Linking Enterprise Data Book on the Web

The book Linking Enterprise Data is now on the Web in its entirety at http://3roundstones.com/linking-enterprise-data/.

You can buy print or ebook versions at Springer or Amazon:

Call for Chapters: Linking Government Data

I'm working on a new contributed book to be entitled Linking_Government_Data. Please see the Call for Chapters if you have any interest in contributing.

A primary goal of this book is to highlight both costs and benefits to broader society of the publication of raw data to the Web by government agencies. How might the use of government Linked Data by the Fourth Estate of the public press change societies? How can agencies fulfill their missions with less cost? How must intra-agency culture change to allow public presentation of Linked Data?

Starting at Talis

I am very pleased to have accepted a job offer at Talis. I'll be helping to stand up a new U.S. subsidiary for them and will continue to focus my efforts on the evolving Linked Data market, both in relation to government transparency and its use in commercial markets.

New Book in Pre-Production

Linking Enterprise Data is an edited volume contributed by worldwide leaders in Semantic Web research, standards development and early adopters of Semantic Web standards and techniques. Linking enterprise data is the application of World Wide Web architecture principles to real-world information management issues faced by commercial, not-for-profit and government enterprises.

I edited this book for Springer and the publisher has created a Web site for it as it enters production.

Springer seems to think the book won't be out until 2011, but I'm hoping on November because I'll be speaking at a conference then and would like to see it out.

I have been given the rights to put the entire book's content on the Web and plan to do so as Linked Data sometime shortly.

Leaving Zepheira

I have decided to leave Zepheira and seek employment elsewhere. Uche, Eric, Bernadette and I have worked closely together over the last couple of months to arrange a clean transition for me. With my current projects at or near an end, this seemed like a good time. My last official day as an employee of Zepheira was 31 July.

I wish Zepheira well and believe I am leaving at a time when the company is strong and their future looks bright.

The future for me is a bit less certain at the moment, but I'm speaking with a number of good people. More when a decision has been made, probably in late August around my birthday. In the meantime, I've updated my resume and Linked In profile as I make the rounds.

Feel free to contact me or leave a comment if you know of exciting opportunities.

Introducing the Callimachus Project

Callimachus is a Semantic Web framework for easily building hyperlinked Web applications. Callimachus allows Web authors to quickly and easily create Semantically-enabled Web applications with a minimal knowledge of Semantic Web principles. James Leigh and I have been working on it for a while. A presentation is also available.

Callimachus version 0.1.1 is now available. This release includes
updated documentation and the first sample applications.
Please see the directions in the file SAMPLE-APPS.txt to understand
the sample applications. More are coming soon!

You can acquire this release either by downloading the ZIP archive
from the downloads area or by checking out the v0.1.1 tag:

svn checkout http://callimachus.googlecode.com/svn/tags/0.1.1/

Either way, follow the directions in README.txt to get started.

Have fun and please report your experiences with Callimachus to the discussion list!

Chinese Units of Measure

Chinese Units of Measure
Originally uploaded by prototypo

I found this antique Chinese ruler in Seoul, ROK, last week. It uses the old Chinese units of length measure, the fēn, cùn and chǐ units.

The tiny fēn is about 3 mm. The cùn is traditionally the width of a person's thumb at the knuckle. The chǐ (or Chinese 'foot') is derived from the length of a human forearm, like a cubit. Or so says Wikipedia.

Those were hard-working people, to have thumbs as wide as a cùn.

The ruler is wooden, with brass inlays marking the units.

Why I will Never Own a Kindle

Fears of Internet security experts everywhere were realized today when Amazon revealed, apparently by accident, that it keeps copies of annotations made on the Kindle ebook reader.

This article at Reuters reported on damage control attempts at Amazon after it (in a delicious piece of irony) deleted copies of George Orwell's 1984 from its Kindles in July. The provider of the ebook version of 1984 apparently did not own the appropriate publication rights. Readers were naturally upset at the sudden disappearance of content from their readers, although of course they forget to read the fine print, didn't they? You can't buy an ebook, you can only rent. Amazon was technically within their rights to delete the content.

That's hardly the full story, though. Amazon was sued by a high school student for having also removed his "copious notes" regarding the deleted novel. The Reuters story linked above showed Amazon's hand when they reported:

Amazon's email on Thursday said that the company would replace
the deleted books along with any annotations made by customers.

That's right, Kindle fans. Amazon has admitted publicly that they, like Orwell's Big Brother, keep copies of any annotations that Kindle users make on the devices. For at least months. Holy cow!

The full text of Amazon's email to affected customers is available at the WSJ.

Perhaps more amazing is that Kindle readers don't particularly seem to care (cf. comments to the WSJ blog post). Kindle notes are synced to an Amazon server and thus available to readers over the Web. That may seem like a feature to some, but not to me. I'll back up my own notes, thanks.

Just Published: 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know

O'Reilly Media has published 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know. My colleagues Kathy MacDougall and James Leigh also wrote for this book.

This is a new style of "collective wisdom" books from O'Reilly. An earlier one was aimed at software architects.

I was pleased to see that O'Reilly used one of my quotes at the top of their home page for the book ("Clever Code Is Hard to Maintain...and Maintenance Is Everything").

The tips I wrote for this book were:

• Clever Code Is Hard To Maintain
• The 60/60 Rule
• The Fallacy Of Perfect Execution
• The Fallacy Of Perfect Knowledge
• The Fallacy Of The Big Round Ball
• The Web Points The Way, For Now

Check it out if you do project management. There's some good stuff in there.

The Death of the Copenhagen Interpretation?

Wow. A climate researcher in the UK has had the guts to propose a new geometry for space-time that provides a new way of answering pesky questions in quantum mechanics. This article in Physorg (see also the article's full text) provides a good overview.

I don't know if I still have the math to slog through it, but it looks to be worth the effort.

Called the Invariant Set Postulate, the proposed law offers a geometry of space-time that resolves long-standing difficulties in quantum mechanics, including complementarity, quantum coherence, superposition and wave-particle duality. Quantum description of gravity may even be possible. Wow. That is an amazingly out-of-the-box contribution.

For the faint of heart, here is a key quote: "The Invariant Set Postulate appears to reconcile Einstein’s view that quantum mechanics is incomplete, with the Copenhagen interpretation that the observer plays a vital role in defining the very concept of reality."

OK, OK, I'm back on Twitter

I'll be at the 2009 Semantic Technology Conference this week and will be twittering on @prototypo.

Freemix is Live!

Freemix is live in invitational Beta. Come check it out!

We at Zepheira will officially introduce it to the SemTech crowd next week and to the press on Tuesday.

You can see my profile on http://freemix.it/profiles/dwood/.

Whew!

Musicians and Coders

Bernadette recently gave me a CD (yeah, really, not an iTunes gift card! She's very quaint.) by Jeremy Pelt, a fantastic jazz trumpeter. In the inside cover of November, he says, "Our greatest responsibility as musicians is to live and grow... then, you might play something hip!"

Indeed.

Announcing Freemix

Zepheira has announced the forthcoming launch of Freemix, a social networking site for data and the people who use it. Freemix will be officially launched at the Semantic Technologies Conference in San Jose, California on June 16, 2009.

Zepheira partners Eric Miller, Uche Ogbuji and myself will brief representatives of the press at 12:00 US Pacific Time in the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose. Zepheira will demonstrate Freemix in a booth on the SemTech exhibit floor.

SemTech conference attendees may also attend a briefing on Freemix on Wednesday, 17 June 2009 from 5:00-6:00 PM US PST.

If you are a spreadsheet user and want to share your data more widely, Freemix is for you. Wouldn't it be nice if your data had friends, too?

Speaking at SemTech

I will be speaking at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose again this year from June 14-18, 2009.

Dan McCreary and I will be giving a three-hour tutorial on entity extraction on the Monday. I'll be presenting a talk on Active PURLs: Stored Procedures for the Semantic Web on the Tuesday. Additionally, it seems likely that I will replace Uche on a panel dubiously entitled Web3-4-Web2, also on the Tuesday.

Speakers have been authorized to share coupons for up to $200 off registration fees. If you would like to get the coupon code, please contact me or leave a comment here by May 29, 2009.

Zepheira is a gold sponsor again this year and we will have a very cool announcement. We are going to officially launch Freemix at the conference. The site is still under authentication, but will be released to the public just before the conference. It should be exciting. If you care are putting real, live, useful, everyday data on the Semantic Web, come see it.

Playing with Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha has been launched and is available for the public to try. I sat down to play with it.

FIrstly (using the rare American adverb here - don't be confused), you can't expect Wolfram Alpha to act like Google. It is a new kind of search engine, as one should expect from Stephen Wolfram. Wolfram is famously the inventor of Mathematica and author of A New Kind of Science.

Wolfram Alpha seems to consist of a linguistic interpretation engine coupled to Mathematica and a growing number of databases. Google, on the other hand, is a free-text indexer of Web content. That suggests that while one might be able to type just about any word or phrase into Google that is somewhere on the Web, one must limit Wolfram Alpha queries to concepts that are in its databases or may be treated as mathematical relationships. Indeed, this seems to be the case.

Wolfram's overview video is well worth watching. It, and the example search results available from the home page, give a flavor for the powerful searches one can do with the site.

Following a lead from the video, I tried typing the female name "Bernadette" into the search box. Wolfram Alpha, as advertised, did indeed respond with a presumption that I wanted information about the name and results that included a time distribution plot of popularity. Searching for "Bernadette David" gave me a distribution plot of both names which showed the highest combined popularity did in fact occur around our birth years. Well done, Wolfram Alpha.

Changing the previous search to "Bernadette Peters" resulted in some minor information about the actress and a link to her Wikipedia entry. Wikipedia links are provided where possible, as a transparent but useful attempt to provide flesh to limited source content.

However, more general searches, such as the word "Zepheira", produced no results. Wolfram Alpha responds to null result sets with a message saying "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.". That alone makes it clear that Wolfram Alpha and Google are at best complimentary.

Too many users on the site result in a cute message saying "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that..." - which is only mildly freaky if your name happens to be Dave. The reference naturally comes from the mutiny of the HAL 9000 computer in the film "2001: A Space Odyssey".

Math, science, engineering and finance queries work well, as expected. A Web interface to Mathematica is useful in itself. I suspect that the site will be most effectively used by college students and some working professionals. My mom and dad are unlikely to find it compelling (although my dad is a weather geek and weather data is well represented, so I might be wrong). Still, the lack of detailed weather results such as live RADAR images would more likely lead him to weather.com.

One can do funky and useless math with aplomb. Wolfram Alpha rapidly provided me with the correct interpretation, unit dimensions and unit conversions for the search "100 furlongs per microfortnight", a speed well above that of sound but under that of light.

Minor misspellings were handled effectively (e.g. "area of icosehedron" was correctly interpreted as "area of icosahedron"). Similarly, "volume of icosahedron" resulted in a correct interpretation. I expected the search "distance to a star" to fail miserably, but the answer was surprisingly useful. Try it yourself to see what I mean.

The problem with this kind of interface is that interpretations of intent are notoriously hard, if not impossible, in the general case. How can Wolfram Alpha expect to know that when I typed "birth year of gandhi" that I meant Mahatma Gandhi? What if I meant Indira Gandhi? Guessing is fine as far as it goes, but most search engines chose to give up that approach a decade ago in favor of appendation of search results.

The interface style is also naturally limited by its underlying data. Searching for "the size of the World Wide Web" resulted in a suggested to try "the size of the world wide" - which it could answer as the diameter of Earth.

I wonder how many people recall that Yahoo used to allow mathematical equations in their search engine? They seem to have removed the functionality. One can only presume that they got in the way of becoming a more general Internet search engine. I suspect there is a lesson there for Wolfram Research. Will Wolfram Alpha stay aimed at specialists or will they grow into a more general tool? Time will tell. Their promise to integrate more databases does not promise to address the inherent limitations of guessing linguistic intent.

In summary, Wolfram Alpha is an expert-friendly search system for specialists and is best used as an orthogonal complement to Google and other general search engines. Its approach is pure Wolfram - unashamedly different and unapologetically ignoring of lessons learned by others.

Finally, Some Clues on the Domestication of Rice

The subtitle to this blog promises posts about "the origins of agriculture", although the field is so slow moving that I have not posted on the topic in three years and have not reported meaningful research here since speculating on religion as a driver.

Fortunately, others are doing active research on agricultural origins even if I am not. Dr. Dorian Fuller of the Institute of Archaeology at University College London has cracked a very special nut, indeed. He and his team have located substantial evidence of the location and timing of rice domestication in the Lower Yangtze region of Zhejiang, China.

Dr. Fuller and his colleagues discovered a location where the local diet shifted dramatically from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to an agricultural one over a mere three hundred years. That alone is fascinating and an important discovery. Equally interesting was the dating of the shift, from 6900 to 6600 years ago. That places rice domestication in a timeframe fully two thousand years later than thought and lends serious support to diffusion theories (versus parallel development).

The process used by Fuller collected mixtures of midden material from the site, and painstakingly separated wild rice remains from domesticated rice remains. Specifically, they looked at spikelets, the place where rice seeds attach to stalks. Like other domesticated plants, rice underwent a genetic shift to retain the seeds for harvest by humans by a process of artificial selection. The shape of the spikelets is sufficiently different as to be distinguishable.

There is a nice scanning electron microscope image of a wild rice spikelet base at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog.

The last I heard, Londo's investigation¹ was still suggesting multiple independent origins of rice in Southeast Asia and lower China. Hopefully Fuller's paper² will put that to rest. Londo at least admitted that his team wasn't certain.

Wikipedia's entry on rice says, "Rice has been cultivated in Asia likely over 10,000 years." It is clearly time to correct that entry and, more broadly, correct the education of literally billions of people who are taught it. I really need to get back to work on my Origins of Agriculture summary and update it with these findings.

References:
[1] Londo, J.P., Chiang, Y-C, Hung, K-H, Chiang, T-U and Schaal, B.A. (2006). "Phylogeography of Asian wild rice, Oryza rufipogon, reveals multiple independent domestications of cultivated rice, Oryza sativa". PNAS, http://www.pnas.org/content/103/25/9578.long

[2] Fuller, D.Q., Qin, L., Zheng, Y., Zhao, Z., Chen, X., Hosoya, L.A. and Sun, G-P (2009, March 20). The Domestication Process and Domestication Rate in Rice: Spikelet Bases from the Lower Yangtze, Science 20 March 2009, 323/5921, pp. 1607-1610, http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/323/5921/1607

Back to Basics

Torture is wrong, regardless of efficacy, regardless of culture, regardless of how it is justified, regardless of how the enemy is dehumanized, regardless of whether someone - anyone - thinks it is useful. Period.

Even my eight-year-old can figure this one out, all by herself and with no hints.

OCLC PURL Server Migrates to PURLZ

The Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) migrated http://purl.org to the PURLZ software this morning at 6 AM US EST (GMT -5).

I'll admit to some frustration that the legacy PURLs were not tested completely and some errors remain. We are working with them to iron out the relatively few remaining problems with the legacy data migration. Most of the legacy data seems to be working as expected.

Update: Nope. They rolled back again. Sigh. Maybe next time they will do it right.

Unfortunate Names for 2009

I have to add Babelease Limited in the UK to my unofficial list of unfortunate names. Babel-ease. Yeah, that makes sense. I completely mis-parsed the syllables the first time...