SoftwareManiac

An application of the Attention Economy

2007-06-18T17:56:00.001+02:00

Seriosity is an interesting application of the so-called Attention Economy.

Good move, Second Life!!

2007-04-27T00:55:00.001+02:00

According to Mark Wallace in this blog post, it seems that Second Life will open-source the server code. I think this is a great move from Linden Labs as it will attract many investments on the SL platform. Also, this way SL candidates itself (and credibly) as the next gen Web platform.

Technorati Tags: second-life, web3.0

Ontologies for the Web's ??

2007-03-30T18:30:00.001+02:00

Ontologies today lack of the flexibility needed for the Web. As a matter of fact, ontologies have been conceived for little communities of experts that try to agree on an "objective" model of a given domain of knowledge. To reach to an agreement about a model is often difficult, even in these little communities of experts. In large Web communities, don't even think about it...

So, should we renounce to ontologies as the foundation bricks of the Semantic Web vision?

I really don't know, but I'm trying to hint a possible solution of this problem.

Ontologies, as we intend them today, are based on Description Logics (DL). A Description Logic is based on an objective interpretation of the reality, not a subjective one. Nonetheless, there exist logics that model subjective interpretations (Epistemic Logic) and even subjective beliefs (Doxastic Logic). Is it possible that an ontology language based on the epistemic/doxastic logic would better fit the reality of the Web? Would reasoning be possible on models built with such a language?

Is there someone out there that can give me an answer?

Technorati Tags: semantic-web, ontology

Chip chip chip...

2007-03-22T10:29:00.001+01:00

Twitter is growing fast. It is a sort of instant blogging for instant self-gratification: you just post answers to the question "What are you doing?", with a few words, as you were writing a SMS. This kind of service permits to a very long-tail of people with a little time or a little attention span or not being a proven blogger (like myself :-) to express themselves in the Net.

What else should we expect now? Maybe automatic systems, like meteorologic stations, could start twittering their data?

Technorati Tags: twitter, event-driven

From PC Era to Web 4.0 according to Nova Spivack

2007-03-14T21:21:00.001+01:00

This diagram is from one of my favourite blogs. It shows Nova Spivack's vision of the evolution of the Web.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, semantic-web, semantic-technologies

A Web of Metaverses or a Metaverse for the Web?

2007-03-13T18:20:00.000+01:00

While Second Life is (inevitably) suffering of scalability problems, it becomes clear that a single metaverse environment is not the way to go. We rather need a "Web of Metaverses", all interconnected and where, possibly, there exists a notion of "Avatar continuity".

Good starting points to materialize this vision are:

Croquet
Open Source Metaverse Project
openID
Higgins framework

Technorati Tags: second-life, metaverse, openID, higgins

Identity management using a Firefox plugin and the Higgins Trust Framework

2007-02-28T17:56:00.000+01:00

Sometimes, a good picture(*) is better than many words...

(click the image to expand)

(*) From the Higgins Project wiki at Eclipse

Rich 3D on browsers

2006-10-26T15:19:00.000+02:00

Today, I have started my first recognition in the world of rich 3D web applications. What I am interested in are open source technologies that enable 3D rendering of complex scenarios on browsers, for purpose of conceptual modelling.
As far as I went to understand, the available options are based on two technologies, AJAX and Flash. On the AJAX (XML) side, I have discovered that there exists a consortium (Web3D) that is working on a specification, called Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML), now superseded by X3D.
The Ajax3D organization is currently focused on mixing AJAX with X3D-based open technologies. In the Ajax3D site, there are some showcases that can be played after having installed a browser plugin. I have installed the Flux player, that can be found at MediaMachines, but other available plugins can be found here.
A database of available tools and applications for X3D can be found here.

Technorati Tags: ajax, ajax3d, flash, vrml, web3d, x3d

GRDDL Working Draft has been released

2006-10-24T18:11:00.000+02:00

The W3C Consortium has released today the First Public Working Draft of the GRDDL specification. According to W3C:

GRDDL is a mechanism to extract RDF statements from suitable XHTML and XML content using programs such XSLT transformations. GRDDL is ready to deploy, allowing powerful mash-ups at very low cost.

Incidentally, I want to mention a fresh article that has been released today from IBM's developerWorks that explores the major techniques, including GRDDL, that are used today to enable machine-human coexistence on the Web.

Technorati Tags: w3c, grddl, Semantic Web

What is your definition of Web 3.0?

2006-10-23T17:22:00.001+02:00

So far I found three common definitions for Web 3.0:

Second Life-like: the next-generation Web will permit users not only to produce and share content in the world but also to produce and share content that is confined in virtual worlds;

The Semantic Web: an overlay of machine-understandable information that will allow automa to perform reasoning on user's behalf;

A global "operating system" where all applications (from personal productivity to enterprise applications) are available on-line.

Can you share *your* definition of Web 3.0?

Technorati Tags: web2.0, web3.0

Sahana: an open source Disaster Management System

2006-10-22T19:04:00.000+02:00

In his blog, Bob Sutor talks about Sahana, an open source Disaster Management System developed by engineers from Sri Lanka.
According to the the project's web site at Sourceforge,

Sahana is a secure Web portal that provides applications for coordination and collaboration in the aftermath of disasters. Applications include finding missing people, connecting organizations, reporting on the distribution of aid and services, matching donations to requests, tracking temporary shelters, and, overall, providing transparency and visibility to groups working in a disaster. Key features include GIS, biometrics, PDA support, and availability in the form of a live CD.

Bob urges the OS community to provide some contribution to the project. What do they need? Here follows a quote extracted from the project site:

Right now we would like more help in terms of pre-deployment to other nations, working with government and NGOs to adopt Sahana and prepare for potential disaster management situations. We also would appreciate any help on documentation, localization, and of course, donations and the occasional pizza or two . You are most welcome to build or modify modules as you see fit to target a specific need. Sahana uses a pluggable architecture, so an end deployer can pick and choose only the modules that would fit the need.

Technorati tags: disaster-management, open-source.

Technorati to support OpenID

2006-10-20T10:19:00.000+02:00

Technorati has announced that it will provide to users the possibility to claim their blogs by relying on OpenID identification mechanism. Essentially, claiming a blog establishes that you are its owner.

On OpenID-enabled sites, Internet users don't need to create and manage a new account for each of them before being granted access. Instead, they only need to be able to authenticate with a trusted site that supports OpenID, called the identity provider or i-broker. Also, if an identity provider uses Strong authentication, OpenID can be used for all types of transactions, included banking and e-commerce.

Such a move from a Web 2.0 player of the size of Technorati will indoubtedly give a strong impulse to the adoption of OpenID by other community-oriented companies.

Technorati tags: Technorati, Web2.0, OpenID.

Situational Computing

2006-10-17T14:43:00.000+02:00

Situational Computing is an emerging computing paradigm where the notion of a "software application" — the key value driver for decades — gets relegated to a secondary role in favor of a new concept, the "situation". In Application-centric computing, the user interacts with an application for some features (e.g. a word processor), with another one for other features (e.g. chat with people) and so on. Each application is a standalone feature-provider. The user adapts to the application, in terms that he/she has to choose the right application that serves his/her purpose. In Situation-centric computing the user interacts with an electronically augmented situation, that provides certain situation-specific capabilities, and that was composed (often dynamically) based on the real-world situation that the user currently is in. As a user's situation changes, the electronic augmentation of the then-current situation changes (often automatically).

A situation is simply what you see when you open your eyes. It's you, your environment, what you can do and what's going on. More formally: "A situation is the combination of people, things, information and capabilities that, together, have relevance to the user at a certain moment in time."

A Situational Software is a software that provides the electronic augmentation to the user's situation in (near) real-time as soon as the situation itself evolves.

Technorati tags: situational-computing

Senso Comune, an Italian project for incorporating common sense into automa

2006-09-06T14:36:00.000+02:00

Common sense is the most human portion of human knowledge. It's all about the cognitive patterns that are proper, and sometimes exclusive, to human experience and that are considered so obvious that they are often overlooked. Consider the following statement:

You start getting hungry again a few hours after eating a meal.

This is not normally coded in ontologies, but all humans recognise it as being true, having experienced it in their own lifes.
Automatic reasoners that incorporate common sense are keen to reason more like humans, as they know the subtleties of being such, with a body, with needs, with emotions, with feelings.
One of the most remarkable project of common sense elicitation for the English speaking world can be found here.
For Italian speakers, I would like to mention a similar project, called Senso Comune, supported by the Fondazione IBM Italia. The wiki of the project and the project itself are hosted by the Laboratory for Applied Ontology and can be found here.

Technorati tags: common sense, Semantic Web, IBM.

Wikipedia3

2006-05-31T14:35:00.000+02:00

Wikipedia³ is a an interesting project running at System One labs which purpose is to convert the English Version of Wikipedia into RDF triples. The reference ontology is a custom one, but modelled after WikiOnt.
Each month, an up-to-date archive of triples gets published under the GNU Free Documentation License. The available formats are RDF/XML, Turtle and N-Triples.

I wonder if someone is currently using these archives for some application...

Technorati tags: rdf, wikipedia.

Presentation about Embedded RDF

2006-05-30T10:49:00.000+02:00

This presentation from Ian Davis is about Embedded RDF, a complementary way to Microformats to add metadata within XHTML documents.

Technorati tags: rdf, metadata, semanticweb, tagging, microformats.

Apologize

2006-05-13T11:07:00.000+02:00

I did a mess with the previous post by changing its title a couple of times. So, it is seen published more than once on some feeds. Sorry...

Technorati tags: metamodel, rdf, metadata, tagging, syndication, collaboration, search engine, web2.0.

Web 2.0 Metamodel

2006-05-13T10:41:00.000+02:00

Despite the warm debate about this, I'm not much interested on whether the Web 2.0 exists or not, if it is just a buzzword or a serious movement. What really matters to me is to catch the few aspects that make the difference as opposite to the old way of conceiving and building the Web. So, in a few words, here's what Web 2.0 means to me:

Collaboration
Syndication (or Web feed)
Tagging (to create metadata)
Searching

The Blogosphere and the Wikisphere have developed around the concept of Collaboration. RSS Feeds and the so-called Mashosphere turn around the Syndication concepts. The Semantic "layer" develops on tagging (more than RDF) to annotate data. Finally, search engines (especially the next generation, based on semantic queries) glue all together.

I'm not sure the picture is complete enough to cover all of the aspects of the Web 2.0, but I think it's a starting point to think to a metamodel of the Web 2.0.

More to come...

Technorati tags: metamodel, rdf, metadata, tagging, syndication, collaboration, search engine, web2.0.

Livesearch from AlltheWeb

2006-05-10T15:59:00.000+02:00

AlltheWeb (from Yahoo) is featuring LiveSearch, a new search engine interactive front-end. Livesearch analyzes your search in real-time and instantly provides Web results with alternate search queries as you type. These suggested queries are based on what other people have searched for.

Technorati tags: search engine, web2.0.

IBM Acquires Unicorn

2006-05-08T16:37:00.000+02:00

IBM is more and more involved in the Semantic Web trail. Today, it has announced the acquisition of Unicorn Solutions, Inc., a worldwide leader in the sector of metadata management. With this move, I think IBM can sharpen its SOA strategy by adding more "data intelligence" to the current capabilities of selection, invocation, management, reuse and governance of services.

Technorati tags: semanticweb, IBM, soa.

Linking physical placemarks to Wikipedia topics

2006-05-06T01:28:00.000+02:00

The idea around Semapedia is great, but imperfect. Placing RFID tags onto physical placemark would be probably a better idea.

Technorati tags: semapedia, rfid, wikipedia.

SPARQL and the Web 2.0

2006-05-06T00:03:00.000+02:00

SPARQL is a SQL-like language to query RDF stores. Recently, it has become a W3C candidate recommendation. A smart article from Jim Rapoza indicates how this specification can help fill the gap between Web 2.0 and Semantic Web.

Technorati tags: rdf, sparql, web2.0, semanticweb.

JSR #244 aka Java EE 5 approved

2006-05-05T17:13:00.000+02:00

On May 1st, the JCP has approved the specification for the Java Enterprise Edition version 5.

Technorati tags: jcp, javaenterprise.

Disambiguating the Web

2006-05-03T15:17:00.000+02:00

Disambiguating the Web is a top issue. This article shows a good vision of how this can be done. Here follows an excerpt:

So, are we doomed to turn the web into a babel of languages? and are we doomed to dilute the quality of pure data islands by simply mixing them together?
Luckily, no, not really.
What's missing is the feedback loop: a way for people to inject information back into the system that keeps the system stable. Mixing high quality metadata results in lower quality metadata, but the individual qualities are not lost, are just diluted. There needs to be additional information/energy injected in the system for the quality to return to its previous level (or higher!). This energy can be the one already condensed in the efforts made to create controlled vocabularies and mapping services, or can be distributed on a bunch of people united by common goals/interests and social practices that keep the system stable, trustful and socio-economically feasible.
Both the open source development model and the wikipedia development model are examples of such socio-economically feasible systems, althought they might not scale to the size we need/want for an entire semantic web.
The semantic web has a lot of people working on the technological guts, but very few on the social practices that might make it happen. I suspect this is going to change soon and solutions might come from unexpected places.

Technorati tags: semanticweb.

Using FreeMind to create RDF Schema

2006-05-02T12:18:00.000+02:00

One of the many possibilities that MindMapping offers is that of creating RDF Schema. I found an article that explains how this can be done using FreeMind (in my knowledge, the best freeware MindMapping software as to date) and a XSLT.

Technorati tags: rdf, mindmapping, freemind.

WebOS market review

2006-04-30T17:10:00.000+02:00

I find the WebOS movement quite exciting. A quite recent article reviews what's happening in this market.

Technorati tags: webos.

Web 2.0 directory

2006-04-30T17:03:00.000+02:00

A directory of Web 2.0 Products and Services can be found here.

Technorati tags: web2.0.

Semantic MediaWiki

2006-04-28T22:40:00.000+02:00

Among the many wiki projects of the Wikipedia constellation, one of them deserves a special mention (not that the other ones aren't noteworthy!): the Semantic MediaWiki. It runs over an extension of the MediaWiki-Software (which powers Wikipedia) with ideas from the Semantic Web. The wiki allows every user to make information more accessible to machines, which in turn makes it easier for humans to search or further use this information.
A better explanation of the project can be found here.

Technorati tags: semanticweb, wikipedia.