artisan: musings / mutterings on semweb themes

Some Domain-Driven Design in action

2009-04-16T20:36:00.009+12:00

I've been working hard on the preview release of gloss.io which is now up for public scrutiny. Aloog the way I've been learning more about the problem domain and many of the req's are solidifying nicely. Meanwhile Eric Evans book on Domain Driven Design which:

has many resonances with my keydrivers for gloss.io - i.e. developing contextual language as a core part of the solution lifecycle, and
captures many useful design principles in a way that I'm going to explore in the next pyglos release (blue-bottle)

I enclose a couple of examples, the first showing an Entity Factory Pattern, using an Interface that specifies the contract which each Entity Factory must fulfil and the key classes that are produced by those factories.

While the following UML Class diagram illustrates the relationship between gloss.io domains for content subscription - such that a dependent domain ( one that reuses content from another domain ) can be notified of changes to the source content.

Both these models form part of the design make-over that I'm busy with right now.

One more thing, I've just found the Google MyLibrary service and have started to capture my professional library - this is a lot richer and easier to manage than my old wiki version of the same. Great work Google!

Glossio preview release

2009-04-16T19:39:00.011+12:00

The gloss.io web glossonomy service is now open for public preview. The application reveals some of the basic principles of the pyglos project - an environment to support the growth of open, community driven concept maps that can be harnessed for domain-specific needs including Glossaries, Thesaurii, Taxonomies and Topic or Concept Maps - see this earlier blog for more.

This first major demonstrates core features for the searching, browsing and visualisation of Concepts identified by Terms. Three taxonomies are loaded : SONZ, FONZ and etnography. In the next release will be member-managed content with many cross-domain, reuse and extension features.

Related resources for this work can be found here...

Glossio general discussion & announcements on Google Groups - I welcome any feedback, ideas or contributions to help me continue with this work.
The Glossio content-linked discussion threads on Disqus are an experimentatl integration of this service within glossio. Please let me know what you think about it!

Cheers, Chris

Transitioning web application frameworks towards the Semantic Web (master thesis progress report)

2009-02-23T16:08:00.002+13:00

I found the this thesis presentations perpective and the project/apps it covers to be quite informative and a useful checklist of some semweb apps to investigate futher. No mention of the OORT libraries I used in CVCore but there is of the Python RDFLib.

Note to self: I should revisit this (CVCore) work as it seems the approach I took could be more innovative than I've realised. Even though this presentation is 2yrs old :)

Transitioning web application frameworks towards the Semantic Web (master thesis progress report)

View more presentations from metaman. (tags: patterns types)

re New Zealand Internet Blackout - Creative Freedom

2009-02-23T13:40:00.003+13:00

It's impossible to see how such a law can be enacted without misuse of abuse. Let the legal system work as designed - i.e evidence based and with fair & qualified judgement.

Join the New Zealand Internet Blackout to protest against the Guilt Upon Accusation law 'Section 92A' that calls for internet disconnection based on accusations of copyright infringement without a trial and without any evidence held up to court scrutiny. This is due to come into effect on February 28th unless immediate action is taken by the Government.

If you think this sounds daft or unfair then click on the link below and sign the petition.

pygloss primer

2009-02-13T15:29:00.007+13:00

I've been working pretty solidly on my pygloss project: a Python Glossonomy web application. So what's Glossonomy you ask? Well, it's something between Glossary - a list of terms and definitions, and Taxonomy - a controlled vocabulary with relationships between terms (like Narrower/Wider, Container/Part, Related etc. ). Also in this space are Ontologies, Topic Maps and Concept Maps. And since I don't want to be constrained by preconceptions I've coined a new word - Glossonomy!

Here are a couple of scenarios that might be familiar...

Two groups of people (communities, departments, agencies) are working in similar spaces and have similar interests. Now they need to collaborate, but they find they're using different terms for the same thing, or the same term meaning different things. It can take months to iron out assumptions and errors caused by simple misconceptions.

A business has invested in defining a formal vocabulary to support its' core processes, and this is published as MS Word document. Because it covers the whole business it's weighty and mind-numbingly boring. People don't really use it as intended.

The tools I mention above all try to address these issues, and so does pygloss, but with some Web 2.0 influences at work. This give use the following characteristics/goals:

100% web application
Bundles related Terms and Concepts into Domains which have self-managing user Communities.
Encourages sharing Terms and Concepts across Domains - cross-pollination, reuse and enrichment.
Search and Visualisation tools to explore related concepts.
The URI is important - terms get enduring URLs so they can be referenced from other places reliably.
Support for semantic web standards - RDF, skos etc

Other extended capabilities could include

Glossary Extraction from parsed documents.
Term, Concept Extraction, based on submitted content (docs, web pages etc) using Natural Language techniques.

In future posts I'll cover the following:

some screen shots and previews of latest pygloss 0.2 featues and the data model.
relationships to wordnet and other taxonomy tools
Some 'under the hood stuff' - how it hangs together (expect some python, ajax, zodb, xapian learnings here).
how this project relates to my earlier cvcore work.

But I'll sign-off now with an appetizer - a some visualisations produced by pygloss 0.1...

Using the AT&T dot library, automated layouts delivered as SVG, PDF, PNG etc...

And from thejit - interactive visualisations, using client-side javascript...

A 'hypertree' layout on the central term 'COURSE' and others within a radius of 2 'hops'

And a radial graph layout, composed of all the terms from the domain IM.SDR...

The Machine is Us/ing Us.

2008-05-08T16:45:00.000+12:00

A stylish award-winning video from Mike Wesch, exploring how our everyday internet behaviour is building a new semantic-savvy digital world.

"Web 2.0 in just under 5 minutes. I was inspired to make this video while writing a paper about web 2.0. Struggling to find a way to put it into words, I decided to make this video to show it rather than tell it....

mediatedcultures.net

Update: Identity Conference 2008

2008-05-05T23:49:00.002+12:00

Re my earlier post: musings / mutterings on meta^2: Identity Conference 2008

Courtesy of delicious network (thanks ldodds) I found an interesting wiki-like debating tool (DebateGraph) which maps/visualises a debate into a specialised ontology.

A good example debate is the current UK national identity system 2008/09 discussion (3rd item in the list of features maps) which includes:

The Government intends to introduce biometric residence permits for foreign nationals in 2008, with the first ID cards expected to be issued to British citizens in 2009.
All UK residents over the age of 16 will be required to have a unique ID card that will combine the cardholder’s biometric data with checked and confirmed identity details, called a ‘biographical footprint’.

This particular debate is quite relevant to much of the conference discussion, which naturally oscillated between the philisophical, the technical and the off-topics ;)

Am I Linked In?

2008-05-05T16:17:00.006+12:00

Ok I'm off work crook - bad weather and a really bad chest cold uugh. So I decided to check out LinkedIn an it seems I've got a number of IT colleagues using the network. Although the UI is quite old-school and unintuitive I'll give it a spin and see how it works out.

Other webservices and web technologies I use include:

Del.icio.us - my mainstay social tagging service (Recommended)
MoinMoin wiki for my Company website
Python and the Pylons webframework
And experimentally, Dapper

Identity Conference 2008

2008-04-30T05:40:00.006+12:00

I'm attending this conference (final day today). A couple of themes fired for me - both from Dick Hardts presentation, - but definitely "under the hood" of several sessions:

What is Open Data - is it like Eric Schmidt's 'the data is in the cloud' ?
I found a few links to the topic of Open Government Data
What is rel='me' (Dick Hardt mentioned this)? Does this relate to the Semantic Web?

I'm hoping to spark some discussion on this today - let's see who's also into this stuff :). I've tagged several relevant sites, see imconf, opendata and opengovernment

semweb on youtube

2008-04-13T12:16:00.005+12:00

Here are a couple of introductory vids fom Matt Sporny.

By Matt Sporny

Some 'good oil' on python default arguments

2008-04-13T12:09:00.003+12:00

Traps and a simple way to avoid-em for python using mutable types as default arguments - well worth a read

http://boodebr.org/main/python/tourist/mutable-obj-as-default-arg

"Many modern languages allow for default function arguments. Default arguments can be a great thing - they allow you to use sensible defaults for the common cases, without taking away the power to add more functionality as needed. You can arbitrarily expand a function definition without breaking existing code by providing sensible defaults for the new parameters.

Here is a fun example of how Python will bite you if you try to use a mutable object (like a list, dict, or object instance) as a default argument. The following is an example function I'm trying to write ..."

A metadata registry in action

2008-04-03T20:04:00.003+13:00

I found this today while exploring use cases for the skos ontology looking for similarities to those for the cvcore. The NSDL Metadata Registry has some interesting features:

it's based on skos
it demonstrates a nice simple approach to the slowly-changing-time dimension , using a timeslice mechanism that allows the user to get a point-in time view of a resource.
all resources are viewable as either HTML or RDF
The developer blog gives an interesting insight into how the project runs.

Well worth a look for my NZ education sector friends :)

Importing FOAF / SKOS ontologies with Protege OWL

2008-04-03T11:21:00.007+13:00

I''ve been having some tribulations with importing the well-known ontologies (FOAF and SKOS) properly in Protege 3.4 (build 108)

First problem - what to import?
Simple question, but no immediately obvious answer. BTW has something changed here recently - as I seem to remember this being simple in the past??

I'm now importing OK from...

Second Problem - Protege errors
I wouldn't expect too much drama here as these are well travelled paths?

foaf won't import...

INFO: Loading triples
INFO: Start processing ontology: http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/20070524.rdf Time: Thu Apr 03 11:42:43 NZDT 2008
WARNING: [ProtegeOWLParser] Warning: No default namespace found in file. Will use http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/20070524.rdf -- DefaultProtegeOWLParserLogger.logWarning()
INFO: [ProtegeOWLParser] Completed triple loading after 646 ms
INFO: [TripleChangePostProcessor] Completed lists after 0 ms
java.lang.ClassCastException: edu.stanford.smi.protegex.owl.model.impl.DefaultRDFSNamedClass
at edu.stanford.smi.protegex.owl.model.triplestore.impl.OWLAnonymousClassPostProcessor.convertNamedEnumeratedClasses(Unknown Source)
at edu.stanford.smi.protegex.owl.model.triplestore.impl.OWLAnonymousClassPostProcessor.(Unknown Source)
at edu.stanford.smi.protegex.owl.model.triplestore.impl.TripleChangePostProcessor.postProcess(Unknown Source)....
...lots more

Curious that I get different behaviour (on my OSX leopard system) depending on how I start Protege.

from the protege.app the ontology loads, but the properties tab is broken (red box)
from run_protoge.sh I get the error output above and the ontology doesn't load

Ok, I checked the latest build (128) and I get almost the same behaviour.

And finally protege 4.0 (alpha) build 61, which Does work - however it's a completely new UI experience.

Why is Genericode so Complex?

2008-03-02T17:11:00.011+13:00

I need to point out the overlapping requirements for OASIS Genericode standard ( v1.0, December 2007 ) and those for my work on the OWL Code Value Core Ontology. Basically they're the same. OK, there seem to be a number of needs captured for genericode that are not part of CVCore, but IMO these are the boundary cases - needed in perhaps 1 or 2 percent of cases (a guestimate at this stage - note to self to look into measuring this). CVCore will be extended if needed to support these, or these advanced requirements can be met in specialised ontology(s) that subclass cvcore:CodeValue etc.

The MAJOR requirement that CVCore is addressing now, and which has been deferred until v2.0 of genericode is mapping between Code Value Items - which in CVCore is done via the hasEquivalent relation. Genericode 2.0 will support Derived Code Lists which seem likely to involve some tricky diff management techniques (uugh).

NB the post title refers to this presentation, published by Tony Coates. On Page 67 he explains that Genericode 1.0 DOES NOT support derived code lists (although they were part of the ) 0.4 draft.

Unfortunately the multi-version, equivalence relation is right at the heart of the Code Value problem (ever tried to understand why two systems validations don't line up for the same topic? Maybe they use different code list versions?) . This , coupled with the need for agreement on the Semantics encourages me that this work is valuable and will help the genericode efforts also.

Introducing the Code Value Core

2008-02-23T13:39:00.006+13:00

And so it begins....

Since I'm doing a project that has a potentially wide audience (at least in the IT world) it's time to start using this medium to shout it out .

The main place to find out about the project is my wiki at CodeValueCore, and there's a lot more material to come - I 'll release it as I find the time.

Code Value Core (CVC for short) is an OWL ontology. It's purpose it to provide a simple standard for CodeValue publication on the Web. It has similar goals to the OASIS Genericode project, but adds longitudinal and vertical relationships between Code Values. It should be fully interoperable with genericode.