Daniel? Blog

I? quite tired as it? quite late and I?e been working on the new site all evening. But, I have just released it! It? called lc8n.eu

The site is a web application which acts a bit like a URL Shortener, but for locations instead. It forwards you to a map of a particular location.

Heres an example of where I am:
* https://lc8n.eu/a

It? at the very beginnings of it? life, and I? planning to do a lot with it. I hope you enjoy using it! You can use it like this (via twitter):
“Hi everyone. I? currently located here: https://lc8n.eu/a , quite tired because I?e been working on the new site all evening.” - https://twitter.com/danieljohnlewis/status/5993518753

As I say. It is quite early on in its life, so if you have any thoughts, comments or bugs that you?e spotted then please do get in touch. I?l be more than happy to answer.

Well I?e released details of the Bristol Knowledge Unconference 2009.

Our main website is: Bristol Knowledge Unconference 2009 : https://www.craftivism.net/wiki/UnCraftivism/Bristol_Knowledge_Unconference_2009

It will take place in the Arnolfini Arts Centre in Bristol on the 12th and 13th December 2009 as part of the “unCraftivism” satellite event which is part of the Craftivism exhibition. unCraftivism is about merging technology and art, and Bristol Knowledge Unconference will be one stream of working during that weekend, other events during the weekend will be done in collaboration with Dorkbot Bristol and the Bristol Robotics Lab.

The Knowledge Unconference will be similar to what it was last year, it?l be all about Knowledge - although we?e slightly more focused this time and have a subtitle: “The Art of Knowledge”, and will experiment with the mixture of art and science that is knowledge. Last year we were lucky to have over 50 people turn up from diverse areas of expertise such as: Knowledge Management, New Media, Semantic Web, Business, Chemistry and Psychology… and we hope to continue to have a diverse mixture of people to take on the subject of knowledge, with a twist of art.

I hope that you will be able to join us, as this will be a really exciting event.

Feel free to get in touch any time if you have any queries:

Daniel Lewis
* UK Telephone: 07834355516
* International Telephone: +447834355516
* Email and Jabber: danieljohnlewis [at] gmail [dot] com
* Bristol Knowledge Unconference 2009 website: https://www.craftivism.net/wiki/UnCraftivism/Bristol_Knowledge_Unconference_2009
* Twitter: @danieljohnlewis
* Skype: daniel.lewis

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? perfect (i.e. they don? 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? 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? absolutely fantastic that more and more people are taking up Semantic Web solutions and providing RDF.

Guys and Girls it? time for the next step!

This is something that I?e been thinking about for a while. People, although they are taking up the SemWeb, they don? seem to understand the full power of it? expressiveness. This isn? a providing problem, this is a usage problem…. Yes it? 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? *just* be an academic thing. Systems which embrace this, and which are in the wild, would greatly benefit. It? 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

Rumours have it, that there will be another Bristol Knowledge Unconference.

The last one was a success… a good turn out, some interesting talks and discussions. So it? only right to do another one.

This one coming up doesn? have a date yet, or a location. It will, unlike the previous, have a “theme” which I?l be trying to get speakers for…. and of course, it?l be in Bristol somewhere.

So… I need some helpers. Please do get in contact with me if you can:

• help me find a location
• help do some general organisational/administrative assistance
• offer to do a talk about knowledge, set to a specific them
• give some money to pay for food and drink

I will strive to make this Unconference completely free for attendees, which does mean that we require the location to be free (or sponsored) and the food to be supplied (or paid for) by some organisation(s)/people.

So please do get in contact if you can help in any way by sending me an email ( danieljohnlewis at gmail dot com ). Else, I?l keep you all up to date through my blog.

Thank you,

Daniel Lewis

Good News!

My second article through IBM developerWorks has been published! (there are one or two things wrong with this article, I won? say anything about it for now and will try to rectify it asap!)

It? titled “Building Semantic Web CRUD operations using PHP” (<- click the title to go read it). It? essentially about showing:

• The similarities and differences between the Relational Database Model and the Resource Description Framework model.
• The similarities and differences between SQL and SPARQL.
• How to implement SPARQL calls for Creation, Reading, Updation and Deletion (CRUD) operations using PHP.

After a bit of toying with it (keep at it, because it will be challenging but worth it!), you should be able to build your Web Application with RDF and SPARQL manipualtion.

If anyone has any questions about it (or about my previous developerWorks article which was titled “Intelligent Agents and the Semantic Web“) then please do let me know.

Oh yeah, by the way… both of my articles so far have been “featured” articles on the IBM developerWorks front page

Daniel

Hi all,

Just letting you all know that this months Semantic Web Gang podcast for October 2008 was released today. It? available on the The Semantic Web Gang blog as a post titled “October 2008: The Semantic Web Gang discusses the launch of Twine“. It is in fact about the recent public release of the Twine.com system by Radar Networks.

Plus, we?e got Nova Spivack (the CEO of Radar/Twine) and Jim Wissner (the Chief Architect of Twine) on the call!

It? great. I am on the call, I didn? say much on the call particularly as just as I was about to ask a question someone else usually piped up just before me and asked a question (often the same question!). I appear at the start and the end of the recording though.

The central thing that I am interested in is actually still under the hood of Twine. I? incredibly interested by the progression of the recommendation algorithms, particularly through modern machine learning techniques. I? also interested in their automatic ontology editing. It? very exciting, and I do have a feeling that the public release that you see today isn? the entirety of twine.

It was lovely to speak to Nova and Jim, and the rest of the gang. There should be another episode later this month

Enjoy!

Daniel

Wow! The UK Government have gone all BBC Backstage on us!

I?e just read the article on the BBC News Website entitled “Government launches data mash-up“. In the spirit of competition, I thought I would share this information with you all.

The campaign/competition is about generating good ideas which can be done with new Government data, this is called “Show us a better way“… and involves information from various sectors including Neighbourhood Statistics, NHS Hospital Information, other Healthcare Information, Schooling Information and information from London Gazette.

Unfortunately, all this information doesn? seem to be have some kind of common access and they it all seems to be in different formats (there? even an Excel file!). So a warning in advance is that you?l have to do some transformations on the data before you can start using the data together.

This is where the difference between Mash-ups and Mesh-ups come!

Mash-ups

When you do a Mash-up, you generally have to bodge two or more data sources together (using data transformations). Then you have to use a lot of hard work stick it into a graphical user interface of some kind.

Mesh-ups

When you do a Mesh-up, two or more data sources are meshed together smoothly and a graphical user interface can be laid on top with little-to-no work. This is done because the data is in an agnostic format, but uses the same modelling framework. This is what RDF offers, as it is not a format it is a modelling language… it doesn? matter what the format is (it could be RDF/XML, RDF/N3, XHTML+RDFa, (X)HTML+Microformats) it will be understandable as RDF. Coupled with the rules of Linked Data, it also offers a common access using well established web practices and protocols!!!

Summary

I am very glad that the UK Government is putting this competition on… but it would be better if all their services followed a standardised modelling framework (and therefore become a Mesh-Up rather than an early naughties Mash-Up). I may enter the competition… but it? quite the wrong time for me at the moment.

Anyways,

Bye for now.

Daniel

1995 (and the early 90?) must have been a visionaries time of dreaming… most of their dreams are happening today.

Watch Steve Jobs (then of NeXT) discuss what he thinks will be popular in 1996 and beyond at OpenStep Days 1995:

• “The Future of Objects, 3/5″ by Steve Jobs (YouTube Video)
• “The Future of Objects, 4/5″ by Steve Jobs (YouTube Video)

Heres a spoiler:

• There is static web document publishing
• There is dynamic web document publishing
• People will want to buy things off the web: e-commerce

The thing that OpenStep propose is:

• WebObjects: an Object Oriented representation of Data available in distributed form over the web

What Steve was suggesting was one of the beginnings of the Data Web! Yep, Portable Distributed Objects and Enterprise Objects Framework was one of the influences of the Semantic Web / Linked Data Web…. not surprising as Tim Berners-Lee designed the initial web stack on a NeXT computer!

I? going to spend a little time this evening figuring out how much “distributed objects” stuff has been taken from the OpenStep stuff into the Objective-C + Cocoa environment. (<- I guess I must be quite geeky ;-))