04.05.05
Posted in Forteana, Semantic web at 12:54 pm by Jon
I received a particularly curious spam email:
Dear potential Speaker:
On behalf of the organizing committee, I would like to extend a cordial invitation for you to attend one of the upcoming IPSI BgD multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary conferences.
The first one will take place in Loreto Aprutino, Italy:
…
All IPSI BgD conferences are non-profit. They bring together the elite of the world science; so far, we have had seven Nobel Laureates speaking at the opening ceremonies. The conferences always take place in some of the most attractive places of the world. All those who come to IPSI conferences once, always love to come back (because of the unique professional quality and the extremely creative atmosphere); lists of past participants are on the web, as well as details of future conferences.
…
If you would like more information on either conference, please reply to this e-mail message.
If you plan to submit an abstract and paper, please let us know immediately for planning purposes. Note that you can submit your paper also to the IPSI Transactions journal.
Sincerely Yours,
Prof. V. Milutinovic, Chairman,
IPSI BgD Conference
My best guess is that this is a particularly sophisticated scam. There is a website , but it looks chaotic and oddly pitched halfway between appeals to vanity and tourism (IPSI-2006 Montreal “With Visits to Jazz and Laughs Festivals”).
Special emphasis is dedicated to hospitality! We like that
attendees and their accompanying persons feel good.
The Advisory Board, with three business advisers sharing a surname and listing only Private Universities in Serbia, also rings false. On the other hand, Prof. Milutinovic does have a (perhaps authentically) rum home page apparently on a university domain.
But what, dear reader, is the story here? Perhaps it is an opportunity for scientists in unfashionable areas to get a foreign jolly. Perhaps it’s an opportunistic Serbian business capitalising as much on some baroque fund allocation as the heaving desire of academics to lecture abroad. And how important in all this is the reader’s expectation that academic life in post-Soviet countries is rather slapdash and very money-grubbing?
As ever, your votes are welcome.
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04.19.04
Posted in Semantic web at 10:58 pm by
I notice that I’m not posting much about anything to do with work at the moment.
That’s fine by me, and I suspect fine by you.
One thing, though.
Collaborative working over several sites, several teams, or - let’s face it - even just several people, can be tricky. That’s why I’m looking at 37signals’ wonderful blog-ish tool Basecamp with glee. It’s not exactly a new planet swimming across the sky, but it’s wonderful in its own elegantly designed way.
It’s clearly been designed with web design companies in mind - the assumption that both workers and clients will communicate through a website is a dead giveaway. It strikes me, though, that the system is perfect for any sort of remote collaborate working.
In the near future I expect to see everyone from field archaeologists to international terrorists making their To-do lists on this sort of system.
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10.06.03
Posted in Semantic web at 4:03 pm by
Existing at the hitherto unsuspected nexus of Situationism and the Semantic Web, the proposed Psychogeographical Markup Language seems oddly, cruelly, workable, seen alongside some of the woolier things already proposed for semantic web protocols.
Sample tagging:
Distinct (is a place distinctive, or has it distinct features)
Border (is this street a definite break with the previous in a psychogeographical sense)
Open (the node present itself as welcoming)
Close (the node present itself as not welcome to visitors)
Lively (a place seems evolving, a centre for social interaction)
Gloom (a place nobody cares for)
Crowds (there are more people than a space can handle)
Desolate (the space is designed for more people than there are present)
Hectic (a space is filled up with objects)
Empty (a space is devoid of objects)
Planned Behaviour (the node implies certain behaviour/way to cross it)
Unplanned Behaviour
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09.11.03
Posted in Semantic web at 12:02 pm by
Some links on how people search for information, or how they want to search for information.
Matt Jones on breadcrumb trails
Thoughtwander, bouncing balls and cycles
Mark Bernstein on The Cycle
Links on information foraging
(all via Matt Jones in the first place)
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07.18.03
Posted in Semantic web at 1:48 pm by
Friday afternoon; being both selfish and hurried, this is a dump of useful resources on the semantic web and its precursors. Normal readers may safely ignore.
XML
XMLFiles tutorials
Namespaces by example
ZVON.org
RDF and semantic web at the W3C
RDF home
Primer for RDF triples
Web Ontology working group
Doing anything good for the weekend?
That’s nice.
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06.23.03
Posted in Semantic web at 9:36 am by
If you’re going to set out on private expeditions to chart the new virtual world (AKA the semantic web), you might as well do it in the character of a chipper Edwardian adventurer. So huzzah for bally old Ben Hammersley and his Sporting Gentleman’s Guide to the Semantic Web.
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06.02.03
Posted in Semantic web at 11:18 am by
Ontology, taxonomy, topic maps, knowledge bases. All this semantic web stuff really needs a glossary.
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05.07.03
Posted in Semantic web at 2:07 pm by
So this is what Matt Jones has been dreaming up for the BBC.
The system will consist of two main components: a public forum to help people research their concerns and find others who share them, both locally and nationally, and a “democracy database,” designed to provide a wealth of information on grassroots campaigning and the legislative process.
Say there’s a proposal to build a new highway. The iCan system will help concerned citizens find each other through the forum and begin the process of organizing an anti-road movement.
Using the democracy database, members of the fledgling anti-road lobby will learn how to set up public meetings, lobby their representatives and voice grievances during planning hearings.
Initially, six BBC news reporters assigned to different geographic regions in the United Kingdom will watch the system closely for potential stories for television and radio.
You see, the Beeb isn’t all about silly headlines, Ground Force and Breakfast Babes. It’s there to provide the organisational means to foment resistance against the establishment too. And Changing Rooms.
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05.06.03
Posted in Semantic web at 5:20 pm by
One consequence of the blizzard of paper I’ve been in for the last few weeks is that I haven’t kept up with semantic web developments. A quick run through of the blogs on right gives this reading list for the rest of the weeK, for me, if not for you:
Whenever you hear high-level descriptions of what the semantic web will (might, ought to) do, it tends to divide into two. The first is what you might term ‘proper metadata’. In other words, the attempt to enforce some kind of useful, reliable standard on the present sorry state of metadata on the Internet.
The second thing is annotation - the ability to append external data onto web resources (like, for instance, adding a comment to someone’s web page). Blogs, particularly Movable Type, enable a very light implementation of the annotation iidea. Anyone can wander along to a blog and post a comment. MT also allows the arcane mysteries of Trackback, which is essentially another type of comment.
Wikis offer another version of the idea of external commenting, albeit one where the content itself can be changed by anyone. The idea of Annotea is that anyone will be able to comment on any web page, and this comment will itself be held independently as a resource. So, for instance, you could comment on a whole series of pages and then search through your own comments, or see who else has commented on these pages. Quite what paid-for-content providers would think of this graffiti is quite another matter, and the opportunities for libel appear to be endless.
As ever, there is some entertainment in store.
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04.01.03
Posted in Semantic web at 4:04 pm by
The not-quite-semantic web strikes again. This time (via Onlineblog), it’s AvaQuest’s GooglePeople, which attempts to answer “who is…?” questions by text mining websites.
Quick test:
Who is the British Prime Minister?
GooglePeople is confident it is Tony Blair. Good start.
Who is the poet Laureate of Britain?
GooglePeople is confident it’s Ted Hughes. Wrong. Andrew Motion doesn’t even make it onto the supplementary list.
Who is the England football manager?
GooglePeople is confident it’s Sven Goran Eriksson. OK, but it mysteriously offers up in second place one Colin Lyne. It turns out he’s Sven’s lookalike.
Who is the best?.
Only one result: Cari Bernstein of the “best viewed with any browser campaign”.
Who is eating all the pies?
GooglePeople hits paydirt. The list starts with “Miss Weston Smith” and visits Sophie Dahl, Jodie Kidd, Marilyn Monroe, Alan Milburn, Phil Collins and Groucho Marx on its strange, meandering path.
Strangely, no mention of Kevin Pressman.
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03.20.03
Posted in Semantic web at 11:45 am by
It looks as though Peppercoin are not the only people trying to kick-start the old online micropayments business. Centipaid are spreading the word of their arrival at market.
Unlike Peppercoin, which uses a wacky algorithm to approximate all the tiny payments going on and pay out accordingly, Centipaid will track each payment by use of … stamps.
Well, ’stamped’ graphics. I like this, because that’s pretty much the original meaning of stamp, so there’s a conceptual consistency to the enterprise.
I’m not sold on the mechanism, though. Saving graphics to My Documents and then uploading them to pay for stuff? It may be perfectly secure, but I’m not sure it will feel secure to internet punters.
Oh, and it took about 10 seconds of browsing the promo site to work out that their target market is gentlemen browsing the web for, ahem, exclusive artistic photographs, who require methods of secure anonymous micropayments.
So, it’ll probably be a roaring success.
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03.18.03
Posted in Semantic web, Bloggery at 3:31 pm by
Cast your eyes over to the right (or up and to the right if you’re reading this in the future)* and you’ll see the much-promised lo-tech Forthcoming section v0.1 in all its fuzzy blue-grey glory.
Challenge No. 1 is to keep it reasonably up to date.
Challenge No. 2 is to make it look better.
Challenge No. 3 is to make it into some kind of all-singing all-dancing plug-and-play searchable calendar enabled hyper-semantic Infuzer-style doodah.
Suggestions for 1 & 2 most welcome. We can all quite reasonably forget about 3 for the time being.
Or maybe I should just list it under Forthcoming.
* Obviously you’ll have to use your common sense here. I never did have the hang of the future.
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Posted in Semantic web at 9:18 am by
I’m still excited by the prospect of Peter Van Dijck’s Taxomita project.
I’m told it’s going to beta today, so I really ought to sort my server out in preparation.
Spring. Weekends on the beach. No splinters. Multifaceted metadata authoring tools. Can life get any better?*
*Don’t hold me to that, please. And don’t mention the war.
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02.19.03
Posted in Semantic web at 4:36 pm by
Ooh. Amphetadesk has completely changed the way I use the web.
But I think I’m going to have to try NewsMonster for size (tip-off from Mr Hammersley). It’s optimised for Mozilla, is very standards compliant, and:
“NewsMonster is backed by a Semantic Web enabled RDF database which allows us to preserve the semantic relationship within documents. This allows NewsMonster to act as an agent on your behalf and help you barter goods and services online. Want to sell your used guitar? No problem. Just create a new advertisement and publish it on your blog. Other NewsMonster users which have agents looking for a similar service will discovery your publication. Throughout the whole process reputation is involved so that you know who you are dealing with!”
This could be where it all kicks off…
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02.17.03
Posted in Semantic web at 4:58 pm by
I’ve covered the congestion charge and (indirectly) war on Iraq, so I may as well go for the full set of obvious topics.
By now, everybody knows that Google have bought Blogger. Now, I use Movable Type, so I don’t know what my Blogger-using colleagues have been officially told - if anything. But it’s fairly obvious that this move isn’t just going to affect people who happen to use Blogger.
Leaving aside Google-ruling-the-virtual-world paranoia, the best guess is that Google will ramp up their dealings with blogs quite substantially. I wouldn’t be too surprised to see something analogous to their current ‘images’ search tab for blogs in the medium term.
Of course, the real changes will go on under the surface. The best analysis I’ve read so far is this one at BoingBoing.net.
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02.11.03
Posted in Semantic web at 4:13 pm by
‘Once we start storing information like this, extracting the metadata about files into a form that we can do useful work with, we come across the concept of Intertwingularity, and search operations like:
- “find me all the letters I printed out last month”
- “find me all the letters I’ve written”
- “find me everything to do with Aunt May”‘
Dan Hon’s gentle introduction to Intertwingularity turns into a meditation on save vs. spool, but I liked the first part.
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Posted in Semantic web at 12:33 pm by
Right. I’m much more pleased with this Visiblog entry. It almost communicates a proposition in the way that a lot of (short) blog entries do:
- Look at this thing
- Compare it with this other thing
- Raise eyebrow
I’m being semi-serious, in fact. The problems I can see with it are the lightbulb, which is intended to indicate “makes me think of”, because I can’t think of anything more appropriate (can you?). Also, the whole thing means nothing if you don’t remember Repo Man very well, as there’s no scope to explain.
More thinking to be done.
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02.10.03
Posted in Semantic web at 1:36 pm by
If you blog, you’ve almost certainly checked your user stats at some point, and wondered why some blogs appear to get a comically larger number of visitors than you. Speaking for myself, my usual theory is that my interests are, statistically speaking, obscure.
OK, that’s a euphemism. I usually look at my blog and think, God, would I read this? But you get the gist of my point.
It turns out that, like everything else in the world at the moment that evades easy explanation, the distribution of interest in blogs follows a power law.
According to Clay Shirky:
In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome.
Power laws, it seems, are the new Chaos theory. They explain everything from the distribution of wealth in a society to word frequencies to the reason why, when carrying a cup of tea around the house, the place I choose to put it down so it’s easily reached again is the one place in the house I’m guaranteed not to visit in the next 20 minutes.*
Next year everything will be explained by Chomskian deep language structure, meme allergy, subconscious Freudianism or planetary arthritis. I’m not sure how to predict which it will be, but I’m fairly sure it follows a power law.
* I’m still conducting research on the latter, but early results are clear. Now where did I put that cuppa?
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02.06.03
Posted in Semantic web at 1:54 pm by
Blogging lesson #1: Don’t post something you wrote last night before checking for new information.
Prolific Mr Hammersley wrote in The Guardian this morning this piece about Latent semantic indexing (LSI). It’s a much, much better way of searching than the current syntactic methods used by Google and all the rest, as it deals beautifully with synonyms. It will happily find pages that cover your search term, even if the search term itself is never used on the page.
This, together with well-structured metadata and ever-increasing amounts of data on sites created by readers of those sites (see Alexa), are all building blocks for a truly semantic web. And it will be created pretty much blog-first. Even the massive amounts of number-crunching required for latent semantic indexing are already being applied to blogs.
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Posted in Semantic web at 11:40 am by
It seems that the semantic web movement is being played out in microcosm in the world of blogging. Blogs, like all html, can of course already carry metadata. Search engines use this metadata to help decide the relevancy of pages. Some bloglistings, like Blogwise, take this “give me a list of things you’re going to talk about” approach familiar from html metadata.
One of the problems is that the metadata is unstructured. If you want to find blogs covering film, for instance, Blogwise provides keyword listings. But they are created by users, which means you have to think of every possible synonym - in this case, movies, film, films, filmes, and so on. This problem can be solved by instructing the search engine to understand synonyms, but it never really overcomes the fact that this approach will never give us any proper information about how material on different sites interrelates.
Another problem is that, by their nature, blogs allow people to post about whatever’s on their mind. And very often this isn’t what they thought they were going to talk about. Much better than asking people to predict what they think will be written is to look at what they actually have written.
This is where some of the blogging community has been doing some really cunning work. A lot of it gets filtered through hubs like Ben Hammersley’s site. Hang around these places for long and you’ll notice that a great of the activity is centred on links in, links out, comments and those pesky, semi-functional Movable Type-specific Trackbacks.
What these things have all got in common is that they relate one site to another. If someone with a blog leaves a comment on your blog, odds are they’ll add in their URL. Now you have some useful information. One URL (or the person behind it) reads another URL. This information can be collated. Then, if you’re a clever bod like Mark Pilgrim, you can use this data to play terrific games like Recommended Reading based on what you already link to in your blog.
Now, indirectly, Amazon are affecting the semantic blog with Alexa, which “gives you access to thousands of user reviews and ratings of web sites, plus site statistics and related links”. According to Alexa: “Now, when you search, you can let the experience of other web surfers guide you on your trek through the internet”. Well, at the very least, what Alexa means is that every site has its very own Amazon-style page, even if mine lazily implies that my site visitors are all keenly purchasing The Literature of Roguery in Seventeenth- And Eighteenth-Century Russia. Who was that then?
In the end, in my opinion, we’ll end up with consistent semantic metadata for blogs, for the simple reason that more and more functionality will appear that takes advantage of it. Bloggers, as a group, are by definition active, keen on explaining themselves and their place in the world, keen on defining their relationships to others (not just other bloggers), and constantly pointing at things in which they’re interested. This makes them prime candidates for semantic functionality.
Not that the initial attempts to enforce strictly defined metadata onto blogs look to have been wildly successful. The current thinking seems to centre on semantic matching of categories, but watch this space.
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