The Tetherless World Weblog

Have attempted to elucidate at least part of my research agenda for the coming year — blogged at: http://blogs.nature.com/jhendler/2011/01/03/semantic-web-new-years-resolutions

-Jim Hendler

The Fall 2010 semester marked the beginning of the Tetherless World Constellation’s undergraduate research program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Although TWC has enjoyed significant contributions from RPI undergrads since its inception, this term we stepped up our game by more “formally” incorporating a group of undergrads into TWC’s research programs, established regular meetings for the group, and with input from the students began outfitting their own space in RPI’s Winslow Building.

Patrick West, my fellow TWC undergrad research coordinator and I asked the students to blog about their work throughout the semester; with the end of term, we asked them to post summary descriptions of their work and their thoughts about the fledgling TWC undergrad research program itself. We’ve provided short summaries and links to those blogs below…

• Cameron Helm began the term coming up to speed on SPARQL and RDF, experimented with several of the public TWC endpoints, and then worked with Phillip on basic visualizations. He then slashed his way through the tutorials on TWC’s LOGD Portal, eventually creating impressive visualizations such as this earthquake map. Cameron is very interested in the subject of data visualization and looks to do more work in this area in the future.
• After a short TWC learning period, Dan Souza began helping doctoral candidate Evan Patton create an Android version of the Mobile Wine Agent application, with all the amazing visualization and data integration required, including Twitter and Facebook integration. Mid-semester Dan also responded to the call to help with the crash” development of the Android/iPhone TalkTracker app, in time for ISWC 2010 in early November. Dan continues to work with Evan and others for early 2011 releases of Android, iPhone/iPad Touch and iPad versions of the Mobile Wine Agent.
• David Molik reports that he learned web coding skills, ontology creation, server installation and administration. David contributed to the development and operation of a test site for the new, semantic web savvy website for the Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office BCO-DMO of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
• Jay Chamberlin spent much of his time working on the OPeNDAP Project, an open source server to distribute scientific data that is stored in various formats. His involvement included everything from learning his way around the OPeNAP server, to working with infrastructure such as TWC’s LDAP services, to helping migrate documentation from the previous Wiki to the new Drupal site, to actually implementing required changes to the OPeNDAP code base.
• Phillip Ng worked on a wide variety of projects this fall, starting with basic visualizations, helping with ISWC applications, and including iPad development for the Mobile Wine Agent. Phillip’s blog is fascinating to read as he works his way through the challenges of creating applications, including his multi-part series on implementing the social media features.
• Alexei Bulazel began working with Dominic DiFranzo on a health-related mashup using Data.gov datasets and is now working on a research paper with David on “human flesh search engine” techniques, a topic that top thinkers including Tetherless World Senior Constellation Professor Jim Hendler have explored in recent talks. Note: For more background on this phenomena, see e.g. China’s Cyberposse, NY Times (03 Mar 2010)

Many of these students will be continuing on with these or other projects at TWC in 2011; we also expect several new students to be joining the group. The entire team at the Tetherless World Constellation thanks them for their efforts and many important contributions this fall, and looks forward to being amazed by their continued great work in the coming year!

John S. Erickson, Ph.D.

I have written a blog about the Linked Open Government Project:

(intro)
This entry is a backgrounder, rather than a technical piece – the goal is to introduce some new work that my RPI laboratory has been doing aimed at using Semantic Web technologies to help the US government in their data sharing efforts at the Data.gov site. Since similar work is going on on the British Data.gov.uk website, led by my colleagues Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt, (with some “friendly rivalry” between the two), I thought it might be worth providing some background, and pointers to this work.

(update – DOH!  Here is the link:

http://blogs.nature.com/jhendler/2010/06/01/linked-open-government-data-and-the-semantic-web

)

I’m currently at the annual meeting for the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society and a few hours ago I was attending a set of presentations by the Internet TG on Input and Output on the Web. One of the talks that caught my attention was by Wayne Shebilske of Wright State University on the use of screen readers to help impaired students complete tasks within educational programs such as WebCT, student status management software, and the like. There seem to be many problems with such tools as Dr. Shebilske pointed out based on his study. I think this could be a prime candidate for SW technologies to step in to improve the end user experience. I foresee using such tools along with technologies like RDFa to give the user a better representation of the content being displayed and improving the overall quality of life for these individuals.

Evan

Just saw Jim’s post on What is the Semantic Web really all about?

I have been wondering about this problem too. What is Semantic Web? Yesterday I have asked a question “Why few (or none?) Web 2.0 sites provide hierarchical tagging?” on LinkedIn and get some pretty good answers:

http://www.linkedin.com/answers?viewQuestion=&questionID=496785&askerID=14212719

For your convenience, I attached my LinkedIn post at the end of this blog.

There are two things in the answers that draw my attention:
* Many do _not_ believe tags, or even hierarchical tags, are semantic; “semantics” means RDF or triples at least to them;
* Some believe that even implementing a hierarchical tagging system is not easy in engineering or social aspects.

I think these two beliefs, among many other reasons, may explain in part why the “Semantic Web” is still far from a reality. The first is about the overestimation of what is “semantics”: triple is one way to express semantics, but it is a question that whether it is _the_ way. The second is about the underestimation of “Web”-scale: realizing a knowledge system, even if is conceptually “simple”,  on the Web can lead to serious scalability problems, both for machine (can you make <1s response for all queries?) and for people (on changing their way of thinking).

Here is what I believe about “semantic web” (note no-capitalization). First, it is not necessarily “the Semantic Web” (just like there is no “the Mobile Web”), as defined by W3C standards or the layered cake model. Semantics is a way of organizing things, RDF and OWL are some ways to express it, but other ways should be encouraged too and sometime work better. Second, tools and services should be “web-ish”, something like a semanticized version of youtube or gmail; after all, “web users” are rarely a bioinformatician or can master a Java-based ontology editor.  Third, start deployment with very very basic semantics like trees (yeah, I know some will protest) and sameAs, but do it in a very very efficient way – if we can’t even come up with a Web-efficient tree reasoner, then how realistic we can come up with a Web-efficient RDF or OWL reasoner?

Now I’m prepared to dodge tomatoes :D

by Jie Bao

===============

My original post on LinkedIn (reorganized a bit)

Why few (or none?) Web 2.0 sites provide hierarchical tagging?

Gmail label and delicious tagging are flat, which is troublesome all the time for me. I have to add (unnecessarily) many tags even if they can be easily inferred. I didn’t find an alternative that allows me to organize my tags in a tree or network. Is there any technical or marketing reason?

People have been talking about semantic web a for a while and are looking for a killer app. It’s apparent that hierarchical tagging is semantic, is in high demand, and is relatively easy to do. Why there is none in popular sites?

PS 1: Let me clarify some situations when hierarchical tagging will save me a lot of time: recently I’m reading a book of Qian Mu, a historian, and tagging my notes on delicious with tags “qianmu“; I also want all those notes be tagged with “history“, but I have to always add both “qianmu” and “history”.

Sometimes I want more than one tags to be inferred. For example, when I add “wuxu” (the year of 1898), I want tags “qing“, “china” and “reform” to be added. You will find how trouble it is to add all 4 tags together when you have about 10 notes on “wuxu”.

In another example, I want to share my tags in both Chinese and English. If I can define two subclass relations between two tags, each in a different language, I will not have to always add the both tags.

Now I have about 1000 tags on delicious. I’m really really in despair need for a hierarchy. I’m willing to pay delicious $100 for such a service.

PS 2: Further clarification: I don’t believe I will need a tagging system that always requires me to pick up terms from a tree, DAG, or a network. I can still freely add tags. But I need some way to clean up my tags from time to time, and organize them. It is just like how i clean up my “download” folder: put them into different folders, and if a folder is too big make some subfolders.