Archive for the ‘Semantic Web’ Category

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Wordcamp and wiki mania

Monday, August 7th, 2006

In lieu of attending maybe the hottest conference ever I did a bit of wiki twiddling this weekend. I submitted a tiny patch (well that was almost two weeks ago — time flies), upgraded a private MediaWiki installation from 1.2.4 to 1.6.8 and a public installation from 1.5.6 to 1.6.8 and worked on a small private extension, adding to some documentation before running into a problem.

1.2.4->1.6.8 was tedious (basically four successive major version upgrades) but trouble-free, as that installation has almost no customization. The 1.5.6->1.6.8 upgrade, although only a single upgrade, took a little fiddling make a custom skin and permissions account for small changes in MediaWiki code (example). I’m not complaining — clean upgrades are hard and the MediaWiki developers have done a great job of making them relatively painless.

Saturday I attended part of , a one day unconference for WordPress users. Up until the day before the tentative schedule looked pretty interesting but it seems lots of lusers signed up so the final schedule didn’t have much meat for developers. Matt Mullenweg’s “State of the Word” and Q&A hit on clean upgrade of highly customized sites from several angles. Some ideas include better and better documented plugin and skin APIs with more metadata and less coupling (e.g., widgets should help many common cases that previously required throwing junk in templates).

Beyond the purely practical, ease of customization and upgrade is important for openness.

Now listening to the Wikimania Wikipedia and the Semantic Web panel…

Posted in Blogs, Creative Commons, Open Services, Open Source, Programming, Semantic Web, Wikipedia | 2 Comments »

Free software needs P2P

Friday, July 28th, 2006

Luis Villa on my constitutionally open services post:

It needs a catchier name, but his thinking is dead on- we almost definitely need a server/service-oriented list of freedoms which complement and extend the traditional FSF Four Freedoms and help us think more clearly about what services are and aren’t good to use.

I wasn’t attempting to invent a name, but Villa is right about my aim — I decided to not mention the four freedoms because I felt my thinking too muddled to dignified with such a mention.

Kragen Sitaker doesn’t bother with catchy names in his just posted draft essay The equivalent of free software for online services. I highly recommend reading the entire essay, which is as incisive as it is historically informed, but I’ve pulled out the problem:

So far, all this echoes the “open standards” and “open formats” discussion from the days when we had to take proprietary software for granted. In those days, we spent enormous amounts of effort trying to make sure our software kept our data in well-documented formats that were supported by other programs, and choosing proprietary software that conformed to well-documented interfaces (POSIX, SQL, SMTP, whatever) rather than the proprietary software that worked best for our purposes.

Ultimately, it was a losing game, because of the inherent conflict of interest between software author and software user.

And the solution:

I think there is only one solution: build these services as decentralized free-software peer-to-peer applications, pieces of which run on the computers of each user. As long as there’s a single point of failure in the system somewhere outside your control, its owner is in a position to deny service to you; such systems are not trustworthy in the way that free software is.

This is what has excited about decentralized systems long before P2P filesharing.

Luis Villa also briefly mentioned P2P in relation to the services platforms of Amazon, eBay, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!:

What is free software’s answer to that? Obviously the ’spend billions on centralized servers’ approach won’t work for us; we likely need something P2P and/or semantic-web based.

Wes Felter commented on the control of pointers to data:

I care not just about my data, but the names (URLs) by which my data is known. The only URLs that I control are those that live under a domain name that I control (for some loose value of control as defined by ICANN).

I hesitated to include this point because I hesitate to recommend that most people host services under a domain name they control. What is the half-life of http://blog.john.smith.name vs. http://johnsmith.blogspot.com or js@john.smith.name vs. johnsmith@gmail.com? Wouldn’t it suck to be John Smith if everything in his life pointed at john.smith.name and the domain was hijacked? I think Wes and I discussed exactly this outside CodeCon earlier this year. Certainly it is preferable for a service to allow hosting under one’s own domain (as Blogger and several others do), but I wish I felt a little more certain of the long-term survivability of my own [domain] names.

This post could be titled “freedom needs P2P” but for the heck of it I wanted to mirror “free culture needs free software.”

Posted in Computers, Economics, Open Services, Open Source, P2P, Semantic Web | 8 Comments »

Long tail of metadata

Monday, May 29th, 2006

Ben Adida notes that people are writing about RDFa, which is great, and envisioning conflict with microformats, which is not. As Ben says:

Microformats are useful for expressing a few, common, well-defined vocabularies. RDFa is useful for letting publishers mix and match any vocabularies they choose. Both are useful.

In other words RDFa is a technology.

Evan Prodromou thinks the future is bleak without cooperation. I like his proposed way forward (strikeout added for obvious reasons):

  1. RDFa gets acknowledged and embraced by microformats.org as the future of semantic-data-in-XHTML
  2. The RDFa group makes an effort to encompass existing microformats with a minimum of changes
  3. microformats.org leaders join in on the RDFa authorship process
  4. microformats.org becomes a focus for developing real-world RDFa vocabularies

I see little chance of points one and three occuring. However, I don’t see this as a particularly bad thing. Point three will occur, almost by default: the simplest and most widely deployed microformats (e.g., , and rellicense) are also valid RDFa — the predicate (e.g., tag, nofollow, license) appearing in the default namespace to a RDFa application. More complex microformats may be handled by hGRDDL, which is no big deal as a microformat-aware application needs to parse each microformat it cares about anyway. From an RDF perspective any well-crafted metadata is a plus (and the microformats group do very careful work) as RDF’s killer app is integrating heterogenous data sources.

From a microformats perspecitve RDFa might well be ignored. While transformation of any microformat to RDF is relatively straightforward, transformation of RDF (which is a model, not a format) to microformats is nonsensical (well, I suppose the endpoint of such a transformation could be , though I’m not sure what the point would be). Microformats, probably wisely, is not reinventing RDF (as many do, usually badly).

So why would RDFa be of interest to developers? In a word, laziness. There is no process to follow for developing an RDF vocabulary (ironic), you can freely reuse existing vocabularies and tools, not write your own parsers, and trust that really smart people are figuring out the hard stuff for you (I believe the formal background of the Semantic Web is a long-term win). Or you might just want to, as Ben says “express metadata about other documents (embedded images)” which is trivial for RDF as images have URIs.

Addendum 20060601: The “simplest” microformats mentioned above have a name: elemental microformats.

Posted in Creative Commons, Microformats, Programming, Semantic Web | 5 Comments »

RDFa.info

Wednesday, May 24th, 2006

I’ve mentioned a couple times in passing.

Ben Adida has been doing an awesome job leading the standards effort the last year and a half, which will pay off handsomely over the next six months. A few days ago he launched RDFa.info, the place to watch for interoperable web metadata tools, examples, and news.

Posted in Creative Commons, Semantic Web | No Comments »

Wikiforms

Thursday, May 11th, 2006

Brad Templeton writes about overly structured forms, one of my top UI peeves. The inability to copy and paste an IP address into a form with four separate fields has annoyed me, oh, probably hundreds of times. Date widgets annoy me slightly less. Listen to Brad when designing your next form, on the web or off.

The opposite of overly structured forms would be a freeform editing widget populated with unconstrained fields blank or filled with example data, or even a completely empty editing widget with suggested structure documented next to the widget — a wiki editing form. This isn’t as strange as it seems — many forms are distributed as word processor or plain text documents that recipients are expected to fill in by editing directly and return.

I don’t think “wikiforms” are appropriate for many cases where structured forms are used, but it’s useful to think of opposites and I imagine their (and hybrids — think a “rich” wiki editor with autocompletion — I haven’t really, but I imagine this is deja vu for anyone who has used mainframe-style data entry applications) niche could increase.

Ironically the currently number one use of the term wiki forms denotes adding structured forms to wikis!

On a marginally related note the Semantic MediaWiki appears to be making good progress.

Posted in Peeves, Programming, Semantic Web, Wikipedia | No Comments »

Bitzi as Tagging 1.0 Metacrap

Sunday, March 12th, 2006

On the Tagging 2.0 panel just cited as (more or less) a non-successful predecessor to Tagging 2.0 applications, saying something like “things like Bitzi (mumble) Cory Doctorow called .”

Vander Wal recently explained in a comment at Joho the Blog:

The big thing that was different, from say Bitzi, was people tagging information in their own vocabulary for their own reuse. Tagging information for others as a priority seems to make it far less accurate as a person may not understand the terms they are using (well understand them as other may).

He’s right. There’s too little private benefit to “tagging” at Bitzi, largely because what interfaces to what you have individually contributed are lame to the extent they exist. The Bitzi use case is rather different from and but it can learn a lot from them.

Posted in Bitzi, Semantic Web, SXSW | 1 Comment »

Semantic Technology Conference wrap

Saturday, March 11th, 2006

The 2006 Semantic Technology Conference was more interesting than I expected. The crowd was older and much more formally dressed and there was far less emphasis on open source solutions than any conference I’ve attended in a long time but it wasn’t merely a vendor schmoozefest.

James Hendler and Ora Lassila’s Semantic Web @5 keynote claimed that Semantic Web technologies have made great strides over the past five years. They pointed out that middle levels of the Semantic Web layer cake are mature and higher levels are subjects of funded research (in 2001 lower and middle levels were mature and research respectively). Near the end they made a strong call to “share; give it away!” — open source tools, datasets, and harvesters are needed to grow the Semantic Web.

My presentation on Semantic Search on the Public Web with Creative Commons went fairly well apart from some audio problems. I began with a hastily added segue (not in the slides) from the keynote, highlighting Science Commons’ database licenseing FAQ and Uniprot. Questions were all over the map, befitting the topic.

I think Uche Ogbuji’s Microformats: Partial Bridge from XML to the Semantic Web is the first talk I’ve heard on that I’ve heard from a non-cheerleader and was a pretty good introduction to the upsides and downsides of microformats and how can leverage microformats for officious Semantic Web purposes. My opinion is that the value in microformats hype is in encouraging people to take advantage of XHTML semantics in however a conventional in non-rigorous fashion they may. It is a pipe dream to think that most pages containing microformats will include the correct profile references to allow a spec-following crawler to extract much useful data via GRDDL. Add some convention-following heuristics a crawler may get lots of interesting data from microformatted pages. The big search engines are great at tolerating ambiguity and non-conformance, as they must.

Ogbuji’s talk was the ideal lead in to Ben Adida’s Interoperable Metadata for a Bottom-Up Semantic Web which hammered home five principles of metadata interoperability: publisher independence, data reuse, self-containment, schema modularity, and schema evolvability. , , Microformats, GRDDL, and RDF/A were evaluated against the principles. It is no surprise that RDF/A came out looking best — Adida has been chairing the relevant W3C taskforce. I think RDF/A has great promise — it feels like microformats minus annoyances, or microformats with a model — but may say otherwise. The oddest response to the talk came from someone of the opinion that [X]HTML is irrelevant — everything should be custom XML rendered with custom XSLT when necessary.

I was somewhat surprised by the strong focus of most talks and vendors on RDF and friends rather than any other “semantic technologies.” was one exception. He apparently claimed last year that by this year would be growing primarily through machine learning rather than input by knowledge engineers. A questioner called Lenat on this prediction. Lenat claimed the prediction came true but did not offer any quantatative measure. It looked like from the slides (unavailable) that Cyc can have databases and similar described to it and may access same (e.g., via JDBC), giving it access to an arbitrary number of “facts.”

If there was a theme that flowed through the conference it was first integrating heterogenous data sources (I don’t recall who, but someone characterized semantic technologies as liberating enterprises from vendors) and second multiplying the value of that data through linking and inference.

Mills Davis’ closing keynote blew up these themes, claiming outrageous productivity improvements are coming very shortly due to semantic technologies, including a slide. The conference hotel fire alarm went off during the keynote, serving as a hype alert to any willing to hear.

SemTech06 reinforces my confidence in what I said in the SemWeb, AI, Java: The Ontological Parallels mini-rant given at SXSW last year. Too bad they rejected my proposal for this year:

Semantic Web vs. Tags Deathmatch: Tags are hot, but are they a dead end? The Semantic Web is still a research project, but will it awaken in August, 2009? People in the trenches fight over the benefits and limits of tags, the viability of officious Semantic Web technologies, what the eventual semantic web will look like, and how to bridge the gap between the two.

I’m off to SXSW tomorrow anyway. My schedule.

Posted in Creative Commons, Microformats, Semantic Web, SXSW | 2 Comments »

Creative Commons Salon San Francisco

Thursday, March 2nd, 2006

Next Wednesday evening in San Francisco come to the Creative Commons Salon sadly not featuring avant-drone-noise electric violin music played on a stage behind white sheets (apropos of nothing apart from listening to that now and not wanting anything else), but should be pretty excellent anyway.

I’ve wanted to do a one-time event like this for a long time, but Eric Steuer and Jon Phillips, who are curating the event and series to be are doing a far better job than I ever could have.

Also next week I’ll be presenting at the 2006 Semantic Technology Conference, then on to SXSW for a panel on digital preservation and blogs and silly parties, but leaving too soon to see the great Savage Republic perform on Friday (in two weeks). Perhaps I should change my flight and find somewhere to crash for two days?

My partner and I are also looking for a new apartment. Know of a great place in San Francisco around $2,000/month and not in the far west or south?

Update 20060303:

CC salon invite

Note Shine’s 1337 address.

Update 20060311: Success.

Posted in Blogs, Creative Commons, Music, Semantic Web, SXSW | 2 Comments »

content.exe is evil

Thursday, February 16th, 2006

I occasionally run into people who think users should download content (e.g., music or video) packaged in an executable file, usually for the purpose of wrapping the content with where the content format does not directly support DRM (or the proponent’s particular DRM scheme). Nevermind the general badness of Digital Restrictions Management, requiring users to run a new executable for each content file is evil.

Most importantly, every executable is a potential vector. There is no good excuse for exposing users to this risk. Even if your executable content contains no malware and your servers are absolutely impenetrable such that your content can never be replaced with malware, you are teaching users to download and run executables. Bad, bad, bad!

Another problem is that executables are usually platform-specific and buggy. Users have enough problem having the correct codec installed. Why take a chance that they might not run Windows (and the specific versions and configurations you have tested, sure to not exist in a decade or much less)?

I wouldn’t bother to mention this elementary topic at all, but very recently I ran into someone well intentioned who wants users to download content wrapped in , if I understand correctly for the purposes of ensuring users can obtain content metadata (most media players do a poor job of exposing content metadata and some file formats do a poor job of supporting embedded metadata, not that hardly anyone cares — this is tilting at windmills) and so that content publishers can track use (this is highly questionable), all from a pretty cross platform GUI. A jar file is an executable Java package, so the platform downside is different (Windows is not required, but a Java installation, of some range of versions and configurations, is), but it is still an executable that can do whatever it wants with the computer it is running on. Bad, bad, bad!

The proponent of this scheme said that it was ok, the jar file could be . This is no help at all. Anyone can create a certificate and sign jar files. Even if a creator did have to have their certificate signed by an established authority it would be of little help, as malware purveyors have plenty of resources that certificate authorities are happy to take. The downsides are many: users get a security prompt (“this content signed by…”) for content, which is annoying, misleading as described above and conditions the user to not pay attention when they install things that really do need to be executable, and a barrier is raised for small content producers.

If you really want to package arbitrary file formats with metadta, put everything in a zip file and include your UI in the zip as HTML. This is exactly what P2P vendor ‘s Packaged Media File format is. You could also make your program (which users download only once) look for specific files within the zip to build a content-specific (and safe) interface within your program. I believe this describes ‘s Kapsules, though I can’t find any technical information.

Better yet put your content on the web, where users can find and view it (in the web design of your choice), you get reasonable statistics, and the don’t get fed. You can even push this to 81/19 by including minimal but accurate embedded in your files if they support it — a name users can search for or a URL for your page related to the content.

Most of the pushers of executable content I encounter when faced with security concerns say it is an “interersting and hard problem.” No, it is a stupid and impossible problem. In contrast to web, executable content is a 5/95/-1000 solution — that last number is a .

If you really want an interesting and hard problem, executable content security is the wrong level. Go work on platform security. We can now run sophisticated applications within a web browser with some degree of safety (due to Java applet and Flash sandboxes, JavaScript security). Similar could be pushed down to the desktop, so that executables by default have no more rights to tamper with your system than do web pages. is an aggressive approach to this problem. If that sounds too hard and not interesting enough (you really wanted to distribute “media”), go the web way as above — it is subsuming the desktop anyhow.

Posted in DRM, Economics, Intellectual Protectionism, P2P, Peeves, Programming, Semantic Web | 2 Comments »

CodeCon Sunday

Monday, February 13th, 2006

Dido. I think this provides AGI, or a way to script voice response systems using and a voice template system analogous to scripting and HTML templates for web servers, though questioners focused on a controversial feature to reorder menus based on popularity. The demo didn’t really work, except as a demonstration of everyone’s frustration with IVRs, as an audience member pointed out.

Deme. Kitchen sink collaboration web app. They aren’t done putting dishes in the sink. They’re thinking about taking all of the dishes out of the sink, replacing the sink, and putting the dishes back in (PHP to something cooler). Let’s vote on what kind of vote to put this to.

Monotone. Elegant distributed , uses SHA1 hashes to identify files and repository states. Hash of previous repository state included in current repository state, making lineage cryptographically provable. used to quickly determine file level differences between repositories (for sync). Storage and (especially) merge and diff are loosely coupled. Presentation didn’t cover day to day use, probably a good decision in terms of interestingness. The revision control presentations have been some of the best every year at CodeCon. They should consider having two or three next year. may be the only project presented this year that had a Wikipedia article before the conference.

Rhizome. Unlike Gordon (and perhaps most people), hearing the triplet doesn’t make my eyes glaze over, but I’m afraid this presentation did. Some of the underlying code ( etc) might be interesting, but was the second to last presentation, and the top level project, Rhizome, amounts to yet another idiosyncratic , with the idiosyncratic dial turned way up.

Elkhound/Elsa/Oink/Cqual++. generator that handles ambiguous grammars in a straightforward manner, C++ parser and tools built on top of same. Can find with a reasonable false positive rate. Expressed confidence that future work would lead the compiler catching far more bugs than usually thought possible (as opposed to only at runtime). Cool and important stuff, too bad I only grok it at a high level. Co-presenter Dan Wilkerson (and sole presenter on Saturday of Delta) is with the Open Source Quality Project at UC Berkeley.

Saturday
Sunday 2005

Posted in Open Source, Programming, Semantic Web | No Comments »

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