Mike’s Digital Laboratory

OpenCyc has just been released under the creative commons license.

Now it is even easier to use the rich and diverse collection of real-world concepts in OpenCyc to bring meaning to your semantic web applications! The full OpenCyc content is now available both as downloadable OWL ontologies as well as via semantic web endpoints (i.e., permanent URIs). These URIs return RDF representations of each Cyc concept as well as a human-readable version when accessed via a Web Browser.

Truly impressive, from what I’ve recently learned about this project it represents decades of work and now it’s available for everyone to share for free.  Kudos Cycorp!  I believe this is an extremely valuable gift to mankind. Here’s a quote from Z-Blog;  “OpenCyc is probably currently bast available and open ontology of the world.”

I think it will be interesting to see what people build with this and other massive linked open data stores. The first thing that comes to mind for me is how this fairly rigorously disciplined ontology, which was built by very serious professionals over a long time might be combined with the more informal but dynamically evolving ontologies of similar scale. For example something like as DBpedia. DBpedia reflects the informally developed, but possibly equally massive knowledge base harvested from Wikipedia.

One thing I learned while developing an internal corporate semantic wiki, was that the mix of informal and formal/dicisplined ontology development was of value almost from the start.  perhaps we’ll get to see someone repeat the same idea with these massive kowlege stores on a much bigger scale.  I can only guess that the folks at Freebase and other similar projects are already hard at work doing just that.

A good read: Paul W writes on automating CMS metadata

In a previous post I asked the question, “What if a web service could automatically provide the CMS metadata when you go to check-in a new topic?” In this post I’ll discuss why you would want to do that, some of the candidate technologies, and what is necessary to make it real.

The interesting back story to Paul’s new blog is this;  while Paul writes about CMS metadata I was on the phone with him yesterday brainstorming about how the heck we are going to get more metadata into his blog?  Being a new blog we have to pump up the Google juice as much as we can. While the best way of course is to keep writing and connecting with people it doesn’t hurt to add metadata to your blog.  Here’s the rub; If you run your own server, like I do, you have much more  control of your blogging software. I run Wordpress so I can experiment with the latest tools like Tagaroo or whatever comes along next that provides the Natural Language processing needed to suggest new tags that I can feed ito the semantic web. With Paul’s blog and others that use a hosted blogging service like Wordpress.com, Typepad or Blogger, you get only what the service provides you.  It’s not your car so you can’t add those hot rod components. So in this case something like Tagaroo won’t work.

So the conversation starts to diverge at this point. But I ask which CMS systems are open and extensible extensible enough to allow for the  next generation “beefed up” semantic gizmos to be bolted on as needed.  For example simple tagging out of the box is good but rich RDF metadata is even better. So as better NLP services come along I’d like to be able to swap out the old parts and put in better ones.  In my case I’ve already bolted on a plugin to generate SIOC metadata which gives me real RDF and FOAF on my site,  and every post is processed with NLP from Calais (Tagaroo) Not to mention a new version of Calias is now out that I can be immediately plugged into.  But I should be clear my point is that It’s not that these are better or worse than any other semantic solutions for my blog, it’s that I have the choice.

This leads to a broader and possibly more improtant conversation around open archtiectures and how they often come along with open source software. This why back a few years ago I switched from Movabale Type to Wordpress. The Wordpress plug in archtiecture is open and anyone with a good idea can get in on the game and we can all play.

In this interview, Vincent Versace sits down with Derrick Story to discuss a number of questions including “How does the artist’s voice make the journey from idea to print?”  To continue the question where Vincent leaves off I ask the question;  “How do you build software tools for someone like Vincent?”.  This is the question we will be asking this winter when I teach Building tools for creative practice at RIT.  If you plan on taking this class or have taken it. I recommend listening to Vincents interview.  How would you begin to understand Vincents world as a photographer.  How might you model his domain. Could you? is it even possible?

Chris Higgins of Mental Floss magazine reminds us of the real rules that govern  the universe:

Sci-Fi writers seem to enjoy coining Laws: adages bearing their own names that live on past their appearances in Sci-Fi stories. Here are five of my favorites, plus one bonus law (actually a Principle) from the world of cartoons.

My good Friend and Colleague Paul Wlodarczyk has started a new blog in his first post Paul wastes no time getting the semantic conversation going when he states; “Semantic markup makes your content more likely to be found and more relevant to the searcher.” for this I have to agree. So what are the answers to Paul’s questions?

* What if we start combining semantic web technologies and semantic document technologies?
* What if we combine technologies that auto-tag named entities with granular authoring approaches like DITA?
* What if you could automatically tag named entities within the DITA topic you are creating, tagging as you type?
* What if a web service could automatically provide the CMS metadata when you go to check-in a new topic?
* What if the publishing tools that transform your DITA to HTML could automatically add the semantic markup to your HTML pages that are published from your DITA content?
* How would that change how you publish business documents like policies and procedures to your employees?
* How would it change how you create marketing content for your web site?
*How would it change the way you create and manage your product technical content?

This will not be one of the those armchair quarterback blogs. Paul is well versed in both the technology and the business of online content. If online content is your interest then add this feed to your favorite RSS feed reader. you don’t want to miss an article.

I just received notice that  United States Patent: 7202977 has been issued.  This is a first for me, a patent that has my name on it that is. I co-wrote this patent With Dave Robinson over 8 years ago.  (These things take time)  The funny thing about it is I only learned of this last Friday by reciveing an invitation to the patent awards cereomony at Xerox. The nice person who took my RSVP for Chicken Marsala and Vegetable Gateau was also was also kind enough to give me the patent number.  (This made searching for it easier)  It seems the patent was issued in April. The patent describes “Methods for positioning a print integrity image capture device”. If you are interested in production print shop environments you might find it interesting.  Also a lot of the credit should go to Dave.  Dave has a number of inventions under his belt and knowing the process of submitting an invention proposal at Xerox, he did most of the write up.

Two revolutionary discoveries reported in the same month. These are headlines you shouldn’t miss in your lifetime.

• ‘Major discovery’ from MIT primed to unleash solar revolution.
• Pathologists Believe They Have Pinpointed Achilles Heel Of HIV.

It doesn’t get any better than this. Well maybe, now if we can only solve world hunger an end all wars. You think I’m joking?  Hey, let’s give it a try.