Twitter is adding support for geotagging tweets to their API which will make Twitter a richer source of real-time news. The Twitter blog reports:

“Twitter platform developers have been doing innovative work with location for some time despite having access to only a rudimentary level of API support. Most of the location-based projects we see are built using the simple, account-level location field folks can fill out as part of their profile. Since anything can be written in this field, it’s interesting but not very dependable.

We’re gearing up to launch a new feature which makes Twitter truly location-aware. A new API will allow developers to add latitude and longitude to any tweet. Folks will need to activate this new feature by choice because it will be off by default and the exact location data won’t be stored for an extended period of time. However, if people do opt-in to sharing location on a tweet-by-tweet basis, compelling context will be added to each burst of information.”

This opens up lots of interesting opportunities but there is still room for geotagging from conent. There are more than one relationship between a Tweet (or any utterance) and a location. They include both were the tweeter was when it was issued but also the location of the event or object that’s the tweet’s subject.

For example, the Baltimore police use twitter to inform the press and public about about significant crimes, major traffic problems and other events. There are 10-15 tweets a day in this stream, all sent by an officer in the BPD Public Affairs department. The majority of the tweets mention a location (e.g., “Shooting on Lafayette Ave, Suspect in Police custody, handgun recovered.”) but are, I assume, sent from Public Affairs office. Baltimore city covers a large area, more than 80 square miles. Many residents or reporters will be interested only in events in or effecting the neighborhoods where they live, work or pass through when commuting.

I also wonder if there are more opportunities for Twitter to add semantic metadata to Tweets via their API.

See also: Bits Blog, O’Reilly.

Maybe WebFinger will succeed where others have failed. At what? At providing a simple handle for a person that can be easily used to get basic information that the person wants to make available. The WebFinger proposal is to use an email address as the handle.

WebFinger, aka Personal Web Discovery. i.e. We’re bringing back the finger protocol, but using HTTP this time.

Techcrunch has a post on this, Google Points At WebFinger. Your Gmail Address Could Soon Be Your ID with some background.

There’s some excitement around the web today among a certain group of high profile techies. What are they so excited about? Something called WebFinger, and the fact that Google is apparently getting serious about supporting it. So what is it?

It’s an extension of something called the “finger protocol” that was used in the earlier days of the web to identify people by their email addresses. As the web expanded, the finger protocol faded out, but the idea of needing a unified way to identify yourself has not. That’s why you keep hearing about OpenID and the like all the time.

The current focus of the WebFinger group is on developing the spec for accessing a user’s metadata given their handle. Using RDF and the FOAF vocabulary should be a no-brainer for representing the metadata.

How I Explained REST to My Wife popped up on Hacker News today. While the way Ryan Tomayko frames his description of http protocols stikes many (invcluding me) as sexist, it’s well written and illuminating.

What hit me like a two-by-four up side the head was his characterization of URIs as being like “GPS coordinates for knowledge and information”. Great analogy!

He’s not really talking about the Semantic Web, but he ought to be. I think we should steal borrow his analogy and use it in explaining the central role URIs play for us.

The Ninth International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2010) will be held 7-11 November 2010 in Shanghai China. The conference events will take place at the Shanghai International Convention Center (map).

The ISWC 2010 organizers include general chair Ian Horrocks, program committee chairs Peter F. Patel-Schneider and Yue Pan, local chair Yong Yu and local organization committee members Dingyi Han, Gui-Rong Xue, Haofen Wang and Lei Zhang.

John Markoff has an article for tomorrow’s New York Times, Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man on a recent AAAI study on the future of AI.

“A robot that can open doors and find electrical outlets to recharge itself. Computer viruses that no one can stop. Predator drones, which, though still controlled remotely by humans, come close to a machine that can kill autonomously. Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone.”

The study was commissioned by AAAI to “to explore and address potential long-term societal influences of AI research and development”. Look for a report published by AAAI later this year. The study involved twenty-five participants who were divided into three subgroups: on concerns, control and guidelines, the nature and timing of disruptive advances, and ethical and legal issues.

There was a panel session earlier this month at IJCAI where some of the study participants discussed highlights from the study. Hopefully this was filmed and the results will be added to the videolectures.net IJCAI09 collection.

While I am generally skeptical of an impending technological singularity, which seems to sum up many of the concerns some have, there are aspects of the future that I do wonder about. At the top of my list is what will happen when virtually all of human knowledge is published on the Web (as it nearly is now) in a for that machines can understand. I’m pretty sure that this will happen in the next decade or two, either through the current Semantic Web approach (as a web of data) or by gradually improving techniques for machine understanding of human languages and images.

Yong Yu and Rudi Studer are editing a special issue of the Journal of Web Semantics on Semantic Search that will appear in the summer 2010. Papers are due 20 January 2010 and decisions will will be sent two months later. Relevant topics include:

• Information retrieval tasks on the Semantic Web
• Incentives and interaction paradigms for resource annotation
• Interaction paradigms for semantic search
• Semantic technologies for query interpretation, refinement and routing
• Modeling expressive resource descriptions
• natural language processing and information extractions for the acquisition of resource descriptions
• Scalable repositories and infrastructures for semantic search
• Crawling, storing and indexing of expressive resource descriptions
• fusion of semantic search results on the Semantic Web
• Algorithms for matching expressive queries and resource descriptions
• Algorithms and procedure to deal with vagueness, incompleteness and inconsistencies in semantic search
• Evaluation methodologies for semantic search
• Standard datasets and benchmarks for semantic search

See the full call for papers for more information.

Here’s a great graphic on the rise and fall of memes in the news from KDD 2009 paper, Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle by Leskovec, Backstrom and Kleinberg. Click on the image to see a larger version.

Here’s the paper’s abstract.

“Tracking new topics, ideas, and “memes” across the Web has been an issue of considerable interest. Recent work has developed methods for tracking topic shifts over long time scales, as well as abrupt spikes in the appearance of particular named entities. However, these approaches are less well suited to the identification of content that spreads widely and then fades over time scales on the order of days —the time scale at which we perceive news and events. We develop a framework for tracking short, distinctive phrases that travel relatively intact through on-line text; developing scalable algorithms for clustering textual variants of such phrases, we identify a broad class of memes that exhibit wide spread and rich variation on a daily basis. As our principal domain of study, we show how such a meme-tracking approach can provide a coherent representation of the news cycle—the daily rhythms in the news media that have long been the subject of qualitative interpretation but have never been captured accurately enough to permit actual quantitative analysis. We tracked 1.6 million mainstream media sites and blogs over a period of three months with the total of 90 million articles and we find a set of novel and persistent temporal patterns in the news cycle. In particular, we observe a typical lag of 2.5 hours between the peaks of attention to a phrase in the news media and in blogs respectively, with divergent behavior around the overall peak and a “heartbeat”-like pattern in the handoff between news and blogs. We also develop and analyze a mathematical model for the kinds of temporal variation that the system exhibits.”

(via the NYT)

The perfect document preparation system has yet to be invented, and I’ve tried many over the years, starting with TJ6. It’s surely impossible for any one system to be best, given the range of documents most of us have to produce: letters, memos, resumes, scientic papers, dissertations, books, etc. Microsoft Word is great for many of these, but like many, I’ve concluded that LaTeX is still the best for academic papers or large, complex documents. I think this graph attributed to Marko Pinteric says it elegantly.

That LaTeX is so widely used is remarkable, given that it has been more that 25 years since it was first released and it was based on the somewhat arcane Tex. But LaTeX has its problems too, and one of them is remembering all of the commands to generate the many symbols that we like to use to make out papers seem more profound.

Detexify is a neat Web service that lets you draw a mathematical symbol with your mouse, interprets the result, and shows you what LaTeX command to use to generate it.

It works pretty well! You can look at the source code — mostly in ruby — on github and contribute. Or you can volunteer to help train the system on new symbols.

(via Hacker News)

Semantics for the Rest of Us: Variants of Semantic Web Languages in the Real World is a workshop that will be held at the on 26 October 2009 in Washington, DC.

We seek two kinds of submissions: full papers up to ten pages long and position papers up to five pages long. Format papers according the ISWC 2009 instructions. Accepted papers will be presented at the workshop and be part of the workshop proceedings.

Organizers:

• Lalana Kagal, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Ora Lassila, Nokia
• Tim Finin, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

The latest Journal Citation Reports (2009) published by Thomson Reuters shows that the Journal of Web Semantics continues to enjoy a very high impact factor. The 2008 measure was 3.023, which was the 12th highest out of the 94 journals in the category of Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence.

Thomson Reuter’s journal impact factor is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. The 2008 impact factor is computed as the citations received in 2008 to all articles published in 2006 and 2007, divided by the number of “source items” published in 2006 and 2007.

The US National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA) plan to contribute funds to support participation by full-time students in 2009 International Semantic Web Conference. SWSA and NSF anticipate providing 10,000€ and $20,000 respectively, with NSF funds being earmarked to support students enrolled at U.S. Universities. We anticipate that the SWSA funds will support 15 awards of 600-800€, and that the NSF funds will support 13 awards of approximately $1500.

Confirmation of the funding, as well as details on how to apply will be available on the ISWC 2009 Web site.

Last year’s student fellows made significant contributions to the conference, and we look forward to this year’s fellows being similarly engaged. In selecting applications for travel support, preference will be given to students selected to participate in the doctoral consortium, followed by students who are first author on a paper accepted at the conference, followed by students who have other authorship on a conference or workshop paper.

Applications are due August 21, with notification of success by September 7.

Direct questions to iswc09_fellowships@cs.umbc.edu.

ComputerWorld has an article on the “nosql” movement and a recent nosql meetup held in San Francisco, No to SQL? Anti-database movement gains steam. Nosql systems are distributed, non-relational data stores that typically use a simple key-value approach to indexing and retrieving data and use a simple procedural query API rather than a sophisticated declarative query language.

“The inaugural get-together of the burgeoning NoSQL community crammed 150 attendees into a meeting room at CBS Interactive. Like the Patriots, who rebelled against Britain’s heavy taxes, NoSQLers came to share how they had overthrown the tyranny of slow, expensive relational databases in favor of more efficient and cheaper ways of managing data.

“Relational databases give you too much. They force you to twist your object data to fit a RDBMS [relational database management system],” said Jon Travis, principal engineer at Java toolmaker SpringSource, one of the 10 presenters at the NoSQL confab (PDF). NoSQL-based alternatives “just give you what you need,” Travis said.”

There were presentation on nine different ‘nosql’ databases: Voldemort, Cassandra, Dynomite, HBase, Hypertable, CouchDB, VPork, MongoDb as well as general presentations by Google’s Jonas Karlsson, and Cloudera’s Todd Lipcon.

Johan Oskarsson of Last.fm wrote a debriefing post on his blog.

“The relatively young but rapidly growing “nosql” community met last Thursday in San Francisco. The idea was to give attendees a solid introduction to how distributed, non relational databases work as well as an overview of the various projects out there.”

and provides links to the presentation slides and videos. You can also search for NOSQL on Vimeo to get the videos.

I learned of this meeting on Hacker News, where you can find some interesting comments.

Of course their are many popular key-value stores that are not designed to support the highly-scalable distributed needs of many Web applications. I found, for example, that as a persistent RDF store for rdflib, Sleepycat out performed MySQL.