Thinking Clearly .

Following Monday’s announcement of the release of OwlSight .50, we’re pleased to announce another update to OwlSight, version .51. This is a minor bug fix release and no new functionality was added. Thanks to those users who took the time to report issues:

• URL escaping of parameters passed into OwlSight
• Rendering of datatype values for Individuals has been fixed
• If an error occurs while generating an explanation, control is properly returned to the main application window.

If you are interested in learning more about OwlSight, please head over to the OwlSight page on owldl.com.

I gave a guest lecture to COMP7000, “Seminar in Research Methods”, which is basically Manchester’s “how to do a PhD” intro course. My presentation was about performance evaluation, on the one hand, and usability evalauation, on the other. I found some fun videos of experimenters gone seriously nuts (see slide 1 for links).

So, I’m in a university. We train people to be researchers. But my formal research training is in philosophy. I’m a CS auto-didact. Lots of people are. It might be fun to have a mailing list to help auto-didacts with a bit less auto. One of the hardest things about research isn’t getting training; it’s finding a community.

There are lots of things going on!

• The OWLWG has had its first telecon (see the agenda, minutes). Our homework for the next telecon is to review the OWL 1.1 documents and the OWLWG charter. So if you had been thinking about taking a peek, this is a good time
• The fall semester has started up again, so I’m again teaching a third-year (that’s, “senior year” to my USites) class with Sean Bechhofer on Knowledge Representation. Per usual, my slides are online (with some commentary).
• OWLED task forces have seen a bit of activity with my posting about “easy keys” (the proposal is not fully fleshed out yet). This led to some yammering about BNodes and their semantics. I’ll do a post in the future about it, but one thing I regret is that I use “existential” as a shorthand for “existentially quantified variables”. BNodes are just existentially quantified variables with graph scope. However, most people don’t work with them as full existentially quantified variables, that is, as plural terms (that is, variables) as opposed to singular terms. I believe that this is what is confusing Reto and why he appeals to singularizing additional constructs (e.g., inverse functional properties) and his implicatures. Existentially quantified variables do not only imply existence, which is fine (and singular terms do this as well!), but also potential plurality. It’s this latter bit that is tricky and dangerous and what I would like to excise from BNodes.
• I will say that I’m a bit disappointed over all with the response to my, I thought, hilariously subjected post, “RDF: XULing or Grueling”. Much was positive (though Harry Haplin went off the rails for some reason), but very little was usefully substantive (at least from my perspective). I really really want a case study of RSS 1.0. I would be shocked if such a thing showed that RDF would have been a sensible wire format in any reasonable variant of history. Also, I have to say, that if it really, really, really is true that MOST adoption problems stem from the facts of RDF/XML, then we are an exceeding stupid community not to simply up and fix that. I conclude from this that either we are stupid, or that the syntax problems aren’t a sufficient condition for widespread lack of adoption, or that at least a good chunk of the community doesn’t believe that syntax problems are all that, regardless of reality. Seriously, if Turtle would cause a doubling of good press for RDF and a doubling of the rate of (happy) adoption, just freaking advocate the hell out of it. Doesn’t have to be in the W3C. Hijack it and run like the wind on a windy day.

So, lots going on!

I’m very happy to announce our first Semantic Web internship program, which we’re calling Semantic Summer 2007. It’s open to undergrad and grad students who’re interested in spending the summer months working on real technical challenges for real clients. No busy or make-work here.

For more details, you can check out the nifty flier (PDF) or look at the background reading to see what kinds of projects our interns will be working on.

To find out more details or to apply, send an email to semantic-summer@clarkparsia.com.

Yay! Hurray! My first snow as a resident of the UK!

(Though not my first snow in the UK.)

Today we had hail, rain, bright sun, and crazy snow….very nifty. And last week we had the “oh wow” winds. As in, “Oh wow, I have to downshift in order to turn the pedals on my bicycle.” Now, it is, of course, a testimony to my wimpdom that I could be stopped dead by a little, ok, a lot, of very fast wind. But still!

On the SPARQL front, I am participating in Yet Another SPARQL Tutorial, but this time it’s a full day and seems rather sensible. Hosted by ESWC 2007, and co-presented with a slew of good folks (Axel Polleres organized it, though some of the other folks were putting together submissions as well). I think it’ll be nice with lots of interesting information.

Coincidentally, Axel has put together a worked out SPARQL Rules proposal. This isn’t too shocking, especially given the presence of CONSTRUCT, but it’s very nice to have it worked out. Folk wisdom is ok, but details drive the devil away. It’s an interesting thing to experiment with.

My bit will be, as one might expect, SPARQL over more expressive entailment regimes (through OWL), plus, I hope, a bit about different ways of interpreting results.

On a slightly related note, Michael Kay discovers some value in XQueryX (the XML syntax for XQuery), albeit with the amusing twist that he finds manipulating XQueryX to be the proper domain of XSLT.

Kendall and I went a good chunk of the way to a SPARQLX (i.e., SPARQL XML format). Perhaps it’s time to revive it. The advantages seem to be the same: XSLT transformations to various legacy formats, the ability to indicate in advance (by a schema) what query feature you do or don’t accept (and thus better WSDL typing), better embedding in other XML formats, etc.