Valentin's Blog

I used to think that the Internet was steadily and rapidly advancing towards one free global net, with the attempts of governments to control it being only very short lived and futile. These days I'm becoming more and more skeptical about this idea, take a look at these links:

• A while ago Iran banned fast Internet Links to cut west's influence.
• A German court has ordered an ISP to ban a large porn site, because it violates strict German laws on youth protection (the decision is being appealed).
• Tunisia is giving you fake 404 error screens when you try to access the wrong political pages.
• In America,  Comcast will secretly sabotage your peer2peer traffic while AT&T will serve you only as long as you don't criticize them publicly (they have since revoked this clause and apologized).
• All in all the last five years have seen a rapid rise both in the number of countries employing filtering techniques as well as the scope of these measures.
• And only 6 percent of Chinese links go out of the country (although the implications of this number is unclear, missing a lot of context - e.g. what percentage of  German links go out of the country? But even if this number is unrelated to the great firewall of china, it still gives an idea how much locality continues to matters).

(In the end I still think that the emergence of one truly global net is very likely, but the way to get there is longer than I thought and will include a number of detours)

Labels: Web

What would the Web look like it were build (more) according to the ideas of visionaries like Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush or Ted Nelson? Alex Wright tries to answer this question in his Google Tech Talk here. He hopes that by looking at ideas preceding the current web we can look beyond the kind of hypertext we are so used to and maybe find solutions to some of the problems facing the web today. Really an interesting talk - in particular the stories about Paul Otlet who started to build the social web of data (on a big scale with dozens of employees and dedicated buildings!) even before computers were invented.

Labels: Web

This paper argues that a significant part of today's Semantic Web research is still dominated by ideas from centralized databases. Furthermore, the main thread of reasoning research focusses on approaches that can never scale to anything similar to the Web. Starting from these negative observations we argue that emergent semantics and ontology maturing are more suitable approaches for dealing with ontologies on the Web. Similarly, a few approaches for more Semantic Web appropriate reasoning exist, but are in dire need of realistic use cases.

A paper by me, Andreas Abecker, Denny Vrandecic, Imen Borgi, Simone Braun and Andreas Schmidt; Denny will present it at the Workshop: "New forms of reasoning for the Semantic Web: scalable, tolerant and dynamic". The entire paper is here.

The paper reflects my frustration with the fact that a large part of Semantic Web research (in particular in Europe) is concerned with something like "Semantic Databases" and not even trying to tackle the challenges unique to the Semantic Web. The paper had a bit of a strange creation process and ended up being not very controversial, but I think its still useful, particular since it collects and orders references to innovative work related to the Semantic Web (as opposed to Semantic Databases). 

Labels: publication, SemanticWeb

As you probably know, a few weeks ago the Anti-Trust ruling of the European Commission against Microsoft was upheld by the European Court of First Instance.  On this occasion the Economist* made some interesting remarks that detail the possible future impact of this ruling on Google and open data:

[...] it largely endorsed the commission's legal reasoning. It argued, for instance, that withholding information that is needed for PCs and servers to work together constitutes and abuse of a dominant position if it keeps others from developing rival software for which there is potential consumer demand. In such cases, the information cannot be refused even if it is protected by intellectual property rights, as Microsoft had argued.

And if Google becomes a central storage vault for data such as users' location and identity, as some fear, European regulators may one day try to compel the firm to give rivals open access to this information - rather as they have now forced Microsoft to release its communication protocols.

*: Issue 38, September 22nd - 28th, sadly not freely available online.

Labels: Web

Radioheads decision to allow buyers to decide how much (if anything) they want to pay for their new album has lead to a flurry of interesting discussions on the future business model of the music industry. I think that there is a good chance that in the long run the price of music records will decrease dramatically and that artist will be making their money from limited editions, memorabilia and, above all, events (see this techcrunch article and the its comments for more).

This weeks time magazine adds another interesting tidbit to this discussion:

Even the most lucrative deals - the ones reserved for repeat, multiplatinum superstars - give artists less than 20% of the sales they generate, and that has to feed multiple band members. Meanwhile, as CD sales decline, the concert business is booming. In July, Prince, long underestimated for his business acumen, decided to turn his most valuable asset - a buzzed-about record - into a loss leader, flooding the U.K. with 3 million free copes of this Planet Earth CD through the Mail on Sunday newspaper. He was ridiculed for going down market, until he announced 21 London concert dates - and sold out every one at prices five times the suggested retail price of a CD. Not surprisingly, Radiohead has an extensive tour planned for 2008.

Update: Also read this later techcrunch article (and the comments, because there are some valid counter-arguments).

Labels: Web

A paper by the usual suspects (Andreas Walter, Simone Braun, Andreas Schmidt and me) about some evaluation results and our plans for future work surrounding the ontology maturing ideas.  It will be presented at the Workshop on Emergent Semantics and Ontology Evolution at the ISWC 2007.

Ontology maturing as a conceptual process model is based on the assumption that ontology engineering is a continuous collaborative and informal learning process and always embedded in tasks that make use of the ontology to be developed. For supporting ontology maturing, we need lightweight and easy-to-use tools integrating usage and construction processes of ontologies. Within two applications – Imagination for semantic annotation of images and SOBOLEO for semantically enriched social bookmarking – we have shown that such ontology maturing support is feasible with the help of Web 2.0 technologies. In this paper, we want to present the conclusions from two evaluation sessions with end users and summarize requirements for further development.

The entire paper can be downloaded here.

Labels: publication, SOBOLEO

Even without the Semantic Web? From the Los Angeles Times:

But I was surprised at how much they could do. Once I had registered at the website, I uploaded some personal data, such as my frequent-flier account numbers, and the names and phone numbers of my dentist, hairdresser and doctor. If I wanted an assistant to make purchases on my behalf, I could also load credit-card information in encrypted form.
Sitting on my couch at 1 a.m., I dashed off a flurry of requests via e-mail:
* Contact all my frequent-flier airlines and inform them that I had recently changed my last name and wanted my accounts updated.
* Schedule a teeth cleaning for sometime in the next few weeks, any time before 9 a.m.
* Make an appointment for a haircut.
* Find out how much an airline ticket to Las Vegas would cost on Labor Day weekend.
Within 30 minutes, there was an e-mail in my in box saying that my requests were being processed. By noon the next day, [they] had sent a list of flight options, a confirmed dental appointment and a date for my haircut.

It is all yours for less than $1 per task ... alas all task are performed by people in low income countries and not by inference engines ... ahh well, at least these "agents" are less dependent on perfect markup.

Labels: SemanticWeb

Excuse the long break in posting - but I was offline traveling through Singapore & Malaysia* ... Amazing countries, this.

For the unlikely case that one of you is also thinking of going to Malaysia, two recommendations: Do not travel to the Cameron Highlands, go to Fraser's Hill instead - its much more serene and less touristy (go there with your own car - the road up/down is great fun  to drive - and stay in Ye Olde Smokehouse).  And second, when going to Kuala Lumpur: see if you can get special deals for the amazing Maya Hotel - if you're lucky its cheaper than your average Day's Inn. And even if you don't stay there you may want to contemplate having a cocktail in the 13th floor "Sky Lounge" terrace, your table lit by the very close Petronas Towers looking like something straight out of Star Wars.  

*: The picture to the right shows me in a park in KL quietly contemplating the effects of little sleep, high temperatures and extreme humidity on the human body ;)

Labels: administration