A Great Week for Old Technology

It seems that ships are again sailing the ocean using wind power. The inventor claims that his kites can reduce fuel consumption of most merchant ships by 10-35%. That's awesome.

Even more bizarre is the Mach 20 paper airplane that a Japanese origami expert wants to throw from the International Space Station. Really, you can't make this stuff up.

Hang onto your towel

Burt Rutan and his business partner announced the design of SpaceShipTwo. Very cool! Oddly, his business partner is apparently Zaphod Beeblebrox...

Bitten by Polymorphism

Architecture discussions can get ugly. I was participating in one when Brian suggested the domain name turdpolisher.com for our activities. A quick check on register.com showed that someone is actually holding that domain, although nothing resolves there. The polymorphism arose when we realized that register.com suggested some alternative domain names, including PolishedToes.com and PolishHeritage.org. *Sigh*

SPARQL Set to Change the Web

The W3C announced yesterday the standardization of SPARQL. This broken and immature standard has the capability to rapidly change business operations, Web searching, the advertising model of most Web revenue and enable a new generation of Web-based services.

SPARQL is broken and immature for the simple reasons that it failed to include a way to write data. I have my gripes about the way it reads data, too, but those are less important. As long as the W3C continues to treat the Web as a read-only system, the longer the Web will primarily be a read-only system. It is bad enough that we have failed to widely implement and use HTTP PUT and DELETE (fully half of REST), but we really should know better than to create new standards in 2008 that make the Web look like an information retrieval system and not an information aggregation and creation system.

For all that, SPARQL is still an incredibly important set of standards. There are three of them, SPARQL the query language for the Semantic Web, SPARQL the protocol and SPARQL the results format in XML.

SPARQL is important because it gives the world a standard way to perform distributed queries across disparate data sets. In other words, it allows you to treat the Web (the Semantic Web) as a database. Relational databases and other data stores can play, too. They just need a SPARQL overlay. This is something that the relational database crowd has never been able to pull off. I suspect that a standards body would have failed do create a standard for an RDB distributed query language if they had tried due to industry competitive pressures, but SPARQL is that critical end run. By pursuing the goal in the Semantic Web community, we now have something that will work for the RDB folks, too.

I remain fussed that Mulgara doesn't have SPARQL support yet, but Paul tells me it should come soon. I certainly haven't done anything to help, so I shouldn't complain.

Why do I think SPARQL can fundamentally change business models? Because of my experiences with this blog. I started experimenting with advertising once my readership reached reasonable levels. Impressions are few, even though readership is decent. Why? RSS. Most people read this blog via news readers or aggregators and not via the Web. They don't ever see the ads. Cool, right? Yeah. Imagine, though, the impact on the online advertising market (which financially supports Google and its competitors) when the Web is a database. Nobody will see the ads. Watch out, world. Where there is chaos, there is opportunity. I can't wait to see what happens next.

Tucana's Fate Sealed

Northrop Grumman Corporation's Electronic Systems Sector has been attempting to sell its Tucana RDF database software for some time. They have been quietly seeking buyers since they dropped public references to it as a "rsemd1-extweb50 Sensor1 Replacement Server" in August 2006. Unfortunately for them, potential buyers keep calling me.

Each call is similar in nature and goes something like this:

Buyer: We are very happy to tell you that Northop Grumman has accepted our cash offer for the Tucana technology. We would like to talk to you about how we can make use of it.

Dave: Sure. I am sure Northrop must have done some work on it since they bought it. What has been added to the code base?

Buyer: They made us swear to secrecy, so we can't tell you that.

Dave: OK, I understand. Can you tell me whether it differs substantially from its Open Source baseline, Mulgara?

Buyer: Umm, there is an Open Source project? What is the URL?

Dave: http://mulgara.org

Buyer: Is it an active project? Do people use it?

Dave: Oh, yes. It is used in production by a number of for-profit and non-profit companies and many researchers.

Buyer: I thought Northrop had killed the Open Source project?

Dave: Nope. They tried but failed. Mulgara was a fork to avoid any future legal disputes. It has no code contributed by Northrop or its contractors.

Buyer: Uh, perhaps we should look into that and get back to you.

Naturally, that is generally the last I hear about it until the next potential buyer calls. The last one was yesterday, but they weren't the first (or the second or the third) and probably won't be the last.

The sad thing is, of course, that if a single manager at Northrop had tried to work with the Open Source community instead of building an empire the project could have been wildly successful in their customer base. There is still a market need for a more scalable RDF database outside of the government, as evidenced by the list of potential buyers, the life sciences community's desire to represent genomic data semantically, Garlik's creation of a custom one last year and continued funding from Mulgara users for scalability development.

UPDATED: Helping the Ogbuji Family

Some of you have contacted me about where to send items or other forms of well wishing to the family of Chime Ogbuji. The best way to help the family is to donate the Ogbuji Family Fund, set up by Chime's father, Dr. Linus Ogbuji. Donations may be made by clicking the "Donate" button on http://thekingdomkids.org/fund/.

Thanks in advance to anyone providing what comfort they can.

Tragedy

Chime Ogbuji, SemWebber extraordinaire and brother to Zepheira business partner Uche has suffered the most tragic occurrence of which I can conceive. Chime lost two of his children in a fire over the weekend, and his third is in critical condition. I waited for the last two days to say something meaningful, but there just are no words for this. I am so, so sorry for Chime and his family. The sad tale is reported here. Chime, our thoughts are with you.

The Poor State of SPARQL Implementations

*Sigh* I had a simple task. Really I did. I am putting the final touches on a journal article and wanted to expand an example to be more interesting. All I wanted to do was demonstrate (in SPARQL) that multiple RDF graphs can be pulled in from URLs and the dynamically-assembled graph queried. I wouldn't have thought that was such a big ask for 2007. Alas, I was wrong.

Here is the query:

prefix sec: <http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~dwood/ontologies/sec.owl#>
prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
SELECT ?class ?test ?testresults
FROM <http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~dwood/ontologies/sec-example.owl>
FROM <http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~dwood/ontologies/sec-testresults.owl>
WHERE {
  ?class rdf:type sec:OOClass .
  ?test sec:isTestOf ?class .
  ?test sec:hasTestResults ?testresults
}

Redland won't do it because it does not support FROM (or FROM NAMED). The same for OpenLink Virtuoso SPARQL and JRDF. Sesame 2.0 might do it, but I got tired of looking. I'll have to get back to it tomorrow.

In the meantime, I hacked around the problem by using a little-known feature of JRDF - one can import a series of RDF or OWL files and query the subsequent graph. It is annoying, and requires local copies of the documents, but it works (kind of).

The really sad thing is that Tucana had this feature (in the iTQL query language) in 2000 or 2001. Mulgara still does, of course. Paul assures me that SPARQL support in Mulgara is finally close. That is wonderful, but it does make me feel a bit guilty for not contributing to it given its obvious need.

I still (since 2000) think that querying multiple data sources from the WEB makes the SEMANTIC WEB a bit more useful, and interesting. *Sigh* I guess I will have to either contribute more or live with it.

UPDATE: Sesame does not support SPARQL datasets according to this bug, even though a patch has apparently already been contributed.

UPDATE: OpenLink Virtuoso demos at http://demo.openlinksw.com/sparql and http://demo.openlinksw.com/isparql now both return results. However, they return four results where I expect two.

Dave Beckett claims that the latest Redland/Rasql from svn now supports the query, but that he also gets four results.

Danny's SPARQLer now returns correct results (two).

Thanks to everyone who responded! Having proper FROM and FROM NAMED support opens a floodgate of potential new SemWeb applications.

UPDATE: Changing "SELECT" to "SELECT DISTINCT" returns the correct two results from Virtuoso. I suspect that change may be needed with others, too.

Returning HTTP 303s for Semantic Web URIs

The World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Technical Architecture Group (TAG) attempted to settle a long standing debate about the use of URL resolution called http-range-14 a couple of years ago by ruling that "If an 'http' resource responds to a GET request with a 303 (See Other) response, then the resource identified by that URI could be any resource." Roy Fielding's original suggestion for the TAG finding is here.

That is a very subtle point. The idea was to cleanly separate those resources that are referred to by an HTTP URL and those that cannot be referred to directly, but might have an HTTP URL assigned to them anyway. The latter include physical items in the real world. Importantly, many of the objects assigned URIs in Semantic Web descriptions are given HTTP URLs but cannot be directly referred to on the Web.

Programmatic resolution of an HTTP URL may refer to an object in the real world (that is, an arbitrary resource) or an information resource (in some virtual form, such as an HTML page or an image or a movie). In that case, the HTTP response code would be 303 instead of 200. A 303 is an indication that the thing referred to may not be an information resource, it may be either an information resource or a "real" object. The body of the 303 (and the Location header) can provide information about the resource without encouraging you to think that what was returned really was a representation of the resource (as you would with a 200 response).

Most HTTP resources are expected to respond to a GET request with a 200 (OK) response and the body of a 200 is an "information resource". The definition of an information resource is that the entire content of the referred object may be "conveyed in a message".

But what about resources that cannot be conveyed in a message? My dog is a resource, as is my car, or myself. These things cannot be conveyed in a message, they can only be referred to. That is where HTTP 303 response codes come in.

RFC 2616 defines HTTP version 1.1 and its response codes. Section 10 defines a 303 thusly:

The response to the request can be found under a
different URI and SHOULD be retrieved using a GET
method on that resource. This method exists primarily
to allow the output of a POST-activated script to
redirect the user agent to a selected resource. The
new URI is not a substitute reference for the originally
requested resource. The 303 response MUST NOT be
cached, but the response to the second (redirected)
request might be cacheable.

The different URI SHOULD be given by the Location
field in the response. Unless the request method was
HEAD, the entity of the response SHOULD contain a
short hypertext note with a hyperlink to the new URI(s).

NB: An information resource should only be returned by an HTTP GET, not a POST, hence the discussion of POST. I unfortunately don't know of many people who bother to comply with Web Architecture to that extent.

Thus, the body of a 303 response is under-specified. There are several open questions. Some of them are:

• What should it contain?
• How should it be formatted?
• Does a "short hypertext note" constrain implementations to a text/html MIME type?
• How short is "short"?
• Can there be more than one Location header?
• If not, what do all the other URIs in the hypertext tell a user? Arbitrarily anything? If so, there is no limitation.

Uche, Eric and I have been trying to answer those questions. I should rightfully include Brian, too. Uche has proposed that the body of a 303 response include RDF (but not necessarily in RDF/XML format!). Eric has suggested encoding RDF content using RDFa, which would allow for the "short hypertext note" to include machine-readable RDF without breaking any existing implementations. The obvious downside is that RDFa is not a standard (merely an Editors Draft) and may not become one.

I rather like the idea of using RDFa, but a broader solution may be to always include a text/html body part, but use a multipart/alternative structure to allow for the body to hold RDF data (in whatever form) if it is present. That way, an implementation would not have to run the body through an RDFa parser just to determine whether any RDF content was present. The use of an additional header to indicate the presence of RDF content would also do it, regardless of the body type.

Of course, others have derided the use of HTTP URLs (emphasis on the Locator aspect) to reference arbitrary resources in the universe (for which the URI, I for identifier, was designed) and for some good reasons. However, I see tremendous value in being able to marry information space with meat space via the resolution of HTTP URLs. In fact, the automated manipulation of Semantic Web content depends upon it. That is why the TAG's finding makes a lot of sense. The use of 303 response codes to both separate resolution from description while maintaining universal addressing ties the abstraction of the Internet to the real world.

The new Persistent URL (PURL) service, now in construction, will allow PURLs to be created that can return 303 responses. The use of 303s to represent arbitrary real-world resources will enable PURLs to coalesce the fragmented persistent identifier space. Do we really need LSIDs, DOIs, INFO URIs and the rest? My answer is, "Not if the Web Architecture supports all their requirements". The representation of arbitrary objects via HTTP URLs and the ability to return multiple See Also URLs from a response would seem to do just that.

TimBL has raised a concern that the information resource contained in a body of a 303 response should not contain anything very interesting, because it is not addressable (in context of the linked data discussion). I disagree. The address of the 303 body is directly addressable because that is what is returned when the URL that got you there is resolved. Further, the 303 status informs a user that the information resource in the body is not the requested resource itself, merely information about it. That is, the URL addresses both the (real world) resource and the information resource in the 303 body and the 303 status allows one to cleanly separate which one you may wish to refer to at any given time, either programmatically or by a human.

As Paul points out, the use of a 303 response code does not put a requirement on the semantics of the identifier. A 303 response may be used to present information to a human user, while at the same time providing an indication to a computer that the resource you addressed is not the one that was returned.

I have posted about http-range-14 issues before, but not in this amount of detail. I think that proper answers to the questions above will be critical to the success of the Semantic Web because we must have a mechanism to programmatically determine whether an HTTP URL refers to an arbitrary thing in the wide universe or that relatively small subset of things that we call information resources.

A big question in any new use of HTTP is how existing browsers have implemented handling of the return codes. I was quite surprised that Firefox and Apple's Safari redirect to the Location header in a 303! For example, go to the home page for Tom Heath (http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/tom/) and you will be redirected to http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/tom/html. Neither browser will show you that an intermediate 303 return code was issued or that the browser followed it. You can see the 303 by using something like HTTPTracer or wget. It is also interesting to note that Tom is using a text/html body describing in human terms what the Location header says (a "short hypertext note", captured using HTTPTracer):

HTTP/1.1 303 See Other
Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2007 16:54:19 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat)
Location: http://kmi.open.ac.uk:8888/people/tom/html
Content-Length: 332
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>303 See Other</title>
</head><body>
<h1>See Other</h1>
<p>The answer to your request is located 
<a href="http://kmi.open.ac.uk:8888/people/tom/html">here</a>.
</p>
<hr>
<address>Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat) Server at kmi.open.ac.uk Port 8888</address>
</body></html>

Tom is using a 303 in the manner described by RFC 2616, and it is important to note that it does not conflict with the TAG finding regarding http-range-14. His response does, in fact, refer to "any resource".

The fact that browsers are automatically (and incorrectly, in my opinion) redirecting to the URLs specified in 303 Location headers suggests to me that Semantic Web applications will need to be careful. We can rely upon our own programmatic handling of 303s, but not the browsers'. We should also, again in my opinion, ensure that we do not break existing browser implementations if we can help it. The use of creative 303 body messages and perhaps new headers is one way out.

Some Kind Words

Steve Goschnick at Solid Software in Melbourne, Australia had some kind words for my paper entitled "RESTful Software Development and Maintenance" given at the 2006 Open Source Developers Conference in Melbourne. Thanks, Steve!

Press Release for PURL Code Rewrite

Zepheira, OCLC and the W3C announced today a project that we have been working on for a month; the complete re-write of the software behind the Persistent URL (PURL) service.

The full press release is here.

I am particularly happy to say that we are working toward a proper Open Source (Apache 2) release of the new code, and enhancements to deal with important issues for the Semantic Web (such as support for HTTP Range-14 return codes). OCLC has also asked us to help build a community around the code to assist both its maintenance and its future direction. That is a refreshing change and should be welcomed by all.

I can't wait to start building services on top of this stuff.

Zepheira Team Picture

Here is a good shot of the current Zepheira team. It was taken at the 2007 Semantic Technologies Conference during the Zepheira reception.

Left to right are Brian Sletten, Eric Miller, Kathy MacDougall, Bernadette Hyland, Uche Ogbuji and yours truly.

Defining Liberalism

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's wonderful Quirks and Quarks radio show interviewed David Sloan Wilson on 23 June 2007 regarding his new book Evolution for Everyone. I belatedly caught the podcast while on holiday, oddly enough in Canada.

Prof. Wilson specifically addressed group dynamics and the thinking of humans in terms of social groups. It seems easy for Westerners to think of ourselves as individuals and ignore our obvious group dependencies. He mildly denigrated the thoughts of Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan and the other evolutionary rationalists when he discussed the place of religion. Interestingly, Wilson noted that 95% (his measurement; I have not verified it but do not think he was speaking rhetorically) of conversations between people in a church relate not to theology but to group dynamics (how people can/could/should get along with each other). He uses this fact to suggest that religious thinking evolved (in a biological sense) to assist us with group behavior. He didn't mention the Baldwin Effect in the podcast, but I look forward to seeing whether it is discussed in the book.

I am particularly interested in the "us versus them" boundary in human behavior and Wilson discussed that. He noted the peculiar tendency of soldiers to act altruistically toward each other while killing the enemy; an extreme form of "us versus them" behavior and one close to the behavioral patterns found in and between hunter-gatherer groups. Then he said a fascinating thing: if one were to consider the group size to be larger, then one sees the killings as immoral. That immediately made me think about liberalism in our society.

What makes a liberal? Why do some people (myself included) become more liberal as they age? I was reared in a conservative, mostly rural society, attended a military college and was surrounded by conservative people until leaving the Navy. However, my thoughts became more liberal as I traveled and observed. Bill Clinton has said "The Democrats win when people think", which may be the same thing. Using Wilson's way of thinking, it suddenly makes sense that the ivory halls of academe are bastions of liberalism. Travel and thinking tend to make one see the world as a wider and more interconnected place. The group size one sees, in other words, becomes larger. Perhaps, as in the case of some, the observed group size becomes the size of the entire population.

I think this is a very, very useful meme. It is the first way of thinking about the differences between people's politics of which I am aware that both satisfies Occam's razor and provides a basis for further negotiation. Once the basis for disagreement is known, a solution is surely closer.

TKD Virginia State Games

I participated in my first Tae Kwon Do tournament a couple of weeks ago at the Virginia State Games near Richmond. It was surprisingly fun. Our dojang did well. I was particularly pleased at picking up the gold for forms, even if it was the old guys' division. In the picture below, I am the geek on the right.

Ultramicroscopicvolcanicsiliconiosis?

My nine-year-old son came home today from a summer day camp to inform me that the longest word in the English language is ultramicroscopicvolcanicsiliconiosis. Is that so? It is not in my dictionaries and a Google search returns zilch. Does anyone know for sure? Can you quote an authoritative source? I would accept the Oxford Unabridged, but don't have a copy at home.

The word apparently refers to a lung disease caused by the inhalation of fine volcanic ash.

APC 1500 Back-UPS

I installed an APC 1500 Back-UPS uninterruptable power supply on my desktop computer yesterday. We get not-infrequent brown-outs and even the occasional power outage in F'burg.

Setup was a breeze. The only trick was needing to connect the battery, which came pre-charged (thereby causing a discharge arc when connecting - I was not warned in the manual and it took me by surprise). The included PowerChute Personal Edition software installed easily on my PowerMac Quad G5. I was pleased to see that I now have a battery icon in my Finder bar and it works to indicate the status of the battery.

The G5, a 23 inch screen and a 17 inch screen, my laptop power supply, Klipsch speakers, a USB hub and an external hard drive add up to about 300 W, giving about 15 minutes of power from the battery. When the machine is sleeping and the monitors are off, the power usage drops way down.

I tried the obvious test by unplugging the power cord. The UPS functioned as expected. The alarm (4 beeps per minute) sounded and the machinery stayed up. Oddly, I did get a dialog box warning me that a USB device was removed and not properly dismounted first. I think that came from the USB monitoring cable on the UPS, but am not certain.

The only (very minor) complaint is a faint smell of ozone. I think I would rather get used to the ozone than risk losing a HDD, so I'm happy.

Mikayla's Yellow Belt

Congratulations to my daughter Mikayla for her advancement to Yellow Belt (8th Gup) in Tae Kwon Do. Here she is with Master Mark Grenier, dad and brother Aidan.

GetHuman

GetHuman is a very, very cool site to collect and disseminate paths around semi-automated corporate call centers. The way one gets an actual human being on the phone is documented for hundreds of big corporations.

GetHuman was founded by blogger Paul English (see the blog that started it all). He started the site "out of his own frustration in trying to obtain excellent customer service." Since then he has built a small but productive team to actually take on the corporations' poor customer service policies.

GetHuman had the beautiful audacity to create a "standard" to which they would like companies to comply. The site grades companies on their compliance with that standard. I can only hope that this idea gets enough legs under it to make a brand.

I see GetHuman as a community workaround to a systemic failure; Corporations set up mostly-automated call centers that saved their time, not their customers' time. Perhaps a Semantic Web solution could be developed to facilitate mostly-automated call centers that serve both interests. In the meantime, the GetHuman standard is a nice way to encourage the eight hundred pound gorillas in our midst to act responsibly with our time.

Lots of Zepheira Press

Zepheira has been getting a lot of press recently. The Zepheira news page certainly has links to more podcasts and respectible publications than any other company I have have the privilege to be part of.

Investors Business Daily came out today with an interview of several key SemWeb leaders, including Eric Miller. The article itself expires after today (!) so I have created a PURL for it so we can eventually move the redirection when IBD pulls their head out.

The article was typical journalistic fare, attempting to be "balanced" in the same way that Fox News is. That is done by showing both sides of a story - even when there are not, in fact, two sides. We see this sort of nonsense with science reporting when reporters go increasingly out of their way to find a few scientists willing to publicly doubt the phenomenon of climate change or willing to say that nuclear fusion will happen commercially within the decade. In the case of the Semantic Web, the same old doubters of 1999 come out to play and get quoted every time, ignoring the clear commercial successes of the last few years.

It is interesting to see Tim O'Reilly routinely quoted in the press now putting the SemWeb in a more positive light than last year: "The Semantic Web is the idea of marking up computer information in such a way that computers can infer meaning from it."

The journalist managed to get basic facts wrong, too, as when he says, "Internet protocols make it hard to search for many basic items on a Web site, such as a simple address or phone number." or "A resource description framework (RDF) and Web ontology language (OWL) are new technologies that can solve that problem. They serve as a kind of wrapper or tag to describe the data inside." RDF and OWL are hardly new (both were standardized in 2004 and pretty stable years before) and of course the Internet protocols have nothing to do with linguistic searching.

He also gets some things right: "This new vocabulary lets computers find and access data on their own. The goal is letting the machines perform rote tasks to gather information and merge the results.", and he mentions products from Oracle and Adobe.

Eric is quoted reasonably. That is a relief. "These Web standards should help companies spot new relationships among huge sets of data and use the findings for better conclusions about their business, says Eric Miller, president of Web startup Zepheira."

I rather liked the MySpace example and wonder if it came from Eric:

For instance, MySpace might let personal pages share information with the pages of relevant friends or colleagues in the social network.

Take someone whose MySpace page describes a fondness for vintage jazz. By entering that information once, that person could automatically be linked to others who share the same interest.

Furthermore, that information could be applied to future Web searches for new music releases. In effect, using metadata could become a way to make MySpace "truly mine," said Miller.

"This means there is a much more flexible, personalized integration point to really connect people," he said. "The notion here is to enter data just once, but to use it often."

Thieving and Sneaky Administration

The US Transportation and Security Administration (TSA) has finally upset me. I've been giving them a lot of slack in recent years because I know it is hard to do what they do and harder still to do it within a huge bureaucracy. Recent events have caused me to reconsider my good behavior.

A couple of months ago I accidently left a tiny Leatherman Squirt on my key ring when I went to Dulles Airport near DC. It was my mistake and I fully expected it to be taken by security (even though the cutting blade is no larger than the file on a set of nail clippers and therefore no conceivable threat to anyone's life). I gave it to the TSA agent on the other side of the metal detector. He looked at it, smiled and put it into his own pocket. It was obvious that he intended to keep it.

Last week I flew to New York State for a meeting. I had my iPod in my only bag, which I carried on. On my way through airport security in Ithaca, a TSA agent told me that my bag would would need additional search. She searched it all right, and stole my iPod at the same time.

I understand that it is hard to find good, honest people to do a job like that. Maybe that should tell us something about the way we attempt to provide "security". Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?