WebFountain

WebFountain: IBM Buzzes the Web for Intelligent Applications "WebFountain works in three stages: base mining, in which indexing and search technologies are used to systematically mine the Internet using focused crawling; an industry component, which requires industry-specific expertise to know the types of algorithms with high value (IBM plans to work with customers and consulting organizations to build these); and the application, which will be delivered to customers as an on-demand service."

""For every megabyte of data we read in," says Carlson, "we create about 10 megabytes of metadata. Our value proposition is the metadata. We extract all of this stuff—nouns, locations, entities—then it goes into an industry process." He says, "We construct higher-level value from this information."

There have been a number of research breakthroughs that have allowed IBM to create the WebFountain infrastructure; the technical challenge was to get to the scale. It is an operation made up of about a 1000-node Intel Linux cluster and half a Petabyte of storage, according to Carlson. While a "me-too solution" could be made by "cobbling together about 30 or so companies in the marketplace," according to Carlson, he doubts they could get past 10 million pages."

Pretty much confirms what I thought, more metadata than data, 10:1 metadata to data.

Metadata Miner

Catalogue "Catalogue is a file cataloging utility that enables quick viewing, managing and updating of metadata or document properties...[the export modules allows you to] apply XSL transformations to XML exports, transform to Dublin Core RDF". It's homepage is here. At the low, low price of US$64.

Hidden Windows

Windows Explorer secrets exposed ""During the development of this product, Whirling Dervishes revealed hidden Windows interfaces that are crucial to the development of such applications but which the existence of was denied by Microsoft.

"An example of such interfaces is the way these applications can manipulate the 'tasks pane', a section that is displayed on the left in Windows XP and contains items like 'Folder Tasks'."

A namespace extension is a virtual folder in Windows Explorer, such as Control Panel. "

New Search Engine (with Topic Clustering)

Make way for the contender to Google's crown "Turbo10 let's you select up to 10 search engines to run a search through. But unlike AskJeeves where all the results are irritatingly put in different boxes, Turbo10's genius to combine them all in one weighted listing - it's the search engine of search engines. So if you wanted, you could select google.com, google.co.uk and news.google.com to search in."

"When we first started trying out the engine yesterday, it had 1102 search engines available. At the moment, it links to 1108. But the time you've reached the end of this article, it will be probably be more."

You know what's really annoying, you can't link to the search results. The results aren't the real URLs either, they are redirections through Turbo10. The idea of a "deep search" is good (the choice of search engines is impressive but restricting it to 10 is not). I can't help wishing that there was more.

Haystack Released

Preliminary Haystack Download Can't wait to have a look at Adenine. Screenshot. I've had problems getting it going on the Mac. ::Managability:: has a review Finding Open Source Java in a Haystack.

Smokey Trousers

Revealed: How Blair used discredited WMD 'evidence' "British intelligence sources said the defector, recruited by Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, told his story to American officials. It was passed on to London as part of regular information-sharing with Washington, but British intelligence chiefs considered the "45 minutes" claim to be unreliable and uncorroborated by any other evidence."

IE is Dead (the Web too?)

WinInfo Short Takes: Week of June 2 "When asked in a recent online chat about the next version of IE, Brian Countryman, an IE Program Manager, said, "As part of the OS, IE will continue to evolve, but there will be no future standalone installations. IE6 SP1 is the final standalone installation." The reason? "Legacy OSes have reached their zenith with the addition of IE 6 SP1," he said. "Further improvements to IE will require enhancements to the underlying OS." Sadly, this perspective is skewed, and suggests Microsoft believes IE is somehow at the "zenith" of the Web browser heap."

Sad, although not at all unexpected (I think there was a better link but that's the best I could find). It's not about a zenith of anything, it's about rights management (Palladium). It also indicates just how deep the changes will be for rights management (not just a plugin for IE, an extra window in Word or integration into Window's Media Player). Also mentioned on Slashdot, Tim Bray, Ryan Lowe's Blog and bradchoate.com.

How MS is Going to Kill the Web

Don't try to re-invent the browser, please. "I read all kinds of thoughts how and why IE should evolve but it really shouldn't. It should be put to rest, and the focus should be moved to an application which is already at our desktop: the CLR itself. It's a waste of energy when you are trying to re-invent the wheel that is already available: winforms. The majority of web-applications use cumbersome HTML-forms to try to build a workable GUI, while a winforms developer can do that with ease using the winforms glyphs and controls. If there was a way to run a GUI using winforms on the desktop of the website visitor, you can build a rich and powerful GUI with common technology which doesn't suffer from the fact that there is no scripting available, all HTML form glyphs are text based and other nasties related to HTML (or XHTML for that matter) which are totally avoidable when you use a decent GUI framework, like winforms."

I think applets have a lot to answer for.

32-bit C64

C64 32-bit processor test! "Ruud Baltissen and Gideon Zweijtzer are testing the selfbuild 32-bit C64 processor. This so called 65GZ032 processor is build in an original Commodore 64..." Pictures of the processor.

iPod - Stupidly Sized Portable Storage

The iPod As A Digital Wallet Gateway Drug "So what to do with all that space? Apple has an unique opportunity at this time to make it available for different uses. Digital cameras are a great place to start. Most of them use expensive flash cards, buying a 256 mg one is quite pricey. Remember those gigs on our iPods? Apple, let us use them with our digital cameras. The same goes for Digital Video cameras. How cool would it be to record directly to your iPod instead of to tape and then transferring it to your machine."

News From Today's Steve Jobs Interview in Carlsbad "No PDA in Apple's future -- their research is that people primarily want a small device which has copies of data already on their computer, make occassional small changes."

WWW2003 Apps

Big Changes for Search Engines notes several applications demonstrated at WWW2003: TimeSearcher, PhotoMesa and PhotoFinder. See also imgSeek and Eikon.

Text Database

Emdros "The data domain which Emdros handles is that of text. Emdros provides a certain abstraction of text that makes it ideally suited to storing and retrieving annotated text, such as linguistic analyses of a text.

These analyses can be, e.g., syntactic analyses, morphological analyses, or discourse analyses, or all of these. Phonological analyses are also supported to some extent.

Emdros is particularly useful in domains where research questions need to be asked of databases of annotated text. This would include dictionary-making, Biblical language-research (Greek or Hebrew), other linguistic research, and research on annotated text in general." The backend is either PostgreSQL or MySQL.

DARPA gives US$1.7 million for OS Semantic Web Project

"Teknowledge says the open source framework will be one of the tools that drives the Semantic Web from research vision to practical reality.

"[Our] Knowledge Systems group is doing extremely innovative research and development that will provide a semantic foundation for the next generation of financial and security software applications," Teknowledge president and CEO Neil Jacobstein said in a statement. "The software in our lives today may be graphical, fast, and useful, but it knows very little about its users tasks, or the underlying meaning of what is displayed on a computer screen. This project is exciting because it offers the possibility of building software that can begin to provide meaningful support for user tasks. I would not describe this as a breakthrough, but rather an incremental step in a long development path. This kind of software has been on Teknowledge's radar screen for over twenty years, and its day is coming."

The technology is steeped in Teknoledge's Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) and the company says it has mapped it to over 100,000 word senses in the WordNet natural language lexicon. The company says its research helps give technical users a comprehensive language for asking precise questions."

http://dc.internet.com/news/article.php/2209971

How MS's DRM works

Rights Management Comes to the Enterprise "Windows RM lets enterprises establish a set of trusted entities, including users, groups, applications, or machines, within an organization. Once these trust relationships are established, users can encrypt data items, such as documents, PowerPoint presentations, and e-mail messages, and assign usage rights and conditions to them based on various levels of trust."

Why Rent?

Microsoft prepares reply to iTunes "Services such as Pressplay, which uses Microsoft technology, have been put on the defensive with news that Apple has sold more than 2 million downloads since April 28, the day its iTunes Music Store launched. But Microsoft is betting that new security enhancements planned for later this year could make renting music, rather than owning it, more attractive to consumers.

Microsoft said it is developing software that makes it easier for subscription services to transfer music to portable music players. These services now provide unlimited downloads of hundreds of thousands of songs to a PC for a monthly fee, but they typically do not allow files to be moved around much. Microsoft said it will soon address this shortcoming with technology that will allow unlimited downloads to a portable device--a dramatic improvement. "

How can it be made more attractive? You don't own the music. One day, when you don't pay your bill not only could your PC OS stop working, your music, your documents, your stereo system could all be made useless or inaccessible. This is the future?

What is a Librarian?

In some ways a librarian could be described as paranoid:

"If we understand libraries simply to be nodes in a global digital network of common resources, nobody retains any responsibility for either those materials or serving the needs of the community. In this environment, there would indeed be no meaningful role for libraries. We do not see this as serving the needs or interests of our readers, particularly if viewed over time. We have come to understand "access, not ownership" more as rationalization of constrained choices than as a functional understanding of libraries' service to their communities, other than purchasing and licensing agents."

And somewhat snobbish:
"So to some extent the question of what is a library anymore could be one about which, "if you have to ask the question, you wouldn't understand the answer.""

I think it's all pretty justified mind you. An interesting read.

What is a library anymore, anyway?

Finally, DRMed HTML

IE beta plugs document leaks "Microsoft released a plug-in for Internet Explorer that is designed to protect sensitive documents from unauthorised editing or copying--an early step in its effort to encourage corporations to use its software to share sensitive information."

Something that would never had worked, to allow the Web to get going, can now be applied now that Microsoft owns over 90% of it.

Another Chat with Gosling

"IDGNS: So, other than easy-to-use Java tools, what else are you looking forward to at JavaOne?

Gosling: The really big trend these days for me is how interesting and how different the edge of the network is becoming. The data center side of the world is kind of like a solved problem, but you see interesting things happening on the edge with things like cell phones and embedded systems that are becoming really fascinating.

IDGNS: Are you saying that Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) will not necessarily be the most exciting area of new development for Java?
Gosling: I'm not exactly sure how to answer that carefully. I mean, J2EE remains a very exciting thing and it has been extraordinarily successful, but it's become so successful and so pervasive that it's kind of like the oxygen in the air that you breathe. It's everywhere; you depend on this critically, but it's not what excites you when you get up in the morning. Of course, if you found yourself on the surface of the moon, all of a sudden it would be really exciting to have oxygen. But around here, oxygen is a fairly common thing."

http://www.arnnet.com.au/index.php?id=1495836492&eid=-100

Tim Bray's RDF Challenge

Want to win the rdf.net domain name? "To the first person or organization that presents me with an RDF-based app that I actually want to use on a regular basis (at least once per day), and which has the potential to spread virally, I hereby promise to sign over the domain name RDF.net."

Disorganise your Music

Clutter is a small Mac OS X application that lets you put music CDs on your desktop. You can drag them anywhere -- they're really windows. Line them up neatly or put them in piles, it's your choice. Each one looks like the real CD's cover, and double-clicking it tells iTunes to play that CD.

Take on the World

Lux looks to be a Java based clone of Risk but available only for OS X. There's also Java Risk and others.

WWW2003 Coverage

Tim Berners Lee's opening keynote covered the Semantic Web and Web Services according to Edd Dumbill's coverage.

The TAP people are semantically marking up the entire web with SemTag.

FOAFFinger is finger using FOAF and Rendezvous.

Then there's also notes taken during the first day.

SearchEngine Watch's Virtually Attending the 12th IW3C2 Conference has links to the papers being presented.

Armadillo

"Armadillo utilizes multiple strategies (Named Entity Recognition, external databases, existing gazetteers, various information extraction engines [such as Amilcare & Annie]) to model a domain by connecting different entities and objects." Related to KIM through the use of the GATE framework. GATE is an LGPLed Java library/framework and provides support for RDF, RDFS, DAML+OIL, and lots more.

Matrix Uses Real Exploit

""That's exactly how the fictional Trinity uses it. In a sequence that flashes on screen for a few scant seconds, the green phosphor text of Trinity's computer clearly shows Nmap being run against the IP address 10.2.2.2, and finding an open port number 22, correctly identified as the SSH service used to log into computers remotely."

"But the unexpected nod to hackerdom doesn't end there. Responding to the Nmap output , Trinity summons a program called "sshnuke" which begins "[a]ttempting to exploit SSHv1 CRC32."

Discovered in February, 2001 by security analyst Michal Zalewski, the SSH CRC-32 bug is a very real buffer overflow in a chunk of code designed to guard against cryptographic attacks on SSH version one. Properly exploited, it grants full remote access to the vulnerable machine.""

Matrix Sequel Has Hacker Cred

.NET two times slower (eventually) than Java

.NET performance still seriously lags Java "If we look at the .NET CLR, being a simple JIT, it never improves over time. On the other hand, the Hotspot Server only widens its performance lead...The Sun Hotspot server edition eventually widens its lead to the point where it is running almost two times as fast as .NET version 1.1! While the CLR couldn't get below 8 seconds, starting with the 23rd iteration, the Sun Hotspot server JVM never went above 5 seconds! So for applications that don't just open and close, the Hotspot JVM absolutely wipes the floor with the latest and greatest Microsoft CLR."

Automated Annotation

"MnM is an annotation tool which provides both automated and semi-automated support for annotating web pages with semantic contents. MnM integrates a web browser with an ontology editor and provides open APIs to link to ontology servers and for integrating information extraction tools." It uses 1.5 of Jena. Amilcare is used in the extraction of concepts. The UI is fairly bad, there seems to be hard coded references to "Program Files" and certain buttons (like loading ontologies and kb) don't seem to work. It is good to see the ideas of knowledge bases, ontologies and automated annotation being implemented.

Algernon in Java

"The Algernon rule-based inference system has been reimplemented in Java and interfaced with Protege. Algernon performs forward and backward rule-based processing of frame-based knowledge bases, and efficiently stores and retrieves information in ontologies and knowledge bases."

v3.4.0 was released on May 16, 2003.

With Jena 2 supporting pluggable inferencing I wonder how much effort it will take to get Algernon in there. There's a list of 14 things (not quite 100) you can do with Algernon (number 9: "Act as a server for remote rule processing"). The original was written in C++.

Ireland Funds Semantic Web

Looks like Ireland is giving research into the Semantic Web almost as much money as heart disease treatments.

"Digital Enterprise Research Centre - NUI Galway - Working on the technologies that will underpin the next generation of the World Wide Web. Their work will involve developing "semantic web technology" - the next generation of intelligent software to facilitate information retrieval from the internet and personalize web applications...12million over five years." Partnering with HP.

Major Research Investment of 42 million euro in Three New Centres for Science, Engineering and Technology - Top Class Research Centres Key to Ireland's Future - 2 May 2003

Speaking of HP, Jena 2, Preview 3 is available for download. This is the first Jena 2 with relational database backend support (looks like only MySQL for now). The schemagen stuff is quite interesting - taking OWL, DAML+OIL and RDFS and converting them to Java classes. Jena performance is not up to 3 times faster.

Matches

My blog matches at the moment are fairly interesting. Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog is one I've noted before as being close to mine. It'll be interesting to see how this evolves over time.

Live Up to Your Promise

Last week some people at work noted bug 724680 on the Metadatabase site:

"No files nor docs submitted!
Live up to your promise!

-chris"

Enough said I think. I wonder, if I ever work somewhere else, if I can ask them to make sure everything I do is OS. Probably not - but this stuff (programming) can be so much wasted effort otherwise.

That being said I've been able to update RCOSjava and I've been quite happy with it. I've received numerous (for it anyway) downloads recently. Can't wait to get 0.5 out.

More Making Money with OS

I hadn't read this before (or heard about it). It's the expanded version of the paper that convinced Jim Barksdale and other Netscape executives to OS Navigator.

"Commercial software companies face many challenges in growing their business in today's fast-moving and competitive industry environment. Recently many people have proposed the use of an open-source development model as one possible way to address those challenges. This document investigates the business of commercial open-source software, including why a company might adopt an open-source model, how open-source licensing works, what business models might be usable for commercial open-source products, what special considerations apply to commercial products released as open source, and how various objections relating to open source might be answered."

Setting Up Shop

Mentioned in REVOLUTION OS.

ContextMedia and Metadata

" ContextMedia's InterChange is one of the more promising CI tools that Tony discusses. It "builds and maintains a major central metadata store... Capturing all that metadata—-and normalizing it around the Dublin Core or some other universal schema—-is the first critical task of any ContextMedia implementation."

Yow. That's nice and all, but it sounds pretty damned ambitious. In fact, all enterprise-wide metadata initiatives sound pretty damned ambitious. Strange for me: I'm a librarian by background, but I'm increasingly finding myself advising that such initiatives be delayed or avoided altogether. They're just too difficult and expensive for most enterprises to take on. Two main reasons: metadata interoperability and metadata merging."

He correctly highlights these two issues but interoperability can be solved with ontologies and ontology maintenance and metadata merging can be done through the use of mapping metaontologies. Either way there can be heavy costs involved, that's for sure.

Got Enterprise Metadata?

Standards supported by ContextMedia include RDF, etc.:
""We've assembled the only open standards-based integration platform in the content management sector, supporting key technologies such as XML, RDF, XSL, LDAP, and ODBC/JDBC, giving customers the most flexible option available to manage and share their digital content assets.""

The Whole World has Gone Mad

Tim Bray just read some of Bruce Eckels. I remain unconvinced.

Okay, so maybe not all the world. James has some interesting points about IDEs and using scripting for faster testing (having seen Jython used for Swing testing certainly agrees with that).

Sun is also going the opposite way with generics. This makes Java more type safe, by removing casting and throwing a compile time error if you add something of the wrong type, rather than less.

More Semantic Blogging

Well this is getting quite common and almost boring (yay!). SnipSnap, based on the UML, allows you to serialize labels to RDF.

Pivot Tables

This is the story of Improv. Another time where Steve Jobs was shown a revolutionary new application. This was the first application that implemented the equivalent of pivot tables.

To quote the Linux Spreadsheet page:
" I would suggest that what happened in the history of the developments is that, for ``political'' reasons, the developments attributable to Lotus Improv (originally developed using NeXtstep ) were lost, and that its better model of spreadsheet construction/management was thereby lost."

A screenshot.

Semantic Shoebox

A Semantic Web shoebox - annotating photos with RSS and RDF Slides from the XML Europe Conference which had some interesting benefits and uses of RDF. He used Jena and Redland. Searching for 'hotel' and 'building' - hmm semantics.

Pixory is another Java based, picture server. It uses EXIF for its metadata.

Classifier4j

Classifier4J Prerelease "This includes the source and demo training and analyzing programs. No sample data is supplied, nor is any usage documentation at all." See also: Contextual Network Graphs, PopFile, PMI-IR and Weka (and Kea).

Apparently, Intel will be doing the same:
"Microprocessor company Intel is soon to release a set of Bayesian network software libraries to help software developers to build better machine learning capabilities into their programs...Intel hopes to release the libraries at the Neural Information Processing Systems 2003 conference on 6 June."

Bush vs. Bush

Fairly old but still good. Governor vs President.

SVG for J2ME

TinySVG Screenshots "Compact code size about 60K, Well defined and documented Java API, *Out of the box* pure CLDC Java SDK for SVG, *Ready to run* viewers for MIDP2.0, Nokia Series 60 MIDP, and Pesonal Profile."

JFluid and Jeneva

JFluid "JFluid is a profiling tool that allows you to profile an arbitrary subset of your program, that can be changed while the program is running. It uses a modified Java(tm) HotSpot(tm) VM, that supports dynamic bytecode instrumentation. This is a new experimental capability in the JVM, that allows tools to hotswap any methods of a running application on-the-fly, and do that as many times as needed." Only available for Windows and Solaris.

Borland Heats Up New, Upgraded Java Tools ""Janeva enables .Net clients and servers to connect with J2EE and CORBA back ends using [Internet Inter-ORB Protocol] as the transport mechanism," Elloy said. Janeva comes with C#Builder, the Borland development environment for .Net Framework."

Visual Thesaurus

Another ball and stick UI

RDF and WebDAV

I've thought that WebDAV and RDF are made for each other (especially, storing and searching metadata). The Twingle project is another one mingling the two to provide "Locating, Creating, and Collaborating" from within Mozilla. It apparently uses a true MVC pattern and the model is represented as RDF.

"Twingle reinforced the lesson that quick, tangible efforts are ideal for bringing unity." - Against the Grain: Getting Projects To Work Together

Talk About Eating Your Own Dog Food

Chef Moz "Yes, you can read and write restaurant reviews here" All data available in RDF. OpenSite's RDF dump but MusicMoz doesn't seem to have one.

Portal

John Bateman's ontology portal... "WordNets are mentioned, but are not central here as I consider them to be mostly about lexical representation and not ontology; their possible 'interface role' is dealt with separately. There is also a clear overlap and lots of interesting action in the Semantic Web effort, several links on this page lead in this direction."

iPod Wiki

Wiki Meet iPod "Gus Mueller has been working on a desktop Wiki application called VoodooPad which merges the thoughts of a desktop notepad with the linking goodness of a Wiki.

But, as they say, that's not all. Gus has just released version 1.1 alpha 1 of VoodooPad which supports exporting your VoodooPad documents, with links and all, to the iPod."

Buggy Bugs

FindBugs " This is the web page for FindBugs, a program which looks for bugs in Java code... Please note that FindBugs is alpha-quality software. You may find bugs in it, and the features and source code may change significantly in future releases."

More Semantic Mapping

Simple Semantics Resolution - RSS 2.0 Module Whether mapping an XML schema to RDF is called mapping metaontologies, semantic schemas (or XR) or semantic shadows it looks good to me.

Jars in Jars

JarJar ClassLoader "allows you to load classes from .JAR files that are stored inside your main .JAR file".

The Race is On

New Apple Service Off To Quick Start "The service, which went live Monday, sold an estimated 275,000 tracks at 99 cents apiece in its first 18 hours, according to major-label sources." According to Fortune "The iTunes Music Store will initially offer 200,000 tunes, paying the record companies an average of 65 cents for each track it sells."

Best of the Best

TripleHop Technologies Named as a 'Best of AIIM 2003' by Transform Magazine "MatchPoint 2.0 was chosen due to the software's significant ability to combine the best of semantic and statistical technologies to provide concept search across the enterprise. Transform Magazine noted specifically its ability to "search across the Internet, corporate intranets, corporate file systems, Outlook and Lotus emails (including attachments), desktop files and databases, refreshing its indices regularly, typically in a three- to four- hour process at night."" They support the financial, legal and others. The rest of the best is detailed here.

Rumour and Speculation

It looks like HP have a project called Genesis which maybe an all Java triple store for RDF or maybe it's just a better interface to existing SQL databases, BDB, etc.

The first email that tweaked me was:
"Preview3 is due to be released in May and will include databsae backed persistent storage (provided by the HP Genesis team). The current preview2 support in-memory RDF models only."

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-dspace/2003Apr/0092.html

The features that it may have are:
"1. Peer-level ingest and publish. This is the server to server interface mentioned previously. In this interface each server owns its own data and is not responsible for the data in its peers.

2. Priveleged peer-level based on one or more of data replication, mirroring, and federation. In this interface each server cooperates to present an interface to a logically combined metadata store."
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-dspace/2003Apr/0046.html

OSCOM

Authena: RDF Rights Descriptions and Syndicated Distribution "Whereas RSS is generally used for syndicating newsfeeds, Authena uses RSS to syndicate rights information and links to digital media in different formats, including thumbnailed, watermarked, and high-quality originals in secure directories, so as to facilitate the indexing, harvesting, and selling of content on the semantic web in accordance with rights defined by the creator." Also at OSCOM will be SIMILIE (mentioned previously), An Ontology for Content Management Systems and many others.

HTML to RDF/RSS

JMdRdf "This software is the tool which creates RDF/RSS. RDF/RSS creation library is also contained. You can generate rss for your homepage rss, only configuring XML .Information is automatically extracted from a title, description, etc. in HTML, and RDF/RSS is created." JMdRdf's sourceforge project.

iTunes Extravaganza

Apple Launches the iTunes Music Store "iTunes(R) Music Store, a revolutionary online music store that lets customers quickly find, purchase and download the music they want for just 99 cents per song, without subscription fees. The iTunes Music Store offers groundbreaking personal use rights, including burning songs onto an unlimited number of CDs for personal use, listening to songs on an unlimited number of iPods, playing songs on up to three Macintosh(R) computers, and using songs in any application on the Mac(R), including iPhoto(TM), iMovie(TM) and iDVD(TM)."

It's only available in the US. Weird. It's still fairly fun to use. There's no caching on the movies you download, I can see this being a real bandwidth buster.

Apple Introduces New iPods "iPods, which hold up to 7,500 songs in a stunning enclosure that is lighter and thinner than two CDs. The new ultra-portable iPods feature completely solid-state "no moving parts" navigation wheel and buttons; an elegant new dock with audio out for fast and easy connection to your computer or stereo; an "On-The-Go" playlist so users can build a playlist right on their iPod(TM); a customizable main menu so users can promote the features they use most often to their top level menu; and Apple's unique, patent pending Auto-Sync for automatically syncing your computer's music library with iPod. The new ultra-portable iPods are available in three models: a 10GB model for just $299 (US), a 15GB model for $399 (US) and a 30GB model for $499 (US)."

Now does everyone re-encode their CDs to AAC? Which I was looking at anyway.

Fortune has an article about it "Each song is encrypted with a digital key so that it can be played only on three authorized computers, and that prevents songs from being transferred online. Even if you burn the AAC songs onto a CD that a conventional CD player can read and then re-rip them back into standard MP3 files, the sound quality is awful."

"In fact, Warner's Roger Ames is trying to broker a deal in which AOL would adopt iTunes as its music-manage-ment software. "Steve was resistant at first," Ames says. "But now I understand that he's decided to go that way.""

JBoss Remoting

JBoss Remoting "The JBoss Remoting (JBR) framework is a core JBoss component that provides a light-weight building block API for constructing network aware services."

"The JBR framework provides no particular remoting service alone; however, it does provide a set of interfaces and classes for easily building network aware services. For example, the JMX component uses JBR to provide JMX Remoting services, making MBeans accessible and transportable within a JBoss networked environment."

Metawebsites

Building a Metadata-Based Website "The online world has been flooded in recent years with talk of metadata, structured authoring, cascading style sheets (CSS). These ideas have at their core the idea of standardizing document creation by separating content from display. Additionally, the idea of a semantic web, consisting of ontologies and controlled vocabularies is gaining momentum. These ideas are about representing knowledge so that machine agents can understand them. At the confluence of these two broad categories of activity, new models of websites are emerging that can be as easily navigable by humans as maintained by rigorous processes."

The four steps of the process are:
1. Centralize the core concepts in a taxonomy.
2. Develop core relationship types between the core concepts.
3. Associate content to the concepts.
4. Make the website use the Ontology's concepts and relationships for navigation.

This is fairly impressive stuff. They even present Delphi as a collaborative way to create a taxonomy.

Emerging RDF

Emerging Technologies Presentations: Gonzo Collaborative Mapping on the Semantic Web and Peer-to-Peer Semantic Search Engines: Building a Memex.

spacenamespace "this is a kind of collaborative mapping project. it consists of geographical models which are represented as RDF graphs. you can wander round them, like a MUD or MOO, with a bot interface which you can use to create and connect new places...it is a semantic web project; it provides a scheme for semantic web identification of places via unique uris. the interaction with people aspect uses FOAF, in the hope that friend-of-a-friend networks can benefit from collaborative filtering as well as collaborative mapping." Includes an example of an annotated, RDF based "walk-through" of London Mudlondon. It uses Perl and mySQL. Interestingly the UK government own the copyright to the shape and controls maps of the UK.

Contextual Network Graphs is a graph-based alternative to LSI available in Perl via CVS. See also PMI-IR, uses Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI) and Information Retrieval (IR).

What Linus Really Think About DRM

Re: Flame Linus to a crisp! "But such a "make the machines be something the _users_ can trust" is 100% indistinguishable from a technical standpoint from something where you "make the machine something that Disney Corp can trust". There is _zero_ technical difference. It's only a matter of intent - and even the intent will be a matter of interpretation.

This is why I refuse to disallow even the "bad" kinds of uses - because not allowing them would automatically also mean that "good" uses aren't allowed."

Re: Flame Linus to a crisp! "PC's are _designed_ ot be flexible - that's what makes the PC's. DRM on a PC is a totally braindead idea, and I _hope_ Microsoft goes down that path because it will kill them in the end."

Macromedia Using RDF?

ETech Report: Finishing on pure adrenalin. "Macromedia's Central ("a brand new way to develop, sell, and deploy applications using Macromedia Flash MX. More precisely, it is a different and exciting response to the need for “occasionally-connected” desktop and mobile applications")...[h]as the notion/ability to send information (even broadcast it) between applications using XML or RDF that where even if separately developed." Screenshot here.

Exercising EXIF

JpegRDF "reads and manipulates RDF metadata stored in the comment section of JPEG images. It can extract, query, and augment the data. Manipulating JPEG images with jpegrdf does not modify the actual image data or any other sections of the file." It basically converts the EXIF format (f-stop, camera, flash used, etc.) to RDF. Uses Jena. I'd like to see an ontology based on cameras and the EXIF (or metdata) that they produce.

Semantically Blogging

Announcement about the semantic blog. "Right at the moment, neither blog is terribly 'semantic' (although you can view the metadata behind each entry) but I wanted to get the baseline public asap."

FOAF for all

Battle of the blog builders "SixApart, the company behind the Movable Type weblogging system, is to lanch a new "hosted" service called TypePad later this year."

"The standout feature is the template maker...and automatic creation of Friend of a Friend data - instantly taking an experimental standard and
taking it to the mainstream."

An example of FOAF use:
http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/home-smart

An idea of FOAF and event discovery:
http://esw.w3.org/topic/EventDiscovery

Things that go Bump in the Night

Make Your Own Rules "Using the patent system as a private regulatory vehicle circumvents the checks and balances to which government-made law is subjected. Constitutional guarantees of individual rights can be invoked only against the government, not against a plaintiff suing for patent infringement. Thomas gives the example of patents that have been granted that regulate the content of speech, including ones for making sales pitches or delivering advertising over networks. Government control of expression is strictly circumscribed. " Yet all indications from the courts are that privately held patents offer their owners the ability to suppress or punish speech without reference to these limitations," Thomas wrote last year in the Houston Law Review."

Interview: Cory Doctorow "But some time in the last five or ten years, all of the action has migrated to intellectual property, primarily copyright. Copyright has become this stupendous weapon for abridging privacy and for abridging freedom -- and those freedoms include things like the freedom to speak."

Removal of Free Press

The press and freedom: some disturbing trends "Once the news conference got underway, the President did not recognize reporters who raised their hands. Instead, he called their names from a list prepared by news secretary Ari Fleischer, the man who told reporters after Sept. 11 that they should watch what they say. When CNN’s John King attempted to ask a question, the President told him to wait because, the President said, ‘‘This is scripted.’’ Then he called the next name on his list: John King." The list of questions to ask W is pretty cool.

Removal of a Legend

Edgar Codd, database theorist, dies at 79 Still waiting...I'm glad more press is covering his death.

RDF and Ontologies

The Web's Next Leap "But for corporations, the immediate value of the Semantic Web may not rest in using it for new services, but rather as a means of integrating data in heterogeneous environments. And the concepts and standards are sufficiently developed to allow that now...Indeed, developing the Semantic Web will take years, says Jas Dhillon, president and CEO of Celcorp Inc., a start-up company in Santa Monica, Calif., that has used RDF and ontologies to integrate applications." Celcorp's product page "Software that thinks - so you don't have to".

Ask Jeeves and Google Agree

Ask Jeeves: What is the best search engine?

The answer is, of course, Google. It must be true because Google says so too.

Features to Remove Functionality

Slashdot claims there's nothing new in Windows 2003. Well that's just plain wrong. MS has 10 reasons to upgrade my favourite is number 7:
"Windows SharePoint Services is a platform for creating large numbers of smart Web communities focused on information sharing and team productivity. It can scale to thousands of sites within an organization. It fully supports load-balanced Web farm and clustered database deployments. Site and server managers can enforce storage quotas using a sites per-server and users per-site criterion. Site usage can be monitored to detect and retire inactive sites. Security is granular, yet easily managed. Windows Rights Management Services (RMS) is a security feature of Windows that works with applications to help safeguard confidential and sensitive enterprise information—no matter where it goes."

Now what were the web people thinking about leaving out DRM in HTML:
"Authors can restrict permission to Web-based information as they create it, and then save the content as a rights-managed HTML file (with the file name extension .rmh). If the readers have installed the Rights Management Add-on, they can open the file and use the contents, based on the permission that the author has given them."

A discussion on the DRM technology is available at Technet. Macs will be left out, everyone has to upgrade to the 2003 version of Office, etc. The best quote: "the organization owns the content, not the user"

It's Cold Outside...

An RDF crawler "I wrote an RDF crawler (aka scutter) using Java and the Jena RDF toolkit that spiders the web gathering up semantic web data and storing it in any of Jena's backend stores (in-memory, Berkeley DB, mysql, etc). Download it here....Plans for the future include tying FOAF-related processing into the aggregation such as smushing and mbox_sha1sum normalising, and making a publish/subscribe-based system so that people who can't run their own aggregators can subscribe to the RDF that's gathered."

Extra points for the Red Dwarf reference:
"We call RDFWeb/FOAF indexers 'scutters' in tribute to the robots from the UK TV series Red Dwarf. They are also called this because, metaphorically, they *scutter* around the Web looking for stuff."

Expressing using OWL

Using OWL to Avoid Syntactic Rigor Mortis "Below is outlined a strategy for realizing the full flexibility of XML through the use of OWL ontologies." A short, simple tutorial on using OWL to produce different "physical expressions" of the same thing.

Business Processes and App Servers

Could application servers be overkill? "I asked O'Toole if he expected Cape Clear's customers to proceed blindly with developing Web services that are devoid of any notion of orchestration or transactional state. O'Toole claimed that complicated protocols like the Business Process Execution Language for Web services (BPEL4WS) or the Web services Choreography Interface (WSCI) are extra baggage and that any functionality that those specifications are designed to handle is easily covered by something found in virtually every system: JavaScript (also known as ECMAScript)."

The most recent column is a little more troubling as far as the W3C is concerned:
"...when the idea of IBM and Microsoft working together was ludicrous, the W3C was offered some measure of protection that if either company attempted a power play, the other would provide the necessary countermeasures to thwart it. But now, with the two working together, the W3C is about to get steamrolled (at least when it comes to Web services). Unless, of course, it decides to defend itself."

EWeek Review Intelligdimension

Intellidimension App Shows Power of RDF "A Windows-based query tool allowed us to access the database and create and test server-side scripts. Server-side scripts are written in RDF Query Language, which, being based on ECMAScript, was easy to use.

The sample applications that Intellidimension provides on its site were a great help in developing for RDF Gateway."

The use of scripting is nice but I'd really like to be able to generate RDF from Java and vice-versa. Combining with using something like Discovery you could get, at runtime, existing services working with new RDF or new services working on existing RDF. They were most impressed by the portal. They also mentioned that it would be good to have standard interface to RDF datasources so that other application servers and web servers could use it. I'd especially like a J2EE connector for example.

Grubby Looksmart

Grub "LookSmart is confident that the number of Grub volunteers will continue to grow, and is hopeful that in time -- perhaps several months -- the system's "distributed crawl" will be capable of indexing all of the Web's estimated 10 billion pages -- every day.

"It will be the first comprehensive index (of the Net)," said Kord Campbell, the programmer behind the Grub software. "We can conceivably crawl every Web page, every day."

By contrast, today's fastest search engines, such as Google or Inktomi, crawl about 150 million pages a day. Google indexes about a third of the Web, and refreshes its index every 30 days, according to LookSmart.

Campbell quietly worked on the software for more than three years in Oklahoma before LookSmart acquired his company and three-person staff in January. Grub was -- and continues to be -- largely an open-source project. "

"If the Grub project attracts enough volunteers, it may be capable of performing the holy grail of Web searches: a real-time "semantic parse" of the Web. Stechert said."

Will Looksmart beat everyone in implementing and deploying the Semantic Web?

URLs and Trademarks

Sixth Circuit finds no trademark violation in post-domain paths "...the Sixth Circuit has ruled that the use of a registered trademark in the post-domain path of a URL does not violate trademark law because it is unlikely to create customer confusion regarding the origins of the goods offered at the website.

The post-domain path of a URL is everything after the domain name, e.g. anything after "nytimes.com" or "lawmeme.org.""

Another Reason for the SW

Recent changes in reporting rules and regulations are going to kill us! "New technologies may change that, however. A reporter from The Economist recently asked Tim Berners-Lee if he could give an example of how companies could make or save money using concepts embodied in the Semantic Web initiative. Berners-Lee at the time did not have a ready answer. But in my mind, the reporting and analysis of financial statements is one area that will benefit greatly from semantics-based technologies." ClearForest is the obvious example of a company doing this.

Blogging with Semantics

The Semantic Blog "As we consume more of our information by way of RSS feeds, the inability to store, index, and precisely search those feeds becomes more painful. I'd like to be able to work with my RSS data locally, even while offline, in much more powerful ways. One emerging option is the XML layer being added to Sleepycat's Berkeley DB, the database that's embedded in the Mozilla mail/news client, in Movable Type, and in a slew of other programs."

ROI of the SW

What is the Business Value of the Semantic Web? "The greatest ROI won’t come from the removal of software applications that you currently employ, but rather the new services that these software applications will be able to provide." I found this all rather unconvincing.

Another Attempt at a Java Office Suite

IBM Plans Sneak Attack On Microsoft Office "IBM Software and its Lotus Software Group have built J2EE-based spreadsheet, document and presentation graphics "applications" that will be bundled for free with the company's WebSphere portal, sources said."

"CIOs, for whom buying portals has become a top priority, will be able to get for free what IBM says will be 80 percent of the Office functionality most people use, said one channel source familiar with the plan. "IBM can now say, 'Look, you can pay for half the portal with what you'll save in Office,' " the source said."

XP Sucks

Refactoring XP Interview "Source code is too complex to be a clear statement of intent. We need something simpler than code and unit tests to define our design – a Word document, or a class model, for example."

"I’ve worked on, trained people and provided tools to people on ballistic missile defense projects, the Space Station, the Hubble telescope, avionics systems, helicopter projects, military flight planning systems, command and control systems, etc. I was talking to a client of mine from a very large jet fighter project yesterday and I suggested they let the architecture of the fly-by-wire system evolve incrementally. We got a good laugh out of it. I think if people on these kinds of projects can manage to develop architectures and then design within the architecture, people doing business or e-commerce systems can, too."

"I’ve also worked with some incredibly talented programmers who would have been awful to pair with...I’d resist any process that wouldn’t allow me, as a manager, to make use of his skills. So I would never mandate pair programming. And of course, my big issue with XP’s approach is that pair programming is used as an excuse for not doing upfront design. That’s completely bogus, in my opinion."

Extreme Programming Refactored: The Case Against XP.

At Least the Oil is Safe

Americans defend two untouchable ministries from the hordes of looters "US troops have sat back and allowed mobs to wreck and then burn the Ministry of Planning, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Irrigation, the Ministry of Trade, the Ministry of Industry, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Information. They did nothing to prevent looters from destroying priceless treasures of Iraq's history in the Baghdad Archaeological Museum and in the museum in the northern city of Mosul, or from looting three hospitals.

The Americans have, though, put hundreds of troops inside two Iraqi ministries that remain untouched – and untouchable – because tanks and armoured personnel carriers and Humvees have been placed inside and outside both institutions. And which ministries proved to be so important for the Americans? Why, the Ministry of Interior, of course – with its vast wealth of intelligence information on Iraq – and the Ministry of Oil."

I think this should make everyone angry. How is history going to judge whether it was worth the oil for relics from ancient civilisations or for any of this? Another article Iraq Liberated Of Culture, History.

'Data Comes Alive' "This was the theme of Esther Dyson's recent industry conference, and aptly summarizes a panoply of emerging new technologies that hold the promise of dramatically increasing what software can do. Among them: web services, which allow applications to seamlessly communicate with each other; the so-called "semantic web," a richer version of the web we use today that allows software to communicate more efficiently without human intervention; and a variety of new enterprise applications that will bring the benefits of automation to many intractably uncomputerized business processes."

k42 is a Java based store for Topic Maps with some interesting storage abilities (it has its own generic store). They have quite a number of interesting product demos. It was announced last March. According to their latest newsletter they have customers such as Bosch.

WebDAV and RDF "Original charter of WEBDAV was to facilitate WEB publishing (vs. WEB browsing). We believe that WebDAV (in combination with RDF) has much greater the potential: to form the protocol of the Semantic Web ."

From Site Search to the Semantic Web "We’ll further explore how Siderean’s faceted metadata resource discovery capabilities will bolster the viability of commerce that involves non-textual digital assets, including software components in the realm of Web Services. Next, we’ll examine how Siderean’s underlying technology, based as it is on RDF semantic encoding, makes Siderean Software's infrastructure a firm foundation for tackling problem number four, inference (or reasoning from data) in the decentralized world of the Web. Happily, cracking problem 4 upon an infrastructure of 1 through 3 is exactly what’s required to capitalize on the full potential of the Semantic Web." They are using Java 1.4.1 and any JDBC compliant database. They have some online demos.

Booch positive on the Semantic Web "Also on the horizon for developers is the semantic Web, said Booch.

"What the semantic Web brings to bear is the notion of bringing more self-knowledge to things on the Web," creating opportunities for new applications that tie together semantically rich and knowledgeable data, he said.

But Booch cautioned, "I must remind you again that software development remains a very, very hard thing. There's no silver bullet here.""

Jena 2 Preview 2 Released the changes since preview 1 include:

* RDQL: support for datatyped literals and standard namespace prefixes
* N3: support for datatyped literals
* I/O: bugfixes and reflecting latest WG decisions
* Reification: new WG-compatible API, I/O round-tripping
* Ontology API: preliminary release of generic API for OWL and DAML+OIL; with improved ontology document management. Inferencing limited to class/property hierarchy closure.

The preview can be downloaded from: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/jena/Jena-2p2.zip?download. The Jena Roadmap was also recently made available.

Calories still count in weight-loss game, studies find "In the most comprehensive review of published science on the subject to date, researchers reviewed data from more than 100 diet studies, which included a total of 3,268 people. They found that weight loss among people on low-carbohydrate diets results primarily from restricting calories, not from some magic nutritional combination." The American Medical Association did the study.

W3C Work On Semantic Web Draws Criticism""If I can make sure that all of my trading partners and all of my systems in my divisions are speaking the same language, that that will solve 90 percent of my problems," Ronald Schmelzer, analyst for ZapThink LLC, said. "People are not at the point where they need to talk to arbitrary systems that they don't know the semantics for."... But W3C spokeswoman Janet Daly said RDF technologies are in use today by AOL Time Warner Inc., Hearst Corp. and LexisNexis. The W3C work is enabling companies to build applications with more sophisticated search capabilities. The group's Web services and Semantic Web technologies are complementary, Daly said. "They actually work hand-in-hand.""

W3C advances Semantic Web drafts ""We're trying to make the Semantic Web as easy as it is now to join relational database tables," said Eric Miller, activity lead for the W3C's Semantic Web Activity and a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "The Semantic Web technologies are designed to enable data from different places to be seamlessly integrated..."We haven't done a good enough job as we would like explaining what we're trying to do with the Semantic Web," said Miller of the technology's current reputation. "It's not rocket science, but a set of simple enabling technologies for data integration on the Web."" Seems to have caught onto what Shelley said.

"SWAP combines two highly successful technologies, viz. Semantic Web and Peer-to-peer computing. SWAP will develop the technology that is necessary to allow users their individual views on knowledge AND let them share knowledge effectively. In order to allow for individual views, every user’s PC is treated as a peer and every user may ask queries to the network of peers."

If you look carefully you can see Iraq's chemical and biological weapons. Sorry, wrong planet. NASA has released new pictures of Mars.

Some comments on Microsoft's use of RSS, in that, the RSS 1.0 spec is just not friendly. IBM is using RSS 1.0 (RDF) and Microsoft is using RSS 2.0. The Microsoft employee that originally broke the news has some words on the RDF tax.

Duh Blog on PC Forum 2003 points to TBL's PC-Forum presentation with some points on Sun's use of RDF. Some interesting quotes: "Tim trashes meta-data" and the real answer to how the Semantic Web can save or make money was something more like "what was the business model for the web 10 years ago". Which is less disappointing. Oh and there are other words with "rdf" in them. This is also a good example of someone using SnipSnap.

Anti-war slogan coined, repurposed and Googlewashed... in 42 days ""Contrary to earlier utopian theories of the Internet, it takes very little effort for governments to cause certain information simply to vanish for a huge number of people."

Rub out the word 'government', and replace it with 'weblog A-list'. In this case a commons resource, this very potent and quite viral phrase, was created by millions of people. But it was poisoned by a very select number of 'bloggers'. Possibly a dozen, but no more than 30, we'd guess.

Who is poisoning the well?

The phrase "greenwash" will be familiar to many of you: it's where a spot of judicious marketing paint is applied to something decidedly rotten, transforming it into something that looks as if it's wholesome and radical new, but which is essentially unchanged.

This is the first Googlewash we've encountered. 42 days, too."

"There is an emerging second superpower, but it is not a nation. Instead, it is a new form of international player, constituted by the "will of the people" in a global social movement...Thus the new superpower demonstrates a new form of "emergent democracy" that differs from the participative democracy of the US government. Where political participation in the United States is exercised mainly through rare exercises of voting, participation in the second superpower movement occurs continuously through participation in a variety of web-enabled initiatives. And where deliberation in the first superpower is done primarily by a few elected or appointed officials, deliberation in the second superpower is done by each individual—making sense of events, communicating with others, and deciding whether and how to join in community actions. Finally, where participation in democracy in the first superpower feels remote to most citizens, the emergent democracy of the second superpower is alive with touching and being touched by each other, as the community works to create wisdom and to take action." This is probably more about the idea of "emergent democracy".

Second Superpower

" Reducing software piracy by just 10 percentage points worldwide would generate 1.5 million jobs and add US$400 billion to the world economy, according to a study released Wednesday by the Business Software Alliance (BSA) and IDC...Based on estimates from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a full 10-point drop could provide money for...Primary education for about 4 million children." Why won't someone think of the children!? These are fairly ridiculous claims and one-sided. "The study doesn't look at any potential negative impact to consumers, such as paying higher prices for non-pirated software. Gantz admitted that some economic benefit to no-cost software exists, and consumers could be affected by law enforcement actions.

The hidden cost of pirated software is fewer legal software choices for customers, Gantz added, and the benefits of a legitimate software market had more impact on the economy than any benefits from consumers using pirated software."

Study: Reduced piracy to create millions of jobs

I did my own quick survey to see how many applications and tools are using Jena: MIES, JemBlog, Ontolog, DSpace, Joseki, Euler proof mechanism (for just RDF/XML to N3 triple generation), RDF Grapher, EOR, IsaViz, RDFAuthor, DAMLJessKB, IdeaGraph, Ontology Middleware Module, Semantic Web Engine, RDF Topic Maps, TRIPLE, FenFire, DAML+OIL Plugin for Protege-2000, MDF, Sesame, and DELI (used for CC/PP in Cocoon).

SVG-OWL Viewer Version 3.0 This converts OWL (if you can find some) to SVG (if you can find a viewer). I got it going, it's a little buggy and under OS X put the SVG in the root directory but apart from that it's good. There's also a last call on 5 OWL drafts.

Mapping relationships - the next step in knowledge management? "I feel that this is a sign the next wave is coming and its foundation is in the move from unstructured to structured information. Blogs are one of the key platforms for moving from unstructured to structured information. They are providing a rich ecosystem to experiment with various structured data and metadata technologies. How long will it be before blogs become part of all the major platforms?"

Meta Information Exchange System "The WYMIWYG meta information exchange system (mies) allows you to add and retrieve comments, notes, explanations, ratings and similar information (i.e. annotations) about webpages. Mies shares the annotations in a decentralized and trust based network with peers.

Soon it will also be possible to share bookmarks in the same decentralized manner. This means that the list of your categorized bookmarks will be permanently updated with new bookmarks that are very likely to be of interest for you. This will be like having a highly personalized edition of yahoo or dmoz.

This is a first step towards a more decentralized and open way knowledge is acquired and produced."

It uses Prevayler and Jena to provide a zero configuration RDF store.

Some useful links dealing with RMI: Accelerate your RMI programming, Flatten your objects, and Java RMI: Serialization.