Dang, I’m so busy with work I don’t have time to post much here these days, even though I feel another library lament coming on. Perhaps it’s best for all I don’t. Maybe I should do something that’s at least related to work; that way I can vaguely justify it. 🙂

Anyhow, here we go ;

Semantic technologies

Some might have noticed that I often diverge into very diverse topics on this blog, but lately I’ve made a decision; I’m falling apart and splitting it in two!

This blog, my main blog for over 10 years now (a crazy notion all by itself!) will stay pretty much as is in terms of technology (Topic Maps, REST, SOA, clustered and distributed systems, databases, software development, and so on) and its various adventures (mine or otherwise), but also keep the personal elements and especially all things library, and perhaps the odd science post as well.

The new blog – the Sheltered Objections – will focus on philosophy and religion, and will be mainly for talking about and critiquing related such topics. I felt the time was ripe to make that distinction a bit more clear, both as I have something to say in that arena (I’ve been a closet philosopher all my life, much to my friends chagrin) but also because I want to let people have a choice between two mostly separated worlds.

So, if you wanna follow me on adventures of the mind and of human definition, go there and subscribe. It’ll be fun, I promise.

Life is terribly busy, and there’s simply too many things to write and ponder about. Since my time is limited, I need to spend my lunch hours and some after time on it, and hence I’d like it this time to be about something you’d like to hear about. So, naturally, the best thing to do is to make a poll ;

Let me know what you think, and if your blog post isn’t on this (admittedly quickly put together) list, pop in a comment and let me know. Let’s give it until … um, Wednesday or so.

Hoo boy, just when you thought your tabs were cleared, you discover that yeah, sure, the tabs in your main browser window is gone, but you forgot about a) 4 other windows full of tabs themselves, and b) circumstances of the time bringing a flurry of interesting stuff you should put out there. So, I’m here to put out some more. I’ll try to classify them as I go along ;

Technology

A faster and more compact Set : For Java geeks and Topic Mappers alike, but mostly for those with both fetishes. And older post I stumbled upon once again and was meaning to look into. One day. Really soon now. Ish.

New Horizons : I’m a bit of an astronomy nerd, so what’s better than the combination of rockets, science and star trekking with the fastest ever made human object!

Open Mind Common Sense : A delightfully fuzzy Semantic Web project that Danny Ayers pointed me to. It’s ontologies with Social engineering. Great stuff!

Pegatron Tegra : Sexy little computer to chuck in the corner to do your digital bidding. Pure lust!

Climate change and politics

Think tanks, oil money and black ops : Where do all the climate change skeptics come from? You’d be surprised. Or not.

The Guardian responds : The English newspaper The Guardian had a series of investigational reports over the alleged scandal of the leaked email of the University of East Anglia, a series of reports they have been severely criticized for by the people involved, ranging from poor reporting to outright lying, pretty serious business for an otherwise respected and large newspaper. The Guardian has posted a reply (at the critics blog, no less). Do read the comments, though, as they are perhaps more important and interesting.

LeakGate : Scientists fight back : Tim Lambert, Aussie vegemite and all-round good-guy, follows up on the many distortions made by journalist Jonathan Leake of the Sunday Times over time, and he points us to this exclusive 31-page complaints letter by climate researcher Simon Lewis. Heady stuff! Will the Sunday Times respond in the same manner or at all as the Guardian above?

Health and fraud

Quack Miranda Warning : If you read this quite common warning on your medication or supplements, beware. And, a good introduction (reading the comments) on where this expression comes from.

Snake Oil : A beautiful infographic from Information is Beautiful, showing a vertical bubble-chart of peer-reviewed double-blind tests on various compounds and organics that you mostly find in supplements; what is proven to show any workings, and what is, essentially, snake oil. I love this one!

Religion and philosophy

Does God have a future? : You know, I’m really starting a man-crush on Sam Harris after this; what style and impeccable delivery, not to mention that he actually understand both the science and the philosophical implications of both. But Deepak Chopra? The opposite; he’s the biggest woo-meister of them all, arrogant and testy, wielding the power of fluffy words and interruption of others. People respect that? I’m shocked.

The God of the old testament : A rather famous quote (and a video of him reading it) by Richard Dawkins, here put in context of biblical quotes to underline what is being said.

Indian skeptic challenges guru to kill him on live TV : Well, kill him with Tantric Magic, as it were. A delightful trip down the staircase of the insanity of what humans think they can do and the brave (in this case Samal Edamaruku, the president of the Indian Rationalists Association)  that stays still and proves them terribly, humorously wrong. I giggled through most of this. There’s even a second part over here where the Tantric is doing the whole “terrible ritual under a full moon with a scepter with feathers and fearsome chanting, and you know, you should be really, really scared, why aren’t you dead already!? Just die, will you! Bugger.”

Supersessionism : Word of the day : “Supersessionism and replacement theology or fulfillment theology are Christian interpretations of New Testament claims“

Off kilter

Kirsten Flagstad : Arguably one of the absolute best opera singers there ever was. And, she was Norwegian. Did I mention I’m an opera-buff?

Ancient Literature : A long list of reasonably known ancient literature. Brilliant if you’re bored.

Circumference of the Earth and the Holocene geographical epoch : A link to the Wolfram-Alpha answer to the circumference of the Earth, and to a WikiPedia article on the Holocene. I’ll tell you all about why I’m reading up on this in another post in the future, but a hint is that you might see me doing some local embarrassing sciency stuff soon. I can’t wait.

Pruzy’s Pot : Uh, a somewhat gross unexplainable short-story of sorts. You just have to hear it, I guess. I will have nothing more to do with it.

Ok, let’s clear out the tabs on my browser ;

A host of mummies, a forest of secrets : “In the middle of a terrifying desert north of Tibet, Chinese archaeologists have excavated an extraordinary cemetery. Its inhabitants died almost 4,000 years ago, yet their bodies have been well preserved by the dry air.“

The trouble with trusting complex science : Another round of of talking about trusting science, specifically this time about climate change. I’m quite baffled that anyone can read the article and then at the bottom shout about conspiracies, it’s all bogus and lies. There’s only one side of this silly debate that’s got any evidence to back up their claim. Can you guess which one?

Right, so I’m still here, in the rubble of my mind, trying to work something out. I haven’t blogged in the last few weeks, because, again I’m lost to the infinite machine of just too bloody much to blog about. Some of these things are somewhat secret stuff, but a lot of it I should yell out for all to see, and I’m sure with a bit of patience and Macedonian Oil I just might.

But not now. “Now” is just a futuristic recap of things I’ve blogged about in the near future, using cheesy book titles ;

• The end is far, far away : Studies in Cosmology, thoughts on the flat universe model and evolutionary natural selection, and how timing is everything
• Ontology schmology bolony : Everything I know about ontologies, linked data and inference, and just what a bloody mess it all is (and the possible ways through it, as far as I can see)
• Library end-times : This is what they were, this is what they are, this is what they’ll become
• Evolution as a driver for moral philosophy : Philosophical greats had good questions that now makes for redundant answers
• Have you heard this?! : Science as a language of beauty, art and transcendence
• Functionally complete impotence : Programming languages that mean well, but are ugly, smells bad and won’t make you light up after having sex with it
• Atheism and agnosticism : A transsexual ploy to power (or, a Tale of two Ditties)
• Software : Sitting comfortably? How sitting in front of a computer makes you a terrible programmer
• Books I’ve read : The good stuff (and where to go next)
• Books I’ve read : Time I’ve wasted (and the reasons for it)
• Lingua Panga! : How language poisons everything (the big problems of humanity blamed on humans talking too much)

Right, so that should leave some clues as to where I am and where my mind is. My bedsite table is brimming over with books and notes, and I’ve got a few half-written articles (novels, is more like it) sitting around waiting for me to retire so I can bloody well finish them.

I also have some real articles in the oven, about service-oriented architecture (SOA) perils and solutions in a time of cloud hysteria, parallel processing mania and key-value minimalist thinking as a way to leverage, er, something or other. I’m sure it’ll be great once I figure out what I’m writing.

Oh, and it’s hot here now. We’ve been to the beach rather often, but being a dad of three crazy kids I don’t get to go in the water much, but I enjoy helping Sam dismantle the beach with a shovel and bucket. It’s also end-of-year stuff with school, Lilje playing in some musical number or two, and generally for Grace and Lilje to say goodbye to Minnamurra Primary as we’re moving them over to Shellharbour Anglican Collage next year following Julie’s new job there. We’re also moving houses in about 10 days (closer to the beach, so it must be good, although I’ll miss the close proximity to all my coffee-shops), so that’s going to be crazy time.

Ok, time to go and treat kids for head-lice which has rampaged through their school of late. And then, dinner. Wish me luck.

What are you talking about?

   We’re always talking about something, but have you wondered why we humans are so good at it? It’s not because we’re smart, that our brain has got some amazing capacity for language, or even that we’ve evolved a great sense of logic and inference so we can break sentences up into compartments, parse it and make some sense of it. No, it’s because we’ve got a tremendous imagination!

   And it seems that our frontal lobe is to blame; it is linked to a number of cognitively important things, like dreaming (preparing the brain for situations and trauma; did you know that no matter the trauma you will be over it [as in, able to move on] within 7 months?), Déjà vu (the frontal lobe is always a few milliseconds ahead of you), intuition (simulating possibilities, feeding you with probables), and in this context, filling in the gaps as best it can.

   And boy is it good at it. Remember that meme that was floating around some time ago, about how researchers have found that if you removed some of the letters from words in a text, the brain is still able to fill in the gaps so that you can make sense of it? The brain will fill in whatever gap there is, and this is also being heavily linked to religion and why people believe in rather bizarre things, from ghosts to conspiracies to “alternative medicine” (“You know what they call alternative medicine which is proven to work? Medicine.'” — Tim Minchin). But I’m not going to get into what they believe here, only how they believe in the same bizarre things as their peers.

   But first some background. My recent adventures in library-land is trying to get some traction on identity management, which I have tried to explain there for the last two or three years with little to no success. I’m not even sure why the library world – full of people who should know a thing or two about epistemology – don’t seem to grasp the basics of epistemology. (Maybe it’s another one of those gaps the brain fills in with rubbish?) How do we know that we’re talking about the same thing?

   If I have a book A in my collection and Bob has a book B in his collection, how can we determine if these two books share some common properties or, if we’re really lucky, is written by the same author, has the same title, and is the same edition, published by the same publisher? We’re trying to establish some form of identity. Now, we humans are good at this stuff because we’re all fuzzy and got this brain which fills in the gaps for us, but when we make systems of it we need other ways to denote identity.

   The library world has a setup which is based around the title and the author, so for example we get “Dune” by Frank Herbert (1920-1986), or if we are to cite it, something like this (from NLA’s catalog) ;

• APA Citation:  Herbert, Frank,  1972  Dune  Chilton Book Co., Philadelphia :
• MLA Citation:   Herbert, Frank,  Dune  Chilton Book Co., Philadelphia :  1972
• Australian Citation:  Herbert, Frank,  1972,  Dune  Chilton Book Co., Philadelphia :

   Never mind that when you look at the record itself it lists Herbert as “Herbert, Frank, 1920-” confusing a lot of automata by not knowing he died over 20 years ago. So we’ve got several ways of citing the book, several ways of denoting the author … what to do?


   The library world is doing a lot of match and merge (on human prose, no less!), where since you know that a lot of authors have died since their records were last updated, you can parse the author field and try to match “sub-fields” within it to match on that. However, this quickly becomes problematic ;

• Herbert, Frank (1920-)
• Herbert, Frank (1921-1986)
• Herbert, Francis (-1986)
• Herbert, Franklin (1920-)
• Herbert, Franklin Patrick Jr (1919-)
• Herbert, Francis (1030-)
• Herbert, Frank Morris (1920-)

   Which of these is the real Frank Herbert who wrote the book “Dune”? Four of them, actually. Now, if you’re a human you can do some searching and probably find out which ones they are, but if you’re a computer you have buckleys trying to figure these things out, no matter how well you parse and analyse the authors individual “sub-fields”. People make mistakes and enter imprecise or outright wrong information into the meta data (for a variety of reasons), so we need some other method that’s a bit better than this. However, do note that this is the way it’s currently being done. Add internationalization to the mix, and you’ll have loads of fun trying to make sense of your authority records, as they are called.

   Now, my book A just happened to be “Dune” by Frank Herbert, so I sent a mail to Bob with the following link and asked if that happened to be the same book ;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel)

   Did you notice what just happened? I used used an URI as an identifier for a subject. If you popped that URI into your browser, it will take you to WikiPedia’s article on the book and provide a lot of info there in human prose about this book, and this would make it rather easy for Bob to say that, yes indeed, that’s the same book I’ve got. So now we’ve got me and Bob agreeing that we have the same book.

   How can our computer systems do the same? They cannot read English, certainly not to any capacity to reason or infer the identity of the subject noted on that WikiPedia page. But here’s the thing; that URI is two things ;

1. A HTTP URI which a browser can resolve, will get a web page back for, and which it displays to a human to read.
2. A series of characters and letters in a string.

   It’s the second point which is interesting for us when computers need to find identity. It is a string that represents something. It isn’t the web page itself, just an identifier for that page, just a representation of a particular subject. This brings us back to epistemology, and more specifically representialism; we’ve created a symbol, a string of letters, that doesn’t need to be read or understood when the strings are put together, but simply a pattern, a shape, a symbol, an icon, a token, whatever. It’s not an URI anymore, but simply a token. And because it’s a string of characters, it’s easy to compare one token against the other. “http://bingo.com” and “http://bingo.com” have the same equivalence as “abc” and “abc”, that is, they are the same. Those symbols, those tokens, are equal.

   So now we can say that the URI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel) is simply a token and a URI at the same time. This is deliberate, and bloody brilliant at the same time; it means that we can compare a host of them for equality as well as being resolvable in case we want to have a look at what they are. This becomes a mechanism for both human understanding of what’s on the other end of the URI, and for doing computational comparisons.

   So are we to use an URI for each of the variations of Frank Herberts name? No, that would bring us back to square one. No, the idea is for sharing these URIs (but more on URIs for multiple names in a minute) in a reasonable fashion, but this is where it gets slightly complex because when you talk to Semantic Web people it’s all about established ontologies and shared data. When you talk to people, it’s all about resolvable URIs. But there’s a bit that’s missing ;

I love http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

   That’s a classic statement, but what am I saying? Do I love the Semantic Web (the subject), or do I love that web page article at WikiPedia explaining the Semantic Web (a resource)?

   Incidentally, my classic statement is known as a value statement in the RDF world, and as a triplet (because it’s got three parts, the three words / notions). Whenever we’re working with RDF, we’re working with URIs. Every single entity is translated into its URI form like such ;

I [https://shelter.nu/me.html]

love [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love#Interpersonal_love]

Semantic Web [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web]

   I need to talk a bit about namespaces at this point. If you’re not familiar with them, they’re basically a shorthand for mostly the first part of an URI, like a representation that can be reused, and then glued together by the means of the magical colon : character, so for example I have many things to say about me and my universe, which each will get translated into a URI ;

me [https://shelter.nu/me.html]

topic maps [https://shelter.nu/tm.html]

fields of interest [https://shelter.nu/foi.html]

blog [https://shelter.nu/]

Writing out the URI for each thing is tedious, and also is prone to errors, so what we do is to create a namespace as such ;

alex = https://shelter.nu/

Now we can use that namespace with a colon to write all those URIs in a faster, less error-prone way ;

me [alex:me.html] 

topic maps [alex:tm.html]

fields of interest [alex:foi.html]

blog [alex:blog]

   Karen Coyle (a voice of reason on the future of the library world)  recently “debated” with me on these things, and I pointed her to “Curing the web’s identity crisis“, an article by Steve Pepper (fellow Topic Mapper like me) which more people really should read and make an effort at understanding. Now I think there’s some confusion as to what is being explained (well, I never got a reply, so I don’t know, to be honest. It’s probably me. 🙂, and also to why we (us terrible representialists) keep bringing this up, but I’m kinda back to where I started in this blog post of trying to argue the case for creating identity of things through more layers than currently is being used.

   We (both RDF and Topic Maps) use URIs as tokens for identity. But in the RDF world there is no distinction between subject identity and resource identity, and I suspect this is where Karen’s confusion kicks in. In the Topic Maps world we make this distinction quite clear, in addition to the resource-specific identities as well (so URIs for internal Topic Map identity, external subject identity, and external resource identity), and this is vitally important to understand!

Let me examplify with how I would like to see future library cataloging being done ;

I have a resource of sorts at hand, it could be a book or a link or a CD or something. Doesn’t matter, but for the example it’s written by Frank Herbert, apparently, and is called “Dune Genesis.” It’s an eBook. I pop “Frank Herbert” into a textbox of sorts, the system automatically does some searching, and finds 5 URIs that match that name. One of those URIs are WikiPedia and another is The Library of Congress. That means LoC has verified that whatever explain the subject of “Frank Herbert” is at the URI at WikiPedia, and that there is a reasonable equality between the two; one WikiPedia page, one authority record at LoC. The other URIs more or less confirm it (and this speaks to trust and government) I choose to accept the LoC URI as a author subject URI. Nothing more needs to be entered, no dates, no names, no nothing. Just one URI.

   Now I pop the name “Dune Genesis” into by tool, and it does its magic, but it return only a WikiPedia URI, and because it’s tradition not to “trust” WikiPedia it means I have a “new” record I need to catalog. However, the WikiPedia URI contains RDFa, so my tool asks if I want to try and auto-populate meta data, and I choose yes. Fields gets populated, and I go over them, controlling that they are good, add some, edit some, delete some, and hit save.

   Two things now happen; the system automatically create an URI for me, a subject identity URI that if resolve will point to a page somewhere on our webserver with our meta data. That URI is fed back into whatever loop that tool uses for federated URIs, it could be library custom-made (see EATS below, or look to the brilliant www.subj3ct.com website for federated identity management) or something as simple as Google (for example, I use Ontopedia a lot, so if I do do “Alexander Johannesen Ontopedia“, I will get as a first result a page representing an URI I can use for talking about me). This creates a dual system of identity, one for the subject, one for the meta data about the book, both using the same URI.

   Do you dig it? Can you see it? Can you see the library world slowly using such a simple mechanism for totally ruling the meta data and identity management boulevard, or what? I pointed to Conal Tuohy‘s EATS system. Make him give it to you, collaborate to make this just work, open-source and make make it a tool for librarians to automatically create, use, harvest and share identities and resources using the same URIs, and you’ve got what you need.

   This is complex stuff, and I think I need a drink now. A nice hot tea will do, and I’ll try to clarify more in the coming days. Until then, ponder “what the heck you are talking about.“

I have to share this one with you. My grandfather, Hans Adolph Johannesen, fought during WWII as part of the Norwegian underground resistance to the German invasion, was captured and put in prison for many years (1 year at Grini, Norway, and 2.5 years in Germany, till the end of the war, with and befriended former prime minister of Norway Trygve Brattli). All of this many years before I was even born. But he shared the stories and the pain and the heroism. I recorded it, I interviewed him, I lived with him. And then he died, almost 10 years ago.

And right now all those emotions came washing over me, a thunderstorm, pouring rain, because I was silly enough to watch this amazing – in the true sense of the word! – artist retelling of such pain and memories, and in the least likely of all places ;

Ukrainian sand artist proves that reality TV’s got talent: “James Donaghy: Kseniya Simonova, the winner of Ukraine’s got talent, has become a YouTube phenomenon by telling stories through sand animation. Who needs Susan Boyle?“

Sorry everybody, but I’ve been attacked by spammers of late, and have had to switch moderation on, at least for now, but I’m terribly liberal and will approve every single message that talks badly of my, uh, bum. When things calm down again I’ll turn it off I’m sure, but I seriously wish Blogger.com had a better comments system (or even a better way to kill spam from an infected site; the current way is just absolute rubbish and painful!). Or maybe this is another sign from below to switch to WordPress which I’ve got a half-finished Topic Maps plugin for and integrates against my shiny new xSiteable Framework 3.0. Hmm.

Wow, what cool sequence of numbers is that?

03.06.09

And that’s today’s date, a very special day indeed. Expect me to meddle and go slow and enjoy family and friends, and I’ll see you all on the other side tomorrow. (And given my wife’s fantastic treatment I’d better start planning something seriously cool for 09.09.09. Suggestions welcome!)