March 29, 2004

Google Gets Personal

Google Labs has added personalized search (by way of unstruct.org). The personalization slider won't work with Safari, so check it out with Moz or IE.

Application Architectures

There have been several posts about a new old application architecture which uses RDF as the M of MVC. Mike Hogan articulated the concept very well (by way of Leigh Dodds).

Do not model your data as objects...

Its just too rigid, it slows you down, it depresses you when you have to refactor half the model due to some new requirement that does not fit. It feels like you are wading through treacle. Objects are not great for data. Source

btw, if you find that you start extending your object model to allow arbitrary property annotation, and some of those properties are actually pointers to other objects in your graph, then that's probably a sign that you may be better off using an RDF based model. And possibly Python too but I've not explored that angle yet. Source

March 27, 2004

SKOS 1.0 Released

SWAD-Europe has announced the availability of SKOS-Core 1.0. Accoding to the guide, the Simple Knowledge Organization System is designed to support the definition of words and the association between words and phrases. One intended use for SKOS is in RDF thesauri.

SKOS-Core allows you to define concepts and concept schemes. A concept is any unit of thought that can be defined or described. A concept scheme is a collection of concepts.

A concept may have any number of attached labels. A label is any word, phrase or symbol that can be used to refer to the concept by people. A concept may have only one preferred label, and any number of alternative labels.

Relationships may be defined between concepts within the same concept scheme. Any such relationship is referred to here as a semantic relation.

Mappings may be defined between concepts from different concept schemes. Any such mapping is referred to here as a semantic mapping. Source

March 26, 2004

Coming Soon: Programming Languages Survey

Over the next week, I will be posting an essay (in parts) about the advantages and disadvantages of four programming languages in developing semantic web apps: perl, python, php, and java.

I will look at the syntax / writing style, libraries, communities, and important implementations (social software, ePortfolio, and blog apps) of each of these languages.

Additionally, I will be covering some of the other major languages used in building the semantic web, including c, c#, and lisp.

March 25, 2004

The Center for Citizens' Media

Jeff Jarvis has announced that he is working on a Center for Citizens' Media, and is hoping to have NYU involved.

March 24, 2004

Danah Boyd on RELATIONSHIP

Danah Boyd has posted a thought-provoking criticism of the RELATIONSHIP ontology (by way of Marc Canter) While I approach this matter from a strongly technical perspective, the perspective she presents should be carefully considered as we define social software standards.

• Relationships are situated within a CONTEXT.
• Relationships are defined by CULTURE; their types are SOCIAL CONSTRUCTS.
• Relationships do not exist without POWER.

Source

My answer is that we will have to allow the semantics of relationships to emerge from the somewhat distorted political dynamics of the labeling process. Openly developing standards for the assignment of relationships surely is better than relying on online services to force standards through flat, html interfaces.

Categorical Context

At the very least, the surface sort of relationship context (i.e. defined by logical groups of relationships) must be incorporated into a relationship ontology. Beyond adding a new dimension of expressiveness, this would create a natural framework for participation. I can see all kinds of useful (and humorously useless) ontologies of relationships withing a certain category being maintained. RDF and OWL allow for contributions from whomever wishes to host one - what ends up being adopted is a different matter entirely.

Perspective

The context of perspective (i.e. defined by who may be viewing this information about your relationship) is something that must be customized by the person maintaining their own information. Identifying the viewer would allow more detailed access, or contextualized access, to the relationship resources.

Culture

As for the cultural aspect, this can be accomplished through subclassing of context, or through the definition of new contexts. Translation services might play a role in how this information may be understood by people of other cultures. Lets be friends in the American sense, or pen pals in the Japanese sense. Actually, lets just be friendster friends.

Power

The power dynamic aspect may be (somewhat badly) incorporated into a standard through guiding the formation of a relationship, especially those which may need to require some sort of verification. Ultimately, the complex power dynamics of relationships should be simply interpreted by the users. My favorite implementation of this notion: the "open marriage" designation.

With a more expressive ontology for defining relationships (certainly more so than RELATIONSHIP), we may actually end up with a better understanding of the social dynamics of the real world, across the world. In order to have a conversation, we need to agree on some conventions, so we can't complain too much about the RELATIONSHIP. :)

Interview with Ken Jordan

Seb Paquet has posted a brief summary about an interview with Ken Jordan, one of the thinkers behind the Augmented Social Network (by way of Many 2 Many).

March 23, 2004

Rules and Rankings in Social Systems

AJ Kim has posted an interesting article about the gaming aspect of social software.

The rules of the game in services such as Google, eBay, and Orkut are enforced and sometimes altered in order to extract the desired information, or to encourage certain behaviors. The rules must also be structured to prevent cheating and abuse, for once there is a game to be won, there will be people who go very far to win it.

Traders in markets such as the NYSE participate in what is probably the largest-scale implementation of social software which uses game play to achieve, through rules governing behavior and information flow, the proper balance between cooperation and competition.

Fuzzy Thinking

Mohamed Khedr has taken a first pass at OntoFuzzy, an ontology for uncertain situations (via SchemaWeb).

An ontology that describes fuzzy concepts such as linguistic terms, membership functions, fuzzy rules and more. Its intended use is for describing uncertain situations and vague information. Source

The FAQs About TypeKey

Six Apart has posted the anticipated FAQ for their upcoming TypeKey authentication service. It looks like there will be many different ways for a web site to make use of TypeKey, or to use an alternative of their own making. Cool!

RELATIONSHIP: Two Worldviews

Clay Shirky has posted a very interesting clarification of his earlier comments about the RELATIONSHIP schema.

Human social calculations are in particular a kind of thing that cannot be made formal or explicit without changing them so fundamentally that the model no longer points to the things it is modeled on...

The flaw in RELATIONSHIP is not that you can’t characterize someone as a colleague and an employee, but rather that you can’t completely specify the fullness of any reasonably complex relationship, you can’t know in advance which of those characterizations you would use in what circumstances, and you can’t make even a subset of those things explicit without changing the thing you are trying to describe. Source

I completely agree with Clay's comment about the importance of circumstance. I have been working on the issue of circumstance in developing a framework for customized social networks. There needs to be a means to contextualize the relationship: friends, co-workers, co-students, acquaintences, strangers (one-way), family members, participants in a common activity, and so on. There may also be more than one context: family members who are also co-workers.

Providing a relationship contexts would place restrictions on the nature of the relationships that could occur between two personae, which would also provide a higher level of expressiveness for users. Further, I believe that working circumstance into a social networking standard would also simplify the development of a means to fetch and query the distributed data.

March 22, 2004

Technorati Redesign

David Sifry has posted a list of new features. Among them is BookTalk, borrowing some good ideas from All Consuming.

March 21, 2004

Semantic Web AWOL from comp.ai?

Leonard Lin has posted a gem of a link to an archived usenet discussion about the semantic web on comp.ai. This informative and thorny conversation was unleashed by a simple question posed by Jorn Barger:

Can someone explain to me why this Google Groups search -- http://groups.google.com/groups?scoring=d&q=group:comp.ai+semantic.web -- shows almost no discussion of the Semantic Web project on comp.ai, ever? Why isn't it even mentioned in the 'FAQ'? What does the academic-AI community think of it, in terms of practicality or theoretical interest?

Aren't businesses spending tons of money implementing XML data-standards, and don't they hire AI-grads for expertise on this? Or haven't AI grad-programs been adequately training students in these semantic skills? Source

March 20, 2004

Dave Winer's Questions for SixApart

Six Apart's announcement about TypeKey is generating some heat - and questions from Dave Winer. By way of a post by Snappy the Clam:

3. Will it be possible for Movable Type and TypePad users to plug into a non-SixApart authentication system?

4. Will the process for designing the API be open or will it be designed exclusively by SixApart? Source

My position on this matter is that centralized user authentication is likely to be run as a business operation, and a service such as TypeKey ultimately helps smaller services compete with agglomerated services such as Yahoo and Google.

It would be ideal for the social software community if SixApart were to create an open, federated system which allows others to maintain alternatives. If they don't, well, we can always work more on an open alternative (there are several out there).

TypeKey: Centralized User Authentication

Six Apart has posted information about their upcoming TypeKey privacy-protected authentication service. TypeKey is clearly a critical aspect of Movable Type 3.0 and Six Apart will be allowing other web sites and services to participate. In time, this web service could evolve into a practical alternative to Microsoft Passport.

TypeKey is a free, open system providing a central identity that anyone can use to log in and post comments on blogs and other web sites. Source

Markdown

Borrowing from email conventions and possibly wiki formatting, Aaron Swartz and John Gruber have developed Markdown, a text markup syntax which can be converted into html by a perl script. There is also a plugin for MT. Play with it using Dingus. (via Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing)

March 19, 2004

LOAF: using social software to minimize spam

Clay Shirky has posted a summary of LOAF, a perl app designed to create networks of trust among email correspondents. The email addresses are obscured by a Bloom Filter in order to prevent "Ex-Girlfriend" attacks :)

LOAF works by attaching a small file to each outgoing email you send, and monitoring your incoming email for LOAF attachments. These attachments are automatically stored away in one of two folders - a 'trusted' area for people you have corresponded with before, and a 'strangers' area for people who are unknown to you.

Each incoming mail is tested against the LOAF files of all the people in your trusted folder. If the sender has corresponded with one of your friends before, a header is added to the email to indicate the number of matches, and the addresses that matched. Source

Sun Hires Tim Bray

Tim Bray announced that he has been hired by Sun Microsystems. He has lots of interesting things to say about it, too.

As of today, I work for Sun. Let’s see; Java rocks. Microsoft sucks. I can play that tune. Source