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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 microformats that I’ve heard from a non-cheerleader and was a pretty good introduction to the upsides and downsides of microformats and how GRDDL 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. XML, RDF/XML, 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 worse is better 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.” Doug Lenat was one exception. He apparently claimed last year that Cyc 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 ERP 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 Ray Kurzweil 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:

Note Shine’s 1337 address.

Update 20060311: Success.

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

SemWeb, AI, Java: The Ontological Parallels

Friday, March 18th, 2005

“The Semantic Web: Promising Future or Utter Failure”, the panel I took part in at SXSW shed little light on the topic. Each panelist (including me) brought their own idiosyncratic views to bear and largely talked past each other. The overall SXSW interactive crowd seemed to tend toward web designers and web marketers, not sure about the audience for this panel. Some people, e.g., Chet Campbell, and others in person, apparently left with the impression that all of the panelists agreed that the semantic web is an utter failure (not my view at all).

Sam Felder and Josh Knowles have posted loose transcripts and Christian Bradford a photo of the panel.

The approximate (with links and a few small corrections) text of my introductory statement follows. I got a few laughs.

I want to draw some parallels between semantic web technologies and artificial intelligence and between semantic web technologies and Java.

AI was going to produce intelligent machines. It didn’t and since the late 80s we’ve been in an “AI winter.” That’s nearly twenty years, so web people who suffered and whined in 2001-3, your cup is more than half full. Anyway since then AI techniques have been used in all sorts of products, but once deployed the technology isn’t seen as AI. I mean, where are the conscious robots?

Semantic web technologies have a shorter history, but may play out similarly: widely used but not recognized as such. Machine “agents” aren’t inferring a perfect date for me from my FOAF profile. Or something. This problem is magnified because there’s a loose connection between sematnic web grand visions and AI. People work on both at MIT after all.

Now Java. Applets were going to revolutionize the web. In 1996! Applets didn’t work very well, but lots of people learned Java and it runs out Java is a pretty good solution on the server side. Java is hugely successful as the 21st century’s COBOL. Need some “business logic?” You won’t get fired for implementing it in Java, preferably using JDBC, JSP, JMX, JMS, EJB, JAXB, JDO and other buzzword-compliant APIs.

While discussing industry innovations with a colleague, the conversation took an interesting turn toward online gaming and how the best uitbetalende Nederlandse casino platforms are leveraging cutting-edge technologies to attract players. These casinos, known for their high payout rates, are incorporating advanced algorithms to optimize user experience and maintain transparency—qualities that seem to resonate strongly with players seeking reliability. The parallels to semantic web technologies became clear, as both fields show how overlooked applications can thrive in environments where practical value outweighs initial hype. It was a thought-provoking example of success driven by adaptability and focus on user trust.

It turns out that semantic web technologies are really useful for data integration when you have heterogenous data, as many people do these days. Just one example: Oracle will support a “Network Data Model” in the next release of their database. That may sound like a throwback if you know database history, but it basically means explicit support for storing and querying graphs, which are the data model of RDF and the semantic web.

If you talk to a few of the people trying to build intelligent machines today, who may use the term Artificial General Intelligence to distinguish themselves from AI, you may get a feeling that AI research hasn’t really moved us toward the goal of building an AGI.

Despite Java’s success on the server it is no closer to being important on the web client than it was in 1996. It is probably further. If what you care about is sexy web browser deployment, all Java’s server success has accomplished is to keep the language alive.

Semantic web technologies may be different. Usefulness in behind the scenes data integration may help these technologies gain traction on the web. Why? Because for someone trying to make use of data on the web, the web is one huge heterogenous data integration problem.

An example of a project that uses RDF for data integration that you can see is mSpace. You can read a a paper about how they use RDF inside the application, but it won’t be obvious to an end user that they’re a semantic web technologies application, and that’s as it should be.

One interesting thing about mSpace is that they’re using a classical music ontology developed by someone else and found on SchemaWeb. SchemaWeb is a good place to look for semantic web schemas that can be reused in your project. Similarly, rdfdata.org is a good place to look for RDF datasets to reuse. There are dozens of schemas and datasets listed on these sites contributed by people and organizations around the world, covering beer, wine, vegetarian food, and lots of stuff you don’t put in your mouth.

I intended to close my statement with a preemption of the claim that use of semantic web technologies mandates hashing everything out in committees before deployment (wrong), but I trailed off with something I don’t recall. The committee myth came up again during the discussion anyway.

Perhaps I should’ve stolen Eric Miller’s The Semantic Web is Here slides.

Posted in Programming, Semantic Web, SXSW | 2 Comments »

Snap Associative Decision Recall

Sunday, March 13th, 2005

Malcolm Gladwell gave an interesting afternoon keynote at SXSW today. Many others have already published extensive notes, including Matt May, Liz Lawly, Scott Benish, Tony, and Nancy White.

My two point summary of Gladwell:

Snap decisions play a much greater role than you’d think.
More information does not make for better snap decisions.

I can’t help but think there is some connection between the importance of and our ability to make snap judgements and Jeff Hawkins’ claims in On Intelligence for the primary importance of auto-associative memory and prediction recall (as opposed to computation). A brain that works as Hawkins describes should be fantastic at making snap decisions and a brain should do lots of whatever it excels at.

I’m only halfway through On Intelligence (excellent so far) and haven’t looked at Gladwell’s Blink at all.

Posted in Health, SXSW | No Comments »

SemWeb not by committee

Sunday, March 13th, 2005

At SXSW today Eric Meyer gave a talk on Emergent Semantics. He humorously described emergent as a fancy way of saying grassroots, groundup (from the bottom or like ground beef), or evolutionary. The talk was about adding rel attributes to XHTML <a> elements, or the lowercase semantic web, or Semantic XHTML, of which I am a fan.

Unfortunately Eric made some incorrect statements about the uppercase Semantic Web, or RDF/RDFS/OWL, of which I am also a fan. First, he implied that the lowercase semantic web is to the Semantic Web as evolution is to intelligent design, the current last redoubt of apolgists for theism.

Very much related to this analogy, Eric stressed that use of Semantic XHTML is ad hoc and easy to experiment with, while the Semantic Web requires getting a committee to agree on an ontology.

Not true! Just using rel="foo" is equivalent to using a http://example.com/foo RDF property (though the meaning of the RDF property is better defined — it applies to a URI, while the application of the implicit rel property is loose).

In the case of more complex formats, an individual can define something like hCard (lowercase) or vCard-RDF (uppercase).

No committee approval is required in any of the above examples. vCard-RDF happens to have been submitted to the W3C, but doing so is absolutely not required, as I know from personal experience at Bitzi and Creative Commons, both of which use RDF never approved by committee.

At best there may be a tendency for people using RDF to try to get consensus on vocabulary before deployment while there may be a tendency for people using Semantic XHTML to throw keywords at the wall and see if they stick (however, Eric mentioned that the XFN (lowercase) core group debated whether to include me in the first release of their spec). Neither technology mandates either approach. If either of these tendencies to exist, they must be cultural.

I think there is value in the ad hoc culture and more importantly closeness of Semantic XHTML assertions to human readable markup of the lowercase semantic web and the rigor of the uppercase Semantic Web.

It may be useful to transform a rel="" assertions to RDF assertions via GRDDL or a GRDDL-inspired XMDP transformation.

I will find it useful to bring RDF into XHTML, probably via RDF/A, which I like to call Hard Core Semantic XHTML.

Marc Canter as usual expressed himself from the audience (and on his blog). Among other things Marc asked why Eric didn’t use the word metadata. I don’t recall Eric’s answer, but I commend him for not using the term. I’d be even happier if we could avoid the word semantic as well. Those are rants for another time.

Addendum: I didn’t make it to the session this afternoon, but Tantek Ã‡elik‘s slides for The Elements of Meaningful XHTML are an excellent introduction to Semantic XHTML for anyone familiar with [X]HTML.

Addendum 20050314: Eric Meyer has posted his slides.

Posted in Bitzi, Creative Commons, Peeves, Semantic Web, SXSW | 7 Comments »

SXSW & Etech

Saturday, March 12th, 2005

I’m in Austin now through Monday for SXSW and in San Diego Tuesday through Thursday for Etech. I’m sad that I won’t be around for any music showcases this year and that I have to leave Austin for one of my less favorite places, but Etech is the better conference.

I’m helping Matt Haughey with a SXSW panel, The Semantic Web: Promising Future or Utter Failure (I’ll be the SemWeb technologies advocate) and an Etech session, Remixing Culture with RDF: Running a Semantic Web Search in the Wild.

Creative Commons will have other events and a party at SXSW.

Posted in Creative Commons, Music, Semantic Web, SXSW | 3 Comments »

Walking Austin

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2004

I spent much of last week in Austin, attending SXSW Interactive with Creative Commons and hearing two nights of good music at SXSW music showcases.

I found time to do some of what I always do when I’m in a new place. First walk around as much as possible. Second, while I’m doing that eat at the local vegetarian restaurants. Third, visit the largest local library.

I think I crisscrossed most of the neighborhoods adjacent to or nearby downtown, about 30 miles total. I enjoyed Travis Heights the most, though admittedly many of my other walks were during the wee morning hours when I couldn’t take in as much visually. Mansions to the west. To the east the Tenth Ward, apparently a predominantly Mexican district, very different feel from San Franicsco’s Mission. Not at all urban. Are drug stores few in Austin, or is it odd to have them every other block, only a slight exaggeration for some areas of San Franicsco? Pleasant surprise: almost no barking dogs.

Mr. Natural (east) is all vegetarian with many vegan options and served some of the best Mexican food I’ve had (however, I’m not a huge fan). I had Tofu Pipian, “Tofu cooked with a rich sauce made of pumpkin and sesame seeds, peanuts, and peppers.” The tofu was very tasty.

Magnolia Cafï¿½ (south) does have many vegetarian options, but almost none vegan. I had Magnolia Stir Fry, “Ginger, garlic, carrots, broccoli, onion, mushroom, red bells and yellow squash sauteed in honey-lime teriyaki. Served over brown rice. With Tofu.” Surprisingly tasty (I’m really not a fan of American diner fare). The place was packed with a short wait for a seat at 3PM.

The Austin Central Library isn’t shiny, but it was quiet, aroma-free, and seemed to have a good collection. Too bad the San Francisco main library mostly has the opposite traits.

I look forward to visiting Austin again. The place started to grow on me.

Posted in Creative Commons, Health, Music, SXSW | 4 Comments »

CC-Austin

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2004

Last week was a busy one for Creative Commons at SXSW, though perhaps not as busy as the week leading up to it.

The CC music panel attracted an if-you-don’t-use-DRM-you-hate-artists troll and hosted at least two interesting announcements: the CC Music Sharing “License” (actually a mere branding-for-music-people of the CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license, not a fragmentation) and physical artifacts from Opsound. Also check out Opsound’s Remix Ready logo/campaign:

When you see this symbol it means that the artist has offered to provide uncompressed source material for remixing. If the files are available for download on a website, there will be a link you can follow, otherwise contact the artist by email to request the material you’d like to use. Please do be patient and allow the artist some time to respond. Obviously some specific materials may not be available. Have fun.

Great idea, and good segue to the CC film panel, at which the 4th Wall Films project was announced. The idea is to make film “source” — scripts, uncut footage, director’s notes — available for remixing. The panel engendered much excitement, and not just for 4th Wall. Film people seem to have a substantially different attitude than music people.

Heather Ford has a good writeup of both panels.

CC also hosted two parties with Magnatune and EFF-Austin. Jon Lebkowsky has many pictures of the first.

Posted in Creative Commons, DRM, Music, SXSW | 1 Comment »

Texas Alien Abductions Up After Chunnel Completion

Monday, March 22nd, 2004

Following the Magnatune & Creative Commons party last Thursday I saw a few more bands play at the Blender Balcony at the Ritz and Room 710 SXSW showcases.

I miscalculated and caught a bit of Supagroup. I can’t stand their brand of rock, not since I first heard something similar when a down-the-street playmate put on a Sammy Hagar record. Supagroup seemed to do what they do very well though. If you have atrocious taste, do yourself a favor and check them out.

Joanna Newsom shtick is singing in a little girl voice while playing a harp in such a way that it sounds mysteriously guitar-like. Great for radio, not bad for a short set, would require a very funny mood to want to listen to an entire album.

Faun Fables is Dawn McCarthy, often accompanied by Nils Frykdahl of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, as she was Thursday evening. I could swear I heard McCarthy sing at the Paradise in San Francisco in the mid-90s, but I can’t find any record of it. At that mythical show (my bad memory has Jad Fair and the Ruins also playing) I was so impressed by the probable-McCarthy’s folk-singing and yodelling that I tried to remember her “name”, but got it wrong, thinking it was Crow-something. Anyway, I was delighted to discover the definite-McCarthy sometime in the more recent past. Her teaming up with Frykdahl is mostly a good thing — Fear March is a nearly perfect song in my book. Sometimes it is almost too much of a good thing, particularly when they sing at the same time. Both have such compelling voices that it is really hard to listen to both at once and hear the beauty of each. Frykdahl ought to do some solo work, even a capella.

Seeing Alice Donut was a real treat. They were on my short list of bands I really wished I had seen, and I’m very happy that they got back together. Singer Tomas Antona is a beautiful person. For star struckers, Jello Biafra was in the audience, the only semi-famous person I noted at SXSW.

Simulacrum playlist for the evening (sans Supagroup) at WebJay.

Also following the Magnatune & CC party, CC’er Glenn Otis Brown attended an MSN party. His account of Microsoft’s tremendous goodwill is a must-read.

Posted in Creative Commons, Music, Peeves, SXSW | 1 Comment »

Night of Bowed Strings and Cambodian Surf

Thursday, March 18th, 2004

Notes on last night’s SXSW showcase at Emo’s Annex:

Electric cello sololist Erik Friedlander at his best (to my ears) sounded like a Tony Conrad–Kronos Quartet hybrid, i.e., amazing. A couple of plucked pieces were relatively boring, in particular a Carlos Santana piece, and to a lesser extent one by John Zorn. The amazing pieces, which should’ve inspired a miniature mosh pit (as opposed to total destruction of the venue, which is what should’ve happened at the one Conrad show I’ve had the pleasure of attending — I’ll have to write about that sometime), more than made up for the uninteresting interludes. Friedlander’s set was the best of the evening, and I plan on checking out more of his music.

Dengue Fever, billed as a “six-piece Cambodian Psychedelic rock band” was decent. Lyrics were all in Cambodian, mostly sung by a Camobdian woman. One sax player worked well with the sound, which is pretty hard to do in my listening experience. Asides: I note that the Dengue Fever site lists among related projects Brazzaville, a band I’m familiar with via their use of Joe Frank, my spiritual guru, on a track called Ocean. Check out L.A.’s Brazzaville found its audience in Russia via downloads and pirated CDs from the December 1, 2003 Los Angeles Times.

Estradasphere played jammy exotica, heavy metal and banjo-led bluegrass, none of it all that effectively to my ears (actually the banjo sounded OK). Each musician played at least two instruments. They’re obviously talented, but the implementation just didn’t work for me.

I’ve seen Sleepytime Gorilla Museum a bunch of times in San Francisco. They played mostly new material I hadn’t heard before, some of it more explicitly political than their previous work, including a song about Rome introduced with a dedication to “the American Empire at its greatest extent” and another intro’d with (to the best of my memory) “a man who saw many things wrong with the world and attempted to fix them by sending little wooden boxes to strong people” about the Unabomber. They closed with the track they used to always open with, Sleep is Wrong, which made everyone very sad there was no time for an encore.

Secret Chiefs 3 consisted of all of the members of Estradasphere less the drummer, plus four other musicians, including two different drummers. They got into some OK multi-ethnic mish-mash grooves. Just OK.

(Apart from Dengue Fever, all of the bands last night employed at least one amplified bowed string instrument.)

For a hint at what the show was like, listen to my 2004-03-17 Emo’s Annex Simulacrum playlist at WebJay. Most of the songs on the playlist are just recent tracks from the artists involved and probably weren’t the ones played last night. I also didn’t make any attempt to choose representative or superior tracks — this post has already taken far too much time, apologies.

Tonight following the Magnatune & Creative Commons party I’m hoping to catch two acts to die for — experimental yodeller Faun Fables and out-of-retirement sardonic-hard-punk-rock band Alice Donut.

Posted in Creative Commons, Music, SXSW | 1 Comment »