From Simia

Popculture in logics

1. You ⊑ ∀need.Love (Lennon, 1967)
2. ⊥ ≣ compare.You (Nelson, 1985)
3. Cowboy ⊑ ∃sing.SadSadSong (Michaels, 1988)
4. ∀t : I ⊑ love.You (Parton, 1973)
5. ∄better.Time ⊓ ∄better­­­­­­­⁻¹.Time (Dickens, 1859)
6. {god} ⊑ Human ⊨ ? (Bazilian, 1995)
7. Bad(X)? (Jackson, 1987)
8. ⃟(You ⊑ save.I) (Gallagher, 1995)
9. Dreamer(i). ∃x : Dreamer(x) ∧ (x ≠ i). ⃟ ∃t: Dreamer(you). (Lennon, 1971)
10. Spoon ⊑ ⊥ (Wachowski, 1999)
11. ¬Cry ← ¬Woman (Marley, 1974)
12. ∄t (Poe, 1845)

Solutions: Turn around your monitor to read them.

My horoscope for today

Here's my horoscope for today:

You may be overly concerned with how your current job prevents you from reaching your long-term goals. The Sun's entry into your 9th House of Big Ideas can work against your efficiency by distracting you with philosophical discussions about the purpose of life. These conversations may be fun, but they should be kept to a minimum until you finish your work.

(from Tarot.com via iGoogle)

How the heck did they know??

England eagerly lacking cofidence

My Google Alerts just send me the following news alert about Croatia. At least the reporters checked all their sources :)

England players lacking confidence against Croatia

International Herald Tribune - France AP ZAGREB, Croatia: England's players confessed to a lack of confidence when they took on football's No. 186-ranked nation in their opening World Cup ...

England eager to break Croatia run

Reuters UK - UK By Igor Ilic ZAGREB (Reuters) - England hope to put behind their gloomy recent experiences against Croatia when they travel to Zagreb on Wednesday for an ...

Beating the Second Law

Yihon Ding has an interesting blogpost taking analogies to the laws of thermodynamics and why this means trouble for the Semantic Web.

I disagree in one aspect: I think it is possible to invest the amount of human power to the system and to still keep it going. I can't nail it down exactly -- I didn't read "Programming the Universe" yet, so I can't really discuss it, but the feeling goes along the following lines: the value of a network increases superlinearly, if not even quadratic (Metcalfe's Law), whereas the amount of information increases sublinearly (due to redundancies in human knowledge). Or, put it in another way: get more people and Wikipedia or Linux gets better, because they have a constrained scope. The more you constrain the scope the more value is added by more people.

This is an oversimplification.

Blogging from an E90

After pondering it for far too long, I finally got a new mobile phone: a Nokia E90. It is pretty big and heavy, but I don't mind really. I am looking at it as a light-weight laptop replacement. But I am not sure I will learn to love the keyboard, really. Experimenting.

But since it has a full keyboard, programming in Python is indeed an option. I had Python on my previous phone too, but heck, T9 is not cool to type code.

One world. One web.

I am in Beijing at the opening of the WWW2008 conference. Like all WWWs I was before, it is amazing. The opening ceremony was preceded by a beautiful dance, combining tons of symbols. First a woman in a traditional Chinese dress, then eight dancers in astronaut uniforms, a big red flag with "Welcome to Beijing" on it (but not on the other side, when he came back), and then all of them together... beautiful.

Boris Motik's paper is a best paper candidate! Yay! Congratulations.

I rather listen to the keynote now :)

Blogging from my XO One.

Certificate of Coolness

Now that the Cool URIs for the Semantic Web note by Richard and Leo have been published -- congratulation guys! -- I am sure looking forward if anyone will create a nice badge and a procedure to get official Certificates of Coolness. Pretty please?

On a different note: I know, I should have blogged from New Zealand. It sure was beautiful Maybe I will still blog about it a bit later. My sister has blogged extensively, and also made a few great pictures, take a look over there if you're interested.

Coming to New Zealand

Yes! Three weeks of vacation in New Zealand, which is rumoured to be quite a beauty. This also means: three weeks no work, no projects, no thesis, no Semantic We...

Oh, almost. Actually I will enjoy to have the opportunity to give a talk on Semantic Wikipedia while staying in Auckland. If you're around, you may want to come by.

It is on February 22nd, 1pm-2pm at the AUT. You may want to tell Dave Parry that you're coming, he is my host.

Looking forward to this trip a lot!

Social Web and Knowledge Management

Obviously, the social web is coming. And it's also coming to this year's WWW conference in Beijing!

I find this topic very interesting. The SWKM picks up the theme of last year's very successful CKC2007 workshop, also at the WWW, where we aimed at allowing the collaborative knowledge construction. The SWKM is a bit broader, since it is not just about knowledge construction, but about the whole topic of knowledge management, and how the web changes everything.

If you are interested in the social web, or the semantic web, or specifically about the intersection of these two, and how it can be applied for knowledge management within or without an organisation, you will like the SWKM workshop at the WWW2008. You can submit papers until January 21st, 2008. All information can be found at the Social Web and Knowledge management workshop website.

Semantic MediaWiki 1.0 released

After about two years of development and already with installations all over the world, we are very happy to announce the release of Version 1.0 of Semantic MediaWiki, and thus the first stable version. No alpha, no beta, it's out now, and we think you can use it productively. Markus managed to release it in 2007 (on the last day of the year), and it has moved far beyond what 0.7 was, in stability, features, and performance. The biggest change is a completely new ask syntax, much more powerful since it works much smoother with MediaWiki's other systems like the parser functions, and we keep constantly baffling ourselves about what is possible with the new system.

We have finally reached a point where we can say, OK, let's go for massive user testing. We want big and heavy used installations to test our system. We are fully aware that the full power of the queries can easily kill an installation, but there are many ways to tweak performance and expressivity. We are now highly interested in performance reports, and then moving towards our actual goal, Wikipedia.

A lot has changed. You can find a full list of changes in the release notes. And you can download and install Semantic MediaWiki form SourceForge. Spread the word!

There remains still a lot of things to do. We have plenty of ideas how to make it more useful, and our users and co-developers also seem to have plenty of ideas. It is great fun to see the numbers of contributors to the code increase, and also to see the mailing lists being very lively. Personally, I am very happy to see Semantic MediaWiki flourish as it does, and I am thankful to Markus for starting this year (or rather ending the last) with such a great step.