Archive for the 'technology' Category

Dass sowohl G8-Gipfel als auch die Gegenmasznahmen von gobalisierungskritisch Bewegten zu einem groszen Teil symbolisch zu verstehen sind, wird der medialen Berichterstattung eine besondere Rolle beigemessen. So gibt es jenseits von bloszer Medienkritik alternative und aktuelle (!) Berichterstattung aus Rostock und Heiligendamm bei Indymedia mit G8-Ticker, G8 Live Radio, G8-TV und bei Spreeblick mit Spree8.

Peter Murray-Rust who participated on the panel about Open Data at WWW2007 has just been interviewed by Paul Miller for the podcast Talking with Talis talking about publishing in academic contexts and how it evolves especially in the light of what i would like to abbreviate as the {open, linked, web of} data. Anybody involved in academia or interested in the future of knowledge should read listen up on his thoughts. Also check out the elaborate list of links in the shownotes.

Verrückt, was alles so im Browser geht: jetzt zum Beispiel auch ein kleines orangenfarbenes Unisexfigürchen so Straszen entlang. Es zeigt an, wo mensch sich auf Googles Straszenkarte befindet und: in welche Richtung mensch schaut. Denn statt einfach nur Straszenkarten mit Satellitenbildern zu mischen, packt Google mit Street View jetzt auch noch Panoramen in die Karten mit rein. Die kleine stilisierte Figur kann dann über die Karte gezogen werden, während es stilvoll die Beine in die entsprechende Richtung ob des Fliegens wegen anwinkelt. Aber noch cooler ist es, damit auf Straszen und Plätze entlang zu schlendern und mal nach rechts und mal nach links zu schauen… Verrückte Welt.

via Spreeblick: Google Street View

If you are involved in Web development in any way there is usually a point in the timeline of a project where you want to see what our dear Internet Explorer is doing with the pages that have worked just fine in your browser of choice and even for the W3C’s validators. Well, if you happen to be using a non-Windows platform chances are that you don’t have an IE at hand – let alone different versions.

NetRenderer to the rescue! The German company GEOTEK offers a service that renders Web pages on the fly in IE 5.5, 6 or 7 as PNGs. So there is almost no need for VirtualPC/Parallels/etc anymore. While you will only see the upper 740 pixels of the page in question and are not able to interact with it you can still check if positioning and basic styles work out fine. Very handy i must say. Something i have looked for for quite some time.

You can make it even more handy if you are using things like Sogudi for Safari or Firefox’s Quick Search. Typing “ie http://www.anarchitect.org” into the addressbar would then show the page at NetRenderer as rendered by IE.

As some of you may have noticed: i like website layouts with menu tabs. On the basis of the InnoVis webpage that i have revamped and wikified lately i have published a PmWiki skin called SimpleTab allowing simple menu tabs for PmWiki while hiding its wiki look.

Today Tim Au Yeung and i have given an overview talk at the Interactions Lab of the University of Calgary, about the things we found most interesting at the WWW2007 conference. Here are the slides (PDF).

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

The 16th International World Wide Web conference is over and i am still in the phase of sorting out and getting my mind around the ideas and concepts i learned about. It was my first academic conference and it was really cool. Mez is asking on the IW3C2 blog what kind of hot trends participants have spotted during WWW2007. While i have blogged already a bit about the conference i try to do a quick personal recapitulation of the ideas and approaches i found the most fascinating.

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.

Further sketchy notes with all the spelling error goodness from WWW2007: this time from the Linked Data tutorial as part of the developer track. Check other of my posts on Open Data that are related to this.

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

More rough notes from the WWW2007: this time i am listening to the panel on The Role of Multimedia Metadata Standards in a (Semantic) Web 3.0 moderated and organized by Raphael Troncy and Susanne Bol.

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

Here are some quick notes i have taken at the panel called Building a Semantic Web in Which Our Data Can Participate moderated by Paul Miller, who is also involved with the Talking with Talis podcast:

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