dichotic noise

I was browsing the National Secular Society site, and from there Concordat Watch site and other articles — including the fact that the Pope Benedict’s plans to revive the Latin Mass. And I recalled a dreadful truth: “The Empire Never Ended” from ‘Valis,’ the book of revelations by Philip K. Dick…

Ah, and what about the post title? The Black Iron Prison is a concept of an all-​pervasive system of social control postulated in the Tractates Cryptica Scriptura, a summary of an unpublished Gnostic exegesis included in VALIS.

“Once, in a cheap science fiction novel, Fat had come across a perfect description of the Black Iron Prison, but set in the far future. So if you superimposed the past (ancient Rome) over the present (California in the twentieth century) and superimposed the far future world of The Android Cried Me a River over that, you got the Empire, as the supra– or trans-​temporal constant. Everyone who had ever lived was literally surrounded by the iron walls of the prison; they were all inside it and none of them knew it.”

Philip K. Dick, Valis, London; Gollancz, 2001, pp. 54 – 55

So, in days four and five we managed to build a team (thanks to Helen): me, Rabeeh Abasi, Sofia Angeletou, Aurona Gerber and Alta van der Merwe. We started thinking on an two-​day implementable project, we argued a lot on what a person needs when is travelling to another country, and the solution come at the bar (thanks to Asun, who chased us out of the school building) where we started discussing cultural differences — as we were a heterogeneous group: two south africans, one greek, one romanian and one pakistani. In the end we decided to build an ontology that can model what are the social norms that govern different situations (such as visiting somebody, courtship, etc.) in different cultures.

We also focused (and argued a lot) on the use of some ontology patterns, such as situation, agent-​role and role-​task. We were on Saturday the second group to present our mini-​project, all the other presentations had a significant fun factor and implementation plans, and couple of them had real prototypical implementations.

And we won! it seems that the complexity of the modelling effort and the sanity of the open research questions we launched did this. I’m personally still puzzled about it.

On day four, the invited speaker was Dieter Fensel, who presented “Service Web 3.0″ — from services ubiquity (the milk bottle in the fridge becomes a service), what’s missing in SOA and to how to bring to it the web properties (scalability, descentralisation, interoperability, openness, etc.). He underlined the major breakthroughs of Web 2.0: blurring the distinction between content/​service consumers and providers, the move from media for individuals to media for communities and integration of human and machine computing in novel ways. Next he presented the Semantic Service Bus, WSMO and MicroWSMO, and the semantic space: TripleSpace.

On day five, Enrico Motta spoke about “A Research Programme for the Semantic Web,” where he underlined that the classical problem of knowledge aquisition
(KA) bottleneck can be solved by using the whole semantic web as an infrastructure and also as background knowledge provider. The gaved examples were about semantic web background knowledge usage in ontology matching.

The rest of these two days were dedicated to the work for “mini-​projects.” Most of the meetings for these projects employed more or less formal places, such as the pool and the bar.…

This day’s invited speaker was Peter Mika, from Yahoo! Research Barcelona. In his talk — The Future of Web Search — emphasised the state of the web search, semantic web deployment difficulties, the shift from documents to databases (web of data), and current trends in annotation/​structure of data: folksonomies, µformats, wikipedia infoboxes, RDFa; then how to reconsider IR in this context: folksonomies mining, GRDDL and hGRDDL, should we have “forgiving” parsers for µformats?

In this context the description of the ideal world would be:

• plenty of precise metadata to harvest
• user intent capturable directly as a SPARQL query
• single ontology used both by the query and the knowledge base (KB)
• a query executed on a single KB, gives the correct, single answer

In real world we face technical and social challenges: query interface usability, data quality (from synctactic/​semantic errors to spam), ontology mapping, entity resolution, ranking across types, results display (information overload and partial understanding issues), user motivation to annotate, trust.

Next, Fabio Ciravegna presented the state of the art in using semantic web technologies for knowledge management (KM) in large distributed organisations — from the sheer amount of raw data (i.e. a Rolls-​Royce jet engine produces 1GB of vibration data per hour) to unstructured reports on the lifecycle (diagnose, repairs, etc.) of such engines, distributed over multiple repositories.

The Rolls-​Royce case study of cross-​media KA was impressive, the main issues (apart of data volume) were that evidence is distributed over different media, from more or less structured text (word, excel, powerpoint and PDF) to 3D images, data integration and hybrid search.

Other specific information extraction (IE) issues were event modelling, table data extraction, distance metrics approaches (as opposed to the linguistic and statistical ones).

Later in the practical session we explored machine learning (ML) from both (human) text annotations as well as image annotations; which also showed how easy humans disagree on annotations and how the annotations reflect the world model of the annotator (and not of the user).

The last tutorial was given by John Domingue, on semantic web services (SWS) — the problems with the web services today, SWS vision, IRS3 SWS broker, web service modelling ontology (WSMO), orchestration and choreography in SWS. Then the Essex County Council Emergency Planning case study was presented and demoed, and the talk ended with OWL-​S and semantic annotations for WSDL (SAWSDL).

In the afternoon’s practical session, Barry Norton led us in how to re-​create the european travel demo with IRS3 and WSMO Studio.

The invited speaker of the day was Richard Benjamins (iSOCO, Telephonica), about “Semantic Solutions for the Enterprise,” he talked about the market, Gartner Hype Cycle 2006 predictions, public and corporate semantic applications and cost factors for constructing ontologies.

Next, Jérôme Euzenat presented at a very fast pace, the role, state of the art and future in ontology matching and alignment; and we got a taste of various matching algorithms in the afternoon practical session.

Asunción Gómez Pérez, gave a presentation on ontological engineering — development process, ontology lifecycle, methods and methodologies for building ontologies, and the tool suites and languages that support them. Most of the things were part of NeOn Project, the NeOn glossary of activities is a nice overview of what ontological engineering deals with.

In the afternoon, another practical session was lead by Aldo Gangemi, where we had to build an simple (and funny) ontology using another set ontology patterns than the ones discussed in the previous day. If in the previous day we played with Protégé 4, now we designed the ontology with TopBraid Composer. (I wonder what is the acceptance within this community of Altova’s SemanticWorks).

Later we had a extreme short walk in mountains, where we followed briefly one of the footpaths of the Fuenfría Valley.

The day started nicely with the “Towards a Social Web?!” talk by Stephan Baumann—which discussed from FOAF, user models vs. contexts, tagging to social networks analysis and visualisation, and related work at CHI2007.

Then we got in Twin Peaks mode, where Sean Bechhofer told us — well, with different words — what The Giant told Agent Cooper: “The OWLs are not what they seem!”

Further, Aldo Gangemi discussed about conceptualisation and modelling aspects in ontology design, and presented some ontology patterns from NeOnDeliverable D5.1.1 — NeOn Modelling Components.

In the afternoon we had a hands-​on Twin Peaks session and some modelling/​ontology patterns exercises; then the first poster session, where I almost lost my voice explaining for two hours my poster about semantic browsing with PowerMagpie.

Selected links of the day:

• BluetunA – an application for Bluetooth-​enabled mobile phones that allows you to connect to other BluetunA users in range and share music recommendations.
• GUMO (General User Model Ontology) from www​.ubisworld​.org
• Flink topics ontology.

Referred papers from CHI2007 proceedings:

• “Over-​exposed?: privacy patterns and considerations in online and mobile photo sharing”
• “Follow the reader: filtering comments on slashdot”
• “The life and death of online gaming communities: a look at guilds in world of warcraft”
• “Why we tag: motivations for annotation in mobile and online media,” see also this post from Yahoo! Research Berkeley.
• “Getting our head in the clouds: toward evaluation studies of tagclouds”