SWOOP
New Features:
"1. Integrated Annotea Client for writing and sharing annotations on
any ontology/class/property/individual. (see Advanced->Annotea) - you
can attach and distribute ontology change sets as well
2. Ontology debugging support (check Debug) through better
explanations via Pellet, and highlighting inconsistent classes / class
expressions.
There are a bunch of minor new features (e.g. improved lookup, manual
checkpoints, more XSD support etc), UI improvements (esp. w.r.t adding
new entities, restrictions and Abstract Syntax/Turtle renderers), and
plenty of bug fixes, all noted in readme.txt."
SWOOP v2.2 beta 3 released
Screenshots of versioning and inline Koalas.
Thursday, November 04, 2004
Martin Fowler on OOPSLA 2004
OOPSLA2004 "Four patterns were voted off. Factory Method (due to the confusion over what it means - the pattern is different to the more common usage of the term), Bridge, Flyweight, and Interpreter. Two patterns, Singleton and Chain of Responsibility, were split decisions.
I found the votes and discussions interesting. Of course it's hard to really consider this without looking at alternatives. I was surprised that Singleton got away with a split decision, considering how unpopular it's become amongst my friends. Most of the others were voted off because people felt they were sufficiently uncommon and that other patterns would probably take their place, sadly we didn't have time to consider new members."
"Steve McConnell opened up day two. His talk focused on the ten year gap between the first and second edition of his excellent book Code Complete. Brian Foote summed it up as a "litany of things I agreed with". My sum up would be that the industry has made real progress in this area during the last decade, despite the usual views of skies falling in around us."
"Attacking software-as-manufacturing was particularly timely since every OOPSLA attendee got a copy of Software Factories in their goody bag. I've been aware of this work for a while, and my instinctive allergy to this metaphor was only reinforced by the "we need industrialization" motivations. Dig deeper, however, and there are good ideas in here - particularly the approach of integrated DomainSpecificLanguage capabilities."
It's good to see this was discussed as the two books I recently acquired were "Code Complete" and "Software Factories".
I found the votes and discussions interesting. Of course it's hard to really consider this without looking at alternatives. I was surprised that Singleton got away with a split decision, considering how unpopular it's become amongst my friends. Most of the others were voted off because people felt they were sufficiently uncommon and that other patterns would probably take their place, sadly we didn't have time to consider new members."
"Steve McConnell opened up day two. His talk focused on the ten year gap between the first and second edition of his excellent book Code Complete. Brian Foote summed it up as a "litany of things I agreed with". My sum up would be that the industry has made real progress in this area during the last decade, despite the usual views of skies falling in around us."
"Attacking software-as-manufacturing was particularly timely since every OOPSLA attendee got a copy of Software Factories in their goody bag. I've been aware of this work for a while, and my instinctive allergy to this metaphor was only reinforced by the "we need industrialization" motivations. Dig deeper, however, and there are good ideas in here - particularly the approach of integrated DomainSpecificLanguage capabilities."
It's good to see this was discussed as the two books I recently acquired were "Code Complete" and "Software Factories".
Mobile Semantic Web
A Mobile Web That Knows All About You "MyCampus consists of several task-specific agents that automatically capture contextual information. Each MyCampus user has a database, called a "Semantic eWallet," which is a repository for users' personal information, such as class schedules, list of friends and classmates, and lifestyle and event preferences. Location data is generated using Pango's WiFi access-point triangulation. All the data is marked with Semantic metadata so that MyCampus agents can make use of it. User's can set access privileges to allow certain people to know where they are at any given moment, or what their schedule for the upcoming week is."
It uses some projects I haven't heard of before OWL inference engine using XSLT and JESS and ROWL: Rule Language in OWL and Translation Engine for JESS.
Via Semantic Web on mobile devices
It uses some projects I haven't heard of before OWL inference engine using XSLT and JESS and ROWL: Rule Language in OWL and Translation Engine for JESS.
Via Semantic Web on mobile devices
PsychiatryOnline to use Silverchair Content Manager
American Psychiatric Publishing Partners With Silverchair to Develop DSM-IV-TR and PsychiatryOnline "With the early 2005 launch of PsychiatryOnline, the complete content of DSM-IV-TR® -- the world's most widely used psychiatric reference -- will be integrated with other essential psychiatry resources through Silverchair Content Manager(TM)(SCM) -- Silverchair's semantic Web platform for clinical references. PsychiatryOnline will provide mental health professionals with comprehensive, intuitive access to the world's leading references..."
That's the little "s" semantic Web, it's not using RDF but just XML based technologies.
That's the little "s" semantic Web, it's not using RDF but just XML based technologies.
A bit of left thinking
As conservative politicians continue to hold power across the world another left vs right debate has been brought up.
Driving on the umm, Right "If human society is of predominantly right-handed people and right-handers tend to the right, then I think Britain got it wrong; we should all drive on the right."
Why do the English drive on the "wrong" side of the road? "In days of old logic dictated that when people passed each other on the road they should be in the best possible position to use their sword to protect themselves. As most people are right handed they therefore keep to their left. This practice was formalised in a Papal Edict by Pope Benefice around 1300AD who told all his pilgrims to keep to the left."
As usual, America copied off the French:
"The connection with the USA is thought to be General Lafayette who recommended a keep right rule as part of the help that he gave the Americans in the build up to the war of Independence. The first reference to keep right in USA law is in a rule covering the Lancaster to Philadelphia turnpike in 1792."
Which side of the road do they drive on? Has a map of Left vs Right, a section on pedistrian movement and lists a place in America where they drive on the left: "There is a rather dramatic segment of Interstate 5 where one drives on the left. It is on the Five Mile Grade coming into the Los Angeles area from the north. Because there are four lanes going in each direction, the separation is several miles long, and the two roadways are on opposite sides of a canyon, the effect is quite impressive."
Driving on the umm, Right "If human society is of predominantly right-handed people and right-handers tend to the right, then I think Britain got it wrong; we should all drive on the right."
Why do the English drive on the "wrong" side of the road? "In days of old logic dictated that when people passed each other on the road they should be in the best possible position to use their sword to protect themselves. As most people are right handed they therefore keep to their left. This practice was formalised in a Papal Edict by Pope Benefice around 1300AD who told all his pilgrims to keep to the left."
As usual, America copied off the French:
"The connection with the USA is thought to be General Lafayette who recommended a keep right rule as part of the help that he gave the Americans in the build up to the war of Independence. The first reference to keep right in USA law is in a rule covering the Lancaster to Philadelphia turnpike in 1792."
Which side of the road do they drive on? Has a map of Left vs Right, a section on pedistrian movement and lists a place in America where they drive on the left: "There is a rather dramatic segment of Interstate 5 where one drives on the left. It is on the Five Mile Grade coming into the Los Angeles area from the north. Because there are four lanes going in each direction, the separation is several miles long, and the two roadways are on opposite sides of a canyon, the effect is quite impressive."
Wednesday, November 03, 2004
AntFlow
AntFlow: Hotfolder Driven Workflow and Automation based on Ant "AntFlow builds upon Apache Ant to provide a new approach to simplifying system automation that uses pipelines of hot folders chained together to perform a given task...Hot Folder Triggers - AntFlow allows users to automate processes based on a file being added or changed within a folder on disk. This provides an intuitive and user-friendly way for end-users to interact with applications and can greatly simplify integration between applications that can output and injest files."
A related article, Patterns and Strategies for Building Document-Based Web Services.
A related article, Patterns and Strategies for Building Document-Based Web Services.
The Greatest Democracy of All
What the U.S. can learn from India's electronic voting machines. "While we in the United States agonize over touch screens and paper trails, India managed to quietly hold an all-electronic vote. In May, 380 million Indians cast their votes on more than 1 million machines. It was the world's largest experiment in electronic voting to date and, while far from perfect, is widely considered a success. How can an impoverished nation like India, where cows roam the streets of the capital and most people's idea of high-tech is a flush toilet, succeed where we have not?"
"Unlike the machines used in the United States, the Indian machines are not networked. Each one has to be physically carried to a central counting center. This takes more time, of course, but reduces the opportunities for mischief. Someone who wanted to throw the election would have to fiddle with thousands of machines, one at a time."
"Or, as the Russians might put it: Why build a million-dollar pen when a pencil will do?"
Another site, E-Voting News and Analysis, from the Experts lists the current problems occurring in the various US states.
It seems weird that the US votes on a weekday. In Australia they picked the election day so that it didn't conflict with the football finals.
"Unlike the machines used in the United States, the Indian machines are not networked. Each one has to be physically carried to a central counting center. This takes more time, of course, but reduces the opportunities for mischief. Someone who wanted to throw the election would have to fiddle with thousands of machines, one at a time."
"Or, as the Russians might put it: Why build a million-dollar pen when a pencil will do?"
Another site, E-Voting News and Analysis, from the Experts lists the current problems occurring in the various US states.
It seems weird that the US votes on a weekday. In Australia they picked the election day so that it didn't conflict with the football finals.
Monday, November 01, 2004
Predicate Dispatch
JPred: Practical Predicate Dispatch for Java "With predicate dispatch, a method implementation may specify an arbitrary predicate as a guard. A method m1 overrides another method m2 if m1’s predicate logically implies m2’s predicate. Ernst et al. provide a number of examples illustrating how predicate dispatch unifies and generalizes several existing language concepts, including ordinary OO dynamic dispatch, multimethod dispatch, and functional-style pattern matching."
"JPred augments the Java language by allowing each method declaration to optionally include a clause of the form when pred, just before the optional throws clause. The predicate expression pred is a boolean expression specifying the conditions under which the method may be invoked."
"While a traditional multimethod is expressed in JPred as a predicate consisting of a conjunction of specializer expressions on formals, JPred also allows arbitrary disjunctions and negations."
"Finally, a notion of resend [13, 37], which generalizes Java’s super to walk up JPred’s method-overriding partial order, could be useful to allow predicate methods within a class to easily share code."
"JPred augments the Java language by allowing each method declaration to optionally include a clause of the form when pred, just before the optional throws clause. The predicate expression pred is a boolean expression specifying the conditions under which the method may be invoked."
"While a traditional multimethod is expressed in JPred as a predicate consisting of a conjunction of specializer expressions on formals, JPred also allows arbitrary disjunctions and negations."
"Finally, a notion of resend [13, 37], which generalizes Java’s super to walk up JPred’s method-overriding partial order, could be useful to allow predicate methods within a class to easily share code."
Friday, October 29, 2004
OntoBuilder
DG Research Team Is Developing a Digital Interpreter "One of the first steps in the process is the creation of an ontology, a cross-lingual thesaurus that provides a thematic structure for all the terms one is likely to encounter. Ontologies need to be semantically sensitive: "bank" near "river" means something quite different from "bank" near "teller."
"In the context of Digital Government, ontologies play an increasingly important role, as database metadata schemas, terminology standardization structures and the foundation for interfaces between applications," says Hovy. "Yet the complexity and cost of building ontologies remains a daunting challenge.""
"Since ontologies are such a necessary and time-consuming precursor to any integration project, researchers are investigating, "semi-automated methods to build ontologies to align and merge existing ones for new purposes and to adapt old ones for re-use," says Hovy, who hopes this will become a prototype project for just such semi-automation technology."
OntoBuilder was covered previously, it's Java based, and is mentioned in the Ontology Tools Survey, Revisited.
"In the context of Digital Government, ontologies play an increasingly important role, as database metadata schemas, terminology standardization structures and the foundation for interfaces between applications," says Hovy. "Yet the complexity and cost of building ontologies remains a daunting challenge.""
"Since ontologies are such a necessary and time-consuming precursor to any integration project, researchers are investigating, "semi-automated methods to build ontologies to align and merge existing ones for new purposes and to adapt old ones for re-use," says Hovy, who hopes this will become a prototype project for just such semi-automation technology."
OntoBuilder was covered previously, it's Java based, and is mentioned in the Ontology Tools Survey, Revisited.
Thursday, October 28, 2004
More ISWC Papers
The previous posting I made on scalable OWL seems to have been very popular and the Semantic Web Interest Group IRC Scratchpad posted links to all the papers at ISWC 2004 Annotations. Sadly, I'm impressed that, under Safari, the title has a drop shadow that is done using stylesheets. More information, Text-Shadow in Safari 1.1.
The U in URI
A couple of interesting postings which seems to have a common theme:
* First in a series of five postings on the "W3C Semantic Web in Life Sciences Workshop", TBL Keynote at W3C Semantic Web in Life Sciences Workshop "True to form, Sir Tim ensured that everyone present understood that they should all use URIs for everything. I wonder what his sock drawer looks like. His example was to define a URI for a concept like "colour"...Tim was asked where to find a browser for the Semantic Web (again). The difference this year is that there is starting to be a good answer to that question. Have a look at (Longwell) and (Haystack). He also pointed to ( Ontaria, which is more of a directory than a browser..."
* Tim Berners-Lee on the Failure of URIs as Identifiers in RDF, Faulty URIs, Identifiers: Uniform Resource Identifier (URI).
* Learn About Haystack: The Universal Information Client
* First in a series of five postings on the "W3C Semantic Web in Life Sciences Workshop", TBL Keynote at W3C Semantic Web in Life Sciences Workshop "True to form, Sir Tim ensured that everyone present understood that they should all use URIs for everything. I wonder what his sock drawer looks like. His example was to define a URI for a concept like "colour"...Tim was asked where to find a browser for the Semantic Web (again). The difference this year is that there is starting to be a good answer to that question. Have a look at (Longwell) and (Haystack). He also pointed to ( Ontaria, which is more of a directory than a browser..."
* Tim Berners-Lee on the Failure of URIs as Identifiers in RDF, Faulty URIs, Identifiers: Uniform Resource Identifier (URI).
* Learn About Haystack: The Universal Information Client
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
Isolation
ACID is Good "Unfortunately, ACID transactions do not work effectively over a long period of time. Do not expect things to work if your transactions last more than even a few seconds...This is the so-called “long transaction problem”. No one has found a solution for it after many years of research. The basic problem is achieving isolation – the “I” in “ACID”. There are no known concurrency control algorithms that will operate over a long period of time."
"Over the years, several techniques have been proposed for managing long-lived activities. One of the first is called a Saga. [GGKKS] Sagas require you to define compensating transactions. A compensating transaction compensates for the effects of a transaction. For example, a compensating transaction for reserving a hotel room would be a transaction that cancels the reservation."
"Therefore, rather than provide support for a single model, such as Sagas, JSR 95 defines an infrastructure to support a wide range of extended transaction models. The architecture is based on the insight that the various extended transaction models can be supported by providing a general purpose event signaling mechanism that can be programmed to enable activities (application specific units of computations) to coordinate each other in a manner prescribed by the extended transaction model under consideration."
The read phases in Kowari/TKS can work over days without interrupting other phases. I've been meaning to try and explain its isolation level which is somewhere between 2 and 3. Reads don't interact with locking but writes are serialized. It doesn't prevent phantom reads but it does mean that querying graphs and getting sub-graphs will always be consistent - i.e. as you constrain it further you always get fewer results.
"Over the years, several techniques have been proposed for managing long-lived activities. One of the first is called a Saga. [GGKKS] Sagas require you to define compensating transactions. A compensating transaction compensates for the effects of a transaction. For example, a compensating transaction for reserving a hotel room would be a transaction that cancels the reservation."
"Therefore, rather than provide support for a single model, such as Sagas, JSR 95 defines an infrastructure to support a wide range of extended transaction models. The architecture is based on the insight that the various extended transaction models can be supported by providing a general purpose event signaling mechanism that can be programmed to enable activities (application specific units of computations) to coordinate each other in a manner prescribed by the extended transaction model under consideration."
The read phases in Kowari/TKS can work over days without interrupting other phases. I've been meaning to try and explain its isolation level which is somewhere between 2 and 3. Reads don't interact with locking but writes are serialized. It doesn't prevent phantom reads but it does mean that querying graphs and getting sub-graphs will always be consistent - i.e. as you constrain it further you always get fewer results.
Tuesday, October 26, 2004
Scalable OWL Lite
An Evaluation of Knowledge Base Systems for Large OWL Datasets "In this paper, we present an evaluation of four knowledge base systems (KBS) with respect to use in large OWL applications."
"DLDB-OWL [23], is a repository for processing, storing, and querying large amounts of OWL data. Its major feature is the extension of a relational database system with description logic inference capabilities. Specifically, DLDBOWL uses Microsoft Access® as the DBMS and FaCT [16] as the OWL reasoner. It uses the reasoner to precompute subsumption and employs relational views to answer extensional queries based on the implicit hierarchy that is inferred."
"...we were surprised to see that Sesame-Memory could load up to 10 universities, and was able to do it in 5% of the time of the next fastest system. However, for 20 or more universities, Sesame-Memory also succumbed to memory limitations...The result reveals an apparent problem for Sesame-DB: it does not scale in data loading...As an example, it took over 300 times longer to load the 20-university data set than the 1-university data set, although the former set contains only about 25 times more instances than the later...Sesame is a forward-chaining reasoner, and in order to support statement deletions it uses a truth maintenance system to track all deductive dependencies between statements."
"From our analysis, of the systems tested: DLDB is the best for large data sets where an equal emphasis is placed on query response time and completeness."
Lehigh University Benchmark.
"DLDB-OWL [23], is a repository for processing, storing, and querying large amounts of OWL data. Its major feature is the extension of a relational database system with description logic inference capabilities. Specifically, DLDBOWL uses Microsoft Access® as the DBMS and FaCT [16] as the OWL reasoner. It uses the reasoner to precompute subsumption and employs relational views to answer extensional queries based on the implicit hierarchy that is inferred."
"...we were surprised to see that Sesame-Memory could load up to 10 universities, and was able to do it in 5% of the time of the next fastest system. However, for 20 or more universities, Sesame-Memory also succumbed to memory limitations...The result reveals an apparent problem for Sesame-DB: it does not scale in data loading...As an example, it took over 300 times longer to load the 20-university data set than the 1-university data set, although the former set contains only about 25 times more instances than the later...Sesame is a forward-chaining reasoner, and in order to support statement deletions it uses a truth maintenance system to track all deductive dependencies between statements."
"From our analysis, of the systems tested: DLDB is the best for large data sets where an equal emphasis is placed on query response time and completeness."
Lehigh University Benchmark.
Network Inference gets $8.1 million
Network Inference Announces $8.1 Million in New Funding "Network Inference, the leading provider of standards-based adaptive software infrastructure, today announced the first quarter 2004 close of $8.1 million as part of its Series B venture capital funding round."
In Search of Mosaic for the SW
Mining the Semantic Web "You've got to have ontologies; you've got to have a language for doing it; you need a social networking mechanism to enable you to make these inferences between representations that people are putting up about themselves. And you need a higher layer that actually crawls or somehow gathers that data and integrates it behind a single interface.
Today we have this new generation of technology. We don't really even have a browser for this information. There are some standards that have just come out, and we're at the stage now where there's no Yahoo. There's not even a Mosaic. There's definitely no Netscape. The question will be really who is in position to make these critical, enabling first key pieces of technology that will catalyze the rest of it."
"Where we're going is to take the hundreds of thousands of real-time news feeds today—going on millions—and turn it into broad search. The way we look at RSS is it's everything on the web that changes, which is to say everything on the web that has value."
Today we have this new generation of technology. We don't really even have a browser for this information. There are some standards that have just come out, and we're at the stage now where there's no Yahoo. There's not even a Mosaic. There's definitely no Netscape. The question will be really who is in position to make these critical, enabling first key pieces of technology that will catalyze the rest of it."
"Where we're going is to take the hundreds of thousands of real-time news feeds today—going on millions—and turn it into broad search. The way we look at RSS is it's everything on the web that changes, which is to say everything on the web that has value."
Slides for Urchin and Kowari
NPG and the Semantic Web, Urchin and Kowari
"Urchin:
* RSS Aggregator which represents all feeds in RDF
* Written in Perl
Kowari:
* Specialized RDF database
* Written in Java
Urchin-Kowari:
* Replace Perl's RCQL with Tucana's iTQL query
* The interface is otherwise unchanged
* Urchin and Kowari are connected via SOAP"
"Urchin:
* RSS Aggregator which represents all feeds in RDF
* Written in Perl
Kowari:
* Specialized RDF database
* Written in Java
Urchin-Kowari:
* Replace Perl's RCQL with Tucana's iTQL query
* The interface is otherwise unchanged
* Urchin and Kowari are connected via SOAP"
P2P Review
The Networked Semantic Desktop "In the first phase, Semantic Web, P2P, and Social Networking technologies are developed, researched and partially deployed. In the second stage, we will see convergence: Semantic Web technology is deployed on the Desktop, resulting in the Semantic Desktop. Similarly, Semantic Web technology is incorporated in P2P networks and Social Networking. Once there is a reliable technology available for the technology convergences, the next phase can be tackled: the combination of the three fields Semantic Desktop, Semantic P2P and ontology-driven Social Networking into the Networked Semantic Desktop."
Via Post details: Networked Semantic Desktop.
Via Post details: Networked Semantic Desktop.
Information Architecture
Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps! "Information architects have so far applied known and well-tried tools from library science to solve this problem, and now topic maps are sailing up as another potential tool for information architects. This raises the question of how topic maps compare with the traditional solutions, and that is the question this paper attempts to address."
Offers a good introduction to the ideas of taxonomies, ontologies, faceted classification, controlled vocabularies, and of course, topic maps.
Offers a good introduction to the ideas of taxonomies, ontologies, faceted classification, controlled vocabularies, and of course, topic maps.
XP vs RUP
XP vs RUP "The main reason is that I think XP focus is the correct one: Simplicity, feedback, embracing change, people developing quality software that works. XP has a positive perspective on software development, putting trust before control. Furthermore, many tools for quality assurance, testing, reporting, and continuous integration have emerged from the XP community."
Monday, October 25, 2004
Interception
Using Spring AOP to Implement the Cuckoo's Egg Design Pattern "This article has shown how to carefully use the active around form of advice inside of the Spring framework. The around form of advice is commonly used when implementing the Cuckoo's Egg design pattern, and so you were shown one example of how this aspect-oriented design pattern can be implemented using Spring AOP."
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