Mike Axelrod’s blog
Marianne writes about 10 Sci Fi Inventions I wish were real to make life easier.
This is a take off from today’s 10 on Tuesday from YanoWhatIMean.com. It’s supposed to be 10 Inventions That Have Made Life Easier but of course I have to give everything a Sci Fi spin so we are going to have a list of inventions from Science Fiction that I wish were real.
My favorite? Why the sonic screwdriver of course!
Last week saw me back from Boston, smack dab into one of my most most most favorite thangs ever… Our Rochester International Jazz Festival. Last year I blogged day by day. No chance this year. Way too busy… but maybe I can list a few of my favorites:
I missed a lot of other great performers, next year I’ll be sure not to schedule a trip to Toronto right in the middle of the week. Doh! what was I thinking.
Last week I attended the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. Although it was a little heavy on the vendor presence there were some great case studies offered by presenters from several organizations who are actually implementing Enterprise 2.0 solutions. The Westin hotel got a real raw deal from their ISP so most of the time the internet connectivity was down. If you want to really piss off an entire population of technology conference goers that’s how to do it. Because of this I did zero blogging while I was there, and I don’t have time now except I wanted to point out one real nugget from the conference.
Sean Dennehy from the CIA and Dave Fountain from the NSA gave an outstanding talk about Intellipedia, and how they have implemented MediaWiki in the intelligence community. The hidden gem here was a paper I found linked from the Intellipedia Briefing Sean posted on the E 2.0 conference web site. The paper is The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community by Dr. Calvin Andrus, December 2004. It’s a very good read and it summarizes very clearly all the theory of why and how wikis (and blogs) can work to create systems expressing all the characteristics required for complexity theory to operate on “on the edge of chaos”. It is this balance on the edge that keeps the dynamic environment continuously adapting and growing in a pragmatic way.
Interestingly enough the formula for creating Intellipedia is very similar to the formula we have crafted for creating Excellupedia. That is to say; MediaWiki tailored to the closed community that makes up our company. Sean also mentioned the importance of establishing an “attribution” policy for contributors to the wiki. The idea is that all posts to the wiki must be attributed to a source, must be verifiable. In our wiki we have done the same, we even went so far as to refine the policy statement through a group consensus process that took place directly on the wiki.
At the end of the conference I offered some feedback to the organizers that they really should pay a little more attention to the message of those who are actually building social software solutions for the next generation enterprise. And that is this; many solutions today, especially these first generation solutions are built on open source software like MediaWiki and Wordpress. Although it’s nice to have so many vendors present. (they really are very nice people) they all seemed to have the same story. And this story seemed to drown out the very important story that open source has brought us. I suggest next year they offer some more sessions on open source solutions and also add a richer technology track. There is a growing breed of new social software technology components emerging today that while not out right solutions, will enable enterprise developers to rapidly “build in” social software components to new and existing systems.
I believe the ease of use of these new tools is (will be) staggering. I have already seen demos that operate at the speed of cut and paste. I will even go so far as to predict that “extremely rapid” social software development will be the next exciting phase for internal corporate solutions developers. This is application development that takes place on the order of seconds and minutes. Hey, let’s coin a new acronym, how about XRSS? Um, never mind, I think not.
Image by chucks via Flick
I seem to have Successfully installed Zemanta. But wait Tagaroo is broken…
You have successfully installed Zemanta’s extension. Now you are ready to Zemify your blog. Just visit one of the supported platforms as an author and you’ll get recommendations while you write.
Hmm… so now I have suggested images.. and articles.. while I write this… Let’s pick some…
Ok, at the end of this entry is what Zemanta thinks are other related articles. (Remember The Zemanta firefox plugin is somehow picking these. the first three seem very random…
Ok, now how about a picture hmmm… I have an update coming in 12 characters. 3,2,1 It’s here… Ok, this looks better now I am adding three more related articles, these make more sense. See articles 4,5, and 6 below.. Also the images now are all relevant. I’ll pick a new one. Ah, the old one goes away… It seems you only get one. Ok, but it’s a good one. Screen shot of Zemata, cool.
Ok so here’s the upshot. Seems like a nice tool. You have to write something first (duh) for it to get it’s semantic mojo working. The default seems to be 300 words. Can you change it? Oh, duh, you can just click the button and force an update, very cool. Ok, so overall not to shabby except Tagaroo is now broken and I really liked Tagaroo.
I am told ClearForest Gnosis is yet another essential power tool for exploration of the Semantic web. Powered by Calais, Gnosis provides real time semantic processing in firefox. Gnosis analyzes page content and highlights (underlines in color) information such as people, organizations, companies, products and geographies. Sort of an auto highliegter for the web. hovering over any of the identified topics, I discovered news, blog entries, maps, company information and Wikipedia entries. Is this useful? I’d say so. A nice feature is that I can configure a list of sites that will be processed automatically. Other pages can be analyzed “on demand” by right clicking on the page or using the keyboard shortcut.
Animate Projects - Magnetic Movie
Natural magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic, ever-changing geometries as scientists from NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratory excitedly describe their discoveries.
LinkedFacts.com lets me search news articles using semantic web technologies. No this is not a news portal, but I can read the news. What I like about this experiment is that unlike traditional news sites I fell more like I’m in the driver seat. It’s a good idea, with some refinement it might even be a great idea.
My next experiment is to “plug in ” to the Semantic Web. Tonight I installed some new tools from sioc-project.org to enable a SIOC feed from my blog.
What is SIOC? The SIOC initiative (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities) aims to enable the integration of online community information. SIOC provides a Semantic Web ontology for representing rich data from the Social Web in RDF.
First I installed Semantic Radar for Firefox. If you’d like to experiment with SIOC, and other RDF feeds, I’d recommend this tool. It’s easy to install and it automatically detects semantic data at any site you visit. Secondly if you leave the default options set every RDF feed you encounter will be sent to http://pingthesemanticweb.com/ where it is collected and stored in a larger repository. (One of many that make up the emerging semantic web)
Ok, cool so now I can detect RDF. Next I wanted to actually generate RDF from my web site with two goals in mind. One to generate an RDF feed representing my blog and all my posts. And two, to produce RDF (FOAF) feed representing the primary Author of the site, namely me.
To accomplish this I installed the SIOC exporter for Wordpress. This little tool is the product of those Deri.org genius minds Uldis Bojārs and Sergio Fernández. Installation is easy, I just dropped in couple of files in my Wordpress plugin directory and poof it’s done. Hey it works with no fiddling. If you are looking at my site now with Semantic Radar installed you should see some RDF feeds and should easily be able to browse them. If not you can try this link to the SIOC browser. Ok, so I said it works without fiddling. But of courae I had to fiddle. First of all if you haven’t noticed by now I’ve changed my site name. In reality I have actually restored it to what it was two years ago just before my blog fell into the great state of disrepair that lasted so long. (But we don’t talk about that) What’s important about that is that I wanted a “title” and “description” in the RDF based on the site name and tag line. I actually wanted the description to read “Mike Axelrod’s Weblog and not the title. Anyway, that did not quite work. Instead I found the title being repeted in the description field. Aha! It’s not a bug it’s an opportunity. So a code hacking we go. Here is the fix if you want to try this:
In the file sioc-include.php change line 605:
before:
$rdf .= “\n\t” . ‘<dc:description>Weblog: ‘ . htmlspecialchars(get_bloginfo(’name‘)) . ‘</dc:description>’;
After:
$rdf .= “\n\t” . ‘<dc:description>Weblog: ‘ . htmlspecialchars(get_bloginfo(’description‘)) . ‘</dc:description>’;
That’s as messy as it gets, and it’s an optional step to take. The only other messing about for me was to fine tune my semantic content. For example I discovered the “bio” section of my Wordpress user account is used to create the description field for the RDF that represents me as an individual (SIOC/FOAF data). After fixing that up by adding a little bit of a bio I felt satisfied.
Ok, looks good, it works, but what’s this all mean? What’s the big picture here? Well I believe it means that this data about me and my site is now harvestable and shareable in a standard format that plugs into any ontology. And of course it plugs into the great “Web ontology” that is the Semantic web, the web of “meaning”. Looks like it’s here and it’s real and I am now part of it.
Huzzah!
So now I have a notebook bulging with new things to try. I think I’m in a state of semantic shock. I debated (yes, with myself) whether I should make on big list of stuff I learned from the conference an d place it in one big blog post, or just tackle things one at a time. On at a time wins. So today I installed Tagaroo on this web site and will try it out on a number of posts including this one. The idea is that Tagaroo sends your post off to the tagaroo server, analyzes what you write and sends back suggested tags to use to add semantic metadata to your post. The semantic tagging is then available via RDF and the my site becomes part of the semantic web.
Although it’s all quite a blur my notes seem to indicate I caught Thomas Tague’s presentation on Calais home to many projects (including Tagaroo). Calais is backed by the publishing giant Thomson Reuters. What will they do with all this semantic data from the worlds bloggers who choose to use Tagaroo. Only good things they promise. The data will be kept confidential and they claim they are not selling it. Ok, I’m a trusting sort of fellow so here it goes.
Oh, did I mention Tagaroo will also offer suggested images from Flickr to add to your post. Here’s one I like:
Woo Hoo! My second year attending the Semantic Technology Conference. This year is even better than last. I really feel like I’m in my element here. I’m also making a lot of new friends and acquaintances. Feels like 1993 all over again.. Anyway tomorrow I give my presentation on how we are using Semantic MediaWiki at Excellus. I have written a paper on the topic that you can download along with my slides. Although I recommend the paper over the slides. (Additionally you’ll find a few links to Semantic MediaWiki stuff.)
And now for some random conference stuff:
Sem tech hallway quote of the day; “It’s the meaning stupid” –Kent Bimson
Semantic app I found myself fiddlin with the most on breaks; Twine - I was inspired by NovaSpivack’s talk on how Twine is architected and the enhancements coming later this year. Hey, It’s turtles all the way down. E-mail me and I’ll send you a Twine invite.
Best talk I missed today: John Gilman, Mike Dean and Matt Fisher on Semantic Queries in a RESTful architecture. I caught up with John on the break only to discover he’ s an Architect at Blue Cross Blue Shield of California, and they have all the same problems to solve as we do at Excellus. John has some very clever solutions. We’ll be talking…
Ok, there’s more cool stuff I could write about, but I must sleep…