Studying: YES Just getting stuck in to the second year of my PhD. Traveling / events: NO Lots going on, probably more useful to watch my Twitter. Read about past events and past travel adventures. Find out where I'm going next, events and adventures. Writing: YES It's NaNoWriMo season. Read about my writing here. Working: NO and yes Tutoring and doing ongoing freelance work, but not taking on any new projects.
I'm supervising (created the brief, overseeing and guiding a group of 6 MSc students, grading) a Digital Media Studio Project in the Edinburgh College of Art. I challenged my lot to use responsive web design techniques in a unique and inventive way. You can see what they're up to here.
(Write-up about this event by the organisers here). DMMM was a conference aimed at sociologists and anthropologists and the like, so, having never studied these disciplines in any way, I was worried I'd have no idea what was going on. Fortunately everyone was friendly, and everyone's research was really interesting, relevant and mostly made sense to me. You can read all of the notes I took here. Humanities researchers are using and gathering digital data in lots of interesting and unique ways. Using social media and other digital methods to engage with study participants (Jo Belcher, Lorenza Antonucci, Eve Stirling); sentiment analysis (Mike Thelwell); examining archives; image use in online interviews (Emma Hutchinson); e-focus groups (Ibrar Bhatt); digital records (reflections) of a creative arts process (Carole Kirk); crowd-sourcing of commercial ideas (Temitayo Abinusawa); avatars and virtual interaction spaces like SecondLife (Evelyn McElhinney); brilliant playful use of hacking to disrupt discussions about online learning (Jeremy Knox on MOOCs). _I _talked about digital media on the Semantic Web, with as much of a sociology swing as I could give it given my limited expertise in that domain. My slides, beautifully illustrated by Chloe Dungate (available for hire! Academic slides starting at £2 a drawing! Loves topics she doesn't understand so she can be as outrageously creative as possible!), are here. You can see my talk notes there, too. danah boyd, whose work I've followed more or less since my undergraduate, teleconferenced in to give a really interesting keynote called "Making Sense of Teen Life: Strategies for Capturing Ethnographic Data in a Networked Era." She discussed working with young people for the last few years to examine their use of social networks (mostly MySpace), and all of the challenges and considerations that came up along the way. She was surprised a lot. The open discussion at the end raised a lot of discussion about ethics. It was implied at one point that the content of tweets or YouTube comments are ripe for the picking with no strings attached because they're already in the public space. It's definitely not that simple. There's also a danger of humanities researchers being out of touch with modern techniques and best practices. Commercial research is sometimes way ahead, but there's no communication between each end of the spectrum, so methods get developed and optimised unnecessarily. A lot of people had experiences indicating that digital methods in humanities are often not taken seriously. Supervisors, ethics committees, funding bodies, who have only worked with traditional methods can struggle to see the legitimacy of results gathered by digital means. On the other hand, certain levels of ignorance can sometimes work to the researcher's advantage in terms of being allowed to get stuff done with minimal red tape (because authorities don't know what questions to ask). Personally I was interested by this general feeling of novelty about digital methods. Having been in computing for almost my whole academic career (not to mention a child of the Web), a lot of things were being critically and confusedly discussed that I just take for granted. Things like the validity of friendships that exist entirely online, and feelings expressed through short-lived text alone. I think arts and humanities researchers who really want to get to grips with digital methods as legitimate research tools should consider orchestrating placements alongside technical researchers and immersing themselves in a world where the main options are all digital by default.
Digital Methods as Mainstream Methodology, London, 7 December
For the second year, I'm tutoring PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS and JavaScript to MSc Design and Digital Media students for the Dynamic Web Design course in Edinburgh College of Art. Sometimes this makes me feel like a wizard.
As a farewell present to Beth, who was vacating sunny Scotland for the harsh and unforgiving shores of the US, I made a squirrel. But not just any squirrel. A Morrissquirrel. That's Morrissey-squirrel. Don't question it. I largely followed this pattern for the normal squirrel parts, then improvised to Moz it up.
December 7th, 2012. Notes as I scribbled them. Read a proper review. **Peter Webster - Digital Resources for Social Scientists at the British Library** British Library research methods guide under social sciences. Web about individuals and organisations is fragile, things disappear. Most site owners ignore requests for permission to archive stuff. New legal deposit legislation next year will allow scraping the Web and archiving everything without worrying about infringing copyright. Using this data is restricted; library premises or print one copy for non-commercial use. Can't use an item simultaneously with any other user.. (regulation is for print, derp) Full text search for internet archive... open question, very complicated. Consultation going on about this. Legislation is very restrictive; need to look at data derived from dataset and how that can be made available. Mike Thelwell - Sentiment Analysis for the Social Web Sentiment is seen as peripheral, and often ignored, but actually it's core. Emotional reaction to tea or coffee. sentistrength.wlv.ac.uk SentiStrength - detect strength of +ve and -ve sentiment in short text. Takes into account that text might not be gramatically correct. In social media, sentiment expressed in different ways (eg. emoticons, deliberate misspellings to embed sentiment: haaaapppyyyyyy). List of +ve and -ve term stems and strengths from -5 to 4. People disagree about sentiment surprisingly much. Something lots of people tweet about must arouse sentiment. But for big events, surge of quantity of tweets, but not surge in +ve or -ve sentiment. Lots of sentiment is implicit. YT comments are easy to get so good source of social data. No ethical concerns about getting permission to analyse because it's already public. (hmm, no?) Longer the text, less well it works. But does have a long text mode, with slightly different scoring. Used by Yahoo question answering system to work out best people to give answers. Companies use it for product reactions. Would like to see these techniques to smaller scale case studies. The most focused data stream still has loads of junk like what they had for breakfast.. Why are 1 and -1 neutral instead of 0? Because psychology - two scales, not one. Jo Belcher - mixing traditional and digital methods to research hidden carers. Is online support for parents and carers socially patterned like social media use? Needs to reach people who don't use the Internet, too, for comparisons. People respond in the medium they were first contacted. Treat online and offline results differently for analysis. Lorenza Antonucci - Using social media in different phases of research process Digital methods allow you to do something different. A lot of focus on big data and secondary digital data (twitter). Not about collecting own data, but using data already available on social media. Might be a problem fitting secondary data into existing theoretical frameworks. So need to collect. She's looking at real vs virtual identities. Not possible to do follow up interviews just over facebook. DM help to select people. Also cross-national research. Age/generational aspects. Jeremy Knox - MOOCs Is learning simply the consumption of information online? Web enabled sensors. GPS to record where he goes within MOOC - physical location and digital space together (cool). Locations tweet when he's in the MOOC. RFID system that allows office books to tweet content. Experiments to disrupt and critise. Playful methods to think about the MOOC in a different way. Assemblage of human, technology and place; learning might be post-human. Final outcome of research? Not sure.. a way to provoke thinking in what is often a closed area. How is learning affected by physical space? Sue Thomas - technobiophilia O'Reilly's topsoil metaphor is cool. Five categories about how people talk about online experiences. Lots of nature metaphors. Metaphors aren't deliberate. We bring nature into computing because we innately want it to be there (biophilia) Carole Kirk - Digital reflection: A method for arts practice-led research? Questions and methods come from practical. Tacit knowledge. Capturing creative processes. How to leave a trace of an action for reflection? Digital methods can help. Not a complete record, but a trace. Digital technologies that involve a high level of manipulation stimulate greater reflection. Only archives - metadata, feedback & discussion. Visible record of reflection. Process of creating records doesn't replace the practice itself. Might trigger embodied memory. Help to articulate fleeting things. In arts, practice-led research is more about creating digital data. Emma Hutchinson - Asynchronous online interviews and image elicitation Async, like email or forum. Complement interview with photos, but not used much online yet. Identity performance of online gamers. Images help with articulation. Lots to talk about. Photos that do/don't get uploaded to facebook, why / why not? Eve Stirling - Facebook profile as research tool Undergraduate transition to university. Lots of HE happens on fb. Looking at the every day. Digital and physical spaces. Personal fb is not academic, and hidden. Twitter is academic. Ethnography is about understanding every day culture and developing trust and rapport with participants. Fb friends are linked to study. Intrinsically linked. Does becoming fb friend need a disclaimer? Informed consent? Personal and professional lives blurring. After study - delete friends? Me! Digital Media on the Semantic Web. My slides are here. danah boyd - Making Sense of Teen Life: Strategies for Capturing Ethnographic Data in a Networked Era Understanding social networks before there were sns The rise and fall of myspace. How much can be made sense of from a distance? Engaging with own friends not like working with young people. How radically difficult it is to interpret what she sees. Young people better at encoding the information they make available, because of adult surveillance. Just because she can see their content, doesn't mean she knows what's going on. Observes offline too. Adults help to recruit youths with different perspectives. Thought about recruiting online but stopped. Not a good norm to start. Make sense of online things with offline interviews (ethical things considered, parents/friends nearby). Don't begin the conversation with online material; need them to feel comfortable first; usually an hour into the interview. How to coordinate data? Serious challenge. Blogging about things as she's thinking through them; trying to make sense of them in a public way. Thinking out loud, can be corrected and challenged during sense-making process. Not just experts, but her participants too. Controversial piece about shift from myspace to fb. Got picked up overnight and got over 10k responses. Most people frustrated and angry and didn't understand where she was coming from. People came forward with quantitative data that helped. Adults attacked her for being racist; young people responded with their stories. How public to make the young people? Don't expose them, no real names unless their already public figures. Never quotes online material exactly so people can't search to identify the young people. Visibility has consequences people don't expect or understand. Can make people more vulnerable by making them visible. The young people could choose to make themselves visible through the process (some do). Speak for them or help them speak? Public in the media to make young peoples' voices heard as much as possible. Never publishes in a closed access journal. Collaboration is in sense-making, not writing. More in intervention-driven projects. Generally don't want to, but a few exceptions - published two papers with teenagers. Tension between MS and research? No, MSR is academic institution. Lots of freedom. Teenagers expect her to fix xbox.. External perception is more confusing than internal. Can make the case for open access in a way that lots of university scholars can't. Problems with paraphrasing quotes from websites? Tries to make quotes more common, found everywhere. Her ethics about making people not more vulnerable is worth more than skimping on real quotes. Helps that she doesn't rely entirely on online data. Says she's not good at articulating her methods. Ibrar Bhatt - e-focus groups and e-interviews Separate summer project on student experience for postgraduate research students, distance learners, part time students globally. Needed in depth focus group without them being there. How involved do the students feel in activities in the School of Education? Different doing focus groups online - affordances and challenges. Used Adobe Connect. Facilitator echos some questions. Multidimensional focus group. Participants could also discuss with each other, and with researcher, over personal chat. Guidelines - rehearsal, drop-in session, beforehand - recording of everything; can integrate their video into a transcription. Temitayo Abinusawa - Social Networking and innovation Technical background. How organisations use IT to promote activities. Social networking - Internet was loads of words, chaos. Make sense of the words, then you can innovate. Can create products and services to meet needs. Good ideas that need funding. People discuss ideas online. Organisations are looking for new ideas too. Organisation can search the Web for ideas to create innovation. Outcomes: organisations can create more for less. Feedback is consumer interaction that takes place on the Internet. Dell IdeaStorm - turn your ideas into reality. Openness is important, not exploitation. (Seems to be reward focussed, rather than transparent exchange culture, query). People don't read t&c so think they're being exploited. Evelyn McElhinney - Social virtual worlds: a new place for the avatar researcher Focus groups in Second Life with avatars collecting, sat in chairs like IRL. Most people aren't roleplaying, their avatars are just themselves. Closing Discussion Ethics Commercial research is sometimes ahead with digital methods practices. Things happening one end aren't being noticed by other end. Need to communicate and look out for each other. Mixed methods research. Digital methods need legitamising to be taken seriously. Sometimes people not knowing much about it can help to get stuff done.
[Notes] Digital Methods as Mainsteam Methodology
Which was hosted by the National Library of Scotland. (Information). I reported on the 1st International Open Data Dialogue in Berlin that I'd been to in December, but then had to immediately leave, so I don't have any notes on the rest of the talks..
Read my complete notes from day one, and complete notes from day two. The 1st International Open Data Dialogue in Berlin in December was broadly a discussion about real-world applications of Open Data. Lots of practice, less theory. Despite this (or perhaps because of this, now I think about it) it wasn't as technical as I expected. Felix Sasaki [1] talked about some basic technicalities of Linked Data and the Semantic Web, kind of the first things you'd learn if you were studying it in a structured way, and I heard a lot of people afterwards complaining that that had been too technical. Importantly, there was a real message of getting things done at this event, and plenty of evidence that a world built on Open Data is not an idealistic pipe dream, but a reality right now. Challenges are being articulated, and solutions are being created, and problems are being overcome. I stress this particularly because a couple of sceptics who weren't at the conference tweeted things along the lines of "Sounds like your conference is a bunch of idealist hippies preaching to the choir…" A genuine concern, but what's really exciting is that this definitely wasn't the case. It was instead a bunch of realist technologists with the expertise and influence to actively overcome barriers to improving the world. Open Data is about social change and empowerment. It is about accountability of organisations with massive influence over the lives of ordinary people. It is not about an abandonment of personal privacy, or everybody knowing everything about everyone else. It should go without saying (yet it still needs to be said) that it is not appropriate to blindly make all data available to everyone about every aspect of everybody's life. But what if you had access to all of the data anyone had ever collected about your life? Think about purchase history (shop loyalty cards, travel tickets), online activities (searches, browsing history, social networking). All this stuff is being stored anyway, all over the place. Often by organisations who fully intend to profit from it, presumably with your unwitting consent. They went to the trouble of collecting it, but you went to the trouble of providing it. It's your data too. What could you do with it (or hire a software developer to do with it)? Then imagine you had access to the same data from everyone in your town, aggregated and anonymised, and visualised in a nice way. Maybe you could team up with your neighbours for cheaper bulk food purchases? Maybe you'd realise that others had similar hobbies or problems nearby, and could form special interest or support groups? Reduce costs by sharing transport to similar destinations (or just have some company on the journey)? There's so much potential within data that's already held. The UK government's Midata initiative is a massive step in the right direction [3] toward compelling commercial enterprises to hand over machine-readable datasets to consumers upon request. In Slovakia and Kenya (and possibly others, but these were the ones that came up), there is a constitutional right to data held by the government. Not without loopholes and other problems, of course [5, 2]. One of the obvious problems is convincing large organisations that hold lots of data (like commercial enterprise and governments) of the circumstances in which it would be in everybody's best interest to release (some of) it. Reasons they don't include a lack of understanding of the benefits; disproportionate assessment of risks; aversion to change; a lack of technical expertise and infrastructure; "data hugging syndrome" [2]; licencing issues; outdated business models. Nigel Shadbolt's experience says that large organisations who open data always see benefits. It's always worth the effort. When the data is there, suddenly developers start doing things with it; applications appear, many unexpected, and usually free. He stressed that it's important to have a stockpile of success stories in case you need to convince someone in charge of the value of Open Data, and his favourite one was the publication of MRSA rates in hospitals (resulting in sharing of good practice, and an 85% reduction in MRSA over two years). See a list at the end of this post for all of the success stories I came across over the course of the two days. There were lots of discussions about the users or audiences of Open Data, and the various different roles people can have. Most consumers of Open Data are developers, and 'ordinary people' see the data via an application. Many won't know (or care) about the source of the data that powers the app, even if it about them. Many will, and trust must be built for people see the value that such apps could bring to their day to day lives. Ideally, releasing a dataset would be part of an ecosystem, rather than a one-time thing. Data providers should value consumer feedback, and commit to good quality, up-to-date data. Rufus Pollock wonders why every dataset doesn't have a public issue tracker, and notes that poor quality data creates wasted time, especially at hack events [4]. A successful Open Data world needs partnership between the public, media and organisations. All of these parties need educating on appropriate combinations of the realistic potential of Open Data, and the technicalities of releasing and using it. Michael Hörz [6] discussed the journalist perspective on Open Data; they're desperate for data about everything, and often manage to get hold of it. But they find themselves begging for spreadsheets or CSV files, because what they get given are PDFs. Eugh! Yet they're not asking for Linked Data formats? Which means, presumably, that after they've been through the trouble of extracting data from PDFs, they're putting it in a spreadsheet or something, and there's still a whole level of usefulness missing. And I assume that's because they don't know otherwise, or perhaps don't have the resources to learn even if they're aware of the possibilities. Similar sorts of reasons that they're being given PDFs by organisations in the first place. So awareness, and easily digestable educational resources (how about SchoolOfData.org) need to be promoted. Now then, about those success stories... This list includes data publishing projects, groups and apps that have been built on Open Data. The Berlin Open Data Portal (100 datasets) Open Cities EU (various OD working groups) EuroCities (OD working group) OKFN OD working group Czech Republic Open Data Portal (171 datasets) Amsterdam Open Data Portal (137 datasets) Adopt A Hydrant (public upkeep of local area) Slovakia Open Data Portal (~52 datasets) Other version of Slovakia Open Data Portal.. (45 datasets) zNasichDani (links between businesses and Slovakia government) Cena Statu (Slovakia governement spending visualisations) OtvorenéZmluvy (Slovakia state profitability) Restart Slovensko (OD hack competition) Open Trip Planner (journey planning platform, deployed across 12 countries) FairPhone (pushing for ethically sourced smartphones) Locatable (where to live in London) Placr.mobi (public transport and venues in London) Mastodon C (green cloud computing) Apps for Amsterdam (OD hack competition) Apps For Democracy (Amsterdam gov't focussed OD hack) Kenya Open Data Portal (531 datasets(!)) Farm Subsidy (EU spending on farm subsidies) Gapminder (Global data trends visalised) Europe Open Data Portal (>800 datasets) That'll do for now. Lots of the portals and competitions have links to app examples etc. There's lots to explore. Finally, I highlighted in my notes quite a lot of things that I need to find out more about. A lot of them are technology or platforms for publishing or sharing Open Data, and various standards or studies I need to read in more detail. I have a couple of questions to ponder on, too: There's a massive focus around hacks (more often than not one off events) as a way of using and promoting Open Data. What other ways are there? What will the path to a deeper integration of Open Data in society look like? There are lots of datasets and vocabularies about public services and society, as well as science and education. What arts, culture and media datasets are out there? (And what has been done with them?) Ooh, or online social interactions? Maybe I'll do a survey. [1] Prof. Dr. Felix Sasaki, keynote: "Linked Open Data @ W3C-Vocabularies, Working Groups, Usage Scenarios." [2] Prof. Dr. Simon M. Onywere, talk: "The Kenya Open Data Incubator Project – Outreach to Research Community." [3] https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/midata-2012-review-and- consultation via Nigel Shadbolt [4] Dr. Rufus Pollock, keynote: "Open Data, Building the Ecosystem" [5] Peter Hanełák, talk: "Open Data and Open Government Partnership in Slovakia." [6] Michael Hörz, talk: "Open Data in Local Journalism: An Excel file?"
1st International Open Data Dialogue, Berlin, 5-6 December
# Tutor and demonstrator, Dynamic Web Design ## MSc Design & Digital Media, University of Edinburgh Taught basic web design and development, including responsive design and progressive enhancement, to students from a variety of (mostly non-technical) backgrounds. Marked coursework.
MSc Design & Digital Media, University of Edinburgh Taught basic web design and development, including responsive design and progressive enhancement, to students from a variety of (mostly non-technical) backgrounds. Marked coursework.
Tutor and demonstrator, Dynamic Web Design
31st December - 6th January 2013 Wrote a 6 month plan. It's nice to have solid targets. Here it is in calendar form. Got the flu.
7th January - 13th January I was subject of Paolo's procedural task labelling pilot experiment. It was quite complicated. I don't know if I did a very good job. I went to TechMeetup and networked like crazy. I talked to Andy Hyde about ALISS getting involved with the ILW hack, and Edinburgh OD scene in general. And a few other people about supporting the ILW hack in various ways. I talked to Felix Gilfedder of Popcorn Horror about novel ways of engaging with creative digital media communities (PhD related!) I briefly met Russell, with whom I hope to discuss digital video metadata (PhD related!) One other thing which isn't related to Open Data or my PhD but is very exciting nonetheless. I went to a Design Informatics talk about the Internet of Things.
17th December - 23rd December Mostly things not strictly PhD related... 18th - Initial meeting about organising a hack for undergraduates during Innovative Learning Week in February 19th - Discussed how local small scale community groups can benefit from Open Data, and how they could get involved in the ILW hack, with Freda O'Bryne and Euan Jackson. \\\\- Also discussed these things with Ewan, and started on a spreadsheet of decent apps that use Open Data, and links to their data sources.
Week in review: Open Data in the community
21st - 27th January Brainstormed about how to work with amateur digital media creators, mostly with the aim of starting to put together a vocabulary for representing various digital media creation processes, collaboration dynamics and audience engagement. More coherent thoughts on that next week, I should think. Lightning-talked about the Berlin Open Data Dialogue at an OKFN meetup in the National Library of Scotland on Thursday 24th. Talked about ontologies for sensor data at Ontologies with a View.
14th January - 20th January Further discussed ILW hack with various parties, and released a website with information for anyone interested in being involved, and registration for students. I went to the first Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition class. It looks interesting, but might be a bit maths heavy... I might concentrate on learning the maths now, and take the class next year, instead of killing myself with both. Caught up on all my blogging!
# Co-organiser, Smart Data Hack ## University of Edinburgh Dropped the ball on my PhD for months to wrangle sponsors, set up the website, recruit participants and generally get shit together. It went well, with feedback from students like "easily the most useful and fun week I've had since I started uni".
University of Edinburgh Dropped the ball on my PhD for months to wrangle sponsors, set up the website, recruit participants and generally get shit together. It went well, with feedback from students like "easily the most useful and fun week I've had since I started uni".
# Co-organiser, Open Data Day Edinburgh Helped organise the Edinburgh branch of [International Open Data Day](http://opendataday.org/) unconference.
Helped organise the Edinburgh branch of International Open Data Day unconference.
I was fortunate enough to attend the Computer Mediated Social Sense- Making workshop, conveniently situated on the ground floor of the building I work in, on the 14th of February. Whilst more technical than the Digital Methods conference I went to in December, the talks and panel sessions served to build upon things I started to think about then. Namely, beginning to situate my research interests amongst many concepts from the currently quite alien fields of sociology and anthropology. The talks were varied, and key themes that emerged were the collection/use of data for social improvement (health and wellbeing, teaching and learning, disaster recovery), and the importance of context in making collected data genuinely useful. A notable challenge is that one piece of data might have a thousand different contexts from the perspectives of a thousand different human beings. So how to communicate these variations to software that processes this data, and perhaps makes decisions using it? Perhaps not to worry too much about that at all. Process things locally instead of globally, using local contexts and understandings, but make sure everything is annotated such that information can still be exchanged across the whole network, and differences in understanding can be accounted for or reasoned out if a need occurs. For the record, I'm looking at how Semantic Web technologies could be used to better connect human and machine in the context of amateur digital content creation (movies, comics, music, art), including how semantically annotating creative (often collaborative) processes as well as the end products of these processes and the engagement of an audience with these products, could improve the overall experience of creating content (along a number of dimensions). A massive part of this will be creating tools that actually collect the necessary data from users. Ultimately, these tools will need to be invisible, ie. easily integrated into existing online routines, with no effort required to use them for the non-technically minded so that a network effect can take place. Incentives for crowdsourcing came up during CMSSM, and someone pointed out that by gamifying data collection for research projects, incentives become the same as ones offered by gambling companies; something competitive and potentially addictive. I think things like global systems of reputation and trust are useful on a network where people are to share data about their own work (or opinions of the work of others) and may be nurturing a desire for popularity or exposure on the network (a network where the people are central, because the data could not exist without them, but where the users and the data are simultaneously co-dependant). Anyway, I'm still brainstorming.
Recently I read and brainstormed some things about interesting ways of creating a decentralised network (social or otherwise). Tent.io is still coming out on top as having the most potential for something I could actually implement and build upon. Tent server is originally Ruby, but there are already Python and PHP implementations. PHP might be the most useful as the mostly widely supported by cheap shared hosting providers, reducing the barrier for people wanting to run their own Tent server. Depot in particular has the goal of targeting the technical lowest common denominator, and making installation and maintenance as easy as possible for a non-expert. Problems with having nodes of a network, whereby people who don't want to set up their own node can sign up to someone else's node, include ensuring consistent URIs for things. If someone wants to up and move to another node, what are the best ways of maintaining connections? Obviously anyone who buys their own domain name and hooks it up won't have a problem, but not everyone can or will. A centralised permanent URI service like PURL (or just use PURL..)? Unhosted and their remoteStorage protocol are interesting. The idea is that a user registers with a remoteStorage provider, then signs into Unhosted apps with that identity. Unhosted apps are all frontend JavaScript, and no data is sent to a server. Anything that needs to be stored - content you creating whilst using the app - is sent to your personal remoteStorage account. There are only two remoteStorage providers listed though, and one of those is a test one that could get wiped at any time. The other, 5apps.com, doesn't appear to provide an interface for browsing and exporting what you have stored with them. Obviously this is an early project, and since anyone with a webserver can theoretically set up a remoteStorage service, has lots of potential. In the short time I spent investigating, I couldn't work out possibilities for sharing data in your remoteStorage, so Unhosted apps might just be useful for personal, non- collaborative activities. Some examples they have are a simple text/code editor, a really pretty simple writing interface, to-do lists, time management, favourite drinks list. Oh wait, friendsunhosted.com is like a twitter service. Because I don't know anyone else using friendsUnhosted, I haven't tested it properly, but it appears to offer a stream of peoples' statuses, which are presumably stored in their personal remoteStorage. I'll investigate better. The mailing list is active and the main developer seems to be on top of things, so this is something to keep a close eye on. Idea: Possible to set up 'remoteStorage' on peoples' own Google Drive accounts, via that API? I don't know anything technically about peer-to-peer, but it seemed like a good avenue to pursue with regards to very established, very decentralised networks of people and files. At an extreme end of 'owning one's own data', I'm curious about storing all your files (eg. linked data graphs) locally and sharing them / accessing other peoples' only through a browser interface. Drawbacks obviously include your files only being available when you're online. I read a handful of good things about the G3 protocol and API used in FilesWire, by Dreamsoft Technologies. I got really excited for a little while, before reluctantly giving up because the whole project seems to be old and very dead. I did track down the developer on LinkedIn and facebook, but I haven't decided yet if it's worth pursuing at all. I investigated Freenet, and their freesites. The Freenet network is all about anonymity; any data you upload is broken up and stored on many nodes in the network. You can't identify where it originally came from, or where you're pulling something from when you retrieve it. There were some messages from 2000/2001 on a mailing list about RDF on Freenet, but nothing seems to have come of that. Requires a software download of course. Again, I don't know enough about the technicalities yet to judge if something like this would be a viable approach for a decentralised linked data sharing network. I also came across (the now deceased) Opera Unite, which is a webserver running inside Opera that lets people share files and serve webpages without the hassle of paying for or setting up their own server.
One of the first useful things I crocheted were these extremely masculine handwarmers. The extremely soft and fuzzy wool was from Age Scotland I believe. I used no pattern and had never made handwarmers before, so they came out far too big. Not to worry, at least you can fit a Tigo in them! I just repeated dc ch1 around, dc-ing in the gap left by the chain each time. I reduced a bit around the wrist area to shape it, but it wasn't particularly effective. I chained about four, instead of carrying on, to make the gap for the thumb, then continued as normal. One of them is shorter than the other, because I didn't count anything. They serve their purpose though, and the lucky owner has even gone so far as to wear them in public in the chilly heights of Appleton Tower.
28th January - 3rd February I read Annotation of Multimedia using OntoMedia by K. Faith Lawrence et al., and we discussed it during Ontologies with a View. OntoMedia might well prove useful in that describing the content of digital media can improve searching, sorting and sharing. I started reading a couple of other papers by Faith, but haven't finished them yet, so expect summaries in the near future. I brainstormed about decentralised networks, with thinking of ways of individuals sharing linked data about themselves and their projects without surrendering all that data to a server in mind.
4th - 10th February When helping to organise an event, it's impressive how much time sending emails, updating websites and spreadsheets, having meetings and generally coordinating things can take up. So that's a lot of what I've done this week. Not PhD, but related enough to be excusable... sort of... (Smart Data Hack and Open Data Day: Joined Up Edinburgh) I have finally booked plane tickets to Serbia for Resonate new media festival, at which I'm hoping to make useful contacts with independent digital media producers, learn some stuff about big data visualisation at the workshops (my places at the ones I've applied to haven't been confirmed yet though), and generally learn more about the digital art scene (and figure out ways SW technologies can benefit people who are part of it). And also to enjoy Belgrade, as I'll have a spare couple of days either side of the festival. Because the flights were cheaper then! Honest! I actually lost an entire afternoon hunting for cheapest flights on websites that weren't obviously scams (Cheap-o-Airlines? Really?? Ultimately booking through JAT directly was the best option), then negotiating cheapest trains to London in order to catch flights, then sending CouchSurfing requests, because why spend money on a hostel when you can meet wonderful new people and get tourist advice for free? I also applied for a place at the Semantic Web Summer School in Spain in July. It looks fantastic and educational and stuff. And I applied for funding to help cover then 900EUR entry cost (a whole week, accommodation and meals included), and SICSA are providing £500, yay! Two thirds of Ontologies with a View met this week, and we discussed BBC use of Linked Data. I only managed to skim the paper, but knew the general principles from articles I'd read about their work before... I will read it properly at some point, though I think a more technical discussion of what they did might be useful.
11th to 24th February I went to the Computer Mediated Social Sense-Making workshop; read about it. I helped organise and run the Innovative Learning Week Smart Data Hack (18th - 22nd), and Edinburgh's version of International Open Data Day (23rd). Both were successful.
I have just checked out the website for Resonate. A little bit jealous now!
Rowe, M. (2007) Meervisage - A Community Based Annotation Tool. ‘Towards a Social Science of Web 2.0’ Conference at the University of York 5-6th September, 2007. How SW can benefit from incorporation with existing 'Social Web'. "...collaborative generation of metadata... using social networks as a user base..." Uses fb groups created for sharing and organisation of research. Suggests posting links to useful resources is comparable to annotating the resource. Comments are more metadata. Points out usual stuff of actually generating semantic data being a problem for SW. System requirements: Annotations must be shared in a community. Annotations can be reviewed and edited (/audited) (by group) Collaborative Central repo. Annotations contain semantic metadata. Content of resource annotated, not URL. Communication layer that doesn't interrupt annotation (uses external services). Review of existing systems: Annotea [9] [13] _J. Kahan, M.R. Koivunen, E. Prud Hommeaux, R.R. Swick. Annotea: an open _RDF infrastructure for shared Web annotations. Computer Networks. 2002. __ _M Koivunen. Annotea and Semantic Web Supported Collaboration. Proc. Of ___ the ESWC2005 Conference, 2005. No communication layer (but has discussion threads, wat?). Can only be edited by author, but can be reviewed by others. Can be local, private or shared. RDF. Piggy Bank [10] _D Huynh, S Mazzocchi, D Karger. Piggy Bank: Experience the Semantic Web _Inside Your Web Browser. Springer-Verlag GmbH. 2005. RDF. Auto and manual. Bundled with scrapers; if they fail, manual. Only of one type. Share group or global, or save to local 'semantic bank' <\\\\-- find="" is="" out="" this="" what=""> Reviewed by all, edited by author. Community of users, but no SNS integration. KIM [14] A Kiryakov, B Popov, D Ognyanoff, D Manov, A Kirilov, M Goranov. Semantic Annotation, Indexing and Retrieval. Journal of Web Semantics, Springer. 2004. Automatic named entity recognition. Links to knowledgebase with ontology. Creates new URIs for new entities or link swith entities it already knows about. Global sharing. Can be deleted but not edited. No social involvement. Magpie [11] _J Domingue, M Dzbor and E Motta. Semantic Layering with Magpie. _Handbook on Ontologies. 2004. Auto annotate webpage. Similar to KIM, but does not hyperlink to knowledgebase; instead each item gets context menu (right click) with services depending on entity. 'Multi-dimensional approach'. Uses ontology to trigger other services depending on concept. Plugin for IE. Simply looks for entities that are in ontology (Dzbor 2004). [1] Using existing information to derive semantics from folksonomies (delicious): _X Wu, L Zhang, Y Yu. Exploring social annotations for the Semantic Web. _Proceedings of the 15th international conference on the World Wide Web, 2006. [15] Social bookmarking tools and how semantic info aids resource discovery. Probabalistic model of how resources are annotated: _A Plangprasopchok, K Lerman. Exploiting Social Annotation for Automatic _Resource Discovery. Eprint arXiv, 2007. [16] Distributed nature of folksonomies. Improve search mechanisms. Tags not great: S Choy, A. Lui. Web Information Retrieval in Collaborative Tagging Systems. Proceedings of International Conference on Web Intelligence, 2006. (vs.) [17] Rigid taxonomies not great: _C Shirky. Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags. Clay Shirky’s _Writings About the Internet, 2005. [18] Methodology for easier browsing of large scale social annotations: Z Xu, Y Fu, J Mao, D Su. Towards the semantic web: Collaborative tag suggestions. Collaborative Web Tagging Workshop at WWW2006, 2006. All use one annotation per resource, not annotation of content within, so only one lot of metadata about a page. Meervisage "To aid the process of collaborative annotation of web documents" Allows sharing of annotations between subset of SNS users (eg. fb group). Management of users and groups offloaded to third party. Stored in central annotation store. Annotations contain author, SNS, folksonomies and date. Made from content within. Meerkat is "responsible for generating semantic metadata by annotating external web resources." Meervisage for management via social network. Meerkat allows a user to edit another user's annotations if they are members of the same group on facebook. Popularity rating of resources rises with fb discussion. Meerkat informs browser users if they come across a resource that has been heavily discussed on fb, and by which group etc. Meervisage also provides RSS feed. Evaluate by comparing precision and recall metrics of annotations by one user in an allotted time, and those by a group. -> Don't know how this helps to assess quality of annotations; maybe I'm dumb? Find out. Limited to private, says it's like that's a good think :s Oh, because public access would be "laborious and resource intensive". Annotations rated on usefulness and weighted. [20] Attempt to describe folksonomies as part of formal ontology. Meervisage doesn't; limited to users' viewpoint: _S Angeletou, M Sabou, L Specia, E Motta. Bridging the Gap Between Folksonomies and the Semantic Web: An Experience Report. Workshop: Bridging the Gap between Semantic Web and Web 2.0, European Semantic Web Conference, _2007. [9] + [13] are most similar. Have groups, but groups aren't already established networks. Future work Annotating multimedia. Matching assigned tags with ontology terms mined from Web. [19] Desktop app for annotating text with ontology: A Chakravarthy, F Ciravegna, V Lanfranchi. AKTiveMedia: Cross-media Document Annotation and Enrichment. Poster Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Semantic Web Conference, 2006.
Notes about Meervisage - A Community Based Annotation Tool (for the Semantic Web)
Michael O. Jewell, K. Faith Lawrence, Adam Prugel-Bennett, and m. c. schraefel (200?) Annotation of Multimedia Using OntoMedia Check out a bit of discussion about this paper on Ontologies with a View. OntoMedia for representing "diverse range of media". Others for media: CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (museums) ABC Ontology (multimedia in libraries and digital archives) Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (attribute and relationshops for task performed when consulting bibliographic records) FictionFinder - FRBR to Online Computer Library Centre WorldCat db - Metadata about characters and fictional places Describe contents of films & comics etc for tracking things down to share you forgot? None quite did what was needed. So created to map to current models but specifically describe media content. Hierarchical approach. 1\\\\. Overview Entity / Event system Entity: object, concept Event: interaction between one or more entities 0 or more Entities are modified OR new Entity created Entities not destroyed, but may have not-exists attribute Decompose to sub-ontologies. ontomedia.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ontologies Mediate? Graphical interface. interaction.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ir/projects/ontomedia/ontomedia Sub-ontologies Core Expression (primarily elements and subclasses; Entity, Event) Media (binding between media and Expression objects) Space (extension of Signage Location Ontology, buildings, and regions of structures) Extensions (more detailed subclasses to Core) Being (people) Trait (attributes of Entities) Events (extends Core->Event) Action Gain Loss Travel & properties thereof Fiction Character (on Being) spoiler info. and accuracy Media More detailed than the one in Core; includes audio, image, photo, text and video subclasses Misc - classes used by any or all of other classes, eg. colour, geometry Specified in OWL Developed in Protege and SWOOP. 2\\\\. Case Study Scene from Total Recall annotated. Represent script and characters, and characters from related book, and links between two forms. Screenplay annotation - SiX - Screenplays in XML. Wraps around existing content. Transition (cuts, fades, blackouts), location, dialogue and direction (action taking place in the script) SiX allows for DC, for creators, date, descr, title. Custom XSL to conform marked up scripts to Oscar requirements for readability. Script Item extends Media Item to link script representation to OntoMedia. Use has-expression to tie to OntoMedia:Expression. Describing places and access etc, like lift, like IF. \\\\- For describing character continuity, eg 'can character really see x' etc. Must describe events that don't occur. Characters want to occur, etc. Multiple timelines, dreams. Declare events. Create timeline and add occurances. \\\\- events can be reused, and coincide. 3\\\\. Testing / querying Imported into Sesame triplestore. RDQL queries (subset of SPARQL, simpler, only ever has 1 graph pattern, doesn't use RDF data typing) 4\\\\. Conclusion No examples of pictures - how to annotate comics? Combining OM with other apps. Stuff integrated into Mediate.
Notes about Annotating Multimedia with OntoMediaLawrence, K.F., schraefel, m.c.: Bringing communities to the semantic web and the semantic web to communities. In: Proceedings of WWW2006. (2006)
J. Hendler, T. Berners-Lee, From the Semantic Web to social machines: A research challenge for AI on the World Wide Web, Artificial Intelligence (2009), doi:10.1016/j.artint.2009.11.010 Powerful human interactions enabled by futuristic high-speed infrastructure. Empower Web of people via coupling of AI, social computing and new technologies. "humanity in the loop". Social machine: "...processes in which people do the creative work and the machine does the administration." (Weaving the Web, p172). Struggling with social mechanisms to control predatory behaviour and threats to privacy. -> Tech must be developed that allows user communities to construct / share / adapt social machines, so successful models evolve through trial, use and refinement. Claims a new generation of Web Technologies needed to overcome barriers to this; cross-disciplinary approach needed. creating tools creating principles and guidelines extending Web infrastructure re: information sharing and address privacy and user expectations of data use. "...a revolutionarily more powerful platform for the individual, enabled by realizing that the individual is also a member of a community" (/ies) "architecture of the future Web must be designed to allow the virtually unlimited interaction of the Web of people" (vs. documents now) Giant Global Graph - dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/215 SW deployment: [3] T. Berners-Lee, J. Hendler, O. Lassila, The semantic web, Scientific American (May 2001) 28–37. [10] J. Hendler, Web 3.0 emerging, IEEE Computer 42 (1) (January 2009). [11] I. Jacobs, N. Walsh (Eds.), Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One, 2004, W3C Recommendation 15 December 2004, http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-webarch-20041215/. "disruptive potential" of SWt, "important paradigm shift" "little work in understanding the impact of their new capability" "the smaller we can make the individual steps of this transformation, the easier it will be to find humans who can be incentivized to perform those steps." "need to develop mechanisms to enable [connections between people]" Lack structure for formally computing qualities like: trustworthiness reliability expectations about use of information privacy copyright (etc) "requires data structures... to treat social expectations and legal rules as first-class objects" ("declarative rule-based infrastructure that is appropriate for the Web"). "open and distributed nature of the Web requires that rule sets be linked together."Cross-context use, sometimes unanticipated.Inconsistency sure to arise. No logics that control contradiction have been shown to scale well. New approaches to problem of specifying contexts (need). SMs must be able to apply different policies based on context. Work in ontologies must extend to allow user communities to identify bias and share different interpretations. Current security models / mechanisms insufficient. [1] - formal models for privacy: L. Backstrom, C. Dwork, J. Kleinberg, Wherefore art thou r3579x?: Anonymized social networks, hidden patterns, and structural steganography, in: Proceedings of the 16th International World Wide Web Conference, Banff, 2007, pp. 181–190. Provenance important in determining trustworthiness. [20] information accountability, legal and public policy: D. Weitzner, H. Abelson, T. Berners-Lee, J. Feigenbaum, J. Hendler, G. Sussman, Information accountability, Communications of the ACM (June 2008). policy-rule-based languages.Reasoners that can interpret policy and determine which uses of data are policy-compliant.-> How to tackle scaling? RespectMyPrivacy dig.csail.mit.edu/2009/SocialWebPrivacy [4] Lit review: T. Berners-Lee, W. Hall, J. Hendler, K. O’Hara, N. Shadbolt, D. Weitzner, A framework for web science, Foundations and Trends in Web Science 1 (1) (2006).
Notes about the Semantic Web and social machines
Lawrence, K.F., schraefel, m.c.: Bringing communities to the semantic web and the semantic web to communities. In: Proceedings of WWW2006. (2006) Research into SW communities: Communities of practice Social networks, eg. FOAF Compare with other definitions of communities outside of SW. Concept: Internet Based Community Network, has properties of COP and SN. Case study: Amateur Fiction Online. Early community definitions, Howard Rheingold: "..webs of personal relationships in cyberspace." 1996 CSCW Conference defined prototypical attributes of communities (Whittacker): Shared goal / interest / need Repeated active participation, emotional ties and shared activities. Shared resources and access policies Information, support and services reciprocated between members ( overlap with ^ ?) Shared context (culture, language) Can be applied to virtual and offline communities. -> More attributes = clearer example of community. Preece: Social interaction Shared purpose Common set of expected behaviours Computer system that facilitates and mediates communication ^^ Things in common. Whittacker's is more inclusive/broad. So for a SW SN: Accessible via browser Explicit links between users System supports creation of these links Links are visible and browseable COP or SN may describe a community, not necessarily. IBCN will do, and could be a COP or SN too. Problem of Amateur Fic. is fluctuation of archive. Personal sites go down etc. How to find a story you remember a bit of? IBCN is also combination of WBSN and virtual community. Lack of incentive to use FOAF (eg. on LiveJournal etc) (Plus ignorance). Doesn't offer anything they don't already have. They don't use much metadata, just tons of human-readable stuff. SW would allow: "better integration of distributed systems" "improved searching and filtering" "more personalised services" experienced users expand options new ways to interact new users ease introduction re: unwritten rules, expectations, terminologies FOP extension to FOAF for anonymous identities. ('Fan Online Persona' - why not just 'Online Persona'?) Consistency likely in community-based system because of advantages of reputation etc. Identity cost. Shared set of behaviour values, or risk losing rep. Reputation gained by taking part. (definitive part of community). Additionally by creating works. foaf:document and foaf:groups allow users to give details about their own creations and review work of others. OntoMedia to describe content complements FOP. Options in FOP gathered from study of metadata of works in mailing lists, websites and groups. Recommender system -> notification system. Allow SNS of writers to be studied at friend level and collaboration level. Application to allow users to create FOP under development...
The 23rd of February was International Open Data Day. Since this fell at the end of the ILWhack week, it seemed like a good opportunity to take advantage of the momentum and engage the stirring Edinburgh Open Data scene. Many ODD were organised around the world; most of them were hacks. In Edinburgh we went for a different approach, thanks largely to input from local community activists like Freda, Leah, Andy and Ally. Some might call it 'social hacking'. Our aim was to gather together people with little knowledge of Open Data, people with data that may or may not be open, and developers and technical types. With Open Data stuff exploding worldwide, and developers going nuts creating cool apps and services that make use of data being released, it's important, you see, for {local, small-scale, voluntary, grassroots} groups and individuals to get involved early on. Such parties are arguably likely to benefit the most from empowerment by data, and if they're not part of the discussion early on we might well see a lot of services developed that meet needs imagined by a not-quite-connected but well-meaning tecchie. So on that note, we want to spread the word about Open Data to those who might normally be left behind. When these groups know what the possibilities are (we can show them successful projects, locally (eg. ILWhack) and worldwide), what is available, and what could and should be available, we empower them to take action that will benefit them. More specifically, people can find out that the English government has released data about such-and-such-of-interest, and politely demand that the Scottish Parliament or local councils do similarly. They can interface early on with developers who are keen to start making, and make sure their real problems get solved (or at least prioritised over potential imaginary ones). They can get involved with things like ILWhack, and have a better idea of what it's all about. Between 10am and 2pm, we gathered around 35 people in the Informatics Forum and, fuelled by tea, coffee and biscuits, began the discussion. We started with an hour of ten minute talks, about a variety of topics: Sally Kerr told us about Open Data at the City of Edinburgh Council; the progress they've made so far and where they hope to go in the future; NESTA's local government Make It Local programme helped Edinburgh Council to move forward with Open Data. She gave a nod to the ILWhack projects that made use of Council data in the week prior. Alex Stobart of MyDex talked about big, open data, and the challenges this presents to citizens and politicians. Iain Henderson explained the Standard Label; an easy to read specification for data holders to present to their users how the user data will be used. Like nutritional advice, but for data.. Other ODD events were centred around hacking with it we spoke! Bob Kerr talked about OpenStreetMap and GeoRSS. I love the obsessive hyperlocal detail in some places, like where the animals live in Edinburgh Zoo. On a serious note, OSM has really empowered local governments and NGOs in developing countries. Andy Hyde discussed asset mapping for voluntary groups; how ALISS collate dispersed health and wellbeing information into a central, open repository, ripe for manual and programmatic access. From Lizzie Brotherston we heard about the Post-16 Learner Journey Project; helping the Scottish Government understand the learning landscape. They're holding a hack in April. Next it was unconference time! We had a short while of whole-room discussion, before identifying three key areas: Standardising visualisation (headed by Bob Kerr) Small scale voluntary organisations (headed by Leah Lockhart) Sustainability of data projects (headed by Ewan Klein) Everybody picked a group and we broke apart for the next couple of hours. The final part of the day was a return to the main room, and further room-wide discussion of the breakout debates. The _s__tandardising visualisations _conversation focussed around bringing people into conversations about data using visuals. Someone pointed out that if news readers used Open Data visualisations, the general public would be a lot more interested in Open Data. It's interesting to imagine a future where data visualisations are embedded into the world, into the landscape. To be able to interact with data meaningfully, you've got to know what it is - to recognise it. A standard - think periodic table - would help people to know exactly what you're talking about straight away. This goes beyond graphs and charts, into a world of layered visualisations that allow layered public contributions of interpretations. Those interested in small scale voluntary organisations discussed data holding and data access issues, including strategies for persuading big organisations to open data (eg. by showing success stories, and proving a certain return on investment). It was agreed that interfacing with developers is important to get things done that organisations really need; but organisations might not know what they need. It was discovered that there's a lot of crossover between groups represented by people who were in this discussion; common needs but gaps in talent. Finally, with regards to sustainability of data projects it was agreed that strategies are needed for keeping things going beyond short hack events; how to sustain that burst of energy for a longer term usefulness? How to keep track of everything that's going on, and link communities with events (see OpenTechCalendar!). Some kind of coordination body might be useful, or working groups / task forces. We wrapped up, collected everyone's details for sharing (to ensure sustainability of the outcomes of the day by making sure everyone can keep in touch!) and people began to drift away. There was an enormous positive energy throughout the day. Discussions were lively and passionate, and we had an excellent mix of people, exactly as hoped for. NB. It looks like Joined Up Edinburgh will come under the umbrella of the Scotland branch of the Open Knowledge FoundatioN, so http://scot.okfn.org will be a good place to keep an eye on now. And to keep in the loop, join the Joined Up Edinburgh mailing list. Other people have blogged about this too. Check out these by Leah Lockhart and Dave Meikle (more links welcome).
Open Data Day: Joined Up Edinburgh #joinuped
Tell Me Scotland publish public notices for things like traffic, planning permissions... And they have a SPARQL endpoint! I'm hacking around with the ultimate goal of creating an interface that allows people to generate a GeoRSS feed for a particular area. Ally of GreenerLeith suggested this, so that they can use this to feed into their own apps. A stage beyond that is to smoosh the whole lot into a Wordpress plugin, to make it accessible to anyone (who uses WP). So far I've got the notices on an OpenStreetMap. I haven't had a whole lot of time, but will make more soon. I'm using the PHP library ARC2 to deal with the linked data. NB. the TMS endpoint is, at the moment, flaky at best. I think they're working on this.
I spent a good deal of time during January and February helping to organise a couple of Open Data oriented events. At least, that's the excuse I'm sticking to for not having done much of my PhD in that time. The Smart Data Hack, also known as ILWhack (Innovative Learning Week* hack) came first, between the 18th and 22nd of February. Innovative Learning week at the University of Edinburgh is an annual week of off-timetable activities for students, designed to enhance their learning experience. Arguably every week in higher education should be innovative and striving provide the best possible education... And Innovative Learning implies the student should be making the special effort and I don't think many would be happy with the idea of paying so their tutors can have a week off, so maybe Innovative Teaching week would be more... better. But that aside. The hack was targeted at first and second year undergraduates in Informatics on the basis that third and fourth years would be busy with final projects. This was by no means a restriction however, and we harboured hopes of enticing along design students and data buffs from other departments to mix up the skill set a bit as well. I knocked up a website with two primary functions. Students could pre-register, add some info about themselves and start to form teams online. Anyone interested in getting involved who wasn't a student could figure out where they might fit in and get in touch. This included people who could sponsor prizes, present real-world challenges to solve, offer data to be wrangled, or provide technical support to participants. We anticipated about 50 students, and invited them to form teams of up to 5. In parallel with gathering sponsorship, we came up with five prize categories of equal merit: Best for travel Best for health and wellbeing Best for communities Best visualisation or UI (First year prize for) Best data mashup We hoped to encourage students to make whatever they wanted, using whatever technologies they wanted, with use of open (or specially provided) data being favourably looked upon. Skyscanner were the first main sponsor on board, pledging prizes for two categories and some massive datasets that aren't usually public and access to internal APIs, as well as engineers to mentor. We partnered with ALISS to encourage use of their local health and wellbeing data API; ALISS also sponsored in part a prize category. The City of Edinburgh Council were on board with some never-before-seen downloadable datasets (still online!), a bunch of pre-approved API keys and refreshingly open minds and supportive attitudes. CompSoc heroically sponsored an entire prize category and promoted the event to its members. Open Innovation sponsored a prize category too, and the School of Informatics contributed towards prizes and catering. Greener Leith proposed a challenge and sponsored a special Mosque Kitchen lunch for everyone after the mid-point presentations on Wednesday. We were able to hold some terrific practical workshops, thanks to: Tom Armitage and Stuart MacDonald, for handling geolocated resources. Philip Roberts, for data visualisation with d3.js. Oli Kingshott, for an introduction to version control, and HTML5 for beginners. We also recruited mentors from UG4 and PhD students, as well as industry professionals, who were consistently present in the hacking space all week or available by Twitter, email and IRC. We marketed the event in the couple of weeks prior (though we were organising up to the very last minute) through shout outs in lectures, posters around the Informatics department, emails to many university mailing lists and word of mouth. As a result, we overshot our expected numbers, with well over 100 sign-ups by the start of the week. This was good news and bad news at the time, as we had to scramble around to make sure we had enough sponsorship to feed everyone and whatnot. By the end of the week, there were around 80 students still actively participating, across about 25 teams. Pretty good! Most of them were Informatics undergraduates as expected, but we had a handful of postgraduates and students from the ECA as well. And the outcome? Some amazing projects and really positive feedback from participants and supporters alike. Naturally only a couple of days passed before somebody noticed that I hadn't sanitized input fields on the website for HTML and CSS input, so they made the projects page spin and play the Harlem Shake before I sorted that out, having been alerted at around midnight. /grumble. Should have seen that coming, of course. In the end we gave away £1500 in Amazon vouchers, five Nexus 7s and ten Kindle Fires. Skyscanner even upped their sponsorship to three prizes because they were so spoilt for choice. You can read about the projects, teams and see some demos here. It was a really exciting and inspiring week for everyone involved. Many of the students are taking their projects further (which is probably the most important outcome) and are in discussions with relevant parties to do so. You can see photos and see other peoples' write-ups about the event here. Will we do it again next year? From the feedback gathered, the response has been a resounding yes!
Experimenting with running this entire website from the age-old Blogger backend. Beating it gradually into submission with help from Temple of Doom stripped down Blogger template, and some pro tips from Blogger Sentral. Because, why not? I have a lot of stuff on this blog. Time to organise it how I want.
Lovingly crocheted over a couple of days. No pattern, all approximated, with scraps of wool of the appropriate colours I just happened to have. I started with a chain the length of the width (shortest side) of my Nexus 7, and single crocheted in each stitch down both sides, and carried on round; so I did the very bottom first and worked my way up in a flat rectangular spiral. I dunno if that makes sense, but it immediately begins to take shape. When I got to the right height, I carried on across the back, then just chained across the front, and continued as before, to make the opening. Though it may look deliberate that the 'tail' sticks out a bit at each side, I actually made it too wide. So I had to decide whether to carry on making it too big and pad it on the inside, or tuck the ends in and make it tighter with the green. I chose the latter and it worked far better than I anticipated. Most of it is just double crochet for no particular reason, but his fuzzy lil' chest is a pattern of alternating front-post triple crochet and back-post triple crochet (triple to compensate so it stays level with the 'normal' double crochet around the triangle, as front- and back-post double crochet are slightly shorter than regular double crochet). His feet and wings are just chains; his eyes made just the way you'd make small circles, but skewed a bit to be ovals (I can't remember, I probably chained three, then [sc, hdc, hdc, tc, hdc, hdc, sc]x2, then sc in each stich around. Don't hold me to that though). The black centres are literally just threaded through and through until they looked right, and the loose ends used to attach. I shaped the beak by periodically crocheting two together. I'm surprised it's as remotely symmetrical as it is, because I didn't count anything. The resemblance is uncanny!
18th - 24th March I went to Belgrade for Resonate.io, and wrote about it here.
11th - 17th March Had a sensible conversation with Ewan about when I should stop reading and start actually producing something. The answer is sooner, rather than later. I'm aiming for a literature review that is "neither a first nor final" draft by the end of April. I started outlining topics that should be in it, and began faffing about with LaTeX (and Markdown and Pandoc). Then started panicking and promptly quadrupled the amount of things on my to- read list. Oops. I blame Matthew Rowe. I finished reading his first year review (2007) as well as his paper about Meervisage: Community-based Annotation for the Semantic Web. I compiled a massive list of more things to read from his lit. review, and then looked up what he's been doing since then. A lot. Mostly relevant. At the very least, interesting. Damn. Don't worry, I'll prioritise that list, and don't aim to finish it before I start writing. Going to Serbia on Tuesday, for Resonate.io. What should I bring back? Information about creative processes for digital artworks. Anything to do with open data or decentralized social networking movements. Potential case studies or people to work with. ... to be discovered? Had a chat with Russell of Makur Media about video metadata and ontologies for describing film/TV production processes. We're doing some of the same research and keeping in touch is likely to be mutually beneficial. Note to self: Summerhall Cafe is nice and the food is cheap; go there for lunch one day.
25th Feb - 3rd March I spent most of this week in a remote village by the sea in the Scottish Highlands. When I came back I read and made notes about the Semantic Web and social machines by TBL; and typed up some notes from a while ago about OntoMedia and the Semantic Web and communities by K. Faith Lawrence. I also translated all of my written meeting notes into Evernote, which promptly glitched out and doubled the amount of typing I had to do. (I considered switching back to Google Docs, but I need labels). I sure love technology. _ I refamiliarised myself with the structure OWL. Awesome diagrams here. _I did some more thinking about how I need to work with amateur content creators to make an ontology that fits their workflow. I should have finished the planning stage of this ages ago, but.. I blame the ILWhack. I keep wondering about the best way to have a system of consistent URIs across a network where the information can move from server to server on the whim of a user. During this wonderment I discovered that purl.org's login system is broken. I joined the mailing list, and people complain about it and have it re-fixed fairly regularly, so I'll just wait..
25th - 31st March A busy, non-PhD-related activities filled week. Social computing seminar on Friday.
4th - 10th March I played with the Tell Me Scotland SPARQL endpoint to put Scottish public notices on an OpenStreetMap: https://rhiaro.co.uk/publicnotices/map.php. It works intermittently, as the TMS endpoint is a 'proof of concept'. Okay, that's not PhD related, but it's still interesting. I went to the 5th OKFN Edinburgh meetup at Napier. Look, evidence, I'm in the picture! Dave Robertson asked me hard questions about how I'll turn my vague research interests and intentions to make something useful into a PhD with genuine contributions to knowledge and I floundered a bit, but he agreed to be my second supervisor nonetheless. I hadn't properly thought about it in those terms, and I'm still figuring it out with like, words. (As opposed to a gut feeling). I'd always planned to plough ahead enthusiastically and hope for the best. That's how I approach everything, actually. I started reading Community-Based Annotation for the Semantic Web by Matthew Rowe (2007); I think it was a first-year PhD review, and I was primarily reference-harvesting. More on that next week. I attended a Social Informatics Cluster meeting, and heard about the Smart Society project; very much in its figuring out stages, but worth following as it appears to have many diverse goals, and various crowd-computation related outcomes might be relevant to what I'm doing. I went to an ESALA lunchtime talk entitled 'Data Objects', by Ian Gwilt of Sheffield Hallam. I have to admit, I was expecting something more technical and internet-of-things-y. Actually data objects are primarily tangible visualisaitons; 3D printed, carved out of wood or sculpted from bronze. The research was about how people reacted to and understood data differently when it was presented in different forms. Interesting, and they got some very pretty artefacts out of it, but not directly relevant so I don't have room in my head to store it unfortunately. I attended the new Social Computing interest group kick-off meeting, coordinated by Dave Murray-Rust. Everyone introduced themselves, and we arranged a time slot for future meetings. It looks like I'll be presenting there at some point in the probably not-so-distant future (it was decided that everyone should). There were a very diverse bunch of people there, and 'social computing' hasn't been defined officially for the group yet. Quite a few people are attending to essentially see what all the fuss is about. I'm hopeful that there will be a hardcore technical leaning, because that's where most of the gaps in my knowledge are. Well, I'm more gaps than knowledge about everything, but that's where I feel particularly vulnerable.
The UK Ontology Networks Workshop took place over one day in the Informatics Forum. There was a mix of people there; some talks were way over my head and very technical, and some talks were by people who confessed they had had to look up "ontology" that morning. And things in between. Lazy writeup, but following are notes as I scribbled them: John Callahan US navy research. Focused information integration. Human intervention to keep predictive part on track. Tweaking. Alan Bundy Interaction of representation and reasoning. Changing world so agents must evolve. How to automate? What would trigger a need for change: Inconsistency Incompleteness Inefficiency how to diagnose which? Interested in language and perception change. Unsorted first order logic algorithm called Reformation. Based on standard unification algorithm. Allows blocking and unblocking unification. Phil Barker Schema.org Cetis (JISC funded) learning resource metadata initiative. Big names behind schema.org. = ontology + syntax Big and growing ontology. Dumbed down for people. LRMI adds to it. W3C go through it. It's creeping, how much do the big names actually care about stuff that's added? don't know how Google uses it. People should consider using it for more sophisticated search and disambiguation. Gill Hamilton Doing more with library metadata. Learnt from OKFN. Had to convince people in charge. Dublin core, didn't like; not specific enough. Instead RDF > OWL. "We know best how to structure our data" Hardest was convincing marketing people that there was no commercial value. Metadata is advert to actual resource. Enrico Motta Traditionally top down approach. So now so many people interacting with semantic structures, so should involve users. Recognise there isn't a unique or best way of doing things. Initial study included modeling task with binary relations. Patterns that are more or less intuitive. 4D least, 3D+1 most. N-ary most widely used by experts. Relationship between reasoning power and intuitiveness of writing? More creativity needed for simpler ones. (Not really sure what he's saying) Email him for copy of study. Chris Mellish Ontology authoring is hard. Better ways to do it. Controlled language input (mature tech); responsive reasoning (also mature, information as you're editing); understanding the process (beginning to understand more). Hypotheses: users don't know what they're doing. What if questions. Many answers, what is relevant? Depends on context. Authoring as dialogue. Todo list. Useable in the same ways as protégé. Peter Winstanley UN classification schemes. Various vocabularies. Allow development of cross mapping between government administrations. Mostly internal currently. Moves to bring externalizing data into the 21st century. Peter Murray-Rust Fight for your Ontologies. Ontologies in physical sciences. Chemists don't want ontologies. They'll sue you. Crystallography uses 'dictionary'. Written in CIF. 20 years to build CIF. Compare physical sciences to government. Every program author writes dictionaries that work for them. When different parties agree, promote to communal dictionary. Provide conventions to help disagreements. Show a company can do it as opposed to a rabbiting academic .. Jeff Pan Tractable ontological stream reasoning. Need to be more efficient, scaleable, as things change. Inputs from web. Dealing with complexities: approximate owl2. Dealing with frequent updates: to-add stream and to-do delete stream. Truth maintenance. Evaluation criteria. Trowl.EU can use with protégé, also supports jena. Edoardo Pignotti Semantic web tech to support Interdisciplinary research. ourSpaces VRE Provenance crucial. OPM prov ontology. Deployed since 2009, 180 users. Comprehensive ontologies but people unwilling to provide metadata. paper! Edwards et al. ourSpaces. Tom Grahame (BBC) @tfgrahame Content arrangement on BBC sport by tagging, automatic to free up editors to write. LD API so systems don't need to know about each other. Growing from simple rdfxml to more complex ontology. Can ask much more general and much more detailed questions about sport. Mapping incoming data is outsourced. Lots of errors, sometimes system alerts, sometimes manual. Working on opening the data. Maybe a dump, but licensing issues. Ewan Klein Mining old texts for commodities, adding place and time and putting in structured database. Transcriptions of customs import records. Skos for synonyms. Dbp concepts. Why? Want to query. Visualisations. Tools? Python script. Janice Watson Harnessing clinical terminologies and classifications for healthcare improvements. Bob Barr Geographical addressing. Addressing and address geocoding is important and broad. Not always postal, but this not addressed (punlol) in ontologies. Different contexts change meaning of address (for delivering, you only care about postbox; property sale whole building). Loads of things to address. Loads of reasons why. Work held up as national address file is owned by royal mail and might be sold! Fiona McNeill Run time extraction of data. Failure driven. Looking at extraction of specific information. Emergency response. Lots of data, timely sharing of data required. From domestic level to humanitarian disasters. How can it be automated? Multilayered incompatibility. Format Terminology Structure ... Richard Gunn Towards an intelligent information industry. Elena Simperl (Soton, sociam) Crowdsourcing ontology engineering. CSrc: Brabham 2008. Distribute task into smaller atomic units. Humans validating results that are automatically detected as not accurate. What are the costs? What resources? Games with a purpose. Like quizzes. Micropayments or vouchers. MTurk. CrowdFlower. Paper about useage of microtask crowdsourcing. ISWC 2012. Claudia Paglieri Ontologies in ehealth. Enrico Motta \\\\- Rexplore Klink algorithm mines relations between research topics. Use this! Nope, it's not public. Uees MS Academic research. Peter Murray-Rust Content mining expands regular text mining. Focus on academic stuff. Chemical Tagger. Takes chemistry jargon and annotated it, knows actions, conditions, molecules etc.. NLP. Uses ontologies and contributes to ontologies. In chemistry, no need to put everything in rdf because there are already lots of formalisms. Proper cool PDF to sensible format conversion. Amy the kangaroo. Looking for collaborators. Yuan Ren Ontology authoring in whatif project. Reasoning with protégé and trowl . Tractable reasoning. Trowl v fast. Notes from conversations / breakout discussions: BBC use owlm triplestore . Store all their datasets in svn. But they have reads and writes to the live triplestore all the time. Lots of people saying minimise owl use because of unpredictable output. Versioning ontologies (available in owl2) in case third parties change stuff you use. You're dependent on their software engineering practices. Only good if they're ahead of the game. IRIs, Arabic characters in ontologies! Semantic heavy, maybe make a decision to abstract away to ids and make heavier use of labels. Difference between importing and using someone else's. There's no (practically useful) software that lets you reason over stuff you haven't imported? (over HTTP?) Build ontology from reality (data), don't start with no data. Lode. Problems with dbpedia URIs changing or disappearing. Hard to visualize massive graphs. Relational, tabular much easier to understand.
Amy, wonderful blog! I was just discussing how well you've done with Duncan Rowland whom I bumped into last week in Lincoln.
Could have been better. I based it on this bread recipe, but amended according to my mother's advice. Thus, I made a batter with 1/3 of the flour (strong white bread flour; 6oz), all of the yeast (one 7g packet) and all of the water (415ml) and the oil (30ml), and left that covered in the airing cupboard for an hour where it bubbled away merrily. Next I mixed in the rest of the flour (12oz) and some salt and a handful of sunflour seeds, poppyseeds and pumpkin seeds. Contrary to what my mother promised, it was very sticky. I stirred vigorously and kept adding flour until I could cope with it, and kneading began. I kneaded for fifteen minutes, having discovered that sometimes punching instead of regular kneading is much more enjoyable. I turned it into six balls and one long bit, and arranged them on a tray and in an ad-hoc loaf tin, and they went back in the airing cupboard for about two and a half hours (I went out). I covered them, as instructed, and that was where things started to go wrong.. The bits that didn't get stuck to the tinfoil rose great. But the bits that stuck pretty much didn't get to rise. They rose outwards loads, but upwards was constrained. Rubbish. I baked them anyway (30 minutes, 220 degress celcius). Tastes great, textures is okay, appearance is disappointing. Next time I won't cover them quite so securely while they're rising. Far more holey than I was anticipating too; I'm not sure if under- or over-kneading causes this.
For breakfast I had Tesco's own brand bran flakes, with soya milk. HAHA that's a lie. I had a cupcake. Orange sponge with a square of dark chocolate in the middle. Homemade, so it doesn't count. Lunch was Linda McCartney sausages in my Mum's 'miracle bread' rolls that I brought back from home a couple of days ago. They have soya flour, and linseeds, and all sorts of stuff. Also in there was 'fresh' (actually week- old) spinach, ketchup, tabasco sauce, hummus and a pinch of magic BBQ spice mix. And bancha hojicha (a Japanese green tea). Then I made my own bread. It wasn't altogether successful. Over the course of the afternoon I drank a cold bottled concoction calling itself jasmine tea from the Chinese supermarket (because whenever I go into a Chinese supermarket I have to try a new weird drink). Dinner, then, was a sort of chilli bean stew, because I thought that would go well with the weird bread... [Soak and boil dried kidney beans; skip this part for canned ones, and chuck them in whenever]. Boileth a quarter of a swede and large chunks of new potatoes with the kidney beans, until everything is soft. Meanwhile: Half an onion, two cloves of garlic, a courgette, a red pepper, broad beans (frozen), a handful of tomatos and a handful of mushrooms into the wok to fry until they looked mostly cooked. Plus pinches of: Vegeta (which is a particularly good vegetable stock you'll find in an Eastern European supermarket); cajun spice mix; chilli powder; piri piri spice mix; garam masala and mixed herbs, and let sizzle for a while longer. Then Quorn mince and a tin of chopped tomatoes, a good mix, and simmer for an indeterminate amount of time (or until the other pan of boiling things is done). Combine two pans of boiling/simmering things (ideally into largest pan). Eat with bread and/or rice and/or a spoon. Follow with more cupcakes and tea.
GemuCon, a first-time gaming convention, wasn't normally the sort of event I'd go to. Especially not with the £35 ticket price tag. But it was being organised by one of my friends from my undergraduate, so I agreed to do the website (violating my no-more-freelance-work policy), and having botched together a custom registration system (scope creep) I was drafted in as 'Registrations Officer' on the committee, too. Since I was in Nottingham on the 4th for the Lovelace Colloquium anyway, I had no excuse not to go. It was a good job I did, as the checking-people-off-who-arrive system was web based, and the hotel wifi was not playing ball from the outset. We'd thought of that of course, and brought backup wifi dongles. Neither of which could get signal. So half an hour before registration opened I was writing a script to export the database into a nicely formatted spreadsheet (sounds simple; wasn't; ask if you're curious) so that we had more than one machine (I had the database locally on my laptop) we could register over 700 people with. Then it was literally non-stop. The other reason I was there was to morally support my good friend TomSka, who was attending as a guest because he is Internet Famous. So my time was split between hanging out in the Operations Room (mostly) to help confused con-goers with things like registration, lost property, picking up merchandise, finding the stairs, getting free cupcakes; making myself useful by running up and down ten flights of stairs on errands (until I discovered the service elevator; two 6-man lifts between 800 people hadn't been so accessible); and hanging out with Tom and Matt. On Saturday I helped him on his merch stall (we sold everything but all of the wristbands and all of the keyrings and earrings). During the quiet times when there were other big events on, and thus no customers, I had to make my own fun. On Sunday I live-tweeted Tom and Matt's panel "How to YouTube". [View the story "TomSka's YouTube panel at GemuCon" on Storify] This generated a small amount of controversy, as people who have never had to live off advertising revenue often hate people who live off advertising revenue even if it means they have found a way to survive by doing something they love, and can provide what they create to the world for free. Frankly I'm just excited that we do live in a world where young creatives can be their own boss, make a living from doing what they love, and where the only hoops they have to jump through to do so are getting better at their craft. Whilst the advertising-centric revenue model may be outdated and may be despised by a good number of people, it's working for YouTubers at the moment and I haven't seen a better alternative present itself. Not everyone, particularly consumers of amateur media, can afford to pay for content they consume; accessing content for free empowers consumers too because their entertainment choices are not controlled by the same person who controls their finances (and thus probably most other aspects of their lives). I'm also fairly convinced that if the advertising revenue model falls flat in the future, amateur content creators will be much faster to recover and adapt than traditional media industries would. The other great thing about this business model - for YouTubers at least - is that many/most don't start out with financial motivations. After a while they realise thier hobby is giving pleasure to increasing numbers of people, so they carry on, and suddenly a side-effect is that they're making money as well, at no cost to their audience. (This may change as YouTubing is acknowledged as a career choice). Maybe naive or overly idealistic, but I don't believe anyone should be stuck doing a job they hate. It's a very, very long term goal for society, but the ultimate utopia is a world in which everybody is motivated and empowered to develop skills they enjoy or knowledge they're passionate about, and to put their abilities to some use that can sustain an acceptable standard of living for themselves and their family. Technology plays a crucial role in this (for a start, all the jobs nobody wants to do will be automated). Anyway, Tom and Matt's panel was full of sound advice for digital creatives just starting out, though the current landscape is a very different one from when _they _began their YouTube journeys (for example: no YouTube). Though I didn't experience much of it myself, GemuCon had all sorts going on. There were a few rooms packed full of video game consoles (for people to entertain themselves at leisure, as well as scheduled tournaments with cash prizes), a room of tabletop games, merch dealers and artists galore, various panels with the various guests, a talent show, a cosplay masquerade, and parties all night every night. Now, I don't like parties, but even I couldn't resist hanging around at a rave for a bit when the music was Pokemon theme remixes, or the Zelda soundtrack. Et cetera. The most impressive thing about this wee convention (and 700-odd people is wee, compared with similar more established cons) is the air of friendliness and solidarity that seemed to be ever-present. Granted not everyone could have been happy at every moment, and there was definitely douchebaggery from time to time, but in general there was a unification of nerds; an unspoken understanding between the stereotypically socially awkward that allowed people to come out of their shells and enjoy themselves in a way that they might normally suffer abuse for, thanks the the common background provided by video game and Internet culture. This is somewhat tongue in cheek, but... hopefully you know what I mean. I made a few new friends, too. If you're thusly inclined, check out 'official' photos (here and here) and videos (here) from Team Neko. And if you visit the new GemuCon holding page, don't forget to Konami Code.
GemuCon (and making a living from YouTube)
I think over rising on your second rise was to blame - 2 and half hours is a bit much! I find it best to cover loosely with oiled cling film, but some people just use a damp tea towel.
In 2008 I was in my first year of university, and the second ever Lovelace Colloquium was held in Leeds. I was encouraged to attend by Professor Cornelia Boldyreff and then-PhD student, now-Dr, Beth Massey. Doing so may have changed my life. At my first Lovelace, I was introduced to the very concepts of conferences, mentors and (importantly) networking. The event was, and has been ever since, a forum for thought-provoking technical talks, inspiring motivational speeches and stimulating discussions about technology-related disciplines, careers, and womens' role within this world. To attend Lovelace is to be surrounded by extraordinary and excited minds; undergraduates at the top of their game, and successful academics and industry professionals to advise and mentor. Having now been along as an attendee, a poster competition entrant and for the past two years as a judge, the conference has provided perfect annual milestones to mark my own academic progression and personal development. I have met so many wonderful people and made so many important connections thanks to this event that I genuinely think I would be in a different place today, perhaps as a different person, had I never been. I can trace back directly or indirectly to one or other Lovelace Colloquium many of the opportunities I have had to develop academically (poster presenting, inspiring conversations), professionally (networked my way to a Google internship) and personally (overcoming low self-confidence, understanding imposter syndrome and conquering public speaking). This year's, hosted by the School of Computer Science at Nottingham University, has been no different. For the first time ever I arrived with time to spare before registration, and got to know some of the other helpers and attendees. I was put in charge of organising posters, directed towards a room containing lots of large fuzzy blue boards, divided up the space based on the number expected in each category (First Year, Second Year, Final Year, and taught Masters) and cheerfully handed out drawing pins to entrants as they arrived. At 10 the crowd who had gathered in a lecture theatre were welcomed by the superhuman Dr Hannah Dee, and the first round of talks began. Instantly relevant (to me), Natasha Alechina discussed work on logic in ontologies. The use of logic can help with debugging when creating new ontologies by detecting inconsistencies (eg. fallasies, contradictions) or incoherance (eg. empty sets). The method they use is to compute a minimal set from a big graph in which nodes are statements, and they keep track of where all the statements are derived from. It was "surprisingly fast" when tested with 1600 large random ontologies, compared to state of the art methods to compute minimal sets. Logic is also useful in ontology matching, for example Ordnance Survey vocabularies versus Open Street Map. Logic helps the process by finding what might need to be changed or removed, but human intervention is needed to make the final call. Next up, Jemma Chambers turned out to be a brilliant speaker and surely inspired everyone in the room by telling us how she'd made the most of a career in technology over the past decade. She was in her last week as a CISCO business development manager, about to move to a similar role at Virgin Media. She started with some statistics: 51% of gamers are girls, but only 6% of those who make games are female. 21% of jobs in technology overall are held by women. Companies with women in their management report a 34% return on investment over companies with only males. 20% of C-level (CEO, CTO, CIO, etc) leaders worldswide are female. (Disclaimer: I may have botched the context of those stats slightly, my notes aren't very clear. But you get the idea. Also she didn't say where these stats are from). Jemma did a year-in-industry during her degree, programming for Oracle. She was bored out of her mind coding (I'm sure some people in the audience sympathised, but probably a minority) and thus learnt what job she didn't want to do when she graduated. Instead, she joined an accounts management graduate program at CISCO, had some doubts but stuck it out, rocked hard in sales and climbed the ladder through hard work and force of will, despite various sexist or ageist behaviour directed her way. A key point here is whatever you end up doing, do it well; being successful wherever you end up opens doors to what you really want to do, if you're not already there. Especially in the big tech companies like CISCO, where moving between jobs internally is facilitated and even encouraged. On a related note, Jemma talked a bit about the flexibility of CISCO (and other similar companies). Working hours, for example, are yours to choose so long as you get the job done. Similarly she's had no problem negotiating maternity leave, and eighteen months after the birth of her son she's working three days a week (and still feels guilty about dropping him with the babysitter). Naturally she mentioned a few (legitimate) generalisations about women in the workplace (nothing I haven't heard before, but this is my fifth Lovelace) and followed them up with some solid advice. Women seem to attribute success to outside forces like luck, or kindness of others, where men attribute success to themselves. It's much easier to move forward if you remind yourself that you worked hard for this and deserve it. Successful men are more likely to be percieved as likeable than successful women, who are often construed as bitches. Ignore what other people think, and don't let yourself get walked on to try and make friends. At the same time, don't let this stereotype go to your head; remember to support other women in the workplace rather than being competitive. Women and men have different leadership styles (generally) as well as other strengths and weaknesses of their own, and it's a combination of the two that really make a successful team, not more of one than the other. Jemma recommends reading Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg. She also discussed the various merits of networking (of which I am happy to attest there are many!) and how to source mentors in the tech community. This talk was a fantastic one to start the day with, especially to prompt any in the audience who might otherwise have not done so, to talk to everybody. Jemma's enthusiastic speaking style will have kept everyone engaged, too, even those still waking up. Dr Julie Greensmith filled us in on her journey from a pharmacy undergraduate through to her current work on artificial immune systems. These are algorithms inspired by human immune systems; robust, decentralized, adaptive and tolerant. They work by knowing what is normal instead of what isn't, which is particularly useful if you don't know what attack is going to come next. Their early work, though excellent, was based on a rudimentary computer scientist understanding of how immune systems work; these days they have a more interdisciplinary team with biologists to improve things even further. Gillian Arnold, who is exceptionally well known and officially recognised as An Inspiring Woman, was filling in for a speaker who couldn't make it. She talked through the best career moments of various people she knew, which ranged from getting software into the hands of the public to promotions and financial incentives. She also talked through a few of the stereotypical problems women have in the a male-dominated workplace, but most of what she could have said had been covered by Jemma. A pro tip for getting attention at meetings if you're being talked over is to bang the table. Dr Hannah Dee gave us a technical talk about her current research, as well as a little background on how she got where she is. She is much happier as a lecturer as opposed to a post doc, as she gets to direct her own research areas, and isn't constrained within fields she's not totally comfortable (like surveillance). So now she's interested in time and change in nature, doing things like laser scanning and time lapsing plants to find out new things that are particularly hard to find out. Some really interesting stuff about camera hacking with the Canon development kit, which lets you write programs in Lua or BASIC, and provides the sorts of menu options you'd usually only find on a really expensive camera. Milena Nikolic is an engineer at Google London who has worked on Google's mobile sites, integrating results from mobile app stores into search results and the Android Market / Play Store. She says she has undergone a "journey of scale", and loves shipping projects that make a real difference and are used by real people. She answered lots of questions about working at Google. As with Jemma's experience at CISCO, hours are flexible at Google, and there are no strict iterative phases for development, but projects have their own cycles. She doesn't spend as much time coding as she'd like, but this varies depending on the stage a project is in, too. Then someone asked "why are girls scared of coding?" and a lively discussion ensued. For some reason I didn't take notes, but things I can remember that were suggested include: Girls are more hesitant about diving in, or scared of breaking things. To progress with programming, you've gotta just keep trying and failing. Girls are more emotionally affected if their code does fail. Guys just shrug it off and try something out. (I personally have never felt like this). Girls are less likely to be exposed to programming or programming-like activities at an early age, so by the time they come across computer science they may see it as boring, too mathsy or not creative. I suspect that had I not got interested in making websites aged ten, it might have passed me by during high school, and I would have ended up doing chemistry or French at university. There were more; I'll add them if I remember. In between these fantastic talks were coffee, lunch and networking breaks and of course, poster judging. I teamed up with Milena Radenkovic to assess the second years, and after three quarters of an hour of lunch, plus a 'last minute' extra half-hour before the decision had to be made (thus I missed the panel discussion), we had narrowed it down to five... It was hard. Seriously. We discussed the poster content, presentation, practicality of the ideas, whether the student was showing a project they were personally involved with or intending to do (this holds weight with me) and how well the student explained their ideas in person. They were all brilliant on all counts. We negotiated splitting the second place prize in two, but still had to choose three out of our final five. Eventually we settled on Carys Williams (quantum cryptography; University of Bath) for the first prize, and Heidi Howard (routers that pay their way; University of Cambridge) and Jo Dowdall (smart tickets; University of Dundee) for joint second place. I only wish I'd had time to look at the rest of the posters! I finished off the day by joining other attendees for dinner, which was all round brilliant, and resulted in a late night. See other fantastic blog posts... Hannah Dee Charlotte Godley Tracey Binnie Amanda Clare
Inspiring and empowering: The Lovelace Colloquium, Nottingham 2013
I'm now officially a volunteer moderator for the Edinburgh Freegle group. I love Freegle (/Freecycle) and have used it for years. I've got rid of stuff I didn't need and given a loving home to many unwanted things. Things I love about Freegle are: Saving items from landfill. The environment says thanks! Getting stuff for free. My bank balance says thanks! Giving stuff away. Other peoples' bank balances say thanks! Knowing there's a network of like-minded, environmentally conscious people out there, and every now and again getting to briefly meet them. Seeing more of the city! Unless it's outrageously far or outrageously raining, I always walk to pick something up. I've seen a dozen parts of Edinburgh I would never have explored otherwise, and discovered a multitude of cute little independent shops that I would have remained disappointingly ignorant of. Possessions I have gained thanks to Freelge include: An under counter freezer. A futon mattress. Clothes. An electric citrus juicer. Ten empty tins for transporting cakes and stuff. A yoga mat. Duvet covers and throws. A kneeling chair. When I met the other moderators a couple of weeks ago to become officially trained in the process, I had no idea how much goes on behind the scenes. Well, I had some idea, but actually there's loads more. Edward Hibbert is behind it all. At it's core, Freegle still runs on Yahoo Groups. This means it's possible to interact with it through email alone. Thus, moderation takes place through the Yahoo Groups interface, but hugely enhanced thanks to Edward's moderator Firefox plugin. (It means I have to moderate using Firefox or suffer the consequences, but it's not so bad. One day maybe we/I'll port it to a Chrome extension). However, there's also a super high tech front-end at Freegle.in/Edinburgh. Check it out. The web interface helps people get their subject lines correct and keeps track of various user stats. It detects where people are posting from from the subject line and plots it on a handy map; it categorises posts by picking out keywords from the subject line too, and usually gets it right. There's definitely more to write about here, but I'm going to save that for another time. Meanwhile, if you're not part of your local Freegle or Freecycle group, change that! Check out ilovefreegle.com to find yours. It's an easy and amazingly beneficial way to help the environment and interact with your local community.
Change of plan. Trying to run the whole thing with Blogger templates did not result in a happy time. So the main site pulls and manipulates the Blogger RSS feed, with Simple Pie making that easy. I then simplified the actual Blogger template and made it match and stuff. The general intention now is that individual posts and comments will be viewed, if necessary, via Blogger, in a kind of archive-y way, but the content organised as I see fit exists on the main site as the primary port of call. But my goodness does Blogger automatically add some crap into its templates. I delete stuff and it comes right back. Pointless classes, and divs, and general unnecessary bulky markup. I give up with trying to strip all that out. By the way, the source code for the site is here. Share and share alike, yada.
Just notes! Workshop by Dr Mimo Caenepeel on Monday 22nd April. 'Critical' does not mean you have to pass judgement, or say why it's good or bad. Not taking things at face value. Started with freewriting about what has particularly influenced / inspired our own research. Five minutes, not allowed to stop or edit, don't worry about quality of writing, not for anyone else to read. A good way to get ideas out of your head and start to organise your thoughts without censoring or constraining yourself. How many pages will a review usually take up in a thesis? My policy is to write what needs to be written and stop when you're done. But apparently 20 to 30, sometimes more, is normal in sciences. There's no consistent / right answer to 'how many publications to review'. For some people it's in the tens, for some the hundreds. Think about how to integrate literature review into the thesis. You're unlikely to have a chapter that is just 'literature review' and no mention of the background reading elsewhere. Good qualities for a lit review? \\\\- Coherence (avoid fragmentation) \\\\- Structure, clarity. \\\\- Proof of novelty - purposeful. A review can often be considered as an indicator of the quality of the rest of the research - demonstrating scholarship. A good place to start: 1\\\\. Write your research question, formulated as a question. 2\\\\. Write up to five research areas that are relevant to your research question. 3\\\\. Note some related issues/areas that will not be considered in your review. Think about balance of content. 1\\\\. Three studies influential in your field (I couldn't answer this, I clearly need to read more). 2\\\\. Two significan older contributions. 3\\\\. Five recent sources. 4\\\\. Two sources that have strongly influenced your thinking. You don't need to consider all papers in the same level of detail. Decide which papers are more important / useful than others. For some papers (important ones) you should work through these questions in the same way every time you read something (this is 'SQ3R'): 1\\\\. Survey: What is the gist of the article? Skim the title, abstract, introduction, conclusion and section headings. What stands out? 2\\\\. Question: Which aspects of the research are particularly relevant for your review? Articulate some relevant questions the article might address. 3\\\\. Read: Read through the text more slowly and in more detail and highlight key points / key words. Identify connections with other material you have read. 4\\\\. Recall: Divide the text into manageable chunks and summarise each chunk in a sentence. 5\\\\. Review: To what extent has the text answered the questions you formulated earlier? Critical reading (these seem like really useful questions to work through whilst reading papers): 1\\\\. What is the author's central argument or main point, ie. what does the author want you, the reader, to accept? 2\\\\. What conclusions does the author reach? 3\\\\. What evidence does the author put foward in support of his or her conclusions? 4\\\\. Do you think the evidence is strong enough to support the arguments and conclusions, ie. is the evidence relevant and far-reaching enough? 5\\\\. Does the author make any unstated assumptions about shared beliefs with readers? 6\\\\. Can these assumptions be challenged? 7\\\\. Could the text's scientific, cultural or historical context have an effect on the author's assumptions, the content and the way it has been presented? See Ridley, D. The Literature Review: A step-by-step guide for students. Sage Study Skills Series. Sage Publications, 2011 (2008).
[Notes] How to write a literature review workshop
Just notes from a three-hour workshop about how to write an Informatics thesis, on the 16th of April. State contributions (to knowledge) explicitly. Intro, conclusions; each chapter should have some (probably not all) contributions discussed. Be obvious; use headings. Knowledge - background: justify choices explain methods acknowledge alternatives evaluate Evidence, well-reasoned arguments, acknowledge limitations. Clear openings for future work. Be clear where they are. Make it reproduceable. Short / concise. Examiners like short theses. Introduce what's interesting and important. When outline thesis, look at structure of main argument, not of document. Background material must have point. Only include as much detail as you need to make point. Points, eg: Explain method you use. Novelty of your approach. Similarities with existing work. Justify choices (evaluate other work). Don't tear down others' work. 'Build on'. Cite examiners, they've probably published something relevant.. (but not for the sake of it). Then we had five minutes to write down what our PhDs are about and what we have already found out. I wrote: How do the futures of the Semantic Web and amateur digital content creation fit together? Can Semantic Web tools and technologies be used to enhance collaborative creative partnerships and encourage fruitful outputs? _ There are knowledge sharing systems and collaborative tools for scientific fields and in education, but nothing for creative artsy things. Attitudes towards data sharing and privacy amongst content creators are in flux. There are lots of projects and energy around open data and decentralised social networks that allow data to become portable and not tied to one platform. One of TBL's visions for the Semantic Web is the dissolution of data silos and 'walled' applications that disadvantage the user, and as such the promotion of the 'ownership' of a user's data by the user themselves, rather than the software or organisation that uses the data. __There are lots of reasons people make content. There are lots of reasons people don't make content (who could / would like to)._ [Notes resume] Use backreferences; don't repeat yourself. Info / advice ...homepages.../sgwater/resources.html ..homepages.../imurray2/teaching/writing Style: Toward Clarity & Grace (book) The Craft of Research (book) When to start writing thesis? Do you already have papers? Slot them into a thesis template asap. Maybe a year beforehand. Slower pace is better. Don't assume appendices will be read. More for extra info if needed by people trying to reproduce your work (not your examiners). Too many direct quotes look like you don't understand and are avoiding explaining yourself. Keep copies of web resources and cite access dates in case they change / disappear. Figures might be copyright if you just copy them from papers, even if you cite them. Remake them, and put 'adapted from' as citation. Examiners? Depends on your supervisor. Discuss. Student might be able to suggest someone to examine. Maybe a balance between internal and external knowledge. Won't be someone junior, even if they're considered an expert in the field. Helpful if supervisor knows how that person will behave in viva. Might be a good reason to avoid someone you think would be perfect from their background. Conflict of interest regulations. You can know them personally though. External can't have been affiliated with UoE in the last three years, or substantially involved in your research (like co-authoring a paper). No ex-supervisors, from any university. No grading system (ie no different levels of passed PhD). Might be external prizes if you want extra recognition.
[Notes] 'How to write a thesis' workshop
Resonate, held between the 21st and 23rd of March in Belgrade, Serbia, is "...a platform for networking, information, knowledge sharing and education. It brings together distinguished, world class artists with an opportunity of participating in a forward-looking debate on the position of technology in art and culture." (from the website). Before I left, I suggested I might return with the following: Information about creative processes for digital artworks. Anything to do with open data or decentralized social networking movements. Potential case studies or people to work with. I largely failed on all three counts. I was thrown from the outset by the apparent poor organisation of the event. Not to mention a complete lack of free food. But the main problem was that well over one thousand people had tickets, but on the first day the main lecture room could hold a few hundred at best. Seating consisted of a handful of sofas and armchairs and valuable floor space was occupied by altogether too many stylish coffee tables. For everyone not lucky enough to be among the first ten in the room it was aching backs and/or pins and needles all round. This situation improved slightly after the first day, when two more tracks opened in slightly bigger rooms, but there was still nowhere near enough space. People were bursting out all doors, so switching tracks ever wasn't an option. There were also several long delays or postponements. A few were weather related, but too many (ie more than none) were organisational; lack of projector in main room, etc. That aside, I was aware that an event labelled 'festival' wasn't going to be right at the conference end of the party<->conference scale, but I was surprised at just how much party it was. A party with thousands of people, where everybody knew someone else but me. This made it particularly difficult to interact. You might expect the opposite. Indeed, I suspect that for most people this was the perfect environment to make new friends, start collaborations etc. I'm (usually) great at networking. I'm never great at social situations involving large crowds, a bar and loud music. I tried. But I couldn't catch anyone's eye, there was never a moment to start a conversation. The most interaction I had over three days was being elbowed out of the way by people who felt more entitled to see what was going on than me. I might have fared better if... ...I had succeeded in getting a place at one of the workshops. Places were very limited, but it was explained that all workshops were open for anyone to listen in on even if you couldn't participate directly. Had I taken part in one, it would have been a lot easier to talk to some specific people. I went along to attempt to listen in, however, to find all of the workshops (twenty or so) consisted of people grouped around tables, together in the same giant hall. The actual participants were craning their necks, straining to hear their workshop instructor over the general clamour of the event, so it was impossible for bystanders to be involved at all. Plus, only a couple of the workshops had (handwritten) signs indicating which they were, so there was also no way of tracking down the ones I was particularly interested in. ...I had been to any of the performances or night club tours that started about about 9pm each day and ran until the early hours of the morning. The performances, as far as I could tell, were electronic music sets, held in night clubs or similar venues. I don't do night clubs, and I was knackered by 7pm anyway, so that was a no go. Having said that, it probably wouldn't have been easier to meet new people over very loud music in a place where everyone was getting drunk, so maybe I didn't miss out. Now I've explained that, I will write a bit about the talks I did manage to get in to, which were generally interesting and of good quality. (The itinerary I sketched out for myself beforehand differed greatly from what I actually achieved because of crowd/small room issues mentioned previously). These aren't the only things I went to, but the only ones I took notes or tweeted about. **Marcin Ignac**, talking about Data Art, showed some really cool things he's done with Plask and WebGL, including 3D data visualisations, hacking with fonts, and realtime installations like a 3D visualisation of global energy market transactions. Plask and WebGL are capable of a lot, just in the browser. He also mentioned basil.js, which is "a library that brings scripting and automation into layout and makes computational and generative design possible from within InDesign" (cite) which looks useful for artists wanting to get into coding. Mike Tucker ("Unity as a Tool for Non-Games") suggested that Unity fills the creative gap recently vacated by Flash. He started out as a Flash guy, but isn't sad or bitter about Flash's demise, and understands that it's time to move on. His current WIP is an app to explore an abstract visual and audio landscape using the device's gyroscope. The audio is 'physically' located in a virtual 3D world, and changes as you navigate around by moving the device in space. Julia Laub told us about her Generative Design book, that she worked on as part of her thesis project. She defined (with a diagram) generative design as creating choices, then making choices, rather than controlling a visual output. She created a visualisation of Wikipedia pages that presents as a self-optimising network - as you interact with the diagram to expand the information you want to see, it rearranges itself for optimal viewing. Her book looks amazing, and getting my hands on a copy is on my things-to-do list. Dmitry Morozov ("An Autonomous Synthesis") showed some great circuit bent installations and sound projects; check out http://www.vtol.tk/. Signal | Noise (oops, I didn't take down the names of the actual guys) ("Datatainment") talked about gamification of data collection. People like "digital navel gazing"; they derive satisfaction from their own data, and comparing themselves to others. They mentioned a "top secret" client project for which they're aiming to "quantify everything people do"... intriguing... Lucas Werthin ("Design, Tech and Architecture for Large Scale Projection Mapping") showed us the ins and outs of an incredible project he'd worked on.. Described here (with videos). The onedotzero screening was a compilation of digital animation work from a number of artists. It was weird and awesome, with some inspiring visuals and music I need to listen to more (inspiring for writing fiction, not for the PhD unfortunately). Notes I wrote during that suggested I need to listen to the music in Warsnare, and the one with the giant Catzilla in. Markus Heckmann and Barry Threw ("Building by Doing - Visually guided design in TouchDesigner") described another easy bridge for artists who want to code. I wrote down "TouchDesigner" in my notes during this talk, but I can't remember why now. Find out more here. My favourite talk was by Ivan Poupyrev ("Computing Reality"). I tweeted loads about it, but none of them got sent because the wifi and my phone weren't playing nice or something. Fortunately I also made a ton of notes. Ivan describes himself as an 'inventor'; he worked for Sony, and now works for Walt Disney, and he is inventing the future. He has a great ethic and vision for the world; all about "giving people tools to make the world the way they want it to be." He envisions a decentralisation of production; large corporations only want to make their part of the world interactive, not the whole world. So ordinary people must have the technology to use, develop, spread, build on. In 1999, his team created an augmented reality toolkit, before it's time. In 2001, they developed a flexible display with is interacted with by bending it and sliding fingers around the back of the screen. A huge amount of interactions are possible just by bending and flexing in different ways. In 2004, Sony said "users will never accept a device with no buttons", and all early touchscreen devices also had buttons because of this. He says the iPhone was the "fall" of the button, proving everyone wrong. Last year (2012) the Sony PS Vita has touchback interaction, and Samsung have released a flexible display this year (2013) but "nobody cares". Now, he says, everything has been invented already, the market is saturated with new gadgets. He sees the future of the technology curve as embedded in people and surroundings: "no question... that it's coming to your body ... going to seep into the environment, disappear into the environment ... seamlessly, invisibly, efficiently" and describes a reality that computes itself, where "the computer doesn't have to exist at all." Ivan was very expressive about not being any kind of "tree-hugger", but is convinced that we don't need to "make more junk". So many resources have been used, and the earth can't support another industrial revolution. Instead, he wants to turn everything that already exists into interactive objects, including humans, animals and plants. That may sound weird / scary / far- futuristic but guess what... they've already done it. Flipping interaction on its head, they're all about not changing the environment, but changing you, or your perception of the environment. Touchৼ/em> is used for 'virtual tactile perception'... they can create a charged field around the human hand so that you feel things differently. The objects themselves are passive, simple, unchanged. The person just has to be in contact with the device that creates the field, which can be embedded in an object you're already touching like clothing, a shoe or an umbrella. Then, with no wires or weird contraptions, the person can touch some object (like a teapot) and as the settings of the field are changed, so the texture of the object appears changed. With this technology they can also tell who is touching something, or which part of your own body you are touching, because everything has a different electronic resistance. An example they produced was a touchscreen drawing application that changed the pen colour depending on who was drawing, with no additional information than sensing the fingers on the screen. Disney has the botannicus interacticus \\\\- an interactive plant. Electrodes in the soil transform any plant into a multi-touch controller! Gestures around the plant (à la theremin) or touching the plant in different ways, can be mapped to things like sound. It's possible to have very high precision. All plants are different, too! So the same tech applied to different plants will cause different outcomes. Video. There's an open source version of Touchৼ/em> for Arduino. Ivan also played with 3D printing, and sees this as something that will become hugely accessible to the extent that people will start to manufacture most things themselves; or at least, pop down to their local corner shop to get something printed from an existing design. They've done some experiments with 3D printing transparent objects, and 'light pipes' which direct colours and sizes of light precisely. They can create interactive displays by projecting light from below or behind objects and piping images onto them. It's possible now to 3D print a broad variety of sensors. These things result in interactive objects that respond to you, but all of the electronics are outside of the object, so you can switch one object for another one and have it work the same very easily. He concluded with: 1\\\\. Digitizing what we already have, not making more junk. 2\\\\. Sustainability requires augmenting humans and growing your electronics. 3\\\\. Distributed manufacturing vs. mass production. Resulting thoughts and ideas I got a general feeling of disparity between 'art' and 'real-life', with strong suggestions that it doesn't matter if interactive, technology-powered art installations break, so long as people are compelled to play with them. That's something I absolutely loved and absolutely hated simultaneously during my MSc in the ECA last year, and still causes internal conflict. (Ie. I understand the value of play and experimentation, but I'm passionate about things being useful and empowering, and it's possible to do both, and it bothers me when people take the easy way out, slap the 'experimental art' label on it and move on to their next solid-outcome-less project). Despite not actually talking to anyone about what I am doing and how it might in some way link to what they do, I suspect digital artists like these kinds of people might be good use cases for what I'm trying to make. They collaborate, have varied processes. And are more likely than amateur YouTubers to be interested in engaging with a new experimental technology. They could, for example, be incentivised to record their processes and actions over the course of a project, and be rewarded with visualisations of their data, and comparisons with the data of others. (Actually making the visualisations is out of my remit, but there will be someone who can..). A thing I should do is analyse blogs, articles, reports, etc about creative digital projects for the vocabulary about their processes. I thought about this as one of the speakers was just describing step by step the process for one project... but I wasn't listening properly; I only realised in time to have this thought, too late to write it all down. But there will be loads of documentation already out there that can be harvested. I always think of my project as something that helps a lot toward connecting with others for collaborating, but a large part can be finding other art/media projects for inspiration. That kind of pitch would sell it to this kind of audience, at least. So that's that. Photos from all the time I wasn't at Resonate are here.
I had an amazing evening at the Starting up in IT panel discussion, followed by Innis & Gunn beer tasting on Thursday evening. It was held in the shiny MMS Quartermile One offices. (When I'm rich, I want a flat on Quartermile. A turret-y one, not a glass one. Or maybe both). I felt chronically under-dressed when I arrived - a majority were suited - but everyone was really friendly and forthcoming with advice. Anyway, speaking of being rich. There were lots of interesting business-wise people to talk to at this event, including CEO of Skyscanner Gareth Williams, and Craig Anderson of Pentech Ventures. Plus lawyers specialising in things like IP, employment, company formation, from MMS. The panel discussion was enlightening; I'll go through some highlights raw notes... Funding Skyscanner - 2 mil from Scottish Equity Partners 2007. Getting funding isn't a goal or validation. Best way to get funding is not to need it. Scottish Enterprise: match funding. Give as much as you get. Confide in investor. Getting wise Don't pitch too early. Build traction first. Prove potential marketshare one way or another. Preparing business plan is productive. Converting to a vision to a plan when you get funding. Subscribe to investment bloggers. Networkiiiing. Find someone to champion you to an investor. Gareth: As many people are delusional as have a key insight. How to know which you are yourself? Employees Do you need employees or contractors? Casual employees in between. Consultant / contractors own IP for work they do. Unless contract says otherwise. Employees don't, employer owns it. I heard about some really interesting ventures, too, like Identity Artworks which looks like they're making a _huge _difference to young people, and have really inspiring stories to tell. Plus ShareIn, soon launching an equity crowdfunding platform. Veeerrry interesting... The panel was followed by beer tasting hosted by Innis & Gunn. I don't drink, but I would have sipped along to be sociable. However, it turned out the beer wasn't vegetarian (filtered through isinglass). This, at least, meant more for everyone else on my table. MMS had come up with a written seating plan, by the way, that separated people who had arrived together. Forced networking! Excellent. This served as great chance for Steve and I to independently practice our GeoLit elevator pitching, and I think we'd got it down to perfection by the end of the evening. Extremely encouragingly, we were consistently met with enthusiasm and responses like "that's an amazing idea!". We left pretty buzzing.
22nd - 28th April How to write a literature review workshop on Monday. Got hold of Amateur Media book (2012) in the NLS, and started reading it. Got in trouble for having a pen instead of a pencil to take notes. Oops. N00b mistake. Did more GeoLit related stuff than PhD stuff. Must try harder. (Got a funding application in and went to a tech start-up panel / networking event that was great). Fiddled with my lit review outline a bit, but didn't really accomplish much. Officially behind schedule for finishing by the end of the month (was I ever on schedule?). MUST TRY HARDER.
1st - 7th April On Monday and Tuesday I'd blocked out 'PhD' time on my calendar, but what was I doing? I do make a point of updating my calendar with hindsight so it doesn't contain lies. I must have done something. On Wednesday I jetted off to exciting Newark, then on Thursday I was in Nottingham for the Lovelace Colloquium (and had a fabulous time). Friday to Sunday saw me running around in circles for GemuCon.
15th - 21st April Tuesday: meeting with Ewan, thesis workshop. Friday: Social Informatics Cluster (non-adoption of technology solutions in healthcare); Ontologies with a View (nothing of import discussed, delicious soup in bread bowls from Union of Genius soup cafe).
8th - 14th April Wednesday: returned from brief sojourn at my mum's; TechMeetup. Thursday: 2nd UK Ontology Networks Workshop (link to notes to follow). Friday: missed Social Computing seminar as (I found out later) they changed rooms after I got there (8 minutes late, still not the latest). The rest: rewrote my literature review outline (still not happy, but need to stop agonising over it as it still doesn't contain anything substantial). Read a largely irrelevant paper about cultural computing (notes may or may not follow). Discovered a book I want and have asked the University Library to get. Only the first page of the chapter I want is available to preview (I've made enquiries to the author of the chapter, too). Started reading Socially Mediated Publicness: An Introduction by danah boyd; notes will follow.
Arrive, breakfast, sleep. Gallery, trams, garden (rain!) Cinema, hack start
Days one to three: Settling in (Melbourne)
[Notes] Watson, Semantic Web search engine, in 2007 and 2011
Thursday 16th of May was the 6th Open Knowledge Foundation meetup in Edinburgh. We had a great room in Techcube, more speakers than usual and loads of attendees. Here's an account. Bill Roberts Bill, founder of Swirrl ("the linked data company") talked about tools and user interfaces they are developing to make handling data easier for communities; particularly for the less technical. They've encountered a spectrum of users with different levels of technical abilities and needs, so they have to account for this in the tools they build. Technical complexity for accessing data ranges from SPARQL endpoints, JSON APIs, downloadable spreadsheets to visualisations, maps and charts. They're focussing on providing the data in accessible ways rather than building visualisations though. They'd struggle to meet or even understand everyone's needs; instead, it's important to concentrate in empowering the communities to use the data themselves. Kim Taylor An undergraduate Informatics student and participant of the Smart Data Hack, Kim showed us placED, the project her team had worked on, and are continuing to develop. This is a place finder for people who are looking to maintain or improve their personal wellbeing. They used datasets from the City of Edinburgh Council (and presumably ALISS?) to create an Android app. They stored their data in a Google AppEngine datastore, but I'm not sure if it has a web frontend as well. Some of the problems they encountered include copyright issues with ordnance survey place data, and royal mail postcode data, which made up part of the Council's data but wasn't available for anyone to use due to licensing restrictions. They worked around this by recomputing location data from the parts of addresses the did have access to with Google's geocoding API. When they open their database up for user input, which they inevitably will if they want their app to stay current and useful, they'll have to think about how to maintain the content. Gavin Crosby Gavin works for the Council, with a title I've forgotten, but it's to do with youth work. Youth work has a very specific definition to do with people aged between 11 and 25, meeting in organised groups with a volunteering adult present. There's loads of this going on in Edinburgh, organised by Scouts/Guides, schools, churches or maybe even self-organised. There's no central database about what is going on where, which is one of the Council's biggest issues in this area. Word of mouth is usually how this kind of information is spread amongst young people, and Gavin suggested that a lot of youths may be unwilling to attend something they'd heard about without a direct invitation from someone they know. In an attempt to reign some of this information in, they've created the Youth Work Map. It's not an ideal system, as they have to update it manually when a youth group or activity organiser decide to inform the Council that they exist. Not everybody opts in, so there is data missing. Manual updating also means the map is not 'live'; things might go out of date and not be removed straight away. Gavin said it is the constraints of the Council's web system that has caused a lot of the problems, and points out that they haven't considered accessibility issues (for example, access for people with vision problems), and it's not interactive. He'd love to see the ability for kids to chat to each other through the map, or leave reviews for particular events. There are issues with child protection here, of course. He would also like to see better tagging and organisation of the content on the map, links to other data repositories (there are parallel similar projects), and the ability to connect events to areas or routes rather than single points. Gavin pointed out that a lot of the audience for this map is likely to be adults looking for youth projects, rather than young people themselves. Leah Lockhart Leah made a quick announcement about the new Local Government Open Data Working Group. They're organising open data surgeries (similar to her social media surgeries that you've definitely heard of by now if you're floating around the OD scene in Edinburgh). They're also hoping to fill in the OKFN Open Data Census for Scotland, and meet regularly in the pub. Tweet Leah if you're interested! Fiona McNeill Fiona works in Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, and she told us about Open Data in climate change science, or the lack thereof. A team she has put together have got some funding to carry out a small investigation about Open Data use in climate change science, and to try to build a network around this. They'll be looking at trends and patterns of the past decade to see if research has been any more successful when existing datasets were used, or if papers are more well-cited when they make their data open at the end of it (for example). She thinks the lack of Open Data in this area could be due to the expensive nature of making data good enough quality to share, and of course the fact that when people have worked hard to gather data they feel that they own it; why should they share? They're hoping that their report might go some way to persuading funding bodies to have sharing of data as a criteria for applications. Contact Fiona if you're interested in this kind of thing. John Kellas John said, brilliantly, that talking about information visualisation usually means graphs. But normal people "don't think in graphs". He works in community education, and a couple of years ago he started working in "volumetric and comparative" visualisations, which can be much more useful and empowering to people. He showed us a visualisation of one trillion dollars (which I can't find a link to, so let me know if anyone has one). He's not had much support with creating tools and visualisations, because he's not interested in making money from it, so it's hard to attract funding. What he's doing looks really useful though, so hopefully we'll see more! Ben Jeffery Ben is another undergraduate Informatics student who took part in the Smart Data Hack and whose team is still working on the project they started at the hack. They're re-imagining the University's student information portal by pulling in lots of different data sources, and presenting the information more sensibly. They've been doing a fantastic job, but of course are all busy with exams and general learning, so the haven't been able to spend as much time on this as they'd like. They're also struggling to get raw data out of the University, and point to (my alma mater) the University of Lincoln's open data portal as an example of what could and should be done about this. So they're turning their project into a pilot to demonstrate what they could do if they had the data they wanted. They're also conscious of similar-but-different projects, like projects.ed.ac.uk, and don't want to duplicate effort. Ben said they've found that a lot of the University of Edinburgh's data is held by middleware vendors, so it's particularly hard to access. But this is information that is funded by students, so it should be available to them! He said the "University should be a breeding ground for knowledge" so data shouldn't be silo'd up. He also said that there are a lot of politics in the way with this sort of thing. They, as any level-headed software developer, just want to build stuff. They're still in various talks though, so this is a space to watch... Susan Pettie and Marc Horne These guys are from So Say Scotland and aim to change culture to make Scotland better. Open Data is important for democratic movements, so they told us about some of their events. They're building a network of activists and campaigners, and hold large scale assemblies themed around 'thinking together', which is a kind of en masse guided brainstorming. They're trying to spark a movement, and are aiming for 25,000 people. They're investigating ways to make their assemblies more efficient, as currently collating all of the ideas that are generated is a manual process. This would be nigh on impossible when they reach their participation goal. There will be a report about their progress on the 27th of May. Devon Walshe Devon was our Techcube host, and he told us about Sync Geeks, Geeks in Residence. This is a program funded by Creative Scotland that puts the technologically minded into arts organisations. Previous efforts by arts organisations to employ 'geeks' to solve a technical problem or produce a digital solution for something have been problematic due to the 'black box' approach. The developers produce an outcome, get paid and leave, often aiming to do the minimum amount of work. Geeks in Residence promotes developers and the organisations working together more closely, to allow for sustainable solutions. Part of the project is to analyse the relationships of people who know about technology, and those who don't, with each other. In my notes I've scribbled "convert fear into technology", and I can't remember what that originated from, but it sounds awesome. Devon did some work with Stills photography centre. Nobody knew what they needed, so after some collaboration they developed an interactive floor plan (because the Stills building is way confusing) and some kind of interactive timeline because Stills has an interesting history. He also plugged the Culture Hack Scotland in Glasgow in July (12th- 14th), which I'm terribly disappointed I won't be in the country for. Next OKFN meetup Will be on the 22nd of August, in Informatics. Here's a link to the Meetup so you can RSVP. I'll sure be there, if I'm not somewhere else.. (depends if/when/where my Mum books an obligatory family holiday).
I'm lucky enough to have some quests to complete, or achievements to unlock, during my month in Australia. 1\\\\. Find the resting place of my Uncle David. My Mum and her family moved to Australia for a few years when she was nine. They moved around a lot, and eventually came back to the UK. Her older brother returned to Melbourne when he was 17, and died there (very suddenly I think) at the age of 28, of a brain tumour. He only visited the UK once while he lived in Oz, and though he stayed in touch with his family, information about his life is sketchy. Until recently I thought I was going to have to trawl through various records to find out where he might be buried, and I'm not even sure what year he died in, let alone where he lived. I talked to my Grandma the other day though, and she knew more than we thought - that he was cremated, and scattered in the "Herb Garden, South Yarra" and that he has a headstone there. I'm not sure how accurate this is; the Web isn't being very forthcoming with useful information right now, but it's more to go on than I had before. 2\\\\. Forge ties between Edinburgh and Melbourne Open Knowledge Foundations. Since there's an OKFN Hack days after I arrive in Melbourne, and not even far from where I'm staying, I've registered to take part. Should be fun. And some less questy, more general things... Check out some of the places my Mum and her family lived. I have a pretty long list of addresses across Victoria and South Australia, to see which still exist and what they're like. Maybe attempt to bump into relatives or family friends. This will be tricky though, as my UK family don't seem to know where anyone on the upside down side of the world is any more, how to contact them, or whether they'd be interested in meeting. The ones we do know are in Perth, which I'm not going to be able to get to. There are quite a lot of them around in Australia and New Zealand though, so hopefully more data will emerge. See Ayres Rock. Duh. See the main cities on the east coast, like Brisbane, Sydney and Canberra. Expensive and time-consuming, but doable. I also want to go to Tasmania. And things that need doing that aren't to do with being in Australia: Two freelance projects, due on 5th June and 1st July. Finish my PhD literature review... Make a poster for the Semantic Web Summer School. (Eep).
6th - 12th May Discovering lots of things to write about semantically annotating multimedia content. I decided there are three main ways to do this: Technical / objective / statistical data: eg. media type; shutterspeed; framerate; duration; resolution; date created; number of times viewed at a particular source; number of time shared ... Bibliographic: creators and contributors and their roles; methods/location of publication; methods/locations of creation ... Content*: fictional characters; locations; camera movements; scene transitions; colours ... These categories overlap somewhat really, and when I get round to it I'll type my Venn diagram up. Technical is easy, and a lot of that is automatically captured by hardware or software used to produce and edit works. It's also relatively easy to extract automatically. Standards like MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 take care of formalising it, and Jane Hunter turned these standards into semantic ontologies in 2002. Bibliographic can largely - but not entirely - be covered by vocabularies that have been around forever like Dublin Core, FOAF and various library- originated things. Things that might be missing (or I just haven't found them yet) are associating roles with tasks involved in digital media production, since pieces are often a collaborative effort. has some idea of participants and roles, but the purpose of is digital rights management stuff, so it's more concerned with the distribution change, I think, than granular production of content. I haven't read much about it yet. Content is more interesting, and potentially more useful for ordinary human beings. Imagine querying IMDB for "that film where John Goodman arrests an animated talking moose on a US highway" instead of scouring John Goodman's filmography or googling for pictures of animated meese until you see the right one. Annotating characters, objects and events, and stringing them onto a timeline is possible with OntoMedia. It's very focussed around narratives, which is great, but doesn't link back to technical so much. So if you did find the answer to that query, it wouldn't be able to serve up the timestamp of that particular scene. On top of what I've looked at already, I still have this list to (re)investigate: BBC Programme Ontology - here, and here BBC Mythology Engine - here, and here Yahoo media RSS standards YouTube RSS standards ComicsML Comic Book Markup Language Comics Ontology hack - here, and here Media Value Chain Ontology A thing I want to do is annotate some amateur content with OntoMedia and with ABC to see how they compare. Maybe I'll do asdfmovie, because it has associated comics, and multiple people participating in production. Then I'll do something live action as well, because I can't base all my research on non- sequitur lolrandom stick figure cartoons. Now, back to work.. I want a better name for this, since I'm referring to everything as 'content' anyway. So some better way of saying 'content of content'.
Week in review: annotating multimedia content
29th April - 5th May Read several papers and an entire book. Notes to follow. Literature review inching along. Got accepted for the Semantic Web Summer School. Talked about the SW search engine Watson project during Ontologies with a View. This is different from IBM's Jeopardy playing Watson. Had to write off the bank holiday weekend because a friend visited. Walked a lot.
20th - 26th May Continued to work on literature review. Nothing much to report. Went to MCM Expo in London and managed to find time (around non-stop merch selling for TomSka and Eddsworld) to ask between 30 and 40 content creators - a wide variety of ages, experience, types of content - about their process and collaborative practices. The thing they all had in common (I randomly picked people as they were waiting in the two hour long queue to get autographs from Tom) was that they all do what they do because the love it, want to entertain people, and if the could earn a living from it too that would be amazing; but that's not why they do it. For many it's the dream, but not one they expect realistically to achieve. That is why this is important to me. Because everybody should be able to make a living from doing what they love*, and the technology exists to allow it. How exciting. Unless they're really bad at it. There's only so much technology can do. But they should definitely have the chance to get good before caving in to a ninetofive that they're not totally passionate about.
Rosh etc, monorail, light show, Chinese.
Day nineteen: Operation Stevie Lesson (Australia Zoo, Sunshine Coast)
Sydney 1 Opera house, ferries.
Wander, pool. Amazingly crappy hostel. Woolshed.
Friday: Arrived. Slept. Saturday: Shoe shopping. Got distracted by something. Posh meal and casino. Sunday: Botanic gardens, but nothing open. After Earth. Fort. Wrath of Khan. Monday: Sleeping in Fort. Gardens, souvenirs. The Purge. Took fort down.
Day twenty four to twenty seven: Quests and silliness (Melbourne)
Canberra. Return of Jamie. World War Z.
Day twenty three: Day trippin' (Canberra and Sydney)
Slept chez Rosh. To Stephen's. Food (breakfast). Slept. Wandered. Veggie restaurant.
Car, wandered, pool, noodles. Uluru. Uluru & King's Canyon. King's Canyon, Alice Springs, desert park.
Days seven to ten: Road-trippin' (Alice Springs, Ayers Rock, King's Canyon)
Days twenty eight and twenty nine: Oops. (Melbourne, Perth, Singapore)
Hanging out. Dropped my things. Sydney in the evening.
Days twenty and twenty one: More beach (Gold Coast)
#GovHack (Days four and five, Melbourne)
# Attendee, Summer School for Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Presented poster "Active Digital Content Creators and the Semantic Web". Learnt lots, slept little. Worked on a mini group project about measuring serendipity. Won the best video prize, with "[Summer School for Semantic Wizards](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BISwM1POYvk)", featuring a wizard who turns water into wine using SPARQL.
Presented poster "Active Digital Content Creators and the Semantic Web". Learnt lots, slept little. Worked on a mini group project about measuring serendipity. Won the best video prize, with "Summer School for Semantic Wizards", featuring a wizard who turns water into wine using SPARQL.
Attendee, Summer School for Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web
I have been on no fewer than thirteen planes in the last four weeks or so. I've already made my apologies to the environment. If it's any consolation, it makes my ears really hurt every time. It's only four days, after that, until I get on a flight from Edinburgh to Madrid. It's becoming as normal as going for a walk. (A walk with earache and slight deafness). Presumably, if using electronic equipment during takeoff and landing, and mobile phones at any time, was actually dangerous there would be some sort of machine to detect if any passengers did have things turned on, and electric shock them (or something). And there would be a degree of consistency in how these things were handled between airports. In quite a few airports in Australia, we were asked to turn our phones off altogether before stepping onto the tarmac to approach the plane. I saw a couple of people who were walking and tapping their screens get pulled aside and refused boarding until their devices were safely off and pocketed. No planes were crashing in the background. And nobody checked that out-of-sight gadgets were switched off. So you only pose a risk if you get caught? And in Zurich, the crew were happy with people making phonecalls right up until the plane started trundling. Security is inconsistent too. And a massive hassle, so in an endeavour to minimise unpacking and re-packing time at the gates, I gradually reduced the number of electronics and liquids I removed from my hand luggage. A timid and inexperienced flyer before this year, I used to think it was standard procedure to remove everything with a glimmer of metal or a drop of liquid for an x-ray in its own separate tray. So out came the chargers, headphones, coins, cards and soaps, along with tablets, e-readers, laptop, phone and clear bags of 100ml containers of liquids. Before the start of this trip I'd figured out that was excessive, and silently pitied those who unloaded all of these things still. Time to see what else the security guys don't give two shits about. Kindle. That was fine. Nobody questioned a Kindle left in my bag. Tablet was the next to stay. My Nexus 7 caused zero concern. At this point I'm just unloading a laptop and liquids. So I left the toothpaste in. That was fine. Then I found out one of my travel buddies had been inadvertently passing through security gates with a 250ml bottle of suncream in the side pocket of his rucksack. Apparently not an issue. At some point on the trip I acquired small scissors; so weak they could barely cut thread. They made it through security in Sydney the first time just fine, but in Alice Springs my bag got pulled back. I thought it was the toothpaste, but no. Once they had confirmed that these scissors were such that they'd buckle before piercing skin, they let me have them back. Same again in Cairns, and Gold Coast. By Sydney round three, the scissors had broken into two parts. A very concerned looking lady asked if she minded if she threw them away rather than let them on the plane. I didn't. By this point I was sending 50ml nasal spray and deodorant through, because what the heck? They were also cool with our massive jar of pasta sauce, and whatever we happened to be drinking at the time. So within Australia, I was just removing my laptop at security (and phone from my pocket). In Singapore, signs actually advised that we keep phones, tablets and e-readers packed, so only the laptop came out there too (my liquids were in my hold baggage by this point). Zurich, however, are nuts. No liquids still, and I got out my Nexus and Kindle straight away because someone ahead of me was getting yelled at about an iPad. Apparently that wasn't enough, and eager staff sent my bag back through three times, unloading more on each round. Out came chargers, headphones, bags within bags, chocolate. I was almost ashamed of how much crap I was carting around. For the final round they dug deep to extract a a sealed bar of soap I bought someone as a souvenir from Cairns. That seemed to do the trick. So then I had to hold up the line re-packing. How does x-raying soap on its own make it less of a threat? Or easier to detect the threat? Serious question. Anyone know? I'm just pleased I left my Vegemite and teas in my hold luggage.
I've never been to Spain, and for some reason the Spanish language baffles me. It's the least guessable European language, in my humble opinion, and I can't get my head (/tongue) around the pronunciation. I've never studied Spanish, but I can get by just fine with French and German, and when I've been in Switzerland, Holland and even Italy I could make a go of communicating to a reasonable degree, so I thought I'd pick it things up. But apparently my brain is resistant to Spanish. That aside, locals are very friendly and even when they don't speak English they don't seem to give you disparaging looks. We arrived on Saturday evening (having successfully got our poster tube past various levels of EasyJet staff who would have been within their rights, if unreasonable, to tell us it was too big for hand luggage). We were met at the airport by new friends, who we later accompanied into the centre of the city to watch the Gay Pride Parade. The streets were packed, the heat was stifling, and the costumes varied and outrageous. The party atmosphere filled the air with a tangible excitement. The parade itself was slow to start, but eventually lasted for several hours. We explored a little, taking in this version of the city as the empty streets of the Sunday morning to follow would have a very different feel. But mostly we sat on the grass, chilling with our hosts and their friends, who were mixing cheap wine and lemonade and bobbing to the waves of techno, trance or cheesy pop that came by with every float. The night was hot, but not unbearable; about 37 degrees, yet there was a slight breeze and no humidity which made all the difference. On Sunday we braved the sun to do the tourist circuit recommended to us to take in as much of the city as possible in the time we had. We deviated somewhat to explore various gardens (beautiful, although I was too distracted by the heat to really appreciate them) and pop into some impressive looking cathedrals (a nice break from the heat, but I find Christian art, architecture and interior decoration disturbingly morbid). Never having thought about visiting Madrid before, and thus never having planned out what I might like to see when I got here, none of the monuments, buildings or squares stood out to me. Architecture is pale and old-looking, and mostly very ornate. Similarly pale sculptures, statues and fountains are in abundance. Distinguishing vegetarian options in restaurants and cafes seemed more challenging than I had the energy for; not to mention, most didn't start serving food until at least one-thirty which wouldn't have allowed us time to catch our train, so I'm ashamed to say we grabbed snacks from a supermarket instead. We (eventually) caught a train from Atocha station in the centre to Cercedilla (EUR 5.30). And thus began the Summer School adventure... Continued in another post.
Semantic Web questions we couldn't ask 10 years ago from Frank Van Harmelen Semantic Web & Web of data = a more manageable mission. Metaweb movie - got bought by Google and incorporated into Knowledge Graph. SW Principles: 1\\\\. Give everything a name (entities). 2\\\\. Relations form graph between things. 3\\\\. Names are addresses on the Web (so we inherit properties of Web like AAA). This becomes Giant Global Graph. (Maybe SW should be called Giant Global Graph?) 4\\\\. Add semantics. Types of things, relationships. Hierarchy, constraints: Inferences. Bounding shared beliefs by sharing ontological information. Space for confusion gets smaller and we begin to agree on interpretation of information. Semantics = predictable inference. Google: from just links to results, to information boxes (last May). Can't directly address Google Knowledge Graph. NXP (microprocessors): 26,000 products. Integrated all databases into triplestore. Exposing subset of triplestore to customers. BBC: 125 million triples. Many data sources. APIs to website. Own ontologies. All have the same triple-layer architecture: Raw data SW layer Output / API / UI etc DataGov: eg. air quality in cities, campaign money, if policies work. Companies don't care about SW, but are using these technologies for their own IRL purposes. These are all different types of use cases of SW technologies: search; data integration; content re-use; SEO; data publishing. It's important that the SW graph is so big. More questions to ask. Good that we no longer know how big, or how fast it is growing... Tens of billions of facts. How many are really permanent? Some are stable, some will disappear - just like the 'regular' Web. "...it being a mess is the only reason why it scales." We need to get used to the idea of SW being a mess - aka "a system so large you can no longer enforce central control" (complex system). The LD cloud is still poorly interconnected, but good graph properties. SameAs.org Heterogeneity is unavoidable. Socio-economic, first to market - why certain systems/ontologies get used, eg. schema.org, dbpedia. Self-organisation. LD cloud grew, nobody designed it. Knowledge follows power curve. This has an impact on mapping and reasoning, storage and indexing. Distribution. Web not geared for distributed SPARQL queries. Everyone pulls in all data and queries local copy. Not very 'webby', disadvantageous. So subgraphs? Query planning? Caching? Payload priority? Provenance. Representation, (re)construction. Metametadata (knowledge about knowledge; uncertainty; problems with vocabs for this). How to get from provenance to trust. Dynamics (change). Cool Web in 60 seconds graphic. SW not changing this fast, but soon.. Errors and noise. Sometimes we disagree. Deal with by: avoid, repair or contain. Or just deal with it \\\\- allow argumentation. Fuzzy, rough semantics - almost, maybe. Lots of research questions. But not ones we could ask 10 years ago. Information universe - "algorithms exist without us looking at them". We should ask if things work in theory. Scientists vs. engineers. Discovering vs. building. Is this incidental or universal? OWL is our microscope. We can see structure well in some domains, but not so well in others. Maybe it's our tool that distorts, rather than a property of the domain. Says we should change our mindset from building stuff to hypothesising and falsifying.
(by Mathieu D'Aquin). Introduction to Linked Data from Mathieu d'Aquin Linked Data = universal connections, like Lego. Universal is why it's important. Workshop instructions. The only problem we had during the workshop was disagreement about how to read the 'broader' and 'narrower' relations between courses. It instinctively ready contrary to what (my) common sense suggested (eg. that 'arts and humanities' is broader than 'history', which some people disagreed with). A quick reference to the ontology documentation resolved that.
[Notes] Introduction to Linked Data at #SSSW2013
It's a dynamic world! Ubiquitous streams and the Linked Data Web from Manfred Hauswirth (pooh42) Streams: Any time dependant data / changes over time. Has done a paper about P2P stuff. Data silo - "natural enemy of SW scientists" Massive exponential growth of global data. Still have to integrate dynamic data with static data. Multiway joins are domintion operator. Need to be efficient. Everything/body is a sensor. Various research challenges: Query framework. Efficient evaluation algorithm. Optimise queries. Organisation of data. CoAP ~= http for sensors. Stuff about sensor networks and context - useful for Michael. Common abstraction levels for understanding. SSN-XG ontology Application: SPITFIRE You can buy a sensor off the shelf that runs a binary RDF store and can be queried. So possible to use SW tech with resource constrained devices. RESTful sensor interfaces stuff being standardised - CoRE, CoAP. Linked Stream Model CQELS-QL (extension to SPARQL 1.1; already legacy) Rewrite query to spit out static and dynamic - lots of overhead. But need to optimise between these. Neither existing stream processing systems nor existing databases could be efficient enough. So the built own LD stream processing system. (Optimised and adopted existing database stuff). HyperWave - didn't succeed. Didn't listen to customers and wasn't open source (license fees). But better than hypertext was back in the day. Performance important for success/uptake. Just putting it on cloud infrastructure doesn't mean it scales. Need to parallelize algorithm. Took it to a point where adding more hardware did help. Problems! Inconsistent results, engines don't support all query patterns.. very early, don't fully understand yet. Long way to go. How to prove what is a correct result? Needs to be easy to use - dumb it down. Linked Stream Middleware (available): Flights, live trains - SPARQL endpoint!, traffic cams. SuperStreamCollider.org Current Tomcat problem with twitter streams. To do? Scaleability Stream reasoning (only processing, pattern matching, so far. Want to infer conclusions). World is: ... uncertain, fuzzy, contradictory. So combine statistics and logics. Hard to scale logical reasoning, so use statistics to shoot in the right direction. Privacy? Build systems! Can't do thought experiments about the Web. Don't get hung up on approaches / labels.
RELEVANT. Users (consumers?): Finding content Media types * mostly text at the moment, little integration of different types Specific tasks - not much connection of results with user tasks. More data than just what you seen in the media (cue my Venn diagram). Plus, eg. paintings - lots of 'cultural baggage'. Care more about the story than the media. Interpretation by end users. Hopefully message that the author intended. Meaning of combination of assets. eg. Exhibition of artists work. Interacting further with the media. Search - serendipitous or focussed around a theme (or both). Different search goals. Sharing, passing it on. (SW and multimedia community need to work together). -> Raphael Troncy on Friday - attaching semantics to multimedia on the Web. Need mechanisms: to identify (parts of) media assets. associate metadata with a fragment. agree on meaning of metadata. enable meaningful structures to be composed, identified and annotated. Workflow for multimedia applications Canonical processes of media production Reduced to the simplest form possible without loss of generality. Heard of MPEG-7? Don't bother.. very much from a media algorithms perspective. Applications: Feature extraction. News production. New media art. An interactive exhibit that responded to audience present. Hyper-video. Linked video. Photo book production (CeWe). (Using this example for explaining processes). Ambient multimedia systems with complex sensory networks. Canonical processes overview... There's a paper. CeWe photobook - automatic selection, sorting and ordering of photos. Context (timestamp, tags) analysis and content (colours, edges) analysis. Things from these you want to represent your digital system (ie with LOD): Premediate, eg. remember to take your camera on holiday. write scripts, plan shots. place a security camera in the right location. Construct Message (not really in the chain, appears all over the place); what to conveny with media? Intention? eg. show people a great holiday. sell a product. inform/advise. Create (method of creation might be important, so record in metadata), eg. take photos. make video. Annotate, eg. automatic or manual. Stuff that is embedded by device vendors (but there's so much more...) domain annotations: landscapes/portraits, timestamps, face recognition. Publish, eg. compose images into photobook. Distribute, eg. print photo book and post. cyclic processes online. COMM - Core Ontology for Multimedia. Premediate and construct message - human parts, she doesn't expect them to be digitised any time soon. Using Semantics to create stories with media Can we link media assets to existing linked data and use this to improve presentation? How can annotations help? What can be expressed explicitly? Message (somewhere between a html page and poetry). Objects depicted. Domain information. <\\\\--- li=""> Human communicaiton roles (discourse). <\\\\--- li=""> Vox Populi (PhD project) Traditionally video documentary is a set of shots decided by director/editor. vs. Annotating video material and showing what the user asks to see. interviewwithamerica.com Annotations for these documentary clips: Rhetorical statement; argumentation model (documentary techniques). Descriptive (which questions asked, interviewee, filmic). Filmic: continuity like camera movements, framing, direction of speaker, lighting, sound - rules that film directors know. Statement encoding (eg. summary what the interviewee said): subject - modifier - object statements. Thesauri for terms. Can make a statement graph, finding which statements contradict and which agree. (He encoded this stuff by hand - automated techniques aren't good enough). Argumentation model - claims, concessions, contradictions, support. Automatically generated coherant story. Are we more forgiving watching video? (Than reading these statements as text). Peoples' own interpretations strongly affect understanding of the message. Vox Populi has (not for human consumption) GUI for querying annotated video content. User can determine subject and bias of presentation. Documentary maker can just add in new videos and new annotations to easily generate new sequence options. User informatio needs - Ana Carina Palumbo Linked TV. Enhancing experience of watching TV. What users need to make decisions / inform opinions. Expert interviews (governance, broadcast). User interviews - what people thought they need (215 ppts). User experiments - what people actually need. Experiment - oil worth the risk? eg. people wanted factual information from independent sources; what the benefits are; community scale information. Published at EuroITV. Conclusions We can give useful annotations to media access, useful at different stages of interactive access (not just search). Clarify intended message. Explicity with annotations. Manual or automatic. Media content and annotations can be passed among systems. No community agreement in how to do this. <\\\\--- li=""> How to store? Questions Hand annotations are error prone - how to validate? Media stuff - there can be uncertainty, people don't always care. Motivating researchers to annotate... Make a game. Store whole video or segements? W3C fragment identification standards - timestamps via URLs.
Collaborative ontology development from Natasha Noy (sssw2012) Stanford, Protégé. In past 10-15 years, through collaboration with scientists (particularly biomed), ontologies have become essential. Don't need to sell ontologies to scientists, they believe in it. Focus on science because that's where she has experience etc. We're not so bad at versioning ontologies, more versioning data is the problem. Experts add stuff, curator checks quality, and publishes upcoming tasks. Similar to open source developments, but no research to compare the two. \\\\- Different because biomed people are paid (well). ICD - International Classification of Diseases. Started 17th century. Causes of death, medical bills, policy making. Revised in 80s over 8 annual conferences. 17-58 countries, 1-5 person delegations, mainly health statisticians. Manual, on paper. Whoever shouted loudest.. Paper copies, only English, pdf. ICD-11 - OWL ontology! Open, Protégé (a customised, Web version), links to others. Conflict resolution: People naturally don't step on each others' toes. Users expect stuff like Web 2.0 interactions, Web interface. Web Protégé: No consistency checking - coming but currently must go offline. Ontologies are solution to everything - versioning, roles, social interactions. Also plugins are the solutions to everything - visualisations.
Social Media Analytics with a Pinch of Semantics Using semantics to solve problems (not solving problems of semantics). SM for businesses: Analytics. How to measure success? SM silos impeding progress. In-house social platforms increasing, so even more so. SIOC to integrate online community information. SIOC + FOAF + SKOS. FB Graph. People are likeaholics. Their 'likes' become meaningless, so you need to take this into account when making recommendations. Browse your data and understand user actions. Behaviour analysis. Bottom-up analysis. Can handle unexpected or emerging behaviours. Community members classified into roles. Identify unknown roles. Cope with role changes over time. Clustering to identify emerging roles. eg. focussed novice; mixed novice; distributed expert; ... Spectrum across users you can or can't do without. Extending an ontology built on SIOC. Encoding rules in ontologies with SPIN. Three categories of features: Social features (people you follow, people follow you, ...) Content features (what you're posting, keywords, ...) Topical/semantic features Which behaviour categories you need to cater for more than others? How roles impact activity in online community. Consistently see that you need some sort of stable mixture of behaviours for activities in forums to increase. ==> Don't know what's causing which. What is a healthy community? Use behaviour analysis to guess what's going to happen to community. Eg. Churn rate. User count. Seeds/non-seeds prop (how many / if people reply to you). Clustering. Unexpected: the fewer focused experts in the community, the more posts received a reply. (But quality of answers?) Community types (Little work in this space) Muller, M. (CHI 2012) community types in IBM Connections: Communities of Practice Teams Technical support .. .. (see slides..) Need an ontology and inference engine of community types. Wants an automated process to tell you what type of community it is - it might be something it wasn't set up for. Then you could determine what sort of patterns you would expect to find. Noone has done this yet. Measurements of value and satisfaction Answers different across communities. They ran it on IBM Connections - corporate community. Most of this work is for managers of communities - see what's happening and help to predict what might be coming next. Can classify users based on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs? Mapping the hierarchy to social media communities. ~90% users happily staying at the lower levels of the 'needs hierarchy'. Behaviour evolution patterns What paths they follow over time. eg. people who become moderators eventually. Engagement analysis What's the best way to write a tweet so that people care about it? Which posts are likely to generate more attention? Getting bored of people finding patterns in individual datasets. What can be generalised to other communities? So experimented with 7 datasets and looked at how results differed across: community types. randomness (vs. topicality) of datasets. related experiments. And people use different features. Semantic sentiment analysis in social media Too much research going on, especially on twitter. Extract semantic concepts from tweets; likely sentiment for a concept. Tweetnator. Semantics increases accuracy by 6.5% for negative sentiment; 4.8% for positive sentiment. OUSocial. Students don't use in-house networks because they already use facebook groups etc. Want to analyse what's happening on them. Upcoming Reel Lives (inc. Ed.) Fragmented digital selves. Want to automate compilations of media (photos, messages) posted online. Changing energy consumption behaviour. Providing information is not enough. Social Eco feedback technology.
Tools and Techniques Recommender systems Input: Set of users + set of items + rating matrix. Problem - given user, predict rating for an item. In real world, recommendation matrix data is sparse. Can use hybrid approaches. Collaborative RS: Like Amazon. Based on other users with similar profiles. Experimentally better than content-based, but you don't always have many users. Knowledge-based RS: No/little user history. Based on domain knowledge. User-based collaborative recommendation: Pearson's correlation coefficient - baseline. Imagine millions of users - computing similarities takes a lot of time. So .. Item-based collaborative recommendation: Focus on items not users. Compute similarity between each pair of items. Don't have to compute similarity between items that don't have overlapping ratings. Cosine similarity / adjusted cosine similarity (taking into account average rating related to a user to eliminate some bias). Content-based RS: Based on description of item and profile of user interests. Items are described in terms of attributes/features. Finite set of values associated with features. Item representation is a vector. Don't necessarily have complete descriptions of items - just have a 0 in your vector. Similarity between items: Jaccard similarity. Cosine similarity and TF-IDF (term frequency - inverse document frequency). Batch compute similarities offline, then use similarities to compute ratings on the fly based on user profile. Predict rate only for N nearest neighbours of items in user profile, that are not in the user profile. An item is worth rating if more than x of N number of neighbours are within user profile. Using LOD To mitigate lack of information/descriptions about concepts/entities. Recommender systems are usually vertical, but LD lets you easily build a multi-domain recommender system. To avoid noisy data, you have to filter it before feeding your RS. Freebase. Tiapolo Automating typing of DBPedia entities. Vector space model for LOD MATHS.
Make a model of what is happening. WeSenseIt \\\\- citizen water observations. River belongs to citizens, not authorities. Physical sensors (hard layer) are expensive and brittle. So use people instead (soft layer, social). Give people small sensors. Phones. Then you just need software for information management. capture. integrate and correlate data. share. Can't rely on phones. Old people in Doncaster. Give them easy sensors instead. camera humidity position GPS water depth, velocity rainfall via accelerometer could coverage via luminocity Costs about EUR 80. Open Source & hackable. Not expected to substitute professional sensors, but a way to crowdsource information you would never get. In Delft Give people flood preparation advice and record who ticks things off, to build a picture of who/how/when preparations take place. The Floow Ltd "Commercialises data solution for telematic insurance." World divided 10x10m squares, sense things everywhere. Traffic risks. Sensors tell you people are going somewhere, not why. That's what social media can tell you. Monitoring development of a house fire via Twitter. Seeing events through the eyes of the community. Social streams: High volume Duplicated, incomplete, imprecise, incorrect Time sensitive / short term Informal Only 140 characters Spam Large music festival. Monitor geolocated messages, trends, topics and relations. Most 'critical' events were management issues. Developing system to warn you automatically about things to pay attention to. Look/listen for event within 72 hours. 10 minutes to find out what it was. \\\\- Simulation of station bombing. Minute by minute description of event. 1.5 billion messages. Linguistic issues Alternative language Negatives Conditional statements Hope/prayer statements Irony/sarcasm Ambiguity Unreliable capitalisation Data sparsity Four things when monitoring: What Identify, classify, cluster Events and sub-events Involved entities Who Human or not? Bots can be beneign, but many are a serious risk. Bots that pretend to be humans. When Where Big problem - people tweet crap! People don't realise when people nearby are in danger. Deception on social media False crowdsourcing political support on social networks. Smear campaigns using bots. Bots to foster / prevent social unrest. Identifying bots 23 behavioural features. Feature set is open. Recognise 90% of bots - more than humans can do. Very small amount of tweets are geolocated, it's useless. Have to use the text. Timestamp is not necessarily correct. Issues in events No infrastructure (eg. at music festivals). Phone signal issues, phone charging issues. Most tweets from outside event. Conclusions Need to convince citizens that authorities are not spying on them. Need to convince authorities that citizens are not all criminals. Privacy and legality issues. Creating a company on this research would be unethical. Need to pass the right message. Full disclosure. Non-intrusive use of tweet content. What happens when authorities demand this technology for privacy-invading stuff. Have to be careful with what you publish. Always assume the bad guys have thought of what you thought of. Always be in a situation where you can destroy your data at short notice. Bit legal barrage behind them. Know what they are/aren't allowed, know what they do/don't have to do. Start leading a blameless life.
Things to investigate further! LibRDF - linkeddata-perl for Debian by Kjetil Kjernsmo. Rakebul Hasan, Fabien Geandon (? not sure about names, can't read my handwriting..) - Trustworthiness of inferences. Taldea - fostering spontaneous communities. Ghada Ben Nejma. NERD ontology for spotting entities. nerd.eurecom.fr See photo:
So I got behind with the blogging. As in, I didn't do any. I will rectify that over upcoming days! But for now, I will reflect on my Pre-Oz quests. 1\\\\. Find the resting place of my Uncle David. Achieved, debatabley. I found the Herb Garden, South Yarra, which was part of Melbourne's amazing Botanic Gardens (and conveniently pretty much across the road from where Jamie lived). However, it has never been legal to scatter ashes there, and there definitely aren't any headstones. It doesn't mean he wasn't scattered there though. So I took lots of pictures. That's the best I could do. It is beautiful. 2\\\\. Forge ties between Edinburgh and Melbourne Open Knowledge Foundations. Well, I went to #govHack and had an amazing time. Pete and I discovered we'd already been to one of Flanders' hacks in the UK, and another hack that had derived from it (Dev8D and DevXS). So we were well received. Also because we'd travelled 11,000 miles to be there. And I got to know some things about Australian data. Stay posted for the official blog. Check out some of the places my Mum and her family lived. I found a caravan park in Palm Cove where she lived 38 years ago, and the creek where she learned to swim! The change in the town from how she described it was immense, but walking the same beach she walked as a child was a really surreal experience. I also dangled my feet in Mossman Gorge in the Daintree rainforest before I even knew that she used to swim there. I saw a sign to Toowoomba near Brisbane, where she lived too. Maybe attempt to bump into relatives or family friends. Wasn't expecting to achieve this. But I saw my cousin in Perth! That was awesome. And it was very good of him to pick us up from the airport, give us a super fast tour of Perth at night and let us sleep on his floor for a few hours, before returning us to the airport for 5am. Thanks Luke! It almost made up for the ..ahem.. additional expenses incurred. See Ayres Rock. Check! It wasn't all that. But the road tripping was amazing. See the main cities on the east coast, like Brisbane, Sydney and Canberra. Check! But only just. Brisbane and Canberra need more visits. I wrung quite a lot out of Sydney, made new friends (one of whom was feathered), ate some really tasty food, and learned to love the Domestic Airport. Two freelance projects, due on 5th June and 1st July. Succeeded the first (with some hiccups) and failed at the second (pending..). Finish my PhD literature review... Haha. That was ambitious. It didn't get a look-in. I feel bad. There was no wifi though! Anywhere! Make a poster for the Semantic Web Summer School. I didn't do that whilst travelling, but it is done now. Meanwhile, whilst you wait for my full blog posts, here are our tweets, nicely collated: [View the story "JamieAmyPete Adventures #travel" on Storify]
For easy navigation of my gibbering. [First impressions of Madrid (6th and 7th, travel)](https://rhiaro.co.uk/llog/2013/07/madrid-first-impressions.html) Mon 8th: Research in theory and practice, and where on earth am I? Notes for keynote by Frank van Harmelen (questions we couldn't have asked 10 years ago) Notes for Introduction to Linked Data by Mathieu D'Aquin Notes from invited talk by Manfred Hauswirth (linked data streams) Notes from poster session Tue 9th: Collaborative ontology engineering and team formation Notes from Lynda Hardman (telling stories with media) Notes from Natasha Noy (ontologies and Protégé) Wed 10th: Practical semantics, and human nature. Notes from Harith Alani (Social Media Analytics with a pinch of semantics) Notes from Tommaso Di Noia (recommender systems; tools and techniques) Thu 11th: Social semantics and serendipity Notes from Fabio Ciravegna (situation awareness via social and physical sensing) Everything from Friday 12th July Notes from Peter Mika (Yahoo!; semantic search) Notes from Raphael Troncy (semantics at the multimedia fragment level) Notes about our mini-project (Evaluating Serendipity) Summer School for Semantic Wizards (video) A cruel joke, a great party and a late night. Final impressions of Madrid (14th, #travel)
Harith Alani talked about using semantics to solve problems around evaluating the success of social media use in business. The SIOC ontology is widely used to describe online community information. It's not as simple as measuring someone's engagement with a brand's online presence - people are 'likeaholics' on Facebook, so you have to look at someone's whole behaviour profile to judge whether their like means anything or not. It's no good just aggregating your data and spewing out numbers - you have to browse the data and try to understand where it came from. He mentioned how little work has been done in classifying community types. Most of the work that has been done seems to be with social networks internal to an organisation. A bottom-up approach to community analysis can handle emergent behaviours and cope with role changes over time. Looking at behaviour categories and roles can help an organisation to decide who to concentrate on supporting and how in order to sustain the community. The results they have seen so far suggest that a stable mix of the different types of behaviours are needed to increase activities in forums - but they don't know what causes what. They're reaching a point where they can use their behaviour analysis to guess what's going to happen to a community: how long it will last, how fast it will grow, how many replies a certain type of post is likely to get, etc. Next they want to be able to classify community types, and be able to look at activities within a community over a period of time and automatically discover what kind of community it is; it might be something different than what it was set up for. They created an alternative Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs to correspond with activities seen on forums, and found that most people are happy to stay at the lower levels of the hierarchy. For example, join a community, lurk for a bit, ask one question and leave. Not everyone wants or needs to be a power user. Papers are being written that find patterns in individual datasets for a particular community in a particular context. Harith and his team are getting tired of this; they want to generalise across communities. So they took seven datasets and looked at how the analysis features differed as well as comparing the results across community types, randomness (vs. topicality) of datasets, and compared similar experiments. Upcoming work includes the Reel Lives project, in which UoE is involved. They're taking media fragments - photos, videos, audio clips, text recorded as audio - and creating automated compilations to tell a story. Another is social methods to change energy consumption behaviour. LiSC in Lincoln did something in this area back in the day.. an app that posted that you were listening to an embarrassing song on your facebook feed if you left your lights on. Notes from Harith's talk are here. SSSW 2013 - Feeding Recommender Systems with Linked Open Data from Tommaso Di Noia From Tommaso Di Noia's talk, I learnt that recommender systems have a lot of maths behind them, especially for evaluating things, and reinforced something I already knew: I don't maths good enough to be taken seriously by most of the Informatics world. I think I understand the principles behind the maths, but when something is descried in just maths, I have no idea what it relates to. I'll work on this. Real world recommender systems use a variety of approaches, including collaborative (based on similar users' profiles); knowledge-based (domain knowledge, no user history); item-based (similarities between items); content- based (combination of item descriptions and profile of user interests). Linked Open Data is used to mitigate a lack of information about entities, and helps with recommending across multiple domains. You do have to filter the LD you use before feeding it to your recommender system though, to avoid noise. Notes here. Tommaso's talk was followed up by a hands-on session, where we got to poke about with some of the tools he mentioned, including FRED (transforms natural language to RDF/OWL); Tipalo (gets entity types from natural language text); and using DBpedia to feed a recommender system. Then we worked on our mini-projects for the afternoon. We made some progress towards breaking down the concept of serendipity and working out what properties we might need to represent as linked data, and how we could observer a user and work out if/when/how they were having serendipitous experiences without intruding too much. In the evening we took a coach to 'nearby' historical town Segovia. Apparently an extremely motion-sickness-inducing two and a half hour coach journey around twisty mountain paths is 'nearby'. Fortunately I was distracted from this horrible journey by a conversation with Lynda Hardman, which I wish I had recorded. Lynda challenged various aspects of my PhD until I could explain/justify them reasonably, including: Why digital creatives? (I'm used to that one now). What is the outcome? Why Semantic Web for this? She also recommended a number of resources, including theses of her recent former students to help me with a structure for my own, and advice on maintaining a healthy balance between thinking and doing. Plus she used to live in Edinburgh, more or less across the road from where I live now. Cool. Thanks Lynda! You haven't heard the last of me :) #travel Once we got to Segovia, we had a guided tour of the ancient Roman architecture, interesting building façades and local legends. It was a very good tour, but too hot to really focus. Then they took us to a restaurant for a local speciality. I was all set to write a whole individual blog post surveying the barbaric nature of human beings, but I didn't do it straight away and now the passion has faded slightly, so I'll leave it at a paragraph. Some people watched the local 'ceremony' out of morbid curiosity I imagine, but it was the fact that so many people took so much pleasure in the idea of violently hacking up bodies of three-week-old piglets that really bothered me. Fortunately the surging standing crowd allowed me (and only one other) to inconspicuously sit it out. The veggie option was tasty, but it was difficult to really enjoy the rest of the evening whilst wondering vaguely about the states of minds of most of the people I was sharing a table with.
#SSSW2013: Practical semantics and human nature
The 10th Summer School for Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web _ _Sunday Arriving by train into Cercedilla, north of Madrid, we immediately encountered other confused looking folk with poster tubes. So we shared taxis (EUR 10) from Cercedilla station to the summer school residence further north, in the forest. After getting keys for our pleasant, single, en-suite rooms, arrivals congregated in the shade by the building to introduce ourselves.. Again, and again, and again, as new people continuously arrived over the space of a few hours. A really broad mix of people are here in terms of nationalities and places and levels of study, but I still haven't quite got used to the fact that answering 'Semantic Web stuff' is not specific enough in this crowd, when someone asks you what your research is about. Nobody needs convincing that these technologies are useful! Later we received schedules, maps, ill-fitting t-shirts* and very helpful name badges, and headed for dinner at the bar down the road. As is traditional when I write about my experiences in new places, I will describe the food every day. It has become apparent, at this residence at least, that variety of ingredients is not ordinary, so in this respect meals are simple. Dinner that first night started with a salad (lettuce, olives, tomato, onion, shredded beetroot and a single slice of hard boiled egg; no dressing), followed by - for the majority - slices of meat (beef? Pork? I dunno..) and fries. Mine was a plate of mushy green vegetables with a little seasoning, that was pretty tasty. Dessert was a single pear, delivered with ceremony, but otherwise unadorned. Healthy, at least. Yet we were all (those I sat with at least) were left feeling a little unsatisfied. I shared a table with a French, Spanish, Italian and Irish guy. Conforming appropriately to stereotypes, and setting up reputations for the rest of the week, the French and the Italian shared the bottle of wine on the table; the rest of us went without. I returned to bed after a couple of hours of socialising and enjoying the cool air in and around the bar. For next year, they could ask for t-shirt sizes when they ask for dietary preferences? Monday The day started early, and with no hot water or wifi for anyone. Breakfast was combinations of sweet pastries, coffee, tea, juice and bread. Punctuated variously by coffee breaks, the learning began in earnest. During the introduction by Mathieu D'Aquin, I found out that I am one of 53 students selected out of 96 applicants to attend this year's Summer School of the Semantic Web! I had no idea it was that selective, or that there had been that much competition. The first keynote was by Frank van Harmelen, about all the Semantic Web questions we couldn't ask ten years ago. Slides: Semantic Web questions we couldn't ask 10 years ago from Frank Van Harmelen Frank started by saying that the early Semantic Web vision has morphed into the more manageable vision of a Web of Data, or a Giant Global Graph, and outlined the principles of the Semantic Web as they appear to stand at present: 1\\\\. Give everything a name (entities). 2\\\\. Relations form graph between things. 3\\\\. Names are addresses on the Web (so we inherit properties of Web like AAA). 4\\\\. Add semantics. Frank pointed out the advantages of the fact the Linked Data crowd, grown naturally and not designed, is now so big we don't know how many triples it contains, nor how fast it is growing. Companies and organisations (like Google, NXP, BBC, DataGov) are using Semantic Web technologies to achieve their own ends, for a variety of different use cases, without caring much about the Semantic Web, and this is contributing to the growth. This growth has given rise to a number of research areas that were impossible to realisitically ask questions about ten years ago, including self- organisation, distribution of data, provenance, dynamics and change, errors and noise (how to deal with disagreements). Frank asserted that rules and structures, algorithms and patterns in data, exist whether we are looking at them or not. He used the analogy that OWL is our microscope, and it may be the tool that distorts our vision of the information universe rather than properties of what we are looking at (for example, structures in data presenting themselves well in some domains but not others). He went on to promote the roll of the Informatician to be to test theories, hypothesis and falsify, as scientists rather than engineers. To discover, rather than build. I struggle with this view of the world, and feel instinctively that theory and practice are intrinsically linked; one can't exist without the other, not just in the grand scheme of things, but in day to day work and research. This is one of the main points of contention with my own PhD, and I've no doubt there will be many more blog posts about this issue in the near future as I reconcile my need to create something immediately useful with the necessity of producing a contribution to knowledge at large. See my raw notes here. We had an Introduction to Linked Data by Mathieu D'Aquin (raw notes here), followed by a workshop. We wrote SPARQL queries to populate a pre- written web page with information about Open University courses, sub-courses and locations thereof. Lunch, similar to the previous night's dinner, was a starter salad, an entire half chicken (or something) plus fries for the carnivores and the most unappealing risotto of my life for (not that I'm ungrateful, but I have never been unable to finish a meal due to boredom before). I went for a walk with some others to grab some fresh air before the afternoon's work, and missed out on watermelon. Manfred Hauswirth presented some really exciting stuff about annotating and using streams of data. Particularly challenging is how to integrate this with static data and make inferences over the lot. Streams include sensor data, as well as ever-flowing social media streams for example; anything that changes over time. They've built some systems to process this kind of data, and one of them is available as middleware. My raw notes are here. In the afternoon we had a poster session, where all participants pinned up posters about their work, and discussed at length with anyone who was interested. Here's evidence that I participated. And here's Paolo's: I wrote a few notes about things from other peoples' posters that I need to look up. The main feedback I received was about making sure I focus, narrow down my topic, and concentrate on some evaluatable deliverables that are PhD-worthy. Questions like (paraphrasing) "why should we care about digital creatives?" threw me, because I thought the obvious answer - that they are people too, Web users, technology users, contributors to culture and an ecosystem of digital content and data - was apparently not enough from an academic standpoint. I was simultaneously told to focus more, and to explain why the problem I'm trying to solve is applicable to all domains, not just digital creatives. But some of the problems I'm looking at have been (or are being) solved in other domains (like e-health, biological research, education) and the reason what I'm doing is interesting is because none of these solutions quite work for digital creatives, and I want to find solutions that do, and try to figure out why. I'm still stuck in some sort of struggle between theory and practice; thinking and doing. And the long-standing problem of how to decide which doing actually worked. I've started scribbling notes about the narrowing down problem. I'll need to have this figured out before my first year review in August anyway, so stay tuned for another post all about it. Then I sneaked off for a nap. Dinner at the bar again; the usual salad, plus some eggy fish thing for most. I got a plate of artichoke. Artichoke is great, I love it, and I'm all for simple meals. But I remain unconvinced that a plate of only artichoke constitutes an acceptable level of effort on the part of caterers. And the sheer quantity made it start to taste a bit funny after a while. But not to worry; we rounded off with a solitary peach apiece. Further socialising, and appreciation of the night sky, before returning to bed write blog posts. I'm super excited and inspired by the talks, work I've heard about so far, and the atomsphere of the place. I'm excited to learn a helluva lot, and remind myself that I'm not facing impossible problems, and am not facing many problems alone. I remember that I am instinctively passionate about the Web and the possibilities it holds (and indeed has already realised) for the empowerment of individuals. I remember how lucky I am to be able to sustain myself through studying something I love so much, and to have the potential to make a change, and through my work maybe even facilitate others to be able to make a living doing what they love, as well.
#SSSW2013: Research in theory and practice, and where on earth am I?
We started work on the serendipity project before breakfast today, although I didn't make it down as early as some of my teammates. To start the day, Fabio Ciravenga talked about some really exciting practical applications of monitoring and analysing social media streams. It's particularly interesting during emergencies, or large events where problems might occur. The people on the ground make the perfect sensors if you can work out the differences between people who are saying something useful and who aren't; people who are really there, and people who are speculating or asking about the situation. A main problem has been that people tweet crap. They were trying to monitor a house fire, but so many people were tweeting lyrics from Adele's various singles at the time, which all apparently contain references to fire, it was almost impossible. They also put (or tapped into existing) sensors in peoples' cars to monitor driving patterns with the aim of more fairly charging for car insurance. I told my Mum about this the other day, and she was pretty alarmed by the idea. Which made me wonder how they'll get mass adoption, if it's going to go anywhere. Fabio did have some interesting things to say about using all this data ethically though, and never working for someone who is going to take that away from you. But in case the 'bad guys' do find out about all this data you have about people, keep a magnet handy. My notes are here. This was followed by a hands-on session where we got to mess with a mini version of the twitter topic monitoring system that Fabio's team use at large events, to try to answer questions about the Tour de France only by manipulating the incoming social media streams and following only links which came through that. Spanish omelette sandwiches were an amazing outdoor leisurely lunch. We headed to the pool down the road and chilled out there for a couple of hours. Us tough British folk found the water pleasantly tepid, whilst all those wimpy Europeans and Latin Americans shivered on the grass. They'd made such a fuss in advance about how cold the pool was going to be. We regrouped that afternoon to work on Project Cusack, creating a slide deck of pictures from Serendipity. I don't like slides with too much to read on, so I enforced this. The imagery from the movie will be lost on most people, but we have at least managed to choose pictures of John Cusack with appropriate expressions for each part of the presentation. We worked outside in the forest, because Oscar's 3G was faster than the residence wifi. We also brainstormed for the required short film, which we only just discovered doesn't have to be about our project. We returned to the residence to find everyone eating ham and cheese, and attempted to get some shots for our film, but other people were unwilling to participate. That evening we ate tasty vegetable soup, weird (in a bad way) pasta in a creamy onion sauce, and chocolatey ice cream cake. The tutors spontaneously organised a game where students had to arrange the tutors by age, which was funny. Someone suggested the tutors ought to play it with the students. Obviously there were too many students, but they elected to find the youngest student, and that turned out to be me.
#SSSW2013: Social semantics and serendipity
We were introduced to the various mini-projects on Tuesday morning, and encouraged to form teams with people who weren't from the same university. I quickly shortlisted the five that sounded most interesting to me, but was disappointed that there weren't any about multimedia. Because how to evaluate a very subjective system is a potential problem for me, the project proposed by Valentina Presutti was my first choice: "Serendipity can be defined as the combination of relevance and unexpectedness: an information is considered serendipitous if it is at the same time very relevant and unexpected for a given user and in the context of a given task. In other words, a user would learn new relevant knowledge. To evaluate the performance of a tool (e.g., an exploratory search tool, a recommending system) in terms of its ability to provide users with serendipitous knowledge is a hard task because both relevance and unexpectedness are highly subjective. This miniproject focuses on two main research questions: what is the correct way of designing a user-study for evaluating an exploratory search tool performance in terms of serendipity? Is it possible to build a reusable set of resources (a benchmark) for evaluating ability to produce serendipity, allowing easier evaluation experiments and comparison among different tools?" Nobody else seemed to be interested though, so I resigned myself to not being able to do it... until I explained the project and why it was interesting, to the best of my ability, to Andy, Oscar and Josef, and they were sold enough to mark it as our first choice. Thus Team Anaconda Disappointed (a name of significant and mysterious origins) was born, and Project Cusack (because of the movie Serendipity, which nobody got) was underway. Our first lecture today was from Lynda Hardman, about telling stories with multimedia objects. It was super relevant to what I'm doing, to the point where I'm surprised I hadn't come across her work already. My notes are here. Lynda has done, for example, work with annotation of personal media objects like holiday photos in order to combine them into a media presentation. She has considered similar things to me, in particular noting that there are many many aspects of data about multimedia - I had assembled my take on this into a Venn diagram for my poster.. One I hadn't considered is annotating an explict message of a piece of media, intended by the creator. This isn't always relevant - sometimes the consumer's interpretation of the media is more important - and this in itself might be an interesting annotation problem. Competing perspectives - something an ontology should be able to represent. I need to check out COMM - Core Ontology for Multimedia. She has an overview of the canonical processes they have consolidated the process of producing digital content into, and how annotation can be formed around these. Lynda also told us about Vox Populi and and LinkedTV; practical applications of annotating multimedia. I made lots and lots of notes. Natasha Hoy gave us some insights from the biomedical world with regards to ontology development, particularly in relation to the International Classification of Diseases which, when last revised in the 80s, consisted of a lot of paper and a whoever-shouts-the-loudest algorithm for inclusion of terms. But the next version, currently under creation, is being developed with a version of Web Protege, customised to be friendly for those who don't know or care about ontologies, and is a truly collaborative process (for those allowed to take part) with accountability for all changes. It's open too though, so even those without modification rights can view and comment on the developments. My notes are here. Lunch was for the first time outside, under the shadows of the forest, and for me was a tray of tomatoey vegetables that were delicious but few. A striking contrast to Monday's lunch. Everyone else had some meat-potato combination, preceded by a salad with tuna, and followed by a peach. The hands-on session followed on from Natasha's talk. We teamed up (temporarily Anaconda Hopeful) and played with Web Protégé. There were two magazines and two newspapers, each with four departments. Anaconda Hopeful were randomly designated the Advertising Department of Iberia Travel (a food and travel magazine). We got stuck in, on paper first to identify some classes and relations that were relevant to us, and then with Web Protégé, along with the other departments of Iberia Travel. We didn't come into any conflicts, but ended up creating a few classes that we needed, but should really have been the remit of another department (I guess we just got there first). Then it was announced that Iberia Travel had bought the other magazine (and one of the newspapers had bought the other), and we had to work together to merge ontologies with the other department. It became apparent that the other magazine had never had an Advertising Department (no wonder they went under!) so we had no-one to attempt to merge ontologies with. We attempted to sell our expertise to the Advertising Departments of the newspapers, but there were already too many people involved in the heated debate that came out of the ontology merging there, so we couldn't really get involved. Later we got cracking with our mini-projects. Valentina showed us aemoo, and the experiments her team had come up with to try to evaluate it. We sat down by ourselves to brainstorm, describing a lot of concepts for ourselves, breaking down the notion of serendipity, figuring out what might be wrong with existing experiments to 'measure' serendipity, and collating literature in the area. (Turns out there is a lot, and it's a very interdisciplinary issue; lots to read about from social sciences, anthropology etc, as well as philosophy of science. In computing, it seems to be primarily discussed within the realms of recommender systems and exploratory search). Serendipity seems to be mainly described as a combination of unexpectedness and relevance. Problems include the sheer subjectivity of it. Some people are going to get excited by all facts they find out, whether they're useful or not. Some people are going to have hidden, inexplicit or subconscious goals that affect how 'relevant' something is to them. People describe their different areas of expertise in different ways; some are more humble than others and would not call themselves an expert in a topic, for example. So whether or not an event can be considered a serendipitous one is a complex question, which must take into account the person's background, goals and existing knowledge, the task they are trying to achieve (or lack thereof, as serendipity is particularly important - in my opinion - in undirected, loosely-motivated activities), the way they are able or encouraged to interact with a system, what they are doing before and after... all these things make up a context for someone's activities, and none of them seem to be particularly measurable. Dinner was a vegetable and potato (yay!) starter, followed by spaghetti in tomato sauce (fish for everyone else, although Andy got a custom omelette, lah-de-dah). Also an apple. We learnt the hard way not to sit at a table directly underneath a light, as the bugs just raiiiin down. After dinner we crowded around Enrico who had offered to provide advice about PhD-ing. From this session, I have a signed diagram of the life of a PhD, because he borrowed my notebook to make it. I tuned in and out of the discussion, and noticed some irregularities between my PhD and what seemed to be 'normal'. For instance, most people didn't seem to have as much control over their topic, or what they were doing at any given moment in their first year. I am really, really enjoying my freedom, but in order to justify that I deserve it I need to sort out my lack of direction and focus. I need to believe in what I'm doing - not be told by someone else - which is one of the main reasons I am doing this particular PhD. Perhaps I need to ask for more guidance to more quickly reach the necessary conclusions for myself. (And, of course, perhaps I also need to stop taking big chunks of time out periodically for different reasons; that might speed up the process as well). Later, the overriding sentiment was that the job of a PhD student was to answer a question, to produce a theory. Not to create a system or solve a large problem; certainly not to worry about practical, real-world applications of theories. Well, I've already explained that this is something I can't accept, and I still am not convinced that that is going to impact on my ability to do a PhD. Theories develop during practice. Coding and designing, like writing, are part of my thought processes, and I reach realisations or find new questions to ask through hacking and playing and making. And why would I be hacking and playing and making, if not to try to produce something of real-world value? If my motivation in making a system is explicitly to come up with new theories, then my approach and outcomes and realisations will be entirely different. In trying to make something that works for real people, not researchers in a restricted domain or specific context; a clean and sterile laboratory, I figure out different things, that matter. There was another discussion that I came into a bit late, but it sounded like a very harsh discussion about problems with research in industry (rather than academia) that seemed to be very overstated compared to what I have read and experienced myself. By the end of the day, it felt like I'd been at Summer School for weeks, and had known everyone forever.
#SSSW2013: Collaborative ontology engineering and team formation
Returned to Edinburgh on Wednesday. Suffering from post-travel depression. That's a thing, I looked it up. It's a thing nobody has any sympathy for. Life is hard. Started and finished my poster for the Semantic Web Summer School. Went to Spain for aforementioned summer school. Spain is hot. Let this mental week of learning begin!
8th - 14th July Semantic Web Summer School, much heat, much fun, much learning... Here's an index of my posts. 15th - 21st July Friends visited. Progress included writing notes to myself to figure out just what my PhD outcomes really are, and why. Came up with: 1\\\\. Recommending how to usefully describe diverse amateur creative digital content (ACDC) using an ontology. a) What are the parts of ACDC that need to be represented? Identify and categorise properties. How do these differentiate it from other similar content? b) What existing ontologies can be used to do this, and how do they need to be extended? 2\\\\. Building an initial set of linked data about ACDC, and providing means for its growth and use. a) Manual annotation of ACDC, and refinement (to test ontology). b) Tools for automatic annotation of the parts of ACDC that it is possible to automatically annotate. c) Tools for manual annotation by the community of content creators and consumers for the parts of ACDC that cannot be automatically annotated. d) Tools to expose the linked data for use by third-party applications. 3\\\\. Create and test an example service which uses the linked data to benefit content creators and/or consumers. eg. Unobtrusive recommendations for collaborative partners (most likely); content recommendation; content consumption analysis (like tracking viral content); community building / knowledge sharing in this domain; ... . 22nd - 28th July Brainstormed with Ewan about stage 3 (above), and came up with the idea of an interface that allows content creators to allocate varying degrees of credit for roles played by different people when collaborating on a project. This would serve to both gather collaborative bibliographic data, learn things about how different segments of the community allocate credit, and provide a potentially useful tool for content creators. With the future value that, if we can learn enough to estimate role inputs from different people, it could be used for things like automatic revenue sharing. Then spent the rest of the week in London, frolicking amongst the YouTubers (including attending a meeting at Google about secret YouTube-y stuff), and annotated some ACDC. Write-up coming soon.
Week(s) in review: #SSSW2013, figuring stuff out and annotating YouTube
# Co-organiser and mentor, Edinburgh Centre, Young Rewired State Helped to organise the local centre, recruited participants in the run up, and helped with mentoring during the week. Also helped to supervise a coachload of kids for the trip to the Festival of Code.
Helped to organise the local centre, recruited participants in the run up, and helped with mentoring during the week. Also helped to supervise a coachload of kids for the trip to the Festival of Code.
Co-organiser and mentor, Edinburgh Centre, Young Rewired State
I sometimes get asked what rhiaro means. Rhia Ro was the name I chose (when I was around 9 or 10 years old I think) and I decided any budding author worth their salt needed a penname (I always wanted to be a writer of fiction; I still do). I scribbled Rhia Ro at the bottom of all my short stories for years, and when I started to converge on a consistent online identity, that's what I went with (before then, you might've known me as gerbilsbhs, theboynextdoor, TheRingleader, mysticalmoonflower or kirilya). Buying rhiaro.co.uk at the end of 2008 was a real formative moment for Rhia and myself. It often gets autocorrected to rhino. Most people instinctively pronounce it rih-haro ree-haro or ree-aro, and that's okay, but really it's reah-ro.
I had two meetings with Dave Robertson, my second supervisor, about what on earth I'm doing, and here is a vague summary of my thoughts afterwards. I came to the realisation between meetings that I need to scrap the term Amateur Creative Digital Content, because amateur doesn't really apply by its true definition and creative is too subjective anyway. Focus on content creators, not content (so previous point doesn't matter so much anyway; maybe just need to look at existing ways people are describing types of users to make it clear who I'm concentrating on). In terms of emphasis of the thesis, I need to make a choice between taking a cognitive science/sociology perspective and a tecchie/engineering perspective (I choose tech because that's where I'm most comfortable, but the sociology side of things is still important). (Therefore) I need to think concretely now about technology architecture. Not to get too hung up on the Semantic Web; the technologies are a vehicle for testing theories, rather than an end in itself (though I still think facilitating a big linked data set of this sort of data is useful in the long run for research and practical applications, I didn't labour that point). Social machines, and how Dave's process modelling language fits in, which I think I get in theory but not practice (I'd probably have to look at a working application and code to understand really). Some of the principles may be useful further down the line, but probably not the language itself or anything. Technology-wise, I'm not thinking about anything novel or new, but more new ways for how various Web and SW technologies are combined and applied to this domain. (?) So maybe the novelty is in marking up various things about content creators and using this to infer information about the processes they're involved in (or want to be involved in) in order to then facilitate these processes, without (necessarily) ever explicitly representing these processes (because from the content creators' perspective, they're certainly not thinking in terms of formal representations of processes, and in many cases won't know what they're trying to make until it's done, for example). How to represent the inferences made might be novel and exciting, but I don't know. Hmm, I still don't think I've figured out how to evaluate .. anything. Beyond comparing activities of users with magical-new-system vs without magical-new- system. And maybe, going back to the this-big-dataset-is-useful idea, by finding questions we can now ask about these kinds of communities that we couldn't before because they were so fragmented.
Vague thoughts about content creators and the Semantic Web
29th July - 4th August Discussed my ideas and work so far with Dave Robertson, my second supervisor, in two meetings this week. Here's a summary of some of my thoughts. 5th - 11th August I worked on my thesis proposal. But it was also Young Rewired State week! **12th - 18th August **Finally (belatedly) handed in my thesis proposal. (My review is scheduled for the 22nd August).
Young Rewired State is a week-long hack event for under 19s. There are centres all over the UK, and the week finishes with a giant sleepover in the Custard Factory in Birmingham, presentations and prizes. I was helping out with running the Edinburgh centre this year, between the 5th and 11th of August. We had 15 young people taking part, and a few parents popping in and out as well. Not to mention several fantastic mentors. Every day we gathered in one of the University of Edinburgh Informatics computer labs. On the first day we did some brainstorming, introduced the young people to Open Data, and they sorted themselves into teams. We had a diverse range of projects by the end of the week. The Weatherproof app was written in Scala with a Web frontend, and as well as telling you the weather forecast, gives you practical advice on what to wear and what to take with you. _Stuff Index _was a Python Web app that lets people photograph and upload stuff they've left out on the street that they want to get rid of, so anyone browsing the site can opt to take it away if they fancy it. Helping to keep stuff out of landfill, and without the dreaded social interactions that come with Freegle. Tag is a game by a one-man team, with a Python game server and a JavaScript front end that lets you chase your friends around the real world, and automatically tags them when you're in range. _PokeGame _is a real-world Pokemon simulator that lets you roam IRL and capture virtual Pokemon. Great stuff! On Friday we crammed into a coach along with the participants from Aberdeen, Dundee and Glasgow, and set off on a seven hour road trip to Birmingham for the finale. The Edinburgh teams didn't win anything, but the presentations were fantastic and everyone had an amazing time. The young people made new friends, learnt tons of new stuff, and hopefully remain enthused about coding. Next year we're going to do more to walk through the creation process of some example apps to get them started off, and maybe do a better job of introducing Open Data and the possibilities it holds. We're also thinking about starting a regular under 19s code club in Edinburgh weekly or bi-weekly - so stay tuned for more info about that. (And if you want to help or participate, get in touch!)
Young Rewired State in Edinburgh #yrs2013
A good resource for those working on with their literature review. I once asked of why we need to write dissertation literature review that helps me to realize its importance.
I have a thing where I can't not finish reading something. There's a very short list of books I never finished, and they all date from when I was about 8 to 13, and are because I was to young to follow them or too young to bear them, and just haven't got around to picking them up again. They haunt my subconscious. These days I feel I have to get at least half way to have given it enough of a chance, and once I'm past half way I feel I might as well finish it. By the time I had wrenched my way through the first half of Angel of Death, I had started to come round to it. By the end I guess I'd enjoyed it in some ways. What I struggled with through the first half was the erratic jumping between persons and, worst of all, tenses. You experience one character's perspective in first person present tense (something I dislike anyway), plus second person directed at another character. And sometimes past tense. Other perspectives were usually third person past tense. I guess I got used to it, but if someone had told me before I started that it was written in this way, I probably wouldn't have picked it up. I'm starting to figure out that I prefer character-driven narratives. This is the pattern with things I've enjoyed lately, anyway. The premise of Angel of Death was kinda interesting. But the characters were utterly flat and often behaved unbelievably or in a very contrived manner, given how they'd been set up. It was all tell and no show. THIS IS A BAD EVENT IN HER TROUBLED PAST, OH BOY, NOW YOU KNOW HER MOTIVATIONS. Totally wasn't enough. The twists and turns throughout are, I suppose, well done. The reader is convinced of the state of the world and, just as you're absolutely certain that that's the way it is, you're being convinced of the opposite. This happens not quite enough to feel like an indecisive cop-out, but isn't far off. There's gory horror, but it feels appropriate and not over-done. Kudos. If there were deeper levels of meaning or metaphor intended, which I suspect they might have been, I missed them. Conclusion: meh, don't bother. But if you've got nothing else to read, you could do worse. If you want my copy you can have it, get in touch.
# Co-founder and organiser, Prewired ## Programming club for under 19s Now weekly. Sometimes more. See [prewired.org](http://www.prewired.org).
Programming club for under 19s Now weekly. Sometimes more. See prewired.org.
# Volunteer Moderator ## Edinburgh Freegle [Freegle](http://ilovefreegle.org) is a national network for promoting reuse and reducing waste by enabling people to give away stuff they don't need anymore, and other people to pick second-hand things for free, in their local area. I'm a sub-par mailing list moderator, and I feel bad about being so inattentive.
Edinburgh Freegle Freegle is a national network for promoting reuse and reducing waste by enabling people to give away stuff they don't need anymore, and other people to pick second-hand things for free, in their local area. I'm a sub-par mailing list moderator, and I feel bad about being so inattentive.
I magicked Autobiography to my Kindle, but I haven't started reading it yet because I'm worried I'll cry from beginning to end due to the sheer beauty of the prose. I'm looking forward to a spectacularly written yarn, designed explicitly to incite scandal and speculation. I'll read it as fiction and fantasy, inspired by, but not based upon, real events. I might relate too much, or regress back to my teenage years. I think I'd enjoy/despise it best shut away from the world until it's over; always the case with the first listening of a new album. I don't know when I'll have time or understanding of peers for that. I'll try to schedule a few days. Maybe I'll run away to Kerrara for a weekend on my own.
It's easy to see why not many people do. I say not many, because I'm sure there are people using the various RDF Drupal or Wordpress plugin. But I don't really know if they count, because that's really just people annotating their content for SEO purposes, and maybe a bit of interlinking with DBPedia to let visitors find out a bit more about topics of interest. But what I'm really talking about is the whole blog running from a triplestore, with a publicly accessible SPARQL endpoint. All the publicly accessible SPARQL endpoints I can find are big 'useful' datasets that people might want to mash up with other things. Archives of data. Not live or frequently updated stuff. Certainly not the contents and metadata of a personal blog. So what's the point? There's not a lot else 'on' the Semantic Web to tap into. There's no hidden Semantic Blogosphere that would yield great worth if I could only tap into it. There are no smart agents traversing the Semantic Web and aggregating interesting blog content for intelligent readers (are there?). And there never will be, if nobody publishes their content this way. So I suppose I'd better get on with it. My point is, it's easy to see why nobody does.
I think I'll use Chris Gutteridge's Graphite layer on top of ARC2. I've been putting off thinking about yet more libraries, but I think I'll end up implementing bits of Graphite in an effort to make ARC2 more friendly anyway, and I'm sure he's done a better job than I ever could.
Several weeks of debating and planning following Young Rewired State finally came to fruition on the 16th of October, with our first Prewired event. Thirty eight kids young people arrived between 9:30 and 10 on that Wednesday morning (it was half term week in Scotland, so we weren't pulling them out of school), grabbed some kindly donated Google swag, made name badges with stickers and felt-tipped pens, and sat down for two and a half hours of lightly guided learning. They were between the ages of three and eighteen, although the three to six year olds were more there to be tagging along with older siblings or University staff. It's obviously impossible to divide attendees up by age and decide what to work with them on, as older definitely does not mean more experienced. We had decided on no lower bound for the age limit, and no lower bound for experience either, figuring that the only real requirement is enthusiasm about programming. There was a huge mix of interests and abilities, and we let them decide for themselves which topics would be worth listening to. We also had about fifteen students, University staff or industry professionals along as mentors. After a few minutes of welcomes, where most of the room were willing to introduce themselves and tell us what they wanted to learn ("Python", "Scratch" and "more about programming in general" were popular ones) we kicked off with three five minute introductions: to HTML and CSS (beginner), to HTML5 Geolocation (intermediate) and to Python's Natural Language Toolkit (advanced). They then had the chance to spend 40 minutes in a hands-on session for whichever of these they chose. The groups were very evenly spread, and despite a few hiccups with Python installations on Windows and Chrome not playing nice with geolocation (worked through thanks largely to the mentors) most people got some code up and running and appropriately hacked about with by the end. We took a break for juice, crisps, chocolate and fruit, plus a bit of hardware tinkering. We'd borrowed a Nodecopter, but hadn't managed to get it charged in time so it wasn't in the air, but there were still plenty of people interested in looking at the code to control it. We also had a demo of a robot arm, which could be controlled by an Android app connected to a Python server, which had been written over the summer by one of our mentors. Next up were three more lightning talks: introduction to Scratch (beginner), doing cool things with Redstone Circuits in Minecraft (intermediate) and introduction to PyGame (intermediate-advanced). The following hands-on session for Scratch was under-attended, possibly ousted by the allure of Minecraft, but the PyGame session had over a third of the group and made some great progress, which was awesome. We finished a little late, but still managed to have time for a quick demo of a football playing robot from the nearby robotics lab, and a few attendees who took their time dragging themselves away from their screens. I'm told that overall it was a success. I was concerned because I was generally called upon when something was going wrong, so my perspectively was weighted towards the negative. But it wasn't too chaotic, none of the kids attendees played up, and as far as we could tell they were doing something in some way productive at all times. A lot of them had had little to no programming experience before that morning, and I really hope they were able to take away something positive and, most importantly, feel encouraged to try things out by themselves at home. Plenty, too, had enough experience that they were calling out to correct the speakers, and helping their peers to get things working. It's a huge challenge to find enough activities to engage so many different levels of experience and interest, and I don't think we did a bad job. Our next Prewired event will be on the 30th of October, and we're running them bi-weekly on Wednesday evenings from now on. They will be henceforth less structured. Our primary aim is to help young people to realise that with programming (and related areas) they can create anything, express themselves, and change the world. We don't wish to enforce a curriculum, but encourage them to explore areas they are interested in, learn how to teach themselves and figure out how to make what they want, and most of all to persuade them not to be afraid to experiment - to hack - and to just keep trying if it doesn't work first time. To get them excited before they become jaded and before this society's stereotypes have a chance to impact on them. You can find out more about Prewired at prewired.org, and join the mailing list there too. Photos and feedback Here are some of the photos from the day: If you took some that you'd like us to add, then please send them to hello@prewired.org! Similarly, send any feedback you have about the event to us that way, as well. Resources I'll update this post (as well as the website) with resources from the speakers and mentors as I get hold of them. Beginning HTML and CSS: A handy tool for demo-ing your code directly in the browser Code and cheatsheet from slides HTML5 Geolocation: Code examples All you could need to know The Google Maps API Building a chatbot with Python's Natural Language Toolkit: Installing NLTK How to Intro to Scratch: Make Scratch programs here Video tutorials Minecraft Redstone Circuits: Some tutorials Intro to PyGame: Coming soon...
Right-ho, it parses whatever arbitrary metadata I put in the comments of the markdown files providing they start with "label:" and end with a newline (" "). And lumps it into displayable html along with the post it belongs to, mostly for easier testing. The next step is to engage some ontologies and turn the metadata and posts into a graph. It's ARC2 time! Update: Actually the metadata it accepts is not all that arbitrary. Will remedy. Update 2: Fixed that.
T'was the night before Nano. A world swims in my head. I'm way scared of planning. I'm alone in my bed. Don't know if I'll sleep. Oh, what have I done? Maybe I'll dream all fifty thousand tonight. Don't panic; it'll be fun! I'm not aiming to 'win' though. Just aiming to write. Any words better than no words. I'm sure my PhD will be alright.
Nanowrimo: "Why do I do this to myself?"
Thinking about the options for hosting the Linked Data for Slog'd implementations, and also thinking about hosting personal and shared Linked Data in general, and Linked Data authored by an Agent who isn't the subject, because this is likely to be appropriate in a lot if cases. For Slog'd it's a bit easier, because people setting up a Slog'd implementation would have a bit of knowledge / interest in the Semantic Web and data ownership, in theory. Such people will probably have already a unique URI (like a WebID) or the ability to set one up. The data is also most likely to be authored by the subject. I'm thinking about it in broader terms because (PhD-related) I want content creators (who don't know or care about the Semantic Web) to publish Linked Data about their involvement in the creation of different digital media and online creative works. Where does this data live, to give them absolute and definitive control over it? If they can author data about anyone and anything (which of course, they can) how do we verify what they say when there are no conflicts, or deal with conflicts that arise? Is content attribution data stored in a giant graph that anyone can update? How do we handle IDs? Is there a central service for generating URIs for people who can't use their own domains (like the MyProfile demo)? How do we link - or not - multiple identities of the same person, according to what they want other people to know? Things found during this braindump: Socially Aware Cloud Storage by Tim Berners-Lee (2011) WebDAV WebID MyProfile: unified user profile service which you sign into with WebID and stores data about you with FOAF. There's a hosted demo, but it's intended for people to host their own instance I think. Code on Github RWW.IO: a personal Linked Data store; looks like RemoteStorage but for LD. Code on Github Read/Write Linked Data by Tim Berners-Lee (2013) Not particularly helpful list of things that support editing Linked Data on the Web Identity Interoperability: need to read this properly.
I'm using Michel Fortin's PHP Markdown to grab each md file in the posts directory and convert the contents to HTML. I'll add some custom stuff to parse labels and categories that I plan to use to organise my content. I also need to think about templating, and when the to-triples part is going to happen. Updates (16:48) PHP Markdown is already able to work with Smarty, but the Smarty docs are awful and the site hurts my brain. The site and docs for Twig seem much nicer, and it claims to be more modern and faster than Smarty, so that's leading the templating engine race at the moment. Do I need to use a templating engine at all? Isn't this kind of what I'm building..?
Didn't have much success talking to the Dydra SPARQL endpoint yesterday. I was briefly worried as there are no docs describing how to write back to the SPARQL endpoint, so I thought that was write-off at once, but then I found a blog post from 2011 about how that has been introduced. Just not documented yet apparently. But to start with, I imported some test triples using the Web interface, into dydra.com/rhiaro/about-me and tried to read them back. With ARC2, along the lines of: include_once("ARC2/ARC2.php"); $config = array( 'remote_store_endpoint' => 'http://dydra.com/rhiaro/about-me/sparql' ); $store = ARC2::getRemoteStore($config); $query = 'select * where {?s ?p ?o} limit 20'; $rows = $store->query($query, 'rows'); But all I got back was an empty array. I tried with with the DBPedia endpoint, which fell over a couple of times, but I got results... except... they were different from the results I got when I queried the endpoint directly through their interface. They seemed sort of metadata-y, rather than actual triples from the store. But it's hard to tell. So I had a go with Python's RDFLib to try to figure out who had the problem. import rdflib rdflib.plugin.register('sparql', rdflib.query.Processor, 'rdfextras.sparql.processor', 'Processor') rdflib.plugin.register('sparql', rdflib.query.Result, 'rdfextras.sparql.query', 'SPARQLQueryResult') g = rdflib.Graph() query = """ SELECT * FROM <http://dydra.com/rhiaro/about-me/sparql> WHERE { ?s ?p ?o . }Limit 10 """ for row in g.query(query): print row And with that I got some triples... but not from the triplestore. It parsed, I presume, whatever semantic markup it could find in the page itself, the page you see when you visit dydra.com/rhiaro/about-me/sparql. Eg. (rdflib.term.URIRef(u'https://s3.amazonaws.com/public.dydra.com/stylesheets/style.css?1337867890'), rdflib.term.URIRef(u'http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#stylesheet'), rdflib.term.URIRef(u'http://dydra.com/rhiaro/about-me/sparql')) Do I have to send an accept header? Surely RDFLib is supposed to take care of that for me... Whatever. If that's how you're going to play it, I'll just make the request with CURL directly. (I used Python's Requests because the Web says it's nicer than urllib2): import requests import rdflib q = "select * where {?s ?p ?o}" url = "http://dydra.com/rhiaro/about-me/sparql" p = {'query': q} h = {'Accept': 'application/json'} r = requests.get(url, params=p, headers=h) print r.text Boom! Triples! Better yet... the ones in the triplestore! By default (with no Accept header set) they come through as RDF/XML, and it won't give me Turtle, so JSON seems to be the nicest looking option. That doesn't really matter though, as nobody really needs to look at it. I guess I'll try CURL with PHP for Slog'd, and just parse it with ARC2. It seems a shame that ARC2's remote endpoint querying didn't Just Work with Dydra, but I don't have the time or energy to try to figure out why right now. Then I need to figure out if I can write to it or not. If I can't... In the name of progressing, I'll have to ditch it and use ARC2's built in MySQL-based triplestore. Update: Parsing the results with RDFLib Because I want to understand exactly what Dyrda is giving back to me, I wanted to quickly parse the results and use them like I should be able to use a graph. The XML that Dydra is returning is not straightforward RDF/XML that RDFLib can just understand. It's a 'SPARQL Result. It looks like this: <sparql xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/sparql-results#'> <variable name='s'/> <variable name='p'/> <variable name='o'/> <results> <result> <binding name='s'> <uri>https://rhiaro.co.uk/about#me</uri> </binding> <binding name='p'> <uri>http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/homepage</uri> </binding> <binding name='o'> <uri>https://rhiaro.co.uk</uri> </binding> </result> ...etc So later I either have to work out how to make RDFLib understand this, or make RDFLib understand the JSON alternative. I really don't want to have to write a custom parser to deal with it. Update: Solved Turns out it's as simple as using CONSTRUCT instead of SELECT in the query. Rookie mistake? I don't know. I feel like RDFLib ought to be able to handle the SPARQL results format somehow though.
Gotta start somewhere. So here's a first post. With Slog'd you will be able to: Write posts in markdown Add tags and categories Upload them to the server Then when someone loads your blog: Any new MD is parsed and turned into triples They can browse through your frontend, with posts sorted however you like, within the layout you created. I don't know how I'm going to do this yet, but I'll save my progress as I go...
Slog'd: *S*emantic B*log* from Mark*d*own
SHRUB: Swap and Reuse Hub Edinburgh The SHRUB is an awesome cooperative dedicated to promoting reuse, recycling, repairing and upcycling. I helped with early sorting-out of the new shop premises, made some shelves.. spent a few hours per week working in the shop in exchange for swap tokens which which I have procured all manner of exciting things, and helped with the big university halls cleanup last year. I regret that I've only managed to make it in a couple of times in 2015.
I touched my toes in yoga today. It happened in the heat of power yoga, and I didn't think I'd be able to do it cold. But I can! That's my goal for the end of the year met then.. (This may sound trivial, but I have short hamstrings, and anything that involves bending in the middle and straightening my legs at the same time I find extremely difficult. This the main thing I'm aiming to overcome with yoga). Another first from today was binding without help in a spinal twist. I managed to do this again at home an hour later, too. And I've noticed that going into Chatarunga between sets of postures has become a reprieve, a chance to catch my breath and rest for a second. Chatarunga is essentially holding yourself in the middle of a pressup, and when I started this class that was not something I could do, or ever though it might be a good idea to do; with the fast pace of the class, it was easy to collapse down onto my chest and skip over it. But over the past few weeks as I've got used to how the class progresses I've slipped into doing the Chatarunga properly - or as properly as I can without having time to stop and think about it - and not having trouble at all. I just tested that theory at home, and held myself in it for a good ten seconds. I haven't seen such fast progress in any of the other yoga I've done. This class is exciting me, and filling me with hope. It's taking a toll on my wrists though. By the end of the semester, they'll be strong :)
What I want to create is a solution to allow the Every(wo)man to publish their blog (/whatever) 'on' the Semantic Web. The Every(wo)man uses a cheap, perhaps archaically run, shared hosting environment, and has little to no control over what is installed there. The most accessible server-side language is PHP. The most likely default databases are MySQL. Files are uploaded using FTP (typically through a client with a GUI) or a web interface like cPanel. Maybe they'd like to change to a new host who would allow them to, say, experiment with Python and CouchDB, but they just renewed their two-year contract, and besides the customer service with their current account is really good, and they have so much content knocking about on that server space now, and they definitely can't afford to be paying for duplicate at the moment. And they also can't be bothered with the faff of remembering how to work with Heroku or something everytime they sit down to tinker, not to mention the worry that their limited understanding of such a system will suddenly start incurring costs. Disclaimer: Previous paragraph may be based on actual events. The solution for running a triplestore from shared hosting is the PHP ARC2 library, which can, wonderfully, drag a MySQL database kicking and screaming into the SPARQL world. But I didn't really want to just use MySQL. It is a terribly practical, but inpure solution. I want a graph database, damnit, with a SPARQL endpoint, and I want somewhere for it to live that I don't have to pay extra for. So what else is there? I want to experiment with CouchDB anyway, so I checked that out. There are hosted instances - like Iris Couch that look pretty easy to deal with. Nobody seems to have optimised it as a triplestore though, so setting up a SPARQL endpoint and proper inferencing and stuff may be a bit beyond me right now. There are lots of hosted triplestores I guess, but they all seem to be about 'Big Data'. I came across Dydra ages ago and signed up for their Beta and forgot about it. Then they called me at my office to find out what I wanted to use the Beta for. I bumbled that conversation because I'd forgotten what it even was (I think they introduced themselves with a different name, too), and I was generally dealing with the fact they'd actively Googled me (I asked) to get my office phone number (the University helpfully posts these on their website) which I had not given to them. And if I had figured out what was going on in time, I'm positive they would not have given me a Beta account for "maybe tinkering a bit to see what it does when I have time at some indeterminable point in the future". UPDATE: The day after writing this I got an email with an invite code for the Dydra beta, and no personal contact from them. Crazy coincidence. I'll give it a shot. Anyway, I'm sure I've come across hosted 4store services that didn't try to step on your toes about what you used it for, but I can't find any now. Talis looks mega promising, aside from having an outdated site with broken links, but they're still allocating stores on a request basis. Grumble. In the interests of moving forwards, I'm going to go with ARC2 and MySQL. But I'll make sure it's all modularised and stuff so it's easy to switch out the store for something else in the future.
Or perhaps more generically, Status to Linked Data. But Twitter is the only thing I update with statuses, so I'll start with that. I want to be able to: Parse the whole backlog of my tweets and turn them into Linked Data along the same schema as my blog posts will be. Tag all tweets with the same tagset that my blog posts use, automatically from hashtags or keywords, followed by a manual second pass. The mapping of hashtags and keywords to tags for the 'automatic' tagging will be done manually, I should think. This, then, needs a nice interface. Shove all that into the same triplestore my blog uses. Integrate status updates into my kanban-style website, alongside blogposts.
I haven't blogged about yoga yet, but now seems like as good a time as any to start. I started yoga-ing towards the end of 2012, with on-and-off classes at the Commonwealth Pool, then joined two beginner classes (with very different teaching styles) in January that ran for a semester as part of Edinburgh Council's Adult Education Programme. I was hooked, and since the start of this semester I've been doing four classes a week: Monday is Vinyasa 'power' yoga, one of the classes held by the University's Yoga Society. It's fast, sweaty and intense, and I'd never have been able to handle it - or enjoy it - as a complete beginner. Tuesday is a really relaxed beginner class running this term through the University Chaplaincy, mainly for relaxation. Great for the final hour of the 24 hour recovery from Monday's class. Wednesday and Thursday are post-beginner Adult Education Programme classes, in Cameron House Centre and Nelson Hall respectively, with one of the teachers from my first semester of regular classes before the summer. But what I really wanted to say, is that today I got myself into a full backbend unassisted (the last two weeks I've had help) and got substantially closer to reaching my toes with a straight back than I ever have before. Go me. (I definitely have shorter hamstrings than is normal, and my main aim with yoga is improving on that).
The post I wrote about EdinburghApps, the City of Edinburgh Council's awesome hackathon, is on the OKFN Scotland blog!
I've committed to Nanowrimo for the seventh year. I almost didn't. It's distressing and frustrating and sucks at my self-confidence like nothing else. It makes me feel like a failure in a way that nothing else can. But it makes me write. If I don't commit to it, I don't write a lot of fiction. Maybe a burst every six months. But every November for the last few years, I've written literally thousands of words. I've brought vague, lingering ideas to life; I've fleshed out characters; I've explored worlds. Every November for the last few years, I've bashed out incoherent paragraphs figuring I'll fit them in properly later. I've exhausted ideas that I now never want to hear of again. I've killed my love for characters, and tired of worlds. I've doubted my writing abilities, my imagination, my creativity, my storytelling. I've convinced myself that I'm incapable of finishing anything. The one year I hit 50,000 words? (50,299 to be precise). I was maybe a chapter away from finishing the actual story. The third quarter needed totally replacing and didn't really fit with the main story. Four or five years later, I still haven't written that final chapter, even though I know what the outcomes are to be. I haven't even typed it all up, let alone re- written part three. I didn't fall out of love with the characters or the world, and I think about it a lot, and it breaks my heart. Every November I've made a few new friends, and reconnected with old ones. Bonding with someone over Nanowrimo is an experience that stands alone. I've had one more conversation-starter than usual. I've discovered some new cafes and new writing software. My productivity has increased as a result of using The Work I'm Supposed To Be Doing as a distraction from writing. Every year I tell myself I'm doing it to make myself write. The 50,000 is irrelevant. I just need to write some words. More than none. Then I'm a winner. But not hitting 1,667 per day still feels like a gut-wrenching failure. Finding out someone else is further on than me brings me down a notch. Even with my inner-editor firmly silenced (she crawls into the cupboard of her own accord on the 1st of November these days) the inability to just sit down and churn out words right off the bat is crushing. But it does make me write. Writing fiction is my first love. What I wanted to be when I grew up was "author". It was a complicated word I knew when I was quite little. Along with "aspidistra", but that's another story. Imagine if I'd gone on to study it? If I was writing because someone told me to write? If I had to write to move forward in life? I'd probably have burnt out well before now. I guess it hurts so much because it means so much. And that's why I have to get over myself and just get on with it. If... when?... if I succeed, where success is writing a story I'm happy with, regardless of length, the boost will be indescribable. I'll get a new lease on life. I'll be sure I can do anything. I'm going to the Edinburgh NanoBeans launch party tomorrow. It's at 2pm in Forest Cafe. I'm going to add loads of new people (People Who Understand) on various social networks to increase the chances of being asked how it's going. Mostly I'll just have to shrug and say slowly, and feel guilty about that movie I watched or that extra batch of brownies I baked. But maybe... just maybe there will be a time this year when I can say "it's going great! I'm ahead of target." And just for some encouragement, here's are some pictures from 2008: Thanks Nano. I need you. Never leave.
I'm trying to automatically find connections between accounts on different networks - social networks, content hosting sites, other? - that are held by the same person Agent. I'm starting with YouTube, because that's a good source of content creators. Who? I haven't figured out a way to reliable pick channels at random (and have since decided that wouldn't be a good way of doing it anyway due to the long tail of people who don't upload anything at all, let alone are 'active' content creators), so I'm starting with the 'standard feeds'. These used to, more sensibly, be called Charts. They're RSS (or Atom or JSON) feeds of statistics about content or channels. They no longer appear on the frontend of the site, but are available if you know where to look. They are mentioned in some of the API documentation, which is referred to in the YouTube Help about generating your own RSS feeds from YouTube content. The standard feeds are: Most recent videos Most viewed Top rated Most discussed Top favorites Most linked Recently featured Most responded Most of these are useful in finding popular videos, which means there's a good chance the uploader has a wide network of connections within YouTube (which I can follow to get more information). Many, though, will be one-hit wonders. I've picked Top favorites as a list that intuition says will be more likely populated by videos from channels to which viewers have some kind of loyalty. These days everything you do on YouTube shows up in your friends feeds, so people may favourite a video as part of building their own identity on the service, as well as to support the content creators they love. It demonstrates an active, positive, reaction to the video. It's the content creators who produce content that is received in this way that I'm ultimately aiming to support. Most viewed, discussed, linked and responded could simply be controversial. Recently featured is some YouTube-inner-circle conspiracy, no doubt. This is all my opinion; if anyone has any better insights on these charts, please do let me know. I'm also limiting the charts to 'this week', to get a fairly - but not too - rapid turnover of data. 'Today' might give me too many less-established one-hit wonder, viral of the moment types; longer term establishes some sort of consistent enjoyment of the video by the masses. 'All time' is a fairly unchanging list, and would mean all my research is based around Charlie Bit Me. (Although this in itself might be an interesting study of content creator evolution; the original video was aimed at close family and friends, went viral by chance, and since the parents and children involved have built a many-$ content creation empire, with sequels and merchandise and all sorts. They've easily made enough from ad revenue to put both kids through college. But that's another discussion). Why though? I'd like to know which other networks are most commonly linked to by active content creators. This might indicate what kinds of interactions are meaningful to them. Social networks for interacting with fans? Other content host sites for different versions of their content, or different media types? Independently run websites and portfolios? Online merchandise stores? Other peoples' content they want to share with their viewers (friends and collaborators)? It might also be interesting to try to find out how often people reuse the same username across sites. And do people link to profiles on other sites that aren't their own? Either profiles they share with collaborators or friends, or just other peoples' profiles entirely? How can I reliably differentiate? YouTube's provisions for external account linking YouTube allows people to put links on their channel. They can choose up to four 'social' links to display icons for over their channel banner, plus one 'custom' link. They can also input as many custom links as they like which show up in a list in the About section of their channel. The predefined list of 'social' links from YouTube is: Google+ Facebook Twitter Myspace Tumblr Blogger deviantArt WordPress SoundCloud Orkut Flickr Google Play iTunes Pinterest Instagram Zazzle CafePress Spreadshirt LinkedIn There are crucial things missing from this list, I'm sure - Bandcamp, Newgrounds, off the top of my head - but if this is what YouTube thinks its users want to connect to, then it seems like as good a place to start as any. And of course, if a chosen profile doesn't appear on this list, they can add it (labelled however they want) in the custom links section. The custom links section is also often used for listing secondary (or tertiary or group) YouTube channels, which are fairly commonly found amongst active YouTubers. Getting these links programmatically The YouTube API (v3) is balls when it comes to giving me information that is useful in this regard. Scraping time! Code is on Bitbucket. Currently all of these links, regardless of banner, social, or custom, conveniently reside in s with a class of custom-links-item. I BeautifulSouped them out. (Why I can't get this information through the API, I don't know). Linked Data-ing things So I'll use FOAF's OnlineAccount to hook all the accounts together as Linked Data, which in theory is a perfect fit. SIOC's UserAccount is also an option, but I'll keep it simple for now. In related news, YouTube is phasing out usernames. New YouTube channels are now created directly through Google+, with a Google+ ID as the unique identifier. It's trying (to the outrage of YouTubers with any kind of branding or well-known identity) to encourage people to hook up their channels to their G+ profiles, and lose their old username. Once done, this cannot be undone. I'd still expect to be able to find out someone's username if they have one though, given the unique channel ID. The API doesn't return this. You get a channel 'title', which is just a display name. For some people (those with established branding) this will be their ye olde username, but for many - most, I suspect - it's their G+ (supposedly real) name. It just means that for YouTube channels I have to use the gibberish long unique ID instead of a nice human readable username for the foaf:accountName. This goes against what I feel accountName means, but is compliant with the spec, so I guess I'll leave it there. Everything else at that point is straightforward: Once the links are got, broken down into their constituent parts with urlparse, I can use rdflib to turn them into, eg: And store them somewhere ... to be continued. OnlinePersonae I'll probably subclass Agent with OnlinePersona (inspired by K. Faith Lawrence's FanOnlinePersona) and have the accounts belonging to that. Eventually OnlinePersona will have more properties which it won't necessarily share with all Agents. Note: SIOC doesn't have a notion of this type. SIOC has UserAccount which subclasses foaf:OnlineAccount, and thus defers back to a foaf:Agent as the account holder. Sooo... what do I use as URIs for my OnlinePersonas? This merits a tangent in the discussion, so I'll make another post about URI issues. URI locations Months ago (probably) I thought it would be a good idea to make a PURL for all of my content creation ontology related stuff. I couldn't find any existing sensibly named domains that are public at purl.org... things like '/ontology' are selfishly private. So I created '/content-creation' as a (public!) top-level domain. It's still 'pending approval'. Which means I can't do anything with it. Is purl.org even looked after any more? Grumble. (Andrei Sambra suggested I use prefix.cc to give my ontology a pretty name. Which looked briefly promising, before I realised it doesn't redirect automatically to an ontology... it's good for humans searching for vocab prefixes, but not for machines by any stretch. Mo validated my feeling that ontology URIs ought to resovle to machine- and human-readable descriptions). I had been going to use data.inf.ed.ac.uk as the base, but the server that pointed to melted down last month. I dunno when it'll be back. So I'll stick to something I, personally, control. At some point I might buy a more suitable domain specificially for it, but I should discuss the options with some people who know what I'm doing before making a decision by myself. Available candidates right now though include: creativecontent.info, webcontentdb.com/info, internetcontentdb.com/info. Oh, I just found out that purl.org isn't unfailingly reliable. In that case, forget it. So for now I'll use: rhiaro.co.uk/vocab/oocc# for the ontology spec for any terms of my own (when I write it) rhiaro.co.uk/cc/onlinepersona/<id> for OnlinePersonas rhiaro.co.uk/cc/content/<id> for content, when I get that far. Next Follow the links to find more connections and/or verify ones I've already found. For common social and content sites, I can manually scrape useful information or use their APIs. For independent websites or things I haven't come across before, I shall devise some means to not ignore them altogether... Grab other stuff from the YouTube profile and handle it in the same way. Featured channels may link to other channels the content creator is involved with. Subscriptions and mutual friends may be a good place to go for building up the network. Put more into the graph than just the FOAF OnlineAccounts. Start on content..
I ventured to Glasgow for the second Open Knowledge Foundation meetup on Monday 18th. It was well attended, and there were six short talks: Lorna Campbell from Cetis talked about Open Scotland. I understood this to be a collaboration between Cetis, the SQA, JISC and the ALT Scotland, to do with the opening up of education, and influencing policy and practicein this area. Here's a blog. Grianne Hamilton from JISC talked about Mozilla's Open Badges. You can use them to reward learning, skills and achievements in all sorts of areas, and any organisaiton can create and issue badge packs to people who have earned them. Recievers can then show them off anywhere they can put HTML. Graeme Arnott talked about a collaboration between Glasgow Womens' Library and Wikimedia, which resulted in the Scottish Women on Wikipedia event. This was a group of Scottish women getting together to edit Wikipedia articles about Scottish Women, and there was very positive feedback. They have more events planned. Graeme also reminded us about Wikimania, which is taking place next August in London. Jennifer Jones told us about the Digital Common Wealth project. She pointed out that with media-saturated global events like the Olympics, the official story is already decided before the event even starts. An alternative to relying on what is broadcast by the mainstream media is to turn the camera on the crowd, and get the 'real' version of what is going on. The Digital Common Wealth project will encourage citizen journalists to work together to craft the story of the Glasgow Commonwealth Games from their perspective. Jennifer also raised the point that although free tools like YouTube, AudioBoo and Twitter are great for spreading stories, the data is still held by third parties - what happens if they disappear? How should initiatives like this safely archive their stories, and keep them in context? Pippa Gardner talked about Glasgow's Future Cities project, for which they have £24 million to develop. It's about "people and data", but she was here to talk about data. There's the Data Innovation Engagement (which apparently needs a better acronym) and Glasgow's data portal which has already launched. Not all of the data on their is 'properly' open, but it's more open than it was before. There's a maps portal coming soon. Follow @openglasgow to keep up to date. Someone asked how they can avoid inadvertantly widening the digital divide by making all this data available - as it will only improve things for people who already have understanding and access. Pippa said there's a dedicate group in the Council working on widening digital participation, so they're involved. Duncan Bain, and MPhil student at the University of Edinburgh, talked about Open Architecture. He says it's hard to define 'knowledge' and 'data' in architecture; architects create drawings/representations, not buildings. There are efforts towards opening certain aspects of this, like wikihouse.cc and the Open Architecture Network, but the culture of the architecture world, and where the money is, seems to be preventing things from going in the same direction as software development any time soon. Here are livestreams of the talks by Jennifer Jones: one and two and a twitter timeline by Sheila Macneill.
Our third Prewired event went smoothly, with 20 young people (about 4 new) and 7 or so parents attending, plus 8 mentors. So lower signups than usual (a few cancellations due to school commitments), but we decided not to do a big publicity push and see how it ran with a smaller group. I didn't notice much difference, since they organise themselves into smaller groups anyway to work on different things. I think next time we'll try to reach our capacity of 40. We had a big group working on a variety of Python projects (games, basics, algorithms, I'm not sure what else..), a small group doing front-end web, and quite a few doing amazing things with Scratch. Every week I discover new things these super-talented young people are doing with their time, and it won't be long before many of them are spending a lot of time mentoring their peers as well as working on their own projects. Nantas came by to talk about what he does with the University's Robotics lab, including the challenges of making humanoid robots play football, and the state of the art, two-million-pounds, full sized humanoid robot that is moving to Edinburgh in the near future. Definitely stuff to get young people excited about learning to code. We've been trying to encourage them to code between Prewired sessions, too, and about half of them said they had. I hope by the next time all of them have, and I'm really excited to see what they're capable of making in a few months time! But... Some of the young people attending are disadvantaged by not being able to bring their own laptop, or having only really old laptops which can't support modern browsers and therefore have trouble even executing the JavaScript their writing (true story). We'd love to be able to pay for a set of simple but up-to-date laptops that we could lend to the attendees who don't have their own during sessions. This at least will put them on a level playing field with the others during the sessions, and I suspect that many of them have adequate desktop machines or family laptops at home. Prewired runs on a budget of volunteer blood, sweat and tears, and zero pounds. We're lucky enough to be able to use space in the University Informatics building for free, and there are no shortage of keen mentors and helpers willing to chip in their time (and in some cases cash for snacks). So if you work for a company who might be able to support the purchase of resources for our young coders, or know someone who does, then please get in touch!
Here is my tale of trying to get it back. £50 isn't a large amount of money to a massive organisation like Sky. But for me, it's two to three weeks food, or a train ticket to visit my mother, or about half of my Christmas shopping (yeah alright, I'm not very extravagant with that sort of thing). Following is an account of how a relatively small mistake on their part, which I thought was resolved well and quickly, then led to an agonising four month back-and-forth of: a) Lies b) Broken promises c) Incompetencies d) All of the above. May: Attempted cancellation I messaged through Help & Support to cancel my broadband and phone line, because I was going away a lot over the summer and it wasn't worth keeping it on. I was told it was sorted. I went to Australia for a month. June: Apparently failed cancellation I got back to Edinburgh and discovered I'd been billed. I turned on my router to see if I'd managed to mess up the cancellation myself, and saw no sign of broadband. So the services were cancelled, just not the billing. 18 July: Good customer service I finally got round to contacting Sky about my bill; by this point I'd been billed for July as well. I spoke to a couple of people on the phone who made me feel like it was my fault, then finally to the lovely Rachael who dug deeper, discovered a human error had occurred as a result of (we think) the two ways of writing the first line my address: 2F2 35 or 35/5. As a result, I had two account numbers... one had the services I guess, and one had the bills. It was very confusing, but once we found the two numbers Rachael properly cancelled my mysterious second account, and very kindly applied £50 credit to make up for the overbilling. I was told to contact again in a few weeks to initiate the refund process. 16-26 Sept: Being blown off I tried several times to contact customer services via help tickets to ask for the refund but got told (by a human, not an automated error message) there 'system error' with my bill, or something totally unhelpful (telling me something I didn't ask about) in response. 29 Sept: Actually, no I'm told the £50 credit can only be spent on Sky services, not refunded directly to a bank account. 29 Sept: I damn well disagree! I protested the unfairness of this, since I have moved somewhere with an existing broadband provider and actually probably wouldn't be going back to Sky after all this even if I had a choice... I was told that actually they can refund it after all, and I should expect it in 48 hours. I pointed out that I'd heard this before. I was told not to worry, it'll be fine! I relaxed. 48 hours later... no refund. Social media Throughout September and October I started tweeting about the problems. I liked to do things like compare Sky's customer service to that of Virgin Mobile (who have done wonderful things for me from time to time). I hoped 'public shaming' might speed up a resolution. I got encouraging responses from the social media team at Sky, who actually seemed to care (which is their job, I suppose) but really I only ended up opening more tickets and talking to other advisors in the end. 21 Oct: A change of tune Following another help ticket chase up, I'm told credit was incorrectly applied in the first place, and has been removed. I'm not exaggerating (just paraphrasing) when I say this was done "for reasons". 21 Oct: You what?! Oh, hey guys, how about... no? I didn't just suffer through months of torment for you try to tell me the only competent member of staff I have spoken to was actually incompetent after all! So I had a very long live chat to William (I think; I've named him, because he didn't leave a follow-up note like he was supposed to) who "carefully reviewed my account" and agreed with the verdict that the credit was incorrectly applied. I protested. He "carefully reviewed my account" some more, and then said he could see that an explicit reason was left for the application of the credit to my account in the first place... so it should have been there after all! Yay. He said it would be refunded to my bank account in 78 hours. I told him I'd heard this before. He said not to worry, it'll definitely be fine this time. Guess what. 31 October: It wasn't. So far, no refund, no re-application of credit to my bill, and not even an update to my help ticket about the conversation. It was like it never happened. I stupidly didn't think to copy the chat as evidence, although I assume they have a transcript of it somewhere. 1 November: Hope I DMed the social media team a bit, and scheduled a time to live chat with one of them, directly. While I waited, I typed out a timeline of everything that happened so far so I could paste it straight to them. Three quarters of an hour later, I have hope once more following a chat with the most human member of Sky customer services I have spoken to so far. He found actual reasons for things that had been done for "reasons". For example, my initial refund was never successfully issued because goodwill credit must be issued as a cheque, not a bank account transfer, so Finance just rejected it. A silly rule, but that's the way of it. (In my case the response was just to not issue it though, so Finance can't even follow their own silly rules). I'm still not entirely sure why the credit was totally removed though, or why on my bill its removal shows up as a charge for Sky TV. He treated me like a person by not making vague promises, or holding back particularities of how the organisation works. He told me he believed I should be receiving a refund based on what he knew so far, but he'd have to talk to his manager. He talked to his manager, who agreed. But he didn't then just tell me everything would be fine. He told me it still might get rejected by Finance (for "reasons", I presume). What he is doing is speaking directly to someone in Finance to get a cheque sent out. He's manually changing my address to make sure the cheque goes to the right place, and he's going to get in touch with me again on Wednesday night to let me know what the progress has been. I asked him what the next step is if Finance reject the refund request, and he implied threats of violence. (NOTE to Sky managers who might read this: I don't believe he meant he would really commit violence on the Finance team. He was doing his job well and using humour to relieve me whilst promising he would make an effor to follow up). He also gave me permission to verbally abuse him if he doesn't get in touch on Wednesday night. I appreciate this sentiment, though it's unlikely I'll get into capslock territory with this guy any time soon. I would tweet a gentle a reminder of course. 6 November: The Wednesday follow-up I got a Twitter DM with a link to a live chat... After just under an hour of waiting in a 'queue' for the live chat I had to leave, and DMed @SkyHelpTeam back to ask if they'd let me know when there was someone there, so I wasn't waisting my time refreshing a page. They responded and sent the details to my MySky help tickets instead. And the result? A cheque is in the post! Please allow 28 days for it to arrive. I sure hope that's true. And that it's coming to the right address. I might send a letter to my old flat, just in case. So I guess I'll update in 28 days whether or not it actually arrived. I'm hopeful, but they've promised me that money is on its way in x amount of time before... Conclusions If your problems aren't fixed immediately, pester the social media team (@SkyHelpTeam). Get everything in writing, record every conversation, keep track of dates, names of customer service people, and what you were promised. Don't give up. For every semi-competant and sympathetic customer service person, there are four or five lazy/useless/uncaring or possibly even malicious ones. Just keep trying, and you'll get through eventually... Recommendations for Sky Following my unfortunately extensive experience with Sky help ticketing, I'd like to make a few suggestions for its improvement. Tickets should be marked as resolved by the customer. I have so many tickets that I don't consider to be resolved, sitting in my 'resolved' tickets column. I should be able to reply to tickets. I post a request, I get a response that is marked as resolved that I don't agree with. I then have to follow up by opening a new ticket, which inevitably goes to a different person, and I end up going around in circles. If I'm taking the time to type out messages to you, it probably means I don't want to talk to you on the phone. It doesn't matter why. Take the time to write messages back. (Related: telling me it's free to call customer service on a Sky line is really unhelpful when I'm trying to contact you about a recently cancelled Sky line. The fact that I never physically had a landline phone, line or no, is irrelevant here).
Generating unique IDs In a centralised system, I could generate my own unique IDs by whatever means, assign them, and be done with it. I thought briefly about trying to generate human-readable unique IDs, but this article made me decide that that will all end in tears. Maybe for now I assume that people won't need to remember their OnlinePersona URI... Dangerous? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe it's more likely that someone will be searched for by all the properties of their OnlinePersona, but the OnlinePersona itself doesn't matter directly. We shall see. So on that note, Python's UUID will do. They're long and horrible. But I'll get over it. Power to the people How do I persist creator and content URIs in a non-centralised, user-owned network? People would need the option to change their URI to whatever they felt represented themselves, like their personal 'about me' page. Trying to enforce content negotiation and a Document != Person mentality here might be difficult. Ultimately it doesn't really matter what their URI is as long as it resolves and persists, right? And if it doesn't resolve, or even disappears entirely, it's kind of rubbish, but not Web-breaking. Kind of the reason the Web still holds up, and the reason the Semantic Web is an extension of that. Assuming a distributed, Diaspora*-esque 'Pod' structure for this network, if a user moves to another Pod and as a result must change their URI, the protocols involved essentially need to require leaving a 'forwarding address' to their new URI. Maybe, in this scenario, URIs are handled differently altogether. Separately from the Pods. You can get a URI from the Pod you just joined, or you can use your own or generate one from a provider. How do you authenticate changing of a URI? Someone could essentially steal someone else's identity by switching out their URI... so... that can't happen. Maybe I'm thinking too much. I might need to talk to someone smarter about this.
A few useful links in this SlideShare from ESWC '11: http://www.slideshare.net/juansequeda/consuming-linked-data
Travelling: YES I'm at the Resonate new media festival in Belgrade. Studying: YES I started a PhD in the Centre for Intelligent Systems and their Applications (CISA) in Informatics at the University of Edinburgh in October 2012. I'm looking at how Semantic Web tools might be able to augment digital media creation by providing collaborative opportunities for content creation and improving connectivity between creative projects. I'm interested in decentralized social networks, and retaining control of and making good use of personal data. Writing: Sometimes Gearing up for Camp Nanowrimo this April. Working: YES and no Tutoring and doing ongoing freelance work, but not taking on any new projects.