"Semantic Web" entries

Four short links: 3 August 2010

Four short links: 3 August 2010

Structured Data, Graph Tools, Photo Lives, Prize Theory

  1. OpenStructsan education and distribution site dedicated to open source software for converting, managing, viewing and manipulating structured data.
  2. TinkerPop — many (often open source) tools for graph data.
  3. Polaroid a Day — a moving human story told in photographs.
  4. Prizes (PDF) — White House memorandum to government agencies explaining how prizes are to be used. The first part, the why and how of contests and prizes, is something to add to your “here, read this” arsenal.
Four short links: 21 July 2010

Four short links: 21 July 2010

Health, Profit, Policy, and Semantic Web Software

  1. The Men Who Stare at Screens (NY Times) — What was unexpected was that many of the men who sat long hours and developed heart problems also exercised. Quite a few of them said they did so regularly and led active lifestyles. The men worked out, then sat in cars and in front of televisions for hours, and their risk of heart disease soared, despite the exercise. Their workouts did not counteract the ill effects of sitting. (via Andy Baio)
  2. Caring with Cash — describes a study where “pay however much you want” had high response rate but low average price, “half goes to charity” barely changed from the control (fixed price) response rate, but “half goes to charity and you can pay what you like” earned more money than either strategy.
  3. Behavioural Economics a Political Placebo? (NY Times) — As policymakers use it to devise programs, it’s becoming clear that behavioral economics is being asked to solve problems it wasn’t meant to address. Indeed, it seems in some cases that behavioral economics is being used as a political expedient, allowing policymakers to avoid painful but more effective solutions rooted in traditional economics. (via Mind Hacks)
  4. Protege — open source ontology editor and knowledge-base framework.

Facebook Open Graph: A new take on semantic web

Facebook's Open Graph is both an important step and one that still needs work.

In this guest post, Alex Iskold places Facebook's Open Graph Initiative within the context of past data-linking efforts. There's work to be done — particularly on the "openness" front — but this effort represents an important step toward weaving the the web of people and things.

Four short links: 21 May 2010

Four short links: 21 May 2010

Evilbook, Design Story, Openness Rating, Web 2.0 Sharecropping

  1. Infrastructures (xkcd) — absolutely spot-on.
  2. The Michel Thomas App: Behind the Scenes (BERG) — not interesting to me because it’s iPhone, but for the insight into the design process. The main goal here was for me to do just enough to describe the idea, so that Nick could take it and iterate it in code. He’d then show me what he’d built; I’d do drawings or further animations on top of it, and so on and so on. It’s a fantastic way of working. Before long, you start finishing each others’ sentences. Both of us were able to forget about distinguishing between design and code, and just get on with thinking through making together. It’s brilliant when that happens.
  3. Open Government and the World Wide WebTim Berners-Lee offered his “Five-Star” plan for open data. He said public information should be awarded a star rating based on the following criteria: one star for making the information public; a second is awarded if the information is machine-readable; a third star if the data is offered in a non-proprietary format; a fourth is given if it is in Linked Data format; a fifth if it has actually been linked. Not only a good rating system, but a clear example of the significantly better communication by semantic web advocates. Three years ago we’d have had a wiki specifying a ratings ontology with a union of evaluation universes reconciled through distributed trust metrics and URI-linked identity delivered through a web-services accessible RDF store, a prototype of one component of which was running on a devotee’s desktop machine at a university in Bristol, written in an old version of Python. (via scilib on Twitter)
  4. Data Access, Data Ownership, and SharecroppingWith Flickr you can get out, via the API, every single piece of information you put into the system. Every photo, in every size, plus the completely untouched original. (which we store for you indefinitely, whether or not you pay us) Every tag, every comment, every note, every people tag, every fave. Also your stats, view counts, and referers. Not the most recent N, not a subset of the data. All of it. It’s your data, and you’ve granted us a limited license to use it. Additionally we provide a moderately competently built API that allows you to access your data at rates roughly 500x faster then the rate that will get you banned from Twitter. Asking people to accept anything else is sharecropping. It’s a bad deal. (via Marc Hedlund)
Four short links: 9 April 2010

Four short links: 9 April 2010

ACTA, Librarianship, HTML Magic, and Understanding Data

  1. PublicACTA — conference to critique the ACTA draft and offer better principles for the negotiators. It will be streamed online, and you’ll be able to watch Michael Geist, Kim Weatherall, and other speakers as well as follow the issues and drafting process. Raw notes and drafts will be on the web site throughout the day. I’m MCing.
  2. The Library is the Machine — article about the relationship of libraries to catalogues, errors, authoritative information, and the lessons for this new world of data we’re building. (via staplegun on Twitter)
  3. Parchment — all-Javascript z-code interpreter. Z-code is the basis of Infocom-style text adventures (“interactive fiction” to aficionados). Impressive for the decoding, interpretation, and speed. The web still surprises me with what it can do and how well it does it. If only it had an app store *cough*.
  4. Fixing the Budget — the Economist polled Americans on the budget deficit. Overwhelmingly they want to cut spending and not raise taxes. When asked where to cut spending, the only agreement was on topics responsible for a few percent of the overall budget. This is why Budget Hero is so important: we need more SimCity-like exploration tools that let you say “what if we did (my favourite policy)?” and see what it does to not just next year’s deficit but those that our children will inherit.

Imagine a world that has moved entirely to cloud computing

For April Fools Day: a short story about a rare skill: Hardware
Guy
.

Four short links: 1 April 2010

Four short links: 1 April 2010

Copyright Economics, RDF, Linked Data Faith, and Douglas Adams

  1. Extending Copyright Duration in Australia (PDF) — economics of copyright extension. This proposal in the “let’s dream” section at the end caught my eye: The potential trade-off between production and distribution of intellectual property can be addressed in a number of ways. Australia could offer a system of graduated copyright protection with differing durations and differing fees. If an individual truly believed that their intellectual property would be valuable seventy years after their deaths, they should pay for that privilege. This is a Coasian solution to the copyright monopoly problem — with property rights being allocated to the public domain. In essence, creators are renting a portion of the public domain. It need not constitute a barrier to invention and creative activity because, in any event, there are few copyright materials that are valuable after such a long period of time and further, if the individual’s beliefs are correct they could either raise the necessary funds by means of a loan or by selling the idea on the secondary market. If, however, they thought their intellectual property were only valuable for ten years then they would pay far less, and so on. (via wiselark on Twitter)
  2. Heart Proposal (Apache) — a planet-scale RDF data store and a distributed processing engine based on Hadoop & Hbase. (via Hacker News)
  3. Collections Trust: 10 Principles for Linked Data — they read to me more as articles of faith than as proven statements of fact. 4. Linked Data can help us achieve more efficient practice. 5. Linked Data can help us deliver on our commitment to Public Access. 6. Linked Data is the next phase in our adaptation to the Web. 7. Linked Data should become an embedded function of the software we use (via PeoplePoints)
  4. Parrots, The Universe, and Everything — 1981 University of California talk by Douglas Adams. (via BoingBoing)
Four short links: 23 March 2010

Four short links: 23 March 2010

PM Plugs Tech, Science Bloggers, History Repeats, Beautiful Math

  1. British Prime Minister’s Speech — a huge amount of the speech is given to digital issues, including the funding and founding of an “Institute for Web Science” headed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. (via Rchards on Twitter)
  2. Periodic Table of Science Bloggers — a great way to explore the universe of science blogging. (via sciblogs)
  3. For All The Tea in China — a tale of industrial espionage from the 1800s. The man behind the theft was Robert Fortune, a Scottish-born botanist who donned mandarin garb, shaved the top of his head and attached a long braid as part of a disguise that allowed him to pass as Chinese so he could go to areas of the country that were off-limits to foreigners. He forged a token and stole IP, in some ways it’s like the reverse of the Google-China breakin. (via danjite on Twitter)
  4. Nature by Numbers — relating numbers, geometry, and nature. Beautiful and educational. (via BoingBoing)

Pew Research asks questions about the Internet in 2020

Will Google Make Us Stupid? Will we live in the cloud or the desktop?

Pew Research, which seems to be interested in just about everything, conducts a "future of the Internet" survey every few years in which they throw outrageously open-ended and provocative questions at a chosen collection of observers in the areas of technology and society. I took the exercise as a chance to hammer home my own choices of issues, like: Will Google make us stupid? and Will we live in the cloud or the desktop?

RSS never blocks you or goes down: why social networks need to be decentralized

Recurring outages on major networking sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn, along with incidents where Twitter members were
mysteriously dropped for days at a time, have led many people to challenge the centralized control exerted by
companies running social networks. We may have been willing to build our virtual houses on shaky foundations when they were temporary beach huts; but now we need to examine the ground on which many are proposing to build our virtual shopping malls and even our virtual federal offices. Instead of the constant churning among the commercial sites du jour (Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter), the next generation of social networking increasingly appears to require a decentralized, peer-to-peer infrastructure. This article looks at efforts in that space and suggests principles to guide development.