Ivan's Blog

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!