Thinking Clearly .

We decided a few months ago to get serious about Python web development in the Semantic Tech area (more about that next year, I think) and I’ve been needing to stop working in the biz and start working on it, which meant only one thing: hire a new Pythoneer to take over from me.

I thought this might be a bit tricky because Semantic Web stuff (mostly OWL and RDF) hasn’t exactly exploded inside the Python world; there’s some stuff, but nothing overwhelming. I posted a few job descriptions in obvious places, aiming to find someone with a strong CS background who could learn the SemStuff as needed.

We got really lucky and found a really outstanding candidate, who I knew already by reputation from inside the Python world. One one of my concerns was that we’d become over the past year a Pylons shop, but this candidate was a big name in the Zope and Plone world. I was on record, back in the day, saying bad things about Zope, so I wasn’t sure how this would work.

Two things saved the day:

1. Zope 3 is very different from the old Zope stuff I learned to hate; more to the point, it’s a lot more relevant to what we want to do than it used to be.


2. the candidate said exactly the right thing in the f2f interview: “I’m a Python programmer. I know Zope but I can learn anything”—just so!

So we did what anyone in our position would do: we hired him! I’m happy to introduce Kapil Thangavelu, Python Web guy extraordinaire, as our newest coworker. He’s hit the ground running, already making great strides on an ontology and metadata repository project/product that we’re working on for a client. I think this consolidates our position as a Java/Python shop quite nicely, and we’re all looking forward to good things from Kapil.

We’ve been busy with new internal projects, as well as some milestones for some customer work:

First, we’re getting very close to putting an RDF-powered data integration app into production at NASA HQ. There have been Semantic Web projects at NASA, but not very many have been put into production alongside ordinay business apps. If we’re not the first (and we probably aren’t), we’re at least early.

At the Semantic Technology conference next week our customer, Andy Schain will be giving a talk about this app, which is called BIANCA, and another one, called POPS, we’ve been working on for NASA.

BIANCA provides a single, integrated view of information about, including relationships between, applications, servers, network services, networks, and change items for NASA HQ. The integration is over four different data sources, and with this integrated view we’re able to provide some novel analysis services, including the ability to do disaster and other outage planning scenarios based on building dependency graphs of the relationships between BIANCA nodes. From these graphs we can generate outage repair plans (though these are not yet optimal plans, that’s coming in the next version) as well as productivity estimates per hour of downtime.

BIANCA is a Pylons web app (and RESTful web service) in front of an RDF database. (The next version of BIANCA will include live querying of DNS, SNMP, IDS, and other “network fabric” services. I suspect we’ll do something in Sesame by building a new Sail for some of these data services.)

POPS (People Organizations Projects and Skills) is the other app, which will go into user pilot soon: it’s an expertise locator service for NASA civil servants and contractors (all 80,000 of them), which also integrates disparate data sources (this time 6 or 7 of them) using RDF. (For more details, check out the 2006 XTech talk about POPS.)

The interesting bit about POPS is the client user interface, called JSpace, which started off as our clone of mspace, but has since diverged in some non-trivial ways. JSpace translates user input into RDF queries against a data aggregation accessible via HTTP.

JSpace is an example of what the cool kids are calling these days a linked data browser, though we haven’t yet done a good enough job talking about it publicly, so no one really knows anything about it at all. One project for the summer is to get more demo data sets up on our site so people can play around with the webstart version of JSpace.

Second, our first internship program, which we’re calling 2007 Semantic Summer, is already an unexpected success. Honestly, I didn’t think we’d get a single applicant, since we’re new and the program is even newer. But we’ve gotten about 10 so far, several of them from very strong candidates, mostly people working on a PhD in computer science and pursuing a diss topic in Semantic Web.

We’ve accepted four applicants for the summer, and there’s another who may intern with us in the fall. This is all very exciting: they’ll be working on a range of projects, including new stuff for Pellet, the next version of BIANCA, and some of our internal projects.

Third, the 2007 OWLED (the OWL Experience and Directions) Workshop—which we’re proud to sponsor—is coming up very soon, the first week of June, right after ESWC in Innsbruck. I wish more of us were able to attend, but it’s not a cheap or easy trip from DC and we’re swamped with engaging work. We did get two papers accepted; they’ll be presented by our European R&D, i.e., Bijan.

We’ve very excited to see the registration numbers looking good, as well as a very cool program of talks and papers. If you’re into OWL DL, OWLED is the conference.

Finally, watch this space on or around 7 June: we’ll have a couple of announcements to coincide with OWLED which will be worth hearing, especially if you’re into OWL.

I’m planning to play around a bit with natural language processing for knowledge acquisition. (Two areas of interest to me: One is helping me, a fairly sophisticated reader, analyze and manage the web pages I read, esp. for the purpose of producing reports, aka blog posts, about a topic. My playing with Diigo is in this vein. The other is a knowledge representation based or enhanced Wikipedia. These two are, obviously, not unrelated.)

My standard first move would be to get a good textbook and start working with Prolog since 1) Prolog has a rich history of use in NLP, 2) I like Prolog, and 3) I really like my favorite Prolog, SWI-Prolog, which has a pretty nice bundled set of libraries and tools. But I just spied NLTK which seems to be an excellent, pedagogically oriented toolkit. I was quite attracted by the tutorial for the older version, but it isn’t clear if it will be updated. (Alas, the NLTK-Lite tutorial is just a set of slides. These are welcome, of course! And I shall definitely read through the older tutorial as well.)

Cypher also seems neat. At least, and as usual, in principle.