The Semantic Web Education and Outreach Interest Group has released a first Working Draft of a document explaining the effective use of URIs to enable the growth of the Semantic Web. The “Cool URIs for the Semantic Web” discusses two strategies for choosing URIs for the Semantic Web, gives pointers to several Web sites that use these solutions, and briefly discusses why several other alternatives are less effective. Comments on this draft are requested by 21 January, to be integrated into a final document at the end of the Group’s charter.

First blogged by Ivan Herman in the SWEO blog. As Editor, I expect feedback especially by SWD and TAG members.

this also means, that finally the document has a cool uri

Meldung übernommen von raus-aus-kl:

Nach dem erfolgreichen und spaßigen MobileClubbing in der U-Bahn Station, wird am Dienstag erneut gezappelt: diesmal am Elf-Freunde-Kreisel hinter der beleuchteten Bahnhofsunterführung! Rest wie gehabt:
Wann: Dienstag, 18.12
Beginn: 19 Uhr
Mitbringen: mp3-Player oder ähnliches mit Eurer Lieblingsmusik
Aktion: los tanzen & Spaß haben!

Mehr: flashmob.twoday.net/stories/4508975/

This popped up on the mailinglists (thx to Danny and Heiko for forwarding)


Every Triple is Sacred
(with apologies to Mony Python)

There are DB designers in the world.
There are OO programmers.
There are Lispers and even logicians, and then
There are those that use ML, but
I've never been one of them.

I'm a true blue RDFer,
And have been since before I was born,
And the one thing they say about RDFers is:
They'll take implementors as soon as they're warm.

You don't have to be a six-footer.
You don't have to have a great brain.
You don't have to have any math knowledge. You're
An RDFer the moment Tim came,

Because

Every triple is sacred.
Every triple is great.
If a triple is wasted,
Tim gets quite irate.

RDF COMMUNITY:
Every triple is sacred.
Every triple is great.
If a triple is wasted,
Tim gets quite irate.

AUTHOR #1:
Let the others spill triples
On academic ground.
Tim shall make them pay for
Each triple that can't be found.

FOAF IMPLEMENTORS:
Every triple is correct.
Every triple is bright.
FOAF USERS:
Tim will let no triple
ALL FOAF:
Away from his oversight.

RDF COMMUNITY:
Every triple is wanted.
Every triple is good.
Every triple bears truth
In a graph's neighbourhood.

AUTHOR #2:
DLs, logic, OOP,
Spill syntax just anywhere,
But Tim loves only RDF, which treats its
Syntax with more care.

RDF COMMUNITY:
Every triple is useful.
Every triple is fine.
STARTUP'S EMPLOYEES:
Tim needs everybody's.
IMPLEMENTOR #1:
Mine!
IMPLEMENTOR #2:
... And mine!
USER:
...... And mine!

W3C TEAM MEMBER #1:
Every triple is beautiful
W3C TEAM MEMBERS #2 AND #3:
Every triple is wed
W3C TEAM MEMBER #1:
To its eternal meaning
W3C TAG:
In the Semantic Web!

W3C COMMUNICATIONS HEAD:
Let the unbelievers produce syntax
For languages complex or plain.
W3C PUBLICATION TEAM:
Tim shall strike them down for
Each triple that's wasted in vain.

EVERYONE:
Every triple is correct.
Every triple is bright.
Tim will let no triple
Away from his oversight.

Every triple is wanted.
Every triple is good.
Every triple bears truth
In a graph's neighbourhood.

Every triple is beautiful
Every triple is wed
To its eternal meaning
In the Semantic Web!

Every triple is sacred.
Every triple is great.
If a triple is wasted,
Tim gets quite iraaaaaate!


See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Sperm_Is_Sacred

OMG I forgot to blog this for three years. Alas, here it finally is.
I was addicted to ultima online seriously, from about 1999 to 2001. I bought the game in New York and then played it intensively all my waking moments. Whenever I was at work or at the University, the main thoughts running through my head were: more strength, going to the woods for lumberjacking and hunting (= in ultima).

Obviously, a perfect ground for a hack later on.
In 2004, freshly joined at DFKI I made a mashup of beloved ultima online with beloved Semantic Web, resulting in a few e-mails exchanged with some ultime hackers (including tensor from ultima-iris.de, now called iris2, we even had plans to bring this to a higher level :-) and a python script to extend wolfpack, a free clone of the ultima online server software.

The result was, that within medieval magic world, you could go up to some characters and ask "news?" and be rewarded with the character reading the news from planetrdf.com for you, ingame. Second, more interesting, it would take all your contacts from your outlook address book via Gnowsis and put them into the game - as rabbits. In many demos I had to kill Libby and Dan to free the plains from too many white rabbits to follow :-)


Alas, here is the screenshots that rotted on my harddisk.




It all was done according to another great plan from us, probably Sven Schwarz and me discussed it.



But the goal was completly different, the typical semantic web idea: what if we could manager our photos, MP3 files, documents, communication with friends, and meet in a 3d virtual environment? What if we could see others that are at the same "place" as us, and exchange information with them? In Ultima, it is possible to hack objects that they can have links to the web - we would have used this to support the gnowsis protocol (back then, still a great idea) and HTTP. Tensor and I also planned to make it possible to exchange MP3s via P2P and Ultima Online as interface.

The difference in knowledge work when having a 3d environment around you is: you see who else is having the same problem as you, when you search for some documents, the people have to go where the document is. I would guess that this implies similar outcome as do communities of practice or coffee-corner KM techniques. The MP3 people? they hang out in Jhelom, But christian pop you say, folks listening to this usually hang out in Buccaneers den. You wanted to search for SemWeb hackers? Why not look in the prism of light dungeon, their link collection is on the walls there and several grandmaster mages have to keep the doors of inference shut 24/7 to save the planet, etc.


I cannot be bothered to get it running again, to repeat the glory you would need Ultima Online, wolfpack, rdflib for python, and these scripts:

• banker.py
• rdftext.py

The second one shows how you can trigger ingame events using python and RDF.

The conclusion of this story is, though, that Dan Brickley was quite right when he thought loudly about buying an island on second life and hack SemWeb stuff into SecondLife, all your triples are belong to SL. Anything going in this direction is going to be awesome, I would guess. Web 3.0 in 3d, that has even the same numbers: Web 3.0d. Sounds like a patch to Web 3.0

Sebastian Trüg has published a first screencast of the NEPOMUK-KDE project, which brings the power of RDF's resource annotation to the KDE desktop environment for Linux (wikipedia).
The first feature is annotation of files with text, rating, and tags. The same is possible for e-mails, websites, and everything else you can think of. Underlying is not a simple model of tags-as-strings, but RDF. Thus, you can easily rename tags and do other nice things, such as semantic desktop search.

The screencast as such is a bit too long and without sound, not very brushed yet. But I bet that once more features are implemented, there will be nicer presentations.



Using RDF on the desktop opens now possibilities to improve publishing data on the web, tags and annotations added to files can easily be added to websites, and vice versa, data downloaded from the web to the desktop can be linked to additional information from the web.

A little background: The NEPOMUK-KDE project is supported by the European Union and helps building a platform for other semantic applications to build upon. This is part of the Lisbon Goal of the EU to become "the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-driven economy by 2010". The know-how to do these things is currently developed in the union, companies and solution providers may then build upon this.