Author: Mike Bergman

Posted:August 20, 2006

OWL-Geospatial Mashups with TopBraid Composer

It is often easy to glaze over in most discussions of the semantic Web. Though I argue many places that it is a historical inevitablity that the federation of meaning (e.g., resolving semantic heterogeneities) that is the ultimate objective of the semantic Web is the next logical step to recent accomplishments in the resolving of physical and data syntax heterogeneities, such a statement hardly sounds or is compelling in itself.

That is why examples are so powerful.

TopQuadrant has posted a really cool mashup demo of the use of its TopBraid Composer semantic modeling toolset with Google Maps, all in the context of a standard geospatial OWL ontology. The demo also simply explains how all of the pieces work together and shows why OWL ontologies make sense in the first place. The demo also shows well the use of SPARQL, the RDF query language.

To see this video in action, choose the Geography and Mapping Support link from the http://www.topbraidcomposer.com/videos.html page.

Posted by AI3's author, Mike Bergman Posted on August 20, 2006 at 9:05 pm in Adaptive Information, Semantic Web, Semantic Web Tools | Comments (0)
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Posted:August 19, 2006

Data Visualization at Warp Speed

The image "http://www.sr.se/press/bilder/sommar2005/thumbnails/25juli_Hans_Rosling.JPG" cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.“Why are we not using the data we have?”

So asks Hans Rosling, a professor of international health at Sweden’s world-renowned Karolinska Institute, in a recent TED 2006 talk, now available on the Web. (The specific link is
http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=hans_rosling&flashEnabled=1, recorded in February 2006.) This 20 minutes video is perhaps the most cogent and entertaining presentation you will ever see regarding how data can be made real and meaningful through appropriate visualization. Professor Rosling inspires us to unlock understanding from the manifest data all around us.

Fortunately, the data visualization techniques he uses can be obtained from the non-profit organization he has founded, Gapminder, which brings global health and demographic data to life using the free Trendalyzer software.

The TED (Technology Entertainment Design) annual conference draws about 1,000 attendees to Monterey, CA, for the bargain price of $4400 per
attendee. TED 2007 is already oversubscribed.

Jewels & Doubloons An AI3 Jewels & Doubloon Winner

Posted by AI3's author, Mike Bergman Posted on August 19, 2006 at 3:45 pm in Adaptive Information | Comments (1)
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Posted:August 12, 2006

Current Listing of 70 Semantic Web Tools

This AI3 blog maintains Sweet Tools, the largest listing of about 800 semantic Web and -related tools available. Most are open source. Click here to see the current listing!

The W3C‘s ESW wiki has just consolidated a listing of RDF and OWL tools. This SemanticWeb Tools listing contains references to about 70 distinct tools, some open source and some proprietary, in areas such as:

  • General Development Environments, Editors, Content Management Systems
  • RDF Triple Store Systems
  • Programming Environments (in about a dozen different languages)
  • OWL Reasoners
  • On-line Validators
  • SPARQL Systems and Support.

The best thing about this listing is that it is available in wiki format and therefore is updated frequently by practitioners in the field. My only complaint is that the listing does not include information extractors (IE) or metadata generators. At any rate, I highly recommend bookmarking this site and re-visiting it frequently.

Posted:August 6, 2006

Happy First Birthday, AI3!

Well, my blog has just celebrated its official one year birthday.  Happy Birthday, AI3!

In the past year I’ve posted a new entry about every three days (128 total) and about half have a user comment.  The posts have been placed into 16 different categories.  My posts tend to be much, much longer than a "standard" blog in keeping with my intent to have this site be an early release point for substantive musings and research.  In that regard, I rate the site a high success, but it does come at a bit of a cost in packaging what had normally been my own internal drafts.

My Pro Blogging Guide has been very popular, with about 10,000 downloads from various venues (including about 2,500 from this site). The site is ranked about 100,000 in popularity on Technorati, pretty remarkable given its narrow and targeted focus.  Thanks!

I find that my posts tend to very episodic.  Fortunately, I post when my natural work flow and research dictates.  I have certainly read about "blogging burnout" quite a bit in the past year.  I suspect that blog authors who see themselves as needing to fufill popular expectations or to build audiences feel such pressures.  I just dawdle along, with my own weird musings and according to my own weird muses.

What’s Coming

I am very excited about the pending release of my semantic Web expert’s reference portal, SWISHer.  It is done and presently resides in the background; I am just working out some publicaton and blog integration details.  Stay tuned!  For those of you in this space, I think you will find its 200,000 or so definitive articles an invaluable reference library.

Other than SWISHer, I expect more of the same from the AI3 blog in the coming year:  a few, long posts per week, most of a research nature or based on analysis, with an occasional PDF or white paper summarizing an active research topic or series of posts.

I’d like to thank you for taking the occasional time to look at my stuff.  I again invite all of you to comment and interact as much as you’d like.

Posted by AI3's author, Mike Bergman Posted on August 6, 2006 at 12:29 pm in Site-related | Comments (0)
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Posted:July 30, 2006

The Exponential Driver of Combining Information

There has been some real silliness recently questioning whether the semantic Web will ever happen.  Simply because an idea does not get popularly embraced within five or ten years does not mean it will never succeed.  Some ideas — including, I submit, the semantic Web — respond to true underlying imperatives and drivers of change.

Henry Story in a recent post on RDF and Metcalf’s law poses the interesting thesis that "the value of your information grows exponentially with your ability to combine it with new information."  I could not agree more.

And that is why the semantic Web, or something very similar to it that might come to be known by a different name, is inevitable.  The Web has given global humanity the access and incentive to post all information accumulated through human history online.  But your glad may be my happy and there is always that leveraged value from combining stuff ("mashups") from different sources and realms.  Those issues are among the classic ones in data federation and a key driver for adoption of means to resolve semantic heterogeneities.  How the semantic Web and its tools and infrastructure actually develops today remains opaque.  But its need and eventual use is not.

Posted by AI3's author, Mike Bergman Posted on July 30, 2006 at 11:29 am in Adaptive Information, Semantic Web | Comments (1)
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