some semantic photo projects I like:

www photos:
https://www.w3photo.org/

foaf codepiction (leo -> clinton)
https://swordfish.rdfweb.org/discovery/2001/08/codepict/
https://swordfish.rdfweb.org/discovery/2002/02/paths/

Masahide Kanzaki, the Semantic Web freak (and bass player):
https://kanzaki.com/works/2004/imgdsc/annot-gallery-e.rdf

and the annotation example by Masahide Kanzaki:
https://www.kanzaki.com/docs/sw/img-annotator.html

jip, the photo freak:
https://www.kwark.org/x/lsgfx

Some weeks ago I found mindraider, a visualiser and editor for Semantic Web data. I found that Martin Dvorak leads this project and asked him if he would be interested to connect it to gnowsis. He realized that this can help very much and started uriqa support for mindraider.

Uriqa support is always useful, so I wisely added a uriqa server to gnowsis that these things can fly better. After downloading and running mindraider & using the latest gnowsis, I was able to produce this:


the "my files" folder in mindraider!

there are still some bugs, but in principle, it works.
Great.



Mindraider longer:
MindRaider is Semantic Web outliner. It aims to connect the tradition of outline editors with emerging technologies. MindRaider mission is to organize not only the content of your hard drive but also your cognitive base and social relationships in a way that enables quick navigation, concise representation and inferencing.

we are happy to announce the release of FoafMe - a java tool for editing, browsing and uploading
FoaF files.

The idea was to make generating FoaF files more convenient and interesting
for everyone.
Therefore our guideline was to provide the following features:

• an easy-to-use interface
• a self-explanatory handling to fill in data
• the ability to manage multiple files
• an integrated browser to show other FoaF files in the web
• a comfortable way to add people to the list of friends (implemented in
  the browser)

FoafMe is available under
https://foafme.opendfki.de
https://www.foafme.com

Further information about installation and usage can also be found there.

FoaF (Friend of a Friend) is a vocabulary extending RDF which is meant for describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do. For example you can enter your name, your nick, the project you're currently
working on, the internet address of an image depicting you, and a lot more. The most important predicate to use might be the "knows" relation. One can add a lot of people to the file - referred to by the location of their FoaF
file or by the unique sha1sum calculated out of their email address. This makes it to a network of friends.
Get more information at https://www.foaf-project.org/.

This is an example for a FoaF file (which you'll hopefully explore and
browse with FoaFMe):
https://www.leobard.net/foaf.xml

We hope you enjoy the product and find it useful. In case you have any
questions, comments and further suggestions, please contact us!
We'll appreciate your feedback.

Cheers,

Leo and Daniel

Lars Zapf and I are hitting the CeBit. On our tour, we are presenting the state of the art Semantic Desktop and Epos results.


As a by-product, there are photos!

Visit gnowsis at the CeBit Hall 9, Booth C10 - DFKI.

I will be at the booth from Sunday 13.3.2005 afternoon until 16.3.2005. If you want to know more about gnowsis, discuss and drink coffee, visit me!

write me a short note before you come....

I just enjoyed browsing through the web of books in amazon, jumping through reading lists, recommended books to my favourite books, read comments.

One comment touched me and i have to quote it:
So I am really, really delighted that *True Names* is now back in print. I note that it is now fashionable to write books "explaining" the Net and the near-term future of our society to the layman -- books such as Negroponte's *Being Digital,* Gate's *The Road Ahead*, or Dertouzos' *What Will Be*. These books are a waste of time. If you would like to explore the implications and likely future of the computer revolution, I would recommend three novels, instead: *True Names* (Vernor Vinge), *Snowcrash* (Neal Stephenson), and *Neuromancer* (William Gibson).

Vinge and Stephenson are not only excellent writers, they are trained, competent computer scientists. *Neuromancer* is the best-written of the three; *Snowcrash* is the funniest and hippest; *True Names* -- well, *True Names* is the source.

-"Olin" Shivers

see source

true names -- well, True Names is the source.

use the source, Luke

read his review. read the book.

I read it because in 2003 some freaky geek in vienna (whom i knew from designing a trading card game together) told me about the book and I am one of the lucky who got hold of the original print on ebay. The story is energy, it is the pure intellectual force of cyberspace, no dumb story around about yakuza or dystopic future towns, it is pure code, pure web, pure idea. it is rough, not fine-cut stuff like today's smooth cyberspace stories. it doesnt try to impress you, it impresses you because of the idea. because of the plain idea of using a fantasy world to interact with the most astonishing information system you could think of. the world itself is new, the social rules in it, the interaction with humans, the goals these have.

I am gonna read it right now. and I do it. like jesus told us: listen to me and do the stuff. read and do.

we can have cyberspace. we can have a three dimensional interface to all data of the world, to control and live there. we already build 3d desktops, one floor above me at the DFKI. interactive with data gloves, take your documents, move them.
I hacked Wolfpack, an open Ultima Online server to have my medieval world be filled with news from www.planetrdf.com. In this world, I can also render the friends of my foaf file running around as rabbits. I could do anything there, as long as it is based on RDF.

The next step will be to make our Semantic Desktop, the gnowsis, get out to the masses. I want to enable developers to use all this data on their machines, to see it as one big RDF graph. information, ideas, people, all as a graph. Extend this graph over your peers, include the semantic data of your friends in your own graph, see it, feel it, sense what is going on in the world. write semantic emails. receive semantic emails. write a semantic blog. read the semantic blogs of others.use a semantic wiki. have a semantic web content management system. luckily, all these things are going on at the dfki (hm, there is no one doing semantic blog. thanks to steve cayzer for publishing about it).

but what for? to find the next dentist in your neighbourhood? No, I want to know WHO is KNOW thinking about "True Names" and knows how to code RDF - I want to instant message this person. I want to see where my girl is right now (she is in the US on holiday). I want to "meet with the circle in the castle, after the swamp, behind the gate that is kept by the guard." (true names)

yeah, on the seventh day god relaxes and sees that semantic web is be good. we will see the world in a different way. perhaps through the glasses of a sorceress or a wizard or a witch or an eagle or a frog. but whatever form we have: we can see the world. see it, see what is going on. think of the globe in Neil Stephenson's "Snowcrash" - or, even better, download keyhole and hack your semantic web geo-annotated photos to it. a christian level 10 hero used to say... do the stuff!

https://a9.com/-/company/YellowPages.jsp

A9.com - they did it.

they cyberspaces half of america. great! Here a copy/pasted snippet:

The most powerful technology A9.com invented for Yellow Pages is “Block View,” which brings the Yellow Pages to life by showing a street view of millions of businesses and their surroundings. Using trucks equipped with digital cameras, global positioning system (GPS) receivers, and proprietary software and hardware, A9.com drove tens of thousands of miles capturing images and matching them with businesses and the way they look from the street.

The whole process (except for the driving!) is completely automatic, making it fast and efficient. Block View allows users to see storefronts and virtually walk up and down the streets of currently more than 10 U.S. cities using over 20 million photographs. We are driving and at some point hope to cover the whole country.

https://zope.niij.org/geekbuero/FrontPage

a friend of mine, Michael Zeltner, had the idea of a "geek office" which consists roughly of a bunch of friends that meet at a place where god has given WLAN and hack together, not necessarily on the same project but to share cigarettes and caffeine (at least thats how I understood it)

brings us to our state of the art research right accross my office door - the Virtual Office of the Future where DFKI, Fraunhofer IESE and RICOH work together on future office environments.

I dream of a coherence of the social aspects mentioned by Michael and the non intrusive, embedded, simple-to-use office tech of the future. Knowledge Working should be like hanging out with friends in the cyberspace. High tech, but looks like an iPod.

oh yeah, and I am in the middle of coding stuff for it. freaky.

As I am giving out many Diploma Thesis Ideas for people who want to write their Master at Kaiserslautern (maybe you? write me...) I have to stick my nose into Semantic Email. The Semantic Email project is already running, but we have to do better.

So I googled some interesting links about the topic I want to share:

• Semantic Email project by University of Washington, also linked by
• bestkungfu on semantic applications
• paper about the same thing
• Article from the same guys
• and then many non-interesting stuff and my own offer...

basically it means: the washington guys did their homework very good.

So if you, dear reader, want to do a master's thesis about it, be my guest.

at our office, we just discovered the meaning of life.

The real truth is that you are sourrounded by idiots.
The meaning of life is to live with this truth.

2nd try
The fact is that you are sourrounded by idiots.
The goal is to life with it.