Mike’s Digital Laboratory

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.

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.

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 one big list of stuff I learned from the conference and place it in one big blog post, or just tackle things one at a time. One 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…

I just got back from North Carolina where I attended a Blue Cross Blue Shield Enterprise Architecture Forum. This was my first time at one of these. Architects from all the BCBS association companies are invited. It was my first time at this really a terrific event and a chance to see what challenges and ideas other companies are thinking about.

I also had the chance to speak about our experience building a corporate encyclopedia using Semantic MediaWiki at Excellus. My presentation on Semantic MediaWiki was very well received and many in the group expressed interest. I’m grateful I had the chance to speak and this will help me get ready for my first public version of this presentation at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose this May.

I want to thank the folks at Blue Cross Blue Shield North Carolina for hosting the event, and for arranging the bus ride over to see the Durham Bulls play the Richmond Braves.

RIT - Imagine RIT: Innovation and Creativity Festival
“Experience education and entertainment through a fusion of art and technology…” - Saturday May 3rd, Don’ t miss it!

Registration for the 2008 Semantic Technology Conference is now open. This is a pretty cool conference. At least last year it was. The line up this year looks just as good. This year I’ll be giving a talk on how we are using Semantic MediaWiki at Excellus Blue Cross Blue Shield. I’m pretty excited about this. This will be my first time presenting on this topic and there is a lot to talk about.

But it’s not all about me, I didn’t know this unitl today but it looks like Steven Forth and Nell Davie will also be talking about SMW. I’ll be sure to catch their talk on this topic as well as many others I hope to see there. And of course a must see talk will be Kent Bimson’s update on Year 3 of his project down at Cape Canaveral. Kent’s the one that got me hooked on all this semantic stuff. His project is pretty interesting and it’s a working solution not just a demo.

Continuing to learn Flex 3… What to code?, oh, what to code? Why turtles of course! So here is yet another demonstration of simple images rendered with Turtle graphics. Still an inspiration after all these years, this is probably the third or fourth time I’ve ported turtle code over to a new environment just to have a little fun. Oh yes you can have the source too!

Of course I have additional motivation. This is also a demo I have put together for a the class I’m teaching. “Building tools for creative practice” although the course is not primarily about Flex or Turtle graphics I’m hoping this might be a nice little diversion we might take tomorrow night.

What are turtles you ask? Well you might check out the original book or go see Steve Kurtz, who first exposed me to the inner workings funny critters.