Semantic Web

G'day Nova

David Peterson — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 11:27:23 GMT

Before I begin telling you why I would like early access to Twine I would just like to thank you. I first sent you an email about a year ago asking what Semantic Web conferences you would recommend. I was pretty new to the field and certainly had not yet met anyone I could even discuss the word "RDF" with. You were kind enough to send me an email back recommending SemTech in San Jose, May 07.

I took your advice and haven't looked back yet... I work in Australia and my company is now working with many of the leading marine science agencies to find ways of accelerating research into climate change. We are using Semantic Web technologies along with open access policies to come up with clever solutions to nearly impossible situations. So I just wanted to let you know what your "small" reply to me over a year ago has lead to.

There are many reasons why I would love to get my hands on Twine, but I will only go into two right now to keep this post short.

1. My regular blogging is done with SitePoint (one of the most visited Web developer sites around). That is a good thing because the people that frequent the site are not your regular Semantic Web junkies, in fact, they are pretty much in the opposite camp. So it is the perfect venue to help persuade a HUGE audience of developers into drinking the Semantic Web kool-aid :)

2. I previously mentioned our work with climate change researchers and science groups and they are just begging for a tool like Twine (although they don't know it yet). I would love to pry and dig my way around to see how it could benefit their important work.

Running D2R server with MS SQL 2005

David Peterson — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 10:40:21 GMT

I was having trouble getting D2R server running on my machine. Now, I know this worked in the past with no problems, but that was a few months ago. I think my version of MS SQL 2005 Express has been updated since then, but I wasn't sure.

Anyway, I couldn't get the thing to run. I kept getting the following error message:

The connection to the named instance has failed. Error: java.net.SocketTimeoutException: Receive timed out.

I was using the exact same configuration file as before so I was getting very frustrated.

map:database a d2rq:Database; d2rq:jdbcDriver "com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerDriver"; d2rq:jdbcDSN "jdbc:sqlserver://david-xps;instanceName=sqlexpress;databaseName=xxxx"; d2rq:username "xxxx"; d2rq:password "xxxx"; .

I did a search and came across this Microsoft doc - How to connect to a named instance of SQL Server 2005 or SQL Server 2000 by using the client tools in the earlier version of SQL Server. I was running a named instance of SQLEXPRESS so I followed the directions from the doc:

Open SQL Server Configuration Manager, and then expand SQL Server 2005 Network Configuration.
Click Protocols for InstanceName, and then double-click TCP/IP in the right panel.
Note InstanceName is a placeholder for the named instance of SQL Server 2005.
On the Protocol tab, notice the value of the Listen All item.
Click the IP Addresses tab:
1. If the value of Listen All is yes, the TCP/IP port number for this instance of SQL Server 2005 is the value of the TCP Dynamic Ports item under IPAll.
2. If the value of Listen All is no, the TCP/IP port number for this instance of SQL Server 2005 is the value of the TCP Dynamic Ports item for a specific IP address
Note If the value of the TCP Dynamic Ports item is not set, you must set it yourself. For more information about how to configure a server to listen on a specific TCP port, visit the following Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) Web site: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms177440.aspx (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms177440.aspx)
Click OK.

So, after all that, I used the TCP Dynamic Ports value and plugged it in to my connection string:

d2rq:jdbcDSN "jdbc:sqlserver://david-xps:49417;instanceName=sqlexpress;databaseName=xxxx";

And it worked like a charm!

del.icio.us Tags: D2R, D2RQ, SQL2005

Photos from Busan, Korea

David Peterson — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 02:46:52 GMT

I am putting some of my photos online from Busan, South Korea where the ISWC2007 conference is taking place. Please take a look.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidsethp/tags/iswc2007/

Flickr Tags: iswc2007, busan

Technorati Tags: iswc2007, busan

Arrived in Busan for ISWC2007 - Wow

David Peterson — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 08:18:40 GMT

Flickr Tags: iswc2007, busan, south korea

I am here in Busan for the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2007). I arrived yesterday afternoon and my jaw still hasn't properly aligned itself with my head :)

This place is amazing, the sheer size of it is mind boggling to me. I haven't seen such a scale of population, high rises, office buildings, factories. I am impressed. The population of Busan is 3.5 million, all packed into a relatively small section of land.

I am also a bit intimidated as well because I speak absolutely no Korean... well actually I know one word "kam-sa-ham-ni-da" which means "thank you". The other translation barrier is that the written Korean language does not use a Roman alphabet but instead uses Hangul: 한국어/조선말

This means that I can not even approach a basic comprehension of what things are or how to even pronounce it. It makes it exciting as I don't quite know what I am ordering, but I have found people to be exceedingly friendly, helpful and understanding.

The city is positioning itself as a hub of technology and development, but importantly it seems to be keeping a lively feeling. I can see the rapid pace of change and construction, on the street level everything is being updated or newly build. The view changes from above though, from a higher vantage point I can see behind all the construction fences there are shacks and dwellings hidden from the street level view. As far as I can tell no one lives in these, either they have been re-located into the massive high-rise apartments or they have been pushed into the country. Either way nothing is standing in the way of progress - it looks like the oldest buildings are about 10-15 years old. And even they are being renovated or torn down for a newer, taller building.

Oh, I almost forgot, the activity and hum goes well into the night, well past 4am. I woke up the first night I was here (couldn't sleep well, beds here are HARD), the window was open and I could here people chatting and laughing below. The city is also brighter at night than in the day! It almost requires sunglasses to walk down the busy cramped streets, with neon and glowing signs everywhere. I like it. The best part is that there are no blinking lights. That is a big plus...

W3C's New Marketing for the Semantic Web

David Peterson — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 15:32:30 GMT

del.icio.us Tags: semweb, w3c

The W3C has a new set of icons for the Semantic Web. About time. Marketing and looks are important and for the Semantic Web to begin to sink in a re-branding was/is necessary.

I congratulate the W3C on a smart move. Although I do question the box theme? The logo makes me thing small, I know it has an upturned corner to invite, but to me, box = closed.

Anyway, it was a good move.

ISWC2007 - All in order...

David Peterson — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 12:51:21 GMT

del.icio.us Tags: iswc2007, semweb, busan

Finally booked at the Seacloud. It is amazingly tough to find ratings or unbiased information on places to stay in South Korea. I know they are one of the most connected countries in the world so that is what makes it so odd.

Seacloud looks great and it has 100mbs connections free in-room.

SmugMug supporting FOAF and other open standards

David Peterson — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 11:06:21 GMT

Just read this on their blog, it has been in place for a few weeks now. Great news, I have a develop account so plan on using this new feature in the Linking Open Data kind of way.

Here is a quote from the blog:

I’m absolutely positive we’re barely scratching the surface, and people like David will set me straight, but at least we’re making forward progress - 150K SmugMug accounts now have auto-discoverable FOAF, embedded XFN, and are OpenID endpoints.

What does this mean for you? It means, hopefully, that SmugMug can play nicely with other social applications on the web. Your network of friends & family is now published in machine-readable formats so that other networks can do intelligent things with that data. How exactly this will happen remains to be seen, but there are lots of bright people thinking about it, so hopefully it’ll happen.

At the very least, when the Semantic Web actually works in the year 2022, SmugMug will be ready.

It is good to see that such a great photo sharing site (SmugMug) has such forward looking developers.

Microsoft releases new Interactive Media Manager with RDF and OWL!

David Peterson — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 14:11:18 GMT

Microsoft has recently released a new media management application that implements RDF and OWL for metadata interchange:

"This RDF model allows companies to add nuance and intelligence to media management beyond what is possible with traditional metadata."

This is a very interesting turn of events, Microsoft is concerned about sharing:

"... Most importantly, the IMM RDF model overcomes traditional barriers to metadata sharing between external systems."

The name of the app is Interactive Media Manager - "A rich, collaborative media management solution for pre-production, post-production and production environments."

I am surprised at this, I was sure Microsoft was looking into Semantic technologies and building internal tools. But to create a production app and to talk about the advantages of RDF and OWL as open standards is impressive.

Here is a screenshot of the player:

URIs - Actually Creating Useful Links for Everyone, not just SemWeb geeks

David Peterson — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 14:26:50 GMT

There is a bit of a debate going on in the linking-open-data list about what are the best practices for creating useful URIs for use in the Semantic Web. I believe that the current best practice is that any URI should be dereferenceable so therefore they need to be transported via HTTP.

The debate started off with links to a European data set where the URI was:

http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/eurostat/resource/countries/France

(note the /resource/) and if a browser would visit the URI it would re-direct them to:

http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/eurostat/page/countries/France

(note the /html/) and if a RDF app would visit the URI it would re-direct them to:

http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/eurostat/data/countries/France

(note the /data/).

A good point that was raised (by Giovanni Tummarello) was that this is not intuitive, I email you a link, you put it in your browser and it is something you want to email to a colleague, but wait, now the URI that you email is now different and if you don't catch that you are emailing a different URI which won't produce the intended results. To a developer (who is not practiced in the arts of URIs, TAG and HTTPRange-14 issues) this is hard to follow, just which one do I use and when.

So a solution that is being used by Openlink's Kingsley Idehen is to use one URI and use content negotiation (via 303 See Other) to return the correct resource. That way there is no URI changing and no potential for confusion. It also is just plain cleaner. Any developer will know straight away what resource to use. This is backed up by the fact that the TAG group stated that any URI that returns a 2XX status code is actually an information resource and should not be used as a URI. So we can't use that for the pointer. Any URI that returns a 303 (See Other) status code is ambigious and could be a resource or a URI.

I think the strategy being used by Kingsley is perfect and is failful to the TAG decision yet answers the point by Giovanni Tummarello.

thing-described-by.org has a thoughtful way of dealing with the issue that bypasses a lot of the above hoopla. Check it out.

Technorati Tags: SemWeb, URI, RDF, httpRange-14

I have invites (5) for Freebase, anyone interested

David Peterson — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 00:21:01 GMT

I just got an email from Freebase letting me know that I have 5 (make that 11 now!) invites to hand out. Anyone intersested? Let me know, just drop a short comment with a tiny note on what interests you in the Freebase technology or Semantic Web or just what you had for lunch...