Twisted

Und ich dachte, nach dem Studiumende werde ich mehr Zeit haben... ganz im Gegenteil, alles ist viel chaotischer geworden.
Wie auch immer, nur damit diese Seite nicht allzusehr verwaist wirkt, und um zu beweisen, dass ich noch da bin, hier ein weiterer Hammerbeitrag aus der Reihe Filme in 50 Worten

Ashley Judd wird Inspektorin in der Mordkomission, doch da macht sie sich schnell viele Feinde. Ihrer erster Job entpuppt sich gleich als eine Mordserie, wobei ihr im Nachhinein auffällt, dass sie mit allen Opfern geschlafen hat. Auch wenn ihr sonstiger Lebensstil eher dazu veranlassen würde, dass sie sich über diesen Zufälligkeit keine Gedanken zu machen bräuchte, da sie ja mit jedem ins Bett hüpft, macht sie sich kurz Gedanken und ersäuft diese dann erfolgreich mit Alkohol.
Schließlich hält sie sich selber für übergeschnappt, und beim ach so überraschenden Ende kommt wieder heraus, wer der tatsächliche Täter ist. Untermalt wird das ganze von einer alten, drohend guckenden Chinesin.

Ein deutlich unterdurchschnittlicher Kriminalfilm. Man hätte einen schönen Psychothriller aus der Grundidee machen können, doch dann wandelt er sich zum sehr konventionellen Krimi-Thriller. Die Schauspieler (neben Ashley Judd Andy Garcia und Samuel L. Jackson) haben wir alle schon mehr leisten sehen, deswegen ist es bedauerlich, dass ihre doch recht ansehnlichen Namen hierfür werben. Mit Taking Lives gibt es zur Zeit eine deutlich bessere Alternative dieses Genres im Kino.

Ultimatum läuft ab

Die Zeit wird knapp. In wenigen Stunden läuft das Ultimatum ab, und noch gibt es keine einzige Zusendung. Sagt nicht später, dass Ihr es bedauert habt - es wird zu spät sein!

Es erreichte mich eine verschlüsselte Nachricht von den Entführern von Zirkonia-B. Schwesterchen gehe es gut, aber so teilten die Entführer mit, sie hoffe sehr, dass die Katastrophe vermieden werden kann, und dass ich nicht das Comic erstellen müsse. Die Entführer schlossen sich Schwesterchens Hoffnung an. Zusammen werden sie bang das Geschehen auf Nodix verfolgen.

Noch einige Stunden... beeilt Euch! Erstellt ein nutkidz-Comic und sendet es an denny@nodix.de. Rettet mich!

Umbau von Nodix

So, ich habe doch versprochen, dass Nodix noch umgebaut wird. Dies ist ein weiterer Schritt, die Titelseite sieht doch damit schon wesentlich aufgeräumter aus. Von den inneren Seiten ist noch nichts umgestellt, aber hier seht ihr schon mal, wie es etwa aussehen wird in Zukunft.

Nodix selbst wird einerseits eine Art Dachseite für die restlichen Seiten der Nodix-Gruppe darstellen, andererseits wird es insbesondere noch diesen Blog beinhalten, den ihr gerade lest, und schließlich noch eine Reihe von Texten und Essays aus meiner Feder.

Mit den vielen, unübersichtlichen Ebenen von früher ist es damit aus. Alle Inhalte sollen mit bis zu zwei Klicks erreichbar werden. Wie üblich, freue ich mich über Kommentare.

Umzug der DSA4 Seiten

Heute habe ich mich hingesetzt und auf Grundlage des Nodix Websiten Generators einen DSA4 Werkzeug DokGen zusammengehackt. Die Ergebnisse: die gesamte Dokumentation zum DSA4 Werkzeug (noch nicht so viel, aber das kann sich ja ändern) ist jetzt herunterladbar, außerdem wurde endgültig eine eigene Subsite für das DSA4 Werkzeug eingerichtet.

Diese ist über tools.dsa4.com oder über www.nodix.de/dsa4 zu erreichen (wobei letztere Adresse bevorzugt werden sollte, da sie technisch ein wenig schneller ist). Gemäß dem Spruch "Gute Webseiten ziehen nicht um" wurden alle bisherigen Adressen in automatische Weiterleitungen verwandelt.

Ach ja, bevor ich es vergesse: Inhalte sind leider keine neuen dazugekommen, sorry.

Und es wurde April...

Die wöchentlichen Updates sind - es wird den etwas regelmäßigeren Besuchern dieser Seite aufgefallen sein - ausgeblieben. Natürlich hat das gute Gründe: am 4. April hatte ich meine endgültig letzte Informatik-Diplomsprüfung (nebenbei, sie verlief äußerst zufriedenstellend), ich bereite mich auf das neue Semester vor (recht viel Philosophie in diesem meinem, wohl letzten Semester), nebenher schreibe ich natürlich an meiner Studienarbeit (beziehungsweise recherchiere für sie besonders viel) und - schließlich, eine Kleinigkeit, die ich dem werten Besucher nicht vorenthalten möchte: ich arbeite mit viel Freude an etwas für diese Seite hier...

Wenn alles weiterhin so glatt läuft wie bisher dürfte es in Kürze ein tolles Goodie für alle Freunde des Schwarzen Auges auf dieser Seite geben. Sobald dass endlich geschehen sein wird, werde ich mich wieder den regelmäßigeren Updates in der Galerie (hier sind mehrere Dutzend Bilder auf meiner Festplatte die in die Weiten des Internets entlassen werden wollen) und in der Chronik widmen. Solange bitte noch Geduld - es wird sich lohnen.

Aber eine kleine Überraschung gibt es sofort: innerhalb von einer Viertelstunde oder so haben ein paar Kommilitonen und ich ein kleines, vollkommen nutzloses Programm (unter 88 KB) zusammengebastelt. Es sollte auf allen Windowssystemen laufen, einfach anklicken und starten (oder zuvor runterladen, ganz wie's beliebt). Nur ein kleiner Spaß...

Ich verbleibe also mit meinen besten Grüßen, und genießt den herrlichen Frühling!
Denny Vrandecic

Und wieder zu den Google-Suchen

Bei den drei Google-Anfragen von letzter Woche ist zwar etwas Ruhe eingekehrt, aber ein weiterer Effekt ist zu beobachten: bei allen drei Anfragen (geruch der luft nach regen, gefühl von schnee auf der haut, eigene wahrnehmung von dem gefühl von schnee auf der haut) ist genau dieser Blog der Nummer 1-Hit geworden.

Die armen Leute, die auf der Suche nach dem Geruch der Luft nach Regen sind, und das einzige, was sie bekommen, ein Blogeintrag ist, der sich genau darüber lustig macht...

Unexpected problems

As you know, I'm a strong believer in the vision of the Semantic Web, and I actively pursue this goal. I am not too sure what it means, but I have hundreds of ideas floating through my head, about what will be possible in this future...

But the road seems longer than expected. For some time I have the dlpconvert and rdf2owlxml web services running. It is very enlightening and interesting to see, what kind of ontologies were used for testing. And I most certainly don't mean the domain of the ontologies used, but rather the syntax.

Both services state very clearly what syntaxes you may use. dlpconvert allows only OWL XML presentation syntax, rather obscure, I admit. That's the main reason, rdf2owlxml was offered. But most people didn't care, they just keep on using RDF - and not just OWL in RDF/XML-serialisation, but much more simple, plain RDF.

Yeah, every RDF is in OWL Full. But dlpconvert only deals with OWL DL. That's stated explicitly. And much less does it work with Abstract Syntax or N3. All of this was tested.

I most definitively don't want to rant about users here. You never should rant about users (I mean, in public). Especially, since everyone who uses a service like dlpconvert is probably quite intelligent and has some expertise in the field of Semantic Web. It's not his fault. It isn't mine either, I wrote quite explicitly what is needed. Maybe it's the W3Cs fault, or maybe it's just to blame on politics.

The fine differences between RDF, RDFS, RDF(S), OWL, OWL Full, OWL DL, OWL Lite, DLP - yes, I said fine differences between RDF and OWL DL - it's just too much to cope with. If it is too much for us, what do we expect of the future user of the Semantic Web? The web as we know it grew to its todays size because it was easy. It wasn't because of standards. For the first few years no one really cared about the HTML standard, I mean, not to the extent we do today in the Semantic Web. Even with tons of errors, pages would load and show nice results. It was a very forgiving system. And now, find out why it was so widely adopted?

The problem is: maybe we really need to be as strict as we are. But I hope we don't. I strongly believe into the virtue of "View source" - but this means understandable views on the source. Not RDF/XML-Serialisation. And still easy to copy. Only this way the Semantic Web can lift off from the roots, from the users. The users were creating the Web in the first years, not the companies. I don't know why everybody is turning to the companies today.

Oh, I should stop, it sounds like ranting again.

Ungeschick

Ich war's nicht!

Unique Name Assumption

I just read Andrew Newman's entry on the Unique Name Assumption (UNA). He thinks that not having an UNA is "weird, completely backwards and very non-intuitive". Furher he continues, that "It does seem perverse that the basis for this, the URI, is unique." He cites an OWL Flight paper that caused me quite some headache a few weeks ago (cause there was so little in it that I found to like).

Andrew, whose blog I really like to read, makes one very valid point: "It doesn't really say, though, why you need non-unique names."

There was an OWL requirement that gives a short rationale for the UNA, but it seems it is not yet stated obvious enough.
Let's make a short jump to the close future: the Semantic Web is thriving, private homepages offer rich information sources about anything, and even the companies see the value of offering machine-processable information, thus, ontologies and knowledge bases everywhere!

People want to say how they liked the movie they just saw. They enrich their movie review with an RDF-statement that says

http://semantic.nodix.net/movie#Ring_2 http://semantic.nodix.net/rating#rated http://semantic.nodix.net/rating#4_of_5.

Or rather, their editor creates this statement automatically and publishes it along the review.

I'd be highly surprised if imdb would use the same URI for denoting the movie. They would probably use an imdb-URI. And so could I, using the imdb-specified URI for the movie. But I didn't, and I don't have to. If I want to state that this is the same movie, I can assert that explicitly. If I had UNA, I couldn't do that. The two knowledge bases could not work together.

With UNA, many knowledge bases relying on inverse functional properties would break as well. FOAF, for examples, uses this, identifiying persons with an IFP of their eMail-Hash. With UNA, this wouldn't work anymore.

Let's take another example. On my mothers webpage there could be a statement saying she has three kids, Jurica, Rozana and Zdenko. I would state on my page that I am my moms kid. My sister, being the social kind, tells the world about her mom and her two brothers, Jurica and Denny.
Now, if we have UNA, a reasoner would infer that one of us is lying. But all of us are very honest, trustworthy people. The problem here is, that my name is Zdenko, but most people refer to me as Denny. UNA says that Denny and Zdenko are the same person. If we have no UNA, we wouldn't believe that. But still we can state it explicitly: my mom could have said that she has three kids, Jurica, Rozana and Zdenko, and those are mutually distinct. Problem solved.

You could say, wait, if we had UNA we still could just claim that Zdenko owl:sameAs Denny, and the problem wouldn't arise. That is true. But then I would have to consider my moms statements. That maybe OK on a scale like this, but imagine this in the wilds of the web - you would have to consider every statement made about something, before you may state something as well. Impossible! And you would introduce non-monotonic inferences, and you probably wouldn't really want that.

What does this mean? Let's take the following row of statements, and consider the answer to the question "Is Kain on of Adams two sons?". So we know that Adam has two sons, and that there is an entity named Kain.

Adam fatherOf Abel.

UNA and non-UNA both answer: don't know.

Adam fatherOf Cain.

UNA says "No, Kain is no son of Adam". non-UNA says: "Sorry, I still don't know".

Cain sameAs Kain.

UNA says "Yes, Kain is a son of Adam (hope you didn't notice my little lie seconds before)". non-UNA says: "Yes, Kain is a son of Adam".

Assuming that, instead of the last statement, we claimed that

Adam fatherOf Kain.

UNA would say: "I'm messed up, I don't know anything, my database is inconsistent, sorry." , whereas non-UNA would answer: "Yes, Kain is a son of Adam (and by the way, maybe Kain and Abel are the same, or Kain and Cain, or Abel and Cain)."

The problem is, that in the setting of the Semantic Web you have a World Wide Web with thousands of facts, always changing, and you must assume that you didn't fetch all the information about a subject. You really can't know if you know everything there is about Adam. But you still want to be able to ask questions. And you want to get answers, and these answers to be monotonic. You don't want the Semantic Web to answer one day "No", the other "Yes" and sometimes "I don't know", but you could be fine with having it either provide the correct answer or non at all.

OWL-Flight and proponents of UNA actually forgot that it's a Semantic Web, not just a Semantic Knowledge Base. If you want UNA, take your Prolog-engine. The Semantic Web is more. And therefore it has to meet some requirements, and UNA is an astonishingly basic requirement of the Semantic Web. Don't forget, you can create local unique names if needed. But the other way would be much harder.

Still, Andrews arguments lead to a very important question: taking for granted that Andrew is an intelligent guy with quite some experience with this kind of stuff, how probable is it, that Joe Random User will have really big problems with grasping such concepts as non-UNA? How should the primers be written? How should the tools work in order to help users deal with this stuff - without requiring the user to study these ideas in advance?

Still a long way to go.

Unique Name Assumption - another example

Ian Davis has a very nice example illustrating the Unique Name Assumption: "Two sons and two fathers went to a pizza restaurant. They ordered three pizzas. When they came, everyone had a whole pizza. How can that be?"'

Better than my examples. And much shorter!

Unter Brüdern

Aus der hochbeliebten, aber nur unregelmäßig fortgeführten Reihe 'Filme in 50 Worten'

Hiermit möchte ich meine Rolle als Multiplikator wahrnehmen, und darauf hinweisen, dass ich über Buddy, und der über den KulturSpiegel, gestern für umme in die Preview des dänischen Films Brothers reingehen konnte. Der hatte mich im Vorfeld nicht wirklich interessiert, aber was man tut man nicht für kein Geld...

Nun ja, der Film überraschte mich. Glaubwürdige Geschichte, überzeugende Darsteller. Drama. Aber so richtig, mit Tränen und verzwickten Situationen, mit Sturköpfen und Helden. Der Krieg in Afghanistan, Angst vor dem eigenen Vater, der Tod eines geliebten Menschen, Besaufen in der Kneipe, Väter, die unverzeihliches sagen - all das wird dargestellt, nicht gewertet, was ich geradezu bewundernswert finde.

Schade, dass manche Szenen übergangen wurden. Hätte ich gerne gesehen, wie der Bruder erfährt, dass sein Bruder gar nicht tot ist. Da wurde geschnitten. Auch das Ende ist dann etwas mittendring statt schon vorbei. Andere Handlungen sind für mich kaum nachvollziehbar. Aber so sind Menschen halt. Auch schade ist: dadurch, dass die Erzählweise nicht wertet, nehmen wir auch nicht so viel mit. Als ob man hier wirklich nur eine Geschichte erzählen wollte, ohne Nachricht. Niemand will mir etwas sagen in dem Film. Es passiert einfach. So wie das Leben. Ob man das von einem Film will mag man selber entscheiden.

Wer Dramen mag, wer gut erzählten, echt wirkenden Geschichten gerne folgt - der sollte sich diesen Film anschauen. Niemand wird aber wegen einer Kulturlücke ausgelacht werden, wenn er den Film doch verpasst.

So, Multiplikatordienst erfüllt. Wann kriege ich die nächste Freikarte?

Unterwegs nach Cold Mountain

aus der Reihe Filme in 50 Worten

Der amerikanische Bürgerkrieg ist ein ganz schlimmer Krieg, in dem beide Seiten unmenschliche Gräueltaten verursachen (ach). Besonders schlimm ist es für Jude Law und Nicole Kidman, die sich eben erst unsterblich ineinander verliebt haben (besonders hilfreich dabei war, dass sie nie die Gelegenheit hatten, sich kennenzulernen - eine hervorragende Voraussetzung für schmachtende Liebe). Er muss an die Front, sie bleibt daheim, um auf die Farm aufzupassen - nicht, dass sie Ahnung davon hätte... Beide müssen Prüfungen überstehen (er muss Menschen töten, fliehen und Natalie Portman verlassen, nachdem sie zusammen geschlafen haben; sie muss kochen lernen), um dann, im großen Finale -

Halt, ich habe ja versprochen, nicht alles zu erzählen, in diesen Zusammenfassungen. Wer das unglaublich überraschende Ende wissen möchte, soll ins Kino gehen. Ein paar nette Sprüche weist der Film durchaus auf, und er ist gar nicht so kitschig, wie alle vermuten - die Schlachtszene am Anfang ist durchaus ein würdiger Herausforderer für den Soldaten James Ryan , aber insgesamt ist er doch ein paar Spuren zu vorhersagbar, und hält sich zu sehr an Klischees und den klassischen Aufbau einer Geschichte.

Kurz: er hat genausoviele Oscars erhalten, wie er verdient hat. Vielleicht einen mehr oder weniger, aber das war's auch schon.

Us speakz english!

So, der erste englische nutkidz-Comic ist jetzt auf der Website (wartet geduldig das Ende des Applauses ab). Danke an Ralf Baumgartner für die Hilfe bei der Übersetzung. Ich glaube im Moment nicht so recht, dass ich auch die englische Übersetzung jeweils zeitgleich donnerstags aufspielen kann, aber ich werde es stets so bald wie möglich versuchen (auf Holz klopf).

Using ChatGPT for fact checking

I wanted to explore the idea that we could use ChatGPT for fact checking. So I took a random article - it gave me the article on Jewish Ideas Daily, copied the text into ChatGPT with the following prompt:

Here's the text of a Wikipedia article. Please find the three statements that are most likely incorrect and rank them, in order to guide fact checking:

Followed by the Wikipedia article text. Here's the answer:

1. "Jewish Ideas Daily was edited by Margot Lurie from its founding in January 2010 until December 2012." This statement is incorrect because according to the article, Margot Lurie was the editor of Jewish Ideas Daily "until December 2012."
2. "Jewish Ideas Daily drew notice for controversial features including one accusing Christopher Hitchens of antisemitism." This statement is difficult to verify without more context, as it is not clear when this feature was published or what specifically it accused Hitchens of.
3. "Like Jewish Review of Books, and Jewish Ideas Daily, Mosaic is funded by the Tikvah Fund." This statement is incorrect because according to the article, Mosaic succeeded Jewish Ideas Daily in June 2013 and is therefore not funded by the Tikvah Fund in the same way as Jewish Ideas Daily and Jewish Review of Books.

Regarding the first statement, GPT says that the sentence "Jewish Ideas Daily was edited by Margot Lurie from its founding in January 2010 until December 2012." is incorrect. I am not disagreeing, but that sentence does not appear in the Wikipedia article text.

Regarding the second statement, GPT says that there is no reference for that statement. In fact, there is, and Wikipedia provides it.

Regarding the third statement, I didn't check the statement, but the argumentation for why it should be checked is unconvincing: if Tikvah fund financed Jewish Ideas Daily, why would it not finance the successor Mosaic? It would be good to add a reference for these statements, but that's not the suggestion.

In short: the review by ChatGPT looks really good, but the suggestions in this case were not good.

The exercise was helpful insofar the article infobox and the text were disagreeing on the founding of the newspaper. I fixed that, but that's nothing ChatGPT pointed out (and couldn't, as I didn't copy and paste the infobox).

Valentinstag

Warum gibt es eigentlich die Valentinsgrußkarte "Ich liebe nur Dich!" auch im Fünferpack?

Van Helsing

aus der Reihe Filme in 50 Worten

Der vielleicht berechenbarste Film des Jahres: Kate Beckinsale in einem Vampirfilm (hat aber im Gegensatz zu Underworld die Seiten gewechselt). Sie verliebt sich in Einen, der zum Werwolf wird (genau wie in Underworld), gespielt von Hugh Jackman (ein Wolf, wie in X-Men), der zuvor noch einen riesenhaften Mr Hyde erledigt (dargestellt wie in der Liga der außergewöhnlichen Gentlemen, aus der auch die Idee genommen wurde, alles zusammenzuwerfen, dessen Copyright schon abgelaufen ist). Ihnen hilft Faramir (wie im Herrn der Ringe), ein Q des 19. Jahrhunderts (James Bond), und der Bösewicht ist der Duke (wie in Moulin Rouge). Van Helsing ist hinter Dracula her, Frankensteins Monster ist eigentlich ganz lieb, und Vampire und Werwölfe bekämpfen sich. Gemacht von dem Team von der Mumie, untermalt von einem Soundtrack von Alan Silvestri (Forrest Gump) und etwa ein Dutzend Deus Ex Machinas.
Kurz: ein Film 100%ig nach Rezept. Ordentlich gekocht, aber etwas fad.

Hätte der Film nicht wenigstens eine Überraschung haben können? Wenigstens einen Hauch von Originalität? Er wirkt, als wäre er von vorne bis hinten vom Marketingleuten entworfen, die alles zusammengeklaut haben (die Liste oben ist bei weitem nicht vollständig), was irgendwie erfolgreich war in den letzten paar Jahren. Und wer kam auf die alberne Idee, den Prolog aus dem 19. Jahrhundert schwarz-weiß zu machen - die Handlung aber, die den immensen Zeitraum von einem Jahr später (immer noch 19. Jahrhundert) stattfindet, in knallbunten Farben?

Vergiss Mein Nicht

Mit den letzten paar Einträgen kam ich mir ja schon richtig nölig vor. Immer nur Kritik an den ganzen, aufwändig gemachten Filmen. Heute aber der Beweis, dass dies an den Filmen und nicht an mir lag (und ganz sicher nicht am besser gewordenen Wetter), ein weiterer, sehr erfreulicher Beitrag aus der Reihe Filme in 50 Worten, ein Film, wo auch die letzten zwei Worte reichen würden

Traumhafter Film über die Liebe, die Erinnerung, vor allem an die Liebe, und wie wir die Realität konstruieren. Ich darf nichts über die Story verraten, weil ich niemanden den Spaß rauben möchte - und sehr, sehr hoffe, dass ihn jeder sieht! Würde ich mich heute erneut in meinen Partner verlieben, wenn ich ihn erst jetzt kennenlernen würde? Gibt es sowas wie den Anderen, der für jemanden bestimmt ist? Wer findet, dass Kirsten Dunst, in Unterwäsche rumhopsend, verdammt süß aussieht?
Dieser Film zeigt mal wieder, was mit dem Medium Film alles machbar ist. Es geschehen Sachen, die in keinem anderen Medium möglich sind - kein Wunder also, dass nicht das Buch zum Film verkauft wird, sondern das Drehbuch zum Film.
Von dem Autor von Being John Malkovich und Adaption kommt jetzt ein Film, der mit Fug und Recht in deren Fußstapfen treten kann. Bisher der beste Film des Jahres (und das sage ich trotz Big Fish).

Kurz: unbedingt anschauen!

Verkehr in Turin

Ich habe mir Sorgen darueber gemacht, wie Stuttgart unter dem Verkehr kollabieren wuerde, wenn es die Olympischen Spiele tatsaechlich nach Stuttgart geschafft haetten.

Diese Sorgen sind vollkommen ausgestanden: die Winterolympiade 2006 findet in Turin statt, einer wirklich schoenen Stadt, der ich dazu nur beglueckwuenschen kann -- aber wie auch immer die Stadt das verkehrstechnisch ueberstehen will, ist mir ein vollkommenes Rätsel.
Dafuer aber ist die Gastronomie schon darauf vorbereitet: so schnell bedient wie hier in den Restaurants wurde ich noch nirgendwo auf der Welt, sehr beeindruckend.

Vernunft

Wenn wir von einem neuen Versuch hören, Vernunft oder Sprache oder das freie Entscheiden naturalistisch zu erklären, so sollten wir darauf reagieren, wie auf die Kunde, jemandem sei die Quadratur des Kreises gelungen oder der Beweis, dass die Wurzel von 2 eine rationale Zahl ist. Es ist nur eine gelinde Neugier am Platze: Wie gut ist der Fehlschluss versteckt worden? - Peter Geach

Vier Jahre Nodix (und kein bisschen weißer)

Am 14. Januar eröffnete Nodix - meine zweite Website nach einem Vorgänger in den frühen 90ern - die Pforten, und vieles, vieles hat sich seitdem getan. Ein halbes Dutzend eigener Websiten ist aus Nodix seitdem entstanden, und noch ein paar sind geplant, die mehr oder weniger ein kleines Netzwerk von Websiten bilden sollen.

Im ersten Jahr wahr ich sehr stolz, 2.000 Besucher gehabt zu haben. Irre! Größenwahnsinnig startete ich die Aktion 10.000, bis Januar 2003 10.000 Besucher gehabt zu haben - und tatsächlich es gelang, sogar schon bis August 2002. 2002 hatte Nodix insgesamt 20.000 Besucher - eine unglaubliche Verzehnfachung! 2003 wurde die Zahl nochmal mehr als verdoppelt - 44.000 Besucher in jenem Jahr. Und 2004 schließlich, bis heute, hatten über 115.000 Besucher! Für eine private Homepage wirklich famos. Vielen Dank all den Leuten, die Nodix treu sind, und es ab und an besuchen.

Allerdings hat sich in den Jahren auch ein kleines Team um Nodix gebildet. Nicht, dass es sich selber so bezeichnen würde, aber große Teile von Nodix entstehen und entstanden unabhängig voneinander. Jüngster Sproß ist Schwesterchens nakit-arts, das lange nur ihre Galerie enthielt, jetzt aber mit ihrem Blog - einem der schönsten überhaupt - zu den bestbesuchten Seiten hier gehört. Desweiteren Ralf Baumgartner, der, obwohl er eine eigene Website hat, sich demnächst verstärkt um something*positive kümmern wird, einer der Dornröschen-Seiten von Nodix. Genau wie die nutkidz. Doch für beide ist geplant, in den nächsten Wochen sie wiederzubeleben, und die Pläne schreiten voran. Versprochen, nichts davon stirbt.

Dies gilt insbesondere für das DSA4 Werkzeug, das zur Zeit leider nicht einmal eine Website hat. Twel wird sich hier verstärkt darum kümmern, doch es hängt an mir. Zu meinen guten Vorsätzen und Plänen dieses Jahr gehört es aber, einige Aufgaben endlich abzuschließen: dazu gehört zunächst das Verfassen zweier Texte für DSA, einer fast fertig, einer in Planung; und dazu gehört der Relaunch der Website zum und das Fertigstellen des DSA4 Werkzeugs. Ja, genau gelesen, mein Zeitplan für 2005 sieht eine fertige Version des DSA4 Werkzeugs vor - definiert als über 95%-ige Regelkonformanz bei der Generierung und Steigerung. Na, ist das nichts?

So weit zu den Versprechungen und Plänen. Und was hat es mit dem Weißer auf sich? Nun, wie seit dem ersten Tag ist die Hintergrundfarbe von Nodix, einer weltbekannten Spielefirma zu Ehren, eaeaea.

Vier fehlende Posts

Wahrscheinlich hat es ohnehin kein Mensch bemerkt, aber bei der Umstellung auf blogger.com bemerkte ich den Verlust von vier Posts: vom 5. November 2002, vom 5. und 18. Dezember 2002 und vom 23. Januar 2003.

Habe sie wiedergefunden und eingestellt (Sicherheitskopien sind was feines). Dies ist übrigens Post Nummer 175 oder so, es scheint hier keine automatische Methode zu geben, das automatisch nachzuzählen. Gar nicht mal so viele, für knapp vier Jahre - Schwesterchen hat im Schönsten Blog von Welt in einem Monat fast 40 Einträge geschafft! Und des Wahnsinns fette Beute brauchte für etwa 140 Einträge auch weniger als drei Jahre.

Kurz, ich bin ein unregelmäßiger, fauler Blogger. Trotzdem danke für die vielen Besuche! (Zu den Besucherzahlen, der Ehrlichheit halber, unter uns: nakit-arts hat inzwischen mehr regelmäßige Besucher als der Nodix-Blog. Gratuliere Dir, Schwesterchen!)

Views on the US economy 2024

By most metrics, the American economy is doing well. But the perception of the American economy is much weaker than its actual strength. This seems to finally slowly break up a bit, and people are realizing that things are actually not that bad.

Here's an article that tries to explain it: because of high interest rates, credit is expensive, including credit card debt, and if someone is buying a home now.

• ‘I’m making the most money I’ve ever made, and I’m still living paycheck to paycheck’, Fortune, March 15, 2024, by Claire Ballentine, Eliza Ronalds-Hannon and Bloomberg

But if you go beyond the anecdotes as this essay does, and look at the actual data, you will find something else: it is a very partisan thing.

For Democrats we find that it depends. Basically, the more you fit to the dominant group - the richer you are, the older, the better educated, the "whiter", the "maler" - the better your view of the economy.

For Republicans we don't find any such differentiation. Everyone is negative about it, across the board. Their perception of the economic situation are crassly different from the perception of their Democratic peers.

• Views of the nation's economy, Pew Research

Virtualität

Ich bin wieder da! Nunmehr weile ich wiederholt unter den virtuell Lebenden - ein sehr problematischer Begriff, wie ich als Hörer der Vorlesung 'Virtualität, Realität, Wirklichkeit' feststellen muss - übrigens eine Vorlesung die auch komplett virtuell zu hören ist, weil sie jeweils aufgenommen wird und die Aufnahmen zum Download auf den Seiten der Abteilung Wissenschaftstheorie der Uni Stuttgart angeboten werden.

Wie dem auch sei - ich bin zurück. Noch bin ich dabei, die ganzen Programme, die ich brauche, neu zu installieren (gute Güte, ist das eine Menge!) und vor allem einen großen, großen Haufen e-Mails zu beantworten, aber Nodix lebt!

Visa haben ungleich Visa brauchen

Als ich vor ein paar Wochen in Dortmund war, um mein Visum für Großbritannien zu beantragen, hatte ich ja eines für 5 Jahre beantragt und eines für 2 bekommen. Da habe ich schon gehofft, dass es das letzte Visum für Großbritannien sei, dass ich beantrage, und dass bis zum Ablauf desselben Kroatien Teil der Europäischen Union sein werde.

Mit einem Punkt hatte ich schon mal Recht -- Großbritannien schafft mit Wirkung zum 22. März die Visumspflicht für Kroaten ab. Das mein schönes Visum bis 2008 Gültigkeit hat ist dadurch natürlich vollkommen irrelevant geworden.

Menno, das haben die doch absichtlich gemacht.

Viva die Moderatoren

Zwei Sachen gibt es, auf die wir uns nächste Woche freuen können! Alle Details im Bild.

Übrigens, von hier aus ein Dank an Viva! Heute fühlte ich mich wieder richtig schlau, als ich mal vorbeizappte. Aus irgendeinem Grund glauben die Programmmacher von Viva ja, Sendungen zwischen die Musikclips zu bringen, die ohnehin 83% der Zuschauer langweilen. Für die Moderatoren dieser Sendung hofft man wirklich, dass sie besser bezahlt werden als sie es verdienen. So auch die heutige Moderatorin, die mit verblüfften Blick feststellte, dass ihr Interviewpartner mit dem Hinweis auf das Lied "Maria" nicht sofort etwas anfangen konnte. "Du weißt schon, das Lied von Scooter". Nach wie vor blickte der Interviewte etwas unwissend in die Kamera, als sie schier an ihm zu verzweifeln schien.

Doch da sagte der Interviewte (dessen Namen ich nicht abgewartet habe): "Ach, ich dachte Du meinst den Song von Leonard Bernstein für West Side Story" - und, schau an, da war es an der Moderatorin, verdattert zu schauen, und dann einen Blick in die Kamera zu werfen, der so deutlich aussagte "Ach ja, dieser altmodische Spinner, wovon der wieder redet..." - offensichtlich keine Ahnung habend.

Man kann wirklich für einen Musiksender arbeiten, ohne die West Side Story zu kennen? Harald Schmidt, wie kannst Du uns in diesem Lande alleine lassen? Mit John Rawls hätte es das nicht gegeben...

Viva liebt dich

So schönes Wetter, und gleichzeitig kann ich mich freuen, denn auf Viva Plus kam soeben die SMS-Nachricht über den Äther getickert: "Ich liebe Denny." - leider ohne Abesender...

Melde Dich doch mal :)

Volver

Pedro Almodóvar macht mal wieder einen Film, und natürlich wird er schön. Wo La mala educación auf schöne Männer setzte, spielen diesmal Frauen die Hauptrolle. Und Nebenrollen. Eigentlich, alle Rollen. In Volver, wie schon in La mala educación, sind Männer nur diejenigen, die Unheil über die Welt bringen. Frauen sind diejenigen, die danach alles verkomplizieren. Äußerst scharfsinnige Beobachtung.

Die Geschichte ist so schön kompliziert und verkorkst, dass sie schon fast wahr sein muss. Der Vergangenheit kann man nicht entfliehen, sie holt dich immer wieder ein -- vielleicht ist das die Hauptaussage des Films. Paul Valéry sagte mal, dass wir der Zukunft mit dem Rücken voran entgegengehen, dass wirnicht sehen, was uns erwartet, sondern nur das, was in der Vergangenheit geschehen ist. Und genau so handeln die Helden hier. Wann auch immer es um die Zukunft geht, verschieben sie das Gespräch auf morgen. Sie möchten die Gegenwart meistern. Die Vergangenheit überwinden. Und erst dann sehen wir weiter.

Passend dazu stellt der Film auch die morbide Faszination der Spanier mit dem Tod dar, vor allem in den kleinen Orten. Aber warum das Bild mit den Windmühlen? Teilweise wurde es in der Mancha aufgenommen, wo auch ein anderer Held, der mit Windmühlen zu tun hatte, herstammt. Doch scheint mir, rennt in diesem Film keiner gegen Windmühlen an. Bei solchen Szenen habe ich immer das Gefühl, etwas verpasst zu haben. Na was soll's, der Film war auch so schön genug.

Drama. Komplizierte Familienkiste, bei der der nächste Schritt ein wenig zu leicht zu durchschauen ist (aber das ist ja bei jeder realistischen Familienkiste so), dafür aber der übernächste Schritt meist noch eine Überraschung bereithält. Sehenswert.

WLAN im Zug

Heute fuhr ich nach Düsseldorf, um bei der Britischen Botschaft mein Visum für Großbritannien zu beantragen und, so es klappt, auch gleich zu holen. Ich hatte schon einiges erwartet -- manche Horrorgeschichte wurde erzählt über Beamtentum, Formaliakrieg, Großkotzigkeit und Willkürherrschaft. Doch nichts dergleichen trat ein (zumindest nicht beim Beantragen heute morgen). Äußerst höflich, zuvorkommend und hilfsbereit.

Allerdings muss ich jetzt einige Zeit totschlagen (um am Nachmittag das fertige Visum abzuholen). Da ich die Zeit zum Arbeiten nutzen wollte, und zudem in der Gegend war, dachte ich mir, probiere ich mal das neue Pilotprojekt der Bahn aus, WLAN im ICE. Also fuhr ich nach Dortmund um von dort Richtung München nach Köln im ICE zu fahren. Dummerweise habe ich doch den falschen Zug erwischt, keinen ICE3 scheinbar, und ich kann einfach nicht herausfinden, welche Züge jetzt tatsächlich WLAN haben.

Schade. Na gut, habe ich mich doch in Düsseldorf hingesetzt und hier ein wenig gearbeitet. Und dann geht es zurück zum Konsulat. Ich war ganz frech und habe gleich ein Visum für fünf Jahre beantragt (statt des üblichen halben Jahrs). Mal sehen, was rauskommt... ein unbekannter (Fast)Landsmann, den ich zufällig am Konsulat traf, erklärte mir, dass das nie klappen würde, und dass das ganze immer Willkür sei, er hätte schließlich Erfahrung damit, schließlich muss er schon zum wiederholten Mal verlängern. Na ja, mit der Einstellung, kein Wunder dass es dann Probleme gibt. Ich vermied es, ihn darauf hinzuweisen, dass seine beiden Aussagen ("Willkür" und "das wird nie klappen") sich gegenseitig widersprechen.

Na, schauen wir mal, was rauskommt. Bloß blöd, dass das mit dem WLAN nicht geklappt hat.

WWW2006 social wiki

The WWW2006 conference next week has a social wiki. So people can talk about evening activities, about planning BOF-Sessions, about their drinking habits. If you're coming to the conference, go there, make a page for yourself. I think it would be fun to capture the information, and to see how much data we can get together... data? Oh, yes, forgot to tell you: the WWW2006 wiki is running on Semantic MediaWiki.

Yay!

Let's show how cool this thing can get!

Wachstumsmodelle

Neue Woche, neue nutkidz, sonst nicht viel Neues zu berichten.

Wie ihr ja wisst, läuft dieses Jahr das Projekt 100.000 - der Counter soll den 100.000sten Besucher auf dieser Seite zählen. Ich habe - da mir das rumrechnen mit Zahlen wirklich Spaß macht - einfach ein paar Hochrechnungen angestellt, um zu sehen, wie erfolgreich ich mit diesem Plan voranschreite. Hier mal ein paar Ergebnisse aus diesen Rechnungen (alle, die von Zahlen gelangweilt werden und seit Sonntag ob Wiesbaden, Hannover und Lissabon genug von Zahlen haben, können jetzt schon ihren weiteren Weg durch den Cyberspace gehen).

Insgesamt habe ich fünf verschiedene Rechenmodelle aufgestellt, welche die Frage beantworten sollen, wie sich die Besucherzahlen über das Jahr entwickeln werden, damit, ausgehend von 20.000 Besuchern zum Jahresanfang zum Jahresende die 100.000 erreicht werden. Die fünf Modelle sind ein Lineares Modell (ausgehend von der gleichen Zahl von Besuchern über das ganze Jahr) über zwei Modelle mit linarem Wachstum der Besucherzahlen (L-Wachs 1 und 2, unterscheiden sich bei der Variablenbelegung), ein Modell, welches das quadratische Wachstum der Besucherzahlen über das Jahr annimmt (Q-Wachs) und schließlich das fantastische Modell mit der Methode "aus'm Bauch heraus". Und das Tolle: bis auf das Lineare Modell sind die Prognosen aller Modelle mehr als erfüllt!

Am 1. Februar hatten wir tatsächlich um die 24.200 Besucher - hier die Prognosen: Linear 26.820, L-Wachs1 22.361, L-Wachs2 22.777, Q-Wachs 22.100 und Bauch 23.000. Überraschend: Trotz der elaborierten mathematischen Berechnungsmethoden ist die Methode Bauch noch die genaueste gewesen!

So, jetzt aber genug Zahlen. Viel Spaß, und bis zum nächsten Mal!

War in the shadows

A few years ago I learned with shock and surprise that in the 1960s and 1970s Croatians have been assassinated by the Yugoslav secret service in other countries, such as Germany, and that the German government back then chose to mostly look away. That upset me. In the last few weeks I listened to a number of podcasts that were going into more details about these events, and it turned out that some of those murdered Croatians were entangled with the WW2 fascist Croatian Ustasha regime -- either by being Ustasha themselves, or by actively working towards recreating the Ustasha regime in Croatia.

Some of the people involved were actively pursing terrorist acts - killing diplomats and trying to kill politicians, hijacking and possibly downing airplanes, bombing cinemas, and even trying an actual armed uprising.

There was a failed attempt of planting seventeen bombs along the Croatian Adria, on tourist beaches, during the early tourist season, and to detonate them all simultaneously, in order to starve off income from tourism for Yugoslavia.

Germany struggled with these events themselves: their own secret service was tasked with protecting the German state, and it was initially even unclear how to deal with organizations whose goal is to destabilize a foreign government. Laws and rules were changed in order to deal with the Croatian extremists, rules that were later applied to the PLO, IRA, Hamas, etc.

Knowing a bit more of the background, where it seems that a communist regime was assassinating fascists and terrorists, does not excuse these acts, nor the German inactivity. It is a political assassination without due process. But it makes it a bit better understandable why the German post-Nazi administration, that was at that time busy with its own wave of terror by the Rote Armee Fraktion RAF, was not giving more attention to these events. And Germany received some of its due when Yugoslavia captured some of the kidnappers and murderers of Hanns Martin Schleyer, and did not extradite them to Germany, but let them go, because Germany did not agree to hand over Croatian separatists in return.

Croatians had a very different reputation in the 1970s than the have today.

I still feel like I have a very incomplete picture of all of these events, but so many things happened that I had no idea about.

Source podcasts in German

• Krieg im Schatten - Auf Deutsch, ein Podcast in sechs Folgen, zu einem bestimmten Fall in den Ereignissen - Mischung aus True Crime und Geschichte
• Episode 78 von "Neues vom Ballaballa-Balkan" - Besser fand ich noch diese Folge, welche die Ereignisse im größeren Zusammenhang betrachtet

Was für ein Zufall!

Ich schreibe einem Kollegen in den Niederlanden. Der Antwortet mir, dass er bald nach Barcelona zieht, auf eine neue Stelle. Keine zwei Minuten später schickt mir Sixt eine eMail mit einem Spezialangebot, Hotel und Mietwagen für drei Tage Barcelona für nur X Euro.

Was für ein Zufall!

Web Conference 2019

Last week saw the latest incarnation of the Web Conference (previously known as WWW or dubdubdub), going from May 15 to 17 (with satellite events the two days before). When I was still in academia, WWW was one of the most prestigious conference series for my research area, so when it came to be held literally across the street from my office, I couldn’t resist going to it.

The conference featured two keynotes (the third, by Lawrence Lessig, was cancelled on short notice due to a family emergency):

• Google’s Jeff Dean was giving a rather mind-blowing talk on the advances of machine learning in the last year or two, particularly focusing on medicine and auto-ML, but covering all kind of advances from chips, TPUs, programming frameworks, to use cases such as early detection of diabetes or cancer. (video)
• TED fellow Claire Wardle talked about the health of the information ecosystem on the Web (or, as I would put it, about fake news, and why that is a bad term), and it was refreshingly nuanced, thought-provoking, and lacking answers - but describing and circumscribing the problem much better than I have seen it before. (video)

Watch the talks on YouTube on the links given above. Thanks to Marco Neumann for pointing to the links!

The conference was attended by more than 1,400 people (closer to 1,600?), making it the second largest since its inception (trailing only Lyon from last year), and about double the size than it used to be only four or five years ago. The conference dinner in the Exploratorium was relaxed and enjoyable. Acceptance rate was at 18%, which made for 225 accepted full papers.

The proceedings are available for free (yay!), so browse them for papers you find interesting. Personally, I really enjoyed the papers that looked into the use of WhatsApp to spread misinformation before the Brazil election, Dataset Search, and pre-empting SPARQL queries from blocking the endpoint. The proceedings span 5,047 pages, and are available online.

I had the feeling that Machine Learning was taking much more space in the program than it used to when I used to attend the conference regularly - which is fine, but many of the ML papers were only tenuously connected to the Web (which was the same criticism that we raised against many of the Semantic Web / Description Logic papers back then).

Thanks to the general chairs for organizing the conference, Leila Zia and Ricardo Baeza-Yates, and thanks to the sponsors, particularly Microsoft, Bloomberg, Amazon, and Google.

The two workshops I attended before the Web Conference were the Knowledge Graph Technology and Applications 2019 workshop on Monday, and the Wiki workshop 2019 on Tuesday. They have their own trip reports.

If you have trip reports, let me know and I will link to them.

• Trip report by Manoel Horta Ribeiro

Welcome!

Welcome to my new blog! Technology kindly provided by Blogger.com

Weltuntergang

Gestern war der 6.6.6.

Und die Welt ist doch nicht untergegangen. Da muss für so manchen Zahlenmystiker die Welt untergegangen sein.

(Übrigens war schon zum zweiten Mal der 6.6.6. Vor 1000 Jahren hat das mit dem Weltuntergang auch nicht geklappt.)

Wenn Nerds protestieren

Wer versteht schon so ein Schild?

Wann gibt es das bei den Studentenstreiks hierzulande? (Und überhaupt, was bedeutet es, wenn Studenten streiken? Dass sie die Arbeit niederlegen?)

Wetten, dass...

„Hast Du die Titelseite gesehen? Schon wieder eine Story über den 11. September…“
„Weißt Du, solange es noch um 2001 geht, ist doch alles in Ordnung.“
„Das ist doch nur für die Medien. Meinst Du, die schlagen wieder zu?“
„Zum Jahrestag?“
„Ja. Wäre doch der Hammer.“
„Ich weiß nicht. Das ist sicher zu vorhersagbar. Alle werden vorbereitet sein.“
„Eben! Stell Dir vor, das gelingt ihnen! Damit zeigen sie, wie fett sie sind.“
„Ja, schon, aber ich glaube, es klappt nicht.“
„Ich würde wetten…“
„Was?!“
„50 Euro. Am 11. September kommt es zu einem weiteren Anschlag.“
„Diesen Jahres?“
„Ja.“
„Ich weiß nicht…“
„Na gut, ich gewinne nur, wenn es mehr als 200 Tote gibt, sonst zählt es nicht.“
„Hmm… abgemacht.“

… die Polizei war abgelenkt durch einen Bombenalarm im Hauptbahnhof … wegen einem vergessenen Koffer… ein terroristischer Hintergrund … eine Reihe von Explosionen erschütterte das Brandenburger Tor, bevor es schließlich in sich zusammenstürzte … die ersten Schätzungen gehen von mehr als 100 Toten aus … die wollen doch Krieg! Dann geben wir ihnen Krieg! … niemand hätte erwartet, dass ausgerechnet Deutschland … die Bundesregierung wurde in Sicherheit gebracht … die ganze Nation konnte zusehen, wie das Brandenburger Tor … vermutet Al-Quaida … wurde eine Moschee angegriffen … Live Schaltung nach Washington … uneingeschränkte Solidarität mit unseren deutschen Brüdern und Schwestern … tiefe Bestürzung … einziges Ziel der sukzessiven Explosionen war, den Fernsehteams genug Zeit … bestätigt, dass es bislang 200 Todesopfer gab, und eine weitere Frau noch um ihr Leben kämpft …

Er zündete sich eine Zigarette an. Seine Finger zitterten. Er stand im Treppenhaus des Hospitals. Hier durfte er rauchen. Und die Ruhe genießen. Das dauernde piep, piep, piep zehrte an seinen Nerven. Seine Mutter. Seine Mutter kämpfte um das Leben.
Die Tür ging auf. Sein bester Freund stand da, schaute etwas blass. Er holte seinen Geldbeutel raus, und drückte ihm zwei Zwanziger in die Hand.
„Fehlen noch Zehn. Kriegst Du morgen im Club.“

Er stieg die Treppe runter. Die Tür unten schloss mit einem lauten, tiefen Schlag.

What is a good ontology?

You know? Go ahead, tell me!

I really want to know what you think a good ontology is. And I will make it the topic of my PhD: Ontology Evaluation. But I want you to tell me. And I am not the only one who wants to know. That's why Mari Carmen, Aldo, York and I have submitted a proposal for a workshop on Ontology Evaluation, and happily it got accepted. Now we can officially ask the whole world to write a paper on that issue and send it to us.

The EON2006 Workshop on Evaluation of Ontologies for the Web - 4th International EON Workshop (that's the official title) is co-located with the prestigous WWW2006 conference in Ediburgh, UK. We also were very happy that so many reknown experts accepted our invitation to the program committee, thus ensuring a high quality of reviews for the submissions. The deadline is almost two months away: January 10th, 2006. So you have plenty of time to write that mind-busting phantastic paper on Ontology Evaluation until then! Get all the details on the Workshop website http://km.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/ws/eon2006.

I really hope to see some of you in Edinburgh next May, and I am looking for lively discussions about what makes an ontology a good ontology (by the way, if you plan to submit something - I would love to get a short notification, that would really be great. But it is by no means requested. It's just so that we can plan a bit better).

What's DLP?

OWL has some sublanguages which are all more or less connected to each other, and they make the mumbojumbo of ontology languages not any clearer. There is the almighty OWL Full, there's OWL DL, the easy* OWL Lite, and then there are numerous 'proprietary' expansions, which are more (OWL-E) or less (OWL Flight) compatible and useful.

We'd like to add another one, OWL DLP. Not because we think that there aren't enough already, but because we think this one makes a difference. Because it has some nice properties, like fully translatable to logic programs, and because it is easy to use and because it is fully compatible to standard OWL, and you don't have to use any extra tools.

If you want to read more, I and some colleagues at the AIFB wrote a short introduction to DLP (and the best thing is: if I say short, I mean short. Just two pages!). It's meant to be easy to understand as well - but if you have any comments on that, please provide them.

 * whatever easy means here

What's in a name - Part 1

There are tons of mistakes that may occur when writing down RDF statements. I will post a six part series of blog entries, starting with this one, about what can go wrong in the course of naming resources, why it is wrong, and why you should care - if at all. I'll try to mix experience with pragmatics, usability with philosophy. And I surely hope that, if you disagree, you'll do so in the comments or in your own blog.

The first one is the easiest to spot. Here we go:

"Politeia" dc:creator "Plato".

If you don't know about the differences between Literals, QNames and URIs, please take a look at the RDF Primer. It's easy to read and absolutely essential. If you know about the differences, you already know that the above said actually isn't a valid RDF statement: you can't have a literal as the subject of a statement. So, let's change this:

philo:Politeia dc:creator "Plato".

What's the difference between these two? In the first one you say that "Plato" is the creator of "Politeia" (we take the semantics of dc:creator for granted for now). But in the second you say that "Plato" is the creator of philo:Politeia. That's like in Dragonheart, where Bowen tries to find a name for the dragon because he can't just call him "dragon", and he decides on "draco". The dragon comments: "So, instead of calling me dragon in your own language, you decide to call me dragon in another language."

Yep, we decide to talk about Politeia in another language. Because RDF is another language. It tries to look like ours, it even has subjects, objects, predicates, but it is not the language of humans. It is (mostly) much easier, so easy in fact even computers can cope with it (and that's about the whole point of the Semantic Web in the first place, so you shouldn't be too surprised here).

"Politeia" has a well defined meaning: it is a literal (the quotation marks tell you that) and thus it is interpreted as a value. "Politeia" actually is just a word, a symbol, a sign pointing to the meant string Politeia (a better example would be: "42" means the number 42. "101010b", "Fourty-Two" or "2Ah" would have been perfectly valid other signs denoting the number 42).

And what about philo:Politeia? How is it different from "Politeia", what does this point to?

philo:Politeia is a Qualified Name (QName), and thus ultimatively a short-hand notation for an URI, an Unified Resource Identifier. In RDF, everything has to be a resource (well, remember, RDF stands for Resource Description Framework), but that's not really a constraint, as you may simply consider everything a resource. Even you and me. And URIs are names for resources. Universally (well, at least globally) unique names. Like philo:Politeia.

You may wonder about what your URI is, the one URI denoting you. Or what the URI of Plato is, or of the Politeia? How to choose good URIs, and what may go wrong? And what do URIs actually denote, and how? We'll discuss this all in the next five parts of this series, don't worry, just stay tuned.

What's in a name - Part 2

How to give a resource a name, an URI? Let's look at this statement:

movie:Terminator dc:creator "James Cameron".

Happy with that? This is a valid RDF statement, and you understand what I wanted to say, and your RDF machine will be able to read and process it, too, so everything is fine.

Well, almost. movie:Terminator is a QName, and movie: is just a shorthand prefix, a namespace, that actually has to be defined as something. But as what? URIs are well-defined, so we shouldn't just define the namespace arbitrarily. The problem is, someone else could do the same, and suddenly, one URI could denote two different resources - this is called URI collision, and it is the next worst thing to immanentizing the Eschaton. That's why you should grab some URI space for yourself and there you go, you may define as many URIs there as you like (remember, the U in URI means Universal, that's why they make such a fuss about the URI space and ownership of it).

I am the webmaster of http://semantic.nodix.net, and the URI belongs to me and with it, all the URIs starting with it. Thus I decide, that movie: shall be http://semantic.nodix.net/movie/. Our example statement thus is the same as:

http://semantic.nodix.net/movie/Terminator http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/creator "James Cameron".

So this is actually what the computer sees. The short hand notation above is just for humans. But if you're like me, and you see the above Subject, you're already annoyed that it is not a link, that you can't click on it. So you copy it into your browser address bar, and go to http://semantic.nodix.net/movie/Terminator. Ups. A 404, the website is not found. You start thinking, oh man, stupid! Why you giving the resource such a name that looks so much like an web address, and then point it to 404-Nirvana?

Many think so. That's because they don't grasp the difference between URIs and URLs, and to be honest, this difference is maybe the worst idea the W3C ever had (that's a hard-to-achieve compliment, considering the introduction of XML/RDF-serialisation and XSD). We will return to this difference, but for now, let's see what usually happens.

Because http://semantic.nodix.net/movie/Terminator leads to nowhere, and I'm far too lazy to make a website for the Terminator just for this example, we will take another URI for the movie. Jumping to IMdb we quickly find the appropriate one, and then we can reformulate our statement:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088247/ http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/creator "James Cameron".

Great! Our subject is a valid URI, clicking on http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088247/ (or pasting it to a browser) will tell you more about the subject, and we have a valid RDF statement. Everything is fine again...

...until next time, where we will discuss the minor problems of our solution.

What's in a name - Part 3

Last time we merrily published our first statement for the Semantic Web:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088247/ http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/creator "James Cameron".

A fellow Semantic Web author didn't like the number-encoded IMdb-URI, but found a much more compelling one and then published the following statement:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terminator http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/date "1984-10-26".

A third one sees those and, in order to foster integration of data offers helpfully the following statement:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088247/ owl:sameAs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terminator.

And now they live merrily ever after. Or do you hear the thunder of doom rolling?

The problem is that the URIs above actually already denote something, namely the IMdb website about the Terminator and the Wikipedia-article on the Terminator. They did not denote the movie itself, but that's how they're used in our examples. Statement #3 above actually says the two websites are the same. The first one says, that "James Cameron" created the IMdb website on the Terminator (they'd wish), and the second one says that the Wikipedia article was created in 1984, which is wrong (July 23, 2001 would be the correct date). We have a classic case of URI collision.

This happens all the time. People working professionally on this do this too:

_person foaf:interest http://dmoz.org/Computers/Security/.

I'd bet, _person (remaining anonymously here) does not have such a heavy interest in the website http://dmoz.org/Computers/Security/, but rather in the Topic the website is about.

_person foaf:interest _security.
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Security/ dc:subject _security.

Instead of letting _security be anonymous, we'd rather give it a real URI. This way we can reference it later.

_person foaf:interest http://semantic.nodix.net/topic/security.
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Security/ dc:subject http://semantic.nodix.net/topics/security.

But, oh pain - now we're exactly at the same spot we've been in the last part. We have an URI that does not dereference to a website (by the way, I do know that the definition of foaf:interest actually says the semantics of foaf:interest is, that the Subject is interested in the Topic of the Object, and not the Object itself, but that's not my point here)
Thinking for a moment about it, we must conclude that it is actually impossible to achieve both goals: either the URIs will identify a resource retrievable over the web and are thus unsuitable as URIs for entities outside the web (like persons, chairs and such) because of URI collision, or they don't - and will then lead to 404-land.

Isn't there any solution? (Drums) Stay tuned for the next exciting installment of this series, introducing not one, not two, not three, but four solutions to this problem!

What's in a name - Part 4

I promised you four solutions to the problem of dubbing with appropriate URIs. So, without further ado, let's go.

The first one you've seen already. It's using anonymous nodes.

_person foaf:interest _security.
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Security/ dc:subject _security.

But here we get the problem, that we can't reference _security from outside, thus loosing a lot of the possibilities inherent in the Semantic Web, because this way you can not say that someone else is interested in the same topic as _person above. Even if you say, in another RDF file,

_person2 foaf:interest _security.
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Security/ dc:subject _security.

_security actually does not have to be the same as above. Who says, websites only have one subject? The coincidental equality of the variable name _security bears as much semantics as the equality of two variables x in a C and a Python-Program.
So this solution, although possible, bears too much short-comings. Let's move on.

The second solution is hardly available to the majority of us puny mortals. It's introducing a new URI schema. Let's return to our very first example, where we wanted to say that the Politeia was written by Plato.

urn:isbn:0192833707 dc:creator "Plato".

Great! No problems here. Sure, your web-browser can't (yet) resolve urn:isbn:0192833707, but no ambiguity here: we know exactly of what we speak.

Do we? Incidentally, urn:isbn:0465069347 also denotes the Politeia. No, not in another language (those would be another handful of ISBN numbers), just a different version (the text is public domain). Now, does the following statement hold?

urn:isbn:0192833707 owl:sameAs urn:isbn:0465069347.

Most definitively not. They have different translators. They have different publishers. These are different books. But it's the same - what? What is the same? It's not the same text. It's not the same book. They may have the same source text they are translated from. But how to express this correctly and still useful?

The urn:isbn: scheme is very useful for a very special kind of entities - published books, even the different versions of published books.
The problem with this solution that you would need tons of schemes. Imagine the number of committees! This would, no, this should never happen. We definitively need an easier solution, although this one certainly does work for very special domains.

Let's move on to the third solution: the magic word is fragment identifier. #. Instead of saying:

http://semantic.nodix.net/Politeia dc:creator http://semantic.nodix.net/Plato.

and thus getting 404s en masse, I just say:

http://semantic.nodix.net/#Politeia dc:creator http://semantic.nodx.net/#Plato.

See? No 404. You get to the homepage of this blog by clicking there. And it's valid RDF as well. So, isn't it just perfect? Everything we wished for?

Not totally, I fear. If I click on http://semantic.nodx.net/#Plato, I actually expect to read something about Plato, and not to see a blog about the Semantic Web. So this somehow would disappoint me. Better than a 404, still...
The other point is my bandwidth. There can be RDF files with thousands of references. Following every single one will lead to considerable bandwidth abuse. For naught, as there is no further information about the subject on the other side. Maybe using http://semantic.nodix.net/person#Plato would solve both problems, with http://semantic.nodix.net/person being a website saying something like "This page is used to reserve conceptual space for persons. To understand this, you must understand the magic of URIs and the Semantic Web. Now, go back whereever you came from and have a nice day." Not too much webspace and bandwith will be used for this tiny HTML-page.

You should be careful though to not have a real fragment identifier "Plato" in the page, or you would actually dereference to this element. URI collision again. You don't want Plato to become half-philosopher / half-XML-element, do you?

We will return to fragment identifiers in the last part of this six part series again. And now let's take a quick look at the fourth solution - we will discuss it more thoroughly next time.

Use a fresh URI whenever you need an URI and don't care about it giving a 404.

What's in a name - Part 5

After calling Plato an XML-Element, making movies out of websites and having several accidents with careless URIs, it seems we return to the very beginning of this series.

http://semantic.nodix.net/document/Politeia dc:creator "Plato".

Whereby http://semantic.nodix.net/document/Politeia explicitly does not resolve but returns a 404, resource not found. Let's remember, why didn't we like it? Because humans, upon seeing this, have the urge to click on it in order to get more information about it. A pretty good argument, but every solution we tried brought us more or less trouble. We didn't get happy with any of them.

But how can I dismiss such an argument? Don't I risk loosing focus with saying "don't care about humans going nowhere"? No, I really don't think so. Due to two reasons, one meant for humans and one for the machines.

First the humans (humans always should go first, remember this, Ms and Mr PhD-student): humans actually never see this URI (or at least, should not but when debugging). URIs who will grace the GUI should have a rdfs:label which provides the label human users will see when working with this resource. Let's be honest: only geeks like us think that http://semantic.nodix.net/document/Politeia is a pretty obvious and easy name for a resource. Normal humans would probably prefer "Politeia", or even "The Republic" (which is the usual name in English speaking countries). Or be able to define their own name.

As they don't see the URI, they actually never feel the urge to click on it, or to copy and paste it to the next browser window. Naming it http://semantic.nodix.net/document/Politeia instead of http://semantic.nodix.net/concept/1383b_xc is just for the sake of readability of the source RDF files, but actually you should not derive any information out of the URI (that's what the standard says). The computer won't either.

The second point is, a RDF application shouldn't look up URIs either. It's just wrong. URIs are just names, it is important that they remain unique, but they are not there for looking up in a browser. That's what URLs are for. It's a shame they look the same. Mozilla realised the distinction when they gave their XUL language the namespace http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul. Application developers should realise this too. rdfs:seeAlso and rdfs:isDefinedBy give explicit links applications may follow to get more information about a resource, and using owl:imports actually forces this behaviour - but the name does not.

Getting information out of names is like making fun of names. It's mean. Remember the in-kids in primary school making fun of out-kids because of their names? You know you're better than that (and, being a geek, you probably were an out-kid, so mere compassion and fond memories should hold you back too)..

Just to repeat it explicitly: if an URI gives back a 404 when you put it in a browser navigation bar - that's OK. It was supposed to identify resources, not to locate them.

Now you know the difference between URIs and URLs, and you know why avoiding URI collision is important and how to avoid it. We'll wrap it all in the final instalment of the series (tomorrow, I sincerely hope) and give some practical hints, too.

By the way, right after the series I will talk about content negotiation, which was mentioned in the comments and in e-Mails.

Uh, and just another thing: the wary reader (and every reader should be wary) may also have noticed that

Philosophy:Politeia dc:creator "Plato".

is total nonsense: it says, that there is a resource (identified with QName Philosophy:Politeia) that is created by "Plato". Rest assured that this is wrong - no, not because Socrates should be credited as the creator of the Politeia (this is another discussion entirely) but because the statement claims that the string "Plato" created it - not a Person known by this name (who would be a resource that should have an URI). But this mistake is probably the most frequent one in the world of the Semantic Web - a mistake nevertheless.

It's OK if you make it. Most applications will cope with it (and some are actually not able to cope with the correct way). But it would not be OK if you didn't know that you are making a mistake.

What's in a name - Part 6

In this series we learned how to make URIs for entities. I know there's a big discussion flaring up every few weeks or so, if we should use fragment identifier or not. For me, this question is pretty much settled. Using a fragment identifier has the advantage of giving you the ability of providing a human readable page for those few lost souls who look up the URI, so maybe it's a tad nicer than using no fragment identifier and returning 404s. Not using fragids has the advantage of probably reducing bandwidth - but this discussion should be more or less academic, because looking up URIs, as we have seen, should not happen.

There is some talking about different representations, negotiating media-types, returning RDF in one, XHTML in the other case, but to be honest, I think that's far too complicated. And you would need to use another web server and extensions to HTTP to make this real, which doesn't really help the advent of the Semantic Web. Look at Nokias URIQA project for more information.

Keep this rules in mind, and everything should be fine:

• be careful to use unused URIs if you reference a new entity. Take one from an URI space you have control of, so that URI collision won't appear
• don't put a website under the URI you used to to name an entity. That would lead to URI collision
• try to make nice looking URIs, but don't try to hard. They are supposed to be hidden by the application anyway
• provide rdfs:label and rdfs:seeAlso instead. This solves everything you would want to try to solve with URI naming, but in a standard compliant way
• give your resources URIs. Please. So that other can reference them more easily.

I should emphasise the last one more. Especially using RDF/XML-Syntax easily leads to anonymous nodes, which are a pain in the ass because they are hard or impossible to address. Especially, don't use rdf:nodeID. They don't give your node an ID that's visible to the outer world. This is just a local name. Don't use it, please.

The second is using them like this:

<foaf:person about="me">
  <foaf:knows>
    <foaf:Person>
      <foaf:name>J. Random User</foaf:name>
    </foaf:Person>
  </foaf:knows>
</foaf:Person>

Actually, the Person known to "me" is an anonymous one. You can't refer to her. Again, try to avoid that. If you can, look up the URI the person gave to herself in her own FOAF-file. Or give her a name in your own URI-space. Don't be afraid, you won't run out of it.

Another very interesting approach is to use published subjects. I will return to this in another blog, promised, but so long: never forget, there is owl:sameAs to make two URIs point to the same thing, so don't mind too much if you doublename something.

Well, that's it. I hope you enjoyed the series, and that you learned a bit from it. Looking forward to your comments, and your questions.

White's illusion

I stumbled upon "White's Illusion" and was wondering - was this named after a person called White, or was this named because, well it is an illusion where the colour white plays an important role?

As usual in this case, I started at Wikipedia's article on White's illusion. But Wikipedia didn't answer that question. The references at the bottom also didn't list to anyone named White. So I started guessing it's about the colour.

But wait! Skimming the article there was a mention to "White and White (1985)" - but without any further citation information. So not only one White but two of them!

Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar didn't help me resolving "White and White (1985)" to a proper paper, so I started suspecting that this was a prank that someone entered into the article. I started checking the other references, but they indeed reference papers by White! And with those more complete references I was able to find out that Michael White and Tony White wrote that 1985 paper, that they are both Australian, that Michael White wrote a number of other papers about this illusion and others, and that this is Tony White's only paper.

I added some of the info to the article, but that was a weird ride.

Who am I?

Well, as this being a blog, it will turn out that it is more important what I write than who I am. Just for the context, I nevertheless want to offer a short sketch about my bio.

I studied Computer Science and Philosophy at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. In Computer Science, I thought about Software Architectures, Programming Languages and User Interfaces, and my master thesis happened to be the first package to offer a validating XML parser for the programming language Ada 95.
In Philosophy I started thinking a lot of Justice, especially John Rawls and Plato, but finally I had a strong move to Construcitivst Epistemology and the ontological status of neural networks (both papers are in German and available from my website.

It's a pretty funny thing that next week I will listen to talk on neural networks and ontologies again, and nevertheless my then made paper and the talk won't have too much in common ;-)

Well, so how comes I am working on Semantic Web technologies by now? I have the incredible luck to work in the Knowledge Management Group of the AIFB in Karlsruhe, and there on the EU SEKT Project. I still have a lot to learn, but in the last few weeks I aggregated quite a good grasp on Ontology Engineering, RDF and OWL and some other fields. This is all pretty exicting and amazing and I am looking forward to see what's around the next triple.

Why some are disenchanted

In a comment to my last blog entry, Christopher St John wrote:

"I suffered through the 80's Knowledge Representation fad, both academically in the AI program at Edinburgh and as a practitioner at the only company ever to produce a commercial system written in Prolog (that wasn't a Prolog development system.) So I'm familiar with the problems that the Semantic Web effort is attempting to address. Having slogged through real-life efforts to encode substantial amounts of knowledge, I find some of the misty-eyed musings that surround the Semantic Web effort depressing. That "most information on the Web is designed for human consumption" is seen as an obstacle surmountable via tools like RDF is especially sad. On the other hand, I'm always happy to make use of the cool tools that these sorts of things seem to throw off. There's probably a certain Proverbs 26:11 aspect to it as well."

Thanks for your insightful comment, and being new to the field I certainly appreciate some report based on real life experience - and I have to admit to probably be faulty of being misty-eyed myself more than once about the Semantic Web (and probably will be in the future as well).

'"Most information on the Web is designed for human consumption" is seen as an obstacle'. Yes, you are right, this is probably the worst phrased sentence in the Semantic Web vision. Although I think it's somehow true: if you want the computer to help you dealing with today's information overflow, it must understand as much of the information as possible. The sentence should be at least rephrased as "most information on the Web is designed only for human consumption". I think it would be pretty easy to create both human-readable and machine-friendly information with only little overhead. Providing such systems should be fairly easy. But this is only about the phrasing of the sentence - I hope that every Semwebber agrees that the Semantic Web's ultimate goal is to help humans, not machines. But we must help the machines in order to enable them to help us.

The much more important point that Christopher addresses is his own disenchantment with the Knowledge Represenation research in the 80s, and probably by many people with the AI research a generation before. So the Semantic Web may just seem as the third generation of futile technologies to solve AI-complete problems.

There were some pretty impressive results from AI and KR, and the Semantic Web people build on that. Some more, some less - some too much even, forgetting the most important component of the Semantic Web underway: the Web. Yes, you can write whole 15-page papers and file them to Semantic Web conferences and journals and not even once mention anything web-specific. That's bad, and that's what Christopher, like some researchers, does not see as well, the main difference between this work two decades ago and today's line of investigation. The Web changes it all. I don't know if AI and KR had to fail - it probably must have failed, because they were so many intelligent people doing it and so there's no other explanation than that it had to fail due to the premises of its time. I have no idea if the Semantic Web is bound to fail as well today. I have no idea if we will be able to reach as much as AI and KR did in their time, or less, or maybe even more. I am a researcher. I have no idea if the things I do will work.

But I strongly believe it will and I will invest my time and part of my life towards this goal. And so do dozens of dozens other people. Let's hope that some nice thing will be created in the course of our work. Like RDF.

Why we will win

People keep saying that the Semantic Web is just a hype. That we are just an unholy chimaera of undead AI researchers talking about problems solved by the database guys 15 years ago. And that our work will never make any impact in the so called real world out there.

As I stated before: I'm a believer. I'm even a catholic, so this means I'm pretty good at ignoring hard facts about reality in order to stick to my beliefs, but it is different in this case: I slowly start to comprehend why Semantic Web technology will prevail and make life better for everyone out there. It' simply the next step in the IT RevoEvolution.

Let's remember the history of computing. Shortly after the invention of the abacus the obvious next step, the computer mainframe, appeared. Whoever wanted to work with it, had to learn to use this one mainframe model (well, the very first ones were one-of-a-kind machines). Being able to use one didn't necessarily help you using the other.

First the costs for software development were negligible. But slowly this changed, and Fred Brooks wrote down his experience with creating the legendary System/360 in the Mythical Man-Month (a must-read for software engineers), showing how much has changed.

Change was about to come, and it did come twofold. Dennis Ritchie is to blame for both of them: together with Ken Thompson he made Unix, but in order to make that, he had to make a programming language to write Unix in, this was C, which he made together with Brian Kernighan (this account is overly simplified, look at the history of Unix for a better overview).

Things became much easier now. You could port programs in a simpler way than before, just recompile (and introduce a few hundred #IFDEFs). Still, the masses used the Commodore 64, the Amiga, the Atari ST. Buying a compatible model was more important than looking at the stats. It was the achievement of the hardware development for the PC and of Microsoft to unify the operating systems for home computers.

Then came the dawning of the age of World Wide Web. Suddenly the operating system became uninteresting, the browser you use was more important. Browser wars raged. And in parallel, Java emerged. Compile once, run everywhere. How cool was that? And after the browser wars ended, the W3Cs cries for standards became heard.

That's the world as it is now. Working at the AIFB, I see how no one cares what operating system the other has, be it Linux, Mac or Windows, as long as you have a running Java Virtual Machine, a Python interpreter, a Browser, a C++ compiler. Portability really isn't the problem anymore (like everything in this text, this is oversimplified).

But do you think, being OS independent is enough? Are you content with having your programs run everywhere? If so, fine. But you shouldn't be. You should ask for more. You also want to be independent of applications! Take back your data. Data wants to be free, not locked inside an application. After you have written your text in Word, you want to be able to work with it in your Latex typesetter. After getting contact information via a Bluetooth connection to your mobile phone, you want to be able to send an eMail to the contact from your web mail account.

There are two ways to achieve this: the one is with standard data formats. If everyone uses vCard-files for contact information, the data should flow freely, shouldn't it? OpenOffice can read Word files, so there we see interoperability of data, don't we?

Yes, we do. And if it works, fine. But more often than not it doesn't. You need to export and import data explicitly. Tedious, boring, error prone, unnerving. Standards don't happen that easily. Often enough interoperability is achieved with reverse engineering. That's not the way to go.

Using a common data model with well defined semantics and solving tons of interoperability questions (Charset, syntax, file transfer) and being able to declare semantic mappings with ontologies - just try to imagine that! Applications being aware of each other, speaking a common language - but without standard bodies discussing it for years, defining it statically, unmoving.

There is a common theme in the IT history towards more freedom. I don't mean free like in free speech, I mean free like in free will.

That's why we will win.

Wiki workshop 2019

Last week, May 14, saw the fifth incarnation of the Wiki workshop, co-located with the Web Conference (formerly known as dubdubdub), in San Francisco. The room was tight and very full - I am bad at estimating, but I guess 80-110 people were there.

I was honored to be invited to give the opening talk, and since I had a bit more time than in the last few talks, I really indulged in sketching out the proposal for the Abstract Wikipedia, providing plenty of figures and use cases. The response was phenomenal, and there were plenty of questions not only after the talk but also throughout the day and in the next few days. In fact, the Open Discussion slot was very much dominated by more questions about the proposal. I found that extremely encouraging. Some of the comments were immediately incorporated into a paper I am writing right now and that will be available for public reviews soon.

The other presentations - both the invited and the accepted ones - were super interesting.

• Timnit Gebru talked about the limitations of AI and when it can backfire
• Jure Leskovec spoke about their work on discovering hoaxes in Wikipedia automatically, and how bad humans are at this task (the algorithm detected 86% of hoaxes, humans 66% - random would be 50%)
• Neil Thompson gave a talk on how much Wikipedia shapes science, based on a super interesting experiment
• Erica Kochi talked about UNICEF’s innovation lab

Thanks to Dario Taraborelli, Bob West, and Miriam Redi for organizing the workshop.

A little extra was that I smuggled my brother and his wife into the workshop for my talk (they are visiting, and they have never been to one of my talks before). It was certainly interesting to hear their reactions afterwards - if you have non-academic relatives, you might underestimate how much they may enjoy such an event as mere spectators. I certainly did.

See also the #wikiworkshop2019 tag on Twitter.