Valentin's Blog

Tool Support for Finding and Preventing Faults in Rule Bases

2009-06-09T05:05:00.001-07:00

I just realized that I never actually published my PhD thesis to this blog. This of course is an negligence that needs to be corrected .. so, embedded below is the (German) summary presentation. I've made the actual (English) document available here.

The Immersive (Geo-) Web

2009-06-04T10:25:00.001-07:00

I just have a sweet spot for technologies/tools that bring a new visual and immersive dimension to the web (see here for an earlier article). Hence I wanted to share a reference to 360cities - not that new, but a great way to immerse yourself into cities and places near and far. Have a look - embedded below you'll find a panorama of Venice. Hit full screen, note that controls at the bottom of the screen allow you to navigate to other panoramas close by and enjoy :)

S.Marco Tower in Venice

How To Wreck Your Living Room (or: The Future of Gaming Controllers)

2009-06-03T06:15:00.001-07:00

Videos from Sony and Microsoft give a glimpse into the future of gaming (that seems set to be dominated by Wii inspired controllers that allow to use ever more body movements to control the game). If you have any interest in gaming at all, you'll enjoy the two videos below.

The first is the video from the demo of the Sony system which still relies on specially marked objects but seems to be extremely precise. The demo is really fun to watch. Sadly embedding is not allowed, but you can watch it on the bbc website.

The other is Microsoft's Project Natal, an extension for the XBox360 that seems to rely exclusively on image recognition (and voice and speech recognition) - no controllers (Microsoft tag line is "You are the controller"), no specially marked objects. This video is embedded below or here on YouTube.

The AI Mashup Challenge 2009

2009-06-03T04:57:00.001-07:00

Always wanted to build a Mashup using AI Technology? Already have one? Why not participate in our AI-Mashup Challenge 2009, win up to 1500€, software or books and meet nice people.

Seriously, together with Brigitte and Pascal I'm organizing an AI Mashup challenge / camp that will be co-located with the KI 2009 (Germany's prime AI conference). Would be great if you wanted to join us - its sure going to be fun.

The deadline for submissions is the 15th of July - so you still have more than 6 weeks to build your Mashup!

You can read more about the contest here.

See you there!

Perspectives Of Strategic SO Research

2009-06-03T04:03:00.001-07:00

An overview of current research topics in service orientation (SO) from a technology oriented point of view. The presentation also gives a glimpse of what we (the FZI and in particular the group of Professor Thai) are doing in this area of SO in particularly with respect to cloud computing.

I presented these slides at the SOA symposium of the BITKOM organization (a large German intra-trade organization in the IT sector). The other (often interesting but all German) slides from this event can be found here.

Back

2009-06-03T02:40:00.001-07:00

Excuse the long break in posting - but I was traveling for a few weeks.

Where Are We And Where Should We Go With Electronic Health Records?

2009-03-28T05:27:00.001-07:00

To me Electronic Health Records (EHR) are one of the most exciting IT-developments of our age: the potential for better medical care, creation of new knowledge through mining this data and the potential cost savings are just so extremely large. And with the American government having dedicated $19 billion to speed up the computerization of medicine, we may actually see some real improvement in the next few years.
Two articles in the New England Journal of Medicine now give interesting perspectives on this topic.
The first article shows just how far away the vision of a comprehensive EHR system still is:

[...] only 1.5% of U.S. hospitals have a comprehensive electronic-recordssystem (i.e., present in all clinical units), and an additional7.6% have a basic system (i.e., present in at least one clinicalunit). Computerized provider-order entry for medications hasbeen implemented in only 17% of hospitals. [...]

The second article is more of a position statement that details very clearly what we should have learned from the web about the design of an EHR platform:

The platform approach to software design can be used to createand sustain an extensible ecosystem of applications and to stimulatea market for competition on value and price.

First, there should be liquidity of data. The platform and itsapplications should reduce impediments to the transfer of data,in an agreed-upon form, from one system to another.

Second, there should be substitutability of applications. The system should be sufficiently modular and interoperableso that a primary care provider could readily use a billingsystem from one vendor, a prescription-writing program fromanother, and a laboratory information system from yet another.

Third, the platform should be built to open standards, accommodatingboth open-source and closed-source software

Three points that should really be the blueprint for all large government organized IT-projects! (and, in fact, all large enterprise IT projects as well)

What are Semantic Technologies? (in German)

2009-03-24T13:40:00.001-07:00

My presentation from the STI Industry Day - the first such networking event organized by the German branch of STI International (the organization of scientific, industrial and government parties interested in fostering semantic technologies)

The presentation addresses the curiously still unsolved question of an understandable definition for "semantic technologies".

Was sind eigentlich semantische Technologien

View more presentations from vzach.

Robots in Pictures

2009-03-21T07:26:00.000-07:00

"The Big Picture" of the Boston Globe is just one of the most amazing websites around. Every few days they post a set of the most gorgeous, intriguing and thought provoking high resolution pictures about some topic, like Carnival, Kyrgyzstan and the American air base there or - and that brings us to the title of this post - Robots. Go on, have a look, you won't regret it.

Orwell 2.0 - The Computer Thinks You Are Not Smiling Enough

2009-03-18T05:31:00.001-07:00

One of the most exciting developments in IT these days is that computers are starting to see, are starting to become able to understand and reason about pictures and movies. However, this development also leads to a host of new privacy nightmares.

I'm thinking about this development for quite a while (see also this post on "Smart Spy Cams" from January 2006) but even I was shocked by some of the applications that smart spy cams are finding (from a very interesting Economist article):

Soon the company will start selling a 'smile measurement' system that will alert managers-in real time, if desired-when a cashier fails to muster an adequate grin. The software is configurable, so employers will be able to decide just how happy their employees should appear.

You should read the entire article for more useful and perverse applications of machine vision technology.

Tim Berners-Lee at TED

2009-03-16T03:57:00.000-07:00

There has been quite a bit of discussion about Tim's appearance at TED - so, here's the video:

Obviously not a technical talk; nevertheless I was quite amused that neither OWL nor Ontologies were mentioned at all :)

The Steps not Taken to Combat Global Warming

2009-03-01T14:21:00.000-08:00

These days I'm more and more amazed at how the increasing alarming global warming rhetoric is not matched by a willingness to do the necessary thing to actually tackle the problem. And I'm not even talking about the difficult political questions of how massively lower our energy consumption - here I mean the research that we need to cope with Global Warming that is not funded because of ignorance or ideology. Let me elaborate the three most striking examples:

Nuclear Energy (from Thorium): Humankind's unprecedented wealth largely hinges on the availability of very cheap energy and - consequently - it seems tremendously naive to assume that a large scale revamping of our entire energy infrastructure around often volatile and more expensive renewable energy sources will be possible without making us all a lot poorer (shaking the very foundations of our societies in the process). For this reason it seems awfully negligent to pursue nuclear energy only half heartedly or (as in Germany) not at all - afterall nuclear energy seems to be the one CO2 free energy source that requires the least adoption of our entire infrastructure (except CO2 storage, perhaps). Particular puzzling is the little investment and attention that nuclear energy from Thorium is seeing, since even though it would require a very large initial investment, it offers a chance for nuclear energy without the risk or a catastrophic meltdown, the prolifiration of nuclear weapons, the problem of decreasing Uranium reserves and nuclear waste thats toxic for millions of years (almost all trash from Thorium reactors would decay within a few hundred years). Its really a technology that could be a tremendous help for the years to come - but you don't hear about it. You can learn more about energy from Thorium from the TechTalk below:

Geoengineering: Many ambitious plans for curbing greenhouse gas emissions only slightly slow down the increase in global CO2 concentrations - and even these plans are enacted only very slowly or not at all. And even a radical cut in CO2 emission will not lower CO2 concentrations - these will only come down over a long period of time. In short: cutting emission (while indispensable) offers no way to quickly combat Global Warming or its effects. Now this is a big problem: we are already seeing the ice caps melting faster than expected and it may yet turn out that Global Warming will cause a global emergency of tremendous proportions (even while we work to cut emissions). Or - even worse - that there really is a climate tipping point where increasing global temperature becomes a self-reinforcing process. And again: cutting emissions offers no way to quickly do anything about it. However, there are really good arguments that geoengineering (such as sulfur seeding in the stratosphere) could quickly, cheaply and effectively lower the temperature in such an emergency. There are also many problems with this specific proposal and geoengineering in general - but it seems downright stupid to not at least massively invest in exploring and understanding these methods and their drawbacks! Below I've embedded a great TED talk on this topic - should you be interested in learning more.

Global Carbon Accounting: Amazingly there is no real global network to measure CO2 emissions and - as a direct consequence - our carbon lifecycle models cannot explain our observations: roughly 20% of the CO2 created by humans is simply not accounted for, we simply don't know where its going. Now there have been attempts to somewhat close this gap by sending a carbon measuring satellite into the orbit but sadly, it just failed to reach the orbit. Luckily the Japanese Ibuki satellite launched at the end of January may also fill this role. These measurements from space are not nearly as precise as those using sensor stations at the ground but at least - for the first time - we may get a really global picture. There is a lot more on this problem in the TechTalk embedded below (the measuring problem is discussed explicitly around minute 15; the satellite he's talking about is the one that crashed):

Scattered Clouds - On the Need for a Web Desktop

2009-02-17T09:33:00.000-08:00

I used to complain that I cannot (easily) keep both my emails and my files in the same organization structure; that I needed one structure on the disk and one inside my email program (outlook). These days desktop search has - to a big extend - solved this problem.

But now, with all the SaaS and cloud enthusiasm there comes an even worse problem: now I have my published slides at Slideshare, the ones I'm working on in Google Docs, together with my spreadsheets. My notes are on evernote - except for notes that are urls - in which case they are on Delicious.com, or mindmaps in which case they are on the servers of mindmeister.com. Finally my text documents are on Zoho (well most, some are on Google Docs) and all the rest is on my JungleDisk - well, except the pictures I want to share which are either on Facebook, Picasa or Flickr (depending on the audience). Oh, and I haven't even talked about the wikis ...

You get the picture? By using the best-of-breed web2.0 applications (which are great!) my desktop is now totally fragmented and I need to remember where a particular document may be. If I'm working on a task or project I have no single location where I can find all my stuff related to this task/project. So there it is - the real need for a web desktop; the single location that brings together our data from many services.The single place where we can aggregate and search for all our data.

Indefinitely better than TV

2009-02-09T12:18:00.000-08:00

For propably half a year I haven't watched any TV - not because I don't like see moving pictures every once in a while, but because the videos you can (legally) download from the Internet are just so much better. Now I wanted to use this post to point you to the one source of videos that has been my absolute favorite: TED talks. These are simply 10 to 25 minute conference presentations - but they are so well done, the topics are so varied and the speakers so impressive that they have nothing in common with your average conference presentations and they beat the crap out of almost anything on TV.

Below I've embedded three of my favorite ones - You'll need one hour to watch them all, but you will not regret it.

The first talk is an incredibly passionate call for the exploration of the sea by Robert Ballard - a talk filled with the astonishing things we learned about the oceans in the last few decades.

The second talk "My Year of Living Biblically" is a very funny talk from a journalist and book author about his one year experiment of following every rule and commandment in the bible (he even managed to stone an adulterer).

Finally the last talk I want to share with you is from Chris Bangle - the controversial genius behind BMWs (and Minis and Rollce Royce) recent car designs (who - sadly - has announced to leave BMW). In his talk he passionately argues that cars are Art and that Design is Love. Did you know that every car you see out there is sculped?

Cooliris & the Future of Browsing Visual Data

2009-02-07T09:09:00.001-08:00

What you see below is a screenshot of how Flickr results look like if you have the Cooliris plugin installed. I wanted to feature this here because there is no doubt in my mind that this kind of tool will soon become a mainstream way of accessing visual information (like Flickr; but also Slideshare or YouTube).

Cooliris still has some rough edges (e.g. it seems to be a memory hog) but I absolutely recommend it to anyone interested in the future of browsing and to anyone who just wants to enjoy Flickr more.

The Year of the Cloud - a Synthesis of 67 IT Predictions for 2009

2009-01-09T09:06:00.001-08:00

Despite all the perils of predictions - I do like spending a few hours reading and thinking about what the next year may bring for information technology. I wanted to share the result with you: my personal synthesis of IT predictions from 67 people and organizations.

Over-Clouded

Cloud Computing is mentioned by so many people that - if nothing else - it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy [5,6,7,9, 10,30,31,34,36,40,44,60,62,65,66,67]. The buzz includes the whole range of cloud techniques and related buzzwords - internal clouds, external clouds, SAAS, IAAS, PAAS and (to a lesser extend) personal clouds a la MobileMe. One interesting aspect is that the current recession may even be fueling this enthusiasm, because it makes the promised cost savings as well as the pay-per-use model seem so much more attractive [8,9,10,66]. On a cautionary note some predictions stressed the need for open standards to make different cloud providers interoperable [5,44], the challenging governance and regulatory issues involved [62,65,67] and the limits of 'internal clouds' [31].

Regaining Control: Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC)

Fueled by the uncertainties of Cloud Computing and Enterprise 2.0 technologies, new regulations to be expected in the wake of the current financial crisis and finally the string of high profile data spills in 2008, many expect a resurgent interest in GRC [8,9,32,35,61,62,64,65,67]. Keywords in this area were Enterprise Digital Rights Management [61], e-Discovery [32] and Policy Language Interoperability [35].

Oh, you also shop here?

Many predictions address social media for the enterprise and Enterprise2.0 technologies [7,14,16,28,28,32,33,46,47,49,51,52,53,54,55,56,75,60,63]. The largest number of predictions addressed the use of social media in the B2C/B2B area for customer service [36,47,54,56], marketing [16,28,33,49] and shopping [40,53] (as opposed to the internal use for e.g. knowledge management).

The most mentioned application was Twitter, but predictions varied widely on where it may be heading: people predict it will gain more legitimacy [54,28], but also that it will lose influence after it has peaked in 2008 [26]. One predicted Twitter will be acquired by Google [50]; another that it will stay independent [33].

Interestingly four predictions addressed and predicted a rise in the fragmentation in IT architecture and IT budget that can occur particularly in the Enterprise 2.0 context - the keywords are 'Bricolage IT' [64], 'Shadow IT' [10], 'Rogue Clouds' [5] and the possible backlash of 'Anti-IT' and 'Slow-IT' [2].

Saving the Environment (and Money)

Green IT - meaning both the use of energy efficient computer systems as well as the use of IT to save energy elsewhere (think 'smart meters','smart buildings', 'smart grid' or teleconferencing instead of air travel) - seems to be another idea whose time has come: the environment is not going to go away as a topic, hardware vendors have green products ready, possible cost saving sound particular tempting in a recession and anti-recession government spending for infrastructure may finance some Green-IT projects [1,29,36,37,62]. IBM was mentioned as one company placed particularly well to profit from an increased interest in 'Smart Infrastructure' [29]. Green IT was the only IT-centric topic with an own article in the Economist's special issue 'The World in 2009' [1].

BI for everyone

Business Intelligence was one buzzword that appeared in a few predictions, most notable in those from Gardner and Forrester Research [6,9,10,31]. People are expecting Business Intelligence techniques to improve to handle very large amounts of data [10] and to become easier to use for end users [6,9]. BI was also mentioned as the next area to be 'SaaS-ified' [31] and the W3C staff predicted great advances in easy to use data visualization [35], surely something that could improve BI solutions.

'Change' coming to eGovernment

The very effective use of social media by the Obama campaign was surely not lost to politicians in Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, the European Parliament, India, Indonesia, South Africa and even Iran - all preparing for federal elections in 2009. Also the tech-savvy Obama administration is surely going to continue its use of modern technology - all in all it seems 2009 will see a great increase in the use of modern IT (in particular social media) in government and politics in general [29,35,53]. Here I include electronic health records - which seem sure to get a big boost from the incoming Obama administration [1].

The Web: Identity, Video, Location, Live Web and Ads for the world

Identity and its portability continues to be an important problem that may see solutions emerge in 2009 [15,17,18,34,48,57]; in this context Facebook Connect was identified as 2009's shiny must-have for modern websites [57].

Online video is the main area that is expected to grow in 2009 [24,25,34,54], another area that may profit from the recession as consumers seek cheap thrills [24]. Also mentioned is an increasing interest in geocoded websites, geolocation and collaborative mapping [13,35,57]. Finally four predictions spoke about the live web, predicting 'Google Maps Live' [59], 'Live RSS' [58] and a more prominent role for the live web in general [33,52].

As for the ads fueling the development of the web: The Economist expects Internet ads to remain strong and to continue to increase their share of all marketing spending [1]. The economist also expects e-commerce to continue to grow even in a recession. There were also some predictions about getting serious about monetizing non-us traffic [22,24].

Too many friends, too much information

Dealing with information overload was another topic that appeared in many predictions. This lead to people predicting "Deliberately Disconnected" [64], "De-friending" [57], 'Social Media Indigestion' [47] and 'Social Graph Shrinkage [53] as trends; better information filtering [62,29,12] and intelligent Internet agents [29,39] were also proposed as emerging remedies.

The Mobile Web: Software, Location and Netbooks

With so many great smartphones entering the market, laptops for the first time outselling desktops and netbooks establishing a whole new category of computing devices, it is no surprise that mobility and the mobile web appear in many predictions [1,12,14,26,36,39,43,52]. Most excitement surrounded netbooks driving the development of servers, clouds and Linux clients [36,39,43] and a possible transformation of the software market through mobile software and mobile app stores [26,39,52]. Other predictions were: location aware services on mobile devices [12,14], the large scale IPhone adoption in enterprises [43] and mobile marketing (finally) taking of [51]. I personally also expect energy to be a big topic in the mobile area with both 'wireless energy' and - to a lesser extends - 'energy scavenging' entering the mainstream vocabulary.

Hardware: HDD and GPU looking for new jobs

2009 is predicted to be the year of the SSD/flash drive for both consumers and the enterprise [26,30,39,45], with HDD's starting to look for new application areas (home-SAN and home backup systems anyone?). Graphic cards will continue their development but will (again) increasingly be used for the computation of 3D outputs (Stereo3D [45]), physical simulations (physX [45]) and just general purpose computation tasks (GPGPU [30]). The processor of the year 2009 will be the Intel Core i7 while AMD will start to sell 6 core processors [45]. I want to add that we will also see dual-core processors appear in smartphones.

Did I miss anything important? Tell me in the comments!

Sources

The sources were selected by Google - in essence these are the top ranking results for a search for IT predictions 2009. Note that some links contain predictions from more than one person and are hence referenced multiple times.

CfP - Social Aspects of the Web

2009-01-07T01:16:00.001-08:00

The 3rd Workshop on Social Aspects of the Web - SAW 2009 (for which I happen to be on the PC) is looking for contributions to be submitted no later than the 1st of February 2009.

Topics include identity, privacy, leadership, collaboration and mining on the social web. Types of social software and the use of social software in the enterprise is also relevant. The full CfP is available here.

The workshop will be held in conjunction with the 12th International Conference on Business Information System (BIS 2009) on April 27-29th in the really beautiful city of Poznan in Poland (see the nice picture by giannisl).

Apple Knows Best

2008-12-06T11:20:00.001-08:00

I finally took the plunge to buy a new Apple computer (a MacBook), after quite a few years of abstinence (a Performa 5200 and a Power Book from the 500 series were my last Apple computers) in which I only maintained some Apple computers from relatives. And I must say, the first few days have been infuriating! In addition to the fact that its really crashing more often than my trusty WinXP Dell, I'm very much annoyed by the "Apple knows better than you" attitude embodied in every part of their software:

Apple knows that there is no reason to turn off your laptop screen when the laptop is open. Hence, if - in my stupidity - I still want to do it, I need to attach the monitor, close the laptop (which sends it to sleep - again a function that apple decided I should not be able to change), then wake the laptop with an external keyboard and only then open the laptop again .. But, as I think about it, Apple is probably right: I simply should not turn off my laptop screen because attaching an external display is a mysterious and unreliable process. Not only do current apple laptops use three! different non-standard monitor interfaces (DVI mini, DVI micro and mini Display Port), but adaptors from display port to DVI are currently not in stock anywhere and the Display-port-VGA adaptors (which are also hard to come by) are barely functioning (while I'm typing this my Monitor has gone black and resynced four times - a very common problem that most users of Samsung Monitors seem to be having - if they succeed in connecting their monitor at all).
Apple knows that the only way I could ever want to sort my podcasts is by when they appeared; sorting by title works for music and movies, but in its greatness Apple decided to deactivate it for podcasts.
Apple knows that I'm to stupid to frame my pictures correctly and hence that pictures should be zoomed and moving around randomly when they are shown in the hope nobody will notice (I'm talking of FrontRow here, not IPhoto where I can at least disable it).
Apple knows the best folder structures for pictures and hence IPhoto can do very little without importing the pictures into this perfect structure (very annoying if you have a cross-platform store with thousands of pictures, trust me).
Apple also knows that I cannot be trusted to choose the content I want to be listening too, and hence pre-filters everything I can choose from (well - unless I leave the Apple software ecosystem; but then I lose a large part of that shiny Apple world).

I'm not claiming its a very bad computer; its beautifully build, extremely quiet, OSX really looks and feels nice. But I must say I'm shocked at the unreliability (software, the adaptor mentioned above and also Bluetooth connectivity) and at how little customization is possible within the Apple software ecosystem. Probably my much more Mac savvy colleague was right when he said that one should simply not buy an Apple shortly after a new line has been introduced - but that's a sad statement about a computer manufacturer where you pay a few hundred dollars/euro extra so you get something that "Just works".

Social Semantic Bookmarking

2008-12-04T02:38:00.001-08:00

Below you find the slides of a paper showing the benefits the can be obtained by adding a little bit more context; a little bit of semantics to social bookmarking sites. This paper was presented by my colleague Hans-Joerg Happel at the PAKM conference. The slides are embedded below and you can see them here at slideshare. The entire paper is here.

Simone Braun, Valentin Zacharias, Hans-Joerg Happel: Social Semantic Bookmarking. 7th International Conference on Practical Aspects of Knowledge Management (PAKM 2008)

An Anthropological Introduction To YouTube

2008-11-25T17:02:00.001-08:00

This is simply a great presentation/movie about why YouTube is more than file sharing, why it is the emergence of a new kind of global community forming new kinds of connections transcending time and space. Its both fun to watch and insightful (and even emotional).

This video is already a few months old and has been posted by everyone and their dogs, BUT, it so good I simply want to have it on here. If you are interested Social Media and haven't seen it - do it! In the beginning it has a few dry minutes but it gets better and better.

Development and Verification of Rule Based Systems - a Survey of Developers

2008-11-20T10:11:00.001-08:00

A few weeks ago I finally presented the results from the developer survey about Rule Base Development - Method, Tools, and Problems at the RuleML symposium in Florida. Embedded below are the slides summarizing the results; you can also download an extended version of the RuleML paper here.

BTW: The camera that was offered as a prize to participants of the survey went to Dr Flower in Australia who develops rule bases for Westpac Banking Corporation to be used in trading applications.

Valentin Zacharias (2008): Development and Verification of Rule Based Systems - A Survey of Developers. RuleML 2008: 6-16

Collective Intelligence and Enterprise 2.0 - Comparing 'Web Scale' to 'Organization Scale'

2008-10-10T14:52:00.001-07:00

Discussing the use of Collective Intelligence for the 'Enterprise 2.0', one almost inevitable argument is that experiences from the web cannot be transferred, because web scale is just sooo much larger. But I wondered - exactly how much larger, in particular when we look at really really large organizations, even the biggest of them all:

Too make it quick: 600 times; there are 600 times more web-users than there are employees in the largest organization. Current estimates put the number of web-users at 1.5 billion, while (according to wikipedia) the largest organization has 2.5 million employees. There are more people in the Facebook group "AGAINST THE NEW FACEBOOK LAYOUT" than there are people in the largest organization on earth! By the way: this organization is the state owned Indian Railways (hence the nice picture by Akuppa); other organizations of similar size are the People's Liberation Army (estimated at 2.25 million active duty personnel) and the largest private organization: Wal-Mart (2.1 million). The largest German organization is Deutsche Post (DHL) with 0.5 million; there are 3000 times more web users than employees in Germany's largest company.

So yes, very clearly, experience from the open web cannot be easily generalized to organizations; not even to the biggest ones and not even if we disregard all issues beyond pure size (e.g. motivational issues).

Large Scale Uses of RDF

2008-10-08T09:34:00.000-07:00

In a recent post ReadWriteWeb laments the little use of RDF in commercial applications. While the general point is valid, they miss quite a few large scale uses of RDF that I wanted to share with you:

1) The largest use of RDF in a real web setting: FOAF, and in particular its support by Google's Social Graph API.

2) XMP, the format used by Adobe to embed metadata in PDF (and other) files. Its most commonly stored in a subset of RDF. With all the Adobe tools, this is deployed on more than a hundred million computers.

3) The use of RDF in Firefox, e.g. for the description and management of extensions. Just take a look at you profile directory, you'll see.

Tackling the Curse Of Prepayment - Collaborative Knowledge Formalization Beyond Lightweight

2008-10-02T08:46:00.001-07:00

We finally came round to write up our ideas on how to overcome the motivation and incentive problems for collaborative heavyweight knowledge formalization:

This paper argues for collaborative incremental augmentation of text retrieval as an approach that can be used to immediately show the benefits of relatively heavyweight knowledge formalization in the context of Web 2.0 style collaborative knowledge formalization. Such an approach helps to overcome the "Curse of Prepayment"; i.e. the hitherto necessary very large initial investment in formalization tasks before any benefit of Semantic Web technologies is visible. Some initial ideas about the architecture of such a system are presented and it is placed within the overall emerging trend of "people powered search".

You can read the entire paper here. I will present it at the INSEMTIVE workshop at this year's ISWC; if you're in Karlsruhe, it would be great to see you there!

License Madness

2008-08-21T13:57:00.001-07:00

Today I wanted to take a few moments to contribute to the commons by improving a few pages on Wikitravel. The first page lacked any images and I though I just take a few nice ones from Wikipedia. But, not so fast; as it turns out Wikipedia is GFDL licensed, while Wikitravel is CC-BY-SA-1.0 (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 1.0 Generic) licensed - and these licenses are incompatible. I cannot copy something from Wikipedia unless I have authored it myself or have asked all authors. Exactly the problem CC licenses try to prevent.

Now, the images on Wikipedia can have different licenses and so some of these can be used. But even images that are licensed under CC-BY-SA, are often licensed under a different version. In fact there seem to be 5 major version (1.0, 2.0, 2.1, 2.5, 3.0 - 2.5 seems to the most frequently used, followed by 3.0 and 2.0) and many more localized version. That's really problematic - how on earth should I know whether I can an upload an image licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.5-DK (the Danish localization of the 2.5 version of the creative commons attribution share alike license) to a site using for example CC-BY-SA-2.0-KR (the Korean localization of the 2.0 version ...). Not even to mention the question on the compatibility of Wikitravel's CC-BY-SA-1.0 with theoretically less restrictive licenses such as CC-BY-2.1-JP (the Japanese localization of creative commons attributions licence version 2.1 - still used for 1100 Wikimedia Commons images).

Luckily Wikitravel also allows images to have a license different the CC-BY-SA-1.0 used for the text - and so I can use pictures licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.1-JP. Still I cannot use CC-BY-SA-2.5-JP (a newer version of this Japanese license) or CC-BY-2.1-ES (the Spanish version of the same license) and I still don't know about the less restrictive CC-BY-2.1-JP mentioned above. Why this selection of licenses? - I don't know, but it says so here.

Turning to Flickr (another great source for images), we see that they support 7 different Creative Commons licenses, but not the CC-BY-SA-1.0 license of Wikitravel. However, 2 of the 6 licenses are at least accepted for images on Wikitravel but, alas of the almost 2.8 billion pictures* on Flickr, 77 million are CC licensed (2.7%) and only 12 million (15% of the CC licensed, .4% overall) are licensed compatible to Wikitravel.

I don't see a simple answer to this problem - probably it will be a while until an agreement on the best open licence emerges. But there is one thing we can all do: If you want to contribute, try to release your stuff into the public domain. Only then can you be sure that it can be reused with whatever collaboration platform may be devised in the future. That's not because a restriction e.g. to get acknowledged is unreasonable - its only because the restrictions can be worded in so many different ways that it will inevitably lead to incompatibilities. I know, there are some things that your need to continue to control, but there are many more where its really not going to hurt you.

I for one, have freed the few images I've uploaded to Wikipedia and put them into the public domain - please do the same for yours! And yes, actually I would like people using these pictures to include an attribution, but that's a matter of good behavior, not a question that lawyers should be involved in.

*: In fact 2785244632 uploaded pictures by the time I write this - Flickr numbers its pictures consecutively, so you can see the absolute number of pictures uploaded by looking at the URLs of the pictures most recently uploaded. Although this also includes some movies and pictures since deleted.