<graph xmlns="http://ilrt.org/discovery/2004/03/rxr/">
  <triple>
    <subject uri="http://purl.org/net/dajobe/"/>
    <predicate uri="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/creator"/>
    <object>Dave Beckett</object>
  </triple>
</graph>

May 6, 2004

Casual Ontology Development

Members of the Mindswap Project have posted Lifecycle of a Casual Web Ontology Development Process for presentation at the WWW2004 WE-SW Workshop.

The paper begins with an interesting description of a short-hand version of OWL which is designed for rapid entry and clarity.

We limit expressivity (i.e. no support for nested restrictions etc) to maintain readability, yet provide sufficient building blocks to construct a basic ontology model quickly, that can be refined later using a more powerful ontology editing tool. A more formal approach to our shorthand notation is being developed at the side. Source.

Lifecycle then describes a design scenario in which Mindswap's SWOOPed toolkit is used to search for and import terms related to the ontology under construction.

Having found related concepts/properties that the user could potentially use in the ontology being created, the editor interface must provide the user with the ability to either link to the data directly (with or without importing the entire external ontology) or borrow a specific subset of it (using a copy-paste mechanism). Source.

May 5, 2004

Distributing the Load of the Semantic Web

Ben Hammersley has put together a cool egoboo tracker for authors, culling data from Amazon, Technoratti, AllConsuming, and others (by way of Cory Doctorow). It is an interesting way to re-combine information.

Unfortunately, the Auctorial Ego Tracker is somewhat slow due to the fact that it assembles the source data in real-time. But it got me thinking about the use of web resources. As real-time meaning aggregators gain in popularity, they will begin to put a much heavier load on web services as well as web servers simply hosting RDF and XML files. If open source applications and useage practices are not developed to distribute the load, the power (and necessity) of well-funded intermediary services such as Google will continue to grow.

It is not surprising that one leading discussion among bloggers concerns the inefficient and potentially overwhelming consumption of RSS feeds. William Grosso's Sunday Afternoon Thoughts on the Design of RSS Aggregators does a good job of explaining this problem and offering solutions.

Some recent approaches to addressing interaction limitations actually borrow ideas from the internet, usenet, and web build-out, including pDNS and RSS over BitTorrent. There is also an interesting discussion on www-rdf-interest about distributing RDF queries.

On a related note, I have recently been sketching out how a small web community might maintain some sort of RDF cache / router / query platform to buffer the interaction between its members and the greater semantic web.

May 4, 2004

Bible Study

I have always believed that Bible study groups are a great source of ideas for the semantic web. These small communities use techniques for referencing, discussing, and bringing meaning to text that were developed long before information became a science.

The Holy Bible as Placeless Content is not only an excellent exploration of the semantic web practices of Bible scholarship, but also a very decent set of practical useage scenarios.

But certain tools are build to make it easier for Bible-enthusiasts to live their christian faith.

• Normative Identifiers (aka Uris)
• Cross References (aka Hyperlinks)
• Blogging
• Indices (aka Search Engines)
• Chain Systems (aka Link Collections)
• Excessive Quoting (aka blogrolling)
Source.

I look forward to spending more time delving into how Christians and other followers of "the Book" have implemented the semantic web.

May 3, 2004

PeoplesDNS

Joel De Gan of PeoplesDNS has posted Whats the problem with FOAF?. He intends to add centralization, private information, social circumstance, and groups - all through his FOAF dns concept. It looks like he will use the RELATIONSHIP (the older one?) and Trust ontologies in this effort.

I am very interested in how community centers will use concepts such as pDNS and what their role in the development of open social networking will be. Social "routers" will be able to provide a level of customization (of information, participation, formality, and privacy) which will be required to break social networking away from the big social networks.

PeopleDNS will use a "De Gan Filter" to handle the anticipated large dataset. Last week, Danny Ayers posted a brief summary of De Gan's implementation of bloom filters.

May 2, 2004

Mozdex Announced

Byron Miller has posted an overview on Kuro5hin about the Mozdex search engine, a service that will provide open information about their page ranking strategy. The indexing process is performed by Nutch, while the search app runs on Tomcat and Lucene. He ends with this open question (for which there are many responses):

Do you think it is actually feasible to work on a process that stays ahead of the cheaters or do you believe it will be something doomed to fail just because its competing against the likes of Yahoo or Google? Source.