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

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.

I’m thinking about upgrading this blog. It’s currently running using the WordPress 2.3.3 engine, and so I’m finally thinking about upgrading it to the latest WordPress (version 2.7).

I’m in the process of updating a test blog to 2.7, in order to test that my theme doesn’t break. If I do update this blog then it’ll probably be this weekend or next week, I’ll let you know how it goes! (But there may be some down time if something goes wrong, so if you come back and see the blog down then you know why )

Cheers,

Daniel

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.

Good News!

My second article through IBM developerWorks has been published! (there are one or two things wrong with this article, I won’t say anything about it for now and will try to rectify it asap!)

It’s titled “Building Semantic Web CRUD operations using PHP” (<- click the title to go read it). It’s 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’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

What is Google Chrome?

Google Chrome is a fresh expression of web browser, they’ve tried to make it quite bare-bones in terms of user interface but the backend is hooked into Mozilla Gecko (the engine behind Firefox, K-Meleon and Camino) and WebKit (the engine behind Apple’s Safari, and Adobe AIR), but with it’s own JavaScript engine (also Open Source) called V8.

At the time of writing this, only the Windows version was available. Mac and Linux versions are due to be released soon.

I’m writing this on Wednesday 3rd September 2008, I’m testing Google Chrome version 0.2.146.27 on Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate on a Toshiba Qosmio (2.4GHz Intel Dual Core).

Initial impressions

• Good: It’s reasonably quick with loading pages, everything seems to load up at the same time.
• Good: I like the URI highlighting. You’ll notice in the address bar the domain name is darker than the protocol, directory and file names
• Good: It handles viewing my own webpage nicely
• Good: handles javascript graphics manipulation well (for instance, my recent ModernEsotericChristianity page which uses the OpenLink AJAX ToolKit load up RDF and then show (and manipulate) an SVG graph using JavaScript)
• Good: It loads scriptaculous and jQuery (including Visual jQuery) well.
• Good: you can use search engines other than Google, in the address/search bar.
• Bad: No menu bar… I can’t stand not having a menu bar, not having one is one of the things I really dislike in Microsoft Windows Vista, the newest Microsoft Office and Microsoft Internet Explorer. It is a lot easier to use a menu bar than it is to use some silly drop down button.
• Bad: No status bar
• Bad: No plugins/add-ons/extensions… like the Firefox extensions that you get. Personally, I can’t live without the Web Developer Toolbar and OpenLink Data Explorer. I know that some people wouldn’t be able to live without Firebug, and soon alot of people will crave Mozilla Ubiquity.

Tests

How about using well established web-based tests to find out how it fairs up against Firefox, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer.

Conclusion

The conclusion is, if you want stability when it comes to accessing pages then go for Google Chrome as it is most likely to render the style and graphics of a page correctly. Safari comes up second in terms of style renderisation, followed by Firefox and Opera. Quite clearly you should never use Internet Explorer.

In terms of easiest to use, Chrome provides a nice interface but I think it needs some extra bits (such as a menu bar). Opera also provides some neat user experience features. Safari is really simple to use. Firefox has a reasonable user interface and it’s theming can make things even easier if desired. I personally find Internet Explorer really awkward to use.

For extensibility, nothing beats Firefox. The add-on system is practically perfect with its update from repository feature, and there are so many extensions in that repository. There are some plugins for Safari (see pimpmysafari.com ) , although not many. Unfortunately Chrome doesn’t have extensions yet, but as it reuses modules from the Firefox and Safari engine I suspect it will do in the future. As far as I know Opera and Internet Explorer don’t really have extensions yet, their developers tend to prefer to build features into the software.

For now, I think I’ll be sticking with Firefox… but I do suspect that Google Chrome will grow, and because of competition that will make Firefox, Safari and the other browsers grow also.

Peace and Light,

Daniel

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UPDATE - the hour of 0 on the 10th September 2008

After making a fresh install of the 64bit Opera version 9.25 on my Ubuntu machine I achieved an 84/100 score for the Acid3 test. Which is obviously the highest score available now.

The weirdest thing is that in order to achieve such a high score, it needs to be a fresh install… not quite sure why. Please note that the scores in my original post are not fresh installs and, Firefox in particular, had a lot of use before the test.