Daniel’s Blog

I’m quite tired as it’s quite late and I’ve been working on the new site all evening. But, I have just released it! It’s 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’s at the very beginnings of it’s life, and I’m planning to do a lot with it. I hope you enjoy using it! You can use it like this (via twitter):
“Hi everyone. I’m currently located here: https://lc8n.eu/a , quite tired because I’ve 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’ve spotted then please do get in touch. I’ll be more than happy to answer.

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

Heres a quick SPARQL snippet to get a list of the worlds Newspapers along with their political stance. It is only a quick one, with a bit more work its possible to get the English titles of the Newspapers and the Political stances.

SELECT ?Newspaper ?Stance WHERE {
?Newspaper rdf:type dbpedia-owl:Newspaper;
<https://dbpedia.org/property/political> ?Stance}

Plug that into the DBPedia SPARQL interface: https://dbpedia.org/sparql

and get out the result for newspapers and their political perspective.

Tada! Quick bit of Semantic Web goodness!

Cheers,
Daniel

[update]fixed evil wordpress formatting on part of my sparql query[/update]

Hi all,

One of my last blog posts was about trying to find a job here in/around Bristol. Well the good news is that I’ve found something to do

From today (Wednesday 10th June 2009), I have a two week contract at nameless. A lovely web design/development agency in the heart of Bristol. They really are a lovely company, who know practically everything about nice user interfaces coupled with strict observance of web standards. It’s going to be good to work as a Content Analyst (a task which is usually assigned to Information Architects) for them for two weeks - particularly as I know some of their staff quite well.

But that’s only a temporary thing. After the two weeks with nameless, I shall be going into permanent full-time work at another web agency in Bristol called Sift Media, which is a publishing company specialising in professional (B2B) online communities (those in Accounting may know of AccountingWEB, those into Knowledge Management may know of KnowledgeBoard…. both of these are projects by Sift Media). I shall be working in the technical team at Sift Media as a Web Developer and probably will offer my various other skills (such as Technical Writing, Knowledge Engineering, Semantic Web etc) when they are needed. Sift Media is part of a larger organisation called The Sift Group, which is a more general web organisation providing the Collaboration and Social Networking platform called Sift Unity.

I’m very excited at being able to work for both nameless and Sift Media, as both are incredibly professionally and socially reputable organisations.

This is the next part of my journey!

Thank you to all of those who have helped me in my job search, and to those who have sent me their best wishes. I really appreciate it.

Cheers,

Daniel

A recent article by the BBC (titled “Hi-tech aims to improve lifestyle“) got me thinking about technology over history. I mean beyond my previous articles about the web, and actually about technology in general.

Historically, technology has been developed for one of the following purposes:

• To automate what would have been done by (costly) human hands
• To provide more information
• To make things easier, and hopefully making money along the way

But has sometimes left us with these side effects:

• Information overload
• Extreme amounts of advertising
• Job loss and bizarre positions
• Extreme energy consumption
• Procrastination

It is about time that technology started to work in the favour of the natural human being, as well as nature in general. I’d like to see technology which is able to work out methods which create more energy than it actually uses. I’d like to see technology which allows human society get fitter. I’d like to see technology which helps humans use telephones instead of relying on web-based/textual communication. I’d like to see technology which removes us from the screen. I’d like to see technology which gives us worldwide freedom.

Maybe we’re on the way there…. or maybe my dream is only possible by devolving technology and going back to basics by working the land with our hands. Let us hope it is the first, because it is probably too late for the latter.

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.

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.

Random thought:

If the Google Docs system interfaced directly with your hard drive (but still through the browser, potentially running locally) would you use it over OpenOffice / Microsoft Office?

I think it might be quite good. I’ve used Google Docs quite a lot recently, but find it a bit of a nuisance the files aren’t directly on my hard drive.

I’d be interested in hearing other peoples views.