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.

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.

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.

Visual Interfaces for Presentation and Querying

I've been wanting to have a way to express RDF, create ontologies, use ontologies, perform SPARQL queries (and other queries), and see results in a visual way. It would look a lot like the node and arc diagrams presented in the Apache Jena Tutorial: "An Introduction to RDF and the Jena RDF API". Like they said, "RDF is best thought of in the form of node and arc diagrams".

One thing that might help with this, especially the querying part, is something like Tangible Functional Programming by Conal Elliott.

Other sources of inspiration might be Dr. Chris Weaver's Improvise Software. Dr. Weaver's Software is used for exploratory visualization. His software follows navigation coordination patterns which include things such as semantic zoom, synchronized scrolling, and scatter plot matrices. The software also allows for the construction of coordinated query graphs with the visual abstraction language coordinated queries.

Visual Abstraction is an interesting topic. Other sources found online include things such as: Chang et. al., "Visual Abstraction in the Visual Design Process", Burnett and Ambler, "Interactive Visual Data Abstraction in a Declarative Visual Programming Language"

Margaret Burnett has written a plethora of documents on Visual Programming. For example, here is one that appeared in the Encyclopedia of Electrical and Electronics Engineering.

Well this is a work in progress. I could be totally off.

Thoughts on the Transit Project

Montana's Transit project reminds me of Howard Rhiengold and Eben Moglen. Howard Rhiengold because of his mention of his mention of distributed computing, and Eben Moglen due to his mention of Freedom Box, a personal device for privacy purposes. Howard Rhiengold gave a TED talk on a "new way of collaboration" which may be found on Youtube. Eben Moglen explores his reasoning behind the freedom box in his talk Freedom in the Cloud. Dylan Mackey told me what I really was doing for my project was developing a programming language. Strangely, this is includes what Montana is talking about.

The Concept of Pull with HackerSpaces

I imagined that the concept of Pull as described by David Siegel would be a boon to Hackerspaces. I would guess that each person would be found by others without the need of a large marketing budget. They could sell their product, partner on projects, and receive funding all because someone else found a need ... and in a utopia, the web of linked data would make this possible. At least, that is how I see it.