Monday, June 25, 2012

Context Information Security Reveals WebGL Security Risks

Context provides an excellent blog post on the Security Risks of WebGL. It is referenced by US-CERT on SECLISTS.ORG. On May 9th 2011, the date the post was written, risks included things such as DoS attacks and Cross-Domain Image Thefts.

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Glorious Generalist's thoughts on Facebook's Open Graph Protocol

I just found a wonderful blog post by Margaret Heller. She gives a healthy background of the history of Linked Data and the Open Graph Protocol on Facebook. This could be something to keep in mind when developing a new platform, if it should be called that.

More Reflections in the Real World

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories seems to have some parallels. They have a College Job Fair posting that mentions a few of the technologies proposed in this blog.

"Experience with knowledge discovery, information extraction, text processing, data analysis, visual analytics, , semantic graphs, natural language processing, machine learning, image and signal processing, large-scale data management and integration." Source: Job Title: COMPUTATION RECRUITER REFERRALS - Job ID: 8226 - LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY - Computation Directorate/Computing Applications and Research Department - College Job Fair Posting

In an article in the American Libraries Magazine titled, "The newest TECH SET® offers 10 guides to today's best library technologies" the semantic web is mentioned. In the same magazine, there is an article titled "Create a Library "Tech Shop"". Could it be that a distributed economy could be focused in libraries?

In 2007, there wasn't a whole lot going on between the semantic web and social networks. Now there is quite a bit. Compare Nova Spivack's 2007 article, "Defining the Semantic Graph, What is it Really?" to the Open Graph Protocol on the Facebook Platform.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Embedding VUE Within a Webpage

This is encouraging, Tuft's VUE may be integrated into a webpage. https://wikis.uit.tufts.edu/confluence/display/VUEUserGuide/20+Web+-+VUE+Applet
Hence, it just might be possible to integrate Friendica with VUE.

GraphGL for Network Visualization

GraphGL, based on WebGL, can be used for network visualization. In fact, it has been implemented with Gephi. Urban Skudnick describes such an implementation at gephi.org. On the web, it can be expressed in HTML5 with the canvas element.

Friendica works with Hiawatha

Thanks to members of DC405, Friendika now works with Hiawatha. Well at least to an extent. There are a few kinks to work out.

 Here is a nice banner for Friendica from
http://wiki.toktan.org/doku.php?id=friendica:promo






And another from http://www.hiawatha-webserver.org/

 

It might be obvious, but Friendica and Hiawatha seem to work well together. Friendica is loaded with privacy settings, and Hiawatha has never been hacked. For those interested, I plan on posting a how to later.

Photos of Ohm Space HackerSpace/MakerSpace

These are a few photos from Ohm Space, which could be a place for Distributed Manufacturing:

Ohm Space Meeting Place:















CNC Machine:















CNC Router:














Prusa Mendel 3D printer:














A view of the west side of the space:














More information about Hackerspaces is available at: http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Validation from thoughts by Peter A. Gloor on Collaborative Online Innovation Networks (COINs)

On page 16-17 of Swarm Creativity, Peter A. Gloor says:

"Over the past two decades, businesses have largely focused on streamlining structured business processes. Today, the challenge is to optimize the flow of knowledge, streamlining unstructured, knowledge-intensive innovation processes, and turning organizations into COINs. By visualizing the flow of knowledge, making it transparent, and optimizing its course, organizations and individuals become more creative, innovative, and responsive to change. This is one of the keys to success in the new century. But while the importance of continuously optimizing and fine-tuning businesses processes is universally recognized, the importance of redesigning and optimizing knowledge flows is still widely underrecognized.
Organizations can successfully promote COINS by giving up central control in favor of self-organization in swarm creativity, developing an ethical code, and setting up a social network connected by hubs of trust (which you'll also learn about in subsequent chapters)."

If this is true, this validates an idea I've had for awhile. That is, it makes a lot of sense to develop a global network of Hackerspaces. Perhaps, each Hackerspace could have its own node of a distributed social network. Hackerspaces seem to be places that prefer to give up central authority in favor near chaos. I know this is the case with Ohm Space. Ohm Space also supports the Hacker and Maker Communities.

See Wikipedia's Hacker Ethic for exposure to the Hacker Community:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic

Or perhaps Chris Anderson's Ten Rules of Maker Businesses for Exposure to the Maker Commununity:
http://blog.ponoko.com/2010/11/16/ten-rules-for-maker-businesses-by-wireds-chris-anderson-%E2%80%94-rule-1/

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Fuseki

I downloaded Apache Fuseki today. It is an improvement on Joseki. Time to learn about the SPARQL query language for the Semantic Web. http://jena.apache.org/documentation/serving_data/index.html

Monday, June 11, 2012

Conceptual Overview

I figured it was time to provide a bit more clarity. Hopefully this achieves it:

One part of this distributed economy is distributed manufacturing, where things are made where they are needed. In addition, there is an internet side to act as an enabler. There is an emerging form of web, the semantic web (or data web), that promises to make web search much easier and organize our information. There is also visual analytics that promises to allow us to see patterns in the data.

For the semantic web, look no further than Google's Knowledge Graph for an example of a Semantic Web application, or even Facebook's Open Graph. Both of these use ontologies, which are a key component of the semantic web.

For visual analytics, Tuft's universities' Visual Understanding Environment is a good example. Ontologies and RDF export are supported (two semantic web technologies). There also are cool things it interfaces with such as zotero (a bookmarking system) and Fedora (an architecture for storing digital content) that make it a bit more powerful.

What I described in the overview post of my blog (http://adistributedeconomy.blogspot.com/2012/03/overview.html) is a big picture view of a platform and system that agglomerates all of these emerging technologies in addition to a few others. They seem to work well together.

Here are a few links:

Google's Knowledge Graph: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/introducing-knowledge-graph-things-not.html

Facebook's Open graph: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/

Visual Understanding Environment (VUE Project) on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/vueproject?feature=results_main

Visual Understanding Environment Home Page: http://vue.tufts.edu/

Semantic Web at the W3C: http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/

Fedora Commons Repository Software: http://fedora-commons.org/

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Examination of VUE (Visual Understanding Environment)

VUE, or Visual Understanding Environment, led by Tufts University provides and excellent way to explore new information. It would correspond to the network visualization portion of this distributed economy. Unlike Gephi, VUE has the ability to interact with various digital repositories such as those built upon Fedora, interact with the bookmarking and bibliographic service Zotero, merge concept maps and interact with instant messaging to promote collaboration,export RDF, and many other things. In addition, VUE also mildly supports ontologies, which are used in the Semantic Web as frameworks to express a particular domain of knowledge.

Diego Uribe has also demonstrated an extension of VUE through his Digital Creative Problem Solving environment. In his extension, he developed an interactive work space that used infrared tracking technology present in the Wii Remote. He also proposed extensions such as a VUE I-Phone app, the ability for multiple users interacting in real time within the same workspace using Wii Remote technology, the ability to import spreadsheets into the map, importation of VUE into Second Life. He composed a two part Youtube video of his proposals which may be found at the following URLs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvH2JQsey-c for part 1 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzVB8KvlqNg for part 2.

A few videos that I found useful include:

VUE 2 overview by VUE Project
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrb7bAtmPE8

Other VUE Videos produced by the VUE Project
https://www.youtube.com/user/VUEProject

Undergrads Should Love Zotero by Rebecca0321
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDoO_JxQAko

Why use the Semantic Web for Distributed Innovation?

Follow the quotes:

"Four organizational principles needed for distributed innovation: "Empower people to experiment." "Enable bits of information to find each other." "Structure information so it can recombine with other pieces of information." "Create a governance system that sustains this process." --- (Summary of: The Success of Open Source) http://www.cooperationcommons.com/node/411

"The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, where on the original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing." ----(W3C SEMANTIC WEB ACTIVITY) http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/