Harry Chen Thinks Aloud

FOAF is an ontology for publishing and discovering social network information on the Web. Though many people have published their FOAF profiles on the Web, but that number is still quite small — in comparison to the number of published MySpace profiles.

While tools like FOAF-a-matic has made easy for the average web users to generate FOAF profiles, but they still require some manual effort to get the profiles published (e.g., a user must complete the form and upload the machine generated RDF document onto a web server). I suspect these overheads are discourage factors that had prevented many users to publish their FOAF profiles.

If FOAF profiles are valuable to the understanding of social network on the Web, we should look for new ways to discover FOAF semantics in the existing web applications, and not depend on the manual publishing of FOAF profiles by the users.

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My memory of the last DotCom boom is fading. But, I think a new DotCom boom is about to begin. The new boom, I think, will evolve around the idea of Web 2.0 and perhaps some mix of the Semantic Web.

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After reading Dan Connolly’s blog, saying that he has outsourced bookmarking to del.iciou.us, I thought I will give this service another try. I have used the service before, but didn’t really get into it.

Spent few minutes reading the HELP page, I discover few new interesting features:

• Tag Bundles: I can bundle a set of related tags. For example, I created a SemanticWeb tag bundle that includes tags such as “ontology, rdf, owl, owls, rdf, rss” etc.
• Private Saving: one reason I didn’t like del.icio.us in the past because I don’t really want to share all my bookmarks with the public. With this new “private saving” feature, I can keep my private bookmarks private.
• Firefox extension: I installed a Firefox extension that allows to quickly save and tag web pages. It works great!

Among those features, I especially like “tag bundles”. If we consider tags as ontology classes, then tag bundles can be thought as functions that define the “owl:equivalentClass” relation or the “relatedTo” relation among different tags. It could be an interesting research project to investigate if we can use software programs to automatically extract ontologies from tag bundles that are defined by users of the same community (e.g., semantic web hobbyists).

Personally I just come to some understanding of Web 2.0. Bloggers are already thinking about Web 3.0, Web 4.0, and even Web 10.0!

• Web 3.0 (QTSaver)
• What to expect from Web 3.0 (ZDNet.Com)
• DeWitt Clinton thinks Web 2.0 to Web 10.0 (unto.net)
• Think Web 4.0! (blog.outer-court.com)

Some highlights:

• Web 1.0 was the Hypertext/CGI Web. (the basics)
• Web 2.0 is the Community Web (for people: apps/sites connecting them).
• Web 3.0 is the Semantic Web (for machines).
• Web 4.0 is when these technologies come together to form what I call the “Learning Web”.

If Web 2.0 is about the convergence of text and semantic data, Web 3.0 will do the same for all digital media. …What will Web 10.0 be…? Your very experiences, your senses, perhaps even your thoughts, will be broadcast and archived for anyone to download and view.

I just discovered that IEEE Computer Society now offers the availability of the latest magazines and transactions content through RSS. Now you can monitor your favorite IEEE magazines and journals the same way you monitor news and blogs.

Some of my favorite IEEE RSS include

• Computer
• IEEE Intelligent Systems
• IEEE Internet Computing
• IEEE Pervasive Computing

Yesterday I attended SICoP 2006 (the 4th Semantic Interoperability for E-Government Conference). I was there with my colleagues to showcase Image Matters’s new product called KnowledgeSmarts.

The purpose of this conference is to create synergy between the government agencies and the industry companies that share a common interest in semantic interoperability technology.

Many agencies in the US government see the lack of semantic interoperability is a big problem. Without it, information can’t be effectively shared between different agencies. It’s often the case that individual agencies invest heavily on data modeling and data collection, but later they each found the effort is unnecessary only if they knew how share and interoperate in the beginning.

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I’m a regular user of SWOOP, a lightweight ontology editor and explorer developed by the MINDSWAP group. Today I downloaded a copy of Swoop v2.3 beta 3. After using it for few hours, I love it.

I especially like the “Fly the Mothership” feature. It allows users to view ontologies in an intuitive graph diagram. The following is a screenshot of using this feature to view OWL Time ontology and a use case of the time ontology:

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Brandon Werner is starting a new semantic web project called cl-semantic. He is also looking for help. Looks like an interesting project just because everyone else is writing code in Java.

Project Description:

This is research using Lisp to develop macros for generating and processing semantic data and programmatically manipulating and generating OWL, similar (or dead on) Racer System’s RacerMaster, which is RacerPro as an object code library. It is also hoped that this project will apply speed paths based off of research from Eugene Agichtein & Silviu Cucerzan regarding predicting performance of relational extraction tasks (RE). This project seeks to re-create some of the work done with RacerPro, however the focus of this project will be on developing a language model for Reasoning Systems to allow for an open-source and vibrant community of developers to continue the work of improving reasoning systems to drive the Semantic Web.

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