Posts tagged with: deri

There is a workshop on Semantic Web site interoperability somewhere in the UK (at KMi ?) next week. I won't be able to attend (My mission for the next days will be to find out if David is still life-guarding the foaflets of the Caribbean ;), but DERI's SemWeb cluster will be there and asked me to provide some SemanticWeb.org-related slides. While scribbling them I (again) came across the issues of resource description discovery. I think I have some ideas how to basically implement the stuff, but there are still two things that I'd really like to be addressed by the Best Practices or Data Access Working Group:

• A standard way for site developers to point scutters and other SemWeb agents to resource descriptions (MGET support vs. response headers etc.) from a given URI
• A standard way to tell SemWeb agents how to find a site's SPARQL end point / query interface (something less complicated than UDDI, please).

(I only had a quick glance at the draft of the SPARQL protocol, maybe there is already a proposal on its way for the second issue.)

Oh yes, and the hash vs. slash issue, of course ;) (I guess that's somehow related to interoperability, too...)
But first: holiday!

I'm back from Ireland. It was great but the last three weeks there almost killed me. I even missed the first hours of the DERI x-mas party as I was developing another component for a knowledgeweb-related demo. After that, It took my body about 4 hours to realize that I had written my last line of code before it sort of collapsed ;) I was ill for a whole week with a temperature I didn't have for years. But now I'm fine again, and after some hardware upgrading trouble the machines are fine again, too, and I can finally continue to work, so we'll hopefully see the new semanticweb.org site soon...

We can't can confirm the Feuerzangenbowle yet as important equipment is still on its way from Germany. Apart from that, Andreas' house-warming and Benjamin's farewell should be reason enough to show up. ;)

(Rumours are that benji is going to give away his 5-star fan heater...)

We are looking forward to seeing you on saturday!

andreas & benjamin

After working overtime three days in a row, I'm now completely off-sync with the other folks here. This doesn't mean that I don't see anyone in the streets when I walk home in the night (that will never happen in lively Galway), but without a doubt I'm the only non-drunk person.

Apart from feeling a little bit like a zombie, night-working at cube farm DERI is definitely much more productive than during the day (with my fan heater being the best investment ever). Oh, and NUI Galway looks actually quite nice after sunset.

In the spirit of an eat your own dog food approach I've written a little SemWeb tool to document the SemWeb tools I'm developing here at DERI Ireland. The tool's basic functionality is documented at the semanticweb.org relaunch project website.

Sebastian Kruk presented his approach to add Semantic Web functionality to digital libraries. He raised some interesting discussions related to his FOAF-Realm project.

Most of the researchers at DERI are dealing with rather virtual things such as models, concepts, or web services. But yesterday I was lucky enough to get a glimpse of how real-world research works. Edward demonstrated that the "shortest path" problem in a graph can be approached by examining the behaviour of a wind-up toy car. There seems to be a direct relation between the number of attempts the car needed to reach the end of the office and the shortest way from one point to the other..

17:27:55 <aharth> anybody seen a tool to ...
18:22:42 <bengee> aharth, http://www.daml.org/tools/tools.htm lists a ...
18:23:24 <bengee> hm, only the ...
18:32:13 <aharth> thx bengee :)

I had the kick-off meeting with Stefan Decker and Andreas Harth today where I proposed an iterative approach for the relaunch of SemanticWeb.org in order to be able to have an updated website by November 7. The schedule is very tight, with the first deadline being just a couple of weeks away.

The reason is that there may (hopefully) be some media awareness (or at least some people who'd like to find out more about the SemWeb) after this year's International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), we should really put up something by then (as it doesn't really help disseminating the Semantic Web when the second or third best result in a Google search points to a website that hasn't been updated for 16 months ;)

Directly after that I joined a face2face meeting of the DERI Semantic Web Portal Working Group (SWP WG) which was quite interesting. The SemanticWeb.org portal was one of their initial use cases, so my work is perhaps going to be mentioned in one of the SWP WG's deliverables. Nice. (Well, only if I don't screw it up...;)

Oh, and there was a social event at Galway's Bazaar Bar afterwards:

More luck today. Sun and everything. The view from my room:


And a double-screen working environment.

I'm working at Ireland's Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) until early December, where I'll try to contribute to the relaunch of the SemanticWeb.org community portal. I actually planned to maintain a list with entries about Murphy's Law hitting me, but didn't expect that I'd have to start with it directly at the airport:

• My suitcase didn't make it to Galway. They found it a couple of hours later in Dublin
• My hand luggage was too big, so I had to put one of my folders in the suitcase. I smartly picked the one with the printed campus map of NUI Galway. Now I couldn't direct the taxi driver to DERI, where the key for my place to stay waited.
• The extended taxi ride got close to a sightseeing tour (EUR 25) and I had to pay another EUR 15 for the bring-in service of my suitcase in the evening.
  

A good start ;)