dichotic noise

Over this weekend (9 – 11^th April) I watched on Ustream the Citability CODEATHON. I already knew about Citability​.org from Silona Bonewald (@Silona on twitter), but the codeathon (from an spectator point of view) was very interesting as both discussions and prototypes.

What is citability​.org?
Citability supports making public government documents and data available online and citable such that they can be easily referenced for public debate, commentary and analysis. This requires that archived versions of documents be stored and linkable so that changes can be easily spotted and reference links remain intact.
(from http://​dccodeathon​.pbworks​.com)

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I updated the code of the previous experiment (Sharing Ubiquity Commands) such that when you open an URL that contains a shared Ubiquity action, it won’t open Ubiquity in preview mode, but display a small icon.

This also allows to display multiple commands on one page, and by using Ubiquity annotation database I could create this command history; such that when you revisit a page where you had already applied some ubiquity commands you will see the icons for each, awaiting re-​applying.

(If the video is clipped, try it here)

Note: The icon and the icon insertion code is repurposed from Aza’s Mouse Based Ubiquity experiments.

My experimental (read ugly) code is available at http://​gist​.github​.com/​2​0​1​053

I recently spoke with Aza Raskin at FOWA on Ubiquity commands/​annotations sharing. I promised I’ll prototype something, here it is…

(If the video is clipped, try it here)

When someone applies an Ubiquity command to a piece of content that tells us what’s the type of that content. The user is making an annotation which is not made for the annotation sake, but made for solving a real need. That annotation if shared could be useful in various ways.

But first let’s look at all the data involved, consider that Alice is selecting some text on a web page, invokes Ubiquity and types ‘translate to japanese’. We have the folowing elements:

1. user: anonymous or with an identity (URI)
2. web page address (URI)
3. selected content
4. Ubiquity command (URI) with arguments

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I’ll assume that who reads this knows what Ubiquity is, if not check it out, it’s awesome.

Since Ubiquity can remember edits you do to a page (via edit and save commands), it may also be able to remember what other commands you applied to a piece of content, such that when you revisit that page you’ll see a small visual hint (could be similar to Alex Faaborg microformats experiments, or Aza Raskin’s mouse Ubiquity experiments) that would let you re-​apply the command.

Imagine that you visit a blog post about a party, and the map command is just one click away just because you did it before.

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Aza Raskin on conversational computing and “The Semantic Web” (loving the quotes)

OK, how can we have Ubiquity publish what people map (with their permission, of course), what commands they use on what piece of content?

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# emerge –ask rasqal raptor

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies… done!
[ebuild N ] media-libs/raptor-1.4.18 USE=“unicode –curl –xml“
[ebuild N ] dev-libs/rasqal-0.9.16 USE=“pcre –gmp –test –xml”

…

Then I downloaded and unpaked the 4store from http://​4store​.org/, then when running configure…

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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.