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April 23, 2003
ETCon Blogs
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08:35 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Semantic Mapping
Jo Walsh is talking about a semantic mapping model for geospatial information called spacewebspace. spacewebspace is a MUD world done using RDF in Jabber (I think). She's talking softly and quickly and its pretty far out there. This Friend of a Friend project is tied in somehow. Steve Fulling would love her slides---they're all in lowercase.
Ignoring XML serialization, RDF is just a directed graph. The MUD bot allows you to tag locations with geodata. I think the idea is to build a virtual, RDF based map of a real place. Boy! I don't think you have to use Jabber since the system is based on GET and POST, any http enabled client should do. There's some reference here to something Hofstadter wrote in Godel, Escher, Bach. I'll have to go look it up. An aside: if you've never read GEB, buy it now and read it.
Possible uses:
- travel itineraries
- picture annotation
- web annotation (blogosphere)
- collaborative annotation (restaurant recommendation)
The system uses OWL (web ontology language) to create taxonomic descriptions, properties, and logical constraints on the spatial model. The model is created us a similar manner by having a "conversation" using Jabber with an ontology bot.
You can use the RDF graph to do route finding traversal. OWL allows psychological factors to be encapsulated in the logical inference. The slide shows an SVG map of the London subway system that is inferred from the semantic model of London. With historical data, that is version control, you could flip back and forth in time inside the virtual world.
This would have some interesting uses in eGovernment and GIS. These people and the Earthviewer and OpenGIS people need to get together. Being able to overlay this data on Earthviewer would be cool. Even cooler would be to use Earthviewer as the interface to this for creating the data.
05:58 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Building the Memex
Maciej Cegiowski from the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education is talking about P2P semantic search engines. The Memex is an idea that Vannevar Bush wrote about in 1945 to catalogue and organize information. Maciej is speaking on semantic indexing.
Maciej claims that its possible to infer semantic relationships from document content. He uses a case study of Steven Johnson (author of the book Emergence). Steve had 1146 paragraph clippings from 15 books arrange in flat-file text. He shows a search on "photosynthesis" which returns the traditional keywork matches but also entries that talk about "chloroplasts" and "symbiosis." It works on the principal that related documents share words.
The most well-known algorithm, called LSI, is O(n3). Another method is called contextual network graphing.
Peer-to-peer search, which seems something of a misnomer to me searches multiple connections in parallel and then interleaves the results. The project uses contextual network graphs to link articles. Maciej envisions a search API that would allow users to plug various search engines into their own aggregator (think RSS, but RSS doesn't quite cut it for this app).
Semantic searching and document linking is popular area. When I was CIO, I talked to a lot of folks who had a better way to search. I talked to some folks, Steve Nieker and Martin Remy, at lunch who are from ThinkTank23 who do searching. Homeland security has pushed this topic to the fore, but large organizations have always had the problem of finding what they have.
03:55 PM | Recommend This | Print This
The O'Reilly Radar
Tim starts off with a well-known quote from William Gibson: "The future is here, its just not evenly distributed yet." This leads to his "big hairy, audacious goal (otherwise known as a mission statement: Changing the world by capturing the knowledge of innovators. One of his key strategies for doing this is "leveraging alpha geeks."
Here's the editorial filters that Tim uses:
- Disruptive technology
- Technology uptake is accelerating
- Its on a long term trend (he quote Ray Kruzweiler: "It has to make sense in the world in which you finish, not the one in which you start.")
- Grassroots support--bottom up
- Inspires passion
- Has deeper social interactions
- There's a real need for information
- Has professional practitioners
- A possible business ecology
Here are some things that are hitting Tim's radar:
- Amazon Web Services. I think whats interesting here is that this is a social networking issue, not a web services issue. Amazon had already bought off on affiliate marketing and thus had a mind-set that was conducive to building web services for their platform. Companies that are having a tough time understanding Web services probably don't have a culture that values interacting with partners in a networked way. Tim has AWS up as an example of a larger trend: creating web-facing databases that can be repurposed. In other words, the same thing I'm talking about in Enabling Web Services.
- Tim Pozar is now talking about the Bay Area Research Wireless Network. This is a community network that has great potential for public safety. We, of course, have this problem in spades in Utah where there is so much rural area.
- Andy Phelps is a professor at RIT. He's showing a player user community web-site called Phank. He's not associated with them, but thinks they are an example of an interesting phenomenon. Phank is a online community, called a guild, built around the game Everquest. They have built a community that is stronger than the bond to the game and so they're looking at other games to migrate to. They fund their work by playing the game and selling information about it on eBay to other players.
02:43 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Eric Bonabeau on Biological Computing
Eric Bonabeau is Chairman and Chief Scientific Officer at Icosystem. He apparently used to work for Microsoft Research. He's talking about social insects and what studying them can teach computer science. The chief question is "how do we shape emergence?" Less succinctly, "how do we define individual behavior and interactions to produce desired emergent patterns?"
His first lesson is "the whole is more than the sum of its parts." Eric spoke for a while about how Ants learn paths to food sources via pheromones and even find the shortest part in a robust way because pheromones evaporate. He's now showing how that can be used to solve the traveling salesman problem. This is biologically inspired since it makes several important departures from true ant behavior. The solution method compares well to other optimization techniques. I found a paper by Dorigo and Gambardella on this topic. Its being commercially applied by companies like Unilever.
The second lesson is "simple rules rule." Eric is describing how ants create bucket brigades organized by size with larger, more efficient ants closer to the nest. Simulation shows that this is the optimal way to organize labor. CVS Pharmacies was able to apply this rule to their distribution centers and saw a 34% increase in productivity.
The third lesson is "no one needs to be in control." He uses the example of collective transport where ants collectively try to carry something too large for any single one. They all push in random directions and make no progress until by chance more push in one direction and get them all going in a single direction. Another example is nest contruction in wasps and termites. He built a model based on a simple rule of brcks being deposited based on some stimulation in the environment. The only form of global communication is the structure itself.
The fourth lesson is "size matters." In small colonies, workers exhibit polyvalence, meaning all workers do all tasks. In larger colonies, specialization occurs. This is true, of course, in human organizations as well. Some organizations don't practice it well and that hurts their efficiency in significant ways. The State IT organization comes to mind.
12:55 PM | Recommend This | Print This
ETechCon Photos
I have started an album of my pictures from the Emerging Technology Conference. Feel free to take and use them.11:43 AM | Recommend This | Print This
DRM Panel
Dan Gillmor is moderating a panel on DRM. First up is Joe Kraus. Joe used to be at Excite back in the day. He is best remembered, by me at least, for an interview with Morley Saffer from 60 Minutes where he said "this is not your father's company." He was right; my father's company lasted more than 3 years. :-) He's now a lobbyist on digital rights in Washington and is quite well informed. His organization is DigitalConsumer.org. His message is one I've said many times: Silicon Valley has to wake up and realize that politics is central to their business. Hollywood and the recording industry understand this very well. Technical companies typically don't.
Wendy Seltzer is an attorney with the EFF. She says that DRM is not digital rights management, but digital restrictions management since DRM isn't about rights, its about restrictions. Of course, rights and restrictions are just two sides of the same coin. She describes copyright in layers. There's a layer of copyright law that has certain rights and restrictions. Companies layer technology on top of that to try and enforce the law and to take away some of the rights of consumers that are granted in copyright law. DMCA is a layer on top of that that restricts technologists and consumers from tampering with that technology. In that light DMCA is not about copyrights, but about restricting technology.
Bunnie Huang is a former MIT student who figured out how to hack the XBox. The interesting point here is that DMCA doesn't attack this hack on the basis that Bunnie stole intellectual property, but on the basis of whether he has the right to run something on Microsoft's hardware, which he bought and paid for, other than Microsoft's OS. namely he put Linux on the XBox.
Lastly is Cory Doctorow, from the EFF. He mentions Napster as the largest collection of human creativity ever. What's more it was built in a matter of months without any central command and control and for very little money. He compares it to a library and the destruction of Napster was a virtual burning of the library. In the wake of Napster, more libraries sprung up in its place. The problem with Napster wasn't that it threatened the the recording industry. New technologies have always displaced existing distribution mechanisms. The problem is that we haven't figured out how to compensate artists in the new system. DRM takes a different approach, asking the question "How can we burn the library so that we never have to burn it again."
11:24 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Howard Rheingold
This morning's keynote presentation is Howard Rheingold on "Technology Innovation and Collective Action." Howard is the author of many books. The book which really brought him to the attention of geeks was The Virtual Community about his experiences in the Well. The latest is a book that has had some popularity called Smart Mobs. I picked up a copy yesterday but haven't had a chance to start it.
Howard's message this morning is "You can create tools that amplify collective action: innovate our way out of the enclosures growing around us." His theme is collective action. He contrasts this with collectivism. Collective action is people voluntarily working together to create some common good and is the basis of civilization.
Howard mentions the use of social software and mobile technology in politics. He claims that technology played a major roll in turning around the recent electioins in Korea and in monitoring elections in Kenya. I would agree and take it beyond mere politics to the realm of eGovernment. I think that the transparency engendered by eGovernment can play a significant role in changing government and driving appropriate social behavior.
He has an interesting take on RIAA and DRM. He notes the change that took place with the PC wherein consumers of computing services became users of computing services. The result of DRM would be to turn us back into mere consumers and only people who worked at certain places would be allowed to be users.
Howard tells the story of having an iPAQ that was enabled to read bar codes. He pointed it at a box of prunes and the UPC was linked to information about the company, product, etc. Each of these was linked to a Google search. The top item in the search on the company that produced the prunes as a Supreme Court decision about them and their labor practices. His point is that every thing has a story. Howard asks the question "who will be allowed to read and write these stories?"