Potlach Feast

Bookmarking an interesting development reported in eweek…

Graham Glass, founder of successful software companies, supporter of Web services and service-oriented architectures, and former chief technology officer at webMethods Inc., has announced his resignation from the business integration software vendor.

“After many years of working on enterprise software, I’ve decided to get back to my training roots and start a fourth and as-yet unnamed product company focused on improving the education system,” he said. “Although the product itself will be an easy-to-use Web-based application targeted at K-12 students, teachers and parents, the underlying software infrastructure will be quite complex and utilize many concepts from the semantic Web.”

Color me interested

I’ve been working more recently with my friend Joseph Hardin who’s Directing the Sakai project about weaving more Semantic Web technologies into the higher education space. I think there is a lot of potential here so I’m extreamly glad to see Glass’s interest in this area. Looks like an exciting development to be sure!

I miss my maps.

Well, I miss google maps more specifically.

Even more specifically, I miss google maps on piggy-bank.

Piggy-bank is about making it easy to manage information you find interesting and share this with a group. Piggy Bank is an extension to the Firefox web browser that turns it into a “Semantic Web browser”, letting you make use of existing information on the Web in more useful and flexible ways. The information I find personally useful comes in many shapes / sizes (personal contacts, bookmarks, bibliographic citations, interesting news items, photos, events, personal email, etc.). While I’ve found lots of applications help me manage each of these independantly, the real benifit I’ve found is being able to see how individual bits of personal information connect. “Oh! I have a meeting with ‘Company Y’ at 5 pm today? Who have I talked with recently that is working with them?” The value from my perspective when you start acquiring enough data is in the relationships among the data rather than the data itself.

You might not know all of the relationships that exist between the information that you find personally interesting, but others may. Sharing these relationships with trusted colleagues creates webs of data greater than the sum of their individual parts.

Ok, back to maps.

One of the nice features of Piggy-Bank (and of the Simile project in general) is making it easy to not only to mix and match different bits of data, but to mix and match different services as well. One of the examples we provide is integrating Google maps to provide a geographical overlay of the data one might collect.

As a thought experiment, I did this with a group of folks that have a serious problem with low-cost, high-quality, flea-powered tube based amplifiers and high efficency speakers (ok, so its a relatively small group… but as a card-carrying member, this stuff sure makes my ears happy-happy!). And while I hope to eventually get around and connect the dots as to why I think global Initiatives like the Semantic Web and specific projects like Simile are so potentially revolutionary in helping communities share information, experiences and more effectively collaborate - the short version is I helped plot the folks that are in this group on a map. People didn’t realize how physically close there were to one another and this little bit of effort is helpful in starting to pull together regional events where folks can geek together on a face-to-face basis.

And it was easy! Piggy-bank helped reduce the cost for collecting this information, merge it with other bits and with minimal effort plot this on a map. Further it allows the ability to overlay *multiple* bits of data onto a map. You want to overlay hotels *and* subway stops in Boston? No problem! Ok.. so there is a problem (you need to have this data transformed into a common representation that faciliates this stitching together on information) . But the effort in doing this is far less than what it would have taken before. And if one person does manage to do the effort of translating the data regarding hotels from ’site X’ and another does subway stops from ’site Y’, its easy for the next person to reuse these translators (along with the translated data!). This in part is what the ‘Semantic Bank’ is all about. Being able to share this information in a way others can reuse it. Collectively, we’re all smarter than any one of us individually.

Ok… so here I am very excited. Whats next? For a long time I’ve been wanted to overlay airports and my travel history for the past 10 years as I’ve often though this would make for a cool map. Here I am getting global airport data into RDF (10 min worth of work) and then start the process of merging this in with my historical travel data.

I go to visualize this and Google turns around changes the API. This is to be expected - they’ve done this on a weekly basis for a while. Its beta, and I more than understand beta code. only now an additional requirement of using an application Key based on a static IP address has been introduced. Err…. now we’re stuck. This shoots the whole personal information meets google maps revolution. There is no static IP address for my client / browser. Various inquiries are underway with Google to see if if there are other options we might consider, but until then I’m unfortunatly mapless.

In the mean time, I sure do miss google maps on piggy-bank. If you want this too, please let us know over on the Simile list.

Several folks have been asking me about more information regarding Oracle 10.2 and RDF support. Googling for these terms turns up various talks of mine, but unfortunatly not much else. I expect the following “Over 100 Partners Thoroughly Test and Support Oracle(R) Database 10g Release 2″ news announcement to be of us to those looking for more information. Technical details are missing from this (see various white papers for these), but the 100 partners bit is indeed very impressive no mater how you look at it

(reconstructed from wayback)

I’m in central London at the moment talking about the Semantic Web with various CIO/CTOs working in and or around the Criminal Justice IT and eGov departments of the UK. During the conference we were notified of the bombings around central London. The conference has been cut short in part because many of the folks I was talking to needed to focus on the real problem at hand. (That, and while it was clear a chain of events were unfolding, it was unclear what the targets were. In this particular case, having so many top UK officials in one single place I suspect was not viewed as a good idea).

The situation was terrible, but the people responded in a fantastic manner. I’m impressed with how Londoners delt with this tragedy - working with each other to help those that need it most. The UK Government officials (Fire, Police, Emergency, etc.) in particular reacted brilliantly in the face of a terrible series of events. People were clearly shocked, but unwilling to let this terrible situation keep them from getting on with their lifes. My thoughts are with those dealing personally with this tragedy.

If there is a silver lining one could see from this event, it was witnessing the indomitable spirit of man rising above such a terrible tragedy. This is certainly not a trip I’ll soon forget.