Linked Together

This demo shows what can be achieved with the correct use of metadata from Flickr images. If nothing else, this answers why you would bother with metadata (as if there needs to be a justification these days). By correctly annotating your content you gain an advantage in leveraging a network of data. Via, Semantically-linked Interactive Imagery: Wow! The Emergent Web in Action and the demo Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Photosynth demo.

Update: What? I've edited this entry. Weird, I'm sure it made sense at the time.

Oh the Waste

Running the Numbers

This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.

It also includes, ".5 feet wide by 10.5 feet tall in three horizontal panels, Depicts 125,000 one-hundred dollar bills ($12.5 million), the amount our government spends every hour on the war in Iraq."

Via, Statistical visualization.

Ontologies in 3D

"OntoSphere3D is a Protégé plug-in for ontologies navigation and inspection using a 3-dimensional hyper-space where information is presented on a 3D view-port enriched by several visual cues (as the colour or the size of visualized entities)."

While I'm not usually a fan of 3D interfaces this is a fairly intuitive approach. It's certainly seems better than the neighbourhood view and hyperbolic view that they talk about in their paper. They offer a "global view" (projected onto a sphere) and "tree focus".

Java 3D can be pain to install, at least it was for me, as it wouldn't detect Protégé's JRE to install into.

Semantic Web News

• Paul announced Mulgara 1.0 which has JRDF 0.3.4.3 (hopefully I'll get a chance to upgrade it to 0.4 now it's Java 1.5). Danny picked up on this and JRDF SPARQL GUI releases.


• TopBraid Composer integrates D2RQ. Featuring Google maps integration and RDF Graph visualization. The documentation has more information on it's use of Jena and Pellet and allows ontology development using the Eclipse framework.


• making sesame2 SPARQL protocol conformant Some thoughts on SPARQL support in Sesame and comments on other SPARQL implementations.


• Not really related to the Semantic Web but via the AI3 blog, Data Visualization at Warp Speed, a brilliant presentation on improvements in health and economic development through the last century through visualization and frantic explanation.
  

Visual Browser

Visual Browser is a Java application that can visualise the data in RDF scheme. The main principle of the visualisation is that:

* the triple (resource, resource, resource) is represented by two nodes connected by an edge
* the triple (resource, resource, literal) is represented by a hint (small window appearing on mouse over the subject node)

Visual Browser uses the Jena framework to obtain the data, since the RDF scheme can be saved in different forms (a single XML file or a relational database).

The visualisation engine is derived from TouchGraph LLC."

Only for Java 1.5.

Provenance to Unify Browsing

A Framework for Unified Information Browsing via RDFX "This Unified Information Service Browser (UISB) project is investigating the means of joining heterogeneous information from multiple sources into a combined and navigable structure...Attempting to unify disparate data sources illustrates that hierarchical and relational data models can place undesirable constraints on the stored data; however, the same data can be stored without constraint in a dynamic graph, which also provides significant potential for enhanced traversal and discovery capabilities."

"The solution that was adopted was to include provenance information for every statement that is added to the graph. Thereafter if a graph, or a statement or a resource is removed from the store, it can be done without the risk of losing information. In addition to identifying where a statement originated, the provenance objects can store metadata describing (among other things) when it was discovered, and when it should expire, therefore enabling the automated management of expired information, or potentially providing an event mechanism to instigate the refresh of the data. The benefit of this solution, is that it does not rely on the graph implementation to ensure that graph merging and un-merging happens as expected, however the added overhead of four extra statements for tracking provenance may negatively affect performance and increase the size of the data store. This will depend on the implementation of the graph store since some stores (e.g. Jena 6.4) can reify statements more efficiently."

RDF's Rainbow

RDF Gravity (RDF Graph Visualization Tool) "RDF Gravity is a tool for visualising RDF/OWL Graphs/ ontologies. Its main features are:
* Graph Visualization
* Global and Local Filters (enabling specific views on a graph)
* Full text Search
* Generating views from RDQL Queries
* Visualising multiple RDF files"

It uses Jena and Jung.