The Sun BabelFish Blog
Don't panic !
semantic camp paris
A couple of weeks ago I attended the second Semantic Bar Camp which took place at the Orange research labs at Issy les Moulineaux, near Paris. This was a great opportunity to meet many of the French researchers in the Semantic Web space, to take part in the French debate, and to help convince interested parties of the reality of the technology.
Jean Rohmer of the large French defense group Thales played the role of the devil's advocate, arguing that the Semantic Web was just pie in the sky theory without practical applications. We delved into various aspects of the theory of the Semantic Web, and I underlined how the biological/evolutionary aspect of language, the Academie Francaise notwithstanding, was a key aspect in understanding the evolution of the web of data. But the best argument was a simple demonstration of the Beatnik Address Book, which showed how hyperdata could solve the serious problem of 2008: the growing number of closed social networks. At the next camp I hope we will be able to delve much more deeply into how to build real practical applications.
Many thanks to Karima Rafes for organizing this well attended bar camp ( pictures ). Stephane Lauriere from XWiki and who is on the Nepomuk Semantic Desktop project, also posted some photos. And I would like to recommend Alexandre Passant's blog to all french speaking readers.
Posted at 11:45AM Apr 17, 2008 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in SemWeb | Comments[1]
Semantic Bar Camp London and Flue
Last Saturday early early morning I took the train to London to go to the weekend Semantic Bar Camp that was held at Imperial College, in the computer science department I studied in. I arrived, late, because I had missed the train in Paris by one minute, and so missed getting an overview of the event. On arrival I was asked to put my name down for a presentation and stick the paper on the board on the first empty slot available. 15 minutes later I improvised a talk on Linked Data. I did not realize that there were a lot of microformats people in the audience with little semantic web experience, so I did not take care enough to lay some important foundations, and show how microformats information should be able to work well with information in an RDF database [1]. I demonstrated the Beatnik Address Book and gave an overview of why this was now filling a really important gap, enabling distributed social networks, a topic on which I have written a lot recently. It inspired Dan Brickley who has been working on SPARQL over XMPP to give me some code and show how this could be integrated into Beatnik... It seems pretty easy to do. What would the use case be though...
There were a number of very interesting talks over the weekend. Daniel Lewis collected a few of the blogs covering the event. Ian Davis presented the work he has been leading on Open Data Licences (pic). Yves Raimond and his team presented some interesting work on semantics and music and an advanced inferencing engine based on SWI Prolog called Henry (picture). Tom Shelley from the Economist got us all asking questions on the pros and cons of personal knowledge in a short presentation (picture). The more information is known on us the better services can be offered, but also what are the risks? Is this not a reason one may end up needing agent technology: ie one may prefer programs to move rather than data to move? Georgi Kobilarov gave a nice overview of the very useful Linked Data project DBPedia (picture)...
All during the weekend I felt very tired which I put down for a while to the trip from Paris. On Monday morning as my condition had gotten much worse it became clear that that I had caught a virus. For two days I could hardly get out of bed, struck by a vicious flue, which has only just left me today. On Friday I was too tired to do any thinking work, so I went to see the Du Champ, Man Ray and Picabia exhibition at the Tate Modern, where you can see Du Champ's irreverent rendition of the Mona Lisa - below the picture are written the letters "L.H.O.O.Q" which if pronounced speedily enough sounds like "Elle a chaud au cul".
Notes
- All I need is some XSLT or Xquery transform to turn microformatted html into RDF (any well known format will do). Mind you, at a later microformat talks it turns out that this may not be quite so easy, as it seems that that the microformat community has not yet agreed on a clear grammar...
Posted at 01:17PM Feb 25, 2008 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in SemWeb | Comments[5]
3 semantic web talks for JavaOne 2008
At least 3 semantic web talks were accepted for JavaOne 2008, taking place on May 6-9 in San Francisco. There may be more, but the following I am sure of:
- A talk by Dean Allemang on practical ontology writing based on his soon to be published book "The Working Ontologist". I am really looking forward to it coming out, as it is a book that should help cut down the learning curve dramatically.
- Über programmer Tim Boudreau and I will be presenting Beatnik: Building an Open Social Network Browser at a Birds of a Feather session. We will look at both the client and server side components and how the theory developed by Dean can turn into a practical product that solves real problems: the data silo effect of current social networking sites.
- Finally some key players will be joining the "Developing Semantic Web Applications on the Java™ Platform" panel where we will hopefully start a discussion and get feedback on what can be done to bring many many more of the 5 million Java developers on board the semantic web. This panel discussion ( the list of panelists is not complete yet ) will be hosted by Rob Frost of BEA and I.
Hopefully this should allow the 20 thousand or so attendees joining us at JavaOne to get a good overview of the the practical developments in this area. And if they like it, the Semantic Conference in San Jose will be taking place a week later from the 18th to the 22nd of May where they will be able meet many of the leading companies and researchers in this area.
For detailed session information see my later post.
Posted at 06:44PM Feb 01, 2008 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in Java | Comments[0]
Hyperdata in Sao Paulo
In the past week I gave a couple of presentations of Hyperdata illustrating the concept with demos of the Tabulator and Beatnik, the Hyper Address Book I am just working on.
The first talk I gave at the University of Sao Paulo, which was called at the last minute by Professor Imre Simon, who had led the Yochai Benkler talk the week before. It was a nice turnout of over 20 people, and I spoke at a more theoretical level of the semantic web, how it related to Metcalf's law, as explained in more detailed in a recently published paper by Prof. James Hendler, and how an application like Beatnik could give a powerful social meaning to all of this. I also looked at some of the interesting problems related to trust and belief revision that come up in a simple application like Beatnik, which touched a chord with Renata Wassermann who has written extensively on that field of the Semantic Web.
Many thanks to Prof Simon, for allowing me to speak. For a view from the audience see Rafael Ferreira's blog (in English) and Professor Ewout's blog (in Portuguese).
Yesterday I gave a more Java oriented technical talk at GlobalCode, an evening learning center in Sao Paulo, with a J2EE project on dev.java.net. I touched on how one may be able to use OpenId and foaf to create a secure yet open social network.
About 25 people attended which must be a really good turnout for a period so close to Christmas, when everyone is looking forward to the surf board present from Santa Claus, getting into their swimming trunks and paddling off to catch the next big wave. Well the really big wave that everyone in the know will be preparing for is the hyperdata wave. And to catch it one needs to practice one's skills. And a good way to do this is to help out with a simple application like Beatnik.
Thanks to Vinicius and Yara Senger for organising this.
Posted at 03:24PM Dec 19, 2007 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in Java | Comments[0]
Yochai Benkler: The Wealth of Networks
This afternoon I attended a teleconference at the University of Sao Paulo where Yochai Benkler talked from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, about his now famous book "The Wealth of Networks" (available online) and answered questions from the audience. Yochai talked about the impact of open source and peer to peer modes of co-operative production on economics, politics, arts and education. The book has many excellent and illuminating examples on how massively parallel and distributed use of human resources can outperform large centrally organised tayloristics production methods. He does point out that this won't work in every field of endeavour, but more naturally in knowledge based ones, where the cost of reproduction is close to zero. More details in the freely available book.
The conference was organised by Imre Simon from the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of Sao Paulo. A web site in portuguese is dedicated to this talk, and it was broadcast live on the web.
At the end of the talk, as the last question from the floor, I asked about what research had been done into applying Metcalf's law to networks as powerful as the Semantic Web, and so how this would affect questions on the wealth of networks. Yochai seemed to think that the Semantic Web was too much about data, and not about people. Of course Beatnik, the semantic address book I am working on right now, is going to show how this dichotomy is completely illusory, and how the distributed, decentralised world of hyperdata should fit perfectly into the central thesis of the book. :-)
Posted at 02:17AM Dec 07, 2007 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in Philosophy | Comments[2]
