Ivan's Blog

Frederick Giasson just posted a blog on the renewed Music Ontology Specification, trying to make it as close to the MusicBrainz project as possible. It will also be possible to query the MusicBrainz database via SPARQL endpoints. Really great stuff!

While we are at it, however… Personally, I listen mostly to classical music, and I’m always frustrated that most of these ontologies, databases, etc, are not really prepared for that at all. I own an iPod, it is all right as a device, but the terminology it uses is really not prepared for that (think of the terms “song” or “album”, for example). But yesterday, on #swig, Frederick also gave me the reference for a classical music ontology: the “Music Vocabulary” defined by Kanzaki Masahide. For that minority of us caring about classical music, this is a good resource to have…

Read through the paper of Bechhofer & al[1] from ISWC. Interesting stuff. Use Semantic Web to help accessibility problems. Per se, this is not new, but the approach of Bechhofer & al. seems promising. What they do is (1) extract CSS class names from an HTML page (not necessarily XHTML…) and (2) use ontologies to categorize the role of each element (as referred to by CSS). Using the knowledge gained from the ontology a tool can rearrange the page, remove unnecessary elements, etc. The ontologies consist of two parts: on the one hand a general ontology describing the possible roles of various elements in general ( e.g., menus) and, on the other hand, specific ontologies for a specific classes of pages. Eg, ontologies are available for all the CNN.com pages, or for the blogger.com blogs. (There is a much better description on the project’s home page.)

Having some contacts with the Web accessibility community (eg, via my contact with the Accessibilty.nl group here in the Netherlands) I know how really difficult these things are. Also, the fact that the Web designers’ community has not really adopted XHTML over HTML makes the development of various tools even more difficult. The advantage of SADIe seems to be that it annotates the (now ubiquitous) CSS tags rather than relying on the content of the (X)HTML page; also, the ontology can be defined for a specific Web site (or family of sites) independently so that no extra information has to be added to the site itself.

Although the project is still in research, I was curious, so I tried the on-line facility for some sites. I was not very lucky with the CNN home page; there was hardly any difference. But, when I randomly chose a blog on blogger.com, the difference with the site generated by the tool is noticable (e.g., the menus are rearranged):

I did not compare this with the output of other tools (like Opera’s small screen rendering which does similar things based on very different techniques). But it is certainly promising.

It is interesting that Danny Ayers just published a blog on turning CSS sructures into RDF. The current tool of SADIe is a javascript goody analysing the DOM tree of the page, and using the CSS ontology knowledge to massage the DOM tree. However, if the CSS structure can be turned into RDF, this can then be mashed up with the Ontology defined by SADIe; ie, other tools can do nice things with those data, too (for example, specialized queries could extract the meaningful information from the page, stuff like that). Could become even more interesting…

1. “SADIe: Semantic Annotation for Accessibility”, by Sean Bechhofer, Simon Harper, and Darren Lunn

Óriási tehetség volt. Fiatal korában már minden hozzáértő felfigyelt rá, és óriási jövőt jósolt neki. Mind otthoni mind nemzetközi porondon öregbítette Magyarország jó hírét. Aztán, az otthoni politikai körülmények, saját biztonsága és jövője miatt, elhagyta az országot és “nyugaton” telepedett le. Külföldön folytatta karrierjét, óriási népszerűségre tett szert. Elérte mindazt amit az adott területen el lehetett érni: nemzetközi elismertséget, tekintélyt, befolyást, kitüntetéseket, tiszteletet. Soha nem tagadta meg magyarságát, mindenki úgy ismerte, hogy a “magyar”; többet tett a magyar név ismertségéért mint megannyi nagybeszéd vagy hivatalos esemény. Hosszú élet után nemrégiben elhunyt. A szakma sokáig fog még rá emlékezni.

Állami gyásznapot azonban Magyarországon nem hirdettek, a TV-ben vagy a rádióban éppen hogy megemlítették. Az illető nem focista volt, nem jelentett populista népszerűséget a körülötte lévő gyásznap meghirdetése és az azon való résztvétel. Solti Györgynek hívták (pontosabban: Sir Soltinak); elhunyt 1997-ben mint a huszadik század egyik legnagyobb karmesteregyénisége. Teller Edének hívták; elhunyt 2003-ben, mint atomfizikus, az Egyesült Államokbeli tudományos élet egyik legnagyobb befolyású egyénisége. Cziffra Györgynek hívták, elhunyt 1994-ben, mint Liszt Ferenc zongoraműveinek utolérhetetlen előadója, és megannyi fiatal zongoraművész támogatója.

A sort folytathatnám, és csak olyanokat emlegetek itt akiknek halála arra az időre esett, amikor ez az állami gyásznap, mint jogi fogalom, már létezett. Egyedül vagyok-e abban a meggyőződésemben, hogy valami itt nem egészen stimmel?

I regularly follow the updates on the “Books on Semantic Web” wiki page. I just found out that for most of the books a new entry has been added: a reference to the book mashup service of Chris Bizer & friends. It is really a great service, thanks Chris!

The only disadvantage is that the various RDF references are spread over the wiki page, so it is not easy to make, for example, SPARQL queries over the whole list of books. To make this easier I made a small python program that simply collects all mashup data for the books on the wiki, merges them into one, and puts the result back on the Web as one RDF resource. The script is ran once a day, so there might be a bit of delay when updating the book list. (I could have added it as a CGI script, and I may do it at some point; the problem is that collecting all the data takes quite a long time, so it is not ideal as a service…)

I had one of those “aha” moments today. I am at the AC meeting of W3C and listened to a presentation on the Internationalization Tag Set work done at W3C. Essentially, the group tries to define a set of generic (XML) attributes and elements relevant and important for internationalization. One of the possible examples is the proper handling of right-to-left scripts in left-to-right one (like Arabic or Hebrew put in an English text): how should one ensure that the text: “פעילות הבינאום, W3C” is properly displayed (i.e., with the ‘W3C’ at the left of the hebrew characters). It so happens that this requires an extra attribute (called ‘dir’ in HTML). HTML happens to have this attribute, but what the ITS group is working on is to define a generic set that could be used in other XML dialects, too. Another example is an attribute to denote whether a specific text should be translated or not.

The question is: what about RDF literals? How can one ensure that the right set of information are set on literals? At the moment we have only the language attribute, which is necessary, but may not be enough. And my “aha” moment was: if we did not have the restriction in the RDF model which says that literals cannot be subjects of triplets then this would be way easier. The current terminologies used in ITS could have a variant in the form of an RDF vocabulary and be used to characterize literals. This may not cover all internationalization issues (like Ruby markup, for example), but may be o.k. for most.

Of course, one has to be very, very cautious in changing the RDF model and semantics, i.e., there might be some hidden mines here. But the internationalization issue may certainly be a good use case for looking at this restriction again…

(There is a really nice overview on the bidirectional issue above on the I18N site of W3C, if you are interested.)

As a typical example of programming by example, I have copied and changed the foaf explorer bookmarklet to make a tabulator bookmarklet. It looks for a link header element referring to application/rdf+xml, and sends the corresponding URI to the (latest version) of the tabulator. The tabulator will automatically load that RDF file, instead of starting up with its default values. Nothing fancy, but maybe useful. (Caveat: if there are several such link entries, the bookmarklet finds the first one only…)

(I wanted to put the bookmarklet itself, ie, the javascript: URI into this blog directly, but blosxom had problems displaying it. Oh well…)

Great keynote from Rudi Studer. An essential part of his keynote was the relationships between the Semantic Web and other communities (KR, Database, Software Engineering, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning). One aspect that I really appreciated in the keynote is that Rudi did not use his keynote on what he (or his team) did and does, but gave an overall view instead (I have seen too many of those self-centric keynotes…). My only respectful criticism is that the Web aspect was a bit missing. I think it was Chris Welty who said somewhere that the new thing in the Semantic Web is the Web; very often, when anaylising the relationships, Rudi did not really make it clear what the Semantic Web’s relationship is to a specific area as opposed to Semantic’s (ie, essentially, knowledge representation’s) relationships.

The most interesting part for me was what he said about the relationship to the Database community. Some new things I will have to learn, that is for sure (eg, he referred to the term “dataspaces”, which seem to be the new buzzword in that community). And, clearly, there is some extra outreach to be done in that space; I just read the blogs of Ian and Danny on the keynote of Mårten Mickos at the the Web 2.0 Summit, which does not look very good. We already had hallway discussion on trying to organize an event around the relationship between SW and databases in 2007 (eg, at W3C); maybe the topic should be a bit larger than I originally thought. To be followed up…

I had to give a talk in the next session, and I spent the rest of the day chatting with different people; ie, no more sessions. But I went to the closing ceremony. I was pleased to see the paper on DartGrid (see my previous blog) win the best paper price in the use cases category. And it was also a pleasure to see the team of Amsterdam win the Semantic Web challenge with their MultimediaN E-Culture demonstrator. What I particularly liked in their demonstration, beyond the technical content, was the beautifully designed user interface with nice, pastell colours, clear, clean, and non-cluttered screen. On the other hand, I can only repeat what I said elsewhere: I had to come to the other side of the globe to learn what people are doing at about 20 meters away from my office at CWI (and I also drive along the Vrije Universiteit with the tramway every time I go to the Office). Shame on me. Something should be done about it…

It was a great, albeit exhausting week (I also took part at a face-to-face meeting of the Rules Interchange Format Working Group last week). And I have a bunch of things to read in the proceedings still…

Only two papers really stuck with me on the second day; I missed a bunch of other sessions, sadly…

The paper of Motik & al[1] is one of the papers which explore the connections of Description Logic and Rules. Obviously, I will have to read the details in the proceedings, but my first understanding is that this is also based on a rules with the DL side being some sort of a black box. The only unusual aspect is the introduction of what they call “autoepistemic extenstion of DLs”. I must admit, this is the first time I hear about this thing, so I still have to understand it. But all this should be interesting. The paper is theoretical for now; my understanding is that there is no implementation yet, though somehow the feeling I got from the presentation is that the authors have a clear idea on how to implement it, so it should be a matter of time only.

The paper on DartGrid[2] is impressive. These guys did a huge work that covers a large palette of achievements: a system to map relational database content to RDF, with a nice user interface to control the details of that mapping; a query rewriter from SPARQL to the necessary SQL queries using those mapping; a semantic query system (backed up by ontologies) to search through those databases; user interfaces to generate queries, etc. And an application combining cca. 50 databases in one coherent system, with each database containing between 70,000 and 100,000 records. This application is deployed in the Chinese Academy of Traditional Medicine and is used by researchers there. Another application on neural research is under development at Yale. (By the way, the home page of the DartGrid project is in English, so you can look it up…) The paper was part of a session on eScience use cases; the other papers were also pretty nice!

There was also a panel on Web 2.0 in the evening. It was not really controversial and the goal was really to see how the Semantic Web could, in some ways, help the further development of Web 2.0. I liked Benjamin Grossof’s characterization, who said something like “it is better to be the child riding the elephant than the ant crashed by it”…

1. “Can OWL and Logic Programming Live Together Happily Ever After?”, by Boris Motik, Ian Horrocks, Riccardo Rosati, Ulrike Sattler
2. “From Legacy Relational Databases to the Semantic Web: an In-Use Application for Traditional Chinese Medicine”, by Chunyin Zhou, Yimin Wang, Heng Wang, Jinmin Tang, Zhaohui Wu, Ainin Yin, Huajun Chen, Yuxin Mao, Meng Cui

The problem with such a conference is that one spends as much time talking to other people as listening to the presentations. Great hallway talks, technical discussion, work… it is all good and important, but I always feel a bit guilty when I miss a session. Oh well…

I quite liked Tom Gruber’s keynote on “Social Web”. Tom tried to avoid the controversial Web 2.0 term and talked rather of the collective intelligence of folksonomies, tagging, blogging, etc. It was good to hear a talk that avoids the unnecessary controversy on the relationship between Web 2.0 and, say, the Semantic Web. Tom also talked about an attempt to give a more coherent ontological model for tagging, though it seems that this work is stalled due to missing people to work on it (see also an earlier blog he had on this for some more details). Would be good to pick this up…

The survey of the Web Ontology Landscape[1] was interesting. They survey a bunch of OWL and RDFS files trying to characterize them in terms of what level of OWL they use, what are the frequencies of usage of various facilities, etc. Although there were some criticisms on whether the sample they use was fully o.k., the conclusions were still interesting. Two things stuck for me: that a large number of OWL ontologies use a very “light” level of functionalities (which leads to the issue of having light ontologies and how important those are); and that a number of ontologies “slip” into OWL Full out of OWL DL due to some very small additional features they use. Bijan told me afterwards that if OWL1.1 were used, than those ontologies would remain OWL DL, actually, which is interesting.

I also quite liked the presentation of Fresnel[2], a language to express how one wants to see RDF data (a distant analogy is like CSS to HTML). The demonstrations showed by Emmanuel were really nice, and one would hope that more tools were at least testing this thing. It is really promising. I talked to Emmanuel later, by the way: it seems the IsaViz is one of the tools that does use this, though not the “stable” version at W3C. He said he would make a new stable version with Fresnel soon; we can then announce it on the SW Activity News page…

The same session included a presentation on /facet[3], a faceted user interface to RDF data. It looks really nice, though one can really have a “feel” to a tool like that by trying it. So I hope to install it on my machine soon to play with it (it requires SWI-prolog; well, that should not be a big problem…). The only slight caveat with this project: I had to come to the other side of the globe to learn what Michiel & Co. are doing, although their office is around 20 meters away from me at CWI… 

1. “A Survey of the Web Ontology Landscape”, by Taowei Wang, Bijan Parsia, Jim Hendler
2. “Fresnel: A Browser-Independent Presentation Vocabulary for RDF”, by Christian Bizer, Emmanuel Pietriga, David Karger, Ryan Lee
3. “/facet: A Browser for Heterogeneous Semantic Web Repositories”, by Michiel Hildebrand, Jacco van Ossenbruggen, Lynda Hardman

Having spend some vacations lately in Beijing, I also took photos, of course. I have finally worked through all of them and have put a selection of those on the Web (mixed with older photos that I took on previous occasions).

Actually, I also play with the Picasa Web Album site, and I have the same album on my site there. I quite like the Picasa program that I have been using to organize my photos for a while. Actually, I also quite like the Picasa Web Album, and I would love to use that site to store my photos but… there is a limitation on the amount of space that one can use for free and to buy a larger space one has to be in the US. No kidding: if you are not in the US (more exactly, if you do not have a US credit card, I guess), then you cannot buy a larger disc space. This parochialism is really offending.

Part of the Workshop was, in fact, a report on what the W3C Interest Group does. Being part of that one, it was not really new to me, but I hope that it was new to the audience… I was impressed, by the way, by the high turnout. This is really good!

But there were also “non-IG” presentations, although I was around only during the morning, so I cannot really comment on all of them. I think the one which impressed me the most came from the Center for Disease Control, in Atlanta, on how they collect data from all over the world for the purpose of global disease surveillance, ie, information on diseases that go beyond national boundaries (SARS, malaria, bird flue, etc). They collect very heterogenous data and they use RDF based technologies to combine those and present them to the user. (See an example interface of what they present.) Impressive stuff. Mashup on a giant scale.

One question did come up, actually, during question time (with them and others): it is nice to see an application pattern whereby very hetereogeneous data are integrated via RDF, and then sophisticated search interfaces are offered to the user to query the data. However, it is very important that the core RDF data should be reachable and shared as raw data. Ie, if other people want to use that data directly, it should not be “hidden” behind beautiful SPARQL engine interfaces… Moreover, the links to the RDF data should be easy to find for everyone to use. The Semantic Web is (also) about sharing data…

In the afternoon I went to the panel on Interaction Design Grand Challanges and the Semantic Web.The panelists (TimBL, Jim Hendler, Nigel Shadbolt, David Karger) had lots of interesting (and sometimes fun) things to say on the issue of interaction with Semantic Web Data (or user interaction in general), on the role (or the lack of role  of ontologies, etc. Nigel had an interesting slide which showed the graphical representation of a pretty large ontology, but it also turned out that, in practice, users use only a very small part of that ontology in practice. The whole issue of “shallow” ontologies came up several times, something definitely to follow up.

However, I must admit I was a bit disappointed, though I also realize that this was my fault. The panel being sponsored by the new WSRI, and all the panelists being somehow involved with this stuff, I was hoping to hear more about some more general, WSRI related ideas and plans (personally, I am mostly interested by the question whether and how WSRI will look at issues like the effect of the Web on societies at large, in a new type of web-illeteracy, etc). But, as I said, it was my fault because it was a false expectation; after all, this panel was indeed part of a Semantic Web User Interface Workshop… Anyway. I think I will have the opportunity to hear about those issues, too.

I had the pleasure of participating at the Uncertainty Reasoning for the Semantic Web (URSW) Workshop today in Athens, GA, right before ISWC. There were quite a number of nice presentations although, I must say, I missed some more practical application examples; most of the papers were quite theoretical. But well, I guess that phase is also important. I must admit I still have to read through the papers themselves to grasp all details, though.

I have already written about similar subject some times ago, where I referred to some work on extending SHOIN(D) towards fuzzy logic. The drawback of the approaches I knew about is that they all needed the development of new type of reasoners, i.e., fuzzy DL engines. And that is really an obstacle for their acceptance. In this respect it was interesting to see one of the papers[1] that aims at overcoming this drawback by attempting a mapping of a fuzzy SHOIN(D) to traditional (“crisp”) DL, which means that, though the user can still express his/her statements using fuzzy DL, after the translation a traditional DL engine can be used. The drawback seems to be that the number of generated crisp axioms is pretty high (sometimes quadratic). But it is certainly a direction to explore.

Another (position) paper that caught my interest was a paper on “Probabilistic DLP”[2]. The Description Logic Programming approach has become pretty well known in the past few years: essentially, the way you could combine logic programming is to treat a DL knowledge base as a black box, and you could ask “questions” to a DL reasoner while evaluating your LP rules. It is a neat separation of two different view of the World. Calì and Lukasiewicz[2] have put an additional twist by allowing probabilistic values be assigned to the logic programming part (the “rules”) while leaving the DL part unchanged, ie, “crisp”. It is a bit like the previous paper: you leave your DL reasoner intact for efficiency. I must say I missed some real-life examples to see that this approach is really useful, ie, that you do not have to mix in probabilistic reasoning into the DL World.

Nicles and Cobos[3] extend DL (ie, OWL) by adding so-called social contexts. If you have statements like Hero(Columbus), you can express things like “Tina asserts to Tim and Tom that Hero(Columbus)”, whereas “Tim and Tom asserts to Tina that Exploiter(Columbus) and ¬Hero(Columbus)” (it seems that the AI community has used similar constructs for a while, I must admit it is new to me). Beyond the familiar ABox and TBox, one has now a set of SBox-s to express these “context” information. It may actually be quite interesting to see where this would lead: when talking to outsiders about the Semantic Web one of the issues that do come up is how to describe the provenance of RDF assertions, what is their value in a given context, etc. This type of work may lead in that direction. Again, I would have liked to see a real-World example… (they also have a Web site for the project).

Last but certainly not least, it is worth bookmarking the PR-OWL site. Not only does it refer to a line of research on combining probabilistic reasoning with OWL (that is what “PR-OWL” stands for), but the site also has a number of good references to what other people have done in the area. Such resources are really good to see and have…

The last session of the Workshop was actually very interesting. The organisers (Paulo da Costa, Kathryn and Ken Laskey) clearly wanted to move towards more practical goals, trying to get out of the ivory tower of academic research. So the audience was divided into small break-out groups to draft variants of real use cases in using some form of uncertainty reasoning. A number of those were drafted, from bioinformatics to wine ontologies. The idea is to propose a W3C Incubator Group where such use cases, with categorization and sketches for solutions, could be collected more systematically, and the use cases drafted at the Workshop would be the first, starting set. The goal is that, eventually, the Incubator Group could provide valuable input to various other W3C groups (like the Rule Interchange Format or Deployment Working Groups) that could address this whole area in conjunction with their respective work. That may be very interesting indeed. One more area to watch…

It was a good day. Looking forward to the rest of the week!

1. “Crisp Representation for Fuzzy SHOIN with Fuzzy Nominals and General Concept Inclusions”, by F. Bobillo, M. Delgado, and J. Gómez-Romero.
2. “An Approach to Probabilistic Data Integration for the Semantic Web”, by A. Calì and T. Lukasiewicz
3. “Social Contexts and the Probabilistic Fusion and Ranking of Opinions: Towards a Social Semantics for the Semantic Web”, by M. Nickles and R. Cobos
4. “Probabilistic Ontologies for Efficient Resource Sharing in Semantic Web Services”, by P.C.G. da&nsbp;Costa, K.B. Laskey, and K.J. Laskey

I had the pleasure, yesterday evening, to see the movie “Girl With a Pearl Earring” (courtesy of the Belgian TV…). The movie itself is, well, a fiction; I think I actually preferred the original novel by T. Chevalier. What captivated was not really the story but the beautiful work done by the cameraman. Some of the shots were really like the paintings of J.&Vermeer in terms of light, colour, etc.

And the movie reminded me again how absolutely beautiful the original painting of Vermeer is. I remember being so captivated by it at my last visit in the Hague at the Mauritiushuis that I sat down on a couch facing the painting and I just stayed there for a very very long time, completely absorbed by the view. It certainly is, at least for me, one of the highlights of classical Flamish/Dutch painting, and of European painting in general. It was good to see such a movie and remind me again…

Szeptemberben már írtam a holland választások érdekes példájáról, miszerint a holland tervhivatal végigszámolja a politikai pártok választási igéreteit. Nos, az eljövendő (november 22-i) választások pártigereteit átszámolták, és az eredményeket tegnap hozták nyilvánosságra. És láss csodát: praktikusan az összes párt (jobb és baloldal egyaránt) korrekt számokkal jött, vagyis az általuk javasolt gazdasági számítások reálisak. (Na ja, ha egy pártnál ez nem lenne igaz, elvesztenék megbízhatóságukat a szavazóknál!) Amit a tervihivatal kiszámolt az az, hogy:

• az egyik pártnál a várható átlagjövedelememelkedés (mondjuk) 2%, a másiknál 2,5%
• az egyik pártnál a társadalmi juttatások (munkanélküli vagy munkaképtelenségi segély, ilyesmi) ennyivel nőnek, a másiknál ennyivel csökkennek
• ennyivel nő/csökken az államadósság
• stb

És minden párt boldog volt; olyan volt mint egy vizsga, ahol mindenki „átment”. A holland polgár pedig az irányultságok alapján választhat: akar-e több kiadást a társadalmi juttatásokra avagy nem, több környezetvédelmi programot avagy sem, stb.

Nem vagyok naív. Tudom, hogy vannak itt is trükkök, és közelről a leányzó fekvése soha sem olyan szép. De azért álmaimban feldereng egy világ Magyarországon, ahol az MSZP, SZDSZ, MDF és a Fidesz választási igéreteit előzetesen átszámolják független szakértők, és az eredményeket nagy fanfárral nyilvánosságra hozzák hetekkel a választások előtt. Talán kiderült volna, hogy mind Gyurcsány mind az Orbán áprilisi igéretei fantazmagóriák voltak… Álmodni szabad, nem?

(Aki esetleg tud hollandul, vagy egyéb germán nyelvek alapján elboldogul vele, íme egy cikk a sok közül a Volkskrant-ból.)

I always considered the BBC World News as the best TV News around, and believed in the aura of impartiality that it tries to convey about itself. Until now, that is…

There were some major raws and street fights in my home country, Hungary, at the beginning of this week; these raws actually followed a series of protestations, turmoils, etc, that have been going on for several weeks now. This week’s events were exasperated by the commemoration of the uprising of October 1956. I do not want to go into a detailed (albeit personal) analysis of all these events, it would take too long; suffices it say that, in my view, what happened is the failure of the whole political establishment of the past 15 years (roughly since the regime changes).

However: what the BBC showed in its reports, in the tone of its “Hard Talk” programme, etc, is an incredibly one-sided view of the events, almost fully dictated by the hypocritical attitude of the current opposition parties and personalities. This in spite of the fact that the responsibilities of those in the raws and street fights are also enormous. We have not heard at all about a number of appalling and, frankly, frightening events around the so-called “opposition groups” on the streets of the past few weeks: making a list of all Jewish members of the current government, carrying around a red-white striped flag (the so-called “Árpád stripes”) associated to the worst fascist movements of pre-war Hungary, or that one of the slogans they shouted was “throw the prime minister into the (river) Danube”. The current opposition tries to wipe these under the carpet, which is part of their policies to regain power. It is all understandable though despicable. But why did the so-called objective BBC News did the same?

Oh well… one illusion less, I guess 

My son made me discover a Turkish jazz pianist called Fazil Say. I must admit I never heard of him before, but I listened to two of his jazz variations: variations on Mozart’s “alla turca” and a set of Paganini variations. I am usually not fond of jazz transcriptions of classical piano pieces, but these two are really good. Worth listening to them!

The interesting thing is that he is as much a classical as a jazz player. On another entry I found on YouTube he plays Busoni’s transcription of Bach’s wonderful Chacone (originally composed for solo violin). Although I do not like Busoni’s transcription at all (I really prefer the original), it is worth noting when a pianist can play both jazz and classical. It is not frequent (Keith Jarrett comes to my mind who also published CD-s with sonatas of Händel, and also recorded the Well Temperated Clavier).

Susie Stephens drew my attention to an Oracle Technology Network blog on the fact that Oracle uses Semantic Web technologies in running their new virtual press room. It is nice to see that Oracle not only sells Semantic Web tools, but they use it for their own site, too…

I had a few hours free in Berlin, so I went to see the new Holocaust Memorial which was finished about a year ago. (The official name is “Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe”.) I have already heard about it, I saw pictures on TV, and I know it is a quite controversial work of art. And, I must admit, when I saw it on TV I could not really appreciate it either.

The memorial consists of a large number (2711, to be exact) gray concrete stelae, placed on a regular grid. There is also a paved pathway between the blocks that people can go to. As the photos below show, the stelae are of different height and their top have different slopes as well. The higher blocks are in the centre of the grid, forming a little “hill”, the ones on the sides are fairly small (about 30-40 cm height).

So far so good, and one could ask what the big deal is. (I was wondering myself, too.) That trick is that, of course, the visitor is pretty much drawn to go and follow the paths between the blocks. And that is where the surprise comes. Indeed, what one cannot see from the side of the memorial is that not only are the blocks of different height, but the paths are not flat either. They usually go down toward the centre, though in a somewhat irregular fashion. What this means is that, when going “in” the grid, one is surrounded by fairly high stelae (some of the are more than 4 meters) very quickly on a path that is smaller than a meter. And the surprising effect comes from the fact that this happens much more quickly than one would expect just looking at the stelae from the side. I can tell you: it is a fairly discomforting feeling. Cut from the sunlight, surrounded by those dark gray blocks on a dark gray pavement… It can get to you. It did for me.

And then, I got it. This is a Holocaust memorial, not only a play with blocks. Remember what happened? First, only very small steps were done (you know, jews had take a special section of the tramway, they may have been banned from some governmental jobs, these sort of things). And people thought: that is not so bad, one can survive that, things will get better. (It was just like those small blocks on the side of the memorial: nothing really exciting.) And then things went downhill. Fast. Very fast, just like getting submerged by those big blocks in the middle of the memorial. We all know what happened next. Maybe this is my imagination, and this is not what the artist wanted; but I do not care. It worked for me… And it was a fascinating, though slightly discomforting experience.

(Maybe I was influenced by the anti-semitic and other, nationalistic noises that reappear on the streets of my home town just about these days. Do not be fooled by the small gray blocks that you can simply sit on; it can be scary very very quickly…)

Íme egy részlet egy CNN interjúból (magyar fordítás részlete a magyar rádió lapján található):

Arra a kérdésre, hogy mit szól Gyurcsány Ferenc kijelentésére, mely szerint valamennyi politikai erő hazudott, Orbán Viktor kifejtette: a magyar politikában kétféle hagyomány létezik.

Az egyik a kommunista párt hagyománya, a hazugság, amelyet a baloldal tovább vitt, a másik pedig az ellenzéké, az egykori illegális „másképp gondolkodóké”, akik sohasem hazudtak. „Én sem hazudtam soha az embereknek” - hangsúlyozta Orbán.

Mondja ezt az az ember, aki az utóbbi 16 év legradikálisabb politikai köpenyegforgatását mondhatja magáénak és akinek hazugságaival és meggondolatlan, nyilvánvalóan hamis választási igéreteivel tele volt és van a sajtó… Nem becsülöm sokra a Gurcsányt sem, de azért az Orbán mint valamiféle ministránsgyerek enyhe túlzás.

(Persze az Orbán jó társaságban van. Sajnos nincs URI amire hivatkozhatnék, de a héten egy amerikai szóvívő, a „Gyurcsány effektusra” reagálva, szintén azt állította, hogy a Bush kormány sohasem hazudott. Inkább nem is kommentálnám, messze vezetne…)

Nemrégiben olvastam Mérő László „Maga itt a tánctanár?” című könyvét amely, többek között, több érdekes összehasonlítást tesz a „nyugati” és a magyar szokások között. Íme egy érdekes példa ugyanebben a kategóriában.

Hollandiában parlamenti választások lesznek novemberben. A napokban az összes parlamenti párt közzétette választási programját. A programban igéretek vannak: ezt-azt fogjuk megtenni, itt és itt, erre és erre fogunk költeni, és innen meg onnan szerezzük meg az ehhez szükséges anyagi fedezetet. Eddig semmi meglepő. Ámde: a józan, kereskedő szellemű Hollandiában a dolog nem áll meg itt. Az összes választasi programot átadják az itteni… Központi Tervhivatalnak (nem vicc, tényleg így hívják: „Centraal Plaan Bureau”). A tervhivatal pedig számol, összead, kivon, szoroz, és utána add egy független jelentést arról, hogy a számok stimmelnek-e, vagyis a, mondjuk, extra bejelentett ilyen és ilyen adójövedelem fedezi-e az ilyen és olyan extra kiadásokat. És bizony a holland választópolgárok ezeket a számokat igen komolyan veszik akkor, amikor leadják (vagy nem…) a szavazatukat egy pártra: valamennyire legalábbis tudják, hogy mennyire reálisak a számok, és ezáltal valóban tág politikai és társadalmi irányokra adják a szavazataikat, nem (csak…) igéretekre.

Érdemes összehasonlítani az áprilisi magyar választásokkal. Hiszen, valljuk be őszintén: az összes párt, jobboldalon és baloldalon egyaránt, összevissza igérgetett, és az emberek többsége számára lehetetlen volt ellenőrizni az igéretek anyagi jogosultságát. Milyen jó lett volna egy ilyen Központi Tervhivatal…

Some times ago I wrote a short blog on the number of SW Books, and those numbers were a bit surprising. I also had short conversation on #swig with some people (I remember CaptSolo and Danny Ayers) on various other lists of books (they both have one…). The idea of putting it on a wiki page came up then. Based on the positive experience of moving the Semantic Web Tool lists on the wiki (quite a number of people have helped maintaining that page since it was published!) I decided to do something similar by collecting books on the subject. The result is on the ESW Wiki.

Of course there are some caveats; it would be great if the community helped in getting things right. Some of those are:

• I did not have all those books in hand . This also means that some books that I put into the the “textbooks” category are, in fact, collections of articles or proceedings, or vice versa…
• for most of the books I could find the ISBN number and put a link to the Worldcat library site which gives a way of mapping ISBN-s (thanks to DanC for this idea). However, some of the ISBN-s have no trace on that site for example most of the non-English books. I am not sure where to link those…
• the main problem is of course the missing Italian, Chinese, Russian, Chinese, etc. books. I have put books that I could find or know about (and could read their titles at least), but I am sure thare are lots of non-English books missing!

Nevertheless, I hope this is a good and useful start

Elie Sanchez was nice enough to send me a copy of the book he edited on fuzzy logic and Semantic Web[1]. Lots of stuff there which are not easy to digest for the non-initiated (and I am not one of those either…). But it is interesting to have a look at it nevertheless. Incorporating fuzziness into the Semantic Web world has been an issue for a while; I have received a number of comments from application developers that such functionality is really necessary to describe their knowledge base. (A relationship between two biological experimental results, for example, can rarely be stated with absolute certainty…).

The book includes several papers that extend the traditional DL with fuzzy statements. In one of the models one can state, for example:

<a:C ≥ 0.6>

meaning that "a" is of class "C" “on a 0.6 degree” . The interesting thing is that U. Straccia gives a full definition of SHOIN(D)’s fuzzy version (SHOIN(D) is the DL variant for OWL). However, as he says, there is no calculus yet for checking the satisfiability of fuzzy SHOIN(D). Of course, this is not the first time these issues are looked at. There was a workshop at last year’s ISWC[2] which addressed similar issues but, somehow, went largely unnoticed; I have not seen any reference to those papers in [1] although, for example, Stoilios et al. reported on a fuzzy version of a (weaker) DL dialect already[3] at that workshop. Oh well…

All papers I saw on the subject in [1] look at fuzziness on an ontology level. I was also looking for something like that on a lower level, ie, have the possibility of adding fuzziness on the RDF level already. Indeed, one should try to keep it simpler and use ontologies only when one really needs it… There is a paper in [2] from Mazzieri and Dragonidoing just that[4]. In their structure one can add a fuzziness on a triple level, ie:

n: s p o.

means that the (s p o) relationship holds on a degree of ≥n. The nice thing in [1] is that all the notions of RDF and RDFS can be translated to this setting, with a reasonable alternative definition of the whole model theoretical semantics of RDFS. They even report to have implemented a forward chaining fuzzy RDFS reasoner in Sesame… Of course the picture would really be complete if this could be expressed in SPARQL, too, but that may not be so complicated. (Hm. That may not be true. It seems that the current model theoretic semantics used in the latest version of SPARQL leads to a number of problems, so a fuzzy semantics might make it much worse. Let us have SPARQL finished first before going there…)

Nice things to think about; it is still to be seen whether this approach will solve real world problems. But it is worth investigating. Looking for a PhD topic? 

(B.t.w.: there will be a similar workshop at ISWC this year. I say similar: probabilistic reasoning and fuzzy logic, though attacking similar problems, are two distinct camps, and the practioners of both fields are very sensitive not to be mixed up with the other…

References

1. “Fuzzy logic and the Semantic Web”, E. Sanchez (ed.), Elsevier, 2006
2. Workshop on Uncertainty Reasoning for the Semantic Web, International Semantic Web Conference, eds, P. Costa, K. Laskey, K. Laskey, M. Pool, 2005. The full proceedings is also available on-line.
3. “A Fuzzy Description Logic f-SHIN’’, Giorgos Stoilos, Giorgos Stamou, Vassilis Tzouvaras, Jeff Pan, Ian Horrocks, in [2].
4. “A Fuzzy Semantics for Semantic Web Languages”, Mauro Mazzieri, Aldo Franco Dragoni, in [2].

I tried to get a reliable number, but it is not that easy…

The obvious starting point was Amazon. By simply searching through Amazon.com (using the key "semantic web") I got 165 hits. By doing the same via Amazon.uk I got 83 hits; this is not that surprising, the subsidiaries of Amazon have often less books. I then tried A9 (you can set A9 to search only for books, which is pretty cool), and I got a surprisingly high number: 1,495(!) hits. Of course, not all hits are valid, we all know that. I made therefore a cursory look at the A9 hits, just looking at the titles and (when available) the few extract linked from the search result page; my feeling is that the first 10 pages, ie, around 100 titles are relevant. These hits include conference or workshop proceedings, but also textbooks published by O’Reilly, MIT Press, Cambridge University Press, Springer Verlag, … I am sure by using other search engines the numbers would be different but probably not significantly.

I must admit that this number is higher than I expected. And the real number is actually even higher, because these hits refer to English titles only. A quick search through the German and French sites of Amazon brought forward a decent number of books in German, a book in French; I also know about books in Hungarian, there are no doubt books in Spanish, Italian, … I think the community is doing well in this respect!

By the way, Nova Spivack maintains a list on Amazon. There are relatively new items on the list, too, so it is probably up-to-date, which is good…

I had, for a long time, a small Python script to extract RDF/XML information from jpg files when that information has been put there by, eg, Adobe’s XMP. Typical example is when one uses the “file info” facility of Adobe Photoshop from Adobe CS or Adobe CS2. The script simply uses a regular expression matching to extract the information, nothing fancy.

I have now made an on-line version of this: one can use URI GET to extract the RDF content on any jpg file via its URI. Here is the example URI to use:

http://www.ivan-herman.net/cgi-bin/xmp.py?uri=http://www.ivan-herman.net/Photos/xmptest.jpg

If no RDF information is found in the file, an empty RDF/XML file is returned. It is one single Python file, you can copy it and install it on another server if you want.

Caveat: I originally intended to use this to access the metadata of my own photos when posted on my Web site. Unfortunately, the tool I use to generate the HTML pages, thumbnails, and the reduced size of the photos themselves does not copy the RDF (ie, XMP) content to the generated file . Ie, my photos on the Web do not contain this metadata. Oh well, maybe somebody else will find this script useful…

(I am almost sure there will be bugs in the script. Mail me then…)

Some of you may have already realized this, actually…

The home pages of the (now defunct) RDF Core and Web Ontology Working Groups used to include lists of development tools, programming environments, as well as references to commercial products. Clearly, maintaining such lists is difficult and, mainly, there is always a danger to become out of date (which is, actually, a good thing: it shows the good health of the Semantic Web related R&D…).

These lists have now been merged, updated, enriched with other references, and moved to the ESW Wiki of W3C. By doing that, we can hope that the community at large can maintain this list together, thereby keeping it as up-to-date and complete as possible. As I said: some of you may have already realized this, because updates have already been done in the past few weeks!

(For those of you who read this as a text-only RSS file, here is the URI: http://esw.w3.org/topic/SemanticWebTools.)

Something quite tragic happened a few weeks ago in the Netherlands, that makes one think about the limits of one’s own work…

There is a series typical Dutch events, called “vierdagse”, which are long walks in the countryside four days in a row. Different cities or villages organize it locally in spring or summer. It is an organized route involving a local organizing committee; a bit like the New York or Boston marathons, except that it is a day long walking instead of running, with four day in a row, and without the element of competion. There is no winner; just be there.

Nijmegen, one of the cities in the South-East of the Netherlands, organized this a few weeks ago. The problem was that it took place in the biggest heat-waves in the Netherlands for very very long time. Temperatures way over 30 degrees Centigrade, no wind, clear sky with blazing sunshine… At the end of the first day, 2 people died of heatstroke.

The remaining three days were called off, of course, but an inquiry was also set up to see if this was predictable by the local organizing committee or not. The person representing the organizing committee was interviewed on TV, and he said that they were careful in trying to predict the dangers, so they also consulted all the available Web sites on wheather predictions, and they decided that it should be o.k. They did not realize through the Web sites that there would be absolutely no wind at all (something very unusual in the Netherlands!), ie, no cooling effect in the afternoon through some breeze. This oversight proved to be fatal. However, (responding to a question to the interview) the organizing committee had not thought of contacting the real experts (ie, the local meteorological institute) directly. “The information on the Web was considered to be enough”.

This tragic story shows one problems that we, people working on Web technologies, should be aware of the Web’s limits as well as social dangers. How can one be sure that the information out there is right or, more to the point in this case, provides a full picture? This is clearly a partially technical but partially social issue. More technical work, but also more outreach, better explanation, a better management of the (social) expectations should be around…

There is an official news item for this, no reason to repeat it here… but there are details that are really worth mentioning. Of course, the emphasis are mine.

The group developing GRDDL will provide a long awaited “bridge” between RDF and microformats (or, depending on where you come from, between microformats and RDF…). The nice thing about GRDDL is that it is simple. Of course somebody will have to write the transformations from a specific microformat to RDF, but GRDDL makes it possible to develop generic processors that “know” what to do, where to fetch the transformation, etc. The very little price to pay is to add an XTHML profile attribute and a pointer to the transformation itself; the rest should be automatic. Details are of course to be worked out but the group starts with an existing note already, worth looking at it.

The new Semantic Web Deployment Group includes several interesting work items; just two of those:

(1) RDFa (see also the separate page for further info) is very similar to microformats but provides a more scalable mechanism. Whereas microformats are a wonderfully simple and efficient way to add a specific set of terms to an XTHML page as, essentially, metadata, RDFa makes it possible to do something similar, but easily mix various vocabularies just like… well, RDF does in general. RDFa requires a bit more rigour but it provides a good alternative to microformats for more complex applications. And it will be possible to define a general GRDDL-like (or simply GRDDL) mechanism to extract the RDF automatically. (Actually, such tools already exist.)

B.t.w., RDFa and microformats+GRDDL can happily live side-by-side for different application classes, there is no need to present them as antagonistic technologies… (And no, it is not true, RDFa is not bound to XHTML2! Look at Mark Birbeck’s note [but see also the note below].)

(2) SKOS is something different: it provides a way to “bridge” (again…) to the more traditional library world, for example, to bring glossaries, thesauri, etc, to RDF. Eventually, one should be able to use SPARQL to federate several of those thesauri on the Web. SKOS does not have the same complexity as OWL, but for some applications this is exactly what one needs. I remember Alistair Miles, one of the drivers of SKOS, saying “OWL is the sledgehammer, SKOS is the nutcracker”. Although SKOS is not yet a Recommendation, there are already quite a number of people experimenting with it around the World. (Just one of the many examples: I met a guy in Australia last week who uses SKOS in Canberra to model medical data…)

Something which is not (yet) in the current Activity, though W3C got several comments on it, is the relationships between Relational Databases (or SQL, if you like) and RDF. How exactly would you map data from, say, mysql to RDF? How would you describe the mapping: is it some sort of a specialized ontology, or is it a set of (Horn) rules (or the combination of the two)? How would you name a record in a Database, ie, what is the URI to be used for RDF? These are all exciting issues and very important for the future of the Semantic Web. The reason it has not been included in the current round of W3C Groups yet is because… well, frankly, there are too many issues to solve before it is mature for standardization. But something is moving: a separate wiki page has been set up on W3C’s site to collect information; it is worth sharing information and experiences. Actually, W3C might organize a workshop on the issue sometimes late 2006 or early 2007. So: watch this space!

Benjamin Nowack pointed out on #swig that Mark’s note is entirely correct because some of the features he cites in his blog are, in fact, not compatible with XHTML1.1. And Benjamin is correct. What is important, though, is that the goal is to decouple RFDa (was: RDF/A) from the development of XTHML2.0 and, instead, define it an XTHML1.1 module.

This may be only marginally interesting for the Semantics Web, but who knows…

A colleague of mine, Karl Dubost, drew my attention on the presentation of Hans Rosling. Hans Rosling comes from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and made a very nice presentation on the evolution of health and other statistical data in various countries around the globe. The data itself is very interesting, but what may be even more interesting is the methods he has to show those. With some colleagues at the Gapminder foundation he developed great visualization tools to make boring statistical data lively. Worth having a look! Statistics may not be as boring as one might think…

Beyond the interest in information visualization, why is this of any interest for the Semantic Web? Well, at the end of his talk he refers to the problem of data integration, of the difficulties but, at the same time, the importance and the interest of integrating data coming from different (statistical) sources. And that is the core of what Semantic Web is all about, isn’s it? If somebody has a contact to the Karolinska, it might be interesting to look at possible connections…

To my great surprise I was asked by the management of W3C to change my current position as Head of the W3C Offices to become Activity Lead for the Semantic Web (which is the W3C jargon for the person coordinating the Semantic Web activities at W3C), starting 1^st of June. The reason: Eric Miller, who was the Activity Lead until now, decided to move on to another job outside of W3C…

Eric came to work at W3C more or less when I did, i.e., in January 2001. Anybody remember what the Semantic Web looked like at the time? There was a version of RDF around with no clear semantics, and with a document that mixed up the model and its XML representation; people were talking about DAML and OIL and DAML+OIL but it was not clear at all how that would work with what was already around in terms of RDF… Today, we have a greatly cleaned up version of RDF, DAML+OIL has been turned into OWL, we almost have SPARQL, we have GRDDL, RDFa, Rules, and SKOS in preparation, let alone the uptake of the Semantic Web in terms of tools, cute demonstration and, yes, serious applications. The various working groups that have produced all this did a really great job; but we should also not forget that all this happened under Eric’s watch, so to say. His contribution in this area is enormous and all of us who care about this field should be grateful to him.

Taking Eric’s job is… scary, I am not ashamed to say that. If I can achieve only a fraction of what he could do, I will be satisfied with myself. I will certainly try, and future will tell whether I will be successful…

On a more personal note: Eric was not only a colleague at W3C but is also a friend. I will loose a colleague, but friendship remains; and that is what really counts!

Just returned from the WWW2006 conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. It was a really long week, four days of conference with presentations to give, preceded by a W3C AC meeting. And, of course, lots of things that one heard, read, learned… not really possible to write all that down in a blog.

Here is an interesting thing I learned that is worth sharing (I hope). I listened to a tutorial on the last day on Semantics for Health Care and Life Sciences. Looking at the subject one expects explanations on how life science people have to manage terabytes of data that are stored in some sort of “silos”, and how RDF and the Semantic Web in general is helpful in combining these data, in setting and finding new relationships. And all that was of course explained (though I do not claim to have understood all the details. However, what really stroke me was something very different. If my understanding is correct, health care specialists have, in some cases, much much simpler problems. Doctors make annotations on the patient’s charts, they send these over to their colleagues or other experts using… PDF or Excel files. They use different terminologies in these notes that differ not only from one country to the other, but from one hospital to the other, too! Eric Neumann, one of the tutorial speakers, showed some very simple applications where a well working annotation system, using controlled vocabularies, built into the interactive note–taking tools that physicians use can make wonders. We are not talking here about hugely complex applications, but of a bit of RDFa (or, if you prefer, some sort of microformats), a bit of GRDDL, combining some simple RDF graphs, etc, can make wonders. Applications that we see in demo form made by SW geeks for SW geeks but which, suddenly, become of an utmost importance for non–geeks. “A little semantics can take you far”…

Hála a francia France Musique rádióadó kítűnő zenekritikai adásának (« Le pavé dans la mare ») felfedeztem egy… Kodály művet. Az op 7-as jegyzetszámú hegedű-gordonka szonátáról van szó. A legjobbnak mínősített lemezt megrendeltem, tegnap kézhez kaptam, és felfedeztem egy másik Kodály művet is, nevezetesen az op 8-as gordonkára írt szólószonátát. Mindkettő egyszerűen fantasztikus mű, a 20. század nagy zenei alkotásai között van a helyük. Hihetetlenül modern művek is, pedig majdnem 100 éve (az első világháború elején) iródtak.

Az, hogy valami új zeneművet fedezzek fel, nem nagy csoda. De azért mégiscsak elgondolkoztam ezen. Budapesten zenei környezetben nevelkedtem, zenét tanultam, a Zeneakadémia rendszeres látogatója voltam. Hogy lehet, hogy ezeket a műveit soha sem hallottam Pesten? Miért van az, hogy Kodályt, mint zeneszerzőt, kizárólag mint a Háry János, a Székelyfonó, meg sok-sok népi ihletésű kórusmű alkotójaként tartották számon? Pedig mind a hegedű-gordonka szonáta mind a szólószonáta a legnagyobb és méltán ünnepelt Bartók művekkel egyenrangúak. Lehetne egy olcsó értelmezést adni ennek, nevezetesen, hogy Kodályt a „népi” magyar mozgalom kisajátította magának és hát ezek a szonáták (habár egyértelmű bennük a magyar hatás, csakúgy mint Bartóknál) bizony nem amolyan népdalfeldolgozások mint a Háry János… Lehet, hogy ez az igazság, de lehet, hogy nem. Nem tudom. Kár.

Ha valakit érdekel: a felvétel a Harmonia Mundi kiadónál jelent meg, a két előadó Xavier és Jean-Marc Phillips. A borítón ez áll: „a magyar zene két mesterműve”. Köszönettel tartozunk a francia rádiónak és ennek a két fiatal francia előadónak…

It is a bit unfortunate that this did not attract more attention. A unique history textbook has just been published. It is a textbook on European history after 1945, which will be followed by others on European history in general. The interesting point is that this textbook was prepared jointly by German and French experts, is published in both languages, and will be part of the official curriculum both for French and for German students preparing what one call « le baccalauréat » and the others call “die Abitur”.

People outside Europe, or younger generations, may not realize the huge symbolic importance of this. The history of Europe has been dominated by the controversy of the French and the Germans, which had largely contributed to both World Wars. It was an unfortunate symbol for the madness of national feelings. It disturbed family lives in the most cruel ways. My family, for example, comes from an area called « la Lorraine », East of France today, which was the subject of wars between Germany and France several times over the centuries. Consequence: two of my grand-uncles found themselves enrolled in opposing armies in the first World War and sent to the same front, just because a crazy frontier happened to be somewhere between two villages. How cruel can that be?

It is one of the greatest achievements of the past decades that this is now in the past. Germany and France will never go to war against one another again. People way too often forget that putting such nationalistic feelings behind us and replacing it with some sort of union is probably one of the biggest achievements of the very existence of the European Union, and this by itself makes it worth having this Union and be wholeheartedly in favour of it. I am not talking of the Franco-German relations only, there are others (to take an example that I visited a few months ago, Süd-Tirol in Italy, or a number of similar conflicts in Central Europe). Looking at my “other half” of my family line, I would love to see a joint history book for Hungary and Romania coming up, for example…

Dan Connolly drew my attention on a really nice work: adding semantics to Wikipedia (or, to be more precise, to MediaWiki, the underlying engine). The paper itself is a primeur for the upcoming WWW2006 conference, but is already available.

What is better, there is a little demonstration online. If you go to the demo page on San Diego, it looks more or less like a usual Wikipedia page. The interesting point is when you go to one of the search pages for “similar” searches, e.g., searching through population. It is worth looking at the URI in this case, which is:

http://wiki.ontoworld.org/wiki/Special%3ASearchTriple?attribute=population&value=1305737&do=Search+Attributes

Pretty clear, right? If you leave out the value (which you can also do on the page with a form), ie, you use

http://wiki.ontoworld.org/wiki/Special%3ASearchTriple?attribute=Population&do=Search+Attributes

You get all articles that list a population value (i.e., all triplets with a specific property). Adding the extra information to the wiki page is not particularly complicated and does not require more attention than, for example, to add microformat data to a page, something the community is perfectly willing to do. For example, when writing the article on San Diego, adding the population is done through:

[[population:=1,305,737]]

One can also label URI-s to become objects in a triple. Simple, and has major potentials. I would be thrilled to see that (or similar) approach folded into Wikipedia soon, with some more complex, SPARQL-like search facilities!

I had the pleasure of returning to Hong Kong again for a very short visit. Hong Kong has really many faces, much more than people usually know about… I spent most of my day on Cheung Chau Island which, though part of the territory, has nothing to do with the fast life of Hong Kong. An island without cars… would you have thought such thing exist in Hong Kong?

Category: /Private/General; Posted at: 17:39 UTC; Permalink

Végre lezárultak a választások. Külföldön élvén én nem szavaztam; talán, ha nagyon akartam volna, akkor meg lehetett volna tenni, de morálisan nem tartottam volna elfogadhatónak. Végülis, bármi is történik, nem viseltem volna semminek sem a következményét, sem gazdasági sem egyéb vonatkozásban…

De, nem tagadom, örülök az eredménynek. Nem azért, mert az MSZP+SZDSZ koalíció győzött, hanem mert a FIDESZ vesztett. Nincs mindent elsöprő bizalmam az MSZP-ben, ahogy nincs nagy bizalmam a nyugati testvérpártokban sem (mondjuk, ahol élek, a holland PvDA-ban). Bár nem vonom kétségbe a jóakaratukat és személyes tisztességüket, de az eddigi politikai és gazdasági eredmények nem feltétlenül meggyőzőek. Az SZDSZ-el is súlyos kifogásaim vannak (például máig sem értem miért lépett koalícióra az MSZMP-vel a múltban akkor is, amikor erre nem lett volna szükség…)

De, ami borzadállyal töltött el az a FIDESZ esetleges győzelme. Az útóbi hetek politikai megjegyzései (mint a Mikola és Semjén beszédek) csak a jéghegy csúcsai voltak; a FIDESZ, és főleg az Orbán féktelen stílusa, populizmusa, országot, embereket, akár családokat megosztó ellenségeskedése évek óta ijesztően hatnak rám. Vannak barátaim Pesten akik arról panaszkodnak, hogy gyerekkori barátaikkal adott esetben már nem tudnak szóba állni politikai hovatartozásuk miatt. A politikumnak ez a mindent elöntő, ellenséges ereje nagyban a FIDESZ, elsősorban az Orbán Viktor hibája. Aki nincs velük, az nem ellenfél hanem ellenség, sőt, a nemzet ellensége, külföldi érdekeket kiszolgáló kozmopolita…

Sajnos, a magyar jobboldal 1989-ben ott kezdte ahol, mondjuk 1949-ben abbahagyta. Nem volt lehetősége a világgal haladni mint ahogy ez a szerencsésebb nyugati országokban megtörtént. Ez már az Antal kormány idején látszott, és sok minden történt azokban az években amelyeket, ami engem illett, igencsak sajnálok, sőt taszítanak (hogy egy példát mondjak: az egyházi befolyás hihetetlen megerősödése). A baj az, hogy az Orbán azóta csak rontott a dolgokon. Soha nem értettem, hogy hogy tudott az ország egy jelentős hányada bedőlni egy ilyen nyilvánvalóan hataloméhes, megalomániás figurának, aki egy alapvetően kozépen lévő liberális pártot egy ókonzervatív valamivé alakított csak azért, hogy, hatalomhoz jusson.

A következő reményem tehát: az Orbánnak (és a körülötte lévő gárdának, mint Kövér, Deutch-Für, Rogán, stb.) mennie kell. Tünjenek el a politikából; alakuljon végre egy tisztességes jobboldal akár egy, akár több pártból, amely az SZDSZ-nek, az MSZP-nek ellenfele de ne ellenége legyenek!

I saw a reference to this thing on Chaals’ blog so I thought I would compete with him 

Countries I visited

It is neat, though a bit misleading; the granularity is way too coarse. I visited indeed Beijing, Gouangzhou, or Hong Kong, but not the whole of China, for example…

To create your own map, go to the visited countries map project.

If you run Firefox, you can add a search plugin to the Swoogle Semantic Web search engine. Just go to the download page and click on the name of the search engine.

Én tudom, hogy választási hadjárat van, dehát azért mégis… Idézek a Népszabadság egyik cikkéből amely Semjén Zsolt, a KNDP elnökének beszédét írja le:

A KDNP elnöke […] bírálta például a miniszterelnök azon kijelentését, hogy a vallás magánügy. Semjén Zsolt — Mindszenty bíboros 1946-os szavait idézve — kijelentette: ahol a vallás magánügy, ott korrupcióba, bűnbe, kegyetlenségbe fordul az élet. Hozzátette: Hitlerék is magánügynek tekintették a vallást, “jött is utána Gestapo, Auschwitz, börtön”.

Vagyis: legyen a kereszténység megint államvallás? Mert ha nem magánügy, akkor kérem szépen az államügy. És akkor mi lesz például a muzulmánokkal, zsidókkal, buddhistákkal, vagy — horribile dictu — az ateistákkal? Börtönbe velük! Vesszenek a pogányok, hiszen, idézem: „Semjén Zsolt […] beszéde végén párhuzamot vont a mostani parlamenti választás és az 550 évvel ezelőtti nándorfehérvári győzelem között, hangsúlyozva: szövetséget kötve, egységesen akkor is sikerült diadalmaskodni a hazánkra rontó pogányság felett”.

Érdekes módon a párt neve Kereszténydemokrata Párt (kiemelés tőlem). Valami nem stimmel. Soha ilyen kijelentést nem engedne meg magának, mondjuk, a Holland Kereszténydemokrata párt (CDA); azonnal felzúdulna az egész holland politikai élet… Kiváncsi vagyok, hogy fog-e valaki reagálni erre.

(Ja, egy apróság: lehet, hogy Hitler magánügynek tekintette a vallást de, ha nem tévedek, Himmler mélyen hívő katolikus volt…)

An issue that has been on my mind for a long time, though it is very difficult to express it clearly (and may also be complete rubbish, actually…). The question is: does the Semantic Web adequately reflect the way of thinking that has evolved in the Far East (e.g., China, Korea, etc), or is it hopelessly “Western”?

I am currently reading an interesting book on the differences between the way the World is perceived in China and in, say, Europe. The author gives lots of interesting examples; here is one. Sometimes in the 80’s, when car usage became more important in China, the authorities introduced import taxes on cars. They introduced a basic tax level and a somewhat higher for luxury cars. A big French car manifacturer asked the Chinese authorities to make their criteria for luxury cars known. They wanted to have a clear list, something like “electric window: check; heated seats: check; built-in radio: check etc.”. However, the answer of the Chinese was that they did not have such a list; however, if the car manifacturer would show them a specific car, they would tell whether it is a luxury car or not.

It would be way too easy to attribute this response to some sort of Chinese inefficiency (or worse). But that would probably be misleading. In the western culture based on strict logic, with our traditions in Greek logic and Occam’s razor, we are used to build up notions by defining their consituents in a precise manner. Easterners have a much more “wholistic” approach in their understanding of the World that they cannot “decompose” that way. This is what manifested itself in the previous example. (Actually, the example is not unlike the difference between Western and Chinese medical practice, for example.)

So, what about the Semantic Web? Well, using OWL, and maybe some extra Horn rules, it is probably straightforward to define, say, an OWL class to describe our view of a luxury car. However: how can we describe the wholistic, Chinese approach? I have no idea… Personally, I consider this to be, potentially, a major (and interesting) problem; after all, how can we expect the Semantic Web to help us in our handling of the resources on the Web if a large population on the net has a fundamentally different view of things?

1. André Chieng, La pratique de la Chine, Grasset, Paris, 2006

I read an article by Rob McCool entited “Rethinking the Semantic Web” in the latest (January/February 2006) issue of the IEEE Internet Computing magazine. One central aspect of the paper is that it takes it as self-evident that “RDF is complicated”, ergo the “the Semantic Web is way too complex”, ergo something new has to be found and used instead

I would really like to see this misconception disappear. We should make people realize that, in fact, RDF is simple. After all, all there is to RDF are triples. A triple (s,p,o), as it is usually denoted, is nothing else than a named link between two “things” (“web resources”) or possibly binding a resource to a simple a. In some ways, not much more complicated than hyperlinks, except that there is a label added to the link. Nobody considers the concepts of hyperlinks as complicated any more… Or, to take another example, all techies have worked with property/value pairs for years, let that be in Java libraries, XWindows preference settings; well, an RDF triple is not much more than that except that it uses URI-s to name things. RDF is just a set of those triples or, if you are of a visual type, a directed and labelled graph representing those. That is it! The rest is syntactic sugar. Whether the RDF triples are encoded in RDF/XML, turtle, microformats, you-name-it, is a matter of convenience, of good tools, and of personal taste. Why trying to find a controversy (e.g., heralding microformats as something fundamentally different) when, in fact, there isn’t? Don’t take me wrong: microformats are really good stuff, that is not the point. But let us just realize that they are all part of the same landscape…

Of course, I am no fool. I know that the RDF/XML format is, well, not the prettiest syntax around even if one is used to XML. And that the RDF community did not make a very good job at the dawn of the Semantic Web to clearly separate the (simple) model from the (complex) syntax in that particular serialization. But this should be put behind us. I also know that reading the formal semantics of RDF is certainly not easy, and that is probably a British understatement. But… how many SQL users have read the formal semantics of SQL? How many users of a particular programming language have read the formal semantics of that language? Those documents are for the few implementors, not for the lambda users…

And, of course, there is the issue of using ontologies, RDFS, OWL, all those complicated things… Yes, those can become complex. But that is always the case with everything we use. A fundamentally simple and very popular programming language like Python has very complex constructs, but not everybody will use those. Similarly: nobody is forced to use RDFS or OWL; you can be a perfectly respectable Semantic Web citizen if you use the basic RDF only which, I believe, is simple and powerful.

The Semantic Web, in my view, has great potentials. Let us not spoil it with such misconceptions… and let us get the message out on this!

Category: /WorkRelated/SemanticWeb; Posted at: 12:43 UTC; Permalink

I scanned through the proceedings of a Eurographics/ACM Siggraph Workshop on “Computational Aesthetics 2005”. Lots of intereting stuffs, although a large portion of the papers were, actually, on non-photorealistic rendering, but that does not make them less interesting.

A paper that caught my eyes was T. Isenberg et al “Breaking the Pixel Barrier”. The authors argue (rightfully so…) that vector graphics is a good thing, that we should not be blindfolded by pixel-based graphics, that vector graphics is better for zooming, no need for re-sampling, etc. And I suddently feld awfully old. The authors seem to have forgotten that computer graphics started with vector graphics, and that pixel based graphics came only later! I started computer graphics with line drawing displays in the early 80’s, pixel based graphics came much later (and it actually took some time for the CAD community to accept them…). Lots of good work done in vector graphics was pushed aside by pixel-based graphics, photorealistic rendering… Anyway. It is good we remember these things and that the non-photorealistic rendering community may revive vector graphics.

Oh yes, and… the hope for the authors is that Windows Vista™ will have a vector-based rendering engine. Which, by itself, is true and has its advantages, but never heard of SVG, and its usage in Firefox 1.5 or Opera 8? This reminded me that it would be nice to take some of the NPR tools and see what it would require to add an SVG output…

(Unfortunately, though the workshop proceedings are online, only EG members can get to the full papers.)

Érdekes cikk jelent meg nemrégiben a Népszabadságban az európai bevándorláspolitikákról, Vincze Hajnalka tollából („Európa: egy előre bejelentett hanyatlás krónikája”). Főleg a nemrégiben lezajlott franciaországi felfordulások fényében érdemes a cikket elolvasni. A cikk egyik szomorú megállapítása, hogy az aktív politikusok mennyire nem foglalkoznak a probléma lényegével, hanem inkább választási esélyeikre koncentrálnak (félreértés ne essék: ez nem csak a magyar politikusokra igaz!). És ezt alá tudom írni: rendszeresen hallgatván a francia rádió híreit feltűnő, hogy mennyire nem beszélnek már a problémákról, pedig azok csak a szőnyeg alá söprődtek az események után…

I just finished a book by Anne Applebaum: “Gulag: A History”. Great book. It is clearly not “fun” to read, but it is one of those books that one has to read time to time. It is a historical essay (over 500 pages in paperback) and, of course, one will not remember all details, but that is fine. A general, overall knowledge will remain.

Interestingly, the epilogue of the book was one of the most interesting parts for me. Possibly because this was not the first time I was confronted with story of the Soviet work camps, with the dissident movements in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, etc. The epilogue concentrates on how the Gulag is (or, rather, is not) remembered and dealt with by the Russian collective psyche as of today. To quote: “… half a century after the war’s end, the Germans still conduct regular disputes about victims’ compensation, about memorials, about new interpretation of Nazi history […]. Half a century after Stalin’s death, there were no equivalent arguments taking place in Russia, because the memory of the past was not a living part of public discourse.”. The text also tries to give and describe the reasons for this, and what profound concequences forgetting this history may have on today’s Russian politics, to a lesser extend on the politics of other, post-Soviet or satellite states, but also on the “West” that similarly tends to forget about the magnitute of what happened.

“This book was not written `so that it will not happen again’, as the cliché would have it. This book was written because it almost certainly will happen again.”

Here are the references: Anne Applebaum, Gulag: a History, Penguin Books, 2004. (It has earlier publications by other publisher, see book’s Web site.

Meg kell mondanom őszintén, hogy Sólyom László nevét nem ismertem elnökké választása előtt. Mivel nagyon elleneztem Szili Katalin esetleges elnökké választását, örültem, hogy egy a leírások szerint józan, független, középen álló valaki került az elnöki székbe.

Azt, amit az újévi beszédről olvastam nagyon megnyerte tetszésemet és beteljesítette várakozásaimat. Bár a politikai pártok hallgatnának rá, mind jobb mind baloldalon! Például: “Én arra lennék büszke, ha Magyarországon nem lehetne lejárató kampánnyal választást nyerni.”, vagy: “[…] az ország, s most már Európa érdekeit szem előtt tartva kellene politizálni, s nem élet-halál kérdésként beállítani a választási győzelmet”. Bár fiatalkorom mondását idézhetném: “Zajos helyeslés a Ház minkét oldalán!”. Én mindenestre zajosan egyetértek…