Potlach Feast

Several folks have asked me privately about Zepheira … more specifically what we do, how to pronounce it and where the name came. The following is a poor attempt to minimize future inquiries

Ok, first, what is it… the home page captures some of this:

Zepheira provides solutions to integrate, navigate and manage data across personal, group and enterprise boundaries to save time and money. Our team are experts in applying Semantic Web standards and knowledge management technologies to address your specific data integration challenges.

Not quite a full answer, but close. For those interested in more details, Zepheira’s services page may be additionally useful.

Secondly… how to pronounce it:

zepheira : ze-fear’-a

see… that wasn’t so hard

And finally, where did the name come from…

Naming things in general is difficult- companies even more so.

I’m fortunate enough to be part of a team of industry leaders who have come together to help provide effective solutions to address various data integration, collaboration and knowledge exchange challenges. During the discussion on what to call ourselves, we found ourselves discussing a wide range of inter-related topics including philosophy, values, experiences, lessons learned and future goals. James Lipton’s Inside the Actors Studio questions, care of Bernard Pivot, we found equally insightful In the process of sharing our individual views on various subjects we collectively recognized that while each of us are respected industry leaders in various areas, we also shared a deep passion for the arts. We found that everyones ‘hobby’ was incredibly artistic in nature - pottery, woodworking, sculpting, music, poetry, martial arts, weaving / fabric, photography, etc.

I own only one piece of “serious” art (something I paid money for). It’s a painting from an Armenian artist named Vakhtang. My wife and I stumbled upon this piece independently in Sausalito and it holds a special place in our hearts. I walk past it everyday and everyday I pause briefly to breath it in. It’s a bit of a daily ritual of mine; viewing this piece makes me pause, reflect and subsequently feel a bit better about life, the universe and everything.

The painting is called ‘Zepheira’.

It was one of those ‘ah ha!’ moments that we as a team had and it came together instantly: “Zepheira, ‘The Art of Data’”. It simply felt right.

I recently acquired a 1948 Martin “60″ outboard which hasn’t been run in over 30 years. I’m slowly breathing life back into this following Art Dekalbs’s 5 Point plan for old outboards which I’ve found quite helpful. It doesn’t quite look as nice as the original magazine ad, but I hope to get close its late 40’s condition as the original detailed manuals were included and parts, decals, etc. are still readily available.

The initial tear-down has been messy, but encouraging. It’s a very simple, but elegantly designed 7.2 hp, 2 cylinder engine. From looking under the hood, I can see why these Martins have quite the cult following.

I’ve been wanting something to go with my boat ‘high treason’ which is designed to be sailed, rowed or motored. It’s too early to tell if I can get this Martin working, but Alex and I are optimistic that we can. Our goal is that in the next couple months to be puttering over the water in style.

It seems like only yesterday that Stu Weibel, Thom Hickey and myself split a 500 bd/ft haul of 8/4 hard maple. Upon deeper reflection, however, I guess it was more like eight years ago. go figure… Well, two moves, two jobs, and one (and a half) kids later, I’ve finally used the last of it and completed my workbench.

The legs and benchtop are made from the 8/4 hard maple, the carcus is baltic birch and the front doors, drawers and trim are lyptus.

Scott Landis’s the workbench book (which in my personal library along with Nakashima, etc. is cross cataloged under ’spiritualy moving’ and ‘woodworking porn’) was a big inpiration. The front vise is a Jorgenson and for the end vise I opted for the less traditional Veritas twin screw. In the end I went with the Veritas brass bench dogs as well rather then the traditional square dogs due to ease of use and personal preference.

The most (technically) difficult part in putting this together by far was installing the tail vise. The twin screw design is a very good one, but the instructions are … errr … just lacking enough in detail that your pretty much assured to screw things up at least once. The most (mentally) difficult part was drilling the bench dog holes. It took a while to convince myself that drilling into a table top on purpose was a good thing to do.

Overall, I’m very pleased with the results. I do a considerable amount of hand planing, scraping and carving. To do this now on a good bench, its hard to imagine being without one. I can quickly see this becoming my favorite tool in my shop.

Over the weekend, in an end-of-the-year cleaning frenzy to free up some much needed space, I stumbled upon my old stash of laser supplies. 30-ish years ago my father and I built a helium neon laser for a grade school science project (in the 70’s I was really into lasers and holograms). After about 60 minutes of trying to get everything back in working order I came to the conclusion it just wasn’t going to happen. And while it felt good to sling solder again, I ultimately had to come to grips with letting most of my stash go. What I couldn’t part with however were the Hughes Helium-Neon laser tubes that made this project possible. After thinking a bit about how to store these for another 30 years, I decided to go a different route. As a christmas present to myself, I built a simple stand to proudly display these tubes. And while most people that see them offer an odd glance or two, to me they are a reminder of a simple truth that often times the best way to understand something is simply to build it.

The legs are 2.25″ diameter cherry with 1.5″ maple shelves and maple cross supports. The black cones and spikes are from partsexpress.

The design is more complex than it needed to be, but the adjustablity and leveling I find extreamly effective. The ‘floating’ aspect of the design is asthetic, modular and allows the shelves to expand / contract (as maple will in the climate I’m in).

There are various modifications I expect to do to make this more useful and minimize the problems inherent in this floating design. (FWIW, I don’t think I’d do another one like this.) In the meantime, however, I’m pleased with the result.

Additional (albiet poor) pictures are available for those interested. Caveat emptor… I know far more about wood than photography.

I’m a jazz fan. The combination of vinyl, low watt tube amplifcation, high efficency speakers and jazz works for me. Spinning some Miles Davis in particular I really enjoy.

Ok… enough on that. A couple of months ago, I spent a few minutes combining some of the tools that we’re building in the Simile project together to show the value of accessing data that is “behind” web pages and viewing this data in new and interesting ways. The Miles Davis discography timeline is a quick example of this (as well as a painful reminder of all of the Miles Davis albums I don’t have!).

For the unfortunate souls who don’t know who Miles Davis was, the BBC sums it up nicely…

“American jazz trumpeter and bandleader. He was in at the birth of hard bop, ‘cool’ jazz, modal jazz and jazz/rock fusion. For much of his life he struggled with racial prejudice and drug addiction. An icon of the modern age.” - BBC Artist Profile of Miles Davis.

The Miles Davis discography data (rdf/xml) and corresponding scraper that extracts the data from the BBC site are available for those interested in learning more. The Timeline tool is another excellent creation from David Huynh and provided by the Simile project.

Earlier this summer I picked up a used Swifty 14 wooden sailboat from Shell Boats. Alex has named her “High Treason” (he’s named my canoe “The Black Pearl” … one might accurately conclude at the age of 5, he’s pretty big into pirates).

The design of the Swifty is quite attractive, and the original craftsmanship quite good. The boat was in need of some “creative” repair, but overall in good shape. I fixed some skuffs, modified the transom, painfully applied several coats of paint / vanish and mounted a bit of chris-craft’esq chrome to help tie her to the dock. More (albiet poor) pictures are available rolled out of the garage for a bit of driveway sailing.

She can easily hold 3 people and only weighs about 250 lbs. I have to admit, I expected the stability from this boat based on the design / plans, but not quite the speed. Overall she’s perfect as single or family day-sailer and / or rower and / or (small) motor-boat. The biggest problem is I can’t seem to get in / out of the water without folks comming up to look at it.

I’ve had a blast both restoring, sailing and rowing this boat with my son. I can’t help but wonder what his take will ultimately be on the subject.

This is a test of of my dreamhost wordpress installation. These guys are the closest folks I’ve been able to find in delivering the services I’ve gotten used to (the W3C’s systems team is an impossible act to follow).

Now… if I could just find an XML/RDF export of my previous blog entries to import into this new one. I see a ‘data portability’ rant in my near future.

Tim Bray’s latest post reminded me of his rdf.net challenge. Working with various companies on RDF and Semantic Web related tools / products I had forgotten this was still in play. As it still is, i’m interested . More specifically, I’d like to offer Piggy Bank (and various other tools in the Simile toolkit) as a challenger.

Reading the (cleverly subjective) criteria of the original challenge

OK, I’m prepared to put my domain name where my mouth is. Herewith the RDF.net challenge: To the first person or organization that presents me with an RDF-based app that I actually want to use on a regular basis (at least once per day), and which has the potential to spread virally, I hereby promise to sign over the domain name RDF.net.

I’ve been using Piggy Bank daily for almost 6 months. Since the latest release a few weeks ago, the stability, speed and performance increases have made this an indispensable tool for me to collect, tag and manage “stuff” that is important to me. Piggy Bank helps me manage contacts, images, news items of interest, scholarly articles, teleconference details, events, web sites of interest, etc. - basically anything I find useful (to date I have about 3000 things i find useful). I figure I save anywhere from 20-30 minutes a day using Piggy-Bank. This give me a couple hours a week more I can spend more with my family - that to me is a killer app!

You can call me an idealist, but I think the Web is terribly metadata-thin, and I think that when we start to bring on board metadata-rich knowledge monuments such as WorldCat and some of the Thomson holdings, we’re damn well going to need a good clean efficient way to pump the metadata back and forth.

I’d argue the Web is actually quite metadata-rich (but my views of the Web go beyond the notion of hyperlinked documents and include the data that is often behind them). The results one gets from searching Monster.com, the listing of available apartments via appartment.com or the nearest starbucks coffee shops based on my zip code are all examples of metadata. The problem isn’t the lack of metadata per se, but the different ways of encoding this information, the ambiguity of terms used to describe this data and the lack of common protocols and interfaces for accessing this data directly. Being able to integrate the data that comes from these sites opens up a whole new set of end-user possibilities (the insomniacs reading this post that would love to see a map of the “show me all of the technology jobs that pay > ‘X’ with appartments that cost < ‘Y’ near coffee shops in city ‘Z’” can see the benefit of integrating this data instantly )

While I believe the semantic web standards (RDF, OWL, SPARQL) are key in helping address these problems in general, Piggy Bank is more focused on making the management and reuse of this data transparent to the user. Its focus is to empower the end-user and make it increasingly easy to access this ‘raw data’ and use / re-use, manage, integrate and share this data with others.

Tim mentioned OCLC’s WorldCat in his original challenge (which aparently has reached 1 billion holdings - congrats!). As a few people know, I previously worked at OCLC for 13 years and have a special place in my heart for libraries. OCLC has recently launched something that call Open Worldcat which provides web access to this data. The problem is (quite selfishly) it doesn’t quite do what *I* want. One of the itches I’ve always wanted to scratch was being able to find libraries that had *all* of the particular items I’m looking for. It’s frustrating to go to a particular library to get “green eggs and ham” and “hop on pop” but somewhere else to get”one fish, two fish” (my son likes dr. suess… what can i say). Making this data available on the web however is the key to opening up new end-user applications. Using Solvent and a couple hours trapped in an airport, for example, I exposed this data to Piggy Bank. Using Piggy Bank’s ability to combine information and integrate this with 3rd party services (e.g. Google maps) , I can overlay the results from my queries on a map and create an end-user application that shows the libraries nearest me that has *all* of the books I’m looking for. Using Solvent I’ve created a similar scraper for NCBI’s Pubmed (which has access to 15 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for biomedical articles back to the 1950s). It took me a couple hours to build my first scaper. It took me half that time to build my second. And if others find either one of these useful, it now will take them couple minutes to plug this in to their piggy bank.

Oh, and by the way - the folks really wanting to “show me all of the technology jobs that pay > ‘X’ with apartments that cost < ‘Y’ near coffee shops in city ‘Z’” can do this now - check out the list of scrapers in Simile’s semantic bank.

The decentralized ‘plug in’ architecture of piggy-bank scrapers are a practical stop gap for services that don’t provide their data in RDF. Check out citeseer If you’d like to a quick sense of of a site that does - its far more useful to be to “bookmark” and share individual article level metadata than traditional web page results. For content providers, if you think providing an RSS feeds helps draw people to your site, providing common interfaces to RDF data will make that look trivial in comparison.

There is lots of data on the Web. Piggy Bank simply allows me to the ability to start to use it. I can’t imagine using my computer without access to a browser. Now I can’t image using my browser without piggy bank.

I think the RDF model is the right way to think about this kind of stuff, and I firmly believe that the killer app is lurking in the weeds out there …

The simile team has been focused on getting work done rather than anything else. Now and again, we should remind ourselves to come out from behind the weeds…

Did I win?

News.com picked up on some of the new work thats going on in the acedemic search / information management space in their article Academia’s quest for the ultimate search tool citing Berkeley’s new interdisciplinary department focus on search technology, CMU’s Javelin work focused on Question Answering search technology and MIT’s Simile project.

I particularly like the susinct point MacKenzie makes regarding the benifits of the semantic web architecture that Simile has developed:

A generalized data archive lets you make data work together in ways you couldn’t before

MIT’s START system based on formalizing / mining metadata composed of natural language phrases and sentences I think is another one thats worth mentioning in this space. Opening up a RDF interface to this data in I think would be particularly interesting.

One search engine can’t do everything. Different search engines / strategies will be more effective at addressing different tasks. Being able to expose the data behind these services and allow individuals / organizations the means to tie together this data will be key .