FLINK, which describes itself as the “Who’s who of the semantic web”, is a demonstration application that won first place in the ISWC 2004 Semantic Web Challenge contest. Flink was developed by Peter Mika of the Free University of Amsterdam as part of his PhD research.

Flink provides information on semantic web researchers, their papers, and their social relationships, mined from HTML pages, Google Scholar, FOAF documents, mailing lists and other web sources. It computes various rankings of the researchers and lets you view a person’s social network graphically as well as viewing people and their social networks overlaid on a world map. Flink manages its data with Sesame and can export the dataset as an OWL document. Flink a good example of a semantic web application largely built with readily available tools that demonstrates a very useful level of information integration.

The Technorati New Years Eve Developers Contest! And here’s the worflow from Technorati:

Get started today! Here’s what you do:
1. Join our Developer Program.
2. Download our SDK.
3. Start developing.
4. When you’re done coding and want to submit your application, complete the form below and send us your code by midnight PST on New Years Eve.
5. On New Year’s Day the Technorati judges, comprised of Technorati engineers and staff, will review all of your submissions. We will judge all of the applications we receive the week of December 31, 2004 and we will notify the winners Friday, January 4, 2005.

With may web services out there, it might just be a case of — who finds the right services and melds them all together. I am giving a stab at this! Its about time I check the API.

The NYT has a good overview article on Firefox and its significance to Microsoft given that IE is now rather old, integrated too tightly into Windows, and poses such a security risk. I think Firefox is an amazing testimony to the possibilities of open source software. It strikes me that Firefox may become the new emacs: a program that I spend the majority of my time in, independent of any particular operating system, designed for extensibility, supported by a large and growing collection of extensions developed by the user community, and nicely done. It reminds me of the quote “Emacs is my operating system, and Linux its device driver.” I think a more appropriate variation might be “Firefox is my operating system and the web is my device driver”. Of course, all is foretold by signs in the heavens, there for those who know where to look.

I came across an interesting publication through Yahoo News - The Role of RSS in Science Publishing

These new ‘disruptive’ technologies are now beginning to challenge the orthodoxy of the traditional website and its primacy in users’ minds. The bastion of online publishing is under threat as never before… While titles and links are the joints that articulate an RSS feed, they can be freely embellished with textual descriptions and richer metadata annotations … This paper describes the growing uptake of RSS within science publishing as seen from Nature Publishing Group’s (NPG) perspective.

This work mainly motivates some extensions to the RSS vocabulary from the PRISM(Publication Metadata) and AdSML(Job Opening, Advertisement) perspective i.e more and more of metadata going in as RSS extensions to suite specific domains.

They also discuss URCHIN to manage multiple feeds which can[will] go out of hand –

It all gets interesting when such metadata has to modeled in a way which allows improved knowledge management.
So the question is - Will RSS lead us to the Semantic Web? You will hear a confident YES! from many out there.

One of the motivations for the semantic web is information integration. The use of URIs as a shared way to reference a resource supports this. But, it’s easy to forget, or at least not focus on, how messy the web and the world really are. We don’t all share the same set of concepts. We have no mechanism (yet) to forge a consensus about what URIs to use to denote concepts of individuals in the non-web world. References after depend on context. People typically describe things by attributes. And so forth.

Here are a pair of interesting papers from the TAP project, a collaboration between Stanford, IBM and the W3C, that deal with some of the practical problems in this area.

Object Coidentification on the Semantic Web, R. Guha. “The SemanticWeb seeks integrate data from many different sources. Since different sources often use different names for the same object, we need to map between these names. We first consider the use of keys to do this mapping and discuss some of the associated problems. We introduce the concept of bootstrapping from some shared names to more shared names and discuss some conditions under which this process is guaranteed to be correct. We describe a probabilistic approach to matching and propose approximations to address the issue of requiring a combinatorially large number of joint probabilities. We report on empirical studies for validating this approach in two interesting domains. Finally, we discuss the implications of better matching techniques for privacy.”

Disambiguating People in Search, R. Guha and A. Garg. “Searching for information about people is a common activity on web search engines. For most names, there are multiple people in the world with that name, forcing users to add keywords to narrow down the results to pages that refer to the particular person they are looking for. In this paper, we present a solution to this problem. We start with simple user interface for indicating which person the user intended. We then focus on how a search engine can rank more highly the pages that refer to this person. We propose an evaluation criterion for this feature and present results from a vector similarity based approach to this problem. To improve on these results, we describe a formal model of reference and provide a general framework for using knowledge from many different sources, to solve this problem. We present results from an empirical study that validates our framework.”

Biologists at the University of Toronto have developed an interactive tutorial about the evolution of cooperative behaviour that is used in their Introduction to Biology class. They begin with the question

“Can cooperative behaviour emerge from groups of selfish individuals? Here you can use a popular puzzle called the Prisoner’s Dilemma Game to examine how cooperation might arise and evolve in animal groups. The results might surprise you!”

The tutorial uses interactive variations on the prisoner’s dilema to explain the concepts. The material is basic, but it is very well executed and motivates the concepts with examples from animal behaviour. We need more sites like this.

Robert Axelrod and Leigh Tesfatsion have written A Guide for Newcomers to Agent-Based Modeling in the Social Sciences which will appear in Kenneth L. Judd and Leigh Tesfatsion (Eds.), Handbook of Computational Economics, Vol. 2: Agent-Based Computational Economics, Handbooks in Economics Series, North-Holland, 2005.

Complementing this is a excellent a online guide with pointers to lots of web resources intended “to suggest a short list of introductory readings and supporting materials to help newcomers become acquainted with agent-based modeling (ABM).” They wisely avoided the temptation of providing a comprehensive site, instead focusing on the best online resources for someone new to the area to read. Although this is aimed at people in the social sciences, there is a lot of good material for anyone interested in how collections of autonomous, self-interested agents work.

Fujitsu and Xerox PARC announced a partnership to study ubiquitous computing (story). Researchers from both organizations will initially focus efforts on developing interoperability standards and protocols based on PARC’s Obje architecture.

“The Obje software architecture is an interconnection technology that enables digital devices and services to easily interoperate over both wired and wireless networks. It provides a simple “meta standard” for interoperation that enables people to access information and services from anywhere, in a completely hassle-free, ad hoc manner.”

Researchers will also work to develop simpler and more secure wireless technologies and also incorporate social science to create new business opportunities, both at the business-to-business and business-to-customer levels.

Researchers at PARC, led by Mark Weiser, did much of the seminal work on ubiquitous computing. Weiser’s 1993 Scientific American article The Computer for the 21st Century is still a good read. After moving on to other things, I wonder if PARC can regain the lead in pervasive computing? A lot has happened in the mean time and many people are working on the vision.

Thanksgiving.

No, we’re not talking turkeys but acknowledgements. Lee Giles and friends have been mining (mostly) computer science papers to determine what people and what funding agencies get thanked the most. In an article with Isaac Councill, “Who Gets Acknowledged: Measuring Scientific Contributions through Automatic Acknowledgment Indexing” in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences he described how they automatically extracted the metadata from documents on the web and the various formulae they used for thank ranking.

The most thanked individual? Oliver Danvy of the University of Aarhus. The most thanked organization? NSF or DARPA, depending on the formula used. Eventually the information will appear on CiteSeer, but for now see these news items:

• Nature news: New Method Ranks Impact of Computer and Information Science Funding Agencies, Institutions and Individuals
• Penn State press release: Acknowledgements hit the limelight

Acknowledgement metadata on papers may become another interesting source of social network information.

PubSub (from publish and subscribe) is a web search engine that matches your “standing queries” against new or updated web pages as it discovers them. This is in contrast to most other search engines that match your “ad hoc query” against all of the content it had previously discovered and indexed. PubSub’s forte is rapid searching over dynamic content — such as blog entries or newsgroup posting. In fact, all of it’s content is currently categories into one of five categories: blogs, newsgroups, press releases, SEC/EDGAR filings, and airport delays. You get the results of your PubSub subscriptions by visiting their site, via RSS or ATOM, through a browser plugin or by using their API in your own code.

PubSub’s LinksRanks feature lets you explore a total ranking of their sources (based on the number of in-links, see the details) and also the 30 day trend of any site.

PubSys is free and it’s not clear what their business model is. It is based in NYC and lead by CTO and co-founder is Bob Wyman. It is a very interesting system that is a good complement to traditional web search engines (traditional in the sense of Internet years).

Interesting news from Netflix, which is looking for ways to keep ahead of its competators. I think I’d still trust IMDB more though. I wonder if they will use FOAF for the basic personal metadata?

Netflix Testing Networking System, Dec 10, 11:18 AM (ET)

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Online DVD rental leader Netflix Inc. (NFLX) is putting social networking on its marquee of coming attractions for next year.

In its latest move to fend off competitive threats, Netflix will let subscribers invite friends to peek at DVDs they’ve watched and read their opinions of the movies. If the invitation is accepted, the sender automatically gets reciprocal rights to read the friend’s lists and reviews.

The concept copies an online networking approach popularized by such Web sites as LinkedIn, Friendster and Tribe. Those services connect people with common friends, hobbies and professional interests.

Netflix, facing competition from Blockbuster Entertainment Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT), began testing its networking system last week and plans to expand it to all 2.3 million subscribers next month.

The company has long encouraged subscribers to post DVD reviews openly but those capsules appear in a scattershot manner and generally don’t provide much information about the writer. Under the new system, people can focus on the picks and pans of those whose opinions they value.

The Geosemantics Interest Group (GIG) Web Portal aims to help geosemanticists in their research and implementations by providing a view on common problems with semantic issues in GIS, providing links to related activities and seeking advise from other communities. Geosemantics is defined as “the meaning of spatio-temporal properties in geo data and geo processing.” GIG is not affiliated with an association or organisation and is intended as a platform for idea sharing on an ad hoc basis.