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.

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.

Hey! nice blog Jeff!  Check out the Center for the Handheld Web.

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.

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Natural magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic, ever-changing geometries as scientists from NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratory excitedly describe their discoveries.

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!

Update 8/13/08: Apparently I forgot to comment on this. The following day my ranking in Google shot up to the number 2 spot when searching on my own name. Prior to this experiment I had to go back several pages of Google results to find my own blog. So Apparently Google is paying close attention to RDF tags. I checked again today and my site is now the number one search result when searching on my name. Nice, SEO persistence. I like it.