I visited Jean Rohmer, working at Thales in Paris, to present Nepomuk and related ideas on the social semantic desktop.

Jean is an AI veteran in France, working at Bull computers and within his own company before, and is now employed by Thales to work on Ideliance, a Semantic Desktop. They sell it primarily to government and military customers, these are the primary Thales customers.

My presentation included the basics of my work, the current Nepomuk goals, and a few examples taken from the Gnowsis project.

Here are pictures of the audience:



And me presenting:


The presentation can be downloaded here:
gnowsis_nepomuk.pdf

I used the same outline I have been using since 2003, but unlike the last years, I found that one of the sentences from my 2003 presentations was missing: "if PIM is the main use of a PC –why is it not defined in the operating system?"

This is a central motivator for my work: making a Semantic Web layer on the desktop, that allows managing your files as easy as web resources, but with Sematic Web coolness. Meaning, your computer knows of people, projects, places, topics, and not only of files.

Last week we had several Nepomuk related meetings in Paris, one I attended myself. The Nepoverse came together to discuss user interface related things.

Yngve Sundblad and Bosse Westerlund from the HCI group at CSC from the Stockholm university were there, with their staff Rosa, Kikki, Sinna, Henrik and Christian, and more I think..

They presented our current state and many prototypes they did, mostly video prototypes. Also they start to identify features, we gave priorities to them and had to work on the ideas.

For example, this is such a user interface idea:

This is a still photograph of a video presentation, you will see the results of this interface in about a year in the open source implementations.

During the meeting, we:

* read e-mails


* watched presentations


and worked on prototypes. This point I did not photograph, because I had to work.

We also had dinner together, here are some pictures:






Alltogether a good meeting on the social semantic desktop features, we worked for three days, some people also had meetings before and after.

I wondered alot about the flower that I saw this year at the burning man festival.



The flower itself has a strong emotional power, wherever it goes, it strikes your heart. Through the flicker group "the flower" I got contact to the do lab people, and asked them via mail a few more things about it, here is more information about the flower. This text is taken from an e-mail and mashed by me with a few links and pics:

About the flower: the major groups that worked on it are the do lab, and abundant sugar's Patrick Shearn was the one who originally had the concept. These are both Los angeles artist collectives.


After someone from Lexus saw the flower at burningman '05, the do lab was hired to bring it out to Chicago for a few days for them. The visit of the flowers to Chicago is documented on the do lab's homepage:

https://www.thedolab.com/portfolio.html



But the work of creating the flowers for the playa was, indeed, done by a lot of dedicated and inspired people from the Los Angeles burningman community (editor: as you can find on the flower tribe from LA on tribes.com). They have brought the flower(s) to burningman for two years, and by the second we were awarded a grant from BMOrg, to help cover some of the costs, but the first year's creation, and even a great deal of 2006 (as there was twice the work with two flowers) was donated, fundraised, and loaned by the people invovled in its creation, and from a lot of incredibly gracious members of the community who wanted to see this vision come to life on the playa.




This community brought it to burningman all in pieces, and put it together there. The whole process of setup and breakdown kept them in the desert for 17 days, and in terms of pre-production and prep work, is a project that's spread out over the whole year.




As a burner, I can only say: blessed be the flowers and the do lab.

I put a newly bought audio-cd "Dendemann-Die Pfütze des Eisbergs" into my iBook drive, to listen and rip it with iTunes. That is the main application of iTunes - right?

What happens:

• iTunes blocks and then hangs and fucks up. Great!
• ok, pressing F12 (the key to eject cd on iBooks) does nothing. So it fucked up the OS
• closing iTunes via alt+apple-esc (=ctrlaltdelete). cd still eaten
• ok, this machine is stuck, I'll reboot and blog on then...
• oh! rebooting doesn't work because the f*** cd driver seems to be hacked directly to the kernel or however they did it, I had to hard-reset the machine (basically, pulling the power chord)

So, after rebooting I wisely

• close iTunes
• put in the CD
• wait till this event of putting the CD in the slot starts iTunes, then
• iTunes asks me if I want to rip this CD, which I want
• and then it works

great! everythings so easy today.

R U serious I have to ask - or are you intentionally f***** it up so that I have to buy the music at the iTunes music store? (which is ok, but then I suddenly think about Audiograbber and Winamp...)

whats that icon about?



The one to the right. You surely know, or have a great idea what courageous people will find at the end of this road...

click picture, comment there!

Today I gave a talk in Darmstadt's ZGDV Institute, at the 3rd Semantic Web Congress. Hugo Kopanitsak organizes these events and managed to get an interesting round of speakers for this event.

Update: slides are for download here, Benjamin Nowack inspired me to put them online, thx.


Here is the homepage:
https://www.zgdv.de/zgdv/zgdv/Seminar/Darmstadt/Kongresse/3_SemWeb

I gave a talk about Semantic Desktop, and as I was the last speaker, I tried to keep it short because all of the previous speakers managed to sum up some minutes of delay.

The audience was filled with people from industry and government, hungry for Semantic Web. Here are two pictures of my audience:



And here is Hans-Peter Schnurr from Ontoprise, a picture I had to "gimp" up a little (a coffe cup was to the lower left and the light had to be corrected for the beamer vs Hans-Peter, luckily Sven Schwarz taught me how to do this on The Great Escape :-).


And Benjamin Nowack


Benjamin made more pics of my talk with his digicam, we will probably see them soon.