Policy Management for the Web (PM4W) is a one day workshop to be held as part of the 14th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2005) on Tuesday 10 May 2005 in Chiba, Japan. PM4W will consist of invited talks, presentations of submitted papers, a panel and discussions. Daniel Weitzner of the W3C will give an invited talk on transparency and policy. Two kinds of papers are sought: research papers that report on the results of original research and short papers that articulate a position, describe an application or demonstrate a working language or system. Papers must be submitted electronically by 1 February 2005. Further details are on the PMW4 web page.

I think PGP (or GPG) is one of the most useful security software out there. However, because the existing reference implementation lacks a good interface for searching and managing public keys, PGP remains to be a tool for the geeks.

To address these issues, the PGP company is now offering a new PGP Global Directory service that will help users to search and manage their public keys. This service also supports many GPG features.

You can read more about this at
the PGP Global Directory website and this Slashdot post.

I have uploaded my public key — search for “Harry Chen” at this page.

Filip Perich (who has forgotten his blogger account info!) points out Google Suggests, a beta version of a new Google service.

“It tries to proactively guess the query a user is typing but pre-filling possible answers… How it works is that is uses JavaScript to open an XmlHttp stream back to the google.com server and sends in every character a user types. Now, there are few questions I have:

• What is the scalability since every character goes back and a query is ran against google.com (try to type: filip p, it will fill in “filip perich”)…
• Is that a security breach as any web site can create a stream back to the server and collect any generated key or mouse event (e.g. scrolling, selecting, copying text not just forms…) without the user’s knowledge… ?”

This also opens up new Google games. See what word Google things should come after “Bush ” in a query. After “Finin “, the only idea Mr. Google can think of is crossmaglen.

Jottings.com wondered what the most frequently queried word or phrases were beginning with each letter of the alphabet. Google suggests reveals…

Amazon, best buy, CNN, dictionary, eBay, Firefox :-), games, Hotmail, Ikea, jokes, Kazaa, lyrics, Mapquest, news, online dictionary, Paris Hilton :-(, quotes, recipes, Spybot (!), Tara Reid (!!), UPS, Verizon, weather, Xbox, Yahoo (no !), zip codes.

You can add a custom mail header to your outgoing email in thunderbird by inserting lines like the following into your prefs.js (thanks to Seth Ladd).

user_pref(”mail.identity.id1.headers”, “foaf”);
user_pref(”mail.identity.id1.header.foaf”, “X-FOAF: http://umbc.edu/~finin/foaf.rdf”);

Note: you have to make sure that you et the right identity (e.g., id1, id2, …) in your preferences file. On my relatively new home machine I found only one, but on my older office machine I found six! I think these accumulated over the years as I moved through different versions of the Netscape family of mail clients. I took the easy way out and added the user_pref settings for all six of the identities. Where you find your prefs.js file will depend on what OS you are using, of course. I found mine in C:Documents and Settingstim fininApplication DataThunderbirdProfilesr6anf7ze.default

This seems like a nice way to enable all sorts of interesting email features, especially if we build on foaf. Spam filtering is an obvious use, about which many are thinking. It could also revive X-FACES, allowing your email notifier to show small image of the person sending you email.

Swoogle is off line for a day or two. We discovered that our Swoogle server (pear) was compromised. (Yet another PHP-Nuke vulnerability.) We have a plan to bring it back up in a more secure configuration with the database behind a firewall and only the web interface exposed to the elements. A consequence is that only the official URL, HTTP://SWOOGLE.UMBC.EDU/, will work. It’s a jungle out there.

SRI has released the OWL-S Editor, a Protege plug-in providing an environment for creating and editing OWL-S service descriptions. It features:

• Visual drag and drop composite process editor.
• Graphical overview of the main parts of the OWL-S ontology. See how your Service/Process/Profile/Grounding instances relate to one another.
• WSDL Import. Generate a skeletal OWL-S description automatically from a WSDL file.
• Developed as a plugin to Protege, so it is easy to browse the domain ontologies that your OWL-S services use.
• Supports ALL properties of OWL-S.
• Loads existing OWL-S descriptions, making it easy to get an overview of complicated service structures and process models.

This is an alpha release (Mozilla Public License) and more features and documentation are being developed.

Accoona is a new search engine company with a lot of business buzz. According to this CNN news article, this new engine is endorsed by the formal President Bill Clinton and has close relationship with China.

So, how Accoona is different from other search engines? “The company said it is using artificial intelligence technology to derive the meaning of words typed into a search.” It has two key features: a business profile search and a so-called SuperTarget feature.

“The business profile search is interesting. It allows users to type in a corporate name and next to the search results is a box that you can click on to get pertinent information (such as contact info, annual sales and company size) without leaving the search results page.

The SuperTarget function is also noteworthy. It enables users to rank specific keywords more highly than others. For example, if you do a search for “Yankees + Giambi + steroids”, you then have an option of clicking on one of those keywords to find more relevant results.”

A survey of people’s beliefs of trust in real life provides important clues for similar issues in Pervasive Computing (techies don’t seem to figure in this list ;). Thinking about trust and security issues for peravsive computing, if this survey is any indication of how we trust other people (and associated devices), it seems that we tend to trust other people in relationships where quality and quantity of services rendered do not have much benefit for the provider. Towards the bottom of the list — professions that are least trusted — these professionals seem to have incentives to sell you something. I doubt that people are born a particular way; its probably a necessity or side-effect of their function. Knowledge from experience, provenance of data, and — function and ownership of device, seem to be noteworthy points for trustworthy pervasive computing.
CNN.com - Survey: Nurses tops in honesty, car salesmen last - Dec 7, 2004

Indirect Reciprocity, Assessment Hardwiring, and Reputation, A Talk with Karl Sigmund

The Edge has an interesting interview with Austrian Mathematician Karl Sigmund on the topic of indirect reciprocity — giving something back not to the person to whom you owe something, but to somebody else in society. I really enjoyed Sigmund’s book Games of Life: Explorations in Ecology, Evolution, and behavior which is an accessible and very enjoyable introduction to many topics surrounding models of cooperation and competition and how they develop. Unfortunately, the 1993 book seems to be out of print.

“Ever wonder what makes LISP so powerful? Now you can find out for yourself- And you don’t even have to install anything on your computer to do it!”. So begins Conrad Barski’s tutorial Lisp comic, Casting SPELs in Lisp. “Anyone who has ever learned to program in LISP will tell you it is very different from any other programming language. It is different in lots of surprising ways- This comic book will let you find out how LISP’s unique design makes it so powerful!” The online comic book tutorial has small bits of LISP code throughout which, when collected and entered into a LISP interpreter implement a simple text adventure game. This sure beats learning LISP from JCM’s LISP 1.5 Programmer’s Manual

Bootstrapping the semantic Web

“It’s tempting to draw parallels between the careers of Albert Einstein and Tim Berners-Lee. Both men made world-transforming breakthroughs and then pursued even grander visions. Einstein, of course, never found the unified theory he sought for three decades. A lot of people think Berners-Lee’s vision of a semantic Web will prove equally elusive.”

“We can all imagine the desired outcome: a version of the Web where items are related explicitly, not merely by co-occurrence of words. But skepticism has greeted the “semweb” technologies that Berners-Lee has been spearheading in the W3C. The approach is based on what’s called “ontology,” which the W3C defines as “a representation of terms and their interrelationships.” Critics argue that we’ll never agree on (or consistently apply) an ontology — and they point to Google (Profile, Products, Articles) as proof that we don’t need to.”

“Semantic-Web naysayers think people and organizations can’t be bothered to assert machine-readable facts about themselves. And, today, that is undoubtedly true. But when others assert facts about you — as they increasingly will — the tide could begin to turn. Individual acts of self-defense may ultimately combine to bootstrap the semantic Web.”

This is big news or maybe not, depending how he will divide his time between W3C, MIT CSAIL, and Southhampton.

Tim Berners-Lee, World Wide Web inventor, to join ECS

The inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, is to take up a Chair of Computer Science at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science. He will hold this position alongside his current appointments as Senior Research Scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). …more…