All Posts http://bnode.org/blog/all All posts from bnode.org en 2007-08-23T11:19:49Z daily 1 knowee.org http://bnode.org/blog/2007/08/23/knowee-org the knowee.org site is online, next step will be a prototype en 2007-08-23T11:19:49Z 2007-08-23T11:19:49Z 2007-08-23T11:39:51Z Benjamin Nowack rdf sweo semanticweb social graph knowee knowee, one of the SWEO Community Projects. There is nice progress, although it took some time to get things moving. An early site is now online, and we have a first design for the app.

I still have to flesh out knowee's approach to "social graph portability" (or whatever it's called this week), but then I'll focus on the prototype which will hopefully be available by Mid/End-September. ]]> SemWeb on a Slide at Düsseldorf's 1st Web Monday http://bnode.org/blog/2007/07/17/semweb-on-a-slide-at-duesseldorfs-1st-web-monday Introduced semsol and gave a mini-talk on the Semantic Web at Düsseldorf's first Web Monday. en 2007-07-17T20:00Z 2007-07-17T20:15:15Z 2007-07-18T09:20:15Z Benjamin Nowack semsol talk semanticweb mixxt peopleaggregator webmontag duesseldorf swoas employer yet, and Web Monday is already coming to Düsseldorf (joining about 20 other cities in Germany). The first event was yesterday and happened in the cool (style-wise) and hot (summer is back!) Lounge of the Mediadesign University.

I took the opportunity to introduce semsol to the local Web crowd, but also put on my SWEO hat and signed up for a short presentation. For better marketing, I've been thinking a bit about distributing a set of single-page tech flyers recently (called "SemWeb on a Slide", inspired by the classical "Semantic Web Illustrated" series, although I'm not there yet). So, I tried a first version , and given the feedback I think this sort of scoped material has a lot of potential. Someone already asked for a version covering semantic markup. Anyway, the other talks were way cooler than mine (at least for me ;), I especially liked Siggi Becker's "Utopia is not a Trend", and the presentation of MIXXT, which seems to be People Aggregator done right.

SemWeb on a Slide - From Data to Knowledge ]]> Semantic Web gets a mention in Visual-x mag webinale report http://bnode.org/blog/2007/05/29/semantic-web-gets-a-mention-in-visual-x-mag-webinale-report A nice paragraph about my talk at last week's webinale en 2007-05-29T11:20Z 2007-05-29T11:21:01Z 2007-05-29T11:25:38Z Benjamin Nowack semanticweb webinale paggr visual-x mag just published a webinale report that contains a nice summary of my talk (and even a link to paggr). Phew, this means that at least some people were not scared off, which is great personally, but also (and more importantly) from a SWEO perspective. ]]> Back from webinale 2007 http://bnode.org/blog/2007/05/26/back-from-webinale-2007 slides and some impressions en 2007-05-26T16:45Z 2007-05-26T16:37:10Z 2007-05-26T17:14:59Z Benjamin Nowack webinale rdf owl semanticweb pageflakes knowee php slides The webinale slides are online now. The session went OK, I'd say. I always make the mistake to look at the high conference prices and then end up trying to squeeze too much information into my talks to give the people some value for their money. It also was a bit hard to predict what the audience of the newly introduced webinale would be like. I did receive some great feedback from PHP coders (sneaking in from co-located IPC) who already had specific questions and asked about RAP and ARC. But I could see from many faces right after the session, that a very basic talk may have been better. Leo suggested to skip the ontology stuff entirely, the amount of different flavours (SKOS, RDF Schema, OWL Lite/DL/Full/+/-/1.1) is surely a whole mess marketing-wise. Next time I'll try to stick to the more intuitive stuff. At least I had a convincing demo about how (low-level) ontologies can be useful to greatly reduce custom application code.

I had a short chat with pageflakes' CEO Christoph Janz. Semantic Web technologies are not on their radar yet (maybe they are now ;), but we talked a bit about the possibility to add some RDF functionality to their widgets (which they call "flakes"). They may let us try some things in the context of the knowee project, e.g. a flake that could store contact data retrieved via GRDDL or a SPARQL endpoint. Might be worth checking out their SDK.

So, next time: less OWL, more wild colours:
semweb web 2.0 layers ]]> Off to webinale 2007 http://bnode.org/blog/2007/05/21/off-to-webinale-2007 SWEO infiltration at webinale 2007 in Ludwigsburg, Germany en 2007-05-21T19:45Z 2007-05-21T19:25:06Z 2007-05-21T20:11:35Z Benjamin Nowack webinale talk semanticweb event web2.0 clipboard see me speak at webinale
I'm kindly invited to give a talk on "Semantic Web and Web 2.0" at tomorrow's webinale in Ludwigsburg, Germany. Leo will be there, too.

Sounds like a nice SWEO infiltration opportunity. And I'm looking forward to some new drankBeerWith triples, there is a networking party on Tuesday, possibly joined by the International PHP Conference and the AJAX in Action sub-event which are colocated with the webinale.

I'll make the slides available when I'm back, but the more interesting news is that I just finished a working little implementation based on TimBL's Semantic Clipboard idea and the "Polymorphic Drag&Drop" functionality I experimented with during the last months (yes, that's DnD instead of CnP now). Now I just hope I'll get swiftly through the theoretical part of my presentation and save enough time for the demo at the end.. ]]> Relocating, and offline http://bnode.org/blog/2007/05/05/relocating-and-offline Moving to a new office, offline en 2007-05-05T11:00Z 2007-05-05T10:59:10Z 2007-05-05T11:04:17Z Benjamin Nowack semsol offline semanticweb online... ]]> SWEO project "knowee" http://bnode.org/blog/2007/04/22/sweo-project-knowee Call for participation en 2007-04-22T22:25Z 2007-04-22T22:23:17Z 2007-04-22T22:27:22Z Benjamin Nowack rdf microformats sweo semanticweb knowee call for participation for knowee, one of the projects supported by SWEO (just in time for the F2F reports tomorrow).

The project is about creating a semwebby address book thingy, but there actually is another dimension to the "outreach" aspect beyond running code. I'd really like to bring RDFers and microformateers closer together (from both directions). RDFers can learn a lot from the pragmatic microformats community, and adding data integration (+query) functionality to microformats can enable a whole new set of applications. ]]> Funded! http://bnode.org/blog/2007/03/20/funded semsol gets funding en 2007-03-20T14:55Z 2007-03-20T13:42:59Z 2007-03-21T17:27:15Z Benjamin Nowack semsol germany rdf semanticweb arc knowee startup SWEO commitments, esp. the knowee community project which is going to start in April).
Quite some orga action coming up, but I'm looking forward to a clean bengee.reboot()
  • I'll move from Essen to Düsseldorf, which is closer to Cologne, the DUS airport, and also a little away from the Web periphery here, with the Ruhr Valley still in reach, though.
  • The appmosphere wordplay is going to be discontinued. No German really managed to pronounce or remember it correctly, and the *-osphere naming is rather overused these days anyway.
  • The new brand will most probably be semsol.com which is going to be transformed to a Semantic Web Agency. (I've always been a frontend developer, combing this with an in-house RDF system will hopefully form a nice USP for the anticipated move towards info-driven Web apps.)
  • The open source RDF framework currently named semsol will get a new name (perhaps just "semsol suite", we'll see), and there will be more product-style solutions (a browser, an editor, a schema manager, etc.).
  • ARC will keep its name, but is going to be re-coded as ARC2 based on the experience and feedback obtained so far.
  • Less research-y slippery slopes.
  • More Germany-targeted activities.
semsol ]]> My first screencast http://bnode.org/blog/2007/03/05/my-first-screencast Tools used for a screencast about forthcoming paggr collector. en 2007-03-05T15:16Z 2007-03-05T15:16:59Z 2007-03-05T16:08:38Z Benjamin Nowack paggr super camstudio semanticweb screencast my first screencast this weekend, oh dear ;-)

I didn't really have a lot to talk about yet (I plan to do some screencasts for the paggr system), so this one was more for testing a number of different tools (the screencast itself is about paggr's soon-polymorphic drag and drop). I used a Windows box and found the following tools quite useful:
  • CamStudio for screen and audio recording,
  • a Magix tool (commercial, I assume there are alternatives) to cut and create an mpeg version from the CamStudio avi,
  • SUPER for converting the mpg file to the Flash video (flv) format,
  • and a free FLV player I found on the web somewhere. It hopefully isn't doing evil things on my server now..

The tools make the technical side of things rather convenient, but it still was more work than expected, and I sound just horrible (sometimes close to "zank you for traffeling wiz Deutsche Bahn", if you know what I mean). ]]> A Comparison of Microformats, eRDF, and RDFa http://bnode.org/blog/2007/02/12/comparison-of-microformats-erdf-and-rdfa An updated (and customizable) comparison of the different approaches for semantically enhancing HTML. en 2007-02-12T14:10Z 2007-02-12T14:02:50Z 2007-02-13T11:25:50Z Benjamin Nowack erdf microcontent rdf comparison microformats semanticweb rdfa structured blogging In order to avoid further flame wars with RDFa folks, I've adjusted the form to not show my personal priorities as default settings anymore (here they are if you are interested, it's a 48-42-40 ranking for MFs, eRDF, and RDFa respectively). All features are set to "Nice to have" now. As you can see, for these settings, RDFa gets the highest ranking (I *said* the comparison is not biased against RDFa!). If you disable the features related to domain-independent resource descriptions, MFs shine, if you insist on HTML validity, eRDF moves up, etc. It's all in the mix.
After a comment of mine on the Microformats IRC channel, SWD's Michael Hausenblas asks for the reason why I said that I personally don't like RDFa. Damn public logs ;) OK, now I have to justify that somehow without falling into rant mode again...

I already wrote a little comparison of Microformats, Structured Blogging, eRDF, and RDFa some time ago, sounds like a good opportunity to see how things evolved during the last 8 months. Back then I concluded that both eRDF and RDFa were preferred candidates for SemSol, but that RDFa lacked the necessary deployment potential due to not being valid HTML (as far as any widespread HTML spec is concerned).

I excluded the Structured Blogging initiative from this comparison, it seems to have died a silent death. (Their approach to redundantly embed microcontent in script tags apparently didn't convince the developer community.) I also excluded features which are equally available in all approaches, such as visible metadata, general support for plain literals, being well-formed, no negative effect on browser behaviour, etc.

Pretending to be constructive, and in order to make things less biased, I embedded a dynamic page item that allows you to create your own, tailored comparison. The default results reflect my personal requirements (and hopefully answer Michael's question). As your mileage does most probably vary, you can just tweak the feature priorities (The different results are not stored, but the custom comparisons can be bookmarked). Feel free to leave a comment if you'd like me to add more criteria.

No. Feature or Requirement Priority MFs eRDF RDFa
1 DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) yes yes mostly
2 HTML4 / XHTML 1.0 validity yes yes no
3 Custom extensions / Vocabulary mixing no yes yes
4 Arbitrary resource descriptions no yes yes
5 Explicit syntactic means for arbitrary resource descriptions no no yes
6 Supported by the W3C partly partly yes
7 Follow DCMI guidelines no yes no
8 Stable/Uniform syntax specification partly yes yes
9 Predictable RDF mappings mostly yes yes
10 Live/Web Clipboard Compatibility yes mostly mostly
11 Reliable copying, aggregation, and re-publishing of source chunks. (Self-containment) mostly partly partly
12 Support for not just plain literals (e.g. typed dates, floats, or markup). yes no yes
13 Triple bloat prevention (only actively marked-up information leads to triples) yes yes no
14 Possible integration in namespaced (non-HTML) XML languages. no no yes
15 Mainstream Web developers are already adopting it. yes no no
16 Tidy-safety (Cleaning up the page will never alter the embedded semantics) yes yes no
17 Explicit support for blank nodes. no no yes
18 Compact syntax, based on existing HTML semantics like the address tag or rel/rev/class attributes. yes mostly partly
19 Inclusion of newly evolving publishing patterns (e.g. rel="nofollow"). yes no partly
20 Support for head section metadata such as OpenID or Feed hooks. no partly partly

Results

Solution Points Missing Requirements
RDFa 35 -
eRDF 34 -
Microformats 33 -

Max. points for selected criteria: 60

Summary:

Your requirements are met by RDFa, or eRDF, or Microformats.

Feature notes/explanations:

DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself)
  • RDFa: Literals have to be redundantly put in "content" attributes in order to make them un-typed.
HTML4 / XHTML 1.0 validity
  • RDFa: Given the buzz around the WHATWG, it's uncertain when (if at all) XHTML 2 or XHTML 1.1 modules will be widely deployed enough.
Explicit syntactic means for arbitrary resource descriptions
  • eRDF: owl:sameAs statements (or other IFPs) have to be used to describe external resources.
Supported by the W3C
  • MFs, eRDF: Indirectly supported by W3C's GRDDL effort.
Stable/Uniform syntax specification
  • MFs: Although MFs reuse HTML structures, the format syntax layered on top differs, so that each MF needs separate (though stable) parsing rules.
Predictable RDF mappings
  • MFs: Microformats could be mapped to different RDF structures, but the GRDDL WG will probably recommend fixed mappings.
Live/Web Clipboard Compatibility
  • eRDF, RDFa: Tweaks are needed to make them Live-Clipboard compatible.
Reliable copying, aggregation, and re-publishing of source chunks. (Self-containment)
  • MFs: Some Microformats (e.g. XFN) lose their intended semantics when regarded out of context.
  • eRDF/RDFa: Only chunks with nearby/embedded namespace definitions can be reliably copied.
Support for head section metadata such as OpenID or Feed hooks.
  • eRDF: Can support openID hooks.
  • RDFa: Will probably interpret any rel attribute.


Bottom line: For many requirement combinations a single solution alone is not enough. My tailored summary suggests for example that I should be fine with a combination of Microformats and eRDF. How does your preferred solution mix look like? ]]> SeenOn - Timestamp or State of Mind? http://bnode.org/blog/2007/02/10/seenon-timestamp-or-state-of-mind fun stuff from #microformats, comments on e/RDF/a wrt to Microformats en 2007-02-10T14:55Z 2007-02-10T14:37:25Z 2007-02-10T15:21:10Z Benjamin Nowack erdf microcontent rdf microformats semanticweb rdfa <tommorris> Every time I see a movie from now on, I'm adding the IMDB URL to my FOAF file. <briansuda> with what predicate? <tommorris> rdf.opiumfield.com/movie/0.1/seen ... <briansuda> seenOn, is that a timestamp or a state-of-mind? (microformats(!) irc channel)

Now, who said RDF was less real-word-ish than microformats?

Related link (wrt to movies, not toxics): Microformats 80%, RDF 20% by Tom Morris about the longtail utility of (e)RDF(a). Wanted to state something like this for some time. After implementing a Microcontent parser (part of the next ARC release) that creates a merged triple set from eRDF and Microformats, I can't say anymore that MFs don't scale (even though making the meaning of nested formats explicit is sometimes tricky). I was really impressed by the amount of practical use cases covered by them (Listings and qualified review ratings even go beyond the demos I've seen in RDFer circles). However, there is still a lot of room for custom RDF extensions that can be used to extend microformatted HTML. Skill levels are just one of many longtail examples: They are currently not covered by hResume, but available in Uldis' CV vocab.

The important thing IMO is that RDFers should not forget to acknowledge the amazing deployment work of the MF community and focus on what they can add to the table (storage, querying, and mixing, as a start) instead of marketing RDF-in-HTML as an alternative, replacement, or otherwise "superior" (likewise the other way round, btw.). I think we also shouldn't overcharge the big content re-publishers. When maintainers of sites like LinkedIn or Eventful get bombed with requests to add different semantic serializations to their pages, they may hesitate to support any of them at all. For most of these mainstream sites, Microformats do the job just fine, and often better. Why should people for example have to specify namespaces when a simple, agreed-on rel-license does the trick already? (We could still use RDF to specify the license details, and even the license link is only a simple conversion away from RDF.) ]]> SWEO Community Project Task Force http://bnode.org/blog/2007/01/31/sweo-community-project-task-force Trying to gather programmers already interested in semweb technology around a few projects. en 2007-01-31T10:05Z 2007-01-31T09:58:12Z 2007-01-31T10:36:34Z Benjamin Nowack rdf microformats sweo semanticweb knowee Kjetil Kjernsmo has initiated a new Semantic Web Education and Outreach Interest Group Task Force called "Community Projects". A great idea.

This rally has the goal of using our collective input to generating real running code, that can help us to demonstrate the value of the Semantic Web to a wide user base. We want to encourage developers to work together to create something that will make a real difference to people's lives today

Just added a proposal for "knowee", a web-based contact organizer (a project similar to something Ivan mentioned some weeks ago, and I think also similar to the work Henry Story recently started). ]]> Got some SemWeb DOAP 'n' FOAF? http://bnode.org/blog/2007/01/17/got-some-semweb-doap-n-foaf Starting to collect RDF descriptions of SemWeb projects at rdfer.com en 2007-01-17T14:40Z 2007-01-17T14:38:58Z 2007-01-17T15:22:11Z Benjamin Nowack foaf semanticweb rdfer doap DOAP editor, an RDF/XML loader, and a basic browser store dump at RDFer.com. Would be great to get some DOAP files describing SemWeb projects in there, and maybe some FOAF files as well. That'd make coding the browsers more fun and a bit more real-world-ish.
Thanks for your help! ]]> Merry X-Mas http://bnode.org/blog/2006/12/23/merry-x-mas FOAF and Snow en 2006-12-23T13:25Z 2006-12-23T13:29:45Z 2006-12-23T13:31:35Z Benjamin Nowack foaf semanticweb xmas
See you after the snow ;) ]]> Magic X-Mas Tree http://bnode.org/blog/2006/12/20/magic-x-mas-tree Powered by Polonium? en 2006-12-20T15:15Z 2006-12-20T14:41:29Z 2006-12-20T15:16:14Z Benjamin Nowack xmas fun
magic x-mas tree ]]>