This rather annoying member recruitment practice is only a small thing that makes me feel pity and at the same time slight disgust for the organization that represents so many computer science students and professionals. Academic values like advancing the field for the sake of humanity and sharing knowledge in an open fashion seem to be replaced by careerism and exclusive content — which is ironically only accessible via horrible interfaces such as the ACM digital library. Can you believe people being lured into becoming an ACM member with a flip-flop calculator? It just seems a bit surreal.

It’s not the yearly fee that keeps me from joining. It just doesn’t appeal to me becoming a member of a cheesy elite club, that has little to do with educational, egalitarian, or emancipatory values that i would rather see embraced in computer science and academia in general. ACM is a member-based organization and ultimately — if the members choose so — it can be transformed. I sure hope it does soon.

PS: while i pick here on ACM, the critique probably equally applies to the IEEE Computer Society and the many profit-driven publishers.

Peter Suber points to some more options for scholars beyond comepletely boycotting closed-access publishers. One of the major one is self-archiving online – which many publishers actually allow. Putting papers on one’s own personal or research group Website is usually accepted. There are also OA repositories that facilitate the self-archiving process. Through services like CiteSeer or Google Scholar it is then possible to make these contributions available in an OA fashion without actually submitting them to an OA venue. Good thinking. Take a look or two into Peter’s short and longer primers on Open Access to learn more around OA principles and practices.

By the way, i have ranted and chanted about Open Access before.

Update: ich hab total vergessen, dass die Ente ja bereits vor fast einem halben Jahr über Regina Spektors Musikvideo für den Song Samson gebloggt hat. Der Vollständigkeit halber sei das hiermit erwähnt.

The background photo is by Paul Miller licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA license.

To me the most prevalent theme was the Semantic Web – also called the Web of Data or Linked Data these days. The idea (still) is to markup and publish data in a more structured way so that it would become better accessible to computers and thus also more easily remixable for humans. While the Semantic Web might not be counted as something new anymore, it still is quite hot. It seems to me as if Semantic Web, tagging, and conventional metadata converge allowing easier and at the same time richer ways of annotating and linking resources.

A related concept is Open Data that i understood as a logical extension of Open Access and Open Source towards the realm of data, e.g. maps, scientific data, bibliographic data, going hand in hand with open/free licensing, e.g. Creative Commons. Consider a “socialized” map service that is fed by GPS enthusiasts and mashed up with other free information repositories. Think about publicly funded institutions publishing their generated data in standardized formats so that it can be reused (read: mashupped). The Semantic Web technologies are in place and more than appropriate to relate resources with each other (RDF), formulate ontologies (OWL), and query the semantic repositories (SPARQL).

At the VIP reception on Friday night i talked shortly to Tim Berners-Lee about whether Web 2.0 communities – e.g. Flickr, Delicious, Lastfm – could be decentralized using Semantic Web technologies and how community features could be implemented in this way. He said that links and backlinks (using referrer logs and/or trackback) could allow to create a social network in a decentralized way. RDF can add meaning to the links and RDF crawlers/trackers could enable search and discovery.

The four keynotes mostly focused on the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of Web research and practice. While the Web becomes an essential part of our lives its social, economic, and political aspects need to be acknowledged, studied, and understood.

After all it was awesome to be part of such a conference. I got to meet quite a few interesting and nice people. I even met with some former colleagues from Santiago from the time i did my internship last summer down in Chile.

Several other people blogged about the WWW2007 conference, e.g. Justin Thorp, Brian Kelly, Ivan Herman, Yuan Niu, Peter Murray-Rust.

Tim Berners-Lee (W3C): Tabulator: A Semantic Web Browser (slides)
- basics about Semantic Web (RDF, …)
- Tabulator allows getting data from different sources together
- while RDF is a graph, can be outputted as tables
- allows instant mashups, e.g. using maps, timeline
- if XSLT transformation is provided any XML dialect can be integrated
- allows easy browsing of linked data

Christian Bizer (FU Berlin): Querying Wikipedia Like a Database
- DBpedia applies concept of LD to WP
- turn structured information of WP into RDF w/ open license
- and interlink with other data sources
- structured info: categorization, info boxes, inter{wiki,language}links, …
- leading to 1.6 mio concepts represented as 93 mio triples
- includes multilingual short and long abstracts
- access as SPARQL, Linked Data Interface, RDF dumps
- enabling advanced queries
- all concepts are identified as URIs
- searching of WP gets improved
- embedding WP information on webpage is easy and uptodate
- interlinking-hub for emerging web of data
- W3C SWEO Linking Open Data Project
- the Open Data movement is getting big fast

Tom Heath (KMi, The Open University): How to Combine the Best of Web2.0 and a Semantic Web: Examples from Revyu.com
- the linked data web is here
- a Web 2.0 and SW peace and love message
- integrating different soc’ networks
- open APIs? even better exposing data using SW technologies
- Web 2.0 to the rescue to make writing RDF/SW easier
- free data from walled data gardens

Raphael Troncy: Introduction
- jungle of metadata formats for MM: MPEG7, IPTC, XMP
- but also tagging: Youtube, Flickr, Lastfm
- and semantic web: OWL, RDF, FOAF+SKOS
- yet, there are interconnections

Lynda Hardman: Is the Message in the Media?
- we want tags with meaning
- video segments as building blocks in the process of
- images of penal speakers are very heterogeneous
- finding images should bring images in a common representation
- video segments: speakers are in different contexts
- continuity and consistency (light, sound, movement)

Sean Bechhofer (U of Manchester): Semantic Web for MM
- SW is about annotation, integration, and inference
- using existing infrastructures to have migration paths
- MPEG7 lacks inference, but does ann’ and int’

John Smith (IBM): Real problem of Bridging the MM “Semantic Gap”
- multimedia/video is big in terms of traffic and storage
- what is the problem? focus on search
- video requires metadata (as opposed to text)
- beyond content chaos, now: metadata chaos
- different approaches along the long tail:
- manual cataloging by pros for popular items
- automated tagging for deep/raw footage
- social tagging by users: personal content
- “semantic gap” has been seen as a machine learning problem
- better: leverage digital masses/crowd

Mor Naaman (Yahoo): Developers are people, too
- people are strange, don’t care about semantics
- but people tag: simple (Rashmi Sinha), powerful, motivated
- generate semantics from tags, e.g. Flickr clusters
- metadata helps, too: geocoding
- “Extracting Tag Semantics”, SIGIR2007
- req for dev app: simple, powerful, tied to motivations
- so far: (GEO-)RSS, KML, GPX, EXIF (read only)
- and Flickr machine tags: subject-predicate-object
- … simple and powerful
- problem: namespace and semantics not defined
- this is up to researchers
- welcome to the emerging semantics web

Discussion
- media object including metadata (W3C Web API WG)
- a designated microformat could do this
- SW is more than a triple in a free form field
- tags of YouTube and Flickr describe resources better
than any format / standard would have done
- most work of feature analysis focuses on sunsets
- is Flickr’s machine tag a new microformat for RDF?
- RDF might not be fashionable, but it’s “bloody simple”
- RDF enables mashing-up (see open/linked data)
- Flickr’s machine tags can be mapped to RDF (flickcurl)
- get rid of feature analyis?
- query by example seems not to be centrally popular
- “Future of the Web” by Nat Torkington

Peter Murray-Rust (U of Cambridge): campaign for Open Data
- his links and notes
- Open Access really demands Open Data
- publisher: “Open Access equals socialized science”

Steve Coast (Open Street Map)
- GPS traces of couriers can be used to create maps
- not quite much data as Google Maps, but e.g. Bagdad
- opening up maps for participation - it is fun
- comparison: as Linux improves, Windows gets cheaper

Rob Styles (Talis): Licensing and Open Data
- licensing to secure OD and encourage use of it
- content, data, metadata (see my former post)
- Talis Community License (TCL), a GPL or CC for databases

Jamie Taylor (Metaweb): freebase
- you can’t have OD if you don’t have data
- Geoffrey A Moore: Core vs Context
- freebase data as an open repository

Discussion questions and remarks
- who pays for OD? Market or state?
- impact factor of Open Access journals lower
- but OA papers get cited more often
- OA journal in biology has highest impact factor in the field
- architecture designs are political statements
- trust of community additions, e.g. map data in Bagdad
- too positive mindset about the honesty of people?
- but also state authorities/agencies are not always trustworthy
- attribution and versioning is key for participation and trust
- questioning validity should be done with every source
- how effective would CC or OD licenses be?
- how to go from here? evangelize!
- CC copyright owners have to enforce the license

• Social and Collaborative Construction of Structured Knowledge (Workshop)
• Tagging and Metadata for Social Information Organization (Workshop)
• Tim Berners-Lee: The Two Magics of Web Science (Plenary talk)
• Communication in Developing Regions (Paper track)
• Semantic Digital Libraries (Tutorial)
• The Future of the Web Page (W3C Track)
• Prabhakar Raghavan: Web N.0: What sciences will it take? (Plenary talk)
• Open Data - Building a Semantic Web in Which Our Data Can Participate (Panel)
• Model Driven Semantic Web Engineering (Tutorial)
• The Role of Multimedia Metadata Standards in a (Semantic) Web 3.0 (Panel)
• Bill Buxton: Design for the World Narrow Web (Plenary talk)
• Linked Data (Developer track)
• Dick Hardt: An Identity Story (Plenary talk)
• Web Data (Developer track)
• The Two Cultures: Mashing Up Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web (Paper)

During the WWW2007 conference i am about to take part in as a volunteer there is a special panel devoted to open data and its potential implication for the Semantic Web. Rob Styles who will talk on that panel writes on his blog about the differentiation between the concepts of data, metadata, and content in terms of copyright law. Since most metadata would lead to the actual content, content providers are usually less interested in making money of just the metadata than of the actual content. In this sense metadata is less restricted in terms of copyright opening up interesting possibilities. Rob mentions several initiatives, e.g. Open Street Map, where metadata is made available by a community of people.

via Brent Simmons: Announcing Skim

Nun schreibe ich ja an meiner Studienarbeit und habe mich eigentlich einer Mediendiät unterzogen. Trotzdem: Eine freie Uni braucht die Stadt

Auf die Uni schimpfen macht es ja auch nicht besser. Zumindest wenn mensch keine Verbesserungsvorschläge macht. Es würde ja schon einen Tuck besser sein, wenn so Dinge wie Mensa und Unibibliothek einfacher auffindbar wären, damit zumindest der Nahrungs- und Wissensaufnahme keine weiteren Steine in den Weg gelegt werden. Nun, da habe ich just für Geld mit einer hiesigen Werbedingsbumsagentur einen interaktiven Campusplan gebaut (und dabei wieder einiges über überausgrosze, monolithische Institutionen, wie die Uni eine ist, gelernt). Zum Campusplan kommst du über die Kontaktseite der Unität, siehe Neu: Campusplan Uniplatz unter Orientierunghinweise.

Ein gröszeres Problem scheint aber die Copy-Paste- und Paraphrasierkultur in der Wissenschaft darzustellen. Stefan Weber hat für Telepolis über textuellen Missbrauch in der akademischen Welt geschrieben. Sehr lesenswert für jegliche studierende, lehrende und/oder forschende Mitmenschen. Besonders sei auf die spannende Tätigkeit des ‘Nachgooglens’ bzw suchmaschinenanbieterneutral ‘Plagiatjagens’ hingewiesen, womit mensch auf so manche Dopplungen in Haus-, Diplom- oder Doktorarbeiten stoszen würde. Für diese Tätigkeit würde ich übrigens für eine technische Erweiterung plädieren, die dann auch nach paraphrasierten Sätzen suchen würde.

Weber stellt drei sich nicht notwendigerweise ausschlieszenden Lösungen für das Problem vor:

• “Schreiben wir doch bitte viel weniger Seiten, und formulieren wir dafür jeden Satz selbst.”
• “Schreibwerkstätten, kreatives Schreiben, rationales Argumentieren, Rhetorik ohne Powerpoint, beinharte Zitierkunde am Beginn jedes kulturwissenschaftlichen Studiums - anstelle […] noch mehr Ergoogelung”
• Die Institute einer solchen Wissenschaft schlieszen.

MP3: 15′04 | 6,9 MB

Links

• Wikipedia: Víctor Jara, Unidad Popular, Salvador Allende, Augusto Pinochet, MIR, Bertolt Brecht, Lilith
• Sexo con Armor
• Tio Lucho
• Radio Tierra

If you haven’t noticed yet: the penguins are plotting and doing the world revolution. Here in Chile we have seen the greatest social movement in 30 years undertaken by high school students – colloquially referred to penguins due to their school uniforms – demanding an education accessible to everyone. Furthermore the open source community – with the famous penguin Tux as its charismatic leader – proofs that the production of value and knowledge needs to be open and accessible. And ultimately we have penguins showing up on walls all over to underline the greatest revolution of mankind – undertaken by their black-and-white counterparts. Besides stepping into their claw steps we finally need to stop global warming to acknowledge these magnificient deeds.

Photo kindly borrowed from the Ente.

Today university students have joined them on a national day of strike. In Santiago this day was accompanied by a large-scale demonstration. I (now) think that such central marches tend to be kind of useless – yet i don’t blame the protestors for the violent and aggressive outcomes. Before we left i was told that the police has not allowed to walk in groups nor carry banners. Nevertheless i helped to carry for maybe ten minutes a bag full of food supplies for occupied schools that was collected by students of the engineering faculty of the university of chile.

On the Alameda – the largest street in Santiago – i have seen how the police has provoked demonstrators and i have seen protestors turn irrational, as well. If activists are letting themselves in on those street fights i think they are choosing the wrong path. Another world will not be created with stones, bottles, and molotov cocktails. I think it would be smarter if activists would be scattered all around the city and country – ironically, as the police demanded. Spatially distributed protests can still be connected via telephone and internet. Protest activities should not only be limited to marching down streets. Seminars and workshops open to general public could put the discourse on a real-life level. This would mean that even more people would not only see the filtered images on television but could get in contact with the movement for real.

In the last days it became obvious that the people are with the students and not with politicians that are busy laying the blame on each other. The movement should now substantiate their demands and use the terrain – not on the Alameda but in the heads of the Chileans – to present an alternative model of education based on equality and emancipation instead of profit and exploitation. Therefore i think it is unwise to turn the students movement into a great mayday gathering with all the destruction included. Media, state, and capital are just waiting for more broken glass to denounce the movement.

More photos in the photo set.

MP3: 20′19 | 9,4 MB

Links

• La Nación Domingo vom 28.05.2006: Soltando Amerres von Betzie Jaramillo, Clases de Democracia von Katherine Pavez
• Technorati: Blogbeiträge zur chilenischen Schülerbewegung
• Flickr: Fotos von Desert Monster
• Indymedia Santiago: viele Artikel auf spanisch

Update vom 30. Mai
Die MP3-Datei war nicht vollständig hochgeladen, was dazu führte, dass ich mitten im Satz verstumme. Dieser Mangel ist nun behoben.

Letzte Woche hat mich Reinhard Markner auf einen weiteren von ihm verfassten Artikel über die Problematik der Anreicherung von Katalogen öffentlicher Bibliotheken hingewiesen: Werbung in der Bücherei - Der trojanische Schutzumschlag, 20. 4. 2006, FAZ. Auf der Inetbib-Mailingliste gibts einen Ausschnitt und auch ein wenig Diskussion dazu.

Jetzt schaue ich auf die Katalogseite der hiesigen Stadtbibliothek und alle Amazon-Verlinkungen, Logos und Vorschaubildchen sind verschwunden. Es wird nur ein generisches (lies: hässliches) Bild eingeblendet. Es findet sich auch keine Dokumentation auf der Seite, was passiert ist. Fragen über Fragen.

Ich selbst fände kleine Buchdeckelbildchen ja schon reizvoll, aber würde sie nicht mit jener offensiven Werbung für Amazon einkaufen wollen, wie sie zuvor eingesetzt wurde. Kennt sich hier jemand mit den API-Bestimmungen von Amazon aus? Es muss doch auch möglich sein, kleine Vorschaubilder einzublenden, ohne gleich den OPAC-Katalog einer Bibliothek in ein Sprungbrett zum Bücherkauf zu verwandeln – wie zuvor geschehen. Es geht doch in diesen Tagen so viel um offene APIs und mehr Community-Think und so.

MP3: 6′39 | 3,1 MB

Links

• No sé por qué piensas tú von Nicolás Guillén
• Toni Mahoni

There are several ways one can prepare a stay in a country with a different language besides formal courses. In my case i did tandem meetings with a Mexican girl in Magdeburg. For me this worked like a alarm clock for awakening my sleeping Spanish abilities that i once acquired in school. The idea is that two persons meet on a regular basis talking both in mother languages and the new one to be acquired. In this way the process of learning and teaching a language is combined. I think i will do this here too. Vamos a ver.

Furthermore i also did employ – claro – web 2.0 technologies. In this case it was podcasting. If you are into computer and internet things this one is for you: Latin Tech Talk. A podcast about information technology held in Spanish via Skype by several Latinos discussing the latest developments in the tech world. The good thing for beginners: technical terms often remain in English, so it is possible to follow the course of the conversation vaguely even though you might not understand all words.

In another podcast i learnt that reading a book still helps even if you almost understand nothing. You get accustomed to co-occurrence of words and the order in sentences. So much about my amateurish insights in learning a language.

Stay uptodate regarding the current actions in French streets, schools, and universities against a new law allowing employers to fire employees younger than 26 for two years after hire. The demonstrations seem to gain momentum and it social software such as Flickr, blogs and Indymedia makes it easy to follow grassroot reporting. Today demonstrations in many cities are planned – so keep track of what’s happening in France by employing the Web 2.0 sites of your choice:

• Technorati: posts containing cpe + france
• Google Blog Search: cpe france
• Flickr: photos tagged with cpe
• Flickr Pools: is france burning ? & Manifs à Paris
• Indymedia in France
  • Grenoble (English)
  • Lille (English)
  • Marseille (English)
  • Paris/Île-de-France (English)

About 40 of France’s 84 universities saw student occupations to varying degrees on Friday in protest at the new law, according to French news agency AFP. BBC News

Learn more

• BBC News: Police battle Sorbonne protesters
• Reuters: French police use teargas to end Sorbonne protest
• Flickr: recent photos tagged with sorbonne

or: How long do i have to wait until Open Access becomes reality?

Marco hat mir letztens erzählt, dass er an einer Forschungswerkstatt der Soziologie in den Semesterferien teilnimmt, in deren Rahmen die Teilnehmer ihre Studien für Haus- und Magisterarbeiten im Bereich der qualitativen Sozialforschung miteinander diskutieren. Bei jedem Treffen stellt ein Student seine bisherigen Unternehmungen vor und teilt seine Fragestellungen und Probleme mit, so dass – in diesem Fall – Studenten der gleichen Fachrichtung Hilfestellung und potenzielle Kritik aufzeigen können. Solche Formen des selbstgesteuerten aber zugleich gemeinsamen Studierens gibt es leider viel zu wenig. Es gibt hier und dort ein paar Lesegruppen, aber das war es dann auch.

Ich denke es gibt Bedarf für sowohl inter- als auch intradisziplinäre Studienwerkstätten. Sie würden Schritte in Richtung einer freieren Uni sein.

Da der technische und finanzielle Aufwand sehr gering ist, gibt es im Internet ungezählte Podcasts zu den unterschiedlichsten Themen. Und du kannst auch dabei sein! Im Workshop lernst du alles, um deinen eigenen Podcast zu erstellen.
Auf dem Stundenplan stehen ein gemeinsamer Streifzug durch die Podosphäre, die praktische Arbeit mit Aufnahmegerät und Mikrofon, das Schneiden der Beiträge und das Veröffentlichen im Internet.

Der Workshop findet vom 20.01.2006 (16.00 Uhr) bis 22.01.2006 (15.00 Uhr) im Medientreff zone! in Magdeburg statt. Eingeladen sind alle Interessierten von 12 bis 27 Jahren. Die Teilnehmergebühr beträgt 30 Euro (fjp>media-Mitglieder 25 Euro) inklusive Unterkunft und Verpflegung (gefördert durch das Land Sachsen-Anhalt).

• Anmeldung bei fjp>media
• meine Vorbereitungen im Wiki

via Drawn!: Der birds und der bees

• Es beginnen „schwere Zeiten für die US-Armee“ aufgrund wachsenden Unmuts bei Eltern und Schülern an amerikanischen Schulen über einen kleinen Paragrafen im No-Child-Left-Behind-Act mit groszen Auswirkungen.

• „Schule hat begonnen. Mit Wal-Mart-Boykott“ Langsam entwickelt sich ein gesellschaftliches Bewusstsein auch darüber, dass der geile Geiz beim Kauf von Schulmaterialen seinen Preis hat. In der zweitgrößten Konsumsaison neben Weihnachten soll dieses in Taten umgesetzt werden.

• „Abschreiben macht klug“, meint dieser Artikel und zieht Lernnetzwerke individueller Nachhilfe vor, da sie die Gruppenarbeit und Kooperation schulen und Unterschiede zwischen Schülern ausgleichen können.

When i readabout how those ‘flower-power-schools’ are organized and what it is like to be a student, it seems so radically new and different, yet the Summerhill School, the first democratic school, was founded in 1921 near Dresden. The founder A.S. Neill believed that “the function of a child is to live his own life - not the life that his anxious parents think he should live, not a life according to the purpose of an educator who thinks he knows best”. I think i can subscribe to that. I have attended regular schools and must say that my curiousness in terms of learning about the world was not really fostered. Instead school always seemed rather like work and chores but not curious play. My own interest was focused for a long time on a computer, which happened to be in my room at home and not in school. Yet, if i had gotten into contact with computers only in school, i’m not sure, whether i would have paid close attention to it.

It seems pretty logical. I have attended lectures on pedagogic psychology, where it is very clear that learning is far more fruitful, if it is intrinsically motivated. But this is where the problems arise, democratic schools putting such principles into practice have troubles qualifying as formal schools, since students can freely choose when to attend a course, a workshop, or a game. In fact, courses and workshops are only set up, if the pupils want to start one. The teachers are mere facilitators, instead of supervisors. But for the state education still happens only in conventional classroom settings.

Of course, Germany’s results in contemporary international analyses beg for critique and change, yet i don’t see this fundamental question mark behind what is and the exclamation mark behind what ought or at least could be. Even though the elections are coming up, the political tribune remains quite silent on these matters. The conference might give some inspiration, since it connects many international initiatives of democratic education performed in actual schools, not just in essays or blog entries…