Failed test

Testing my mobile blogging thingie (and it failed, should have gone to the other blog). Sorry for the German noise.

Gotta love it

Don't do research if you don't really love it. Financially, it's desastrous. It's the "worst pay for the investment", according to CNN.

Good thing I love it. And good thing Google loves the Semantic Web as well. Or why else do they make my desktop more and more semantic? I just installed the Desktop2 Beta - and it is pretty cool. And it's wide open to Semantic Stuff.

FOAFing around

I tried to create FOAF-files out of the ontology we created during the Summer School for the Semantic Web. It wasn't that hard, really: with our ontology I have enough data to create some FOAF-skeletons, so I looked into the FOAF-specification and started working on it.

<foaf:person about="#gosia">
<foaf:knows resource="#anne" />
<foaf:name datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string">Gosia Mochol </foaf:name>
</foaf:person>
<rdf:description about="#anne">
<rdfs:isdefinedby resource="http://semantic.nodix.net/sssw05/anne.rdf" />
...

Well, every one of us gets his own FOAF-file, where one can find more data about the person. Some foaf:knows-relations have been created automatically for the people who worked together in a miniproject. I didn't want to assume too much else.

The code up there is valid FOAF as much as I can tell. But all the (surprisingly sparse) tools could not cope with it, due to different reasons. One complained about the datatype-declaration in the foaf:name and then ignored the name at all. Most tools didn't know that rdfs:isDefinedBy is a subproperty of rdfs:seeAlso, and thus were not able to link the FOAF-files. And most tools were obviously surprised that I gave the persons URIs instead of using the IFP over the sha1-sum of their e-Mails. The advantage of having URIs is that we can use those URIs to tag pictures or to keep track of each other publications, after the basic stuff has been settled.

Pitily, the basic stuff is not settled. To me it seems, that the whole FOAF stuff, although being called the most widespread use of the Semantic Web, is still in its infancy. The tools hardly collaborate, they don't care too hard about the specs, and there seems no easy way to browse around (Mortens explorer was down at the time when I created the FOAFs, which was frustrating, but now it works: take a look at the created FOAF files, entering with my generated FOAF file or the one for Enrico Motta). Maybe I just screwed it all up when generating the FOAF-files in the first run, but I don't think so really...

Guess someone needs to create some basic working toolset for FOAF. Does anyone need requirements?

SSSW Last Day

The Summer School on Ontological Engineering and the Semantic Web finished on Saturday, July 16th, and I can't remember having a more intense and packed week in years. I really enjoyed it - the tutorials, the invited talks, the workshops, the social events, the mini project - all of it was awesome. It's a pity that it's all over now.

Today, besides the farewells and thank yous and the party in Madrid with maybe half of the people, also saw the presentation of the mini projects. The mini projects where somewhat similar to the The Semantic Web In One Day we had last year - but without a real implementation. Groups of four or five people had to create a Semantic Web solution in only six hours (well, at least conceptually).

The results were interesting. All of them were well done and highlighted some promising use cases for the Semantic Web, where data integration will play an important role: going out in the evening, travelling, dating. I'd rather not consider too deeply if computer scientists are rather attacking an own itch here ;) I really enjoyed the Peer2Peer theater, where messages wandered through the whole class room in order to visualize the system. This was fun.

Our own mini project modelled the Summer School and the projects itself, capturing knowledge about the buildup of the groups and classifying them. We had to use not only quite complex OWL constructs, but also SWRL-rules - and we still had problems expressing a quite simple set of rules. Right now we are trying to write these experiences down in a paper, I will inform you here as soon as it is ready. Our legendary eternal struggle at the boundaries of sanity and Semantic Web technologies seemed to be impressive enough to have earned us a cool price. A clock.

Thanks to all organizers, tutors and invited speakers of the Summer School, thanks to all the students as well, for making it such a great week. Loved it, really. I hope to stay in touch with all of you and see you at some conference pretty soon!

SSSW Day 5

Today (which is July 15th) just one talk. The rest of the day - beside the big dinner (oh well, yes, there was a phantastic dinner speech performed by Aldo Gangemi and prepared by Enrico and Asun if I understood it correctly, which was hilariously funny) and the disco - was available for work on the mini projects. But more about the mini projects in the next blog.

The talk was given by University of Manchester's Carol Goble (I like that website. It starts with the sentence "This web page is undergoing a major overhaul, and about time. This picture is 10 years old. the most recent ones are far too depressing to put on a web site." How many professors did you have that would have done this?). She gave a fun and nevertheless insightful talk about the Semantic Web and the Grid, describing the relationship between the two as a very long engagement. The grid is the old, grudgy, hard working groom, the Semantic Web the bride, being aesthetically pleasing and beautiful.

What is getting gridders excited? Flexible and extensible schemata, data fusion and reasoning. Sounds familiar? Yes, these are exactly the main features of Semantic Web technologies! The grid is not about accessing big computers (as most people think in the US, but they are a bit behind on this as well), it is about knowledge communities. But one thing is definitively lacking: scalability, people, scalability. They went to test a few Semantic Web technologies with a little data - 18 million triples. Every tool broke. The scalability lacks, even thought the ideas are great.

John Domingue pointed out, that scalability is not that much of a problem as it seems, because the TBoxes, where the actual reasoning will happen, will always remain relatively small. And the scalability issue with the ABoxes can be solved with classic database technology.

The grid offers real applications, real users, real problems. The Semantic Web offers a lot of solutions and discussions about the best solution - but lack surprisingly often an actual problem. So it is obvious that the two fit together very nicely. At the end, Carole described them as engaged, but not married yet.

At the end she quotes Trotsky: "Revolution is only possible when it becomes inevitable" (well, at least she claims it's Trosky, Google claims its Carole Goble, maybe someone has a source? - Wikiquote doesn't have it yet). The quote is in line with almost all speakers: the Semantic Web is not Revolution, it is Evolution, an extension of the current web.

Thanks for the talk, Carole!

Wikimania

Friday the Wikimania starts. Looking forward to it, I'll be there with a collegue and we will present a paper on Wikipedia and the Semantic Web - The Missing Links on friday. Should you be in Frankfurt, don't miss it!

Here's the abstract: "Wikipedia is the biggest collaboratively created source of encyclopaedic knowledge. Growing beyond the borders of any traditional encyclopaedia, it is facing new problems of knowledge management: The current excessive usage of article lists and categories witnesses the fact that 19th century content organization technologies like inter-article references and indices are no longer sufficient for today's needs.

Rather, it is necessary to allow knowledge processing in a computer assisted way, for example to intelligently query the knowledge base. To this end, we propose the introduction of typed links as an extremely simple and unintrusive way for rendering large parts of Wikipedia machine readable. We provide a detailed plan on how to achieve this goal in a way that hardly impacts usability and performance, propose an implementation plan, and discuss possible difficulties on Wikipedia's way to the semantic future of the World Wide Web. The possible gains of this endeavor are huge; we sketch them by considering some immediate applications that semantic technologies can provide to enhance browsing, searching, and editing Wikipedia."

Basically we suggest to introduce typed links to the Wikipedia, and an RDF-export of the articles annoted with these typed links being regarded as relations. And suddenly, you get the a huge ontology, created by thousands and thousands of editors, queryable and usable, a really big starting block and incubator for Semantic Web technologies - and all this, still scalable!

If the Wikipedia community agrees that this is a nice idea, which I hope with all my heart.
We'll see this weekend.

SSSW Day 4

This day no theoretical talks, but instead two invited speakers - and much social programme, with a lunch at a swimming pool and a dinner in Segovia. Segovia is a beautiful town, with a huge, real, still standing roman aqueduct. Stunning. And there I ate the best pork ever! The aqueduct survived the huge earthquake of lisbon of 1755, although houses around it crumbled and broke. This is, because it is built without any mortar - just stone over stone. So the stones could swing and move slightly, and the construction survived.
Made me think of loosely coupled systems. I probably had too much computer science the last few days.

The talks were very different today: first was Mike Woolridge of the University of Liverpool. He talked about Multiagent Systems in the past, the present and the future. He identified five trends in computing: Ubiquity, Interconnection, Intelligence, Delegation and Human-orientation.
His view on intelligence was very interesting: it is about the complexity of tasks that we are able to automate and delegate to computers. He quoted John Alan Robertson - the guy who invented resolution calculus, a professor of philosophy - as exclaiming "This is Artificial Intelligence!", when he saw a presentation of the FORTRAN compiler at a conference. I guess the point was, don't mind about becoming as intelligent as humans, just mind at getting closer.
"The fact that humans were in control of cars - our grandchildren will be quite uncomfortable with this idea."

The second talk was returning to the Semantic Web in a very pragmatic way: how to make money with it? Richard Benjamins of iSOCO just flew in from Amsterdam where he was at the SEKT meeting, and he brought promising news about the developing market for Semantic Web technologies. Mike Woolridge was criticizing Richard's optimistic projections and noted that he also, about ten years ago, spent a lot of energy and money into the growing Multiagent market - and lost most of it. It was an interesting discussion - Richard being the believer, Mike the skeptic, and a lot of young people betting a few years worth of life on the ideas presented by the first one...