Ivan’s private site

January 24, 2007

Integrating Wikipedia and SW

Filed under: Semantic Web, Work Related — Ivan Herman @ 18:05

Chris Bizer and friends have recently announced their dbpedia site, which provides a mapping of the structural content of Wikipedia in RDF. For example, the categorization data of the Wikipedia entry on the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh can be seen as:

(I used the example of Amitav Ghosh in some of my presentations before, hence using this example.) Great stuff.

Chris & co always give me ways to extend the size of my foaf file… Using their latest goody (and following example on their page) I could add an extra line referring to <http://dbpedia.org/resource/city/Amstelveen> to mash up my foaf file with data about the city where I live (their previous contribution to increase my foaf file’s size was to add reference to my publications…)

It is also a nice coincidence that this is the second project in the last few days that binds these types of data with Exhibit as a tool to display the data (see their example; the other example being the Sweet Tools of Michael Bergman)…

January 13, 2007

BibTeX in RDF

Filed under: Semantic Web, Work Related — Ivan Herman @ 11:53

I just blogged elsewhere on BibSonomy, an alternative to del.icio.us that also includes bibliographical references. The core terminology used by the system (for bibliographical information) is based on BibTeX but entries can also be dumped to other formats. See, for example, a portion of my references in BibTeX or RDF.

However… which RDF terminology for BibTeX? Unfortunately, there are several around. BibSonomy uses the http://swrc.ontoware.org/ontology# namespace (usually referred to as “SWRC”), defined by ontoware. The bibtex2rdf tool by the Simile Project at MIT uses the http://simile.mit.edu/2006/11/bibtex# namespace (unfortunately, there is no namespace document). Incidentally, Steve Cayzer blogged yesterday on his usage of yet another tool, also called bibtex2rdf, that uses the http://www.edutella.org/bibtex# namespace (again, no namespace document). And, of course, there is also an example in microformats that could be used with either GRDDL or RDFa.

And all these vocabularies are different, unfortunately. For example, the ontoware version (used by BibSonomy) has a major flaw in my view: authors are just listed as individual property-values, without enclosing them into a Seq or (better) in a collection. Anybody who has ever co-authored a paper knows that the order of contributors is important. The usage of VCard, Dublin Core, FOAF, etc, is also different from one tool/vocabulary to the other. Pity… Maybe it is worth for the community to sort this out?

BibSonomy

Filed under: General, Private, Work Related — Ivan Herman @ 11:10

I colleague in the SWEO group (I think it was Paul Miller, I am not sure) drew my attention to the BibSonomy service. The service is pretty much along the same lines as del.icio.us. One can have bookmarks, share it with others, add tags, etc, etc.

So why bother? Well, the nice feature of BibSonomy is that it combines the traditional shared bookmarks with a more rigorous storage of bibliographical data. Ie, one can store bookmarks just like on del.icio.us, but one can also store bibliographical references for books, journal articles, etc, tagged the same way as bookmarks. For people working in, e.g., research where bibliographical data are necessary, this is a real plus. And the same social networking works for these entries, too. Ie, my (publicly visible) entries tagged with “accessibility” lists both my (few) bookmarks and the literature entries side by side. It has the usual goodies (RSS feeds, public vs. private bookmarks, etc) that I use at del.icio.us; one can also have a BibTeX and EndNote dump of the publications, as well as RDF formats.

I am seriously thinking of moving to this service instead of del.icio.us… To be seen.

(B.t.w., it has an extra service of importing your del.icio.us entries. An easy way to start with it…)

January 9, 2007

New ESW page: Converters to RDF

Filed under: Semantic Web, Work Related — Ivan Herman @ 12:15

A new page has just been added to ESW Wiki: list of converters to RDF. Clearly necessary and useful… and having it on the Wiki makes it possible to keep it up-to-date more easily!

B.t.w., the SWEO group will create a separate task force on Resource Gathering which will look at pages like this one. Still in the making, but worth keeping an eye on it…

January 7, 2007

Changing to WordPress

Filed under: General, Private — Ivan Herman @ 15:51

I used blosxom for a long time as a blogging software. It was quite all right but, I must admit, I got a little bit bored to keep it up myself if I had to do any change. So I decided to become lazy and switch to WordPress… I tried to do my best to set up RSS redirects so that the possible aggregations would continue to work. I am sure there will be problems but, well, this is the way these things work. If there are too many problems, I can still go back to my previous self.

My older blogs are still accessible via the 2006 archives (and before); the permalinks should also work. Some of the category pages do not seem to work, the RSS redirections seem to have taken their toll on the way blosxom operates…

January 4, 2007

A simple template for Picasa and Picasa Web

Filed under: General, Private — Ivan Herman @ 14:40

I have been using Picasa for a while to organize my photos on my machine, run a local slideshow, etc. It is a good software for that. I generate my photo albums with the HTML export facility of Picasa which also has a simple template system that lets you adapt the output.

I have recently updated my templates to include some javascript to navigate among the pictures with arrow keys; while I was at it, I also made the output proper and valid XHTML. I have put the template files to this site, in the somebody wants to use them: just download the zip file, deflate it in the web\templates directory of your Picasa installation, and that is it. Picasa will pick up the template automatically from this directory.

Not all my albums use the cleaned up version yet, but you can look at, say, my photos of Amsterdam as an example (I have commented out the copyright statement and the extra calligraphy image from the distribution, you might want to adapt it to your taste…).

Having said that, I will also have to look at my photos on Picasa Web again now; they have just made it possible for international users to buy (if necessary) additional disc space. This facility has some nice features, it may very well be a nice alternative to my current, mostly manual way of generating albums on the Web. I do not know yet.

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