icwe2017 (7 out of 7)

Week in review: 5 - 11 June

Attended ICWE2017 in Rome, talked to people about dokieli and Linked Research.
Took the bus from Rome to Ancona, the ferry from Ancona to Split, and the bus from Split to Sarajevo.

🏷 icwe2017 linked research travel

Sun 11th of June 2017 at 11:59pm (+02:00)

Some weeks in Europe

After 7 months in the southern hemisphere, I returned to Europe by way of a cheap Aero Flot flight from Tokyo to Venice that I booked ages in advance. I've enjoyed manageable temperatures and weather conditions, but missed Malaysian hospitality and food variety. I have a new appreciation for medieval stone architecture and winding cobbled streets, and forests without monkeys in them, but my bank account is hurting thanks to comparatively overpriced and substandard accommodation.

I spent approximately a week in Trieste, a week in Portoroz/Piran, and a week in Rome. In Trieste I relaxed, explored, reflected, deflated. In Portoroz I attended the Extended Semantic Web Conference, co-chaired a half day workshop, scribed a panel and Sarven and I won a best paper award for Linked Data Notifications, and otherwise socialised extensively. In Rome I walked a freaking lot, attended the International Conference on Web Engineering, socialised a little bit, and didn't really manage to get any work done.

This morning I took a bus across the width of Italy, from Rome to Ancona. Last time I was in Ancona I noted that this place is probably beautiful in good weather, and I was right. Two years ago I arrived here on delayed trains, worried I was late for my ferry, in torrential rain, with no idea how thoroughly nonsensical the ferry boarding process is. This time I arrived with several hours to spare, and wandered around a little in the glorious sunshine. Now I knew where to go for ferry checkin and boarding, the process was quick and easy. I had a leisurely lunch at Zazie, a small vegetarian cafe in the town center, and bought supplies from a supermarket. The ferry has not departed yet, 20 minutes after its scheduled time. But not to worry, I've got all night. Just like last time, I'll arrive in Split, Croatia, at 7am tomorrow morning.

In Split I'll take the day to myself, spend a night in a hostel, and then on Sunday I'll take a bus to Sarajevo, where new adventures await.

🏷 https://rhiaro.co.uk/tags/eswc2017 ferry icwe2017 italy slovenia travel

Fri 9th of June 2017 at 8:02pm (+02:00)

At the ICWE conference dinner last night, it was proudly announced that they have finally signed a long term contract with Springer for proceedings publication.

I. Am. Confused.

This seems like a backward step. Locking another generation of researchers into a broken system of academic elitism and inaccessibility of knowledge. This does not conjure an appropriate picture of the future for the Web engineering community. Why have we engineered ourselves into a paywalled corner of static PDFs? Aren't we supposed to be pioneering here? Why is it such an "achievement" to pay a huge pile of money to a for-profit company to keep all of our hard work in a dead end, which our libraries and institutions have to pay again to get it back out of?

Is everyone just cool with this?

🏷 https://linkedresearch.org/ academic publishing icwe2017 linked research springer

Thu 8th of June 2017 at 2:25pm (+02:00)

Some questions about dokieli:

You can 'save as' to somewhere... where exactly?

Your personal data store can be accessible at any URL, you just need write access and a script that understands HTTP requests and dokieli can talk to it. The UI/authentication flow depends on the choices you make about how your server is set up.

... how will it compete with other [centralised] approaches in the editing marketplace?

Well.. dokieli is not trying to take over the world. It's a prototype, to show how we, can decentralise content creation, designed to encourage experimentation in this space.

What happens to annotations when text changes?

You can annotate a static copy of your own. But we have open issues around that.

How do authors know when an article gets a notification?

They can use any LDN consumer to read that inbox.. This is orthogonal to dokieli. An LDN consumer could give them a desktop notification, make their mobile buzz, or print something out of a receipt machine, or whatever is useful for you as an alert.

What about privacy?

Access control is orthogonal, you can apply these rules on your personal data store when you store documents and comments etc.

...and some things to do with trust and provenance.

🏷 https://dokie.li dokieli icwe2017 linked research

Tue 6th of June 2017 at 12:42pm (+02:00)

It's dokieli o'clock at ICWE2017. Sarven Capadisli presents tooling for a read-write Web which helps you own your data, and have more control over the user interfaces you use to create and edit content. dokieli includes social features, including sharing and annotations, across decentralised personal data stores.