Daniel Lewis

There is a competition for developing a logo for the DataPortability Project.

I’ve added my contribution:

You can win stuff! You can also see other peoples contributions on the flickr pool.

Technorati Tags: dataportability, data, portability, logo, competition

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What DataPortability Is:

I just spent my Sunday evening (from about 6pm GMT until 9:30pm GMT) having a discussion about what data portability is exactly. Here is my first informal definition, which seems to fit the general idea that was being talked about.

First things first. DataPortability is a brand… its a kind of un-organisation (a bit like BarCamps are un-conferences); a group of people and organisations who have the same philosophy, a philosophy of the portability of data. Every member of DataPortability should push for (advocate/evangelise) portability of data to web-users, developers and organisations. The DataPortability Project will support other projects/groups working towards data portability (at the moment this explicitly includes communities involved in OpenID, OAuth, Microformats and the Semantic Web). Some members of DataPortability are also involved with legal issues and privacy which are just as important as the portability of data. The DataPortability Project is there to support people into a Web of Data.

Portability of data, or data portability is portable data. In other words, data can be copy/pasted and/or moved from one location to another. This is dependent on accessibility.

There is an issue of identity of data, in my opinion this can be described in a format such as RDF and identified using a URI (in the case of a user identifier this could be an OpenID, which is a URI connected with an authentication protocol).

Similar to the Semantic Web?

There are things “in” the DataPortability Project which are similar to things in the Semantic Web Project/Community and vice-versa. The Semantic Web basically provides the theory/research, tools and techniques to create and link objects together. The DataPortability project, however, provides advice and support to create objects which can be moved around over the web. Both groups are looking into privacy and legal issues. Both groups do use and research each others recommendations.

Linked Data

Linked Data is essential, I can’t stress this enough, and I will be focusing on this a lot in the future. It is not explicitly part of the DataPortability Project, but it is part of the Semantic Web. It is essential for the Web of Data to exist.

Note

These are very rough thoughts based on an informal skype chat, DataPortability members are developing a more formal definition. I’ll let you know when its released, but the above are my thoughts.

Document Links

• The Data Portability Project Site
• The Data Portability General Google Group
• Semantic Web Frequently Asked Questions <- very good resource for those starting to figure out what the Semantic Web is.

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I just had a little thought about how to explain the Ontologies that you find on the Semantic Web. You could say:

An Ontology is a bit like a thesaurus, but with a hierarchy of terms each with its own properties

SemWeb people: Does this make sense?

Non SemWeb people: I wonder if this is a useful way to understand Ontologies.

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Here is my DataPortabilityAndMe video

John Breslin’s DataPortabilityAndMe Video is also good, and so is Ian Forrester’s DataPortabilityAndMe Video.

Technorati Tags: DataPortabilityAndMe, dataportability, semanticweb, web

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Some people have written up about SemanticCamp on their blog posts, here are the ones that I know of (in no particular order):

• Daniel Lewis : “SemanticCampLondon - Quick Review“
• Yves Raimond: “Yay for SemanticCamp!“
• Frances Berriman: “SemanticCamp London“
• Jeremy Keith: “Semantopoly“
• Tom Heath: “Saturday and Sunday at SemanticCamp“
• Benjamin Nowack: “Back from SemanticCamp London“
• Andrew Walkingshaw: “Semantic Camp London“
• Glenn Jones: “Semantic Camp London“
• Premasagar Rose: “SemanticCampLondon“
• Tom Morris: “SemanticCamp Roundup“
• Jon Linklater-Johnson: “Semantic Camp“
• Henry Story: “Semantic Bar Camp London and Flue“

The best thing is that the event seems to have good reviews from both the Semantic Web community and the Microformats community… which means that it was a success in regard to bringing the two together!

(p.s. if I have forgotten any then let me know and I’ll add them to the list. I would point you to the Technorati SemanticCamp tag search, but not everybody tags and uses Technorati)

Technorati Tags: semanticcamplondon, reviews, blogs

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After reading a blog post by Ben Goertzel about formalising Consciousness and Will using Hyperset Theory, I delved into reminding myself about some set theory and learning a lot about Hypersets.

I was quite astonished to find that the whole of the RDF language is perfect for Hyperset theory. Thank you Ben for writing that blog post, it came at a perfect time because of my recent talk at SemanticCamp was about the technologies that have and should influence the development of the semantic web, and I mentioned:

• Object Orientation
• Frames
• Semantic Networks

I can now add Hyperset Theory to the list.

What is a Hyperset (briefly)?

A hyperset is a set which can contain itself, so it is recursively declarative. A good example is a set of types, which is a type itself [1]:

Types = {Types, Booleans}

Booleans = {true, false}

To quote from Piotr Kaminskis report [1]:

The advantage is that types and instances are all part of the same model and can be treated
uniformly, which is very important for semistructured data

Which should sound very familiar to Semantic Web developers because an Ontology (a set of hierarchical classes) is defined in the same structure as a set of instances, which is (in most modern cases) RDF.

Piotr actually goes on to develop a metamodel called Braque based on Partially Ordered Hypersets (aka Hyper-pomsets), and actually applies that to the Semantic Web in a second report [2] submitted as a Master of Science Thesis.

This also comes back to something which was mentioned at SemanticCamp: “someones metadata is another persons data”. For example, a hierarchy of animal types is an ontology as it is a class hierarchy and therefore metadata, however, it is also data as names and properties are themselves atomic (this might not be the best example, but its the best I can think of at the moment).

Hyperset theory is technically a subtheory of Non-well-founded set theory.

So we, as Semantic Web developers, can learn from this

As the ontology-instances relationship is all just a lot of triples in a big set, which isn’t explicitly classical set theory and could quite easily be and often is a hyperset, we can learn from hyperset theory too. Where does it really help, where does it hinder, are there any good work-arounds which are used in hyperset theory which could be used in my RDF. These are all questions which can be asked from hyperset theory and potentially applied to Semantic Web theory.

There are similar questions that can be asked of Frames, Semantic Networks and Object Orientation. What can we learn, because the Semantic Web is just an extension of these things which provides an even longer history to the Semantic Web than what people often think of as just the Web, RDF and OWL.

References

[1] Kaminski, P. “Using Hypesets to Represent Semistructured Data”, Information Systems Modeling 2002. Available online <https://www.ideanest.com/braque/ISM2002.pdf> (Accessed: 20th February 2008)

[2] Kaminski, P. “Integrating Information on the Semanitc Web Using Partially Ordered Multi Hypersets”, MSc Thesis at the University of Waterloo. 2002. Available Online: <https://www.ideanest.com/braque/Thesis-web.pdf> (Accessed: 20th February 2008)

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There are a lot of photos for SemanticCampLondon on Flickr.

My favourite is:

(Photo Taken by Libby Miller at SemanticCampLondon Stored on Flickr)

The above picture actually shows the real work which the BBC have been doing. Upside-down-pentagrams explain the BBCs work on the Semantic Web. Guess what, they are also using the Ruby Programming Language too!

You can also look at the Flickr Tag “SemanticCamp” via the OpenLink RDF Browser.

I also have a few photos on my myopenlink photo gallery space.

Technorati Tags: semanticweb, flickr, openlink, rdfbrowser, semanticcamp, semanticcamplondon

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A quick review of how SemanticCampLondon went this weekend

SemanticCamp was great, I really enjoyed it and I really enjoyed helping out with the organisation.

Here is a run down of the various subjects covered during the event:

~ SVG ~ Accessibility ~ URIs ~ Linked Data ~ Linking Open Data ~ Embedding Semantics into Applications such as iTunes ~ Semantic Address Books ~ Semantic Web & Music ~ RDF for TV/Radio ~ Public Sector on the SemWeb ~ Automatic Indexing Science ~ BBC Programmes (in RDF) ~ DBpedia ~ Open Data Licensing ~ SemWeb Architecture ~ Contextual Matching ~ SPARQL IRC Bot (aka SPARQLBot) ~ Microformats (hCard, hAvatar, Privacy and Other Issues, Parsing) ~ Social Networking and Web of People ~ Streaming RDF ~ Making your FOAF file better by injecting Linked Data by Reference ~ academics and semantics ~ Semantic Monopoly ~ Data Spaces ~ Technologies which influence(d) the semantic web ~

More information can be found via the getsemantic wiki SemanticCamp_London Page

My Presentation

My presentation started at about 12:05pm on the second day (today, which is a Sunday).

• The Subjects of the Slides: Data Space Philosophy & Technologies which influence(d) the Semantic Web
• The Subjects of the Questions: OpenLink Data Spaces, OpenLink Virtuoso, OpenLink Ajax Toolkit, MOAT (Meaning Of A Tag), DataPortability, APML, OpenLink RDF Browser, https://myopenlink.net/ods/
• The Slides (in PDF)

Update 18th February 2008 (15:55GMT): Now hooked up with dbpedia tags

Technorati Tags: semanticcamplondon, semanticcamp, semanticweb, upcoming:event=402789

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Hi all,

Just a quick note to say that I am ashamed to say that I check out where I am in the Google Search Ranking, its quite addictive, I check once a month-ish and I constantly battle the actor Daniel Day-Lewis…. which is quite funny

One point I should make here is that search would be a lot better if things were SemanticWebbisised.

Long live FOAF and other technologies which make up the Semantic Web.

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DataPortability - The Pros

If you were not aware there is a movement going on at the moment called the DataPortability initiative. This initiative has been set up to try to:

• show users of web systems (in particular Social Networking systems) that they currently don’t have full control over the information that they put onto systems
• assist developers and business people that the best way forward to to make Data portable, as in you can move your information from one system to another by sharing (one of the slogans was “sharing is caring”).

I think that this is a very good cause because

• Its a step in the right direction for the next web (which might be called Web 3.0 or the Data Web)
• It is more ethical as it gives the user the ability to control who has what information

From a technological point of view it does seem to be going in a good direction with technologies such as:

• OpenID for Identification
• OAuth for Authentication
• FOAF for sharing profile and friendship information (plus this is a Semantic Web based vocabulary)
• SIOC for linking blog posts, wiki articles and such like together into a community (this is also a Semantic Web vocabulary)
• RSS and OPML for News Feeds (aka Syndication)
• Microformats (this is a Semantic Web based technology for embedding meaningful data into (X)HTML web pages)
• APML for sharing information about a users interests (also known as an Attention Profile)

DataPortability - The downsides

There are two downside which I can see at the moment in regards to the DataPortability initiative, and they are:

• It hasn’t concentrated on linking common data together to make a meaningful graph. This is what people are trying to do on the “Linked Data” project. This would come about with the use of things like SKOS, SCOT and MOAT.
• It has concentrated on Input/Output. With DataPortability a user has more control over their data, but its still a “copy/paste” problem, which uses up more memory and what if one side is edited and the other is not. It is a silo problem, data is more important for the user than for companies. Real Data Portability should be based on references like an Object Identifier (OID) is a unique key to an object, this can be done on the web using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs).

Summary

The DataPortability Initiative is a good one, I do see it as a stepping stone to the next web (or an evolutionary step towards a better being) and it has some very cool technologies that it tries to promote. However there are downsides, which can (and should) be fixed using Semantic Web technologies.

OpenLink Software supports DataPortability Standards and Semantic Web Standards, and I am on the DataPortability Evangelism Group and in the Semantic Web Community. With OpenLink Data Spaces the user is in full control of their data, its theirs, no silo, they give permissions about who/what can access it and it is their own Personal Space.

A new slogan for DataPorability + the Semantic Web

Providing meaning is caring, therefore: Connect, Control, Share, Link.

Document Web Links (for Humans):

• DataPortability.org
• Semantic Web at the W3C

Technorati Tags: dataportability, semanticweb, webstandards, pros, cons

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