The Semantic Technology Conference, San Jose, June.09

The Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose, 14-18.June.2009, was probably the most exciting and most rewarding conference I’ve ever been to.  I’ll be devoting several posts to discussing the contents.

For now:  The Fairmont Hotel is beautiful in that elegant and slightly oldish-modern way.  The facilities functioned really well – except for the slightly-deficient Internet access.  I guess that they weren’t ready for that many geeks madly typing and browsing and blogging and tweeting away.  There were two lunch tables devoted to tweeters.

The New York Times had two hot-shots there, telling the story that NYT has been “semantic” for a century and will escalate now:  Semantic web service soon.  It looks very real.

The Wolfram-Alpha representative sometimes had to say “Steve sometimes says things like that,” with ensuing technical discussion of the Wolfram methods.  Bit hit at the conference.

I would name this The Year of the Semantic Web Service:  NYC, Wolfram, Ontos, Expert Systems, DBpedia, OpenCalais, Freebase.  And more.  I’ll try to blog on each of them.

Of course, there were many discussions of ontologies, RDFa, controlled vocabularies.  Semantics in the Enterprise.  Text analysis – in very great depth and sophistication.

CloudBus gets boost from the Cloud Consortium

Reliable sources report that Google, Yahoo, Sun, IBM, Microsoft, and Amazon form the American branch of the (very) secret Cloud Consortium (CloCon).

This group is reportedly working on the CloudBus, designed to connect the newest container computers (CloCompCont) to the Cloud.  The CloudBus includes components for data and energy flow.  The contactless data connection uses quantum-coupled pi-mesons, entangled at the factory for maximum data flow capacity and a reliability proportional to the reciprocal of Planck’s constant.  This means of course that every ConComp can communicate with any ConComp base using any of its pi-sets.  This is hot, I mean, cold stuff.  (This invention is expected to decrease the world demand for copper and gold by 15%.  Sell short now!)  Security measures are under consideration.

The most radical component of the CloudBus, however, is the EntropyBus, for handling energy flow in and out of the ConCompCont.  We know that a computer requires  a flow of organized energy (good old fashioned electromagnetic fields) as input, and produces a flow of disorganized energy (really old-fashioned heat) as output.  The goal is to maximize the amount of computation possible with the minimum of chaotic energy creation.  The CloCon intends to lobby for the repeal of the Second Law of Thermodynamics in order to further its goals.

Special allowances for virtual support, virtual updates, virtual bug-fixing will be provided by the VVM (virtually virtuous machines) that provide the platform for all computation.

International participation is substantial.  There is one Russian participating corporation and forty-two Chinese participants.  The EU has three academic committees studying the possibilities.  Translations will be available soon.

Update:  Microsoft has withdrawn from CloCon, annoucing their own version of the incipient standard CloudBus, calling it SilverLiningBus, which will be almost compatible. A compatibility license will available from their sales offices.

Interesting Tools and Semantic datasources

Interesting tools:

Wikipedia - How did we live without it?

Zotero – research aid: a Firefox add-on. Very useful now.

What can we do with this wonderful resource:

DBpedia - wikipedia content available as a web service

Surprise!:

Did you know that the CIA has an online database CIA Factbook

and that it has been indexed with RDF annotation?

Promising, but not yet:

ClearForest Gnosis – Firefox extension -

Intimidating:

Protege - Ontology editor, not for the faint of heart

Tabulator - CSAIL at MIT

Do you have any suggestions?

Power available

The power of computers, the available bandwidth, and the low cost of storage make wild new things possible. DeepText is about exploiting all of these capabilities to make the simple act of interacting with a document wonderful, satisfying, useful, and transcendental.

Semantic Loop again

Well, I retract my over-statement. There is a good-to-excellent Semantic Research Tool. Zotero

It’s pretty geeky and akademiky, but I’ll swim there.

Semantic Loop

There’s something that I’ve noticed while researching the activity on the Semantic Web:  It’s very complex.  So, I’ve been dreaming about tools that could make this research easier.  You’re probably catching my drift by now.

I need the tools that will be developed by Semantic Workers in order to be an effective Semantic Worker.  Oh well – isn’t that just like reality.

I need an easy way to collect bookmarks:  fast and very good at reading my mind at what I want to day and do with a bookmark.  There are dozens, maybe hundreds of bookmark tools (especially for Firefox, of course), but not one that I have found is even close.

I need the sites that discuss the Semantic Web to have semantic annotation (markup), so that I can record their valuable ideas and research without the tedium of repetitive cut-and-paste.  I don’t care if there are ten non-standards to deal with  –  I’ll cope somehow.  We Semantic Workers must start ourselves providing markup.  Isn’t it time that we made our lives easier by following our own recipes.  Microformats may not be a whole solution, but it would be a very very nice start now.  We probably need a few hundred new formats.

Microformats

Microformats make sense. Annotate information with information: metadata.
I love the idea, and we’re bound to see it grow (or something similar).
However, it’s really only a baby step.

I have to admit that XML notation pushes some of my buttons: “not very elegant” “bulky” “irregular”.
Oh, well, it seems to have won and we’ll live with it and prosper.

Tools for the Semantic Web

A “document” is a node in a web-based network of information. A user of the Semantic Web must participate in many existing information libraries and standards, as well as adding advances. The goal: A document interacts with a user using smooth, beautiful, efficient methods. The user can tailor this interaction to their personality, needs, mood.