The CSSWS 2006 program is available

Frederick Giasson

As I said, I will be at the CSWWS in Quebec City the 6th June 2006. The program of the event is now available. I just got a look at it and it seems really interesting because they have been able to have speakers that will talk about a wide range of Semantic Web technologies, techniques, domains and problematics.

There will be two tutorials:

  1. Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) Standards for Ontology Development
  2. State of Affairs in Semantic Web Services (SWS)

and many presentations divided in 4 main themes:

  1. Architectures and Systems
  2. Rules, Description Logic and Uncertainty
  3. Applications
  4. Foundations

It will be really interesting to attend to that workshop because there is a lot of room for really interesting discussions about the Semantic Web.

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The WayBack Machine told me that I was blogging 6 years ago and that I developed a blogging software in Perl!

Frederick Giasson

I was playing with the WayBack Machine when I had the idea to look at the first domain name I bought about 8 years ago: decatomb.com

The archives from the WayBack Machine are quite impressive: from 2000 to 2005 (have in mind that I didn’t update it from 2002 to 2005).

Then I started to look at the first real website I developed with nostalgia. I was amazed to found it back online. What was Decatomb? At that time I was defining it as:

 

 

“Decatomb Production is a web site designed to help other computer professionals and enthusiasts in their fields of expertise. We provide a database of useful information from Decatomb’s Community. We also archive and make available a selection of the best technical papers, articles and analyses. In addition, we link other useful websites, newsgroups, events and books. The website is organized in 25 sections of the mosts popular programming languages and subjects.”

With amazement I found that I tried to create a developer community with that website. Then I started to remember things from the past: that I had about 200 subscribed users with profiles, that I developed a IM chat system in Perl, and finally I remembered (and found while surfing the website using the WayBack Machine) that I developed a “blogging” platform (in Perl) integrated in the layout of the Decatomb’s website: it was 6 years ago.

I was amazed to remember, and found, what is now called a blog. I just got out of the high school at that time and I didn’t know what a blog was a that time (I found what it was about 2 years ago).

Then what I found astonished me.

1- I found that I was displaying my last published items at the top of the page.

 

 

2- I found that each article had their own permalink, title, body and “view comments” and “post comment” options.

 

 

3- I found that the “post comment” section was quite similar with the current comment section on my blog.

 

 

4- People even posted comments on this “blog”! What surprised me was that the “friendly ship” of the conversation is the same as the one I have with my blog readers now. Nothing official, only people wanting to talk about something.

 

 

The only thing I can say is: thank to the WayBack Machine for that re-discovery. It seems that I was predestinated to rediscover blogs and blogging.

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Links are metadata on Web documents that let you get into conversations

Frederick Giasson

I just came across a blog post by Doc Searl that link to a conversation about linking vs non-linking bloggers.

I was surprised to read this from Robert W. Anderson:

“What I should have said is that as a new blogger, linking is required to get into the conversation.”

My question would be: then how old bloggers can get into conversation without linking? The thing is that a link is the best metadata element we can use to link Web documents together. All the current technologies understand what a link is, and how to work and play with it.

It is sure that in the future (the Semantic Web, the Web of meaning) we will be able to link documents without “explicit links in document”. But for now, with the current technologies available, they are essential both for writer (to get into conversations) and readers (to know where the information came-from and go-to).

Links are definitely essential to beginner and expert bloggers to get into conversations.

By the way, I saw that weird argument a couple of times on the Blogsphere in the last weeks: “Strong web bloggers no longer link”. The argument here seems to mean: stop linking because the big ones stopped (you have to stop if you want to be one of these bigs). I have to confess that I don’t get it… Some A-list bloggers probably stopped to link to other people for some reasons. One of them could be because they think that they are so bright that they don’t need other people ideas to write something intelligent. For them I would cite Emerson: “Every man I meet is my superior in some way. In that, I lean of him”. Okay, I agree, most of them probably stopped to link to other people because they see themselves as columnists and not as bloggers(people that get into conversations evolving on the Web via their personal Web log) anymores.

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Communities’ websites should use FOAF profiles to help users managing their online persona

Frederick Giasson

The social software industry (Web 2.0?) is the new buzz on the Web today. New virtual groups and communities are emerging everywhere at a terrific pace and users generated content websites are becoming the norm.

To create these communities, supporting websites are creating advanced user profiles to try to connect their users based on their interests, relationships with other people, projects involvement, etc. Recently I talked with some of my clients about their projects and each of them needed some type of user profiles into their system. Some user characteristics changed from one system to another but the core characteristics were always the same: name, homepage, geo localization, interests, etc.

It is really great, but as a user of these systems, something is bothering me with all these social websites: I always have to create a user profile, spending my time to create and update it when it changes. For example if I have to change my name (do not worry, it is not in my plans!) then I have to login into each of my user accounts, and change my profile accordingly. It is so boring that people just do not do it: they initially create their profile and forget it after.

The thing is that profiles do not grow-up with the user: the user’s interests will change in the future, but not the profiles’. Eventually the difference between the user and his profile become so big that the profile become a person of its own (okay, I admit that the concept of virtual-re-personification of a profile is weird).

Considering that, I tried to resolve the problem with the next generation of Talk Digger:

 



(Client on the image to enlarge it)

 

  1. Bob have a website (a blog?) on a web server with its own domain name (bob.com). Each month he has to make some changes to his FOAF profile because he gets new interests in life, work on new projects, etc. Considering this, he edits and changes the FOAF profile hosted on his web server accordingly.
  2. The updated FOAF profile is then saved on the web server and available to anyone connected on the Internet.
  3. Bob also have a Talk Digger user account (that is also a FOAF profile). Each week Talk Digger will check if Bob changed his FOAF profile, and if Bob changed it, then Talk Digger will update Bob’s Talk Digger user account accordingly to this new information.
  4. The new information is saved on Talk Digger and all the Talk Digger users instantly have access to that new and updated information about Bob.
  5. Bob’s FOAF profile hosted on his web server and Bob’s Talk Digger user profile are synchronized and reflect the changes in his persona.

 

What is really cool is that Bob do not have to care about his Talk Digger user account. He only has to change his FOAF profile hosted on his web server and within a week the changes will appear on Talk Digger.

It is cool with Talk Digger, but thinks about it if all the “communities’ websites” that Bob is subscribed to would do the same thing? Bob would not have to think about his users profiles scattered around the Web and he would be sure that all his information would be up-to-date.

This is exactly what the new generation of Talk Digger is doing right now and it is working quite fine. Users can import their FOAF profile into Talk Digger and then Talk Digger will crawl their profile once a week or so. That way, in two clicks, they created their Talk Digger user profile with their personal information and do not have to bother with updating their Talk Digger user profile anymore.

The advantage for communities’ websites by using FOAF profiles is that it is becoming the norm to define users’ profiles on the Web. Millions of Internet users already have and maintain their FOAF profile. But the real advantage of FOAF profile is that they are defined using RDF. So a user could extend their FOAF profile as infinitum using different vocabularies and then creating a more-than-human detailed profile. Then communities websites would only retrieve the information they need (or understand) of that profile (one website could only need his interests and another one only his connections with other people but both information would be available if they eventually need it).

This is what it is all about: helping people to manage their online persona. That way they will not have 20 different descriptions of themselves scattered on the Web as time go on.

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