Harry Chen blogs about Web 2.0 Validator, an automated web tool that determines how 2.0ish your Web site is based on a set of Web 2.0 characteristics. While Harry reports that his site only scored 11, it now scores 31! No, I don’t think he’s just been studying for the test so he could retake it. It appears due to Harry’s post on Web 2.0 Validator — just talking about Web 2.0 Validator makes your site seem to be a Web 2.0 site to Web 2.0 Validator. Or maybe this is related to Russell’s paradox, somehow.

Anyway, this post should help raise our own Web 2.0 factor a bit, even though the site is not in public beta, uses PHP and not Python, and we don’t really mention mash-ups, startups, Less is More, Dave Legg, the Web 2.0 Validator’s ruleset, Flickr, VC, VCs, Nitro, Firefox, Ruby, links to slashdot, or uses the blink tag.

Google Scholar, it’s a good thing, as Martha Stewart would say.

We recently added a feature to our ebiquity paper repository that ties papers to their Google Scholar entries. The main motivation was to allow us to track citations.

As I’ve worked through our papers to verify and add their Google Scholar keys, other benefits are becoming apparent. In several cases I’ve discovered errors or omissions in our own meta data. Sometimes our own entries have had the title wrong! In other cases, I’ve found several Google Scholar entries for the same paper. Sometimes this is due to an error by the author of a citing paper, which can propagate.

I suspect that some of the errors originate with us. Here’s one scenario. When a paper is accepted for publication, the author is happy and excited and adds an entry in our database, along with softcopy of the draft. People download and read the draft and, if it’s good, start citing it. Months later the ultimate copy, which may have a different title and even a different author list, is finalized. Ideally, our site is edited to reflect the final metadata and final softcopy. But, sometimes this doesn’t happen or the final softcopy is not uploaded for copyright reasons. In any case, the old, and possibly incorrect metadata and draft may have escaped to roam the Internet.

Lately I’ve started to add a header to draft copies of papers posted to our side that states that they are drafts and also where the final version will appear. I’ve found Acrobat’s ability to add a header to an existing pdf file to be very handy for this. I’ve also used Acrobat to extract the first page of an article for which we don’t hold the copyright, add a header pointing to it’s source, and post that on our site (as in this example.)

Finally, one of the ideas that underlies the current Semantic Web vision is that it’s very useful for things on the web to have good identifiers. The Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) is the Semantic Web’s favorite identifier, but we all recognize that just using URIs is to simple for many objects (e.g., people). OWL’s contribution to this is the notion of an inverse functional property. If my ontology defines SSN as an inverse functional property, then two objects that share the same SSN must be the same. So, along these lines, the googleScholarKey property should be inverse-functional and have domain=publication and range=string.

We noticed a Jose Vidal using a great idea on his publication list which we’ve added to the ebiquity site’s publication page. Jose augments his paper descriptions with data from Google Scholar (GS) — a link to the GS data, the number of citing papers, and a list of their GS data.

We think GS is likely to be increasingly important in the academic/scholarly community. It’s a way to find papers, of course, but also helps judge their significance to the field as measured by the number of citations. Citation counting is the traditional way of measuring the impact of a paper. Using Google Scholar’s citations to measure impact has its problems, a topic we’ve posted on before and is also discussed in the bibliometric circles, but it’s free and convenient, a combination that’s hard to beat. (Writing this, I wonder if anyone has tried a recursive model like that used in pagerank to citation graphs. If not, this would be an interesting experiment to do).

Here’s how our paper listings now works. We augmented the RGB paper ontology to give the paper class a new metadata property, googleKey, that is then used to derive the other properties — the number of citations and links to the GS description and the list of citing papers. Right now getting the GS Key is done manually since automating it reliably is not trivial. But we do have a link on the paper display that makes it easier to find the key by querying GS with the paper title and showing the results. If the paper is in GS, it will probably be on the first page.

Every night, an agent (well, ok, a cron job) checks Google Scholar to update the citation counts for all of the papers that have a GS key.

Our lab members tend to enter papers into the site’s database as soon as they are accepted for publication, which is long before they show up in Google Scholar and even longer before they begin to accrue citations. So authors will have to periodically check recently entered papers and update them with their GS keys when available. It will take some weeks or more before we’ve processed all of the old papers to look up their GS Key. Once we’ve done so, I think it should be easy to maintain it.

Two Ph.D. students are joining the ebiquity lab this Spring.

Wiboonsak Watthayu is a PhD candidate working with Professor Peng on the application of Bayesian networks to decision support systems with multiple uncertain criteria. He is currently teaching Computer Science in his home country of Thailand and will be on leave for the Spring so he can finish his dissertation. Wiboonsak will be sitting in ITE 368.

Lushan Han is a Ph.D. student who is just joining UMBC this semester. Lushan comes to us from the University of Delaware. Before coming to the US for graduate school, he worked in the computer industry in China and attended Peking University. Lushan is sitting in ITE 377. Lushan will initially be working on Swoogle while he decides what topic to pursue for his dissertation research.

Please welcome our newest ebiquity lab member, Mr. Capresso, recently arrived from Portugal. His sleek, stainless steel thermal vacuum carafe with drip-free pouring spout is said keep coffee hot for up to 4 hours. Even on his first day in the lab he has found ways to contribute to several research projects. Capresso is currently being supported by a generous grant from Google’s Adsense department. Olá Capresso.

Baltimore Sun’s Troy McCullough talks about Pranam Kolari’s work on detecting splogs in his column on Sunday, 15 January 2006. The column also has an associated podcast.

Fighting spam sites – latest battle in the blog wars
On Blogs: Troy McCullough, Jan 15, 2006

It seems that everyone has a blog these days – a spot that others can visit to find out what they have to say about something or nothing in particular. Some blogs are widely valued fonts of specialized wisdom, but many are viewed as uninteresting expressions of personal ego. The difficulty of sorting the good blogs from the bad can be a frustrating challenge – one that is seen as a serious threat to what has been viewed as a vital feature of the Internet.

Now, three University of Maryland, Baltimore County researchers have made a far more disturbing conclusion about blogs. After analyzing millions of blog posts, they have determined that the blogosphere is drowning in spam, the pejorative nickname given to unsolicited Internet advertising. Using data collected by weblogs.com, a prominent blog tracking service, doctoral student Pranam Kolari and professors Tim Finin and Anupam Joshi analyzed 40 million blog updates submitted from 14 million blogs.
…

We’ve moved the ebiquity site (and many of our other sites) from blackbox to EB1 — a rack-mounted Sun Fire X2100 running Linux. Poor old Blackbox was underpowered and its fan kept failing. An emergency fan transplant from an even older organ donor helped keep it going, but we all agreed that it should be allowed to retire with dignity. Transition to the new Sun box went surprisingly smoothly, thanks to the hard work of a number of lab members and alumni. EB1 lives in the main machine room in the ECS building. We’ve also added EB2, a Sun Fire V20z, that is being used to host Swoogle’s databases and crawlers. If we are happy with these machines, we plan to get several more to add to our rack in the machine room.

Friends of the Ebiquity group and readers of the Ebiquity blog are welcome join the LinkedIn networking group Friends of CSEE@UMBC.

Go to this URL to join the group:
https://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/896/6BE1922AFF24/

What Is LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is an online network of more than 4.2 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 130 industries.

When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your professional accomplishments. Your profile helps you find and be found by former colleagues, clients, and partners. You can add more connections by inviting trusted contacts to join LinkedIn and connect to you.

What Is LinkedIn for Group?

https://www.linkedin.com/static?key=groups_info

Gvisit.com offers a clever service that shows the locations of your web site’s recent visitors using Google Maps. After registering your site, you put a bit of javascript on each page you want to track. Your map shows the last 20 or 100 unique visitors, depending on whether you are using the free or paid version. Here’s the Ebiquity visitors map we did for EBWEB, our ebiquity site.

Google Maps EZ is a free resource for embedding a Google map on a web page without writing any Javascript or learning Google’s map API. It uses standard HTML syntax with a few special keywords in a way that allows search engines to index the map contents. I tried it out to make this custom map for visitors to UMBC. Please suggest some other places to put on the map. I can attest to it being easy. And fun.

I’ve been thinking of how we could use Flickr to publish our photos in a useful and interesting way. The ebiquity web site has, of course, it’s own facility, for uploading, storing and annotating photos (thanks Filip). But there are some advantages to using Flickr. Flickr is very popular so using it might increase our visibility and allow us to connect to more people. For example, searching Technorati for blog posts tagged with ‘pervasive computing’ shows the most recent public Flickr photos with that tag (if there were any!). Flickr also has some useful features like tags, notes, comments, groups, easy interface, etc. and is likely to continue to add innovations as the Web evolves.

Our Ebiquity photo site has some interesting, research oriented features like being able to add arbitrary annotations that are rendered and published as RDF. And, of course, we have complete control over it, allowing us to implement and experiment with new ideas for tagging, semantic web annotations, etc. It’s a valuable testbed, one that most people and groups don’t have.

So, can we have the best of both?

One idea is to use EBWEB as the primary source for our photos, but to add code to automatically upload new photos to the ebqiuity Flickr site. The code would also add appropriate titles, tags and comments and include in the comments a link to the OWL metadata. Flickr limits the HTML one can put in comments, so we can’t do anything fancy like embed rdf or use microformats.

But, maybe there are other ways we can use Flickr. If any ebsters (ebites?, ebiquiters?) want to play around with the ebiquity Flickr site, let me know and I’ll email you the site username and password.

We’ve upgraded EBB to WordPress 1.5.1.3. The posting interface is similar, but there are some changes. If you encounter any problems, email finin@umbc.edu. We’ve added text ads in an attempt to get rich. Or at least make enough money to keep the ebiquity lab’s coffee fund solvent. If anyone’s moral sense is greatly offended let me know. Coffee drinkers get two votes, btw.