captsolo weblog

Slashdot has sparked another discussion on the article "Feds Convict Warez Dealer" talking about the potential conviction of one of the warez suspects:

"The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa said that Jathan Desir, 26, of Iowa City, has pleaded guilty to charges related to his role in a criminal enterprise that distributed pirated software, games, movies and music over the Internet.' Desir is the first conviction that Operation Fastlink has done. He will possibly serve up to 15 years in prison when his sentencing is in March 18, 2005."

What is amazing and shockingly so - that the price [in terms of years in prison] of the imaginary losses to big companies due to this person sharing / distributing digital media (music, movies, software) to others is higher that the price of destroying a person or even group of person physically (murder) or psychologically (rape, kidnapping, abuse, ...).

What is software / music / movie?

It is a piece of digital or analog information.
People are copying pieces of data and sharing them.

What are the losses? 50 million USD mentioned there?

Wrong. Companies are counting money they have not got and will not get. Not everybody who tries the software or listens to a tune for free would buy it for the [a high] price. Those who will like the tune or movie, might even listen to it and go buy the real thing. So the losses are not more than 5-10% of the reported. So much for imaginary losses.

What is lost? Data? Those imaginary, very small pieces of information that you can not touch? I hear the voices saying data are valuable and it cost lots of money to produce it. Not going to refuse this, let's for now assume that there are losses, just much less than they cry they are.

Now - are those very small pieces being taken away from the companies, producers, authors? Are they being robbed? No! It costs very little to produce copies (both for the publishers and for pirates) and in the process you are not taking the "master" copy away from anybody. You are not taking away the software, not preventing the company from continuing producing and selling the copies.

And yet - in the USA people committing a homicide, completely destroying a human being and its soul, or completely destroying people's lives, get less punishment than people who have made illegally copies of bits of data, without taking _anything_ away from the owners of the rights to these data in the same sense as life is taken from a human body.

Just - lost money, which nobody can prove they would have gotten in the first place, if there were no illegal copying. Money - that's all it takes to be more valuable than a human life...

The comments on Slashdot:

- comment 1:
True, but I don't know that the punishment is unjust. It partially depends on where he is incarserated. I realise this is a long sentance, but he did pirate quite a bit of software.
This is not a troll, it is a point ov view from someone in the Tech industry.

- comment 2:
... I really don't know where to begin with you.

Most of you are just throwing around "numbers of years in prison" as if they mean nothing at all. The maximum sentence this guy could receive is 15 years. Don't you have any concept of just how LONG that is? 15 years ago, it was 1989. Think about where you were in 1989 and everything you've done between now and then. Now imagine it ALL WIPED OUT, instead spent in a cell. And not because you killed or raped someone. No. Because you committed "copyright infringement".

Now does the punishment really fit the crime?

- comment 3:
...this is not a state case, its federal. He will receive a nice chunk of the 15 years.

What is amazing to see is this kid is facing the possibility of doing more time than your average homicide, rape or sexual assault criminal. According to the National Criminal Justice Reference System (NCJRS), the following sentences are listed as the average:

* Homicide: Average sentence = 149 months.
* Rape: Average sentence = 117 months.
* Kidnapping: Average sentence = 104 months.
* Robbery: Average sentence = 95 months.
* Sexual assault: Average sentence = 72 months.
* Assault: Average sentence = 61 months.

Make note this potential sentence exceeds the averages for violent crime, and exceeds the time given by the Department Of Justice to Andrew Fastow, the CFO of Enron convicted of bilking millions of dollars from employees and investors. This poor kid is looking at 180 months. We have a problem with our criminal justice system.

- comment 4:
... it's just scary.

In one case you've destroyed an individual- taken his/her dignity, the right to be safe, the very 'temple' of his/her body with a violent act such as rape.

In another, we have little bits of signal that have 'more' importance than the afore mentioned victim.

I have always been cynical and said everything comes down to money- religion, lawyers, corporations- it all revolves around that little dollar sign.

But when you hear about someone getting locked away for 15 years (sorry Kevin) ... it's just another world.

- comment 5:
I remember reading up on a study on the highway speeds and how 75 vs 65 resulted in less fatalities...

When it was all done and concluded it worked out to be about 1.3 million (if memory serves) per life saved.

Unfortunately, the lack of speed cost society about 4.3 million per life (Very convoluted logic- I didn't follow it) due to increased time 'wasted' while commuting.

- comment 6:
NO, NO, NO, NO, NO
He did NOT charge for access to copyright materials

[...]

I think he was just suffering from the downloader's syndrome of trying to have every title in the warez scene in his computer just in case that at some time if the need rises for a particular utility he will have it.

He was just being a librarian and a collector. He wasn't asking money for people to access it. THe people who could access it were probably people on a IRC channel. His crime was probably that he became too good a collector and a librarian.

So in philosophy it is equivalent to a teenager sharing his/her collection of digital goodies he/she's found on the web and stored on his/her computer.

- comment 7:
Industry in the US, back in the clolnial days, started out by explicitly violating the British patent system.

That system was intended to create long-term monopolies on many manufacturing processes and devices, such as thread mills and power looms. Part of the point of these patents was to keep colonies agricultural and raw-material producing, dependent on the "mother country" for their manufactured goods (rather than competing with it and becoming a world power).

The arrival of people with knowlege of mill manufacture, who set up their own plants here, was a major factor in the colonies achieving the ability to break away. And the "mother country"'s attempts to enforce these monopolies produced some of the major greviances that lead to the revolution.

So now it looks like the US has come full circle. B-(

Slashdot has an article "Life Interruped" talking about the stress related to the information / cognitive overload that is taking place in our lives as our times gets more and more fragmented.

-- the original article: "Life Interrupted" (Seattle Times)

It raises some very good comments:

- comment 1:
And I disagree with the assumption that when you do several tasks that you are "multi-tasking" (OH NO, THE XMAS SHOPPING ON TOP OF GETTING THIS COFFEE!) as true multi-tasking is doing the actions at the same time. For example I am watching the news on the death tolls in India, listening to a cd of inxs, bitching about this link in irc and typing this reply all at once - all are being thought of at the same time while only limited by the speed of my fingers.

- comment 2:
For a while now I've been anti-interruption. I shun any kind of unsolicited alert about events such as new email arriving, a friend signing on to an IM network or the phone ringing. I find I enjoy activities a lot more now that I can see them through to completion without beeping and flashing alerts interrupting me at arbitrary moments.

- comment 3:
I find that in math, if I work on several problems at the same time, all the while surfing or reading/writing email I can get it done just as fast, and perhaps more deeply than if I tackeled each one separately and sequentially. I guess it's the same in programming. If you get stuck on some pesky function, you leave it for a while, work on something else and then come back to it when you have a new idea. Don't tell me people can't multitask. BS.

- comment 4:
Personally, I love having this information available. I crave it. I'm constantly aware of the state of the world around me. When something of note happens to one of my friends, that knowledge circulates throughout our social circle almost immediately.

For anyone who's read Snow Crash, there are people referred to as "Gargoyles." They are connected to the net 100% of the time, interacting with it through wearable computing and visual overlays, streaming and feeding information as fast as possible concurrently with their physical life.

Of course, I can also feel overload with the information.

How do I manage it? I guess I just stand there and let all the information rain down on me.
The most important thing then is to have the tools (sponges?) efficient enough to save / put down the information (both original and, more imporantly, processed) flowing though me.

Danny's weblog also has some articles about the information overload.

A presentation titled "Introduction to the Semantic Web and RDF" for the talk A.M. Kuchling at ZPUG DC, December 2, 2004.

Merry Christmas to everybody!

On 26-Nov-05 I wrote an article RDF for scientific publications ? asking - Why don't Semantic Web researchers publish their lists of publications in RDF, using the same technologies they are researching?

denny vrandecic volunteered to answer - "Have you taken a look at Bibster? It reads Bibtex data and allows you to search them semantically in a P2P-network."

I did try Bibster - see the comments below. However, my main question was not about the tools that can manage bibliographies. It is very good that people publish their papers on their websites (PDF, PS, ...), it is even better if they attach Bibtex information to them.

But this information still has to be retrieved by us, mere humans, to locate where the papers are, to find the links to PDF or PS, to locate and import Bibtex entries.

What I ask is - why the researchers DO NOT publish a list of their publications in RDF, making it easy for scutters to collect the information automatically and, optionaly, to have it in a well-structured categorisation (SKOS may be of use here).

About the Bibliographic Software itself - see a wishlist of requirements for bibliographic software to allow to:
- describe a document
- categorise a document
- associate a file and/or URL (full text) with a document
- add interesting quotes (text excerpts) to the document information
- add relations (references) to/from other documents
- view and navigate relations

If I look at Bibster, it does allow to describe a document, categorise it, but nothing more.

In fact, Bibster is pretty rigit in what it allows to do - while semantic web technologies are meant to allow to describe and manipulate information in a flexible way, Bibster restricts more than it frees you. I would expect a semantic application to have relations, to have users as separate resources around which you can navigate for papers. It does not have that. I has some one-dimensional feel to it.

Re. categories - having ACM topics is nice of course, but again - having it in the UI is good , but imagine a researcher working in one field. He may have very fine categorisations of his field, but yet it may happen that all his personal categorisation falls into a single ACM topic. So - what's the use for topics in this case?

I believe having much more flexibility would help a lot. To allow a researcher to create his own scheme of concepts, probably using SKOS for managing categories of concepts. Optionally, to have mappings between concept schemas.

User interface has it faults as well. Keyboard navigation does not work well, have to use mouse to perform many tasks. In case when I'd want to past Bibtex information (assuming it's been copied from CiteSeer page, i.e.) into the Bibster database, I have to save it into a text file and then import that file. No simple way of creating an entry by pasting Bibtex info. It looks like ontologies are making life difficult here, rather than helping.

Apart from the shortcoming mentioned above, it is a good program.

It is not great at creating and organizing bibliographies, but it is good as a proof of concept for exchanging bibliographics information over a peer-to-peer network. Still, there are questions about its inflexibility vs. flexibility you'd expect from a semantic application.

So - I would use it to exchange bibliographies in a P2P network (probably this will blend together with researchers social network in a near future), but not to organize and use them.

Question:

Could anybody give me pointers to the software for monitoring of search results?

By search engine results monitoring I mean a desktop software that retrieves first n search results for a given search string at regular intervals and reports about movement of the resources in the search results, newcomers, ... A kind of dynamics of TOP 20 matches for a given search term.

I think I saw a number of such programs, possibly integrated together with RSS reader or with software for capturing the contents of web pages. But, as it happens from time to time, when you need it you cannot find it. :/

No - I have not disappeared and am keeping this site running.

Though recently I have been very busy moving and settling in Galway, therefore there was little time I could devote to actually writing something on the blog.

Anime Vault [rus]

Antonz anime and hentai list - a sample of anime CD catalogue (in HTML)

Kanpai Club [rus]

Kanpai Club news - 11.04.2004
? ??????:
- ????? ???????????
- ?????? ????? - Jin Roh
- ?????? ????? - Nekojiru-sou
- ?????? ???????????????: ?????

Interesting animes:
- .hack//SIGN
- Cat Soup - Nekojiru-sou

Anime news [rus] (??????? ???????????)

See Also:
* Derīgi linki / Useful links (2)
* Derīgi linki / Useful links (1)

Googling:
* for tummarello "semantic web p2p"
* for RDF "inference engines"
* for Normalization of ontology implementations Rector 2002
* for Uschold, M. and Gruninger, M. Ontologies: Principles, Methods and Applications pdf
* for mindswap document server

SiLRI - an old reasoner from Ontoprise
http://ontobroker.semanticweb.org/silri/

The Semantic Web: Current Status and Future Directions
by Yuh-Jong Hu, 1-Jun-2004
http://www.cs.nccu.edu.tw/~jong/pub/mis0601talk.pdf

DOAP: XML Watch: Describe open source projects with XML, Part 4
by Edd Dumbill, 28-Jul-2004
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-osproj4/
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-osproj3/
http://www.mindswap.org/issues/issue41 - issues re DOAP
http://usefulinc.com/edd/notes/DOAP - DOAP notes

ISWC'04 Tutorials
http://iswc2004.semanticweb.org/CFParticipation/tutorials.html

ISWC'04 Tutorial: Theory and Practice of RDF Query Processing
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~heiner/ISWC04Tutorial.html

Towards Distributed Processing of RDF Path Queries
Heiner Stuckenschmidt, Richard Vdovjak, Jeen Broekstra, Geert-Jan Houben
3-Feb-2004
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~jbroeks/papers/IJWET.pdf

Ontology Design Patterns and Problems: Practical Ontology Engineering using Protege-OWL - a tutorial at ISWC 2004
http://www.co-ode.org/resources/tutorials/iswc2004/

The OntoClean Ontology
http://protege.stanford.edu/ontologies/ontoClean/ontoCleanOntology.html

Reification
http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-rdf-primer-20040210/#reification

Porting Wordnets to the Semantic Web
W3C Editor's Draft 8 July 2004
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/WNET/Porting

Ontology-driven Natural Language access to Legacy and Web services in the
Insurance Domain
http://www.loa-cnr.it/Papers/BIS_2004.pdf

ONTOXPL? – Intelligent Exploration of OWL Ontologies
http://www.cs.concordia.ca/~haarslev/publications/WI2004.pdf

Extracting RDF from "Sviesta Ciba"
http://journal.bad.lv/community/sc_news/2210.html?mode=reply

---

Blog in French
http://paranoidandroid.canalblog.com/

Read more! »

Inspired by finding many good papers on the web and following the "eat your own do food" * principle I want to ask:

Why don't Semantic Web researchers publish their lists of publications in RDF, using the same technologies they are researching?

If we look for papers, in most cases we can google and find their authors' web pages. But each page looks different and you have to go to every one and see if you can find the PDFs of interest.

The good thing is that researchers do publish local copies of papers on their home pages.

* quote "eat your own dog food" (for some reason i mentally omit the word 'food' when reading this) from bnode article "OWL-backed project documentation".

Have you been looking for the full text PDF of research papers from ISWC 2004?

Like in this RDF IG chump:
dajobe: interesting ones to me - A comparison of RDF query language proposals
[...]
dajobe: any karlsruhe/AIFB people around to find the first paper PDF? Google links on their site gives a zope error, although there is a cached pdf->html version

Then search no more!

Follow these 2 wonderful links to find a full list of ISWC 2004 PDFs:

* ISWC 2004 CD [RAR, 25Mb]
* ISWC 2004 CD index online

Spotted on bbs.xml.org.cn (though I could not read much of the text written there...).

Before finding these links I was going to annotate a list of accepted papers with hyperlinks of the papers found and links to their authors webpages.

It would make sense to use an RDF datastore and simple bibliographic application to author and access this information. But now we can skip the searching phase and get all papers at once.

But before finding this, I used the simplest tools at hand (my aim was finding papers and not doing a system to organize them, which would still be nice, provided some free time) and annotated ISWC 2004 Workshop on Trust, Security, and Reputation "by hand":
* trust_security_reputation-iswc-workshop.sxw [OpenOffice Writer file]

If you know of more links to PDFs or their author homepages from this workshop or other ISWC 2004 workshops, please let me know.

Link to a Semantic Web Hacking by Christopher Schmidt.

Contains some interesting projects:

* FOAFer - an extension to let you know when the page you're on contains FOAF data
* DOAPer - an extension to let you know when the page you're on contains DOAP data
* Julie - an IRC interface to Redland for storage and querying.
* FOAF - general page for FOAF related tools and hacks I've put together.
* MeNow - Homepage for the MeNow project.

Benja Fallenstein from the Fenfire project was a visiting scientist at the DFKI this week.

Leo Sauermann (from the Gnowsis project) writes in his blog:

Fenfire is a research project developing an RDF-based desktop environment, including a great RDF browsing and editing tool. see screenshots. At the moment fenfire uses RDF files (f.e. in Turtle) to get the triples.

Wouldn't it be great if fenfire would display gnowsis RDF from the Semantic Desktop instead? And if we could press a button and - from the fenfire graph browser - open the displayed resources in their corresponding hosting applications?

[... timeline of the action ... ]

Gnowsis and Fenfire have met and another time, great Semantic Web developers (aka us) have proven that using ontologies, RDF and web protocols RULEZ. In just a day, two open source projects made substantial integration work.

Congratulations on good work, Benja & Leo!

GEODISE - Semantic Web - Useful Links

A list of sematic web resources.
GEODISE stands for "Grid Enables Optimisation and Design Search for Engineering".

Currybet.net has an article identifying real names within bbc search terms

"i've been working on a way to identify the people or 'characters' that bbci search users are looking for. it is in a rough beta at the moment, but i am hoping we can eventually turn it into a 'people in the news' or 'people you are looking for' feature on the bbci site"

See Also: Derīgi linki / Useful links (1).

The Web's Father Expects a Grandchild - Business Week
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/oct2004/nf20041022_6972_db083.htm

MuseumFinland -- Finnish Museums on the Semantic Web
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/group/seco/museums/
one of the winners of the Semantic Web Challenge 2004.

FOAF explorer
http://xml.mfd-consult.dk/foaf/explorer/

MortenF:
blog - http://www.wasab.dk/morten/blog/
foaf - http://www.wasab.dk/morten/blog/archives/author/mortenf/foaf.rdf
skos - http://www.wasab.dk/morten/blog/archives/author/mortenf/skos.rdf
rss 1.0 - http://www.wasab.dk/morten/blog/feed/rdf

Photos from ISWC 2004, annotated
... A Fish
... Tomoya and Libby

"What Differences Did We Make?" from "Developing the Semantic Web with SWAD-Europe by Dave Beckett

Kashori Weblog - Semantics for Agents

Matters - A log of ideas about what matters - a weblog at the same location, containing references to papers about the Semantic Web ...

Wednesday, November 10, 2004
- Ehrig, Staab: QOM - Quick Ontology Mapping
- Bipartite Graphs as Intermediate Model for RDF

Monday, November 08, 2004
- Crucial factors in the origins of word-meaning
- Situated Grounded Word Semantics
- Bootstrapping Grounded Word Semantics

...

Article on the Semantic Blogging (Sep 25, 2004) on Ash Maurya's Weblog.

I hold the opinion that blogging can be much more: an effective replacement to email and a better knowledge capture/collaboration tool. People need a purpose to blog and the key is getting them to blog without knowing they are...

this makes me think about the thoughts from TimBL's talk on WWW2004 - "Populate SW from data not hand markup" and "Don't change existing systems, put RDF adapters on"...

Links to:
1. Semantic Blogging from HP Labs in Bristol.
2. Greg Narain's thoughts on Blogging Archetypes
3. Get Real: End of E-mail [as superceded by blogging]

Type-Z.ORG Wiki containts a page Impact of storing RDF triples with Redland

Some excerpts from it:

In my prototyping Archipel, my pet software configuration management system, I started to use Redland to store the version information as RDF triples. I quickly realised that the RDF storage (stored by Redland using Berkeley D was using a lot of space, compared to what I was doing. For instance, storing 143 files generated a database of 624Kb, plus a directory containing the actual file content (the RDF storage did only contain versioning information). This is something like 5 to 6 time the size I was expecting.

...

The results

During my measures, I ended up with databases of 6Mb for 10000 triples, and 66Mb for 100000 triples. Apparently, the Redland RDF storage scales rather well (in a linear fashion), which means that the overhead is constant, and does not decrease as I hoped.

The following diagram illustrates the overhead of triple storage for our various types of statements, depending on the number of triples of the same type in the database:

(the diagram is not available on the page)

A very nice picture, featuring DanBri at the FOAF Galway 2004 workshop.

You can find some more here.

In an earlier article I wrote about a Semantic Grid community portal.

It did not take long time for people to catch up on the phrase how the Semantic Grid is formulated and coin templates for describing Semantic ________ (anything).

For example (from the comment by Leo Sauermann on the above mentioned article):

The Semantic President is an extension of the current president in which speech is given well-defined meaning, better enabling presidents and people to work in cooperation.

Nevertheless, it does not say if the Semantic Grid idea is a hype or not. That we can say only after exploring in more details what it is.

Quite possible that it is at the same level as transfering knowledge over P2P networks (Semantic P2P Networks) or operating with the semantics of information, not just data on your desktop (Semantic Desktop) - all are the fusion of the Semantic Web ideas with ideas from other domains.

Apparently, there is interest in the Semantic Grid at the European Union IST framework level.

Next week there is an IST 2004 conference (15-17 November 2004, Hague) and one of the networking sessions is called "N 45 The Semantic Grid: when the Semantic Web meets the Grid ...".

Here is the draft agenda:

Monday 15 November - 16:00h to 17:30h

16:00 – 16:15 Setting the IST scene
V. Obozinski, European Commission, DG Information Society Unit F2 “Grid Technologies”
B. Macklin, European Commission, DG Information Society Unit F2 “Knowledge Management & Content Creation”

16:15 – 16:30 The Semantic Grid – Grids leveraging Semantic Web technologies
D. de Roure, University of Southampton (TBC)

16:30 – 16:45 The Semantic Web – Capitalising on growing Semantic Web expertise
D. Fensel, Scientific director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute Ireland

16:45 - 17:15 Open discussion
Members of the Grid and Semantic Web communities discuss issues of interfaces, mutual strengths and synergies between the two related research fields, and where bridges can be meaningfully built. Aread for possible intersection will be outlined and directions where individual areas of the Semantic Web and the Semantic Grid can be advanced in parallel will be discussed.

17:15 – 17:30 Conclusions
D. Fensel & D. de Roure present a way forward for improving collaboration between the two communities, based on the discussion.

BTW - does anyone know and/or can comment about good alternatives for Google Desktop that also work with PDFs, ... formats? Linux applications - both desktop GUI and text-only apps are fine as well.

Also - what are the applications that extract metadata from PDF and/or convert PDF to text files?
Text files can then be indexed using a search engine capable of indexing plain-text...

Currently I've heard of DocSearcher (for Java), mnoGoSearch (sf.net page here), Medusa (for Gnome) and EnFish (for Windows). And - how does one launches DocSearcher once it's downloaded? I could not find where to start, not the documentation to tell me how.

The Semantic Grid community portal:

The Semantic Grid is an extension of the current Grid in which information and services are given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. We believe that this approach is essential to achieve the full richness of the Grid vision, with a high degree of easy-to-use and seamless automation enabling flexible collaborations and computations on a global scale.

See also: http://www.semanticgrid.org/GGF/

the formulation "is an extension of the current Grid" sounds very much like the original formulation for what the Semantic Web is.

Trust Metrics Evaluation Project wiki.

The goal of this project is to review, understand, code and compare all the trust metrics proposed so far.

Chris-P (the author of PeriPeri Wiki) commented an earlier post here that this blog is not normally viewable on Mac browsers. Now this is fixed.

The problem was that PHP was always sending a default charset (ISO-8859-13 in this case) in page headers that was different from the charset in which the web pages were actually made.

I do not have access to the Apache config itself, but the problem was finally solved by setting UTF-8 as a default PHP charset in .htaccess file. Everything shall be working OK now.

If something does not work as it should, please report.

Also - I think I should improve the design and useablity of this site.
If you have ideas how to make it work or look better, please write in comments.

One thing I am thinking of - is the Categories sidebar really necessary? It provides a good view of the structure of this blog, but it also takes a lot of place. How many of you are using it?

Is there something that is missing here?
Please tell.

Another thing that worries me is that every time somebody requests http://captsolo.net/info , the web server makes a permanent 301 redirect to http://captsolo.net/info/ . But the admin of the web server reassured me that it is a normal behaviour. Other sites (i.e. PlanetRDF) also add a trailing slash, so this shall be all right.

Networked Semantic Desktop - an interesting term found on the ThoughtStroms Wiki by Phil Jones (Phil's Wiki may contain other interesting pages as well).

The term comes from the title of this paper by Stefan Decker and Martin Frank:
http://server2.tecweb.inf.puc-rio.br/we-sw-2004/DeckerFrank.pdf

Forsyth's Group Dynamics Resources Page:

Many interesting resources pointing to the articles and research about social networks, groups and group dynamics.

del.icio.us: captsolo/social-networks

Margaret Fleck, a researcher at HP, has developed technology that automatically captions photos based on what you and your friends say about them in online chat.

HP: Eavesdropping on Storytelling - Tech Report: HPL-2004-44

Abstract: This paper presents the design of a photo display system that eavesdrops on photo storytelling, without explicit intervention by the users. The captured narratives are transcribed by a speech recognizer and analyzed to produce keywords for later image retrieval. The photo display sequence and timing information is captured and used to improve the browsing UI.

New Scientist: Snapshot chat creates automatic captions

Wired 12.10 (Oct'04) has an article on photo annotation titled "Point. Shoot. Kiss It Good-Bye".

Ben Schneiderman - for the 2001 conference of the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction, Shneiderman set up kiosks where members could tag any of 3,300 photos taken over the past 20 years of meetings. Attendees dragged and dropped the names of the people they recognized. "Hundreds of users provided thousands of annotations," Shneiderman wrote in a postconference report.

Google search for: Corbis photos annotate

Organising personal pictures with content analysis technology
Sebastien Gilles, Chahab Nastar, LTU Technologies
http://www.infonortics.com/searchengines/sh04/slides/ltu.pdf

Meeting Human Needs with New Digital Imaging Technologies
Ben Shneiderman - University of Maryland
http://dsonline.computer.org/0211/d/up4vav.htm

Direct Annotation: A Drag-and-Drop Strategy for Labeling Photos
Ben Shneiderman, Hyunmo Kang
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/photolib/paper/DirectAnnotation7.doc

Web-siteStarter: Exporting photo library to the web
Richesh Ruchir (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/photolib/)
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/photolib/webstarter.doc

How to use a Controlled Vocabulary, Keyword, Hierarchical Classification, Thesauri, Taxonomy or Subject Heading system to describe images in an image database:
http://www.controlledvocabulary.com/imagedatabases/

The Halfbakery is a communal database of original, fictitious inventions, edited by its users.
http://www.halfbakery.com/

The eVe SDK is a suite of Java component development tools that enable you to build, test, and publish visual search applications. - reportedly "It is also be used to to find images from the 60,000 royalty free images library from Corbis".
http://www.evisionglobal.com/developers/sdk/
http://www.evisionglobal.com/tech/overview.html

Leonardo's Laptop - Chapter 5 - Understanding human activities and relationships
... part of a book by Ben Shneiderman
http://mitpress.mit.edu/main/feature/leonardoslaptop/pdf/chapter5.pdf

Meeting human needs with new digital imaging technologies ...
Shneiderman, B.; Multimedia, IEEE ,Volume: 9 , Issue: 4 , Oct.-Dec. 2002
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MMUL.2002.1041942

trailblazer - Visualizing Community Activity with Contextual Metadata
By Francis Li - Interaction Design Institute Ivrea - June 23, 2003
http://people.interaction-ivrea.it/f.li/project/report.pdf

Labeling Images with a Computer Game
Luis von Ahn and Laura Dabbish
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/ESP.pdf

CHROMA: A Photographic Image Retrieval System
Ting-Sheng Lai - January 2000 - University of Sunderland
http://osiris.sunderland.ac.uk/~cs0sla/thesis/

A Benchmark for Image Retrieval using Distributed Systems over the Internet: BIRDS-I
Neil J. Gunther, Giordano Beretta - Jan 2001
http://arxiv.org/ftp/cs/papers/0012/0012021.pdf

Adaptive Linking between Text and Photos Using Common Sense Reasoning
Henry Lieberman and Hugo Liu - MIT Media Laboratory
http://web.media.mit.edu/~hugo/publications/papers/AH2002-aria.pdf

Robust Photo Retrieval Using World Semantics (2002)
Hugo Liu and Henry Lieberman
http://web.media.mit.edu/~hugo/publications/papers/LREC2002-cris.pdf

Hugo Liu - Research
http://web.media.mit.edu/~hugo/research/index.html

Learning the Semantics of Words and Pictures
Kobus Barnard and David Forsyth
http://vision.cs.arizona.edu/kobus/research/publications/ICCV-01/WAP.pdf

ARIA (Annotation and Retrieval Integration Agent) is a software agent that acts as an assistant to a user writing email or Web pages. As the user types a story, it does continuous retrieval and ranking on a photo database.
http://agents.media.mit.edu/projects/aria/

Using Common Sense Reasoning to Enable the Semantic Web
http://agents.media.mit.edu/projects/semanticweb/

Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures by a Statistical Modeling Approach
http://www-db.stanford.edu/~wangz/project/imsearch/ALIP/PAMI03/01227984.pdf

Picasa - photo organizing software
http://www.picasa.com/picasa/?sourceid=awd&subid=ha-picbd&cv=1

PhotoWiki
http://www.preclick.com/photogallery/display.php?str_queryP=65&str_displayMode=by_photographer

Microsoft: MyLifeBits project

Jim Gemmell - researcher working on MyLifeBits

Joi Ito: International Workshop on Inverse Surveillance - April 12, 2004

Project: F-Spot

F-Spot Wiki
- F-Spot use cases

F-Spot project page
- Mailing list
- TODO from the CVS - the next closest thing to a roadmap.

linuxart: F-Spot interface info

If F-Spot lives up to its promises (as it is only in the begining), it will be an application I will most certainly want for managing my photos.

=> See a mockup here <=

This may be a good moment to join well defined F-Spot use cases and the photo meta-data description initiatives (see FOAF Project CoDepiction page and Planet RDF) from the Semantic Web community.

In other words - to join the extensible and useful meta-data with a nice and useable interface. There is already a step towards this vision - tasks summary lists Beagle integration as a search feature.

What I would like to see:

1. (Main) - to see F-Spot use an extensible, full-scale photo meta-data storage (using RDF) for image meta-data - you can describe any metadata in RDF, but if you have a fixed scheme for describing, say, tags, that may not be so easily extesible to describe EXIF metadata or who or what is on the photo.

2. - F-Spot to be able to import metadata embedded in the photo (or supplied in a separate file) and to export metadata (as a file or webpage) for usage by external systems (i.e. codepiction).

Views and opinions are welcome.

A trend [or pattern] to use a hash of e-mail address to associate information to persons (or hash of something else to associate information to this something else) is getting more and more used.

Introducing Gravatars.

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an 80x80 pixel avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?

Other uses: using hash of e-mail for foaf:knows relations; using hash of the URL to get PageRank of the page; ...

Photos - it would be interesting to see how and if this pattern can be applied to photos. It certainly would be good to be able to locate meta-information for a photo even if it has moved (and it's URL changed).

This would not allow to directly use it for locating photo, but at least a use case like "Show this photo's metadata!" would work. But what is a hash of a photo? A checksum of the whole photo file? It may take long to calculate.

Wired 12.10 : "Point. Shoot. Kiss It Good-Bye" - an article on photo annotation in Wired Oct'04 issue. By David Weinberger. A theme which gets lots of attention in the Semantic Web community.

Your hard drive is overflowing with gazillions of digital pics. DSC00234.jpg might as well be labeled DON'T_KNOW_DON'T_CARE.jpg. The quest to build the photo archive of the future.

Life with Alacrity: Tracing the Evolution of Social Software - the history of the "social software" from 1940s to the present day and the future.

Some more:
1. Urchin RSS aggregator [sf.net]
and a related announcement to www-rdf-interest

William Gibson's weblog is live again.

As he puts it:

Because the United States currently has, as Jack Womack so succintly puts it, a president who makes Richard Nixon look like Abraham Lincoln.

And because, as the Spanish philospher Unamuno said, "At times, to be silent is to lie."

Gibson's book "Pattern Recognition" was one of the most amazing books I've read. Interesting and (it came as a surprise) shifting away from pure cyberpunk book into the realm of marketing and social networks.

I wonder why I cannot find previous blog entries where I've written about this book? Have I been too much into the book to remember writing about it. Certainly was an interesting idea throughout the book about the viral dissemination of pieces of video (like meme propagation) and of tracking this spreading via secret information concealed in each of these pieces (SteganoGraphy) and identifying them.

Q: What interests me most?
A: When the next Gibson's book will be published and what it is about.

Cool - his blog's RSS feed is valid RSS 1.0.

Although I think it should be more consistent - if the blog says "William Gibson blog", then the author should also be William Gibson and not as it is now:
<dc:creator>Bill Gibson</dc:creator>

Today was a weekly on-line FOAF meeting.
See #rdfig irc logs here: http://rdfig.xmlhack.com/2004/10/13/2004-10-13.html

Ben Hyde in Notation-3 on why XML has met it's limits and on RDF that can do more.

Some resources from IBM:
alphaWorks: Introduction to semantics technology - Sep 2004
alphaWorks: Ontology-based Web Services for Business Integration - Sep 2004
alphaWorks: Ontology Management System - Oct 2003

And something interesting - British Library Turning the Pages - Leonardo da Vinci notebook sketches and more of the cultural and scientific heritage.

Web 2.0 Review: Don't forget there's another kind of scaling by Jason Fried.

Out of pure coincidence I stepped on Everything2 twice today, via different routes and to different subjects. Looks very interesting. Those 2 subjects I found certainly do.

Guess I will have to find out what Everything2 really is.

RDF (thing) @ Everything2 - a simple and clear intro to RDF by crschmidt.

Books that will induce a mindfuck (idea) @ Everything2 by Pseudomancer.
Lot's of weird and interesting books mentioned there - many of my favorites.

A quick announce - my site has a new address now - captsolo.net.
Update your links accordingly!

Home page (Uldis Bojars / CaptSolo) - http://captsolo.net
CaptSolo weblog - http://captsolo.net/info

The site structure is the same as before, therefore substituting http://captsolo.net for kaste.lv/~captsolo should work OK. Old links work for now, but I cannot guarantee they will work much longer.

If you have any suggestions re. site design or functionality, feel free to comment. The same applies if you notice any bugs resulted from the domain name change.

---

DONE: Updated FOAF profile

TODO: Fix displaying of Unicode (some problems with Apache not indicating correct encoding)
Fix problems with entry of special characters.

Looking at the auction site Bidera you'd notice that it uses RSS feeds.
It even has a separate page explaining what RSS is and listing RSS feeds per all categories, available in RSS 0.91 and RSS 2.0.

This use is quite interesting and I decided to look at it more closely.

(looking at RSS 2.0 feed for Books category)

<item>
  <title>Count Zero - Softcover edition of book by William Gibson</title>
  <link>http://www.bidera.com/cgi-bin/us/emaximarket.cgi?action=item&item=13188</link>

  <description> [contains Item No. / Starting Price / Close Time / Item title / ... ] </description> 
  <category domain="http://www.bidera.com/auction_html/14/books/index.htm">Sub Category: Other</category>
  <content:encoded>CDATA encoded rich contents</content:encoded>
</item>

Some observations :

1. Valid RSS 2.0 - GOOD
Bad that it is not RSS 1.0, but more on that later.

2. Categories - good, but with bugs
The site provides information about the category item's in. Generally this is a good usage, as one could get RSS feed for all categories and then parse / filter items.

There seems to be a problem with category values and domains though - if you look at a number of categories you would see that the domains differ and the value always stays the same.

3. Lack of more RSS fields.
Items contain only basic fields + category and content:encoded. It would be useable to add more information, starting with pubDate and guid if such info is available. author could possibly be used to point to the bidder's information.

pubDate is especially important - to let RSS feed readers know when the items has been published. If not present, feed readers will assume the time when it has read the feed, thus preventing one to know the date/time when the item was put on auction.

4. Rich description.
The description part is much richer - it contains data about the item's number (unique ID?), start price, close time, title and description. Encoded content may contain photo of the item. Unfortunately this information is only human-readable.

More uses :

eBay (reference auction site) does not have RSS feeds.

It might be a question of time - although I did not find RSS feeds for eBay itself, I did find some developments in 3rd party sites providing custom RSS feeds for EBay categories or your favorite auction searches:
- Free Bidding Tools
- RSS Auction - allows search filtering by currency, ...

Downside - feed quality is not as good as if generated by the auction site itself, some feeds did not validate, items' information is very scarce - just title, link, description. No dates, categories, ... (At least, for now)

Interesting:

Pluck allows to monitor searches on a number of on-line services (Google, eBay, Amazon, ...).
While it does not rely on eBay RSS feeds (because there are none), the tool look interesting.

They have coined (or was it somebody else?) a term "Perch" or "persistent search" which does a search on [Google, Amazon, you name it], saves the search and then monitors changes to it - something that I have always wondered about.

Conclusion :

Taking Bidera as a sample, here is what can be done:

1. Use all RSS features
Add more information - pubDate, (fix) categories, author, guid.
Optionally - comments could be used to point to a webpage or RSS feed with current item's status (or just to comments about it). Simplest thing that can be done to the already existing feed.

2. Go for RSS 1.0
Generating information in RSS 1.0 is simple, at the same time allowing use of this information by emerging Semantic Web applications.

Practical, business minded people would ask at this point - why do I need RSS 1.0 and why do I need to do more than that?

RSS 1.0 - although the version number 1.0 (versus 2.0) might be misleading, RSS 1.0 is the most re-usable and extensible feed format. Read Why Choose RSS 1.0? (XML.com).

Publishing data in RSS 1.0 would ensure the widest possible range of application that may use this information. Don't fall into a trap by thinking that feeds are only for humans to read.

Why more? - to get most out of your data!

Having information in RSS 1.0 has a good price/performance ratio. We could stop at that.

But what?! People Agents can not find out what is the starting price? [Unless they are able to recognize what's written in the description, which we assume they don't]. And not even the closing date?! Then you might need more.

3. Rich Auction Meta-data [RAM]

When I said RSS 1.0 is the most extensible of feed formats I did not lie. [Of RSS feed formats for sure - one could say there's Atom now. I will leave that to readers to say how and if Atom is better. I know that RSS 1.0 is sufficient and well suited to do the job]

RSS 1.0 may and should be extended with modules (see RDF Site Summary 1.0 Modules).

This requires more effort, but one could easily write an RSS module to represent rich auction metadata - including starting price (per item feeds could also provide current price or even the bid history), better categorisation, bidder's information, start and closing dates, bid statistics, ... Anything you need can be there.

Best part is that RSS 1.0 can include any arbitrary information - it does not have to be an official RSS module. You can see usage of FOAF information (see sample)to tell more about the creator of the item and in the same way you can use your own vocabularies (alias modules) to tell anything about the subject (in this case - item on sale).

If there are no known users for this information right now, having it available will certainly make it tasty for future applications. Discarding [for now] wild guesses about anything that can be done with this data, the 1st usage would be auction aggregators that take auctions from a number of sources, put them together and filter and process this rich meta-data to their users' needs.

Just to say I am sorry for the site downtime for the last 4 or 5 days. Could not warn in advance as this just happened.

A friend of mine who is hosting this server (thank you, NightMan) migrated it to a new hardware. This involved moving to a hostname as well, which will eventually break your links to this blog.

I will have a new domain name up shortly to avoid such influences in the future. Will let you know the new name soon.

For generic links to blog's main page please use:
http://purl.org/captsolo/blog

NightMan has kindly set up forwarding to the new hostname, but this is only a temporary measure before the kaste.lv host ceases to respond.

Now I have to look into a good way to redirect links to have search engines link to the new address. What would work best. I've read that permanent 301 redirect is Google-friendly, but maybe someone knows for sure.

For the "hard" links from webpages - please use the purl.org address for main page and I'll publish new hostname shortly.

Looks like Orkut is lagging quite heavily. I get lots of errors and delays and friends are complaining they cannot even register in the site.

Is Orkut facing scalability issues?

Honestly, I think it scales quite well for its size (compared with some local friendster sites which apparently were not planned even for tens of thousands). It would be interesting to know what is Orkut's architecture and how it tries to ensure the scalability.

BTW what is the number of Orkut users ATM?

XVII International Cinema Forum "Arsenāls 2004" started on 18.09 and today it was the 4th day of the festival.

Often I feel like a man in a desert - movies are appearing in theaters every week and yet there is little or almost nothing to see. That is why I wait for "Arsenāls" to happen every 2 years and can't wait until the next time comes.

This year the festival has arrived, bringing 150 films in 9 days.

The festival site is nicely laid out & easy to use.

Movies section contains a list of all movies present in the festival. Each movie page has a "clock" icon which leads you to a festival, highlighted in dates/places where you can see this movie.

Programme section has a running schedule showing the when and where.

Last movie that I saw and the most impressive so far is Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... and Spring (2003) directed by Kim Ki-Duk. It is very different from his other movies I've seen - those were unbearably violent, while this is beautiful visually and philosophical I think. In a few words it is about the continuing cycle of life, shown via the life of an old monk and his apprentice.

Some minutes ago we (in Riga, Latvia) felt a light earthquake.
Could well be a 1st earthquake I have witnessed - they are not very fequent here.

That was an echo of a more serious earthquake that happened today - its centre was somewhere on Kaliningrad / Poland border and strength - 4-5 in force by Richter.

Reflecting on this posting:

Blogs act as instant communication tools and the suppliers of news.
I felt it - I reported it.

While reporters are calling their agencies and the big media machines are coming into action, the information is already out there. Of course, if it were more severe, I probably had other things to do rather than write about it. Although blogging is addictive...

Roberto Garc?a's homepage on the SIG SEMIS site has an interesting rendering of his RDF profile.
See for yourself.

The RDF profile is represented in a Flash application. It looks very easy to comprehend (accessibility++).

It would be interesting to know if that is just a nice display created specially for Roberto's profile or does this flash application could take any RDF / FOAF file and display in such a nice way. From its nice look, I doubt that it is a generic application. But who knows?

Mobile Technology Weblog has a story about mobile virtual Post-It notes.

It is related to attaching annotations to a particular place or - vice versa - locative metadata to different kinds media.

GPS World runs a story about WorldBoard.
This is a system that allows you to place virtual notes at specific locations around the world - a kind of digital Post-it Note, that others can find and read in the future.

Huh? Well, an example might be that you see a flower growing in the wild. You leave a note for future passers by that the flower is endangered, that it's called a Robbins Cinquefoil, along with a picture of it in full bloom. And being in an inspired mood, you record a poem you've just made up and leave an audio file of that too.

Others can access that information, either by visiting the physical location or by accessing it over the web. Hence, if you wanted to see a Robbins Cinquefoil for yourself, you could find the nearest one to you.

Jo Walsh has more information about the locative media in the semantic web:
1. Locative Packets
2. Recommended Vocabularies
... these links point to the locative.net site.

Also about locative meta-info: managing information about locations [B:\datenbrei blog]

I found the article "Who Cites Who?" an interesting reading - it touches the subject of what social meta-information appear when looking, i.e., at book buying habits. The article is inspired by a very interesting research by Valdis Krebs.

A couple of years ago one of my themes (limited by tools) was to cross-link citations, to see who cited who positively or negatively. ie forget the content for a moment, look at the meta-data. I noticed John Udell is focussing on meta-data in business e-mail-based communications, and via this other infoworld blog, followed the link to Valdis Krebs' Orgnet.

John picks up on the polarisation (binary) effect created - but Krebs thesis is more general - Intra-community linking is rich, Inter-community linking is sparse. The inter-community linkers he charcterises as "The New Pioneers", after Tom Petzinger's book on management theories. Krebs started with analysis of "purchasing" habits, but extended it to memes
- which is still "buying" of course ..
...

Public services are springing to life one after another - del.icio.us for bookmarks, flickr.com for photos, Gmail for mails, ...

I did come over my lazyness and cautiousness over where my data are and registered for del.icio.us. Gmail account I have already and Flickr.com is in the plans.

People are very enthousiastic about these services - which offer either social-knowledge benefits as del.icio.us or are nice-looking easy to use as Flickr or (state your reasons). So they put their data in these services and build various add-ons (see GmailFS and other apps).

But what do I see today when looking for my del.icio.us bookmarks?

( http://del.icio.us/captsolo )

503 Service Unavailable

The service is not available. Please try again later.

These services are useful, so I am not a proponent of the POV that they are evil. But, obviously, we have to think who has our data and for every site containing critical information absolutely must have the ability to make a local backup.

A dump of bookmarks, a DVD with photos + metadata, ...

Criticality of each service is what every user must determine for himself individually. In general, Orkut 24/7 is not so important to me, bookmarks are a bit more important and mails ... these can be critical.

( subtitle - "Does the Semantic Web behave like a living system?" )

One can find amazing things when not looking for them.
Let's call that peripheral vision, ok?

Quote from the webpage:

" The goal of this work is to show how to model and analyse the Semantic Web as a whole, i.e. as a complex system.

To explain the difference between simple and complex systems, the terms “interconnected” or “interwoven” are somehow essential. Qualitatively, to understand the behaviour of a complex system, we must understand not only how the parts interact but also how they act together to form the behaviour of the whole. "

Found this link while looking for graph analysis and visualization software.

This research project uses software called Pajek - a tool for large network analysis.
Looks very powerful. With so many options available I just feel lost - where do we begin?

And another question - it does not understand GraphViz .DOT files.
Is there a converter from .DOT to Pajek's file format?

See also:
1. Del.icio.us - graph-drawing
2. Pajek (Package for Large Network Analysis) HOW-TO
3. Search Strategy: Search with peripheral vision

BTW program's name Pajek comes from a Slovenian word for spider.

My position paper "Extending FOAF with Resume Information" has been accepted to the FOAF Galway Workshop 2004, organized and sponsored by SWAD Europe and DERI.

I am on my way to Galway now.
The workshop will take place on 1-2 September 2004.
... or in 2 days time.

See: full list of papers accepted to FOAF Galway

More: FOAF Galway [rdfweb.org]

Anti-Copyright book by Misha Verbitsky or rather a copy-left book is something that I've just found.

Might be an interesting history about the copyrights from the beginning (Gutenberg's era) to the modern days. You may read it, but you have to understand russian to do this.

I found this book in relation to events around electronic libraries in Russia.

See - in Russia people are not SO exagerately obsessed with restricting access to books and other creations of mind. While we see a restrictive technologies and laws being put in place in the US to limit people's ability to watch the DVD they've bought whereever they want, there is some freedom left.

If you want to read some literature in Russian, you may turn to some of the electronic libraries. The most well known is Moshkow library.

The information contained in there are books in text format. You may read them. However, it is not that the person in charge does not think about the rights of the authors. I many cases, when the author can be contacted, he has a (sometimes verbal) permission to put these works online, and he will pull the book offline on the first request.

Forgot to say - it's free and not for profit.

But now the greed endangers these libraries - one "commercial" library has appeared and they have persuaded some authors to sue the free electronic libraries. Interesting that the free section of this "commercial" library contains books copied from other free libraries (who have put work into scanning, OCRing and correcting the texts).

Attitude against freely accessible electronic books is different in "the west". English translation of the "Labyrinth of Reflections" by Sergey Lukyanenko was asked to be taken offline by the publisher who is going to publish it in English. BTW - I strongly suggest you to read this book once it comes out - this book is the russian "Neuromancer".

But I still wonder - does a freely available electronic copy diminish or - on the contrary - increase sales of the book. Maybe, it gives people more choice?

Mood: Watching "Ghost in the Shell - Stand Alone Complex I"

Wired 12.09: The Giants of Anime are Coming - The three titans of Japanese animation are all about to unleash monster new films. Watch your back, Shrek.

Recommended Anime: TV Series

The Cardboard Shrine of the Otaku, Version 1.2

http://boards.theforce.net/Fan_Films/b10015/15646323/p133/

WHO: Aaron Swartz, an 18-year-old computer whiz who in 2000 helped develop the popular Web-content distribution software RSS.

See also:
1. Read more in Wired Magazine
2. Fact Check (Aaron Swartz Weblog)

I like this thought from "Fact Check":

It is a simplistic method of factchecking, but one apparently appropriate for our simplistic method of journalism. Neither reporter nor factchecker need look at reality; all that is important is what people say reality is.

Remember - not a long time ago I wrote about science fiction movies (see Robot Stories), saying that in my opinion "Blade Runner" is the best sci-fi movie in the [robots and artificial intelligence] genre.

It appears that I am not the only one thinking so. Expert panel in The Guardian science fiction issue votes on top 10 sci-fi films. And the top one is ... well, you get it.

Top 5 sci-fi movies by The Guardian:

1. Blade Runner (1982) - Dir: Ridley Scott
2. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - Dir: Stanley Kubrick
3. Star Wars (1977) / Empire Strikes Back (1980)
4. Alien (1979) - Dir: Ridley Scott
5. Solaris (1972) - Dir: Andrei Tarkovsky

See also:
1. Guardian - Life - more of the science fiction issue, but it is not a permalink. So read now.
2. via SlashDot

Just watched a movie "I, Robot" (2004).

It is technologically advanced, well made film, based on famous work of Isaac Asimov. Pleasure to watch.

My favorite work of Isaac Asimov is the "Foundation" series. "I, Robot" seems too ... technological (?) to me.

[added later] ... just read trivia on the film - The appearance of the Dr. Lanning hologram to subtly guide and acknowledge the progress of Spooner is a reference to the hologram of "Harry Seldon" in the novel "Foundation", by Isaac Asimov, who guided the members of the Foundation after his own death.

But - above that... What if we strip this movie of all the nice wrapping? What is the idea, the thought at the center of it?

Somebody or something using its power to achieve world dominance? Think any movie with conspirative or domination plot. I.e. "Enemy of the State" also featuring Will Smith.

What does it show us? That robots are evil? Don't know.
Nothing fascinating or unseen there.

I think the best movie in this genre is the "Blade Runner" (1982) by Ridley Scott.

See more: Blade Runner -> trivia

There is the thought, ultimate idea (idea or ... feeling?) that is so capturing. Lots of humanity in the "artificial" beings. Do they dream? ...

"I, Robot" does not add anything new or interesting over the "Blade Runner". Apart from being technically perferct? Perfect?! If we compare it with a movie made 22 years ago, is there really so much technical progress in it?

This brings me to this question - if everything that could be invented has already been invented? And we are just perfecting it now?

Having said all that, I am not entirely honest to movie creators.

"Robot Stories" (2003), coincidentally named same as this post, is a very warm and human movie about robots. A movie featuring very much of the human warmth ... and very little of the technology itself. That is something I enjoyed watching very much.

"Artificial Intelligence" is also a very good movie in this genre.

Mozilla Sunbird a.k.a. Calendar is a new bird in the Mozilla application family. The first 'official' beta version is out now.

Slashdot writes:

"Along with the new Mozilla-Japan initiative and the release of Mozilla 1.8a3 today, the Mozilla team released the first 'official' beta release of Mozilla Sunbird, version 0.2, a stand-alone calendaring application (similar to Apple's iCal).

There are two flavors of this project, one that works as a ~700 KB plugin to Firefox/Thunderbird/Mozilla (titled Mozilla Calendar) and the ~8 MB stand-alone calendaring application, Mozilla Sunbird (rate the apps over at GnomeFiles.org). These builds are the first to feature a new default theme, a new logo and the customizable toolbar functionality.

Note that Sunbird is still an experimental technology preview that contain bugs, but it is pretty stable."

Sources:
1. gemal.dk: Mozilla Sunbird
2. SlashDot: Mozilla Releases Mozilla Sunbird 0.2

Mozilla Sunbird logo by Marc Carson.

Article in CNET News titled "RSS gets down to business" writes:

Primarily the province of bloggers, RSS is moving into the business realm, with the release this week of a new application for sharing calendar data over the Internet.

Developer John Pacchetti released a trial version of RSSCalendar late last month, and the free application has quickly become one of the first nonblogging successes for RSS (Really Simple Syndication), the standard behind Web logs and news aggregator feeds.

I can see that Danny has already commented on RSSCalendar in www-rdf-calendar mailing list suggesting a more machine-readable form in RSS 1.0 feed. - A natural thought for us semantic web minded.

It did not take long for Charles McCathieNevile to come up with a script to produce an RDF version of RSSCalendar data.

Martin Terre Blanche also has analysis of RSSCalendar in his blog. He comes close to a need for more machine readable information "As I mentioned there, having the date, venue and such-like information in the RSS description field is fine for human consumption, but limits the degree to which the information can be automatically syndicated."

Another interesting RSS resource is straTechnologist.
Although its a pitty to see a resource dedicated to RSS not having an RSS feed itself.

Wrote code to display a box with last commented posts in b2evolution.

Simple, yet useful thing - displays a list of posts that have been commented last. Each post is displayed only once, a number after a post indicates how many comments it currently has.

Read more! »

At last installed an e-mail classification program POPFile. The amount of spam has been increasing so much that I could not stand it any more.

The first impression - POPFile is very good. With some initial training (1 day) it is showing a very good accuracy.

Now I need to learn:

1. how to copy POPFile data to another computer so that I can use the same already-learned POPFile at work computer as well;
2. may i delete messages from POPFile history? - the answer is yes, the history is not needed for classification, just for teaching POPFile by correcting it.

The spam detection in b2evolution is also working quite well, but I think IP based filtering would improve it by preventing spam with different URLs, but coming from the same IP address. - reminder to myself to clean up the comment spam too -

Recently I start to notice that I cannot follow all the information appearing on the Planet RDF, Semantic Web Interest Group IRC Scratchpad and other interesting sites. Not to mention #foaf and #rdfig IRC channels and other RSS feeds of interest. Actually, I started to notice that some time ago, but it gets more and more visible now.

I like to collect and analyze the information on topics that interest me. I could do that all day long, but it is too much for the time that I can devote to it aside from work and other things that must be done.

For quite a long time I've been keeping an eye on the field of the Semantic Web. Now there is very much information.

It may mean 2 things:
a) the Semantic Web is finally spinning up (and there is much more action than was 2 years ago);
b) the information about it has become more available with more related blogs appearing, Planet RDF and other portals aggregating them. RSS feed readers helping it even more.

It is the combination of both I think. More practically useful applications are due to appear soon. In the end we probably will not notice that there is something "semantic" - it will just be inside of what we use, on our desktops.

Some of the comments about a SlashDot article "How Google Will Have Achieved The Semantic Web".

By the way - it is correct that the original ftrain.com article that SlashDot is referring to is dated July, 2002. So we are speaking about an article ~2 years old now. Still, the Semantic Web is on the start line.

... comment by MarkWatson:

Strong AI requires grounding symbols in real world things, events, and processes.

I think that simply defining the "meaning" of words in ontologies is likely good enough for useful web-based software agents. It will take time, but with well defined ontologies, and common use of RDF using standard schemas will make a lot of cool things possible. I think that dealing with ungrounded symbols, but symbols defined and related to other symbols in a structured way, is OK.

One of the classic complaints of AI systems can be summed up with a trivial example:

Define a relation in Prolog:

father(ken, mark).

A human reader assigns their own meaning to "father", "ken", and "mark". To a prolog system, this could just as easily be:

aaa1(aaa2, aaa3).

Somewhere, on the edge of symbol-slamming systems, there has to be some connection with the real world, with our experiences.

For semantic web applications, this "edge connection" can simply be tying into symbols defined in OWL ontologies, RDF Schema, etc.

The problem is getting people to use RDF (I added RDF to my main web site years ago, but it only contains limited information).

Another problem with RDF is that there are several kluges to get it into XHTML, but that will hopefully change soon.

A good toolkit for experimenting with the semantic web is the Swi-Prolog semweb library (http://www.swi-prolog.org/packages/semweb.html/ [swi-prolog.org])

... comment by theno23:

I'm certainly knee deep in RDF and OWL; I develop a GPL'd RDF engine called 3store [sourceforge.net] which is moving OWL-wards in the near future.

I've been a low-level DB wrangler for some years, and FWIW I now find semantic-web structures much easier to deal with than SQL. The simple fact that you dont /need/ a schema to assert data and make queries is hugely useful, not to mention the inference RDFS can do, which is pretty lame my AI stnadards, but is very fast,and still quite owerful.

... comment by sonicattack:

A system that perpetually collects information presented in a language that easily conveys the attributes and logical relationships between different objects and concepts. (Scratches beard.)

Make the system distributed and let people run their own information collecting agents. Every home computer becomes a part of the network of logical relationships, each with a tiny piece to contribute to the puzzle. My computer could have complete information about the workings of combustion engines - what parts they consist of, and their relationships.
When someone requests information about car manufacturing, some relevant part of it will be retrieved from my store.

Now, let's make the system ask us for help, when information is missing. Let the system start drawing own conclusions from the facts it gathered, and tell us when it needs something filled in. As it grows, more and more complex queries could be answered.

Q: CAN THE EFFECTS OF GLOBAL WARMING BE REVERSED?
A: THERE IS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER

Or how about:

A: TO REDUCE GLOBAL WARMING, FIRST WE MUST... ?? ... !! ... -- THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM --

Oh, at least I hope the network will be able to finally find the true correlation between the price of gold and the length of men's beards.

In is dangerous to watch news or read newspapers - one would find many stupid things happening on the political scene. So I'd prefer to ignore them. Unfortunately, not always I can.

European Commission is an institution that represents and upholds the interests of the EU as a whole, and is the driving force within the EU institutional system regarding legislation, etc.

Now each of 25 EU countries has to nominate its candidate for one member of the European Commision each, also called a commissioner.

Sandra Kalniete - current EC commisioner from Latvia has everything needed for this post - diplomatic carreer (Minister of Foreign Affairs; Ambassador to UNESCO; Ambassador to France; Ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva; ...), education, experience, strong personality.

It would be a natural and well motivated decision to appoint her a commissioner to the EC, but there is one problem - she is not from a party of the ruling minority coalition in Latvian parliament.

Now, instead of thinking what's best for Latvia and EU, the politicians from the ruling coalition (consisting of 3 parties: Zaļo un Zemieku savienība (ZZS), Latvijas Pirmā partija (LPP), Tautas partija (TP)) are engaging in marketplace games to see who can get this post.

Read more! »

A story by Paul Ford "August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web" has been SlashDotted.

It's one a recent appearances of articles about the Semantic Web on SlashDot. It would be a good opportunity to see what SlashDot audience thinks about the Semantic Web and maybe find some good ideas and see where more information is needed.

Bad that I am not a SlashDot subscriber and cannot comment.

Linux Journal has announced it's 2004 Editor's Choice Awards.

Interesting that the award for the best game goes to RSS.

[ via SlashDot ]

This is a pretty nifty Gmail trick (from redemption in a blog via TIMELINE via gmailwiki):
Create a label named "Unread" and Gmail automatically lists all unread email when you call up that label.

An article "New features in Mozilla Thunderbird 0.8" [source: redemption in a blog] says:

RSS Integration

That's right, RSS reading capability is going to be built into Thunderbird. Apparently, it could look and function somewhat like Opera (see Opera RSS reader screenshot) - just speculation though. The "core" bug is bug 225158 - Thunderbird should act as an RSS/Atom newsreader, too. The roadmap promises this bug (or rather RFE) will be fixed for Thunderbird 0.8.

I would like my current favorite mailer TheBat! to have RSS agregation functionality AND to be available for Linux. But if it does not have these features, I will move to Thunderbird, Evolution or Sylpheed sooner or later.

Link to an MSNBC article about business use of social networks.

Techquila Shots article "Representing Events in Topic Maps" and the comments lead to some links about HEML and RDF iCal:

1. information about HEML on SemWeb IG IRC Scratchpad
2. RDF iCal to HEML convertor - an XSLT stylesheet by Masahide Kanzaki.

These links are a part of RDF Calendar scheduled topic chat, 2004-03-24.

Here is a nice, short list of Semantic Web related bots.
If you know some more, add to the list.

FOAFBot - IRC community support agent.

Photo-annotating bot by Matt Biddulph.

whwhwhwhwhwhwh by Libby Miller.

MarcOnt initiative by Sebastian Ryszard Kruk - bibliographic description and related tools utilizing Semantic Web technologies.

ThoughtTreasure is a commonsense knowledge base and architecture for natural language processing that uses multiple representations including logic, finite automata, grids, and scripts. The ThoughtTreasure knowledge base consists of:

* 35,000 English words and phrases,
* 21,000 French words and phrases,
* 27,000 concepts, and
* 51,000 commonsense assertions about those concepts.

langreiter.com: ThoughtTreasure - it's also a website of general interest.

aboutAI.net: ThoughtTreasure [11/10/1999]

AI Wiki: ThoughtTreasure

Interesting project. Although I wonder how up-to-date it is - the website is quite old.

BTW - did you know that 'simpler' (or older?) languages that have word declinations are easier for natural language processing than languages where words stay the same. Baltic languages, including Latvian, are examples of former, while English (which has probably most of the natural text recognition efforts) is an example of later.

| do not know the details of WHY, but I assume that the changing word forms (declinations) contain semantics of how and in what sense this word is being used, thus helping to determine the role of this word in the sentence.

Semantic Web best Practices and Deployment WG has published first working drafts of ontology design patterns:

- Representing Classes As Property Values on the Semantic Web
http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-swbp-classes-as-values-20040721/

- Defining N-ary Relations on the Semantic Web
http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-swbp-n-aryRelations-20040721/

Comments are welcome to "public-swbp-wg (at) w3.org".

ARC is a collection of lightweight PHP scripts for RDF developers.

Although there is already the stable and feature-rich [RDF API for PHP], there is ongoing demand for something smaller that could be used and extended a little bit more easily. Therefore ARC consists of stand-alone classes with one PHP file for each class.

ARC RDF/XML Parser creates an array of triples from RDF/XML. The functionality is still very limited. A find_triples function as well as some indexing/grouping functionaliy is already under construction. However, ARC is meant to stay lightweight and the focus before adding new methods is on removing bugs, so no date can be given when those functions will be available.

From the ISWC 2004 conference program:
1) Accepted papers: Research Track
2) Accepted papers: Industrial Track

01:47 CaptSolo> hi morten, libby
01:47 mortenf> moreso for you!
01:47 CaptSolo> european side of foaf is not sleeping
01:47 mortenf> getting close…

01:47 libby> we never sleep! the foaf must go on!
01:48 CaptSolo> libby, soon i will be flying near/over England
01:48 CaptSolo> foaf must go on!
01:48 * crschmidt grins
01:48 crschmidt> sleep is useless!
01:48 crschmidt> CODE CODE CODE!

Read more! »

In May I wrote about automatical generation of the UI for metadata creation/editing.

Peter Van Dijck commented in on his weblog saying:

Sure it's possible but it will be ugly. An ontology generally doesn't carry enough information in it to construct an elegant UI - far from it. All you'll end up with is a generic interface.

The problem is that an ontology is just a description of a domain. What you do with that information (including how you best edit it) can vary extremely. And what you do with it determines the UI, not the inherent structure of the ontology.

Sure - the ontology (in RDF or OWL) carries the description of the domain terms and their relations. But instead of just pointing out that it will be ugly, we may ask:

What is the minimum amount of information we need to add (annotate the subject ontology with a representation metadata) in order to generate a meaningful user interface, based on the given ontology?

I am speaking about annotating the subject domain ontology with metadata describing how to display or interact with this ontology's data instances. Since the annotation may (and in most cases will) be separate from the ontology itself, we may have a number of different annotations and a number of different UIs being generated.

Today (or yesterday, if we consider it's past the midnight) was my namesday:

It was a nice day.

Gmail Gems blog offers a collection of tips and tricks for the Google Gmail service.
You may also submit your tips 'n' tricks.

P.S. I wonder what rules govern when you get a new bunch of Gmail invitations. I had 6 invitations appear some 3-4 days from signing on, but now there's need for more.

Cory Doctorow's (EFF) DRM talk at Microsoft Research.
June 17, 2004

A very interesting talk about Digital Rights Management explaining:
1. That DRM systems don't work
2. That DRM systems are bad for society
3. That DRM systems are bad for business
4. That DRM systems are bad for artists
5. That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT

1. That DRM systems don't work:
...
DRM systems are broken in minutes, sometimes days. Rarely, months. It's not because the people who think them up are stupid. It's not because the people who break them are smart. It's not because there's a flaw in the algorithms. At the end of the day, all DRM systems share a common vulnerability: they provide their attackers with ciphertext, the cipher and the key. At this point, the secret isn't a secret anymore.
...

Links:
1. Canonical text-only version of the talk - it also has a list of URLs for other versions of this talk

See Also:
1. Gizmodo: What's in your gadget bag, Cory?
2. Kairosnews: Cory Doctorow on DRM

Now some time has passed since my last blog posts.

I was (and still am) pretty loaded with work and thing to do, but got at least some relaxation - most of this week is a national holiday, which means relaxing, drinking beer and having fun.

Jāņi or John's Day is the name of the festivity and since it is the biggest festivity in Latvia besides Christmas, it takes more than 1 day.

Good news are - now I am more optimistic about having some free time for the blog and Semantic Web things. See you around.

Links:
1. Jāņi / John's day @ WikiPedia
2. Latvian mythology @ WikiPedia

This site was intermittently down due to a hosting server upgrade.
Apologies to all of you who had problems connecting.

Everything should be all right now.
If the problems persist, I may have to look for an alternative hosting.

See you around!

Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments

SIMILE is a joint project conducted by the W3C, HP, MIT Libraries, and MIT's Lab for Computer Science. SIMILE seeks to enhance inter-operability among digital assets, schemas, metadata, and services. A key challenge is that the collections which must inter-operate are often distributed across individual, community, and institutional stores. We seek to be able to provide end-user services by drawing upon the assets, schemas, and metadata held in such stores.

SIMILE will leverage and extend DSpace, enhancing its support for arbitrary schemas and metadata, primarily though the application of RDF and semantic web techniques. The project also aims to implement a digital asset dissemination architecture based upon web standards. The dissemination architecture will provide a mechanism to add useful "views" to a particular digital artifact (i.e. asset, schema, or metadata instance), and bind those views to consuming services.

SIMILE :: main project page
SIMILE :: Wiki

Subprojects:
1. Longwell
2. RDF Browser

A major goal of the W3photo Project is to create an archive's whose images and metadata are open access by developers of the semantic web.

Wily Yuen writes: "Nigel McFarlane's Rapid Application Development with Mozilla is now available as a PDF download from Bruce Perens' Open Source series at InformIT. Please support the author and buy the book if you find it to be useful."

Displaying a keen sense of irony, InformIT have ensured that their download page does not work in Mozilla. The book is available as a zip file containing a collection of PDFs or as a zip file containing a collection of RTF documents.

spotted in a mozillaZine article

Unrelated offtopic:

Releasing a free version of a book is a good thing. Of course, we should also thank the author for the work put in the creation of the book and buy the book if possible.

It may be interesting to know that many Russian books, mainly fiction, are available for free download. This way you can read many interesting things.

lib.ru: Free online book library
(Maksim Moshkov's library)

There are also some free English translations of Russian fiction.

Why free? Must be a different mentality.

I would strongly suggest reading Sergey's Lukyanenko science fiction wonder "A Labyrinth of Reflections" which is Russian "Neuromancer". Unfortunately the free English version is taken offline (bad news) because the book is being prepared for publishing in English (which is good news).

TimBL @ WWW 2004 (May 17-22, 2004, New York):

* http://www.w3c.org/2004/Talks/0519-tbl-keynote/ - keynote slides
-> http://www.bestkungfu.com/archive/?id=478
-> xml.com: Berners-Lee Keeps WWW2004 Focused on Semantic Web
-> islands around us - "A line that stood out for me at yesterday's Tim Berners-Lee talk was "Start off with islands and stitch them together." He said this in answer to a question regarding ontology standardization."

SemaView :: the company

* http://www.semaview.com/company/the_team.html
* http://www.semaview.com/d/Semweb_Illustrated.pdf

Events:

* http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/events/Overview.html

* 1-2 March 2004 Meeting of the W3C Semantic Web Interest Group
* SWAD-Europe Workshop on Semantic Web Storage and Retrieval - 13-14 November 2003, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands. RDF storage, parsing & query

Problems - uniquely identifying objects:

* The Donna Summer dilemma
-> discussion about it on #rdfig

* part of SWAD presentation by Dave Beckett - sh1m: Explains some stuff surrounding IFP

Semantic aggregation:

* rdfweb.org: aggregation strategies alias smushing.

RDF notations:

* http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/discovery/2004/01/turtle/

Interesting / More reading:

* http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/talks/200404-nict/
W3C Semantic Web developments by Dan Brickley

* http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/events/20031113-storage/positions/walsh.html

* http://www.meskill.net/weblogs/ - interesting reading, nice & functional weblog

* http://www.csd.abdn.ac.uk/~ggrimnes/pubs/SemanticFloraFauna.pdf

* SECO: Mediation Services for Semantic Web Data by Andreas Harth

* SWRL - semantic web rule language combining OWL and RuleML

Interesting idea - to visually display relations between Wiki pages.

WikiNerveCenter and other interesting features (i.e. GraphWiki) are a part of MiniRubyWiki.

Makes me think about displaying visually a richer set of relations which you may have in PeriPeri metadata wiki - where you may have a number of pages being part of master pages by isPartOf and hasSubject relations.

And about visually displaying the resulting RDF graphs, generated from Wiki pages.

testējam burtiņus lielus un mazus.

liela zaļa govs žūžoja krēslā un visiem rādīja mēli.
timotiņa mēli un pelavu mēli.

ŗņšūļīõšēāčž
ŖŅŠŪĻĪÕŠĒĀČŽ

This is a test how b2evolution handles Latvian characters in Unicode.

The upgrade to b2evo v0.9 completed.

If you notice any errors, please report.
If you notice changes you like, tell me.
(though not much changed on the outside)

New version is interesting, upgrade & installation easy.
Many visual and functional changes to the admin interface (from 0.8.6).
Localisations of the blog, installation and admin interface.
There is a Lithuanian localisation, I wonder who might do the Latvian translation?

In short time I will reapply my local changes:

* showing remote IP address for referers & searches (admin interface) - +OK+
* 'last comments' box on the blog page
* 'currently reading' box on captsolo and small-n-tabby weblog - +OK+
* link to my FOAF profile - +OK+
* adding GeoURL information - +OK+
* fix to make searches case-insensitive [could be the fault of my host server mysql why the searches get case-sensitive, but since Francois says its not b2evo bug, i'll have to patch it locally] - +OK+
* some skin improvements - show author's name, post status, show post status by change of post frame appearance, ...

I did not think there were so many small changes I've done...

Some nice changes:

* plugins (textile, texturize, BB-code, ...) - can be enables/disabled on a per-post basis
* comments - open/closed/ disabled for each post
* RSS feeds for comments

Version 0.9 “Europe” of a very good blog engine b2evolution (a fork of b2) has been released this week.

A quick list of new features:

* Install and start using b2evo without editing a single config file (fplanque)
* Localized install screens (blueyed)
* Most settings moved to backoffice
* Improved antispam with full control on what you report to the centralized blacklist (fplanque)
* RSS & Atom Feeds for Comments (fplanque)
* Comment authors are automatically identified with their profile if they are logged in (fplanque)
* Comment permalinks (fplanque)
* New template tags (object oriented) (this is the visible part of the code cleaning iceberg (fplanque)
* Enhanced Calendar (counts posts, links to archive of month, browse by year… ) (blueyed)
* More link type options (fplanque)
* Search Engine Friendly Permalinks: use post title in the url (URL titles) (fplanque)
* Community blogs: protected posts are now restricted to blog members and are no longer visible by any logged in user. (fplanque)
* Optional output buffer handling, which provides ETags-support and handles gzip compression. (blueyed)
* Comments can be closed / open / disabled (post per post). (fplanque)
* Full locale support instead of lightweight language support.
* Locales can be fully administered in the backoffice now. (blueyed)
* b2evo will redirect to correct blog if permalinks point to wrong one (fplanque)
* Blogrolls have been renamed to Linkblogs which should be a little easier to understand.
* Backoffice improvements.

+ Plug-in system, with value added plugins included: (fplanque)
* Texturize plugin.
* Auto-P plugin.
* Textile 2.0 plugin.

Also in the works:

Script for Movable Type to b2evolution migration to be available soon.
If you wish to test it now, contact the author or sign up on the MT script migration page in b2evolution forums.

Near-By:
* b2evolution: Downloads
* b2evolution: Documentation Wiki

I have been wondering how to generate a user interface for entering / editing metadata, given the ontology(-ies) to be used. An automatical way to generate the UI should be possible.


The generator would take ontology [ or learn for sample data ] and transform it into the user interface in languages like XUL, XForms, …


From a comment to [ RAM 5 ] - Open Source Media Architecture:

Comment from Schuyler
The Epistomat: Generating Consensus About RDF Ontologies and Rules



Jo & I wrote this paper on the subject of automatically generated interfaces to RDF ontologies, and collectively defined ontology evolution.

Related:


1. RDFe - A Schema-Aware RDF Editor by Sean B. Palmer.


2. Research paper: Generating Adaptive Hypertext Content from the SemanticWeb [ pdf ]


3. Research paper: RDF Authoring Environments for End Users [ pdf ]



4. Authoring Tools for RDF [ ESW Wiki ] - this page is useful, but also shows a problem with wikis - somebody has to maintain it to keep it relevant and up-to-date.

I wrote about a site Lojjic.net in an earlier article showing it as a site with an interesting design and use of RDF.


To answer the question about RDF usage its author writes:

Thanks for the link– to answer your question, not only the photo metadata but the entire site’s content is stored as RDF triples. I use a Redland triple storage which is queried for statements relating to the requested URI; those statements are serialized to simple RDF-XML and translated via a series of XSLT sheets to give the final views sent to the browser. There’s a clunky but functional web interface for managing the RDF content.


If you take any URL (such as index.rdf.html) and remove the .html you’ll get an RDF-XML representation of the statements used to build that page. There are also other suffixes you can add in place of the .html to get different views: .browse, .pdf, etc., they’re all linked to in the “Other Versions of This Page” icon in the fisheye menu.


It’s been a pet project of mine for a long time now and I hope to someday release it as a full-fledged content management system, but work and life in general makes progress slow.

See also - Updates - lojjic.net, 2004-02-22


Interesting what will this project become in the future. And it is certainly interesting to observe the uses of RDF, OWL and other Semantic Web technologies in practice.




While there, see some wonderful flame fractal pictures. Makes me wish play with fractals again - its so different from the old Mandelbrot set pictures. Which were also beautiful.

Effective immediately, Evolution Connector for Microsoft Exchange Server 2000/2003 (formerly Ximian Connector) is available under a free, open source license. Users no longer need a license file to run the software, and source code has been made public at http://ftp.ximian.com under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).


With the Connector for Microsoft Exchange installed, Evolution functions as an Exchange client, enabling users to become full participants in company-wide group scheduling and other collaborative tasks. Linux and Solaris users can access public folders, Global Address Lists, email, calendar, task lists, and group scheduling information.


The next version of Evolution, available during Q3 2004, will deliver expanded Exchange connectivity based on the current Connector technology. Support for MS Exchange features will be enhanced to include mailbox management, quota messages and password management.

This page is for users thinking about migration from Windows to Linux or those who want to find a Linux application best suited for their uses.


I still wish TheBat! e-mail client was ported to Linux. At some moment I’ll have to find a substitute for it, but it is too good to replace.


See also: Wine & TheBat! in Linux

1st European Semantic Web Symposium, taking place in Greece, 10-12 May 2004, started yesterday.


SWIG IRC logs for some transcripts of the symposium:
- #rdfig log - 11-05-2004






[ spotted on Semantic Web Interest Group IRC Scratchpad ]

Information about the Semantic Web in Russian.


OSP.RU (Open Sustems Publications):
- Semantic Web: роли XML и RDF

- Библиотека знаний Сyc

Ziņas no Slashdot.com:


Slashdot reports about free WiFi in Estonia:

“BBC Technology’s Clark Boyd reports on one man’s efforts to make free 802.11 Wi-Fi wireless Internet access ubiquitous in Estonia.


An estimated two-thirds of Estonia is now covered by wireless hotspots according to Veljo Haamer, who convinced Estonia’s major oil companies, Neste and Statoil, to install free hotspots at gas stations.


Two-thirds of Estonia’s approximately 280 public hotspots are free to use, all of which are marked with signs. But Haamer still wardrives for dead-spots and next plans to get free wireless access to public parks and green spaces. Last year Slashdot covered Estonia’s legislation declaring Internet access a human right.”

I wonder if and when Latvia will come to a decision that Internet access should be a human right and when WiFi hotspots will be more than a commercial service provided in cafes.



N.B. Last 2 days of a RAM-5 Workshop will have workshops and lectures related to free wireless networks and open source.

[ RAM 5 ] workshop just started today. Lots of interesting people are here. And many interesting workshops ahead.


This is the first time I actually met people from #foaf - Zool and Schuyler. Talked about many things, I wish I could remember a half of them.


Ideas keep on appearing in many minds at the same time. One of them is the idea to generate user interfaces (XForms, XUL, …) for editing ontologies automatically from ontology schemas. I had thought about it a bit, and, as I understood, Zool and Schuyler have done something more in this direction.


[… there were more interesting topics and ideas …]


Tomorrow session will start with:

10.30-12.15

PeriPeri Wiki has some very interesting ideas and I wanted to try it for myself, but unfortunately I could not get it to run properly.


The only documentation available is on the Peri Peri homepage, but it is not abundant.


Some problems solved, some left - read on for details.

Read more! »

PeriPeri is an interesting wiki engine that allows to add metadata to the wiki pages.


Example:

PeriPeri-DublinCore page some metadata in the page header:


Abstract: A small set of widely applicable meta-data
Subject: PeriMechanics

Subject: PeriPeriBasics
Is-Part-Of: PeriPeri:RdfForWikis

Requires: MetadataSyntax


It is not a surprise that this information is neatly displayed at the bottom of the page, but it is more interesting that a link to this page automatically appears as “Has-Part” metadata in the PeriPeri-RdfForWikis page which does contain explicit information that “DublinCore” is a part of it.

Unfortunately I had problems installing PeriPeri and therefore cannot try it myself.

---

This Wiki hosts a test of ideas found at:

• The FacetWiki project
• The DoubleWiki project (see PeriPeriForDebate)

For more information:

• PeriPeri
• MeatBall - PeriPeri
• MeatBall - RdfForWikis

Today [May 1, 2004] Latvia and 9 other new member states joined the European Union. It is hard to tell what will change, but there certainly will be changes.


BBC News: Dazzling entry for new EU members.


What will it bring for me? I do not expect much to change in my life, but I hope I will get more chances to meet friends from other countries. In person, at last. Brink beer, etc.


Did I say we have tasty beer?

P.S. If there is an ontology of political entities with a concept of the EU in it, somebody’s gotta modify it now.

Now I keep googling backlinks for every webpage I visit.


As a result, some interesting sites show up.
For example author of the StaticFree Blog writes about an idea for Lojban - RDF translation.

I don’t know much about Lojban, but the author claims they are more alike than we might think.


Also interesting:
- http://staticfree.info/projects/nokia3650linux/

- SharedExpenses
- http://staticfree.info/css/

An extensive list of Mozilla bookmarklets.


Part of Ryan Hatch’s bookmarks.

Also contains links to other interesting resources like memepool, cryptonomicon.net and arstechnica.

Thoughts while looking at Annozilla and thinking about using blog entries as a source for web page annotations:


I would like to see a Mozilla / Firefox sidebar application that automagically shows Google backlinks for a web page I am looking at. While not an application of Annotea, it should contain less “noise” than a public annotation server [unless the annotation rating system is introduced].


Backlinks and Annotations || kuro5hin.org has a discussion about backlinks and annotation and also has a bookmarklet for showing Google backlinks.

With the release of Annozilla 0.5 beta this month and after reading related weblog articles [1],[2] I decided to check out this Mozilla extension. It has been a while since I last looked at web annotations via an Amaya browser.

Annozilla is a set of Mozilla or Firebird extensions that are used to interact with the annotation servers.


This is the the Annozilla project, designed to view and create annotations associated with a web page, as defined by the W3C Annotea project. The idea is to store annotations as RDF on a server, using XPointer (or at least XPointer-like constructs) to identify the region of the document being annotated.


[ spotter: Jamie Pitts ]

The idea for shared web annotations is a good thing, but I do not see that it has moved much forward. Main problem is that the use of Annotea is not widespread. As Jamie Pitts says: “While I have always had great hopes for web annotation, it is plagued by the classic chicken-egg problem. Getting the success feedback loop going involves building communities with web annotation.”


It will not move much forward if there will not be an easy and transparent way to create web annotations AND an easy way to see/query them.


What can be done?


1) Easy annotation.


Weblog entries are often used to annotate webpage contents. Why can’t we use there annotations? Nathan Young describes generating annotations from a weblog in B2 weblog with annotea annotation server.
- probably Nathan’s tool can be adapted to b2evolution. i could use it here then.

- why are we thinking about it only now if such thoughts were out there already 1.5 years ago?


Danny Ayers in Raw: Annotating the Web explores using weblog entries for annotations and adding the Annotea vocab to the RSS feed or storing this info along the weblog entry.
- see also the discussion in comments of Danny’s post.


2) Annotation rating.


If there will be many annotations, there is a potential to much noise (irrelevant comments, spam, …) which would render annotations useless.


To overcome this problem, we may use a rating system for annotations where the most relevant annotations get better grades and are higher up in the list [or only annotation with a certain rating and higher are shown].



The rating could be either on annotation [how could we add the rating to the annotation?] or on its creator basis. In the later case we could use the FOAF web of trust to decide which annotations are worthwhile seeing.

Education / Links
Semantic Web seminar (WS03/04)

http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~dbis/lehre/seminar-ws0304/


Semantic Web PhD Course - Spring 2002


CS586 Spring 2004 - Course Outline [ univ. of so-cal ]


Sites Relevant to Ontologies and Knowledge Sharing


People
Semantic Web Science Association [uni-karlsruhe.de]


Mindswap Group - People

Mindswap - Papers


Other
Knowledge Management & Workflow

A list of web resources related to the Semantic Web.


Quite a comprehensive list, but not updated recently. © is 2002.

Roy T. Fielding has a dissertation “Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures” on modern web architecture and how it differs from other architectural styles.

RDF Survey is a collection of RDF resources available on the web.


It is made by Reinhold Klapsing. The last date on the document is 2001, but it is possible that there is some interesting information.


The page says Reinhold is working on XWMF - An eXtensible Web Modeling Framework. [this page has some papers for further reading]

---

Papers found on the web:
1. Survey of RDF data on the Web - a technical report by Andreas Eberhart. 15-Aug-2002.

2. ONTOLOGY STORAGE AND QUERYING - by Aimilia Magkanaraki, … Apr-2004.

3. RDF Publications - FORTH - Institute of Computer Science

Part of the mail sent to rdfweb-dev and www-rdf-interest.
This is a placeholder for feedback.

What ontologies you might suggest to use for describing the following subject areas:


- Person itself
- Contact information

- Work experience (company, time period, title, …)
- Education (educ. institution, time period, degree, …)

- Publications *
- Courses, certificates

- Skills (specific, language, driving, …)
- References

- Wishes for desired job/company / Conditions (relocation, …)
- … other information …

- Meta-information about the Resume itself (revisions, …)

Read more! »

Tom’s Hardware Guide:
- Migrating from Windows To Linux: Part 1 - Preparation

- Migrating From Windows To Linux: Part 2

Smuks bil

XML.com article “Using libferris with XML”.

There are several benefits of using libferris with your XML applications.


* Access to large amounts of metadata such as:
- width, height, depth, gamma and pixel data of images

- width, height of video files
- camera and thumbnail information from jpeg/exif files

- native on disk EA from XFS filesystems
- ID3 Artist information from music files

- RDF repositories
- Text representations of HTML, man, pdf and djvu images. The text version is created lazily upon request and accessed through the metadata interface through the “as-text” EA.



[…]

b2evolution 0.8.9 by Francois Planque - a “Spring” release is out!


This is a blog tool that I use on my website and I am very content with it.


Documentation wiki for b2evolution was also recently created.

Reading or suggesting the use cases may be interesting.

# Private blogs: assign individual user rights for each blog
# User groups / Roles based security

# Comments can be set open or closed on a post by post basis
# Several conf options moved from the _conf files to the backoffice.

# More blog dependant settings (instead of gloabl options)
# Users can choose if they want to receive notifications or not for new comments/trackbacks/etc on their posts

# The HTML checker now allows tables in posts by default
# Made RSS 2 valid. Added icon to feedvalidator.org.

# Atom 0.3 support.
# Quicktags made compatible with mozilla (Ron)

# Automatic loading of /conf/hacks.php if this file exists

bibTeX Definition in Web Ontology Language (OWL) Version 0.1 [ visus.mit.edu ]


BibTeX-2-RDF translator [ produces RDF in OntoWeb ontology ]


OntoWeb - a European Union founded project about Ontology-based information exchange for knowledge management and electronic commerce.


/ it was a productive blogging evening today, but now it’s time to get some sleep /

An interesting article from Leigh Dodds weblog “Get Your FOAF On: Events” about extending your FOAF with information on attendance of various events.

ldodds writes: Continuing the Get Your FOAF On series I’ll show you how to describe your attendance at an event, with some specific notes on conference attendance.


Describing events isn’t a goal for FOAF, but it is a goal of the RDF Calendar group who are developing an RDF schema for capturing calendar information. The RDF Calendar Taskforce, is an article I wrote for XML.com some time ago now, but provides some

useful background on that groups activities and goals. They’re obviously much further along now and you can now found some detailed, and growing, documentation of their current calendaring vocabulary in the ESW Wiki: RDF Calendar Documentation.

[ spotted on a Danny Ayers’s frassle weblog ]

A link-dump related to semantic web and bibliographic reference software.


TikiWiki -> Faceted classification - software catalogue


http://openreference.sourceforge.net/ - OpenReference is a Servlet/JSP based database application to manage your or your group’s research references.


Pile - the Portable Information Linking Engine, which is a document storage and presentation system designed to make cross referencing information easy. The web site not only hosts information about Pile, but also is conveniently run on Pile.
/ this is interesting! /


Open standards and software for bibliographies and cataloging - lists many open source bibliographic software projects.

Including Haystack, OpenOffice Bibliographic Project and others.


ContentSaver - with the extended shortcut menu in Internet Explorer, you can easily gather material during your Internet research. Later, you can view and organize it in ContentSaver, a MS Outlook-style application.
/ it offers faceted navigation, so it is close in this to my wishes for reference info organization software. but it lacks the ability to relate documents to each other [cross-reference] and, obviously, to navigate these relations. /


http://thedata.org/iassist2002_oss.ppt - “Using the Virtual Data Center: Archiving, Cataloging, and Distributing Data”

… a presentation describing some open-source software for libraries.

A wonderful idea from hackdiary.com to author RDF using OpenOffice vector drawing application!

OpenOffice’s vector-drawing app has a very nice Visio-like ‘connector’ tool that can link objects together with lines. It’s very easy to put together labelled directed graph diagrams and have the lines re-flow as you move the nodes around.


It also has a well-documented XML file format, which got me thinking that graph drawings could be converted into RDF automatically. I wrote some python code to read in OO files and print out n-triples.

I see the article has been out for some time, but the idea is worth noting anyway.

“Smart Style on the Semantic Web” [ citeseer info ] - found an interesting paper on the CiteSeer.

ABSTRACT


Web publishing systems have to take into account a plethora of Web-enabled devices, user preferences and abilities. Technologies generating these presentations will need to be explicitly
aware of the context in which the information is being presented. Semantic Web technology can be a fundamental part of the solution to this problem by explicitly modeling the knowledge needed to adapt presentations to a specific delivery context.


We propose the development of a Smart Style layer which is able to process metadata that describes content and use this metadata to improve the presentation of the content to human users. In the paper, we

derive the requirements of such a Smart Style layer by considering Web design from both the document engineering and graphic design perspectives.

The paper is published on 2000, but still it might be an interesting reading - who knows what is “lost in translation".



Get this paper in PDF

I think it’s time for us to be able to organize our information in an intuitive and natural manner - to use the way we are thinking visually, in symbols, rather than in plain text stream.

I wish to be able to take the some metadata about an item [article, images, …], to relate the item to others and to be able to view and manipulate all this information in a graph view.


Let’s take biographic data.

I wanted to find a tool to organize bibliographic data.

Requirements - to allow to:
- describe a document

- categorise a document
- associate a file and/or URL (full text) with a document

- add interesting quotes (text excerpts) to the document information
- add relations (references) to/from other documents

- view and navigate relations


Ideally that would be a graphical tool that allowes to navigate the document relations in a graph form, view the graph in various views and explore its clustering.

I looked at EndNote and was disappointed - seems that its not much more than a library card storage system with the ability to format the cards in various formats and access bibliographic databases.


Regarding bibliography databases I can find the information I need in the CiteSeer and DBLP.


What I really need is an intiutive graphical interface to the documents and their relations.

---

The wish for graphical represenation is somewhat related to MindMapping [1,2,3].

At the time when I looked at TheBrain [4,5,6] software, its look & feel was very similar to what I’d like to see in such a graphical tool. Non-prorietary and open-source is preferable of course.


If it were not for easy, graphical navigation, the Wiki Way seems like an acceptable way to organize references. At least it can do what’s required, though transforming the documents and their relations into the Wiki markup would be quite time consuming unless it can be automated.


I have not found such a tool for reference data, but there’s always a possibility that somebody has already found one or made it.


MindMapping
[1] MindMapping @ C2 Wiki

[2] MindMapping @ WikiPedia
[3] MM resource at the MindManager site

TheBrain
[4] TheBrain site

[5] TheBrain @ C2 Wiki

[6] Slashdot | OpenSource Alternative to TheBrain?

Tools for the Semantic Web page at cefriel.it.


A good collection of resources and links.


Last links:
# Scalability and Storage: Survey of Free Software / Open Source RDF storage systems

# RDF Query
# Ontology Building: A Survey of Editing Tools by Michael Denny

# visualization service for RDFS - FRODO RDFSViz

Updated the Resume RDF schema (cv.rdfs) with correct namespace for RDFS.


See also:
- CaptSolo weblog :: Resume RDF

- CaptSolo :: Semantic Web

This is the canonical list of WikiEngines.
The engines are listed twice, with different ordering. Discussion and requests are at the end of the page.


RandyKramer started the page as a “master list” of all known WikiEngines, WikiFarms, and maybe WikiForums at WikiEngineReviewWikiLists. He copied and merged several lists to make this one.


Overwhelmed by this long list? Try ChoosingaWiki or WikiChoicetree. Or else CreateWiki.



- see-also: Wikis => Comparing Wiki features

… a Semantic Web course at LSDIS, University of Georgia.

Xoro 400 DVD player is a nice and inexpensive DVD player, capable of playing DivX.


However, the DivX format has many variations and while Xoro 400 plays many of them, regular firmware updates are needed to keep pace with DivX format evolution. The last firmware update on Xoro firmware download page is dated 13.11.2003.


Is there newer firmware for Xoro 400???
As far as I know, there isn’t.


Somebody mentioned that you can flash Xoro 400 (not plus) with the firmware for Xoro 400plus.

If so, can somebody confirm this?


I asked this question on Xoro forum, but the answer so far is that the ESS chipset in Xoro 400 is no longer supported by the manufacturer. And that you cannot flash it with firmware for Xoro 400plus.


If Xoro ceases to support their players so fast, I wonder if it is wise for consumers to buy their DivX player products.

I want to find a good wiki engine to use.
If you have suggestions, feel free to comment.

I have tried MoinMoin so far. It is nice, lots of Semantic Web hackers use it, but I lack the comments feature of WakkaWiki. And I am not sure can I use special characters (i.e. Latvian) for WikiNames.


WackoWiki seems to be very effective.
TikiWiki is a complete framework that might prove to be very effective (I want a place for photo gallery and like other its features, too).



Things to try are the FacetedNavigation of Diamond Wiki and a PalmOS wiki named MegaWiki - maybe I will blow the dust of my good old Palm Vx and try a wiki on it.

Wiki Comparison pages


Quickiwiki, Swiki, Twiki, Zwiki and the Plone Wars Wiki as a PIM and Collaborative Content Tool


Looking at Wiki [ Life with Alacrity ]


Individual Wikis


Diamond Wiki is an experimental WikiClone with an emphasis on FacetedNavigation powered by MetaData.


TikiWiki - a powerful open-source CMS and Groupware tool.
Features include: articles, forums, newsletters, blogs, a file/image gallery, a Wiki, drawing applet, Mobile Tiki (PDA and WAP access), a directory, … Too many to name them all.

- TikiWiki rel. 1.9 - what’s in the development?


MegaWiki - a Wiki application for the Palm OS by Jerry D Hedden.
The MegaWiki hack provides the ultimate in Palm application linking. Jumping to and between desired records in the Memo Pad, Date Book, To Do List, Address Book and others applications from just about anywhere is now as easy as just touching your stylus to the screen.


MoinMoin - an excellent Wiki written in Python. I have tried it and like how it works. Stores pages as text files. Shows user the visited pages trail. …


WackoWiki - a robust Wiki engine in PHP, fork of WakkaWiki. Page comments, i18n, skins, etc.

- see CaptSolo :: WakkaWiki & forks


PmWiki - version 0.6 has been released and now includes Author Tracking and Internationalizations. Might be interesting.

- Pm Wiki Cookbook - recipes and examples for customizing PmWiki.

WakkaWiki is a lightweight WikiEngine powered by PHP and MySQL.
- WackoWiki is a fork of WakkaWiki.



The feature I like most is the “Page comments” part. This allows visitors to leave comments w/o having to change the actual text of the wiki - the process which may not feel normal people not familiar with Wikis.

Read more! »

CryRat pastāsta kas ir manga.

Manga, in Japanese, means “flowing words” or “Undisciplined words". It is an ancient art that has been used for centuries as a form of entertainment. It’s basicallt Japanese comic books, which can be easily translated to English. However, just saying manga are comics from Japan is wrong.


… read the rest in Anime forum

This is a special day of the year for me - as it is my birthday today!
My 30th Birthday, actually!

And the day has been beautiful. Now it is time for evening, some celebration, etc. Received lots of beautiful flowers from colleagues & friends. Thanks 2 everybody!

My best wishes to all the people who celebrate their birthday today:
- Baiba who is in Netherlands now
- edd, crschmidt and kota - friends from #foaf and #rdfig
- Bruce Willis
- ... and many more about whom i just do not know yet.

Found this nice picture in the Latvian Anime forum and just could not resist.

Why couldn't it be a present to us all? I like it! Do you?

My wishes?
- joy and happiness

- lots of Fuji Velvia film
- wishes in the Amazon wishlist


I wanted to convert the wishlist into RDF and add it to my FOAF info as Danny Ayers described in the blog article "It's My 40th Birthday Today", but was so loaded with work whole week that did not have free time to do that. There's only human-readable version, sorry!



Another wish - to have enough free time to do the Semantic Web stuff I like. To add more info to my FOAF, improve the CV RDF schema and put into life many other ideas.

Kaislības, kas, jaunās valdības rosinātas, virmo ap KNAB vadītāja amatu rosina daudz diskusiju sabiedrībā.

Studio Ghibli anime DVDs.


They are beautifull!

At least I can speak about those I have seen myself - “Princess Mononoke", “Spirited Away", “Laputa: Castle in the Sky".

The original /. article: DVD Authoring under Linux?


This guide was posted on the Gentoo Forums by shiznix. Find it here: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=117709 [gentoo.org]


A few links:
http://dvdauthor.sourceforge.net/

http://dvd-slideshow.sourceforge.net/
http://www.pcxperience.org/james/dvd/presentations/20031016/medres/text0.html

http://www.tappin.me.uk/Linux/dvd.html
http://gecius.de/linux/dvd.html

http://www.dahnielson.com/primer.txt
http://polidori.chapelperilous.net/

http://qdvdauthor.sourceforge.net/
http://dvdstyler.sourceforge.net/

Read more! »

Beidzot tas ir noticis!


Seriāls “Dark Angel” (re

The 5th RAM workshop entitled “Open Source Media Architecture” will take place from May 4th to 9th, 2004 in Riga, Latvia, organised by the RIXC.


Accordingly three “media architecture” working groups will be set up:
[01] Open Source Architecture

[02] Locative Media Architecture
[03] Acoustic Cell-Space Architecture.


More information:

- [RAM5] workshop

- Locative Network

Article “RFID Tags in New US Notes Explode When You Try to Microwave Them” informs that the new US bills contain RFID tracking device.


… you also get to enjoy the picture of these bills after they were microwaved. each has a burnt hole in the middle.

Meeting of the W3C Semantic Web Interest Group in Cannes-Mandelieu, France is taking place right now as I write this.


I think it is one of the most important events in the Semantac Web area this year.


You may read the transcription of the meeting in #rdfig logs [ Mar 1, 2004 ] … or follow it online on #rdfig.
See the chump of web links on RDF Interest Group Scratchpad [ for 01-Mar-2004 ].






[ thanks to Libby for this photo from her moblog ]

It is interesting to read the press sometimes.

Russian news agency grani.ru reports:


A candindate for Russian presidential elections Ivan Ribkin has been denied access to federal (covering all Russia) TV channels to display his campaign ads. The contracts were signed, money paid and then Friday (27.02.2004) evening within 10-15 minutes interval all 4 channels sent faxes that they will not display the ads. [ Link to the article ]


The official reason for 2 of the channels is that the ads show Mr. Vladimir Putin (president of Russia) thus violating his civil rights. Interesting, that the places where Putin appears in the ads are the actual video footages from very same federal TV channels.


Mr. Ribkin criticises the politics of the current Putin administration. Such step would be similar to the situation if all major U.S. TV channels denied to show Democrat’s candindates and their ads [ordered so by current administration] because they show or mention George Bush thus violating his civil rights.


The presidential elections in Russia will take place on March 14.

Mr. Ribkin is not the only candidate prevented from the normal election campaign.

And another article:


Iran’s news agency IRNA reports that Osama bin Laden has been arrested on the Afganistan - Pakistan border. Pakistanian officials and media do not confirm these news.


[ Bin Laden Is Captured in Pakistan, Iran News Agency Reports - bloomberg.com ]
[ Link to the article - grani.ru ]



Iran’s radio informs that Osama bin Laden has been captured a long time ago, but the U.S. has been “saving” these news for presidential elections and that Mr. Rumsfeld’s visit to Pakistan on Thursday was connected with this.

It is interesting (and often terrifying) what measures are used by those in power to keep this power and ensure the re-election.



The first article is based on confirmed facts and the second has not been confirmed, but I would not be surprised very much if it were true.

Article “AllConsuming Reading Lists in RDF” in Leigh Dodds blog describes generating RDF list from the information in AllConsuming reading lists. I think it is time to supplement my FOAF with more information.


So here it is: AllConsuming.net reading list for CaptSolo [in RDF]
What is missing: author info could be nice, besides the book title which is already there. and to make it locally as for now it uses w3.org xslt service.



Next step could be to take my Amazon.com wishlist out of the dark and convert it to RDF as Danny Ayers described in “It’s my 40th Birthday Today!” and earlier posts.

discussion on FOAF and RSS in social networks [ orkut.com ]


rdf as barcodes, and geowarchalking [ undergroundlondon.com ]


FOAF examples:
classes.example [ foaf.crschmidt.net ]

Ecademy.com generated FOAF file

Using psutils in *nix. [rus] [Unix4All]
UNIX4all project in general - Linux, Unix articles [ rus ]


Operation Gadget blog

- on gadget news & reviews


Glacial Erratics blog


Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks
- by Danny O’Brien

- ETECH conference, Feb 2004


“Secret software” - little hacks, scripts, …

- by Simon Cozens

From xml.com, oreillynet.com:
Building Metadata Applications with RDF

Googling for XML !!!
Using linking to add features to wikis

Bookmark navigation as linking application - about mozwho
- by Bob DuCharme

- author’s weblog


The State of the Python-XML Art, 2003 [ 10-Sep-2003 ]
- by Uche Ogbuji


Exploring with Wiki

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham, Part I
- by Bill Venners, 20-Oct-2003

- from artima.com !!!


Earle Martin - interest in Wikis, etc.
- his info

- his webpage


Star rising for the Semantic Web
- Edd Dumbill, 11-05-2002

- Behind the Times - his weblog


Tools for Re-Finding
- from MozWho Labs

-> Keeping found things Found


ad hoc knowledge management tools [ 20-Dec-2002 ]

- from Way.Nu

Vai Jūs zinājāt, ka rīt notiks nometnes “Alfa” ziemas salidojums?


Ja nē, tad tagad esiet informēti.

Man pa

See 18-Feb-04 RDFIG scratchpad for links by DanC on formalizing Curriculum Vitae data.


It mentions “Resume schema in RDF” discussion which was a part of my efforts to create RDF schema for describing resumes back in 2002.


Now I see interest in others too to formalize the description of Curriculum Vitae data on the Semantic Web. With regard to this please see:
> RDF schema for describing resumes

> article re. Resumes and RDF [ captsolo weblog ]

And, as more work is needed in this area, please comment under this weblog entry if you have ideas and thoughts how to advance description of CV in Semantic Web.

We Are Morons: a quick look at the Win2k source at kuro5hin.org provides a quick look at the leaked Windows 2000 sources.

Help needed!


Does anyone knows how to solve a problem installing Oracle 9.2 Cluster Manager on RedHat Advanced Server 3.0?


Search on Oracle metalink returns one thread, but it is “hidden” - the owner has decided not to reveal the solution. Search on Google returns no hits.

Installation of Cluster Manager hands at 98%.
It just stops waiting for something.

The last entry in logfile:


Calling action unixActions2.2.0.6.0 changePermissions
source = /usr/oracle/920/oracm/bin/ocmstart.sh

permissions = 755


Apparently it is waiting for chmod to complete, which never does return. It is possible to ‘normally’ cancel the installer, but thus the installation of the Cluster Manager is not finished.

Permissions for ocmstart.sh are 777.

Trying to change the permission before the install does not help (installer copies a new copy over it), neither does changing them during the install.

For discussion about ontology for GPS measurements and the mesurement errors see here:
RDF Interest Group IRC Chat Logs for 2004-02-11

23:43 - CaptSolo> a quick question on schemas for GPS data: do existing schema allow to describe the measurment error of the current location


23:44 - * timbl hasn't seen any. Agrees that would in interesting ... a possible totally separate experimental error ontology.
23:46 - timbl> I would lokk for basic science ontologie sto see if they have iut along with metres and seconds.

23:48 - danbri> related but different: http://esw.w3.org/topic/GeoOnion


00:05 - timbl> :WayPoint1234 wgs84:latitude [ err:expected -44.87123467; err:error -00.00006 ] . or words to htat effect.

Also related:

* Locative Media
* Garmin Geko 201 and RDF by mortenf



It’s also worth to mention http://www.locative.net/ website related to gps and rdf.

Aiz loga krīt lielas, skaistas sniegpārslas.

Photography predictions by Thom Hogan.


In-depth analysis of what is likely to happen in the photography world in 2004. Among other things - Canon makes a new trio of DSLRs, phones kill the low-end digital compact camera and “buy’em while you can” suggestions for films and cameras.


With me still sticking to the film SLR, maybe it is time to get alarmed with everything going digital. But well, I still like film and will stick to it for now.

I’ve been exploring the social network Orkut (thanks to Danny ) and, guess what, now I have minus 32k friends:

You are connected to -32253 people through 5 friends.

Seems like integer overflow problems happen not only on spacecrafts.

Publications by Jen Golbeck about the Semantic Web.
Might be interesting to explore them a little more.



… found this link while exploring Orkut social network. thanks to Danny for inviting me in. …

A nice quote from Monologue:

“We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.”


Albert Einstein

If you are looking for reference materials in a number of different subject areas, try this:
A Selection of Ready Reference Web Sites, picked by the staff of Lakewood Public Library.


Subject areas:

* 000 - Generalities
* 100 - Philosophy and Psychology

* 200 - Religion
* 300 - Social Sciences

* 400 - Languages
* 500 - Natural Sciences and Mathematics

* 600 - Technology and Applied Sciences
* 700 - The Arts

* 800 - Literature and Rhetoric

* 900 - Geography and History

Is there a place on the Internet where I can see a list of Fortune 500 companies?


A simple search leads to the home page of www.fortune.com, but all ends with a subscription offer. Which is not exactly what I am looking for.


Anyone?

deviantART is a wonderful art comunity where you can post your inspiration and look at wonderful examples of other “deviants” art.


However, after the dART moved to a new look and engine, in my opinion it has become less usable and less fun - I lack the ability to see small images of art in my “watchlist” and some other things. So - now people look at the pictures based on the titles and not on what they see in thumbnails. Its a waste I think.


Nevertheless, here are some of my most favorite “deviations” of recent months, found in the same watchlist.

Already Ghosts by *cryptorchid

Inner Strength by *vk
Layers of Beauty by *enayla

My New Friend by +olya (its wonderful!)
Number One the Crescent - 2 by *redux

Playmate XXX 3 by `suzi9mm (some fetish )
The cunning miss. fox caught by *cryptorchid (amazing!)


Her Silent Silhouette by ~arcipello - I have no words to describe the beauty of it!



And a wonderful 2004 Cosmic Calendar by +dinyctis!

I did a little exploration of what Semantic Web related books have been recently published. Here are some of the titles.

Practical RDF

- by Shelley Powers
- published in July 2003 (1st edition) by O’Reilly

- ISBN: 0596002637 - find it at Amazon.com


Towards the Semantic Web: Ontology-Driven Knowledge Management
- by John Davies (Editor), Dieter Fensel (Editor), Frank van Harmelen (Editor), Frank van Harmelen

- published in January 2003 by John Wiley & sons
- ISBN: 0470848677 - find it at Amazon.com


Ontological Engineering

- by Asunci

It has been a relative silence in my blog, so here are some random links.

It turns out there is a Slashdot.jp site.

Might be interesting what they write there if you understand Japanses. I don’t…


There is an OpenOffice Document Converter on-line.
The converter allows you to convert existing documents from the various programs of the suite into other formats, such as PDF, LaTeX or MS Office.


Rethinking Weblogging [ mindview.net ]


handhelds.org - site for open source software for handhelds and wearable computers.


Moving away from XSLT - Martin Fowler lists some reasons why he is moving way from XSLT.


From Neal Deakin’s Place:

- Is Mozilla development too hard?
- mozquery - a Mozilla/Firebird extension providing a set of tools to write and process RDF files content.

- MozPython - embeds the Python interpreter in Mozilla.

- Thoughts and Proposal for the Seamonkey/Firebird Chrome Registry

Manual describing the Linux startup process.

I just got my Canon EOS 5 - a used camera, but still a major upgrade to the previous EOS 300.
Both are film cameras and I cannot wait to get my hands on this one.


But there is a slight problem - it has a manual in German which I do not understand.

Good news are that I found a site containting documentation for Canon cameras, lenses, flashes:
> EOS Documentation Project

Unfortunately there was no manual for EOS 5.


If anyone knows where to locate a PDF with EOS 5 manual, please => let me know.

A list of 100 most frequently mentioned books of 2003 from allconsuming.net

… I was going to post a link to the 50 most bought books at Amazon as #1 and this as #2, but then I looked at the Amazon list: most of the books, with the exception of Harry Potter, are about diet, loosing fat and other books usually sold via negative advertising on the TV-shops, etc…


I want something more interesting - so look through this list and skip the Amazon’s.

Improvements to be done for my Resume RDF Schema:


1. write a short description in English
2. create sample resume using the schema

3. correct namespace for RDFS


If you come up with any ideas when else is needed for Resume RDF Schema, let me know by commenting below.

Has anybody else made a schema for describing Resumes?
What is the practical usage for it?

Do I need to use OWL, DAML?

This paper describes a system for integrating generalized RDF metadata into the standard Palm

1. Lev Manovich | Essays: What is Digital Cinema?

2. Video Signal Standards and Conversion Page

[ must see! :B ]


Google 2003 year-end summary of search patterns, trends and surprises.


I bet google has lots of statistical information on our browsing and searching habits. So - take a look.

Programming XPFE/XUL F.A.Q [rus]
Wiki of XPFE/XUL Programming F.A.Q. [rus] - containt more info than official faq.


-> Tools for Mozilla programming from the F.A.Q.:

1. RDFedt - an RDF editor.
2. cview - XPCOM component viewer.

Mozilla (standalone) Composer is the direct evolution of Mozilla Composer according to the “new roadmap", the companion editing tool to Firebird and Thunderbird.


Version 0.0.1 of Mozilla (standalone) Composer is available on the site.

Plkst. 9:20.


Izeju uz ielas - brrr, tik auksti, ka ausis salst nost.

Pilsēta tuk

Y-2004 has begun - new year’s celebrations are coming to an end and we are starting to do first things planned in this year and are enjoying our life [ as always ].


Have a good and prosperous new year, full with love, health and happiness.