Jana Herwig |The Semantic Puzzle

The Day after Freebase went RDF

October 30, 2008 by Jana Herwig, Category: Linked Data & Open Data, Mashups & Web services

So what’s been happening on the blogosphere after John Giannandrea’s keynote at ISWC and the revelation that Freebase now produces Linked Data from an RDF service…

Tetherless World sums up the Freebase facts (e.g. 156,000,000 assertions made; 1370 published types; 75 domains; graph model, identity, web based) and further points out that ontology creation “is a social process, and both freebase and semantic wiki are tools that enable users to create ontological vocabulary without worrying too much on building a comprehensive ontology.”

Inkdroid notes that the RDF service release “is important news because Freebase is an active community of content creators, creating rich data-centric descriptions with a wiki style interface, fancy data loaders, and useful machine APIs.” This is followed up by a quick and handy tutorial how you can get machine readable data back from freebase using a URI with Freebase. Conclusion:

So why is this important? Because following your nose in HTML is what enabled companies like Lycos, AltaVista, Yahoo and Google to be born. It allowed for agents to be able to crawl the web of documents and build indexes of the data to allow people to find what they want (hopefully). Being able to link data in this way allows us to harvest data assets across organizational boundaries and merge them together. It’s early days still, but seeing an organization like Freebase get it is pretty exciting.

Yves Raimond was the first to wonder on the public W3C LOD mailinglist: “now, to see whether it links to other datasets ” – the idea of having linked data without the linkage would indeed seem like love’s labour lost. Semantic Focus / James Simmons seconds: “One downside is the data doesn’t appear to link to external resources, in a sense walling itself in. It should be trivial to link the topics that came from Wikipedia back to Wikipedia as well as DBpedia (which would be killer, by the way).” This is followed up a later post, where James expresses concerns regarding the relationship DBpedia / Freebase: “Freebase may see a drop in userbase growth and participation if it becomes a mirror of DBpedia (or vice-versa) and the popularity once garnered by one project may shift towards the other, or away entirely.”

More News / Andrew Newman puts the Freebase RDF service release in context with Cathrin Weiss’ “250 million triples on your iphone” submission, iMoCo, to the Billion triples challenges, also DBpedia and Semaplorer, developed at the University of Koblenz:

DBPedia stood out because it was the only one that allowed you to write data to the Semantic Web rather than just read the carefully prepared triples. For a similar reason I though SemaPlorer was good because they tried to do more than just the standard triples but went that extra bit further by making it more generic like integrating flickr. But they were all excellent, all of them showing what you get with a billion or more triples and inferencing.

That combined with the guys at Freebase making all of their data available as RDF and it was a big day for the Semantic Web.

ARQtick / AndyS plays a bit with the Blade Runner example cited by Freebase, e.g. takes a look at the graph, looks for interesting properties and extracts author names

N.B. If you want to follow ARQtick’s example: use the Linked Data browser plugin Tabulator or go to the Marbles site to view the RDF – without a data browser you’ll be redirected to the HTML page. You will also need it to make sense of rdf.freebase.com.

The Future, Quantum Encryption, Privacy on the Social Semantic Web

October 28, 2008 by Jana Herwig, Category: Semantics & Philosophy, Social Software

Just two memos: There is a talk tonight with Thomas Länger from the Viennese quantum encryption project (BBC article about the project), co-organized by quintessenz (an organisation devoted to civil rights in the information age) and Transforming Freedom (who are dedicated to documenting the discourse of the battle zones of digital culture; I volunteer for them). ORF wrote a German article about it, with information about the venue and start time. The key issue quintessenz want to raise with this talk is: Who is going to benefit? Will “unbrekable” quantum encryption become available to citizens, too? Quantum encryption cartridges for your PC, anyone?

Secondly: I published an “inaugural interview” Marion Fugléwicz-Bren did with two of my colleagues, Matthias Samwald and Thomas Schandl (not so inaugural for the former, as he already joined SWC in January). I’d like to extract this quote by W3C member Samwald regarding privacy on the (corporation owned) social web and the future (user-managed) social semantic web:

I also think that Semantic Web technologies will receive a lot of media attention when the first big, public breach in security / privacy happens in one of the websites that currently dominate the whole world wide web. At the moment, we all are uploading most of our private and business lives to web sites such as Google, Facebook, Flickr and others. It is just a matter of time until a big scandal happens, be it the companies themselves that misuse the vast amounts of data they have, or be it a government agency in an overzealous effort of crime prevention.

When this will happen, people will re-evaluate the trend towards massive centralisation on the web, and will search for opportunities to make the same feeling of being ‘in the network’ happen in a distributed environment, without selling ones soul to a multinational corporation. Then we will find that such an opportunity already exists — the Semantic Web.

Read the whole interview here.

Multimedia in the Web of Data – Annotating and Interlinking Photos, Music, Multimedia [WOD-PD]

October 23, 2008 by Jana Herwig, Category: Conferences & Events, Internet & Media, Linked Data & Open Data, Mashups & Web services, Social Software

The Web of Data Practitioners Days concluded with the session on Multimedia in the Web of Data, the first part of which was led by Ansgar Scherp (University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany).

Multimedia content, as Ansgar pointed out, is hardly annotated, badly organized, and hardly ever looked at again – just think of the 300 something pics you might take on an average week-end getaway, and which you never touch again. Annotating multimedia content requires a lot of work and dedication – but most of the time, these pictures eventually dissappear in the “digital shoe box” that is your photo management software.

The most obvious remedy is to annotate content as early as possible, ideally when creating the content, ideally already on your portable camera (formerly known as: mobile phone:) Ansgar suggested to provide incentives for people to encourage picture annotation – professionals could for instance receive a higher financial reward if the deliver already annotated pictures. And of course there are ‘Games with a purpose’ such as Google Image Labeler, where players tag images in pairs, with and against each other, and are rewarded with the entertainment factor of the game.

The slide below shows what has happened (or will happen) to the process of creating photo books in the digital age and the age of mashups:

$Ansgar Scherp\'s slides$

After all, this is the age of the social semantic web, so why not try and (re-)use the content, structure and contexts that other users have already created on the web? Content augmentation, for the scope that Ansgar is concerned with, consists in the reuse of content and structures (e.g. from sources such as Flickr and Wikipedia, Geonames) made possible through the definition of rules, e.g.:

If there are two or less pictures on a page*
then automatically augment the page with additional photos using location information.

* Page here means a page in the album you are currently working on – you probably took a picture of yourself and your friend in Paris, and even though you went to the Centre Pompidou, you forgot to actually take a pic of the building itself – well, let the web be your library!

So the goal is clear: develop a procedure for applying automatic content augmentation in the creation of good photo books.

But what makes a ‘good’ photo book anyway? Here are some of the results of a structural analysis of real, human-created photobooks conducted at CeWe Color:

% of photos with faces: 36%

Number of album pages: 16.96

Photos per page: 6.69

Text fields per page: 1.45

% of pages with text: 87%

There are many rules that can be established from the structural analysis, which can be applied in turn in the creation of photoboooks, e.g. rules like this one,

If the text located in the upper third of a page
if the font size is equal or larger that 16 points
if the number of words is less than 10
if there is no caption on the page that has a bigger font size
then this page is the title

Ansgar recommended xSmart, which he described as a “context-driven authoring tool for page-based multimedia presentations.”

Ansgar’s presentation was followed by two more: one by Yves Raimond on Interlinking Music on the Web of Data, and one on Interlinking Multimedia – in spite of better intentions, I did not manage to cover these two in detail, but at least I gathered the links to relevant resources from all three sessions… Continue reading →

Session 4: Using the Web of Data [WOD-PD]

October 23, 2008 by Jana Herwig, Category: Conferences & Events, Linked Data & Open Data

This morning’s first session was dedicated to Using the Web of Data, or, as Alan Dix put it: “In the end, it’s not about data – it’s about use!” Alan and Richard Cyganiak were the keynoters for this session.

Alan Dix is a Professor at the Computing Department of Lancaster University, and author (with Janet Finlay, Gregory Abowd, and Russel Beale) of Human-Computer Interaction.

To start with, Alan pointed to the two sides of achieving the web of data: Firstly generating the web of data (a billion triples, as mighty as this may sound, is actually tiny, says Alan) and then, secondly, accessing the web of data.

With regard to generating the Web of Data, Alan distinguished between top down and bottom up approaches, counting to the former the creation of the web of data from legacy sources (i.e. where you take existing data and semantically lift them, e.g. from structured data) or web scraping such as DBpedia‘s extraction of data from Wikipedia.

N.B.: This notion of ‘top-down’ does not imply a hierarchical relationship, but rather means that there is already a plan for what is going to be put on the web of data (e.g. ‘all semi-structured information on Wikipedia’ or ‘dataset XY from project Z’). The bottom-up idea here implies that data is added as the result of an action, or interaction, as the user/s go, e.g. relationships are created as the user expands his or her social network. For instance on Amazon, user interaction is used to generate semantics: People do not tell Amazon what they like, they simply buy it.

Having relationships of course does not imply yet that these relationships are part of the Semantic Web. Or, as Alan put it, “why should I be RDFizing my online presence if none of my friends are?”

Please take a look at the PDF of the Alan’s slides (2,4 MB) – what I cannot reproduce here is a chart he developed, which was very useful for describing current scenarios on the web and which posed a twofold question:

Does a website/platform have the web of data implemented? YES/NO
Is the web of data on ta website/platform apparent to the user? YES/NO

The possible combinations (YES/YES, YES/NO, NO/YES, NO/NO) provide a good heuristic tool for describing what is currently available, with and without the Semantic Web. Take, for instance, the shiny interface of Talis’ Project Cenote: Cenote’s vision is to “make library data visible in many contexts, inside and outside of the library, making the data much more accessible and visible to a wider audience – benefiting current and potential users of library services wherever they are.” On Cenote, the user doesn’t see that it’s got the Web of Dat in it – it is actually implemented, but not in a way that is apparent to the user.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have a platform like Facebook: Alan referred to Facebook as “the user’s own web of data”, i.e. web of relationships: The user is aware of these relationships (they actually shape his interaction and communication with the site), and the (numerous!) apps on Facebook continually add relationships, but, regrettably, insulated from one another and not using RDF (and don’t you try to take data out of Facebook!).

Two examples of public data that Alan cited and that grow as people/institutions add data do them are Freebase (the “open database of the world’s information” – see previous posts on this blog about Freebase) and Swivel. Swivel allows people, institutions, anyone to upload and explore data, also featuring official data sources such as (links go to their Swivel pages): New York Federal Reserve Bank, UNESCO Institute for Statistics, DukeResearch or EUROSTAT. According to Alan, there is already more data on Swivel now than in the whole Linked Data cloud.

Alan also mentioned the Social Graph API – o yesterday evening Luca Hammer (one of the web 2.0 people who had joined the Open Hacking Session) introduced me to the WordPress Plugin “Meet your commenters” – Meet you commenters uses Social Graph to find social relations on the web, and adds these data to the commenter profiles it creates in WordPress.

Image via WikipediaOn a different note: I took sometime today to explore Alan’s homepage and found the cute Christmas Cracker’s application which was first developed in 1999 and which is now also available on Facebook. As trivial as it may sound at first – sending virtual Christmas Crackers (with more than 5000 possible combinations!) is a good showcase for developing Human Interaction Scenarios, and a number of papers have been written about the application. Here is the casestudy which Alan recommends to begin with: Designing experience – virtual Christmas Crackers.

The abstract and a list of links to all websites and demos Alan discussed can be found here. Full reference: A. Dix and R. Cyganiak (2008). Using the Web of Data. Keynote at WOD-PD 2008 | Web of Data Practitioners Days, Vienna, Austria – Oct 22-23, 2008. http://www.hcibook.com/alan/papers/WOD-PD-2008/

Even if you have not met Richard Cyganiak in person, you have certainly come across one of his creations: The Linked Data Cloud. Richard is a research assistant at DERI Galway. In his demo, he gave us the opportunity to gain hands on experience, introducing a tool he dubbed Snorql, which is basically an easier to use version of a SPARQL-endpoint, as it already has the required prefixes ‘pre-installed’:

Using the Snorql interface, we could explore the dataset we had created collaboratively during Keith Alexander and Yves Raimond’s session. Writing SPARQL queries manually can be a challenge, but is next to impossible if you (like me) don’t know the syntax. But today we could just copy and paste all the queries from a website Richard had put up prior to his session – thanks a lot for the excellent preparation and demonstration!

Richard also showed a couple of RDF browsers in action, e.g. the Tabulator Plugin (“a Firefox extension which allows Firefox to handle data as well as documents”), or the Marbles Linked Data browser which is running right on beckr.org/marbles; enter, for instance http://api.talis.com/stores/wod-pd-sandbox/items/People/JanaHerwig (learn more about Marbles here).

Thank you, Alan and Richard – the combination of talk and demo was indeed a perfect intro towards using the Web of Data.

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