Thought of the day, originally posted at #w3c (IRC chat)

I used to think of the web as a web of documents, but now I see it as a web of documents and web of data. I took what I saw, but maybe I never understood it from the beginning. See TBL's original proposal. By random chance I picked up a book titled "Intelligent Databases: Object-Oriented, Deductive Hypermedia Technologies" by Parsaye et. al. After reading some of it, I'm seeing some trends. It seems that the web is pulling a lot of ideas from it and doing it in a distributed fashion. now to figure out what is going on today...simple answers, I don't know

Financial System

I've realized that I do not understand the financial system. Would the existing financial system support something like MNDF, or does it need to be augmented? If so, how can it be done so it does not alienate anyone? Speaking of alienation, how would people like Tim Berners-Lee go about it? He says, "This is for Everyone". He even founded The World Wide Web Foundation http://www.webfoundation.org/, which is "devoted to achieving a world in which all people can use the Web to communicate, collaborate and innovate freely, building bridges across the divides that threaten our shared future". I certainly feel that the web is very powerful tool, and agree with Tim that even more changes could occur with the semantic web (should it exist). It is my hope that these changes do involve everyone.

Crisis

I feel in somewhat of a crisis. I am doing this because it appears to work best for me at the present time. But that seems selfish. I think, "why don't I let it go"? I think it will help people. If that is the case, then it is worth pursuing. On my pursuit though, I feel it would be best to listen to others, and be humble. I hope I can do that.

Open Tech Forever

I noticed Michel Bauwen's publicising Open Tech Forever on Indiegogo. On their funding campaign they say, "Open Tech Forever is helping create the Open Source Economy: a collaborative society that shares its knowledge, skills, technologies, and resources to overcome artificial barriers and achieve abundance and prosperity for all." They also have a website at http://opentechforever.com/. Aaron Makaruk, who is involved in the project, also gave a descriptive TEDx talk in Madrid about Open Source Ecology. The founder, Yoonseo KANG also will speaking at SDF 2013 . Other's mentioned include Johnathan Yelenick who is heavily into permaculture and Tristan Copley Smith who produces videos for the project.

PaySwarm client in Node.js

"This is the first blog post in a three part series that will explore the PaySwarm specifications and demonstrate, using code examples and video, how to build a fully functional PaySwarm client in Node.js." Reference: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/04/web-payments-with-payswarm-identity-part-1-of-3/

Imputed Production and the Social Sufficiency Coalition blogs

I haven't looked enough into various models to use linked data. Presently, I have no idea what will truly work. Thanks to Patrick Anderson I know of some new things. He has two blogs that I know of: (http://imputedproduction.blogspot.com/) and (http://socialsufficiencycoalition.blogspot.com/).

Two Discoveries: Stuff like the Danube Project and (apparently) similar stuff Henry Story is working on

I just discovered that Henry Story (http://bblfish.net/) is doing some stuff like this thanks to his post on Markus Sabadello's The Three Visions video (seeAlso: http://projectdanube.org/). Here are what appear to be the latest links: https://blogs.oracle.com/bblfish/entry/supply_networks for his blog post, and http://java.net/projects/sommer which includes a file, and a description for something titled AddressBook in the svn repo as well as something online ( http://java.net/projects/sommer/sources/svn/content/trunk/www/AddressBook.html?rev=515). Awesome, bookmark for the future.

Project Danube

I have to give a shout out to Project Danube. If you want serious coding go there. http://blog.projectdanube.org/. I'm still learning: http://bshambaugh.org/experiments/connect_dots3.html.

Pangaia Project

Mark Janssen on the public-community-io mailing list informed me of a very similar project at pangaia.sf.net. A lot of thought was put into this project, and I intend on checking it out.

BotQueue

I e-mailed Zach Hoeken and he told me about BotQueue, a program that he has been working on with a few others. Apparently this is a way to send 3d printing requests such that multiple printers can print them at a time, speeding up efficiency. This seems great for the distributed manufacturing portion of the concept mentioned in this blog. I'd imagine one could extend this idea to other types of manufacturing so distributed teams could automatically build things (perhaps incorporating linked data) wherever it is best to build them without a lot of fuss. Tony pointed out in his blog hoektronics that he didn't see the point in distributing print jobs around the world, and then shipping them to location for purposes of inconsistent quality control, higher shipping costs than one shipment, various times of arrival. Zach retorted that it really wasn't the point of BotQueue. Instead it was to control large groups of printers at a high level. Again, this makes me wonder, how will this work with linked data, and forms of AI? I believe the folks at Digital Bazaar have given some thought to 3d printing and payment. I'm not certain I can find it, but here are some use cases published by Payswarm, a product that they have developed. Maybe there would be a way that everything could be paid for, and people would be happy?

Current Activities - 2/12/2012

I'm currently reading Resilience by Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy and Towards a New Socialism by W. Paul Cockshott and Allin Cotrell. I've also read descriptions on the P2P Foundation concerning Wolfgang Hoeschele, Roberto Verzola, Raoul Viktor, and Mark Joob. Perhaps you can separate things in two classes: what is going on, and what to do about it. I'll have to write more once I know more. The model presented here is just a proposal, and the ontologies are likely the hardest part. People must implement them, and it is difficult to get them to do that. See for example John Wilbanks talk titled, "Second-Generation Open Access: Building an Open Content".

Am I Doing the Right Thing?

A question I deal with almost daily is, "Am I doing the right thing?". I may want to go back to school, but I am horribly afraid of debt, and somewhat dysfunctional while focusing on anything but this. I have a Master's in Chemical Engineering with a focus on Polymer Processing, with a focus on Melt Blowing (an area that most have never heard of). I am studying Additive Manufacturing (Additive Manufacturing Technologies: Rapid Prototyping to Direct Digital Manufacturing by Ian Gibson et. al.

In an e-mail I said, "It is difficult for me to say what my computer skills are. I've built websites with html, Flash, GIMP, InkScape, Drupal, and freebie JavaScript. I've touched PHP, Python, and Java, and a very small amount of JavaScript (I've seen it a couple of times). I've looked at Bash scripting (and maybe Perl?), but I'm still not that much. Except for a few stints with Basic and a confusing course in C++ before entering college, some attempts at C in undergrad, I didn't start challenging myself religiously with programming until around 2007 to 2008 with Fortran. I find I spend most of my time trying to connect things in books, in journals, online, and through experience, to figure what is most important. I know right now I decided that it would be a good idea to study computer networks, network security, logic, Dr. Jeffrey Ullman's Introductory C.S. book in conjunction with MIT Scheme, perhaps study Dr. Ullman's Coursera course on automata, a book on Intelligent Databases by Parsaye et. al etc. I spent over a year with professional hackers at a hackerspace, but found myself to be a newbie because it was another person who used things like grep, sed, and awk, and regexp to help me set up a Hiawatha webserver to run Friendica. Some interactions on the public-lod mailing list have also led me to the concept of resilience, which I'm told has something to do with my blog (adistributedeconomy.blogspot.com). I've read Dr. Liyang Yu's A Developer's Guide to the Semantic Web, played around a little with the visualization tools, ontology engineering tools, etc, but still found myself confused (thinking I should just study, code and definitely interact more). ....

My LinkedIN profile gives some idea of what I've done otherwise (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/brent-shambaugh/9/125/9b9). ....

Currently, I'm teaching one chemistry lecture right now in a part-time temporary position."

ISO 15926 - The Semantic Web for Process Industries

I recently discovered a standard which uses the semantic web for process industries. It is ISO 15926 <1>. Apparently it has been in development for awhile, since the late eighties <2>. It is self-described as the "Semantic Web for Engineering" at its official website <3>, <4>. A brief introduction may be found here <5>. The iRINGTools Software was created "to provide users with a deployable implementation of ISO 15926 services" <6>. Antoly Levenchuck apparently is an expert in the area. He started a blog <7>, and is also the president of the TechInvestLab consulting firm <8>, <9>.

I first learned about ISO 15926 from a presentation <10> by another expert named Adrian Laud who works for Noumenon Consulting Limited <11>. He gave this presentation at the Seminar on Industrial Information Management at VTT in Espoo, Finland <12>.

An overview of some implementations of ISO 15926 is available on the IRING Website <13> which includes work described by Levenchuck and Laud.


<1> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_15926

<2> http://www.infowebml.ws/intro/paper.htm

<3> http://15926.org/index.php

<4> http://www.infowebml.ws/

<5> http://www.infowebml.ws/intro/introduction.htm

<6> http://iringug.org/wiki/index.php?title=IRINGTools

<7> http://levenchuk.com/

<8> http://iringug.org/wiki/index.php?title=TechInvestLab

<9> http://techinvestlab.ru/techinvestlab_en

<10> http://www.ththry.org/datafiles/userfiles/File/THTH_Spring_Seminar_2010_Laud_Proteus.pdf

<11> http://www.noumenon.co.uk/

<12> https://www.simantics.org/simantics/events/the-spring-seminar-of-the-thth-association-and-the-codes-project

<13> http://iringug.org/wiki/index.php?title=IRING_Implementations

Hacking Resources Originally Posted on the WebPayments Mailing List

For what is worth, here are a few things I've found interesting, or would like to learn more about:

TCP/IP/HEX

IBM Red Book: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/gg243376.html
     Hexadecimal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexadecimal
   - Hex Editor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hex_editor
   - Hex Dump: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexdump


Patvera Maltego (network visualization used for social engineering)

http://www.paterva.com/web6/products/maltego.php


Social Engineering Risks (the weakest link)

- Social Engineering: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_engineering_%28security%29
- Hacking the Human, Ian Mann


Rainbow Tables, Dictionary Attacks, Brute Force Attacks  (for Cracking)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_table
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary_attack
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute_force_attack


Rainbow Series (Collection of infosec books)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Series


BackTrack Linux (penetration testing distribution)

- http://www.backtrack-linux.org/


Wireshark (packet analyzer)

- http://www.wireshark.org/


Network Security Conferences, such as:

- DEFCON: https://www.defcon.org/   (curiously, no mention of the semantic web)
- Blackhat: http://www.blackhat.com/


Metasploit (platform for exploitation)

- MetaSploit http://www.metasploit.com/
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasploit_Project


SNORT (network intrusion detection and prevention)

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snort_%28software%29


netstat (network statistics)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netstat


ISO/IEC 27000-series (standards for information security)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_27000-series


Books:

The Network Security Bible, Eric Cole

Joel Scambray et. al, Hacking Web Applications Exposed, 2nd Ed.


Magazines:

Phrack Magazine: http://phrack.org/

What do Biohackers (a.k.a Citizen Scientists) believe?

Please see Meredith Patterson's, A Biopunk Manifesto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Thn7d7-jywU Perhaps they could benefit from a distributed economy?

Musings

R&D is decreasing in industry, and academia is thought of having the role of picking up the slack. Professors and Graduate students may know a lot in a particular area, but at the same time they may not be well aware of what is going on in other fields. There are cries for creative solutions and collaboration. There are real problems to solve. Citizen Scientists want to help, but face hurdles accessing published literature. Employers are looking for people to fit their positions, and job-seekers are looking for positions they qualify for. It seems a lot of this has to do with linking people with data.