Sunday, September 30, 2012

Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (also see "A Few License Labels")

Yes! There is a way to express license information in RDF. That is, there is a way to make copyright information machine readable. Once labeled, this frees the human to do other things instead of aggregating material that falls under the appropriate license.

Welcome to Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (ccREL). Also see an article for it on Wikipedia.

Please compare this to a previous post titled, "A few license labels".

Friday, September 28, 2012

CmapTools

In addition to Tufts Universities' Visual Understanding Environment (VUE), I also discovered CmapTools. It appears a bit older than VUE, but in some ways is more functional. Like VUE, it provides a means of building concept maps. Concept maps are like mind maps, except that they do not have to have a central node. See concept maps on Wikipedia for more information.

I am very interested in expressing concept maps semantically so that they are machine readable. This could make the information useful for other purposes such as other visualizations. For example, see my previous post, "Network Visualization Within Diaspora (cont.)". As usual, the bioinformatics community seems to be ahead of the game. See a website on Semantic Maps for Bioinformatics.

Monday, September 17, 2012

A few recent findings

Simantics is one of the most sophisticated open source project-based tools I've seen. It reminds me of tools developed by Dassault Systemes. Kune is based on Apache Wave (formerly Google Wave) and is similar to Rizzoma. This relation and further relations may be found on Wikipedia under Apache Wave. Cytoscape is a wonderful visualization tool from the Bioinformatics community. It allows for RDF visualization and SPARQL Queries.

Monday, August 20, 2012

Quotes I like

"Over the course of history, these five elements have characterized teams and collaborative innovators, starting a the dawn of humanity. Disruptive innovations like gunpowder, the printing press, paper money, and bookkeeping are not the result of a carefully planned innovation process. Nevertheless, by analyzing teams and collaborative innovators of the past, we can identify their typical behavioral patterns. Those lessons from the past form five corollaries.

1.Collaboration networks are learning networks.
2.Collaboration networks need an ethical code.
3.Collaboration networks are based on trust and self-organization.
4.Collaboration networks make knowledge accessible to everybody.
5.Collaboration networks operate in internal honesty and transparency.

The elements constitute the “genetic code” of participants in COINs."

pg. 53, Swarm Creativity, Peter A. Gloor


This quote reminds me of distributed funding as described in an earlier post:

'One could envision a "digital-age co-op" with peer-rating systems that dynamically apportion shares to contributors based on the community's assessment of the value added by individual contributors. Annual profits form sales and services could then be distributed across the community of contributors. Whatever the precise arrangement, it's clear that the future of peer production lies in hybrid models where participants share and appropriate at the same time.' pg. 283, Wikinomics


Quotes related to Boeing:

"Like many of its contemporaries, Boeing is moving beyond the multinational model to something new--a truly global firm that breaks down national silos, deploys resources and capabilities globally, and harnesses the power of human capital across borders and organizational boundaries." pg. 284, Wikinomics

Concerning Boeing's 787:

"Altogether, it's a massive technological and human challenge to bring together such a diverse and globally distributed team of designers and manufactures into a highly complex and structured development project. Underlying this complex network is a real-time collaboration system created by Boeing and Dassault Systemes called the Global Collaboration Environment. This cutting-edge system links all of the various partners to a platform of product life-cycle management tools and a shared pool of design data." pg. 227, Wikinomics (See the YouTube video Global Collaboration Environment for Electronics or End to end PLM story for an example.)

"No more need to send engineering drawings back and forth between engineering and design teams. Any member of any team, anywhere in the world, at any time, can access, review, and revise the same drawings and simulations while the software tracks the revisions. Non-engineering managers can get in on the action too. Light-weight viewers enable everyone from marketing execs to cost accountants to review and comment on the plans as they progress, ensuring that the final design come to fruition in the broadest possible context.', pg. 227-228 Wikinomics

"Without real-time access to a shared pool of design tools and engineering data, Boeing's efforts to create effective interenterprise collaboration would be nowhere.", pg. 238 Wikinomics


The Wikinomics relating to Open Source:

"In the old days you were assigned to a corporate team, and that's where you stayed, building up bonds of trust and loyalty that would enable you and your teammates to collaborate effectively. Today, new forms of mass collaboration suggest that companies may be better off with a more self-organized approach to teaming. ... Some will no doubt complain that such a radical approach to workplace organization is unmanageable. But if that were really the case, then we wouldn't see communities like Wikipedia, the open source movement, of the Human Genome Project collaborating successfully on a very large scale. With the right tools and enough transparency, a large and diverse group of people self-selecting to add value can complete even the most complex tasks with only a minimum of central control", pg. 259, Wikinomics

Strategies of SocialText:

"Mayfield thinks that the solution is collaboration tools that adapt to the habits of workplace teams and social networks rather than the other way around. Indeed, this insight was the genesis of the business. He and his partners came up with the idea for Socialtext when they observed how employees in Silcon Valley firms were bringing in applications from the open source community and using them as a source of personal competitive advantage. If the tool proved to be effective, they would quickly begin to see a bottom-up demand pattern emerging in the firm as other employees clamored to try them out." pg. 252 Wikinomics

Saturday, July 28, 2012

Some Research on A few Progamming Goals

Given that mobile technology is so popular, at some point it may be prudent to investigate mobile technology programming. I was very excited when I discovered a video about creating a touch enabled user interface for Java ME devices. I looked it up later, and I found a page that is perhaps better. Here is a screencast for creating a touch enabled UI, that I may have found originally. I also stumbled across a Google Tech talk titled "Girl Geek Dinner #5: How to Succeed in Mobile".

Also, screen a size could be an issue. I was reminded of this when I tried to find some more information about what Nerdy Girls (a group at Ohm Space) had put up. I found this site on github.

I've been wanting to have a way to express RDF, create ontologies, use ontologies (e.g. I believe fill in instances of ontologies to create particular RDF graphs), perform SPARQL queries, and see results in a visual way.

Here are a few initial observations:

Franz has a product called Gruff that allows for graphical SPARQL queries within AllegroGraph. Everything is done without writing code, and this is demonstrated in a YouTube video titled, "Graphical SPARQL Queries from the Gruff Lab". AllegroGraph also provides another way to see the result from a SPARQL query, this is though integration of TopBraid Composer. This is demonstrated in "AllegroGraph TopBraid Composer Integration" on Youtube. In addition, AllegroGraph allows for visual RDF browsing which is apparent in the Youtube video, "AllegroGraph Views". As a side note, Franz is also associated with Callimachus, which is described on the home site as, "A framework for data-driven applications based on Linked Data".

Protege-OWL includes the OntoGraph and OwlViz plugins. An OntoGraph demonstration video on Youtube has in the caption that it allows "browsing, searching, filtering, and manipulating the graph". OwlViz allows someone to navigate the class hierarchy and compare the asserted class hierarchy with the asserted class hierarchy.

The NeOn-Project involves 14 European Partners. Activities such a collaborative ontology development, ontology visualization, a graphical rule language, and others are possible. Based on the manual, the capabilities appear to be very extensive. One example is their relationship browser. Their video tutorial appears to be very interesting

Dan Brickley posted about Visual SPARQL queries with the Semantic Web.

Sunday, July 8, 2012

Protocol Confusion

I have been confused about protocols. Apparently, Rizzoma does not use Apache Wave? It does according to Wikipedia. According to a comments section on the Rizzoma site it uses ShareJS. Jeremy Naegel also comments on it on Quora. For reference, here is a long list of protocols on the W3C site.

Saturday, July 7, 2012

Project Related Links Online

The Edelweiss research group has much in common with the scope of this blog and with Apache Wave (also on Wikipedia), on which platforms such as Kune and Rizzoma have been built. These platforms are distributed, but are unlike Diaspora and Friendica since they do not use protocols like Salmon and Zot. In addition, they do not use OStatus. More information about distributed social networks may be found on Wikipedia.

Edelweiss is an acronym for Exchanges, Documents, Extraction, Languages, Webs, Ergonomics, Interactions, Semantics, and Servers. More information about its scientific foundations may be found at http://raweb.inria.fr under the heading Social Semantic Web. Fabien Gandon, the head of this group also has participated in the Gephi project with his Semantic Web Import.

One popular website with the semantic web is Michael K. Bergman's site. He includes a list of Semantic Web tools. Out of all that I have seen, his is one of the most interesting, and perhaps complete.

MIT hosts the Center for Collective Intelligence. Books associated with the group include ones such as Democratizing Innovation by Eric Von Hippel, and The Future of Work by Thomas W. Malone.

Bioinformatics is one application for the semantic web. This is apparent in places such as the Semantic Web Challenge at semanticweb.org, the paper by Cannata et. al., "A Semantic Web for bioinformatics: goals, tools, systems, applications", the Zachary Voase's blog post, "Bioinformatics and the Semantic Web", semanticweb.com, and the World Wide Web Consortium's site. A fascinating book dealing with bioinformatics is Kevin Davies $1,000 Genome.