Potlach Feast

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 .

(reconstructed from wayback)

Talks over on the Simile list have moved into the realm of bibliographic citations and of the best way of describing people. FRBR has been mentioned as well as IFLA’s FRAR work for authority records in this context. I’m particularly encoraged by the more recent work of Ian Davis and Richard Newman in this area in grounding FRBR in RDF.

I very much respect the FRBR work and I believe the instantiation of FRBR in RDF is an important step for weaving libraries into the Web and letting folks outside of the library community know that the libraries still know a thing or two regarding the modeling and management of information . I’d very much like to see this work move forward and I’m interested in learning more about how to help.

From the perspective of project Simile (where this discussion in part is taking place), however, I’m slightly less interested in the “best” way of describing things (e.g. People) and more interested in how to start operationalize the contextual linking of these things together. I believe there are some relatively simple steps that might be taken to achieve a very powerful network effect.

Here is an example …

hubmed has wrapped pubmed and provided (among many things) an RDF representation of the corresponding bibliographic data. This is an important step for “connecting things” in the biomedical and life sciences community. Here is an example of one of these records ( HTML, RDF/XML)

By itself, the article in RDF form is not really helpful. That said, in RDF it makes it easier to connect this with other data sets. To illustrate this example, I’ve added this RDF data to the Semantic Bank and used this tool to help connect intersting bits and pieces from several servers.

One of the first things one may notice looking at this record is that you’ll see the authors listed as (anonymous items). This is one of the reasons why I’m of the opinion that a “default value” thats included by the data providers would be useful.

If you get past the debug-view of the interface, another thing you may notice (choose ‘Show Referers’) is the fact that this article is a “supporting Article” for an Observation and that there is another article that supports this Observation as well. Further, this Observation is one of several “supporting Evidence” (again choose ‘Show Referers’) that is associated with the Amyloid Hypothesis which is related to Alzheimers Disease.

Some of this data comes from pubmed (articles), some comes from scientific communities (in the above case, the Amyloid Hypothesis is from Alzforum). Through the Semantic Web we can begin to see the various potentials of using a common framework to draw connections among various “things” of interest. In this specific case of the life sciences community, I think this community is very close to not only connecting people to people, people to articles, articles to journals, etc. but articles to hypothesis, hypothesis to disease, genes, proteins, etc. And ultimatly conntecting the dots between diseases to drugs.

There are many paths one may take to make this connection and the path for one may not be the same as one that works for another. Providing the ability f\ or people to create new connections among data and share this with others is key. A community focused on a particular goal, task or interest coupled with a f\ ramework for representing, sharing and integrating data is a powerful combination.

Small but important steps will help facilitate this goal. On the technology side, more tools like Connotea, Simile, etc. are required. From the content side however, common means of referencing ‘things’ that are real (people, places, articles, genes, proteins, etc.) and from there, agreement on a common means for describing these resources (RDF) are still required. Common protocols and interfaces to this data will be needed as well. This is where technologies such as SPARQL will be increasingly critical. Folks over in Nature and Hubmed seem to “get it” and are good examples of a growing awareness in the “interconnectedness of things”.

There continues to be a lot of focus on the “best” way to describing things. I don’t want this to stop. My hope is, however, that people will begin to place an equal if not greater value on the contextualization of these things they’re hoping to describe. As we weave a web of data, I believe how things connect will prove more valuable.

A few days ago I lugged home a new (to me) Brent model 3 potters wheel as a present to my wife (who is the real potterer in the family). I found a great deal in the local paper and I couldn’t pass it up. I’ve been throwing on Brent ‘B’ for the past 10 years, but the extra weight of the ‘C’ along with the 1/2 hp motor is a welcome addition. Heavier is better! That said, I don’t really expect to be able to throw the 50 lbs of clay this thing can handle anytime soon .

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.