"Reification is the soul of the Semantic Web" is a good example of reification in the Marxist interpretation. Don't believe me? Then stumble yourself accross the wikipedia article on reification (marxism).

Reification (German: Verdinglichung, literally: "thing-ification") is the consideration of an abstraction or an object as if it had human (pathetic fallacy) or living (reification fallacy) existence and abilities; at the same time it implies the thingification of social relations.

More:
Ordinary examples of Reification

Reification occurs when specifically human creations are misconceived as “facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will”. [3]

Reification is very visible in advertising when the advertiser or designer deliberately tries to associate a commercial product with all kinds of desirable qualities or contexts, with the suggestion that if you buy the product, that you will have access to or experience those desirable qualities. The product thus acquires an deliberately contrived imaginary status in addition to its real status.

A very graphic visual example of reification is pornography in which sexual acts are separated out from the total human context in which they occur.

Reification also frequently occurs in language and any form of communication which involves the representation of things or relationships by symbols. For example, the sentence "Make your money work for you" contains a reification, because money does not do any work at all, people do. The power to do work is falsely attributed to money.

A characteristic of mental illness can be that the mentally-ill person reifies himself or parts of the world around him, misplacing the true context of things, or attributing powers to himself and to objects in the world which they do not really have.

Because of heavily copy/pasted from wikipedia, this blog post is under available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

Do you want to know what problems the Semantic Web solved?

The Semantic Web Education and Outreach (SWEO) Interest Group is pleased to announce the first set of Case Studies and Use Cases giving some examples of how the Semantic Web of machine readable data is used today. Applications are presented in areas ranging from automotive to health care, and from B2B systems to geographical information systems. The SWEO Interest Group will continue to publish new Case Studies and Use Cases in the future; an RSS feed for new submissions is available. A short overview is also available in Open Document Format, PDF, and HTML formats.

see the original post by Susie Stephens at W3C.

We are offering several open positions for projects in the Semantic Desktop area.

At the moment, the question is: how to support knowledge workers with the Semantic Desktop? Clever AI algorithms, text analysis, personal ontologies, flickr-mashups, many roads lead to the goal of smart computers.

This topic can be done by you as a diploma thesis (or internship, if you are not at the end of your studies yet):

• Metadata Alignment on the Semantic Desktop

I also search for assistants for implementing user interfaces and other things at hand.

• Implementing Social Semantic Desktop – Services

Requirements are:

• Java developing
• Basic Semantic Web knowledge (you shouldve created a few triples)
• You have your own homepage or show us by other means that you are capable of presenting your work
• Preferably you are near Kaiserslautern, or live in Germany, plan to move here

We offer a challenging task and a friendly work environment, as you can see, we expect well-thought work and qualitative results from you.

Apply to sauermann[ad]dfki.uni-kl.de.

https://aperture.sourceforge.net/

Aperture is a Java framework for extracting full-text content and metadata from various information systems (e.g. file systems, web sites, mail boxes) and the file formats (e.g. documents, images) occurring in these systems.

The entire Aperture Framework has been rewritten to utilize the RDF2Go framework.
It is now completely independent from the underlying RDF store. Aperture registries
and factories can now be used in an OSGi environment as services. The
infrastructure allows for on-the-fly deployment of new extraction components.

download the new release:
https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=150969

Additional improvements include:

- the logging subsystem has been changed from Java Util Logging to SLF4J. This solves
some classloading issues that were encountered when using Aperture in
web applications.

- a set of OSGI BundleActivators have been added for embedding Aperture
in an OSGi environment. Additional ant target creates two OSGI bundles from
Aperture source code. The OSGi setup has been tested extensively
in the Nepomuk Social Semantic Desktop project.

Updated dependencies
- updated Sesame 2.0 from alpha-3 to beta-4
- updated the applewrapper library to version 0.2
- RDF2Go 4.4.1
- Sesame 2.0-beta4 RDF2Go Adapter revision 2682
- SLF4J 1.3.0
- osgi.core-4.0.jar - The reference OSGI jar file, necessary to compile activators.
- don't use apache commons-logging anymore, the RDF2Go depends on commons-logging
but this is now done with the jcl104-over-slf4j bridge
- removed the original commons-codec.jar and replaced with an OSGI-friendly
bundle org.apache.commons.codec_1.2.0.jar
- org.apache.httpclient_3.0.0.rc2.jar

best regards
Leo Sauermann
Chris Fluit
Antoni Mylka

When developing rich client applications for the semantic web, components for visualising and editing RDF data are useful.

The gnogno framework is an approach to bind RDF models from RDF2Go to Swing and Eclipse SWT widgets. It allows to edit text values, make lists, and program user interfaces using a clear design pattern. The RDF data can be taken from various frameworks, such as Jena or Sesame (RDF2Go wraps these). Inspiration for this project comes from the Borland DataSet components, part of Delphi.

• gnogno wiki page
• documentation

I made a 20 minute screencast showing some basic components



At the moment, gnogno is alpha and subject to change, but I would like to hear feedback from you about the principal idea, and if you want to use this project, you may want to join me developing it. Its free software/open source. Please add comments with feedback here to this blog-post.

Why did I do this? I was a professional Delphi programmer before I did Java and Semantic Web, therefore I dig these simple frameworks that bind data directly to the gui.

An older story by Barton Warner, pointed to me by Gunnar's blog post.

How computer scientists would design a toaster

it has snow white and coal black in it, and a king...