We are proud to say: NEPOMUK is the only Semantic Web product on the CeBit fair, the biggest computer fair in the world. Why?

Wanting to search for other people working in the topics of web 3.0 and semantic web, I searched the official CeBit 2008 search engine for products and exhibitors for Semantic Web technologies. The product NEPOMUK came as single result. The only exhibitor mentioning semantic web is groupMe.

First!



You can see NEPOMUK in Hall9, booth B37, and GroupMe (presented by my good friends from L3S) in the same Hall 9 at booth B22.

There is a question related to the semantic web, and this question is - will it be a centralized, dictated system or open? Is there "one weird standard to rule us all?"

Update: Roy Fielding, who motivated to write me this post yesterday, answered in a comment and I reconsidered my post, rewriting it (29.2.2008). Updates are Italic, deleted text striked.

The fundamental question as such - is the semantic web a controllable system or a distributed (more chaotic) structure - shows up in different manifestations. I interpret the question of unambigous URIs - one URI for one concept, not multiple - as subtopic of this.

As you could guess already, the answer is no. The Semantic Web is as free, open, uncontrolled, unreliable as the web today, but with more features.

Roy Fielding said (actually cited) that one the Semantic Web's goal is to unambigously identify resources. He also cited another quote by Tim Berners Lee:
I don’t want the Web to constrain what people do: the Web
is not there to constrain society. It’s there to model society
in its completeness, in its entirety. [Tim Berners-Lee, 1994]

What does this mean? Unambigous means when you talk about the Tesla Car, you must always use the same identifier (in our case, a URI) to refer to it. As could be expected, this idea is not a requirement of the semantic web and not practically required nor used much. Some people state it as a nice scientific goal, but deployers don't have to care about it as the W3C recommendation has something else to say.

Instead, people continue to say things about the world in blogposts and wikipedia and elsewhere as always, minting new URIs for things as they want. In the Semantic Web, the standard tags "rdfs:seeAlso" and "owl:sameAs" are then used to link the different views about the same thing, or the Tesla. If you want to neen non-ambiguity, perhaps use sindice (or any other semantic web search engine). Horray, freedom of expression and scalability prevails.

And yes, the Semantic Web is already there, for example on openlinkeddata, or on GoPubMed. So maybe Roy's statement "the semantic web will never happen" indicates Roy is living in the past? We will see in the future...

Sorry Mr Fielding, this sarcasm now rebounds to myself, I was wrong, you are right in citing both positions.

I will be presenting NEPOMUK at the CeBit 2008 next week,
at Booth B37 Hall 9.

I will be there on 4th and 5th March, if you want an appointment, please phone me beforehand (I won't read mail that much).
(germany) 0176 24548974

here is the full press release in German:

DFKI auf der CeBIT 2008

Das DFKI ist auf der CeBIT 2008 (04.03. - 09.03.2008) im Rahmen des CeBIT-Konzepts "future-parc" mit einem eigenen Messestand vertreten. Der Stand B37 in Halle 9 umfasst eine Fläche von 72qm und befindet sich in unmittelbarer Nachbarschaft zum Stand des Bundesministeriums für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF (Halle 9, Stand B40). Darüber hinaus präsentiert das DFKI Exponate auf einem weiteren DFKI-Stand, dem DFKI - John-Deere-Stand (Halle 9, Stand C07), auf dem Stand des BMBF und auf dem Gemeinschaftsstand der Universität des Saarlandes (Halle 9, Stand B35).

great advertisment at find a grave dot com, "find old school buddies" at stayfriends.de. you do the math....

We have written a Technical Report on our integration of Sesame2 with Lucene.

Enrico Minack, Leo Sauermann, Gunnar AAstrand Grimnes, Christiaan Fluit, Jeen Broekstra: The Sesame Lucene Sail: RDF Queries with Full-text Search.
download PDF (alternate link)

For short:
PREFIX search:
SELECT ?x ?score ?snippet WHERE {?x search:matches ?match.
?match search:query "person";
search:score ?score;
search:snippet ?snippet. }

Abstract:
With the growth of the Semantic Web, the requirements on storing and querying RDF has become more sophisticated. When a larger amount of data has to be managed, queries in structured query languages, such as SPARQL, are not always powerful enough. Use of additional keywords for querying can further reduce the result set towards the actual relevant answers, however, SPARQL only provides complete string matching or filtering based on regular expressions, which is a very slow operation. In contrast, state of the art Information Retrieval (IR) techniques provide sophisticated features such as keyword search, lemmatisation, stemming and ranking. In this paper we present a combination of structured RDF queries and full-text search. It is implemented as an extension of an established RDF store (Sesame) with IR capabilities using the text search library Lucene, without requiring modifications to existing RDF query languages.

Bibtex
(in these files you find all my publications, including this one)
bibtex
bibtex / rdf

The implementation lives here:
https://dev.nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/wiki/LuceneSail

I found one of my favorite movies on google video: "Your Studio and You".



You can read the wikipedia article to learn more, the film has three aspects which make it excellent:

• It is funny and well done
• The movie featured a bevy of celebrity appearances which includes Andrew Bergman, James Cameron (shown improving the Universal Studios landscaping), Shaun Cassidy, Robin Cook, Shelley Fabares, Michael J. Fox (sometimes mistaken in the film for Dian Bachar, a longtime Parker-Stone collaborator), Brian Grazer, Heavy D, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Barry Kemp, Angela Lansbury (shown painting the Psycho House), Mike Lobel, Traci Lords, Kevin Misher, Demi Moore, Darrin Pfeiffer, John Singleton, Steven Spielberg (shown as a Universal Studios Guide), Sylvester Stallone (in his Rocky Balboa character, and subtitled for comedic effect), Marty Stuart, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker. (from Trivia about Seagrams)
• It is historically interesting.

Let me focus on the last point. Read on Zap2it.com an interview with Trey Parker, who together with Matt Stone directed the movie.
On April 6 1995 Seagrams, back then one of the largest beverage company in the world, decided to sell its share in DuPont oil for $9 Billion to instead later buy Universal Studios, MCA, PolyGram, and Deutsche Grammophon.

Universal Studios PR employees contacted David and Jerry Zucker "to make a short film for Universal to be played at a big coming out party Seagrams was throwing for all of its employees." link
The Zucker brothers ("Airplane", "Naked Gun", "Top Secret") had no time and asked Trey Parker and Matt Stone (who were complete unknown punks) to do the movie, Zucker Bros. said to already have a "very funny script".

But when Trey and Matt appeared on site for the takes with Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Michael J Fox, they were surprised that the "very funny script" did not exist. Also, the PR people were aroused not to see the Zucker Bros on site, but punks.

"We suddenly just stopped everything and said, 'let's just do it all like a really stupid '50s industrial movie. Because then at least that part of it will be funny. And so we just started trying to shoot it like those little 'duck and cover' nuclear things from the '50s."

The movie features "Seagrams Wine Coolers", and good advice how to improve Universial City Studios (UCS) - all employees agree "It's UCS for me". So, Seagram beverages decision to get more fun in entertainment business led to this movie a year later.

Really weird: Trey Parker did not see the movie for four years after the take, because it was so internal that they did not give a copy to the directors (!?) but it showed up on the web (!!hurray!!) in 2001, and then... haha.

The result is above, and the guys made many great things after and before it, such as Southpark. True Art.