Patrick Chanezon: Semantic Web

Link: RDFMap (RDF Mapping Language). [Semantic Web Blog, featuring RDF]

Wed, 30 Apr 2003 09:28:55 GMT

RDFMap (RDF Mapping Language). [Semantic Web Blog, featuring RDF]

Re: Matrix reloaded

Tue, 29 Apr 2003 08:51:46 GMT

Name calling at Sam's Intertwingly about CSS.

Mark Pilgrim's concluding remark "Instead only try to realize the truth. There is no trunk. Then you'll see that it is not the trunk that locks, it is only yourself. " reminded me my favorite Zen Koan.

"Two monks were arguing about a flag. One said: `The flag is moving.'
The other said: `The wind is moving.'
The sixth patriach happened to be passing by. He told them: `Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving.'"

I would say that Mark is closer to enlightment than Dave :-)

Link: FOAF Autocreation. [Raw Blog]

Mon, 28 Apr 2003 13:38:21 GMT

FOAF Autocreation. [Raw Blog]

Link: foaf weblog. [Raw Blog]

Mon, 28 Apr 2003 13:38:04 GMT

foaf weblog. [Raw Blog]

Sha1ing, smushing and aggregating FOAF. [hackdiary]

Wed, 02 Apr 2003 10:06:37 GMT

Sha1ing, smushing and aggregating FOAF. [hackdiary]

Matt's making progress working with foaf, java and rdf. Keep the url here for future reference.

From Winnemuca to the Semantic Web Nirvana: we're still far from Mother Mucca's Blue Moon Lodge !

Wed, 12 Mar 2003 13:54:49 GMT

10:23AM. Logging off from California. 7:06PM. Logging on from Winnemucca, NV. Had a lovely drive today. I'm exactly where I want to be, in the middle of absolutely nowhere. A little bit of rain coming over the Sierra. It's warm here, in the upper 50s. Had a little trouble connecting via Earthlink, it's a long distance connect so I'll probably wait to upload today's pics. [Scripting News]

Dave's in Winnemucca, NV, "in the middle of nowhere".

If you use the population density metric on the US map, yes Dave, you're really in the middle of nowhere.

But your post struck a chord in me: I'm french, I've lived in California for 3 years, and the number of US cities of which I know the name is pretty low. 50 to 100 I would say. But Winnemucca is one of them, because it's the place where Mona accidentally ends up at her grandmother's Bordello in Armistead Maupin's More Tales of the City (this site for a spoiler).

So using the litterary resonance metric, Winnemucca is a pretty important city in the US, considering the number of people worlwide who have read Maupin's books.

This is not just for teasing: What I'm after in this post is that I can see some useful application of semweb technologies applied to this.

What is needed is:

Books RDF descriptions describing which places are involved in the book (this could be autogenerated for books for which content is digitized and available)
web service: geo(placename) gives you lat/long (ICBM coord)
RDF description about the books I like (I need to check if such a schema already exists)
FOAF: exists today
Open source Mapping software: exists, found the excellent article by Owen Densmore, Java Geography for the Smart Mob, Part 1: OpenMap

The application I want to build is something like this. I plan for a trip somewhere and the system could generate these maps:

absolute litterary density: based on the whole corpus of books.
friends based litterary density: specify how many foaf degrees I want to hop.

Books are just one example: replace it with everything you are interested in.

This is just a half baked idea and many more meta data are needed to get there: we're still far from Mother Mucca's Blue Moon Lodge !

Cool new tool to create image narratives [Marc's Voice] really ? I could not make it work

Thu, 06 Mar 2003 14:11:50 GMT

Cool new tool. [Marc's Voice]

I tried it but could not make anything interesting out of it. Let me know if you get the gist of it.

Think Spring [Jon's Radio]

Thu, 06 Mar 2003 13:58:53 GMT

Think Spring [Jon's Radio]

An interesting framework on Mac OS X to organize objects and tag them with meta data. One more sign that the semantic web vision begins to bear some fruits.

Meta-data by humans (and other semantic web stuff). [Marc's Voice]

Thu, 27 Feb 2003 00:48:10 GMT

Meta-data by humans (and other semantic web stuff). [Marc's Voice]

Avoiding confusion between RDF, OWL and XML (dajobe). [Semantic Web Blog, featuring RDF]

Wed, 26 Feb 2003 17:19:23 GMT

Avoiding confusion between RDF, OWL and XML (dajobe). [Semantic Web Blog, featuring RDF]

Crowbar's apps localized in Lingua Franca ?-)

Tue, 25 Feb 2003 17:32:56 GMT

XML is Lingua Franca ? Je ne pense pas si [Crowbar]

To parody A comment in Lingua Franca on the history of the City of Algiers (1852) cited by Schuchardt (1909)

“SGML venir … boum boum … andar; HTML venir … boum boum bezef … andar; XML venir … tru tru tru … chapar.”

[SGML came, cannonaded, and left. HTML came, cannonaded heavily, and left. XML came , blew their bugles, and captured it.]

As for Crowbar's francish statement, I wish he'd used a ResourceBundle instead of a Static ;-)

public static final String warning="Sacre Bleu!";

Crowbar's posts are hilarious: keep up the good work.

It's also fun for me to see that Francois "Padawan" already commented the post: we're old friends in real life, had dinner together a few weeks ago, and I very often see his comments in many weblog entries I read. I really need to write my foaf file !

Stigmergy and the World-Wide Web [Bitworking]

Tue, 25 Feb 2003 16:56:50 GMT

Stigmergy and the World-Wide Web Joe Gregorio wrote a fascinating essay about how the World-Wide Web is human stigmergy, stigmergy being interaction through the environment, a phenomenon observed and described in insects, resposible for ant paths and termites nests architecture.

Semaview : RDF vs XMl [Semantic Web Blog, featuring RDF]

Mon, 24 Feb 2003 16:21:40 GMT

Semaview : RDF vs. «Designed as a one minute overview of the differences and similarities of RDF and XML[Semantic Web Blog, featuring RDF]

Foaf geographical browser: not there yet but nearly !

Thu, 13 Feb 2003 17:08:03 GMT

In my monday post Apache maps its commiters based on GeoUrl: Lazyweb, give me a foaf based equivalent ! I asked the Lazyweb to create a little service that would take a foaf file as an entry and generate a map of the world with dots corresponding to the location of the people in the file, based onICBM header tag in their home page.

Joshua Schachter commented

Someone's done it:

http://xml.mfd-consult.dk/foaf/explorer/?foaf=http://xml.mfd-consult.dk/foaf/morten.rdf
joshua schachter [joshua-geourl@burri.to]

First I want to thank Joshua for GeoURL , a great idea.

His homepage is a model of impressive minimalism: the other thing he wrote is Reversible, "a self-aggregating directory/webring/wiki/newsthread system"

I like the idea very much and will explore this as soon as I have solved my Trackback in radio issue.

Morten Frederiksen's FoaF Explorer is excellent ! It seems to fetch the ICBM already, and gives a web based presentation, with GeoUrls for the different urls that have it. All the infrastructure for what I have described is there.

But the functionality is not there yet it seems.

Also he links to Jim Ley's foafnaut, a SVG based browser for foaf files: I was thinking about creating a foaf explorer using Marc Barrot's ActiveRenderer, but using SVG is a much better idea.

And Jim has a foaf people on the world map : it seems to be static. What I wanted is exactly that but dynamic, like the foafnaut, where I can submit a url or a foaf file to get the map.

I'm sure Jim must not have generated the map manaully, and I hope he'll publish the service soon.

Thanks Joshua for this great comment and your cool soft.

Apache maps its commiters based on GeoUrl: Lazyweb, give me a foaf based equivalent !

Mon, 10 Feb 2003 14:23:54 GMT

Who Is Apache?. A nice little project is being worked on by the Apache committers to help map where everybody is. [The James Duncan Davidson Weblog]

A creative application of the GeoUrls concept, to foster community communication. I'd expect more of these to be created over time.

I'd invoke the LazyWeb to create a little service that would take a foaf file as an entry and generate the map.

I would architect it in 2 scripts:

- foafToGeo

Reads foaf file, extracts property http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/page or homepage, + relevant data that you want to present on the map as title for points (firstname + lastname + email for example)

When exist looks up homepage for an ICBM header tag

Generate a file (need to define a standard xml syntax for it) with:

title, href, long, lat

- the second script, let's call it GeoToMap

takes the file in input and outputs a html or svg file with points on a map with titles and urls. It could be customizable, to specify a stylesheet and maybe other stuff.

This could be extended later to create a geographic foaf browser: input your foaf file, the href will point to the foaf file of people, which would be fed to the service again.

This could answer some questions like: where are the friends of my friends located. Also this could be very easily used to generate automatically a map like the Apache one for all sourceforge projects.

I definitely need to take some time off someday to play with all these cool ideas: in the meantime, if you like the idea, be my guest :-)

Pedantic Web. Stefano Mazzocchi:Good idea. Bad name. ;-)[Sam Ruby]

Thu, 06 Feb 2003 12:22:36 GMT

Pedantic Web. Stefano Mazzocchi:Good idea. Bad name. ;-)[Sam Ruby]

Agreed. But I don't have any smarter idea for a name.

OntoWeb web site is really half baked

Wed, 05 Feb 2003 09:34:39 GMT

I tried to register to the OntoWeb Portal described in Use Cases and Requirements for the Web Ontology Language (OWL) 1.0 and got this Zope error page.

Among other quirks: The news page does not give any date for the items, and there's no RSS feed for the News.

Not very appealing ! I wonder why they list such an unfinished demo in the use case draft ? This does not add any credence to the semweb initiative and invites the usual criticism that it is an accademic unpractical effort.

At least they should state on the main web site page that this is an unfinished not fully functional site.

Zope Error

Zope has encountered an error while publishing this resource.

Error Type: AttributeError
Error Value: setMemberProperties

Troubleshooting Suggestions

The URL may be incorrect.
The parameters passed to this resource may be incorrect.
A resource that this resource relies on may be encountering an error.

For more detailed information about the error, please refer to the HTML source for this page.

If the error persists please contact the site maintainer. Thank you for your patience.

Traceback (innermost last): File /usr/local/Zope-2.5.1-src/lib/python/Products/Hotfix_2002-04-15/__init__.py, line 51, in publish_module File /usr/local/Zope-2.5.1-src/lib/python/ZPublisher/Publish.py, line 114, in publish File /usr/local/Zope-2.5.1-src/lib/python/Zope/__init__.py, line 159, in zpublisher_exception_hook (Object: OntoWeb) File /usr/local/Zope-2.5.1-src/lib/python/ZPublisher/Publish.py, line 98, in publish File /usr/local/Zope-2.5.1-src/lib/python/ZPublisher/mapply.py, line 88, in mapply (Object: register) File /usr/local/Zope-2.5.1-src/lib/python/ZPublisher/Publish.py, line 39, in call_object (Object: register) File /usr/share/zope/lib/python/Products/CMFCore/FSPythonScript.py, line 90, in __call__ (Object: register) File /usr/local/Zope-2.5.1-src/lib/python/Shared/DC/Scripts/Bindings.py, line 252, in __call__ (Object: register) File /usr/local/Zope-2.5.1-src/lib/python/Shared/DC/Scripts/Bindings.py, line 283, in _bindAndExec (Object: register) File /usr/share/zope/lib/python/Products/CMFCore/FSPythonScript.py, line 124, in _exec (Object: register) (Info: ({'script': <FSPythonScript instance at 92c3400>, 'context': <CMFSite instance at 9db7eb8>, 'container': <CMFSite instance at 9db7eb8>, 'traverse_subpath': []}, ('password', 'confirm'), {}, ('password', 'confirm'))) File Script (Python), line 10, in register File /usr/share/zope/lib/python/Products/CMFCore/RegistrationTool.py, line 130, in addMember (Object: portal_registration) File /usr/share/zope/lib/python/Products/CMFCore/MembershipTool.py, line 407, in addMember (Object: portal_membership) AttributeError: (see above)

Wed, 05 Feb 2003 09:15:14 GMT

OWL Use Cases and Requirements Published. 4 February 2003: The Web Ontology Working Group has released an updated Working Draft of Use Cases and Requirements for the Web Ontology Language (OWL) 1.0. The draft defines "ontology." It outlines six use cases, design goals, requirements and objectives for a language which can describe the semantics of classes and properties used in Web documents. Read about the W3C Semantic Web Activity. (News archive) [World Wide Web Consortium]

It is good that W3C documents these use cases, especially with links to examples: this will make it easier for manager types in tech organizations to understand the value of the Semweb standardization effort, and what it could bring to their products if they adopt it today.

Most relevant to my current main professional area of interest:

2.1 Web portal

...

One example of an ontology based portal is OntoWeb. This portal serves the academic and industry community that is interested in ontology research. Another example of a portal that uses Semantic Web technologies and could benefit from an ontology language is The Open Directory Project; a large, comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors. RDF dumps of the Open Directory database are available for download

SVG Open 2003: Call for Papers and Early Bird Registration [World Wide Web Consortium]

Wed, 05 Feb 2003 09:00:57 GMT

SVG Open 2003: Call for Papers and Early Bird Registration. 3 February 2003: Early bird registration has started for SVG Open 2003, to be held in Vancouver, Canada on 15-18 July 2003, with additional half-day workshops and tutorials on 13-14 July. Co-sponsored by W3C, the SVG Open conference series is the premier forum for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) developers to share ideas, examples and implementations. The call for papers is open through 28 February. (News archive) [World Wide Web Consortium]

Mon, 03 Feb 2003 14:04:22 GMT

Photo-annotating bot. A background project for a while has been to write a bot to help me annotate the fairly large number of pictures I post to picdiary (1496 at the last count). Creating a document of RSS-based metadata is a slightly cumbersome text-editor job every time I post a new set of pics.... [hackdiary]

Annotating my pics is also a problem. I'd prefer using a point and click annotation system (minimal typing) to annotate, then being able to extract the annotation to whatever format is needed: RDF, some useful XML schema, etc...

There was an interesting attempt described on the semweb page a few years ago, where RDF using dc: was stored in the jpeg headers themselves, with a jigsaw plugin to read them.

I've not seen any compelling system for that though.

RSL. RDF Service Locator [Semantic Web Blog, featuring RDF]

Mon, 03 Feb 2003 13:23:50 GMT

RSL. RDF Service Locator = WSIL + RSD + RDF also update referring to WS-Policy Endpoint Reference [Semantic Web Blog, featuring RDF]

I need to read about RSD to understand the value of this.

Do people really use WSIL ? I know it's been incorporated in Apache Axis after IBM code donation, but the spec is still in draft status and I haven't heard about it in a while.

Peter Van Dijck: Introduction to XFML

Fri, 24 Jan 2003 15:57:15 GMT

Peter Van Dijck: Introduction to XFML. [Scripting News]

Good article, and the spec is simple enough to read.

Implementing support for it could be a great addition to our Portal search features: let users of a portal share their facets, and have some standards ones defined at the role level.

Ben Hammersely's Guardian piece, FOAF [Eclectic]

Fri, 10 Jan 2003 11:16:48 GMT

Ben Hammersely's Guardian piece, FOAF [Eclectic]

Network Navigation Widget. [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

Fri, 10 Jan 2003 08:46:20 GMT

Network Navigation Widget. [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

An interesting visualization tool. Too bad it's not online so that i can test it with my own weblog.

Touchgraph [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

Thu, 09 Jan 2003 13:46:20 GMT

Touchgraph [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

What is interesting are the links to the different TouchGraph applications. I had played with the GoogleBrowser, but others popped up since then.