Daniel’s Blog

I’ve started using the following setting for my university report writings, and I highly recommend it!:

• For finding articles and books: Google Books, Google Scholar and CiteseerX
• Zotero, a firefox plugin for Bibliography Management. Which includes the ability to sponge bibliographic data from all of the above and many of the article repositories on the web (and Amazon.co.uk books category ).
• BibTeX, which is a bibliographic format that can be exported from Zotero.
• LaTeX, which is a document markup language which is reasonably similar (although in some ways simpler, in other ways more complex than) HTML. LaTeX can also work with BibTeX, by using unique identifiers, LaTeX has the ability to give a code, pull data out of the BibTeX file and provide precise styling for the document that you are referencing.

Absolutely amazing. I highly suggest using all of the above. I also use something called Kile which is an “Integrated LaTeX Environment” for Linux (it was made specifically for KDE, but I use it through Gnome).

I’ve dabbled with LaTeX in the past, but it just didn’t really work for me until recently. So please, if you do write articles, then try out LaTeX if you haven’t already!

UPDATE - Friday 20th February 2009

I’ve given up on Kile, as it doesn’t seem to work on my Laptop. I’m now using Texmaker. Which is cross-platform, and seems a lot more responsive than Kile.

Yep, another SPARQL query. This time listing all UK Prime Ministers and their religions (in order of party). The results are here: “UK Prime Ministers and their Religions“, and here is the SPARQL for it:

SELECT ?PresidentName ?PartyName ?ReligionName
WHERE
{
?president
dbpprop:party ?Party;
dbpprop:order dbpedia:Prime_Minister_of_the_United_Kingdom;
<https://dbpedia.org/ontology/religion> ?Religion;
rdfs:label ?PresidentName.
FILTER (lang(?PresidentName) = "" || langMatches(lang(?PresidentName), "en")).
?Religion rdfs:label ?ReligionName.
FILTER (lang(?ReligionName) = "" || langMatches(lang(?ReligionName), "en")).
?Party rdfs:label ?PartyName.
FILTER (lang(?PartyName) = "" || langMatches(lang(?PartyName), "en"))
} ORDER BY ?PartyName

I was wondering about the Presidents in the United States of America, and wondered what their religions were. So I zipped up some SPARQL queries to run against DBpedia, they aren’t perfect (i.e. they don’t capture all of the presidents due to mislabeling and me not being too bothered about the answers), but it provides some answers.

The Democrats:

SELECT ?PresidentName ?ReligionName
WHERE
{
?president
dbpprop:party <https://dbpedia.org/resource/Democratic_Party_%28United_States%29>;
dbpprop:order dbpedia:President_of_the_United_States;
<https://dbpedia.org/ontology/religion> ?Religion;
rdfs:label ?PresidentName.
FILTER (lang(?PresidentName) = "" || langMatches(lang(?PresidentName), "en")).
?Religion rdfs:label ?ReligionName.
FILTER (lang(?ReligionName) = "" || langMatches(lang(?ReligionName), "en"))
} ORDER BY ?ReligionName

Which the answer is viewable “Democratic Presidents Religions”

The Republicans

SELECT ?PresidentName ?ReligionName
WHERE
{
?president
dbpprop:party <https://dbpedia.org/resource/Republican_Party_%28United_States%29>;
dbpprop:order dbpedia:President_of_the_United_States;
<https://dbpedia.org/ontology/religion> ?Religion;
rdfs:label ?PresidentName.
FILTER (lang(?PresidentName) = "" || langMatches(lang(?PresidentName), "en")).
?Religion rdfs:label ?ReligionName.
FILTER (lang(?ReligionName) = "" || langMatches(lang(?ReligionName), "en"))
} ORDER BY ?Religion

Which the answer is available directly here: “Republican Presidents religions”

Please note

• It doesn’t return all presidents of the parties
• It does use the DBPedia SPARQL engine (powered by OpenLink Virtuoso)
• It does use some shortcuts (i.e. not defining PREFIXs and the FROM clause), as the DBPedia SPARQL engine provides these nice shortcuts.

It’s absolutely fantastic that more and more people are taking up Semantic Web solutions and providing RDF.

Guys and Girls it’s time for the next step!

This is something that I’ve been thinking about for a while. People, although they are taking up the SemWeb, they don’t seem to understand the full power of it’s expressiveness. This isn’t a providing problem, this is a usage problem…. Yes it’s fantastic that we can interlink objects now, but what does it mean to be an object? What can we learn implicitly and explicitly from this highly-structured and highly-distributed web of data objects? and finally, what can we do with what we learn?

These questions are the real heart and real soul of the Semantic Web, and an area in which us Semantic Web advocates have really mentioned much before.

And please note, this shouldn’t *just* be an academic thing. Systems which embrace this, and which are in the wild, would greatly benefit. It’s breaking down the walled-garden and combining the intelligent systems which have previously been in websites like amazon.co.uk and google, and exposing those methods to the real semantic data.

The key to all of this is improvement of society. If your project improves society (or helps the environment in some way), then your project should be excellent. Whether or not it makes money!

Hope this all makes sense…. feel free to ask questions, or give your opinion.

Daniel