Category: data-and-semantic-web

I heard somewhere HP are working on a wearable system which records pretty much all of your day. Its being pioneered by HP labs in Bristol, yep the same lab the semantic blogger came out of… I still stick by my thoughts that HP are really doing some interesting research in the semantic web area.

The whole concept of a always-on camera isnt a new one. Hell even I thought about it when I was doing work with Trium back in college. But the thing which comes to mind instantly is the privicy issue, you only have to look at slashdot to see what I mean. And even though I see all the points, what I'm more interested in is, the link with semantic blogging. Adding words to the pictures?

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I was speaking to an ex-student on jabber instant messager tonight, and he said something which was out of the blue.

[23:52:43] David> this is going to be the year of rss
[23:52:52] Ian> lol why do you say that
[23:53:15] David> last year was im
[23:53:15] Ian> have a answer already but just wondering why you say that
[23:53:18] David> this years rss
[23:53:58] Ian> hummm yes i guess
[23:54:26] David> and coss your working on it!
[23:56:12] Ian> just finished new intranet, uses rss all the way through
[23:57:18] David> for rave?
[23:57:34] Ian> yep
[23:57:52] David> so give me an rss demo feed

Now I've been using rss for a while now, but not in the tradional sense most people use it for. I'm tending to use it for serious syndication. As mentioned the new rave intranet and website is based on rss through and through-out. I was dropped a link by dave to live streams of new bit torrent downloads in rss, which I have aggergated into a nasty fat feed. And there is the webbased xmlrpc client which is built on jsp and html forms. All coming together really nicely, but i dont buy the this year crap – specially when you consider the Atom threat, Soap and others… But also I cant decide where the rss fits in the grand scale of things. Personal publishing or the Semantic web? And of this all links back to my one voice thought, which I still havent finished yet…

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Been working hard at college on the Freedom of information site. Its now coming close to completion, its a shame because I had a few things I needed to do to make it a complete job.

1. Unlimited OPML transformation – so you can click on each outline and go down a level, only seen it done using Javascript not standard XHTML and CSS
2. Word ML to XHTML – Microsoft's own XSL transformation is pretty good but first up only works on the Beta 2 of Word ML and its bloody HUGE
3. Word ML to PDF – Chris was planning to do this with XSL-FO, but we couldnt even imagine the nightmare to do it. Plus you can now buy one which does it

Ideally I would have liked to done something like this. But it wasnt going to happen… The main crutux of the matter is that no matter what happens the xml which word or anything turns out will be nasty only because the staff have no idea how to create well structured office documents.

Been reading Practical RDF as well by the way, liking XML/RDF cant wait to get something I can use it for.

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I briefly saw this in my offline reader while reading my news in the car on the way to the Twin cities but was obviously offline so couldnt check it out futher. However in the back of my head i've been meaning to catch up on XFN. It actually looks very good and so so simple compared to FOAF even though there not really compareable… Will start using XFN soon i think…

XFN™ (XHTML Friends Network) is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. In recent years, blogs and blogrolls have become the fastest growing area of the Web. XFN enables web authors to indicate their relationship(s) to the people in their blogrolls simply by adding a 'rel' attribute to their a tags…

My first XFN link to Dave, just need to add profile to my blog pages and i'm ready to go… might do that in a bit before i sleep.Oh just to note I also added a GeoURL to all the pages too, while i was at it.

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Been reading through some of the links on simonstl.com. Some interesing presentations and thoughts. I dont agree with alot of what simon talks about such as Why I Don't Like RDF and Creating Schemas While Preserving Your Sanity Looking Beyond W3C XML Schema, which explores why to abandon W3C XML Schema in favor of RELAX NG and Schematron. I do however love his playmobil style of presentations.
Other presentations are worth looking at including, Microsoft Office and XML.

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The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview and the counter on A Response to Clay Shirky's The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview. Interesting rants but nothing major, some interesting links however…

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Paul in 3rd Interaction pointed me at this nice topic map editor. I would say its pretty much the best one I've seen so far. First think its not written in Java, which doesnt bother me that much but does sometime have a effect when you have a large and complex diagram. It saves as SVG natively and imports/exports to XTM and a range of image formats. Its just a shame it doesnt import or export RDF but we all already know the massive aurguements happening in the semantic web community about RDF and XTM. So until that day I'm forced to transfrom between them and lose certain meaning and use other editors for RDF such as this one I found a while ago. The other one worth a mention which I use to use is, freemind which promises to have topic map and svg abilities soon.

Oh by the way I also saw this on plasticbag a moment ago, which is kind of related. It links to this pdf which shows Tom Smiths thought about social software.

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Saw this while browsing around the oscom site RDF/Topic Maps and reification

On that same note, I've also been looking around the extreme markup conference site and wishing I could afford to go to these kind of events. Reading the abstract from this years keynote – William Kent. Data and Reality, really sends the shivers up my spine. Kent says: “Many texts and reference works are available to keep you on the leading edge of data processing technology. That's not what this book is about. This book addresses timeless questions about how we as human beings perceive and process information about the world we operate in, and how we struggle to impose that view on our data processing machines. Wow, what a keynote that would have been.

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Tim Berners-Lee Royal Society Webcast. And my previous post

Ok I'm live blogging this while I watch and listen from home. I unfortually have to say I missed almost one hour of it. The live stream was difficult to get half way through but I caught the last 10mins of Tim's talk and I am still listening to the questions.

Sam from Spiked asked a question about using semantic web for alternative reasons like making money. Interesting question and Tim made it clear rdf is like paper and can be molded into anything you like. There will be those who do just that, while others will use it for pro-human reasons.

Someone in the crowd asked if there something tim wished he could have changed in the last 14 years? He replied yes the slash slash. Great answer Tim. Not quite what I would have thought he would have said.

Interesting question asked about xlink came up too. Tim talked about the xlink in brief and touched on other areas of the w3c like svg, smil and x3d. Explaining how the semantic web was just one part of the w3c and the lecture had to be about something. Then he went back to rdf and touched on annonation – in the amaya browser. Suprising it would seem only a few knew what he was talking about it.

A good question came from the web. Should the w3c have been involved in streaming media standard? Tim makes it clear w3c dont impose standards, but maybe just maybe they should have been involved in the dissucssions at a earlier stage. The question also made reference to the fact you needed IE 5+ with Realplayer 8 to view the live stream. Cheeky but good point made.

Another cracking question came from the web.
Should there be unique ID's for web users to cut down on web fraud, etc? Tim had a good think about this one for a while, then replied with a sensible answer. For small communities yes, but not on a larger scale like nation. Everyone should be responsible for there words, but people have the right to be anonymous. He mentioned Slash dot's system as a balanced way of everyone being responsible but also allowing people to be anonymous.
Tim mentioned he will be involved in some talk about this issue somewhere in the uk very soon, it sounded like maybe within 2-3 weeks. Will have to check his blog for more details.

Then that was the end of the questions, which was a real shame. I'm hoping Fly on the wall will put up a clean version for vod very soon. I cant believe I missed almost a hour of the lecture. Shame on me, all i was doing was burning cds and watching the channel 4 news.

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Tim Berners-Lee Royal Society Webcast, I for one will be watching this one live on Monday. Its a shame its in Real media format but I may transcode it at a later date. Maybe stick it on newsgroups for a wider audience. I will be emailing all my students and friends this link too.

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Seen Geourl's so many times but never actually looked into what its all about.

GeoURL is a location-to-URL reverse directory. This will allow you to find URLs by their proximity to a given location. Find your neighbor's blog, perhaps, or the web page of the restaurants near you.

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Got this link from Semantic Blogger demostrator, FreeMind is free mind mapping software, written in java.

Going from the screen shots alone, it looks as good if not better than my pocketmind map software on my ipaq. It is also ment to support export to xml? Which schema it uses i dont know, but I'm sure I can knock out a what ever to topic map xsl, if someone hasnt already done so.

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Another semblogging component, Category Chooser.

Fantastic idea, could be great for those times when your not sure what catergory to put the post in. Sometimes you can spend a good few minutes changing your mind back and forth between two catergories. Would be great to have some systematic advice.

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David marks has finally sorted out a demo of his beatiful but clever project os david.

Here's the very large quick movie for the project. I expect david will put the project online at some point in the future, if he can find a host which will give him lots of bandwidth and xmldatabse storage.

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Semantic navigation
Tree view navigation, with Developer weblog
Almost worked on my new ipaq too!

Seriously these guys at HP, are truly coming up with some very useful applications using simple technologies.

Oh also saw this on my travels,
New updates from the author of Blucene. I have not installed or looked at the docs yet, but it allows you to post and delete using a form i believe?

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