Simulated OS for teaching Assembly

Apoo is very similar to one of the uses of RCOSjava.

Jena2 Manager

"Briefly stated, I needed a means by which I could quickly hack models and ontologies to learn how to use Jena2. There remain many things to learn, and many things to finish coding in the program. I'm turning it loose so that others can contribute to its development. The JOSL license requires that those who fix things in the code or otherwise improve it return their code to the public. JOSL does not require that users use an open source license on new code that extends the licensed code."

Jena2 Manager

On Ontologies and Gnomes

The AI gnomes of Zurich "McDermott ends with a zinger:

It's annoying that Shirky indulges in the usual practice of blaming AI for every attempt by someone to tackle a very hard problem. The image, I suppose, is of AI gnomes huddled in Zurich plotting the next attempt to --- what? inflict hype on the world? AI tantalizes people all by itself; no gnomes are required. Researchers in the field try as hard as they can to work on narrow problems, with technical definitions. Reading papers by AI people can be a pretty boring experience. Nonetheless, journalists, military funding agencies, and recently the World-Wide Web Consortium, are routinely gripped by visions of what computers should be able to do with just a tiny advance beyond today's technology, and off we go again. Perhaps Mr. Shirky has a proposal for stopping such visions from sweeping through the population."

The entry links to a paper which lists the things that the Semantic Web "violates" wirth respect to traditional assumptions about AI. Including lack of referential integrity, variety in quality, diversity and no single authority. As noted, these are the same problems with human intelligence too.

webMethods going Semantic

Interview: webMethods CEO eyes Web services innovation "Secondly, there’s a whole other layer to deal with, what I call the semantic integration problem. Web services are great but they standardize pure connectivity between applications. The applications still have highly varied data models, extremely different ideas of what business processes should look like. Yet for most large organizations, a business process is going to span many applications. So you’re always going to need in the middleware stack something that can do wrapping, transformation, and, more than that, can actually keep the model of how the business processes are implemented across all of the infrastructure pieces.So [you need] something that’s technology-neutral underneath, like our Fabric product, and then on top have the ability to orchestrate business processes across all of these nodes in the fabric. Our customers now want to get real-time intelligence about what’s happening with the business and with the business processes, and they want to see it in dashboards, they want alerts. So we can put real-time monitoring around [IT infrastructure] at the business process level."

"We’re also able to offer enterprise event management, [injecting] business events into some kind of AI [artificial intelligence]-based rules engine."

Web Services in RDF

The question of how Web Services and the Semantic Web came up again recently. Here are a few links to current work in the area:
* Semantic Web enabled Web Services,
* Government Semantic XML Web Services Community of Practice,
* BPEL2DAML-S,
* Esperanto,
* Meteor-S,
* Supercharging WSDL with RDF, and
* SWAD-Europe Thesaurus Activity.

Don't Panic

Neil Gaiman hitchhikes through Douglas Adams' hilarious galaxy

Only 3

Three Uses for the Semantic Web They include:
* Sideline Semantics (or how to cut down on those darn post-planning columns),
* The Policy Ontology, and
* Cross Domain Searching for Calendar Concerns.

The Policy Ontology was perhaps the most interesting:
"I decided to tackle this with an interface to Jena for Apache Cocoon, or to use Cocoon parlance, a Jena-based transformer. I had no idea what kind of systems sat behind virtual reference applications, but I did know the protocol used underneath the queries was based on SOAP, and Cocoon excels at inserting itself in between any XML stream and adding value to the contents. So my approach was to use Jena's inference capabilities to map different classification schemes based on relationships defined in either RDF Schema or OWL. Yes, you could do the same thing with a table or two, and a thousand other ways, but the ontology approach provides a formal syntax for defining relationships."

Seems similar in idea to Sherpa Calendar.

The application is WIBS.

Fractally Yours

Openness & Interconnection "Big Fractal Tangle would be the name of a blog...A decade into the first Web, we've now got way too much information available, too much for any of us to sift through easily, which is why we need Round Two: the annotated, interconnected, Web. This new organic, evolving, maintainable, improvement will do more than simply increase the accuracy of our Google searches. It'll help real people understand and visualize interconnection, which in my opinion will alter our society profoundly for the better.

This was to be the point of my paper. Driving home that night, my brain frazzled and my voice hoarse from too much talk, I realized the topic was too big for a single paper. It'll have to be a blog."

See also: The Fractal nature of the Web.

CEUR Workshop Proceedings

CEUR Workshop Proceedings includes Semantic Integration, ICSW 2003 and Practical and Scalable Semantic Systems.

Random RDF Tools

MusicBrainz Java API, RDFical (English version), MnM and FOAF Explorer - some of these I've covered before.

One Stop Schema Shop

SchemaWeb " SchemaWeb is a repository for RDF schemas expressed in the RDFS, OWL and DAML+OIL schema languages.
SchemaWeb is a place for developers and designers working with RDF. It provides a comprehensive directory of RDF schemas to be browsed and searched by human agents and also an extensive set of web services to be used by RDF agents and reasoning software applications that wish to obtain real-time schema information whilst processing RDF data. "

Who are you?

Gillmor Takes On Dvorak's Anti-Blog Stance ""Perseus thinks that most blogs have an audience of about 12 readers," Dvorak argues. Yes, John, but who are those 12? If one of them is Bill Gates, and another is Tony Scott, CTO of General Motors, and another is John Cleese, well you get the idea. Sometimes it's who you know as much as what. RSS only amplifies this, allowing a Ray Ozzie to post only when it's valuable to him and his readers. It's "You've got blog.""

Bill, Tony, John, give me some feedback then.

Exceptional Exceptions

Best Practices for Exception Handling "When deciding on checked exceptions vs. unchecked exceptions, ask yourself, "What action can the client code take when the exception occurs?"

If the client can take some alternate action to recover from the exception, make it a checked exception. If the client cannot do anything useful, then make the exception unchecked. By useful, I mean taking steps to recover from the exception and not just logging the exception."

"Preserve encapsulation.

Never let implementation-specific checked exceptions escalate to the higher layers. For example, do not propagate SQLException from data access code to the business objects layer."

The only one I slightly disagree with is:
"Log exceptions just once

Logging the same exception stack trace more than once can confuse the programmer examining the stack trace about the original source of exception. So just log it once. "

I think I'm right, in there's been cases where logging at different levels of abstraction have required multiple logging of the same base exception. I've also found it helpful rather than harmful.

Ontologies

"OntoBuilder started as a tool (with a user interface) developed in Java. Later, one of the requirements was to implement OntoBuilder as an agent, removing any user interaction required. Therefore, OntoBuilder was implemented as a TCP agent. OntoBuilder can be accessed as a graphical tool, as a command line tool, as an applet, as a java WebStart application, as a TCP server, and using an HTML interface."

Includes ontologies in domains including: car rental, job finding, news, and others. Shouldn't forget about Metalog either.

Also, a new book called Ontological Engineering has just been published (well November 1) just in time for Christmas, the perfect stocking filler.

Pluggable Data Types

Curiosity Killed the Cat "This argument cements my suspicions that the using RDF and Semantic Web technologies are a losing proposition when compared to using XML-centric technologies for information interchange on the World Wide Web. It is quite telling that none of the participants who tried to counter my arguments gave a cogent response besides "use an xsd library" when in fact anyone with a passing knowledge of XSD would inform them that XSD only supports ISO 8601 dates and would barf on RFC 822 if asked to treat them as dates. In fact, this is a common complaint about them from our customers w.r.t internationalization [that and the fact decimals use a period as a delimiter instead of a comma for fractional digits]. "

One of the things on the Kowari Roadmap (I wish I could point to the real one) is pluggable data type handling. The basic idea is that you can describe the data handler and have data type processors register themselves with Kowari. Much like RelaxNG's.

SARS, SOTA and the Semantic Web

October's issue of Computer had two interesting articles on the Semantic Web:
Fighting Epidemics in the Information and Knowledge Age "We have simulated the spread of SARS and shown that isolation control measures had no significant effect on containing the epidemic's outbreaks...Information and knowledge sharing profoundly influenced the extent and duration of the SARS epidemic. At first, lack of information and knowledge sharing hampered China's efforts to research the virus and control the epidemic. SARS appeared initially in Guangdong province, but during the outbreak's early stages, the obtained experience with controlling and curing the disease was not available to health workers in other affected regions...Currently, however, the Web cannot guarantee the accuracy and reliability of the data it holds. To overcome these limitations, scientists are exploring ways to reshape the Web. The Semantic Web and the Grid represent just two of these efforts."

I'm not sure why I liked this article so much. Is it the old man vs microbe battle? Is it the positive reaction and can-do attitude about these problems.

Ontology-Mediated Integration of Intranet Web Services "Dealing with this flood of options will require sweeping automation. To meet this challenge, the authors built their smart office task automation framework—SOTA—using Web services, an ontology, and agent components."

Updates

Notes from SWAD-E "Building a triple store based on non-relational technology was represented by several participants such as those using BDB (not in Jena2 at present) and more sophisticated indexing such as @semantics. These have the advantages of smaller system dependencies than RDBs (slightly different SQLs, optimising needs, fetures) but are more "bare metal". The indexing is done using hashes (content digests) or using triple identiifers. A brief discussion showed that there were a variety of content digests used across relational and non-relational, MD5, SHA1 and using the top/lower 32/64 bits. As disks are still much slower than processors, there is little difference on modern systems (but MD5 is seen as more common). The non-relational triplestores tend to have better intimate knowledge and use of the RDF details such as schema information but still need to have query optimising, text searching and so on added by hand rather than reusing relational work."

libferris Release 1.1.12 "New fnamespace for setting XML like namespaces to refer to EA, added support for mounting RDF/bdb and RDF/XML files with list, rename, remove, create support, can now save EA in a user's local RDF/bdb file, new as-rdf EA to export all EA for a file as RDF/XML, new myrdf:// URL for personal RDF storage, can now handle directory names that are URIs properly, isCompressedContext() no longer tries to read a context to find out if its compressed or not, commented g_io_channel_set_encoding() because it was causing errors setting encoding on a fifo to null." Note of libferris.

Semantic Web the comic Less said the better.

Java Goodies

Stocking up on the Internet before I spend a week on holidays:
JmDNS is a Java implementation of multi-cast DNS and can be used for service registration and discovery in local area networks. Part of JTunes.
JXTA 2: A high-performance, massively scalable P2P network "JXTA 2 introduces the concept of a rendezvous super-peer network, greatly improving scalability by reducing propagation traffic...Implementation of the shared resource distributed index (SRDI) within the rendezvous super-peer network, creating a loosely consistent, fault-resilient, distributed hash table".

Both ripe for the impending release of the Kowari project on SF.

Authors, Librarians and More Metadata

It's been nearly a week since Clay's posting. It's with some weariness that I began reading this response, but it was well worth it. Paul Ford has been a long time supporter of the Semantic Web.

A Response to Clay Shirky's “The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview” "But logical reasoning does work well in the real world—it's just not identified as such, because it often appears in mundane places, like library card catalogs and book indices, and because we've been trained to automatically deduce certain assumptions from signifiers which do not much represent the (S,P,O) form."

"I am a writer by avocation and trade, and I am finding real pleasure in using Semantic Web technologies to mark up my ideas, creating pages that link together. What I do is not math done with words. It's links done with semantics, and it forces me to think in new ways about the things I'm writing."

"For every quote he presents that shows the Semantic Web community as glassy-eyed, out-of-touch individuals suffering from “cluelessness,” I could give a list of many other individuals doing work that is relevant to real-world issues, who have pinned their successful careers on the concepts of the Semantic Web, sometimes because they feel it is going to be the next big thing, but also because of sheer intellectual excitement...My money's on them. They know what they're talking about, and aren't afraid to admit what they don't know."

The best is definately last:
"Postscript: on December 1, on this site, I'll describe a site I've built for a major national magazine of literature, politics, and culture. The site is built entirely on a primitive, but useful, Semantic Web framework, and I'll explain why using this framework was in the best interests of both the magazine and the readers, and how its code base allows it to re-use content in hundreds of interesting ways."

The Semantic Web looks to become a little bigger and a little better.

Fabl

Describing Computation within RDF "A programming language is described which is built within RDF. Its code, functions, and classes are formalized as RDF resources. Programs may be written using standard RDF syntax, or in a conventional JavaScript–based syntax which is translated to RDF."

Somehow I missed this being announced on the rdf-interest list. Interestingly, he's used DAML and not OWL, I can't see any obvious reason for that.