September 12, 2004
New weblog
I started a new weblog called Software will save us. Hope to see you there!
March 01, 2004
Comments closed
Some criminals were starting to spam this weblog, so I closed comments for all entries. You may still post comments via trackback. You can also contact me directly under rws at netalive dot org.
February 10, 2004
FOAF vs. vCards
Tantek Çelik wonders what FOAF gets you over plain old vCards, an ages old technology that is already implemented in most e-mail clients, address books and cellphones and is still doing its job:
(...) the biggest irony I see about FOAF is its name, which stands for "Friend of a Friend", and yet the technology has nothing to do with "friends". Like Jonas said, it's simply vCard recast in RDF, except for the "knows" relationship, which itself is quite meaningless (quite ironic for a Semantic Web effort), as it provides no more meaning than a plain hyperlink.
More on FOAF vs. vCards from Jonas, who came up with the thought in the first place.
Progress update on Marusha, the semantic DJ
And another weekend I should have spent learning was just wasted for Marusha. Here comes a new screenshot for your viewing pleasure:
I ran into a number of serious scaling issues on Friday. Adding the 16 million tracks from freedb.org to the parser's database really was the straw that broke the camel's back. Lesson learnt: There are types of queries that a relational database will never be able to run in acceptable time.
Don't expect another update for a week or more - the exams will keep me occupied.
February 05, 2004
Marusha is alive and kicking
In all seriousness, working on Marusha was one of the weirdest things I've ever done. But after two days of browsing, crawling and crosslinking the data that's out there, a first operational version is finally here. Marusha is currently processing 43,000 statements over the 3,900 songs I own. And it works well enough to be slightly scary at times.
Expect more updates soon.
February 03, 2004
Marusha: Using semantic web concepts to create your own private DJ
With exams hovering over my head, I'm trying to save as much time as possible for my new pet project, Marusha.
I'm sick of browsing my huge MP3 collection for songs I'd like to listen to. I've always envied how the people on Star Trek could walk into their apartment and tell the computer to "play something with Spanish guitars". In a sense this is what I'm attempting to do with Marusha. A local, intelligent MP3 server that keeps suggesting new songs to my playlist and learns from my decisions for what I like and what not.
Interestingly I've found myself using semantic web concepts in the creation of Marusha. The properties of a song that allow me to form relationships between songs are hidden everywhere - in the folder structure of my music library, metadata in the songs, playlists by me and other people, Amazon, Google, Marusha observing my listening behaviour.
As with the semantic web, the data is already out there and waiting for someone to piece it all together. I can't wait to see where this project is going to take me.
Mazzocchi on the Pedantic Web
Stefano Mazzocchi in a message to the Apache Community List:
Moreover, in light in my semantic web involvement, I'm getting more and more unconfortable with RDF (see my semantic web fight club pictures in boston in the gallery at http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/) and I'm more and more heading myself into the concept of 'data emergence' where you don't go around bothering people to markup their data as *you* like it, but *you* make an effort to collect their data and make a sense out of it.
January 24, 2004
Bottom-up semantic web session at ETech
I saw that Tantek has proposed an interesting participant session for the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (which happens to share titles with this weblog):
Real World Semantics - Today's web developers are using XHTML more and more to express themselves semantically, while leaving the presentation to CSS. Learn how this grass-roots bottom-up lower-case semantic web is quietly and incrementally growing in all sorts of places.
Please head over the the ETech Wiki and add your feedback to Tantek's proposal if you're interested.
The whole table of sessions and events at ETech looks nothing short of amazing. Nothing but 6,000 miles of distance, three exams and a student's budget will keep me away from it.
January 22, 2004
Someone will build the bomb
Sebastian comments on my previous post:
How am I supposed to act in a self-responsible manner if I want to "safely use a public, globally linked network" under these conditions? Unplug my laptop?
As much as I hate to admit this: If by "safely" you mean anonymously unplugging your PC will be the only option. The data is there, and it is technically possible to have a smart program look at the whole web and find out which parts belong together. Nobody has done that yet, but someone will. Someone will build the bomb.
The bomb won't be built in bad faith. On the contrary a whole new world of possibilities awaits us. But the delusion of anonymity, the idea that a document can only be "somewhat" publicly accessible, these will be among the collateral damage. We will no longer be able to rely on the big sky theory that a piece of information can somehow "drown" in the Internet's vast pool of data.
Back to your question, Sebastian, I believe that self responsibility means to be aware of these things. Be aware of what you publish. Be aware of where you publish. Know that there won't be a gray zone anymore. Private and public, full anonymity or none at all. There will be nothing in between.
Full post feeds available at new URL
I have changed Real World Semantic's RSS feed to include posts in their full glory. Should this site ever take off I may be forced to revert back to excerpts only, but while I only have a handful regular readers I figure it doesn't matter.
The feed also has a new location. If you're news reader has the slightest clue, it should redirect it for you automatically.
