The Tetherless World Weblog

The joy of multiple blog sites is having to post pointers to one blog entry from another.

My blog at nature.com now has an entry entitled “The Semantic Web: My personal (unofficial) FAQ” which lives at http://network.nature.com/people/jhendler/blog/2009/08/03/the-semantic-web-my-personal-unofficial-faq. Comments, and especially your suggestions for Qs and As are more than welcome there or here (or anywhere else for that matter)

Cheers,

Jim H.

Colleagues - one of my blog entries at Nature seems to have hit a nerve - been zinging around the “twittersphere” and I’ve received a number of responses in private not just commiserating, but agreeing with the major points.  I want to make it clear that this is solely my own opinion, and it has not been carefully researched, but given that so many US Semantic Web researchers have shared the frustration that I express here, I thought I’d share it on planetRDF as well  (Europeans, believe it or not, on this side of the ocean it is hard to get funding for Semantic Web research - you have no idea how lucky you are!)

-Jim H

from blog entry: “Why NSF cannot fund high-risk, high-reward research”

The twittering of #semtech2009 got me pretty frustrated - seems like the “big O” Ontology story was way too prevalent, and while linked data had a good showing, the relationships between linking and ontologies seemed to be forgotten a lot.  It motivated me to write up some thoughts on this on my Nature blog site in a blog entry entitled “What is the Semantic Web really all about” -- I look forward to your comments there or here…

Jim H

For those interested, I kept a twitter log of my daughter’s graduation — but did it in haiku to make it more interesting — slightly edited and cleaned up - here’s what I’ve got.

Graduation in Haiku

Parents wait and wait
Students anxious in the hall
Commencement is nigh

Pomp and Circumstance
Way too many caps and gowns
precess slowly by

Chairman of trustees
welcomes all to the event
when will he be done?

President makes jokes
then he gets more serious
“we need your money!”

Now they proceed to
honorary doctorates
lots of famous folks

(someone sends a text
it’s a message from my kid:
“Get me out of here!”)

juris causus doc
no one has heard of this guy
must be a donor

Commencement address
starts with funny anecdote
so what else is new?

Speaker’s really good!
Words of hope and cheer - too bad:
grads are all asleep

Cannot see my kid
the talks all go on too long
will it ever end?

A problem with this:
seeing your kid get her degree
means watching the rest

The Prez says the words
the crowd stands up, cheers real loud
kids now have B.A.s

Alma mater sung
speeches made, degrees conferred
graduation’s done

I saw a webinar demo of Wolfram|Alpha given by Stephen Wolfram today — the system is very impressive — (you can read my blog about it on the Nature Network)

One thought struck me - we’re trying to do open-linked data, while what Wolfram has is an impressive engine that uses the “closed” knowledge that lets them do curation, testing and computation.  Sort of like open social networks vs. the many specialized ones — still, he shows what is possible with data and a good computational engine, and I think that will be generally good for all of us “data on the web” types.

(Jim H.)