Well I’ve 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’ll be all about Knowledge - although we’re 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

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

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’s only right to do another one.

This one coming up doesn’t have a date yet, or a location. It will, unlike the previous, have a “theme” which I’ll be trying to get speakers for…. and of course, it’ll 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’ll keep you all up to date through my blog.

Thank you,

Daniel Lewis

Here are some predictions for Computing & IT in 2009:

  • Hardware
    • More and more Cloud Computing services (and improvements)
    • Personal Supercomputer Hardware (such as NVidia Tesla)
  • Software
    • Advancement of ease-of-use in Operating Systems, particularly Linux… which will see more of a take up this year than ever before.
    • Browsers (particularly Mozilla-based and Opera) will start to contain more and more Semantic Web based features.
  • Web
    • More people and organisations providing Semantic Web services. Leaders in this field will help greatly, such as the BBC, BT and the UK Government.
    • The original developers and advocates of the Semantic Web, will start to move away from it a little in an attempt to improve the semantics of the Semantic Web. Areas such as Fuzzy Logic, Bayesian Probability, Advanced Description Logic, Intelligent Agents and Artificial Neural Networks will be bridged with the Semantic Web by researchers.
    • Web development will become more and more like desktop application development.
    • Web design will become more focused on providing the data rather than providing pictures, fusing with Information Architecture.

BUT! More importantly, things may seem to slow down in terms of development within the computing field. This won’t be entirely the case, we’ll see more efficiency improvements than feature additions… and these developments will probably help the efficiency of those companies using that software/hardware.

Although I’ve mentioned all of this. Please note that I truly feel that we should move away from a materialistic view to a more societal and/or spiritual point of view. This means that although new things may be released in the future, we should recognise them, but not be tempted by them if they are not necessary updates.

Hi all,

Just letting you all know that this months Semantic Web Gang podcast for October 2008 was released today. It’s 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’ve got Nova Spivack (the CEO of Radar/Twine) and Jim Wissner (the Chief Architect of Twine) on the call!

It’s great. I am on the call, I didn’t 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’m incredibly interested by the progression of the recommendation algorithms, particularly through modern machine learning techniques. I’m also interested in their automatic ontology editing. It’s very exciting, and I do have a feeling that the public release that you see today isn’t 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

Intelligent Agents and the Semantic Web

One of my (independent) articles has been published as a feature article on the IBM developerWorks website. It is “Intelligent Agents and the Semantic Web“. Not only that, but they also published a podcast episode with me. Have a read, the examples are in Java, but all the theory applies to any programming language and agent library.

What? “Semantic” Web, “Linked” Data and Web “3.0″? What are they?!!!?

Today (Tuesday 28th October 2008), I gave a seminar/discussion of the new web-based buzzwords, and explained that terms like Semantic Web, Linked Data and Web 3.0 aren’t marketing nonsense but very well defined techniques and technologies. The seminar went really well, and the ideas were well received.

In fact, you can have a look at the “iPaper” version of the slides , thanks to my academia.edu account.

New main website design

I’ve got a brand new combine harvester…. well, actually a new main website design which explains what I do, what I’m interested in… and gives a lot more info than my old one did. Go have a look at vanirsystems.com.

linkeddata, semweb @ 16 September 2008, “No Comments”

Good news for the Linked Data community comes from Berlin student Christian Becker, who provides us with information about BBC Interlinking with DBPedia:


commissioned to create links between DBpedia and an internal BBC vocabulary, which enable the BBC to use DBpedia/Wikipedia as a

controlled vocabulary

Keep up the good work Christian!

Yeah, you heard me right:

Linked Data is more important than the Large Hadron Collider

My points:

  • I feel that the Large Hadron Collider is a bit of a waste of time, money and a big waste of energy (think of all the carbon emissions!).
    • Why do we need to know the very very smallest parts of things?
    • Why do we need to know what happened microseconds after the big bang?
    • Why not just analyse what happened if the Higgs Boson was and wasn’t found (every possible aspect)?
    • Face it: It’s not going to cure Cancer, or prevent HIV
    • Face it: we’re still going to be here whether or not the Large Hadron Collider was successful
  • Linked Data on the other hand is incredibly important
    • Everything in real life (conceptual/abstract and objective/physical) is interconnected with everything else
    • We have a lot of data about everything, but it’s not interconnected
    • Linked Data allows for the interconnectedness of data, and therefore true computation modelling of everything. Which then allows for a real and useful insight into scientific (and artistic and historic) data!
    • Just imagine a world where you can easily browse through the history of the atom, and then delve into the science found on the atom, and then go deeper into the subatomic level, and then browse back out into the historic realm, finding out about experiments that happened and whether it had any impact on society.
    • Thanks to Linked Data:
      • a lot of problems can be solved before they arise
      • new areas of research can be formed
      • “recreating the wheel” can be prevented
      • a really interesting browsing experience can be achieved

So there we go. That is why Linked Data is more important than the Large Hadron Collider….

Sorry to the physics-geeks, but maybe you can gain something useful from Linked Data if you aren’t already. I know that some Chemistry and Physics people already have some Semantic Web / Linked Data research & development going on, and hey Tim Berners-Lee did start the Web project at CERN.

I fear that a lot of people within science and even computer science forget to look at things with Holistic eyes, as a lot of science and mathematics is incredibly Reductionist.

Kingsley Idehen made an interesting blog post recently in a question and answer format (see his blog post: “The future of the desktop“), so i’ve decided to provide my own answers:

Q: Is the desktop of the future going to just be a web-hosted version of the same old-fashioned desktop metaphors we have today?

A: In terms of becoming web-based the desktop as we know it will not change much at the very surface level. I doubt that a web-hosted version of the old-fashioned Operating System would ever be stable enough (some of you will know if you’ve ever used a “

dumb-terminal“). The Operating System, however, is likely to become more and more web-aware; taking up more and more of the challenge of “Web Universal Plug and Play”.

Q: The desktop of the future is going to be a hosted web service

A: False. I think it’ll be totally the inverse, I’m even inclined to say that everybody would host their own space which is interconnected with other services across the web…. it won’t be a “hosted web service”.

Q: The Browser is Going to Swallow Up the Desktop

A: Interestingly this is where Microsoft were heading in the right direction… the file system explorer was also the internet explorer, just by changing the location in the address bar you were capable of switching from file mode to web mode. (takes quite a lot for me to admit that). If you have a fully integrated system then you can take full advantage of everything. The web of documents, is a web of documents…. what are file systems good at manipulating… documents (and also viewing metadata)! So is the browser going to swallow up the desktop? No… it already has.

Q: The focus of the desktop will shift from information to attention

A: No information is vital…. attention will become an interesting part of search, but it’s actually has to maximise utilisation of information (aka knowledge) in order to do it’s best (just as any other program needs to do). This effects both desktop systems and browser systems.

Q: Users are going to shift from acting as librarians to acting as daytraders

A: People are always going to categorise things, and other people will always want things categorised. How can you expect someone to trawl through their bookmarks without them being categorised? However, things will become more automised when interlinked with other interlinked data…. therefore users are likely to become Personalised Knowledge Managers controlling what knowledge they possess and how they want their intelligent agents to deal with it.

Q: The Webtop will be more social and will leverage and integrate collective intelligence

A: OK, first off… really bad terminology usage going on here. Webtop? That’s a bad name… and for something which I don’t think will become widespread. Also collective intelligence is actually about agents having specific knowledge. The web-aware desktop will slowly include more and more agent technology (see some of the Apple/Xerox work on Intelligent Agents and Intelligent User Interfaces done in the late 80s and early 90s) and will certainly encorporate

Linked Data technologies (see the Semantic Desktop and OpenLink Data Spaces).

Q: The desktop of the future is going to have powerful semantic search and social search capabilities built-in

A: Yes, I’ve mentioned this in most of my answers above.

Q: Interactive shared spaces will replace folders

A: I agree with Kingsley when he says “Data Spaces and their URIs (Data Source Names) replace everything. You simply choose the exploration metaphor that best suits you space interaction needs”… there is nothing more to say than that…. a URI is the key to a data space, a data space is where your data objects are stored which also have their own URIs.

Q: The Portable Desktop

A:The portable desktop (or ubiquitous desktop) will emerge as a mobilisation of a Linked Data desktop…. all depends on hardware at the moment. This will go beyond mobile phones, mobile computers (such as the Asus EEE) and PDA’s.

Q: The Smart Desktop

A: Yes, this is what I’ve been discussing.

Q: Federated, open policies and permissions

A: Have we not got the technologies for these points already :-)

Q: The personal cloud

A: Can’t add anything more to Kingsley’s point “

Personal Data Spaces plugged into Clouds (Intranet, Extranet, Internet).”

Q: The WebOS

A: There are some interesting implementations of the WebOS idea out there, and a few years I was actually considering building one using Ruby On Rails and AJAX….. really we don’t need to focus on this right now, it’s more about interlinking things (aka Linked Data)

Q: Who is most likely to own the future desktop?

A: I have nothing more to add to Kingsley’s comment: “You! And all you need is a

URI (an ID or Data Source Name for “Entity You”) and a Profile Page (a place where “Entity You” is Describe by You).”

SemanticBible Linked Data: Version Alpha 1

I am very very pleased to announce something which I have been working on for a while which is the transformation of SemanticBible into Linked Data. Please be aware that this a very early version at the moment, and so if you see it break when you are looking around then I’m probably improving and enhancing it.

More information (and recent update information) is available on the Linked Data SemanticBible about page. But here’s a quote from it for you:

SemanticBible is an online Semantic Web version of the Bible, it has lots of facts and figures about the Christian sacred texts. Please do have a browse around.

A Brief History

SemanticBible started life as a project by Sean Boisen over at SemanticBible.com, but Daniel Lewis and his colleagues at OpenLink Software decided to help Sean out by providing a Linked Data based approach. The outcome was this service.

Starting URIs:

  • https://semanticbible.openlinksw.com/bible/cgi : The Composite Gospel : holds information about the stories in the Gospels
  • https://semanticbible.openlinksw.com/bible/NTIndividuals :New Testament Individuals : holds information about people and places referenced in the New Testament
  • https://semanticbible.openlinksw.com/ontology/cgi : The Composite Gospel Ontology : the vocabulary for describing the stories in the Gospel
  • https://semanticbible.openlinksw.com/ontology/NTNames : The New Testament Names Ontology : The vocabulary for describing the people and places referenced in the New Testament

As I said before, do expect it to break randomly…. but if it seems like theres something not quite right, or if you have any feature requests that you wish to add then do email my work email ( dlewis[at]openlinksw[dot]com ) or skype me ( daniel.lewis ).