Just One More Layer of Abstraction

" Open Source, Open data, Process Models" has Sean McGrath linking to "Open Data matters more than Open Source" which is a comment on "Open Source is Dead".

Sean writes:

Traditionally, reference implementations (i.e. traditional source code) has been the way to do this. "Running code" is the final arbiter.

Maybe this is as good as it gets? Unfortunately, a fully blown word processor runs to many, many thousands of lines of code and the semantic devil is buried way down in the details...

Dave writes:

Until we can convince (or force) web sites to embrace and standardize on Open Data formats — XML, JSON, or even CSV, as appropriate — we will be in some ways even more locked in than we were in the bad old desktop days.

Dare writes:

Similarly, how much value do you think there is to be had from a snapshot of the source code for eBay or Facebook being made available? This is one area where Open Source offers no solution to the problem of vendor lock-in. In addition, the fact that we are increasingly moving to a Web-based world means that Open Source will be less and less effective as a mechanism for preventing vendor-lockin in the software industry. This is why Open Source is dead, as it will cease to be relevant in a world where most consumers of software actually use services as opposed to installing and maintaining software that is "distributed" to them.

The point the Sean is making is that even if we achieve what Dave is suggesting we still haven't solved the semantic problem. Making it explicit and non-proprietary is not found in XML, JSON or CSV - these just aren't descriptive enough. And having running code is all fine but it's not generic enough - it will be tied to Java or C# or whatever.

The answer is of course both, but both a data format that is descriptive enough (like RDF/OWL) and open source stores that have the ability to process large quantities of it (because you will have vaste quantities of your own data in the future and you won't want one company to own it).

Semantic Web 2.0

Some recent articles about people discussing the same ideas as the Semantic Web. The Great Database in the Sky "He went on to describe his vision of a skype for database access, combining my data, your data and public data into the next generation OLAP, running a trillion transactions per day. An example could be weather data and he asked what if you could run a SQL statement across all the data sources in the world"

"This is where it became evident that there is a deep disconnect between the traditional database community and the semantic web community. Mårten’s response was rather vague, that this wasn’t as broad as the semantic web and that the semweb includes unstructured data so wasn’t appropriate."

CEO of MySQL "Invents" the Semantic Web! "I have to say, his talk was both a validation of what we have all been working towards, and as Ian Davis explains, it is also a clear sign that the W3C and the Semantic Web community have not found a way to get the message accross."

And moving data around, owning your data seems to be another aspect of the Semantic Web overlooked.

WEB 2.0: Google CEO: Take your data and run "The more we can, for example, let users move their data around, never trap the data of an end user, let them move it if they don't like us, the better."

And my mind boggles at the idea of taking the proposed Australian Access card and their integration problems and fusing it with RDF. Some interesting points: "...the Access Card will be owned by the cardholder and not by the issuer...The effect of the issuer retaining ownership is that they control the card and the purpose for which it is used."

"In Centrelink alone we have a massive 275 kilometres of files...Medicare has to measure its records in a similar way. They have more than 3 square kilometres of storage space for forms with signatures."

"We collect, and almost never reuse, this information."

"The new card will finally put an end to this waste of time. We will be able to reuse the information that you have given us before, but only for the purposes for which you gave it to us. We can then pre-populate forms and take a lot of the pain out of the claim process."

Triple Fest '06

Aperture "...is a Java framework for extracting and querying full-text content and metadata from various information systems (e.g. file systems, web sites, mail boxes) and the file formats (e.g. documents, images) occurring in these systems."

Supports: Plain text, HTML, XHTML, XML, PDF (Portable Document Format), RTF (Rich Text Format), Microsoft Office: Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Visio, Publisher, OpenOffice, OpenDocument, Corel WordPerfect, Quattro, Presentations and Emails (.eml files). Check out the Extractor API and associated interfaces.

Put all that together with stuff like Wikipedia3 and others.

The BBC's open programme information project... including Jon Pertwee in FOAF.

Riki

KaukoluWiki "KaukoluWiki is a Java-JSP-based Semantic Wiki that manages its data by using Semantic Web tools.

The main reason for developing such a Semantic Wiki was the fact that most Web pages lack machine-readable semantics, i.e. means to include the meaning of a certain piece of data in a formalized representation. This is the reason why automated integration of knowledge and reasoning over this knowledge is not possible yet."

Via, gnowsis 0.9 technology preview.

On the Other Hand

A collection of posts that seem contrary to my current point of view but which I find myself agreeing with none the less:

• Instead of autoboxing in Java being confusing, inconsistent and clunky it's useful and concise.
• Instead of Java being dead because of its strong typing people are increasingly picking more strongly typed languages and Perl is being replaced by Ruby.
• Instead of test driving making creating procedural/data driven code and to avoid any test artifacts, test driving leads to more OO code and methods for testing should be left in (although I would've thrown an IllegalArgumentException not a NPE).
• Instead of everyone becoming a librarian, librarians and semantic web developers are excluding many means of shared understanding.

MusiK documentation

MusiK is Kowari's demo application. It does seem to have problems with some Mp3 metadata in iTunes but the supplied Mp3 in the data directory works. The UI is still a little rough (you have to scroll up the panel divider in OS X, for example). The point though is to show how to write an application using Kowari and the speed at querying, loading, etc.

MusiK (Music Player for Kowari).

Kowari now uses JID3 - A Java ID3 Class Library Implementation (in CVS) and it seems to do a better job of not dying when parsing the ID3 tags.

Gnowsis Alpha

Available for Download I had to prioritize downloading it or blogging it...

Installing and running it was pretty painless (just running a shell script) and I'm already going through my MP3s - it evens executes iTunes. It's good to see these ideas implemented.

Feature list :
Server Features
* Local RDF Database (Jena Model based)
* Data integration Hub. integrates different Data sources.
* Filesystem adapter
* MP3-ID3 tag adapter (using MP3 Library by Jens Vonderheide)
* Microsoft Outlook adapter
* Mozilla Thunderbird email adapter
* Mozilla Firefox bookmarks adapter
* XML/RPC API
* Java Client API
* full text indexing (using Apache Lucene)
* local webserver for experiments (using Jetty)

Browser Features
* Browse the local Semantic Desktop
* shows related information for any resource
* Manage your projects using ordinary File Folders
* full text search
* Link anything with drag-drop
* annotate photos and persons

Check out the planned features too.

Universal Inbox

Tom recently pointed me to Spaces which is calling itself a Java based Outlook replacement. Not only does it do email, calendaring, tasks and notes but it has a built in RSS aggregator. The news items appear in your space/Inbox. This is similar to News2Mail but there doesn't appear to be a conversion. I've downloaded and played with it and it's very cool (cool meaning fast, seemingly stable, works with my mail settings, easily configurable, etc.) but not quite good enough for me to switch to using it. A recent blog by the author of Spaces mentions that "...in the future meta-structured storage integrated within applications will become the norm, rather than the exception".