Kowari v1.1 Pre-release Feature Peek

Kowari version 1.1 is finally close to completion. We expect a code freeze in October, with the release following shortly thereafter. I have posted a quick overview at Sourceforge.

I LOVE being an Engineer

My 7-year-old son was recently given a set of good-quality knights and horses by my sister-in-law. The set came with a small catapult, which fired small, plastic rocks about 3 feet. Naturally, the rocks were soon lost and my son wanted it to shoot farther. With a change in the number, type and placement of the rubber bands, it will now shoot an ice cube far enough to hit the road from our front door (about 28 feet). Now that's fun!

MIND Lab's PhotoStuff Tool Now Uses Kowari

Mike Grove from UMD's MIND Lab has extended his PhotoStuff SemWeb photo-markup tool to allow metadata storage in Kowari. Metadata associated with images may be stored in either local or remote Kowari servers. If the image being edited is a JPEG, metadata may also be stored directly into the image. Metadata is associated with one or more loaded OWL ontologies. This is very cool and worth a look.

To get the new PhotoStuff with Kowari integration, use the "PhotoStuff 3.0 BETA" link from PhotoStuff Downloads.

Mike has also created a Mindswap Kowari Java Library to abstract access to Kowari. Note the automatic translation from RDQL to iTQL occurring toward the bottom of the page.

Staying at The Kendall

I just returned from the semi-annual PAW face-to-face meeting at MIT. Meeting notes are on the PAW site.

We stayed at the historic and beautiful hotel, The Kendall. Future visitors of The Kendall who are male and straight should take note that "hair purifier" is owl:sameAs shampoo and "hair protector" is owl:sameAs conditioner :)

Tyranny of the Majority

"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." So the oft-repeated maxim sometimes attributed to George Santayana tells us. I'm pretty sure that history is being repeated in the Sunni areas of Iraq this week. Many Sunnis decided to boycott the Iraqi national assembly elections earlier this year to focus on fighting an insurgency. They are now left with little representation in the assembly writing the draft constitution. The Kurdish and Shia majority seem intent on punishing the Sunnis for their long support for, and benefits from, the reign of Saddam Hussein. This reminds me of the economic punishment of Germany after World War I, which is widely regarded to have proximately resulted in the nationalism that in turn gave us World War Two, at least in Europe.

George Wilhelm Hegel, while I'm quoting others, reminds us, "What experience and history teach is this -- that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on its principles.", so we should hardly be surprised.

The Sunnis are very likely to be left with little natural resources, an angry populous and a continued strong US military presence. Under such conditions, the insurgency will surely get worse, not better.

Making the economic punishment worse is the religious tension. Joseph Campbell (writing way back in 1964!) correctly identified the source of such tension:

"Now it is signally a fact, signally illustrated in the history of the Levant and particularly in Judaism and Islam, that when religion is identified with a community (or, as we have expressed the idea, with a consensus), and this community, in turn, is not identified with an actual land-based socio-political organism, but with a transcendental principle embodied in the laws of a church or sect, its effects on the local secular body politic, within which it thrives but which it does does identify itself, are inevitable and predictably destructive."[1] (Emphasis mine, to make the central point easier to spot)

Almost everyone will disagree with me on this, but I think we should just admit that the UN charter, which provided the world with the idea that failed states be forced to keep their boundaries, is wrong. This admission is necessary to fix Palestine, the former Yugoslavia, probably Darfor in Sudan and definitely Afghanistan. There is nothing wrong with breaking up Iraq into smaller, stable states. If we admit that such an option exists, we can be part of the solution. We can instigate a process which leaves the Sunnis stable instead of desperate. Desperation breeds violence, more than poverty.

[1] Campbell, Joseph. Occidental Mythology, The Masks of God Volume 4, Penguin Arkana edition, 1991, page 277

The Best Advice

I periodically like to quote Calvin Coolidge on the subject of persistence. I gave the following advice to my son tonight and thought I should share it with all of you:

"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent."

Visited Countries

OK, I'll fall in line with the rest of the geek crowd and post my World66 results:




The US:




and, sadly, just a bit of Europe:

The Mythology of Star Wars

Bernadette and I saw Star Wars Episode III over the weekend. I finally get it! For years I wondered why the great mythologist Joseph Campbell was so enamored with Star Wars. Now I understand.

Campbell, now dead, was friends with George Lucas and often spent time at Lucas' Skywalker Ranch. Campbell spent his lifetime studying the similarities between human cultures and was responsible for identifying many of them for the first time. His book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, for example, notes that hero myths follow a similar pattern around the world. A hero (any hero) starts off easy, goes into the underworld where things are tough and comes out the other side transcendent. That is, the basis for a good story anywhere is pretty much the same! Christopher Vogler even used this phenonenon in his guidebook for writers, The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers. Star Wars clearly has this aspect in its first three stories (Episodes IV-VI).

Campbell's wonderful four-volume study of worldwide mythology, The Masks of God, culminates in his theory that post-modern humans (that's us, folks) are making our own mythologies. This is described in Creative Mythology : The Masks of God, Volume IV. He has cited Star Wars as an example of this phenonenon.

The part of Star Wars that confused me was how the hero motif fit in relation to the latter episodes (I - III). Darth Vader is really the bad guy and very much anti-heroic. Even though he had his moment in the dying gasp of Episode VI, it just didn't seem to work for me. Then I re-read Campbell's take on Judaism's great memetic leap, the concept of the Chosen People. Campbell notes that the myth of Moses, which has no historical or archeological basis (and not for want of looking!) is really a hero myth with a twist; the Jewish Partriarches go "down into Egypt" and the transendent hero which emerges on the other side is not them, but the people as a whole. The authors, as Campbell said, understood exactly what they were doing. I think Lucas did the same thing.

Star Wars, for all the rational criticisms levied against it (compare to rational criticisms levied against the Bible or the Koran), makes perfect sense as a hero myth with a twist. Episodes IV - VI are a classic hero myth, but incomplete. The completion (Episodes I - III) fill in the gaps and provide the twist: Star Wars is now a hero myth which takes two generations to complete. Anikin Skywalker goes down into the underworld and his son emerges transcendent. Campbell would have loved that!

US Venture Capital is Dead (at least for now)

Respected venture capitalist Howard Anderson (founder of Yankee Group and two VC funds, now teaching at MIT's Sloan School) has written a succinct description of the state of US VC. His bottom line: he's out and staying out.

Anderson's analysis makes sense to me. If he is right, then there was no point in starting up in the last few years and no point in starting up in the next several. Only time will tell whether this state of affairs is structural and thus long-lived (as Anderson thinks). If so, technology entrepreneurs had better start thinking of new ways to fund the movement of their ideas into the mainstream.

For now, my solution to that problem is to use a combination of Open Source Software licenses for my work, consulting around its use and deployment and subcontracting when I need a larger team. The use of Open Source licenses allows an individual to prove oneself and differentiate oneself from the rest of the pack; that fact that it extends the Open Source phenonenon is an economically-driven by-product, albeit one which is good for the community. Subcontracting leaves me without the overhead of a startup, soomething I am glad to avoid after the last decade of making payroll.

I thought Anderson's last thought was right on target: "Ever wonder what we did for a living in early-stage venture funding? I bet you think we spent the day searching for the next insanely great company. But we spent most of our lives in endless meetings with people who were lying to us: scientists who swore that their patents were solid and entrepreneurs who insisted that they had no competition. We lied right back at them: said our money was different." Hope springs eternal on both sides, and will ensure that many VCs continue to operate while they lose money. I hope I can keep that lesson in mind as I face new startup opportunities. There has to be a better way.

Thanks to Brian Sletten for the link to Anderson's article.

Impact of Northrop Grumman Purchase on Kowari Users

Several Kowari users have asked about Kowari's future since the purchase of Tucana's intellectual property. Please allow me to clarify in a public forum:

Northrop Grumman purchased, among other things, the copyright to Kowari (which makes them the copyright holder under Kowari's Mozilla Public License.

Informally, the MPL license ensures that licensees may use the code and make modifications. The applicable part of the license requires modifiers to submit modifications back to the original developer (formerly Tucana, now Northrop Grumman) if the modifications are distributed to any third party.

So, all is well for Kowari users. All you have to do is submit new modifications to the Kowari source code that you intend to distribute to Northrop Grumman instead of Tucana. No big deal. I intend to blog it when they decide who should get those modifications. Of course, IANAL, so check with one if you like.

Kowari and Sesame Compared

Chris Wilper did a nice comparison of Kowari and Sesame. The comparison mostly highlights the design criteria differences in the two projects: Sesame is nicely lightweight and easy on resources. Kowari is much faster on the queries and performed much better on the more intensive operations.

I will note that Chris used a version of Kowari which is a year old (for some reason) and was wrong about Kowari not supporting xsd#int. Still, kudos for publishing this interesting data.

Consulting to Northrop Grumman

Northrop appears to be quite serious about becoming a Semantic Web company. They have retained my consulting company, Software Memetics, to train them on TKS internals, consult regarding future releases, help define new features and even to help them with their relationship with Kowari.

Former Tucana engineer Paul Gearon is in the US now to start the source code turnover. Andrae Muys will be coming to the US next month to continue that effort. Frequent NoFluffJustStuff contributor and JavaOne speaker Brian Sletten and author/entrepreneur Darren Govoni and I will be conducting the long term strategy and feature work.

I expected them to ask for a source code turnover, but I certainly didn't expect them to make such a serious monetary commitment. Between the purchase of the Tucana IP, their significant internal spending and all this consulting, they have laid down some serious dough. It is awesome to see Semantic Web technologies making such an impact in the federal market. The big question on my mind is what they have planned for the commercial sector. Stay tuned.

Perl Syntax Error Not Caught at Compile Time

I have a bad habit of munging the syntax for perl 'open' commands. Instead of the correct syntax, e.g.

open (TESTFH, "< test.txt") or die "Couldn't open data file: $!";

I tend to misplace the right parentheses, like this:

open (TESTFH, "< test.txt" or die "Couldn't open data file: $!");

Consider this test script:

#!/usr/bin/perl
open (TESTFH, "< test.txt" or die "Couldn't open data file: $!");
while () {
  $content .= $_;
}
print $content or die "Couldn't print data: $!";
close TESTFH or die "Couldn't close data file: $!";

This code will generate an error like this:

$ ./test.pl
Couldn't close data file: Bad file descriptor at ./test.pl line 7.
$

That is, the file handle was never opened properly, but did not fail. The WHILE block does not execute and the print statement has nothing to print, but does not fail. A simple syntax error which should have been caught at compile time has promulgated through to a nasty and poorly-reported run time error.

Unfortunately, the use of the 'strict' pragma ('use strict;') does NOT catch this error at compile time.

This example was generated on Perl v5.8.6 for darwin-thread-multi-2level, but I have seen it on Linux as well. Earlier versions of Perl 5 have this problem. I haven't tested Perl 6 yet.

SWCASE05

A workshop on Semantic Web Case Studies and Best Practices for eBusiness called SWCASE05 will be held at the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2005) in Galway. I have been asked to serve on the Program Committee by Robert Tolksdorf (Freie Universität Berlin), Alain Leger (France Telecom) and my colleague Guus Schreiber (W3C).

Maybe I'll go to ISWC this year; I hadn't planned on it, but the W3C Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group face-to-face meeting will be held 4-5 Nov in Galway, the two days just prior to ISWC.

Mea Culpa: Spotlight is Actually Useful

I have been pretty critical of Apple's Spotlight and still have some UI suggestions for its designers (such as increasing the amount of information shown about individual results), BUT I have found myself slipping into using it recently with much success.

I couldn't find a contract this morning. Spotlight reported it as its top hit. I couldn't locate an email message in the folder where I thought I filed it. Spotlight found it. I couldn't find a Web page I thought I had bookmarked. Spotlight found it without trouble. Wow.

There have been a couple of times when I failed to find what I was looking for with Spotlight, but I have to say that I am more efficient with it. I should be very relieved; Spotlight is metadata-based searching, after all. If Spotlight failed to work, then the whole SemWeb thing would be questionable.

Well done, Apple, and pay no (OK, "little") attention to my earlier criticism.

Northrop Grumman Buys the Tucana Knowledge Server

It's official! I am very pleased to announce that Northrop Grumman Corporation has purchased the intellectual property of Tucana Technologies, Inc., to include the Tucana Knowledge Server and associated patents, copyrights and trademarks. There is a major new Semantic Web company in town.

Northrop quietly pre-announced the purchase to some of its big customers at SWANS in April, but the deal wasn't officially closed at that time.

Northrop has decided to continue development of TKS and to release a new version sometime in the future. We are still discussing feature sets, licensing and schedule, so don't bother to ask me yet. I'll post it here when I can.

The purchase also included the copyright to Kowari. Stunningly for a company their size, Northrop has not only agreed to support Kowari but rushed to do so. I certainly didn't expect a US federal systems integrator to "get" Open Source Software, but times have clearly changed. Their senior managers have made a legitimate effort to figure out the licensing and how to make it work within their business model. I have confidence that we can figure out a way to make it work for both the Kowari community and Northrop Grumman.

Northrop and Tucana plan to come out with press releases shortly. I'll post the links when they are up.

# vs. / Formally Settled

The W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) has formally settled the httpRange-14 issue. Roy Fielding actually posted the results on 18 June, but I've been slack and am trying to catch up. This deserves wider dissemination and probably a full decsription of ramifications in some W3C Notes.

WISE 2005

I've been asked to join the program committee member for a workshop on Scalable Semantic Web Knowledge Base Systems at the WISE 2005 conference this November. I've never served on a program committee before, but am told it is an interesting and rewarding experience. I hope to review some interesting papers, so get 'em in!

Thanks to Mike Dean (BBN Technologies), Yuanbo Guo and Zhengxiang Pan (both of Lehigh University) for inviting me.

Too Close to Home

This post on XML-DEV is hilarious, but perhaps a bit worrying for those of us working on the Semantic Web. Thanks to Bijan Parsia for the link.

Amsterdam in 30 Seconds

Amsterdam is pretty amazing. The entire city is below sea level. It has been a massive engineering effort to build a city here and it will take even more to keep it here once the Arctic ice cap melts. Amsterdam is famously liberal and shows it. The streets are dirty, but cleaned often. There do not seem to be any laws, but it all works surprisingly well. I love the lack of cars. Public transporation is cheap and easy and the streets are filled with bicycles. Lots of people simply walk. They use so many "wheelies", luggage with wheels, a stroll down the street can put you in mind of an airport. Fat girls with Batman t-shirts and thin girls wearing hardly anything at all. Young men in striped trousers and jackets. The notorious Red Light district is present, but full of hookers from poor countries overseas. It is smaller than its reputation. The canals, canal boats and ever-present bridges are quite picturesque. You can't swing a dead cat without hitting a museum. The home of Heineken. I've rented a bike for the next couple of days and plan to see the dikes.