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2nd Social Data on the Web (SDoW 2009) workshop

Date: October 25, 2009
Location: Washington, DC (USA)

The workshop, co-located with the 8th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2009), aims to bring together researchers, developers and practitioners involved in semantically-enhancing social media websites, as well as academics researching more formal aspect of these interactions between the Semantic Web and Social Web.

The list of accepted papers is published at the workshop webpage and is also available as RDFa (RDF data extracted from the SDoW 2009 page).

The list includes:

• Continuous Queries and Real-time Analysis of Social Semantic Data with C-SPARQL
• FOAF on Air - Context-aware User Pro?les for the Social Web
• Folksonomy Resources as a Data Source for the Social Data in Semantic Web
• Freemix: Social Networking Meets Data
• Mapping between Digital Identity Ontologies through SISM
• Multiple Personalities on the Web: A Study of Shared Mboxes in FOAF
• Reactivity and Social Data: Keys to Drive Decisions in Social Network Applications
• Semantic History: Towards Modeling and Publishing Changes of Online Semantic Data
• SiocLog: Providing IRC discussion logs as Linked Data
• Social Networks of an Emergent Massively Collaborative Creation Community – Case Study of Hatune Miku Movie on Nico Nico Douga
• The Mobile Wine Agent: Pairing Wine with the Social Semantic Web
• The NoTube Beancounter: Aggregating User Data for Television Programme Recommendation

Looks like this is going to be an interesting workshop.

Note: I am one of the organisers of the workshop, along with Alex, John and Sergio.

Related:

• 1st Social Data on the Web (SDoW 2008) workshop - incl. full proceedings in PDF

SSS’09 is taking place in Stanford, CA starting from today (March 23) until Wednesday, March 25.

More information: Program of the AAAI Social Semantic Web (SSS’09) symposium

See also: Twitter messages about SSS’09

Web 2.0 (aka. social web) applications such as Wikipedia, LinkedIn and FaceBook, are well-known for fast-growing online data production via their network effects. Meanwhile, emerging Web 3.0 applications, driven by semantic web technologies such as RDF, OWL and SPARQL, offer powerful data organization, combination, and query capabilities.

The social web and the semantic web complement each other in the way they approach content generation and organization. Social web applications are fairly unsophisticated at preserving the semantics in user-submitted content, typically limiting themselves user tagging and basic metadata. Because of this, they have only limited ways for consumers to find, customize, filter and reuse data.

Semantic web applications, on the other hand, feature sophisticated logic-backed data handling technologies, but lack the kind of scalable authoring and incentive systems found in successful social web applications. As a result, semantic web applications are typically of limited scope and impact. We envision a new generation of applications that combine the strengths of these two approaches: the data flexibility and portability of that is characteristic of the semantic web, and the scalability and authorship advantages of the social web.

Activities of Irish recording industry association are putting online freedom in danger. The Internet is one of the most important tools that people have access to these days and it keeps us informed, can be our workplace and can help people get support when it is needed. Governments are claiming that we should lessen the digital divide that separates people into those who have access to the Internet (and computers) and those who do not.

It is this time when the record companies say: “hey, we want to be both judge and executioner in cutting people off the Internet". That is what the “3-strike disconnect” demands are about. To let private companies cut someone off the Net for indefinite time without due process and without a way to clear the accusations.

Even in court cases the “evidence” (which would be enough to disconnect users in Ireland) of record company investigators has been proven wrong. They have accused people who are disabled (and they may suffer the most if disconnected from the Net) and people who don’t even own a computer. If their evidence is courts is questionable, how can we trust what they do together with ISPs behind closed doors and without any transparency?

To protest against this threat, join Blackout Ireland.
Make your avatar black showing support for Irish Internet users.

• Blackout Ireland blog
• follow #blackoutirl on Twitter

In press:

• EFF: Irish Blackout: Why Irish ISPs Should Stand with Their Customers
• Ars Technica: Blackout Ireland rallies support against P2P disconnections

Irish recording industry is forcing ISPs into disconnecting Internet users and censoring the Internet. This blog posts describes the problem and tells why it is a very bad idea:

• http://andyaz.ie/blackout-ireland/

These threats have led Internet users to start a protest movement called Blackout Ireland:

• Blackout Ireland blog
• #blackoutirl Twitter conversations - live updates

Blackout Ireland follows in the footsteps of the original #blackout
in NZ. They are fighting against a controversial censorship law that was
about to be introduced:

• New Zealand Internet Blackout - protests against the Guilt Upon Accusation law ‘Section 92A’
• NZ #blackout timeline shows a prime example of citizen activism

You may think that turning your Twitter avatar black may not have much effect. You may be wrong. Imaging the awareness that can be raised by such high-profile twitter users as @stephenfry when his >200′000 readers were wondering why his avatar was black (during NZ #blackout).

Update: Canada is emerging as another battlefront for online rights:

• Canada’s Quebecor (ISP) wants a three strikes approach that would terminate its own subscribers

Michael Geist writes in the article linked above:

“That any ISP could demonstrate such hostility toward its own customers provides a clear indicator of the utter lack of broadband competition in Canada and serves as a warning that the New Zealand fight could eventually make its way here.”

If you need to install Redland Python bindings on Mac OS X then one of the ways is to use MacPorts:

sudo port install redland-bindings +python25

It is just one command and all dependencies will be installed automatically. (Though I usually install python25 with a separate command)

There is a cost to this because MacPorts would compile its own version of Python and as a result the installation might take a while. This is due to MacPorts policy to install all the prerequisites.

Context: I was having issues installing Redland Python bindings on Mac OS X and it seemed that nobody around me had them working either. MacPorts turned out to be the easiest way to do this.

See also:

• Redland RDF library - Python bindings
• redland ports on MacPorts

Claudia has extended our WordPress SIOC exporter and written up a nice report about it: Extended WP SIOC Exporter

She gave her permission to republish this report over here and would be happy to get your feedback.

I extended Uldis Bojars WP SIOC exporter to also export semantic metadata which are embedded in the HTML content of a Posting.

Why is this useful?

Semantic metadata embedded in the HTML of a posting’s content can reveal more information about the topic of a posting (i.e. about what a posting is about). Tools such as Structured Blogging (http://structuredblogging.org) or the Semantic Reblog prototype I am working on, embed semantic metadata directly into the HTML content of postings.

The WP SIOC Exporter relates at the moment the whole plain text of a post’s content with the resource representing the posting itself via the sioc:content property. The html representation of the post’s content is related with the resource representing the post via the content:encoded property. Additionally links are extracted from the post’s content and related with the post via the sioc:links_to property.

My extended version of the exporter also extracts images from posts’s content and relates them via the sioc:embeds property with the resource representing the post. If the image is a flickr image an rdf:seeAlso link is generated that points to the RDF description of the image obtained via Masahide Kanzaki’s  wrapper. Furthermore semantic metadata,  which are embedded in the HTML content of a post, are extracted and relate with the post via a sioc:embeds property. I am not sure if sioc:embeds is the best  property to relate the embedded entities with its container post. Maybe something like sioc:topic would be better. However the URI of the embedded resources are related with the post URI and the parts of the resource description, which has been embedded, are also exposed (because if only parts of a resource’s description are reused or embedded in a post’s content, it might be also interesting for machines to know which parts have been reused/embedded in the posting and if the reused/embedded resource is described via microformats, it might not have an URI which identifies the resource).

I use the ARC2 library (version from 2009-02-12 -> it is important to use this version or higher) which provides a parser to extract different embedded semantic metadata formats such as RDFa, eRDF and MF. I modified the method declaration of the toRDFXML method in the ARC2_Class.php file . Thats why at the moment “my” version of the ARC2_Class.php must be included to the SIOC Exporter arc folder. But Benjamin already told me that the modification will be included in the next ARC2 version.

If you fancy to test this version of the WP SIOC Exporter, download it here.

Any thoughts are of course welcome!

The URL of del.icio.us bookmarking service has changed. Since September 2008 instead of the fancy “name-hack” (del.icio.us) they use something easier to write: delicious.com.

Photo: a slide from MacWorld 2006 presentation “The Podcast Economy” by Chris Pirillo.

I noticed the new re-design (see Screen Shots And Feature Overview of Delicious 2.0 Preview) but did not pay attention to the URL until someone mentioned it.

Are you using Delicious? Via a website or using some additional software?

Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) is a proprietary protocol developed by Adobe Systems for streaming audio, video and data over the Internet, between a Flash player and a server.

This protocol is used by a number of well known sites such as BBC iPlayer, Hulu and videolectures.net.

My interest about this protocol is in being able to save streamed video for later viewing (while sitting in a cafe or traveling). Most of popular open source video players and tools currently do not support RTMP, be it for playing video or downloading the video stream.

Here are pointers to information that I could find:

RTMP protocol:

• RTMP open source and RTMP protocol [Open Source Flash]
• RTMP protocol [Gnash Project wiki]
• AMF object spec - describes a format of data objects passed inside RTMP connection
• RTMP protocol flavours - lists various flavours of the protocol: RTMP, RTMPT, RTMPS, MRTMP, …
• RTMP protocol, handling and downloading [Zen of Linux]

Downloading RTMP streams (let me know if they work ok for you):

• rtmpdump [C++, open source (GPL)] - a small, nice utility developed by Andrej Stepanchuk (based on the libRTMP library from XBMC media player)
  
  • “get_iplayer gets High Quality Flash BBC iPlayer RTMP Downloading Capability” - uses rtmpdump for downloading RTMP from iPlayer.
• How to record RTMP flash video streams using Red5 [Java] - describes Java code to use with libraries from Red5 in order to record RTMP.
• How to record rtmp:// flash video - a list of tools for recording RTMP streams. (*)

(*) tools in that list are Windows only and closed source (= will not help in improving RTMP support in other tools).

Libraries:

• RTMPy [Python, MIT license] is a Twisted protocol for RTMP
• RTMP library [C++, GPLv2] from XBMC media player
• ToDo list for a C++ RTMP Server mentions “pull out a C++ RTMP Client library from the present sources for stand-alone use” as one of the tasks for volunteer contributors.
• libcurl - there is an open ticket about adding RTMP support

Re. RTMPy it was not clear to me how to use it for the task at hand.

Interesting applications:

• radio2daap [Erlang, open source (MIT license) - expose on-demand flash radio as an iTunes shared library
• XBMC [open source (GPL) ] - a fully functional media player application with RTMP support.
  But how do you use it to record a RTMP stream? (e.g., this video from ISWC08)

With regard to standalone applications there are RTMP streaming servers (e.g., Red5) but we may have to wait a little further before protocol support appears in media players like mplayer and VLC, or in libraries such as libcurl.

What is your experience in working with / playing / recording of RTMP media streams?

VIM Color Scheme Test shows VIM in >300 different color schemes. There’s a lot to choose from.

I currently use MacVim and its default color scheme. Will need to find a good color scheme to use in the fullscreen mode (Cmd-Shift-F). I had a custom scheme installed in Komodo Edit but I have not used this editor in a while.

What are your favorite code editors / IDEs and what color schemes do you use?