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28 August 2007

This Week's Semantic Web

Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2007-08-26 (less than usual - normal service will be resumed next week..)

Docs

Cheat Sheets

Software News

Linking Open Data News

Linking Open Data

Inkdroid:

"If it isn’t already, put the Linking Open Data project on your radar. It’s a grassroots effort to make large data sets available on the web. These aren’t just tarballs sitting in an FTP directory either–they’re URL addressable information resources available in machine readable format..."

See also: Planet RDF, various other blogs, Semantic Web Interest Group IRC Chatlogs & Scratchpad, ESW Wiki, SemWebCentral, Sweet Tools, W3C Semantic Web Activity

Posted by Danny Ayers at 04:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

20 August 2007

This Week's Semantic Web

Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2007-08-19

Docs

Software News

Events etc.

Miscellany

Quote of the Week

Once again, the semantic web has easily ignorable answers.

- Bill de hÓra

~

Sources include Planet RDF, various other blogs, Semantic Web Interest Group IRC Chatlogs & Scratchpad, ESW Wiki, SemWebCentral, Sweet Tools, W3C Semantic Web Activity, mailing lists, personal emails etc etc. If you see anything suitable this coming week, please mail meor use the del.icio.us tags "semweb weekly" - thanks!

Posted by Danny Ayers at 04:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

13 August 2007

This Week's Semantic Web

Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2007-08-12

In the Media

Docs

Software News

Events etc.

Calls for Papers

Miscellany

Thread of the Week

On #swig :

<MFen> i love the idea that, if someone wants to create their own monster, they can just publish an n3 somewhere that describes it
<MFen> and then *use it with online tools already written*
<MFen> heck, they can even add a "color" attribute, and publish a document that annotates every existing monster in the universe with a color, should they want to
<MFen> i suppose i'm preaching to the choir
<xi_> uhhuh
<xi_> but monsters are new ground for us

Quote of the Week

The next domino to drop is data silos.

- Sam Ruby

~

Sources include Planet RDF, various other blogs, Semantic Web Interest Group IRC Chatlogs & Scratchpad, ESW Wiki, SemWebCentral, Sweet Tools, W3C Semantic Web Activity, mailing lists, personal emails etc etc. If you see anything suitable this coming week, please mail meor use the del.icio.us tags "semweb weekly" - thanks!

Posted by Danny Ayers at 06:04 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

12 August 2007

Brad Feld Talks with Talis about Early Stage Venture Capitalism in the Technology Sector

Bfeld-Tall

In our latest Talking with Talis podcast, I talk with Brad Feld about venture capitalism and an investor's perspective on the technology sector.

Brad is a Managing Director at Foundry Group and Mobius Venture Capital, and based in Boulder, Colorado.

Listen Now

Download MP3 [40 mins, 18Mb]

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

This conversation was conducted using Skype on Friday 10 August, recorded with Ecamm Network's Call Recorder for Skype, and edited on a Mac with Garageband.

For further Talking with Talis podcasts on the emerging Web of Data, see here.

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Posted by Paul Miller at 08:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Talis Platform News - issue 2 now available

Platform-0807

The second issue of Talis' monthly Platform-related newsletter is now available. Highlights include news of the evolving Talis Platform Advisory Group, an item on Open Data and Open Licensing, and breaking news on the new Talis Platform Early Access Developer Programme which Danny Ayers is setting up.

Talis Platform News contains information on the evolving Platform, highlights ways in which it is being used, and tracks external trends that have a bearing upon ourselves and our partners (all of you, potentially) in building upon the Semantic Web to realise the full potential of the Web of Data.

Take a look at this month's issue, sign up to receive email notification of highlights from each new issue as it becomes available, and get in touch with ideas for items in future months.

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Posted by Paul Miller at 02:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

7 August 2007

The complexity of locality; and why 'good' often isn't enough

Dopplr-Badge

Before I go any further, I should make it clear that this post is not intended as a criticism of Dopplr. Rather, I'm using Dopplr as a handy example of a wider problem in the expectation that many readers of a blog like this one are already on Dopplr and seeing the same issues for themselves.

To quote from Dopplr's About page;

“Dopplr is an online service for frequent travellers. It was created by an international team of world travellers. We saw a need for this kind of service, but discovered that no one was offering it. So we did it ourselves, and are delighted that other people are liking it as much as we do.

If you travel more than five times a year and have friends who do as well, then Dopplr is for you.

How does Dopplr work? It lets you share your future travel plans with a group of trusted fellow travellers whom you have chosen. It also reminds you of friends and colleagues who live in the cities you're planning to visit.”

Dopplr Account Management For Paul Miller
Dopplr is great. You tell it where you're going and it lets you know if any of your friends and acquaintances will be in the same place at the same time. It also does a reasonable job of tracking down contacts from some of the other social networks you're likely to already inhabit. One tiny little gripe would be that the two-way granting of permissions seems to lead many users to forget that just because they can see my trips doesn't mean I can see theirs in return. [All the yellow people in the image can see me. I can't see them]. Yes, I'm fully aware that the intention is good, and that some of these people might consciously be choosing not to share their information. But I'm also aware that most people I've mentioned this to claimed not to have known that the relationship wasn't reciprocal by default.

Now to the bigger point; that of 'locality'. Dopplr appears to rely upon the explicit naming of points in space. However, we all know that geography doesn't really work that way, and that named points ('towns', 'cities') run together and spread in all sorts of complex organic ways. These points can also be physically close to one another. One Dopplr traveller, for example, might have a trip to Leeds. Another might have a trip to Bradford at the same time. Can Dopplr tell them that they are close to one another, or does it only deal with them being in the same place?

'Close' is, of course, not a constant either. The fact that a reasonably accessible contact of mine is now 100 miles away instead of 150 is probably not worthy of mention. The fact that an acquaintance from Australia is only a few hundred miles away in London might be both noteworthy and deserving of a train ride to London on my part.

So how do we evolve this first generation of reasonably useful social networking tools (of which Dopplr is one example), to make them understand and reflect the realities of the real world and the people who inhabit it, without seeing us drown in a sudden flood of almost-intelligent behaviour?

If you are on Dopplr and want to connect, I'm him, not him [shock! horror! Someone stole my name!]. If you're not yet on Dopplr and would like to be, just ask nicely for an invite...

And maybe we should all start logging major airports through which we pass as Dopplr destinations? I might be travelling from somewhere obscure where nobody else goes, to somewhere equally obscure and unvisited, but I might pass through Heathrow, O'Hare and assorted other hubs en route... and the number of times that I have bumped into acquaintances in airport departure halls suggests that there may very well be more likelihood of meeting people there (if only I knew to look for them) than in any town or city I might care to visit. So how about it, Dopplr-gang? Is there scope for a “passing through”-type addition to your trip creation screen?

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Posted by Paul Miller at 05:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Dana Gardner and friends explore the Semantic Web

Bd Itunes Logo 013 Copy 1-1

Driving home last week, I listened to the latest of Dana Gardner's BriefingsDirect podcasts; SOA Insights Analysts on Semantic Web, Adobe and Open Source Flex, and Future of UDDI.

Although only released last Monday, the podcast was recorded back in April. An edited transcript is also available.

For the first thirty minutes or so of the conversation, Dana and guests Joe McKendrick, Jim Kobielus, Dave Linthicum and Todd Biske talked around the notion of the Semantic Web, particularly from an enterprise-focussed viewpoint.

As Dana outlines in his introduction (quotes drawn from the transcript),

“We’re going to be digging into a few topics today. The first, the Semantic Web. We’ve heard quite a bit about Web 2.0+, perhaps even Web 3.0, the whole notion of a more intelligent web, something that provides things in an automated fashion with some intelligence. Of course, there is going to be more than one definition of Semantic Web, and we are going to dig into that too.”
“This [topic] was brought up by Jim Kobielus, the whole notion of Semantic Web. It’s been perking up on the radar and showing up in a lot of different places. We wanted to see if there’s anything new going on and if there’s any convergence with what we refer to as Web 2.0 and even Enterprise 2.0.”

It's interesting to listen to Dana's guests talking around their perceptions of the Semantic Web. They clearly perceive its value as initially lying inside the individual enterprise, as this quote (and others) show;

“[Dana] Gardner: Jim, this is stuff that's being done inside the firewall and primarily on premises and within enterprises, right?

[Jim] Kobielus: Yeah, primarily it’s being done within enterprises, but to varying degrees it’s being done across B2B environments as well, where you have diverse data on your ERP system. You have your line-of-business apps, transactional databases, web sources, and so on, and you’re not consolidating that data into a data warehouse. Rather, you're leaving all that data in the source repositories and dynamically mapping it to composite, unified views. What I am getting at is that there are a lot of vendors of these EII products that provide a semantic layer. Probably, the most widely used is Business Objects. They call it ”Universe“ capability. So, to some degree, this sounds like the Semantic Web.

Gardner: Now, hold on. Shouldn’t we again go to that point? Shouldn’t we call it the Semantic Intranet? It’s not really Web. It’s not standard. It’s not taking information off the Web. This is usually data and information that’s within the confines and control of the organization.”

I can certainly see value in leveraging semantic technologies within the individual enterprise, and that is indeed where we're seeing many of the early semantically enhanced products breaking out of the research labs of our universities and corporations.

A significant part of the value that we at Talis perceive, though, is in working with data holders to get their data (or some aggregate of the more sensitive stuff) out from behind that firewall and available for manipulation and enrichment within, between, across and amongst diverse silos with the help of the Talis Platform. Writing recently in our latest white paper [pdf], Justin Leavesley and Ian Davis highlight some of the opportunities; opportunities that do not require the 'ocean boiling' to which Jim refers on the podcast.

“The Talis Platform harnesses this wave of sophisticated mass collaboration by semantically connecting the activities of individuals and organisations. Although built on core Semantic Web technologies the Platform hides this complexity from those building on it. Individuals, companies or governments do not need to become experts in Semantic Web technologies to wield its power, just as there is no need to understand HTML or PHP to write a blog, putting the power of the Semantic Web into the hands of millions.

Driven by a vision of the convergence of social, technical and economic waves of disruption, Talis have created an environment for building next generation applications. The Talis Platform enables innovative applications that learn from and assist their users to be created by any software developer. We seek to be successful by enabling development partners worldwide to use the Talis Platform to create successful products and services that delight and excite their users in every field of endeavour.”

Key to this is, of course, finding means to integrate painlessly with the legacy systems already at work within likely partners for the Platform, and that's where this podcast series' wider theme of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) comes into play through the provision of light-weight - probably Open - adapters capable of deployment inside the individual enterprise. These facilitate communication between local legacy systems and the network capabilities of the wider Platform, and we're already seeing a first generation of these adapters getting down to work in one of the Platform's early markets with Talis Keystone.

The Semantic Web's potential - as with the Web-Web - lies in reaching far beyond an individual organisation's intranet. To do this, we do not need to agonise for decades over the one true ontology. We also don't need universal buy-in and adoption from the outset. What we need are specific use cases and enabling technology, and we at Talis welcome approaches to talk about either or both.

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Posted by Paul Miller at 03:13 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Paul Gearon Talks with Talis about RDF databases, OWL and more

Headshot
In our latest Talking with Talis podcast, I talk with Paul Gearon about RDF databases, his research interests in OWL, and some of his experiences in working with Semantic Web technologies outside the lab.

Paul is closely involved with the ongoing development of the Mulgara Semantic Store, and touches upon issues addressed in an earlier podcast with David Wood of Zepheira.

Listen Now

Download MP3 [49 mins, 22Mb]

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

This conversation was conducted using Skype on Friday 3 August, recorded with Ecamm Network's Call Recorder for Skype, and edited on a Mac with Garageband.

For further Talking with Talis podcasts on the emerging Web of Data, see here.

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Posted by Paul Miller at 02:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

6 August 2007

This Week's Semantic Web

Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2007-08-05

In the Media

Docs

Software News

Events etc.

Calls for Papers

Miscellany

Not the Layer Cake

Quote of the Week

The universality of the URI is a fundamental aspect of the web architecture.

It remains that the benefit of the web is primarily the wide interoperability of this single namespace.

- timbl

~

Sources include Planet RDF, various other blogs, Semantic Web Interest Group IRC Chatlogs & Scratchpad, ESW Wiki, SemWebCentral, Sweet Tools, W3C Semantic Web Activity, mailing lists, personal emails etc etc. If you see anything suitable this coming week, please mail meor use the del.icio.us tags "semweb weekly" - thanks!

Posted by Danny Ayers at 09:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

3 August 2007

Trust and crowd-sourced applications

One of the topics to which Thomas Vander Wal and I turned our attention during yesterday's podcast was that of 'trust'. Specifically, we were talking about the complex multi-dimensional relationships at play in enabling one to fully leverage the power of a folksonomy.

To take a simple example, a student just embarking upon a new course of study might choose to treat tags (and other assertions) placed on a resource by their tutor in a different manner to that in which they treated tags placed by their peers. That is not to say that the tutor is 'right', and the students 'wrong'; simply that a sensible evaluation of the whole might very well lead the student to give some weight to the thoughts of someone more experienced in the field.

This very quickly becomes complex, of course, as an 'expert' in one area is certainly not also expert in another field. We need easy ways to assess 'expertise' and 'authority'; ways that may have no relation to such traditional concepts as tenure, seniority and rank.

I was therefore interested when Paul Gearon, with whom I recorded a further podcast this evening, independently sent me a link to some work from the University of California, Santa Cruz; their Wikipedia trust coloring demo.

“In this demo, the text background of Wikipedia articles is colored according to a value of trust, computed from the reputation of the authors who contributed the text, as well as those who edited the text.”
“In order to compute text trust, we first compute the reputation of all Wikipedia authors at all points in time. The goal is to be able to answer all questions of the kind 'at 7:04 am UTC on Jan 23, 2006, what was the reputation of the user with ID 3546?'. See below for the computation of author reputation.

Once the reputation values for all authors for all times are available, we compute the trust of each word of each revision. We compute the trust value of each word of a revision according to the reputation of the original author of the word, as well as to the reputation of any authors that have edited the page, especially if the edit is in the proximity of the word. We are still fine-tuning the algorithms, which will be described in a forthcoming publication.”

Quoting from the abstract to a paper (which I didn't manage to see) they presented to the WWW2007 conference in Banff,

“We present a content-driven reputation system for Wikipedia authors. In our system, authors gain reputation when the edits they perform to Wikipedia articles are preserved by subsequent authors, and they lose reputation when their edits are rolled back or undone in short order. Thus, author reputation is computed solely on the basis of content evolution; user-to-user comments or ratings are not used. The author reputation we compute could be used to flag new contributions from low-reputation authors, or it could be used to allow only authors with high reputation to contribute to controversial or critical pages. A reputation system for the Wikipedia could also provide an incentive for high-quality contributions.

We have implemented the proposed system, and we have used it to analyze the entire Italian and French Wikipedias, consisting of a total of 691,551 pages and 5,587,523 revisions. Our results show that our notion of reputation has good predictive value: changes performed by low-reputation authors have a significantly larger than average probability of having poor quality, as judged by human observers, and of being later undone, as measured by our algorithms.”

It will be fascinating to see how this work pans out.

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Posted by Paul Miller at 08:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Amazon releases new payment service

Having teased his Twitter followers for more than 24 hours, Amazon's Jeff Barr just released a blog post describing their new web service, the Flexible Payment Service.

“We've taken all that we know about dealing with credit cards, bank accounts, fraud checking and customer service and wrapped it all up into one convenient package.

In much the same way that S3 and EC2 allow developers to forget about leasing space in data centers, buying servers and negotiating for bandwidth, FPS shields developers from many of the messy and complex issues which arise when dealing with money. Once again, we take care of the 'muck' and developers get to focus on being innovative and creative.”

Yet another example of commoditising the previously differentiating (and difficult), enabling application developers to concentrate their efforts on the bright idea or creative spark that truly differentiates them from their competition.

It'll be great to see how this goes... and what Amazon release next...

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Posted by Paul Miller at 08:55 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

2 August 2007

Thomas Vander Wal Talks with Talis about Folksonomies

Vanderwal Headshot 100X130.Shkl
In our latest Talking with Talis podcast, I talk with Thomas Vander Wal of InfoCloud Solutions about Folksonomies, and some of the ways in which this apparently simple concept is being extended to meet today's complex requirements.

During our conversation, we look back upon the genesis of the term - which Thomas originally coined - and consider the relationship between emergent folksonomies and more established formal taxonomies of terms.

Listen Now

Download MP3 [57 mins, 26Mb]

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

This conversation was conducted using Skype on Thursday 2 August, recorded with Ecamm Network's Call Recorder for Skype, and edited on a Mac with Garageband.

For further Talking with Talis podcasts on the emerging Web of Data, see here.

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Posted by Paul Miller at 05:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

An open social network ?

Robert Scoble draws my attention to an upcoming update to Plaxo which would appear to move in the direction of openness that I (and many others) have been asking for.

“But then he explained why we should care: Plaxo is going to open up a new social network that’s both open as well as controllable. Translation: Plaxo is making a play for Facebook.”

Whether Plaxo is the 'right' tool or not, they would at least appear to be moving the right way... and I'll be sure to take a look.

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Posted by Paul Miller at 03:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack