I haven’t replied to you yet, please accept my apologies as I have a backlog of e-mail to get through and also my phone SIM card died this morning).

So what else is happening? I had an interview with Maryrose Lyons yesterday for the latest Brightspark Consulting newsletter, and today I’m correcting some exam papers that were put on a very long finger. I also got a copy of Jonathan Zittrain’s “The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It” in the post which I’m looking forward to reading soon…

English Brightspark Consulting, California, Chris Saad, Conor Wade, CrowdGather Inc, Daniela Barbosa, Danny Ayers, David, Eric Miller, food, Galway road, Golden Gate Bridge, Henry Story, Hotel Kabuki, Ian Davis, Internet Computing article, Japantown, Jonathan Zittrain, Mayhem, Nova Spivack, San Francisco, San Jose, Sanjay Sabnani, Steven Forth

In no particular order

Book signing with Jim after his talk - selling out!

Singing blues classics with Danny Ayers at 3:00 am.

Channeling  Ari Fleischer at Tuesday's press conference.

Herding a hundred or so cats through two hands-on trainings on semantic web deployments.  And having a bunch of the cats thank me for being such a great teacher!

Random people thanking me for the 'great demo!' at the Oracle tutorial.  Last minute work pays off.

Chris Halaschek in a suit.

A room full of people who knew enough about data warehousing to understand our OLAP work.

All in all - great conference!

Uncategorized Ari Fleischer, Chris Halaschek, Danny Ayers, OLAP, Oracle, semantic web deployments

It’s been three months since my last round-up of all things SIOC-ed, so here is entry number seven in the series:

• Version 1.0 of a SIOC API for Perl has been released on CPAN! The CPAN page for the SIOC API is here. A description of the project itself is available here. Thanks to Jochen Lillich, Thomas N. Burg, and also to Internet Privatstiftung Austria (IPA) for funding this work.
• A new RDF API module for Drupal has been announced that will include sub-classes / sub-properties of popular terms from SIOC, DC, etc. (Drupal creator Dries Buytaert has also said that an RDF API will appear in the core of Drupal 7; see this video.) Stephane Corlosquet has also made an RDF Schema proposal for Drupal (which includes SIOC) and has received very positive feedback. Some potential RDF use cases for Drupal have also been described.
• Gautier Poupeau has written a useful guide (en Français) on how to RDF-ise your blog in two parts: the theory and the practice. It uses RDFa and vocabularies including SIOC, SIOC Types, DC Elements, DC Refinements and XSD.
• SIOC data is now being produced by memoQ by Yuki Matsuoka and Hideaki Takeda of the National Institute of Informatics, Japan.
• Keith Alexander at Talis has described (and shown) how it is possible to create client-side Semantic Web applications using their Convert service. For example, on this page comments functionality is added to a section identified with a “sioc:has_reply” property using a short piece of embedded widget code.
• ASP.net developer John Dyer has written a nice post on DataPortability and its standards, talking about OpenID, FOAF, SIOC, APML, etc. Daniel Lewis has also written a good overview of DP. More recently, John announced the DataPortability pack for BlogEngine.NET that produces SIOC, APML and FOAF. BlogEngine.NET founder Mads Kristensen has also written about data portability and making an API to your website.
• OpenLink’s Personal Data Space Explorer now also exposes SIOC, FOAF and other RDF data. See Kingsley’s post on linked data via FOAF and SIOC.
• Uldis Bojars, Alex Passant and I will present a tutorial entitled “Interlinking Online Communities and Enriching Social Software with the Semantic Web” at the 14th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2008) in Beijing this month.
• I did an interview with SemanticWeb.com called “SIOC-ing the Semantic Web” in January, and talked to PCWorld about data portability and SIOC. Uldis recorded a podcast with Talis in February with SIOC as one of the main topics. (Eric Miller also described in another Talis podcast how FOAF and SIOC are useful not only for getting at historical content, but for providing fine-tuned content-delivery systems connecting people interested in various aspects of a particular domain.)
• Alex has produced a universal SIOC reader widget. The widget can query for SIOC data from any SPARQL endpoint that provides a JSON output for SELECT queries. (Alex has also released the Meaning of a Tag ontology which links with SIOC and SCOT.)
• Phillip Rhodes has been working on the OpenQabal “social software operating system” which integrates a set of applications (including Roller and JavaBB ) via single sign-on (SSO), a common look-and-feel, and SIOC.
• Sean Palmer has written an interesting article entitled “One Semantic Application, One UI?” in which he talks about Tabulator and its interfaces, including application specific panes for FOAF, SIOC and DOAP.
• Tim Berners-Lee talked about FOAF and SIOC in an interview with Marie Boran from Silicon Republic for the Irish Independent: “A project that started back in 2000 called Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) represents relationships between people, as well as basic contact details. SIOC does this for groups: it extends the FOAF idea to being able to talk about whole groups of people. Groups are a very important part of the Web because online communities are where we form our trust. It is very useful to build tools that apply to all the online communities so they can all generate this social trust information. I am excited about SIOC because you can use that information to determine trust, to let people in. If someone is in a group that a friend of mine is part of, I can create another relationship based on that.”
• Uldis, Tuukka Hastrup and Thomas Schandl are updating Uldis’ WordPress SIOC Importer, which allows you to create blog posts based on SIOC data ported from weblogs, mailing lists, forums, IRC, etc.
• Chris Bizer, Richard Cyganiak and Tom Heath have published a very useful document called “How to Publish Linked Data on the Web” (mentions vocabularies to use like FOAF, DC, SIOC, DOAP, SKOS, MO, Rev and CC). See also Leo Sauermann and Richard’s “Cool URIs for the Semantic Web“.
• In the area of collaborative work environments, SIOC is being used in the Ecospace project to export metadata from both BSCW and BC. Here is a BSCW SIOC export service, and there is also a CWE version of the SIOC Explorer (which includes data from both BSCW and BC).
• Sören Auer’s team have produced Triplify, which enables simple mapping of RDB to RDF data in a variety of web applications. Using Triplify, SIOC and FOAF data can be produced from Drupal 5, WordPress, WackoWiki, and Open Journal Systems.
• The new version of BoardTracker will have an API to export data using SIOC.
• The Sindice group will soon release the SWPop widget for WordPress that allows you to view posts, comments, topics, etc. made by any blog commenter across the SIOC-o-sphere (as indexed by Sindice). You can see a preview here.
• This is an interesting post by Andrew A. Peterson on how semantic standards like RSS, FOAF and SIOC (SIOD!) can provide sustainable SEO for websites, referencing the Yahoo! Search announcement regarding support for RDF and microformats.
• Ben O’Steen describes a Pylons interface to carry out CRUD functionality where items are linked together semantically using SIOC.
• Leigh Dodds has a fun FOAF (and SIOC) tale about Bee Node (told using SPARQL)!
• I’ve presented at WebCamp on DataPortability, web standards, SIOC and FOAF and recorded a related video on DataPortability and me. It pales in comparison to this one from Danny Ayers!

Previous SIOC-o-sphere articles:

#6 http://sioc-project.org/node/310
#5 http://sioc-project.org/node/294
#4 http://sioc-project.org/node/272
#3 http://sioc-project.org/node/271
#2 http://sioc-project.org/node/138
#1 http://sioc-project.org/node/79

English Alex Passant, Andrew A. Peterson, API, ASP.net, Beijing, Ben O Steen, BlogEngine.NET, British Columbia, Chris Bizer, content-delivery systems, Daniel Lewis, Danny Ayers, Dries Buytaert, Enriching Social Software, Eric Miller, Hideaki Takeda, Informatics, Internet Privatstiftung Austria, Irish Independent, Japan, Jochen Lillich, John Dyer, Keith Alexander, Leigh Dodds, Leo Sauermann, Marie Boran, Missouri, National Institute of Informatics, Online Communities, Open Journal Systems, operating system, Perl, Phillip Rhodes, RDF, Richard Cyganiak, Sean Palmer, Search announcement, SKOS, social software, Stephane Corlosquet, Thomas N. Burg, Thomas Schandl, Tim Berners-Lee, Tom Heath, Web applications, Web Conference, web standards, Yahoo, Yuki Matsuoka

Wow! Danny Ayers has made the best video I’ve seen for the “DataPortability and me” competition, which ends today:

Travelling on the train to Dublin and back this morning, I gathered and made some slides for future presentations on DataPortability and SIOC:

English Danja, Danny Ayers, Dublin