Turing Award to Bengio, LeCun, and Hinton

Congratulations to Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun, and Geoffrey Hinton on being awarded the Turing Award, the most prestigious award in Computer Science.

Their work had revolutionized huge parts of computer science as it is used in research and industry, and has lead to the current impressive results in AI and ML. They were continuing to work on an area that was deemed unpromising, and has suddenly swept through whole industries and reshaped them.

• ACM Turing Award 2018

Something Positive in Deutsch wieder online

2005 und 2006 übersetzten Ralf Baumgartner und ich die ersten paar Something Positive comics von R. K. Milholland ins Deutsche. Die 80 Comics, die wir damals übersetzt haben, sind hiermit wieder online. Wir haben noch vier weitere Comics übersetzt, die in den nächsten Tagen auch nach und nach online kommen werden.

Viel Spass! Oh, und die Comics sind für Erwachsene.

• Something Positive auf Deutsch

DSA Erfolgswahrscheinlichkeiten

Ich fand es immer spannend, auszurechnen, wie hoch die Wahrscheinlichkeit ist, dass eine Talentprobe in DSA gelingt oder nicht. Ich konnte über die Jahre hinweg keine vernünftige, geschlossene Formel finden, und so blieb ich immer bei Überschlagsrechnungen. Dabei visualisierte ich mir im Kopf die drei Würfelwürfe als die drei Dimensionen eines Raumes, in dem ein Teil des Raumes gelungene Proben und der Rest des Raumes misslungene Proben darstellt.

Ich dachte lange darüber nach, dass es interessant ware, diesen Raum tatsächlich zu visualisieren. 2010 musste ich während eines Forschungsaufenthalts in Los Angeles ein paar Webtechniken erlernen - HTML Canvas, jQuery, Blueprint, etc. - und am besten lerne ich, indem ich ein kleines Projekt mache. Also nutzte ich diese Gelegenheit. Damals war DSA4 aktuell, und entsprechend machte ich das Projekt für die Regeln von DSA4.

2017 überarbeitete Hanno Müller-Kalthoff die Visualisierung und passte sie an die neuen Regeln von DSA5 an. Hier sind Links für beide Seiten und eine DSA5 App:

• Erfolgswahrscheinlichkeit bei DSA4 Talentproben
• Erfolgswahrscheinlichkeit bei DSA5 Talentproben
• Android App für DSA5 Wahrscheinlichkeiten

A bitter, better lesson

Rich Sutton is expressing some frustration in his short essay on computation and simple methods beating smart methods again and again.

• A bitter lesson

Rodney Brooks answers with great arguments on why this is not really the case, and how we're just hiding human ingenuity and smartness better.

• A better lesson

They're both mostly right, and it was interesting to read the arguments on both sides. And yet, not really new - it's mostly rehashing the arguments from The unreasonable effectiveness of data by Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, and Fernando Pereira ten years ago. But nicely updated and much shorter. So worth a read!

Wikipedia demonstriert

Eine Reihe von Wikipedien (Deutsch, Dänisch, Estnisch, Tschechisch) tragen heute schwarz um schlecht gemachte Gesetzesänderungen zu verhindern. Ich bin stolz auf die Freiwilligen der Wikipedien, die das organisiert bekommen haben.

• Deutsche Wikipedia

Spring cleaning

Going through my old online presence and cleaning it up is really a trip down memory lane. I am also happy that most - although not all - of the old demos still work. This is going to be fun to release it all again.

Today I discovered that we had four more German translations of Something Positive that we never published. So that's another thing that I am going to publish soon, yay!

Prediction coming true

I saw my post from seven years ago, where I said that I really like Facebook and Google+, but I want a space where I have more control about my content so it doesn't just disappear. "Facebook and Google+ -- maybe they won't disappear in a year. But what about ten?"

And there we go, Google+ is closing in a few days.

I downloaded my data from there (as well as my data from Facebook and Twitter), to see if there is anything to be salvaged from that, but I doubt it.

Restarting, 2019 edition

I had neglected Simia for too long - there were five entries in the last decade. A combination of events lead me to pour some effort back into it - and so I want to use this chance to restart it, once again.

Until this weekend, Simia was still running on a 2007 version of Semantic MediaWiki and MediaWiki - which probably helped with Simia getting hacked a year or two ago. Now it is up to date with a current version, and I am trying to consolidate what is already there with some content I had created in other places.

Also, life has been happening. If you have been following me on Facebook (that link only works if you're logged in), you have probably seen some of that. I married, got a child, changed jobs, and moved. I will certainly catch up on this too, but there is no point in doing that all in one huge mega-post. Given that I am thinking about starting a new project just these days, this might be the perfect outlet to accompany that.

I make no promises with regards to the quality of Simia, or the frequency of entries. What I would really love recreate would be a space that is as interesting and fun for as my Facebook wall was, before I stopped engaging there earlier this year - but since you cannot even create comments here, I have to figure out how to make this even remotely possible. For now, suggestions on Twitter or Facebook are welcome. And no, moving to WordPress or another platform is hardly an option, as I really want to stay with Semantic MediaWiki - but pointers to interesting MediaWiki extensions are definitely welcome!

Stars in our eyes

I grew up in a suburban, almost rural area in southern Germany, and I remember the hundreds, if not thousands of stars I could see at night. In the summers, that I spent on an island in Croatia, it was even more marvelous, and the dark night sky was breathtaking.

As I grew up, the stars dimmed, and I saw fewer and fewer of those, until only the brightest stars were visible. It was blindingly obvious that air and light pollution have swallowed that every-night miracle and confined it to my memory only.

Until in my late twenties I finally accepted and got glasses. Now the stars are back, as beautiful and brilliant as they have ever been.

Croatian Elections 2016

Croatian elections are upcoming.

The number of Croatians living abroad - in the so called Croatian diaspora - is estimated to be almost 4 Million according to the Croatian state office for Croatians abroad - only little less than the 4.3 Million who live in Croatia. The estimates vary wildly, and most of them actually do not have Croatian citizenship. But it is estimated that between 9-10% of holders of the Croatian citizenship live abroad.

These 9-10% are represented in the Croatian parliament: out of the 151 Members of Parliament, there are 3 (three) voted by the diaspora. That's 2% of the parliament representing 10% of the population.

In order for a member of the diaspora to vote, they have to register well before the election with their nearest diplomatic mission or consulate. The registration deadline is today, at least for my consulate. But for the election itself, you have to personally appear and vote at the consulate. For me, that would mean to drive or fly all the way to Los Angeles from San Francisco. And I am rather close to one of the 9 consulates in the US. There are countries that do not have Croatian embassies at all. Want to vote? Better apply for a travel visa to the country with the next embassy. Live in Nigeria? Have a trip to Libya or South Africa. There is no way to vote per mail or - ohwow21stcentury? - electronically. For one of the three Members of Parliament that represent us.

I don't really feel like the parliament wants us to vote. Making the vote mean so little and making it so hard to vote.

Gödel and physics

"A logical paradox at the heart of mathematics and computer science turns out to have implications for the real world, making a basic question about matter fundamentally unanswerable."

I just love this sentence, published in "Nature". It raises (and somehow exposes the author's intuition about) one of the deepest questions in science: how are mathematics, logic, computer science, i.e. the formal sciences, on the one side, and the "real world" on the other side, related? What is the connection between math and reality? The author seems genuinely surprised that logic has "implications for the real world" (never mind that "implication" is a logical term), and seems to struggle with the idea that a counter-intuitive theorem by Gödel, which has been studied and scrutinized for 85 years, would also apply to equations in physics.

Unfortunately the fundamental question does not really get tackled: the work described here, as fascinating as it is, was an intentional, many year effort to find a place in the mathematical models used in physics where Gödel can be applied. They are not really discussing the relation between maths and reality, but between pure mathematics and mathematics applied in physics. The original deep question remains unsolved and will befuddle students of math and the natural sciences for the next coming years, and probably decades (besides Stephen Wolfram, who beieves to have it all solved in NKS, but that's another story).

Nature: Paradox at the heart of mathematics makes physics problem unanswerable

Phys.org: Quantum physics problem proved unsolvable: Godel and Turing enter quantum physics

AI is coming, and it will be boring

I was asked about my opinion on this topic, and I thought I would have some profound thoughts on this. But I ended up rambling, and this post doesn’t really make any single strong point. tl;dr: Don’t worry about AI killing all humans. It’s not likely to happen.

In an interview with the BBC, Stephen Hawking stated that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race”. Whereas this is hard to deny, it is rather trivial: any sufficiently powerful tool could potentially spell the end of the human race given a person who knows how to use that tool in order to achieve such a goal. There are far more dangerous developments - for example, global climate change, the arsenal of nuclear weapons, or an economic system that continues to sharpen inequality and social tension?

AI will be a very powerful tool. Like every powerful tool, it will be highly disruptive. Jobs and whole industries will be destroyed, and a few others will be created. Just as electricity, the car, penicillin, or the internet, AI will profoundly change your everyday life, the global economy, and everything in between. If you want to discuss consequences of AI, here are a few that are more realistic than human extermination: what will happen if AI makes many jobs obsolete? How do we ensure that AIs make choices compliant with our ethical understanding? How to define the idea of privacy in a world where your car is observing you? What does it mean to be human if your toaster is more intelligent than you?

The development of AI will be gradual, and so will the changes in our lifes. And as AI keeps developing, things once considered magical will become boring. A watch you could talk to was powered by magic in Disney’s 1991 classic “The Beauty and the Beast”, and 23 years later you can buy one for less than a hundred dollars. A self-driving car was the protagonist of the 80s TV show “Knight Rider”, and thirty years later they are driving on the streets of California. A system that checks if a bird is in a picture was considered a five-year research task in September 2014, and less than two months later Google announces a system that can provide captions for pictures - including birds. And these things will become boring in a few years, if not months. We will have to remind ourselves how awesome it is to have a computer in our pocket that is more powerful than the one that got Apollo to the moon and back. That we can make a video of our children playing and send it instantaneously to our parents on another continent. That we can search for any text in almost any book ever written. Technology is like that. What’s exciting today, will become boring tomorrow. So will AI.

In the next few years, you will have access to systems that will gradually become capable to answer more and more of your questions. That will offer advice and guidance towards helping you navigate your life towards the goal you tell it. That will be able to sift through text and data and start to draw novel conclusions. They will become increasingly intelligent. And there are two major scenarios that people are afraid of at this point:

1. That the system will become conscious and develop their own intentions and their own will, and they will want to destroy humanity: the Skynet scenario from the Terminator movies.
2. That the system might get a task, and figure out a novel solution for the task which unfortunately wipes out humanity. This is the paperclip scenario— an AI gets the task to create paperclips, and kills all humans by doing so — , which has not yet been turned into a blockbuster.

The Skynet scenario is just mythos. There is no indication that raw intelligence is sufficient to create intrinsic intention or will.

The paperclip scenario is more realistic. And once we get closer to systems with such power, we will need to put the right safeguards in place. The good news is that we will have plenty of AIs at our disposal to help us with that. The bad news is that discussing such scenarios now is premature: we simply don’t know how these systems will look like. That’s like starting a committee a hundred years ago to discuss the danger coming from novel weaponry: no one in 1914 could have predicted nuclear weapons and their risks. It is unlikely that the results of such a committee would have provided much relevant ethical guidance for the Manhattan project three decades later. Why should that be any different today?

In summary: there are plenty of consequences of the development of AI that warrant intensive discussion (economical consequences, ethical decisions made by AIs, etc.), but it is unlikely that they will bring the end of humanity.

Further reading

• Jaron Lanier on the dangers of the Myth of AI, with answers from Steven Pinker, George Dyson, Stuart Russel, Rodney Brooks and others
• Elon Musk warns about AI (Guardian article)
• Bill Joy on why the future does not need us
• Oren Etzioni on why he is not afraid of AI
• Ethics of AI on Wikipedia

Published originally on Medium on December 14, 2014

Start the website again

This is no blog anymore. I haven't had entries for years, and even before then sporadically. This is a wiki, but somehow it is not that either. Currently you cannot make comments. Updating the software is a pain in the ass. But I like to have a site where I can publish again. Switch to another CMS? Maybe one day. But I like Semantic MediaWiki. So what will I do? I do not know. But I know I will slowly refresh this page again. Somehow.

A new part of my life is starting soon. And I want to have a platform to talk about it. And as much as I like Facebook or Google+, I like to have some form of control over this platform. Facebook and Google+ -- maybe they won't disappear in a year. But what about ten? Twenty? Fifty years? I'll still be around (I hope), but they might not...

Let's see what will happen here. For now, I republished the retelling of a day as a story I first published on Google+ (My day in Jerusalem) and a poem that feels eerily relevant whenever I think about it (Wenn ich wollte)

Popculture in logics

1. You ⊑ ∀need.Love (Lennon, 1967)
2. ⊥ ≣ compare.You (Nelson, 1985)
3. Cowboy ⊑ ∃sing.SadSadSong (Michaels, 1988)
4. ∀t : I ⊑ love.You (Parton, 1973)
5. ∄better.Time ⊓ ∄better­­­­­­­⁻¹.Time (Dickens, 1859)
6. {god} ⊑ Human ⊨ ? (Bazilian, 1995)
7. Bad(X)? (Jackson, 1987)
8. ⃟(You ⊑ save.I) (Gallagher, 1995)
9. Dreamer(i). ∃x : Dreamer(x) ∧ (x ≠ i). ⃟ ∃t: Dreamer(you). (Lennon, 1971)
10. Spoon ⊑ ⊥ (Wachowski, 1999)
11. ¬Cry ← ¬Woman (Marley, 1974)
12. ∄t (Poe, 1845)

Solutions: Turn around your monitor to read them.

My horoscope for today

Here's my horoscope for today:

You may be overly concerned with how your current job prevents you from reaching your long-term goals. The Sun's entry into your 9th House of Big Ideas can work against your efficiency by distracting you with philosophical discussions about the purpose of life. These conversations may be fun, but they should be kept to a minimum until you finish your work.

(from Tarot.com via iGoogle)

How the heck did they know??

England eagerly lacking cofidence

My Google Alerts just send me the following news alert about Croatia. At least the reporters checked all their sources :)

England players lacking confidence against Croatia International Herald Tribune - France AP ZAGREB, Croatia: England's players confessed to a lack of confidence when they took on football's No. 186-ranked nation in their opening World Cup ...

England eager to break Croatia run Reuters UK - UK By Igor Ilic ZAGREB (Reuters) - England hope to put behind their gloomy recent experiences against Croatia when they travel to Zagreb on Wednesday for an ...

Beating the Second Law

Yihon Ding has an interesting blogpost taking analogies to the laws of thermodynamics and why this means trouble for the Semantic Web.

I disagree in one aspect: I think it is possible to invest the amount of human power to the system and to still keep it going. I can't nail it down exactly -- I didn't read "Programming the Universe" yet, so I can't really discuss it, but the feeling goes along the following lines: the value of a network increases superlinearly, if not even quadratic (Metcalfe's Law), whereas the amount of information increases sublinearly (due to redundancies in human knowledge). Or, put it in another way: get more people and Wikipedia or Linux gets better, because they have a constrained scope. The more you constrain the scope the more value is added by more people.

This is an oversimplification.

Blogging from an E90

After pondering it for far too long, I finally got a new mobile phone: a Nokia E90. It is pretty big and heavy, but I don't mind really. I am looking at it as a light-weight laptop replacement. But I am not sure I will learn to love the keyboard, really. Experimenting.

But since it has a full keyboard, programming in Python is indeed an option. I had Python on my previous phone too, but heck, T9 is not cool to type code.

One world. One web.

I am in Beijing at the opening of the WWW2008 conference. Like all WWWs I was before, it is amazing. The opening ceremony was preceded by a beautiful dance, combining tons of symbols. First a woman in a traditional Chinese dress, then eight dancers in astronaut uniforms, a big red flag with "Welcome to Beijing" on it (but not on the other side, when he came back), and then all of them together... beautiful.

Boris Motik's paper is a best paper candidate! Yay! Congratulations.

I rather listen to the keynote now :)

Blogging from my XO One.

Certificate of Coolness

Now that the Cool URIs for the Semantic Web note by Richard and Leo have been published -- congratulation guys! -- I am sure looking forward if anyone will create a nice badge and a procedure to get official Certificates of Coolness. Pretty please?

On a different note: I know, I should have blogged from New Zealand. It sure was beautiful Maybe I will still blog about it a bit later. My sister has blogged extensively, and also made a few great pictures, take a look over there if you're interested.

Coming to New Zealand

Yes! Three weeks of vacation in New Zealand, which is rumoured to be quite a beauty. This also means: three weeks no work, no projects, no thesis, no Semantic We...

Oh, almost. Actually I will enjoy to have the opportunity to give a talk on Semantic Wikipedia while staying in Auckland. If you're around, you may want to come by.

It is on February 22nd, 1pm-2pm at the AUT. You may want to tell Dave Parry that you're coming, he is my host.

Looking forward to this trip a lot!

Charlie Wilson's War

Ein einfacher Kongressmann (Tom Hanks). Eine sehr rechte reiche Texanering (Julia Roberts). Ein äußerst guter CIA Agent (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Und Sowjets die in Afghanistan einmarschieren, im Kalten Krieg. Amerika muss sich wehren, auch am Hindukusch!

Der Film behandelt den afghanischen Krieg (den aus den 1980er Jahren), und es geht um sehr ernste Themen. Zudem beruht er auf wahren Ereignissen. Dennoch verpackt er es in abstrusen Witz, liefert uns charmante Antihelden, und deutet schließlich auch an, wie es zum nächsten Afghanistankrieg kommen konnte (den aus den 2000er Jahren), doch ist das kaum das Thema in diesem Film.

Wie bereits Hunting Party ein Film, der doch sensibel mit jenen Wahrheiten umgeht, für die er eintritt, und mit umso derberen Humor und Aufklärung die Missstände anprangert. Ein besonderer Spagat gelingt dem Film da er die Aufteilung des politischen Spektrums in rechts und links nicht einfach mit Böse und Gut gleichsetzt, wie es etwa Michael Moore gerne macht, sondern ähnlich wie Team America nach beiden Seiten austeilt -- Lob, wie auch Kritik.

Wir sahen den Film gestern in der Sneak, leider in der Originalversion -- insbesondere die Texanischen Dialekte waren echt schwer zu verstehen, weswegen wohl der eine oder andere Gag verloren ging. Ich hoffe ihn dann auch in der deutschen Synchro zu sehen.

Charlie Wilson's War (Der Krieg des Charlie Wilson) läuft in Deutschland am 7. Februar 2008 in den Kinos an.

Bewertung: 4 von 5

• Wikipedia  
• imdb
• Offizielle Website

• Trailer bei Apple

7 Jahre

Heute sind es genau sieben Jahre, dass ich diese Website eröffnet habe. Und heute wird sie umbenannt! In den letzten Wochen stellte ich die Software vollständig auf Semantic MediaWiki um, welches es mir deutlich einfacher erlaubt, die Seite zu pflegen als jemals zuvor.

In den nächsten Wochen will ich langsam, aber sicher, die alten Inhalte, die seit einem Hacker-Angriff auf Nodix verschwunden sind, wieder hochladen.

Eine wichtige Änderung gibt es freilich (nicht die Hintergrundfarbe, die ist geblieben): der Name der Website wurde geändert. Kein Nodix mehr, ab jetzt heißt die Seite Simia. Und ihr werdet merken, viele der Seiten sind Englisch, andere Deutsch. Einfach auch, weil inzwischen vieles von dem was ich mache, Englisch ist. Ich hoffe, dass das nicht abschreckt. Es sind ja dennoch noch viele Deutschsprachige Inhalte vorhanden.

Und was leider noch nicht funktioniert, ist das Kommentieren, sorry. Das heißt, vorübergehend ist das nur per Email möglich. Ich arbeite dran.

Kindheitsträume wahr werden lassen

Randy Pausch ist Professor für User Interfaces and der CMU, einer der bekanntesten Universitäten der USA. Im September 2006 wurde bei ihm Bauchspeicheldrüsenkrebs diagnostiziert. Seitdem kämpft er um jeden Tag.

In der Vortragsreihe Journeys (Reisen) der CMU, welche Randy mit seinem Vortrag eröffnete, sollen die Vortragenden sich überlegen, was sie den Zuhörern sagen würden, wenn dies ihre letzte Gelegenheit für einen Vortrag wäre. Ihr Erbe, sozusagen.

Der Vortrag -- auch wenn er knappe anderthalb Stunden dauert -- stellt flott und unterhaltend Randys Kindheitsträume vor, und wie sie wahr geworden sind, oder nicht. Er erzählt viele Anekdoten, und fasst wichtige Weisheiten zusammen.

Das Video des Vortrags, mit Untertiteln in Deutsch oder Englisch, ist bei Google Video erhältlich. Sehenswert.

Darjeeling Limited

Wunderschöner Film. Auch wenn der Sympatexter offenbar nicht allzu begeistert war, mir gefiel er sehr. Wem Wes Andersons andere Filme gefallen haben (insbesondere The Royal Tenenbaums und The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), der wird sich auch an Darjeling Limited sehr freuen.

Der Film ist farbenfroh, hat einen witzigen Soundtrack, unzählige skurrile Situationen, und hin und wieder auch sehr tiefer Stoff zum Nachdenken. Anderson setzt seine Schauspieler hervorragend in Szene, verzaubert mit den wunderbaren Macken der drei Brüder, und lässt einen mit der Gewissheit wieder aus dem Kino gehen, dass die eigene Familie gar nicht so verrückt ist, wie man immer angenommen hat. Die drei Brüder auf dem Weg durch Indien können erst sich selbst finden, wenn sie zueinander gefunden haben -- und das ist erst möglich, nachdem sie mit dem Gesicht nach vorne auf ein echtes Schicksal treffen.

Bewertung: 5 von 5

• Wikipedia  
• imdb
• Offizielle Website

• Trailer bei YouTube

Social Web and Knowledge Management

Obviously, the social web is coming. And it's also coming to this year's WWW conference in Beijing!

I find this topic very interesting. The SWKM picks up the theme of last year's very successful CKC2007 workshop, also at the WWW, where we aimed at allowing the collaborative knowledge construction. The SWKM is a bit broader, since it is not just about knowledge construction, but about the whole topic of knowledge management, and how the web changes everything.

If you are interested in the social web, or the semantic web, or specifically about the intersection of these two, and how it can be applied for knowledge management within or without an organisation, you will like the SWKM workshop at the WWW2008. You can submit papers until January 21st, 2008. All information can be found at the Social Web and Knowledge management workshop website.

Semantic MediaWiki 1.0 released

After about two years of development and already with installations all over the world, we are very happy to announce the release of Version 1.0 of Semantic MediaWiki, and thus the first stable version. No alpha, no beta, it's out now, and we think you can use it productively. Markus managed to release it in 2007 (on the last day of the year), and it has moved far beyond what 0.7 was, in stability, features, and performance. The biggest change is a completely new ask syntax, much more powerful since it works much smoother with MediaWiki's other systems like the parser functions, and we keep constantly baffling ourselves about what is possible with the new system.

We have finally reached a point where we can say, OK, let's go for massive user testing. We want big and heavy used installations to test our system. We are fully aware that the full power of the queries can easily kill an installation, but there are many ways to tweak performance and expressivity. We are now highly interested in performance reports, and then moving towards our actual goal, Wikipedia.

A lot has changed. You can find a full list of changes in the release notes. And you can download and install Semantic MediaWiki form SourceForge. Spread the word!

There remains still a lot of things to do. We have plenty of ideas how to make it more useful, and our users and co-developers also seem to have plenty of ideas. It is great fun to see the numbers of contributors to the code increase, and also to see the mailing lists being very lively. Personally, I am very happy to see Semantic MediaWiki flourish as it does, and I am thankful to Markus for starting this year (or rather ending the last) with such a great step.

Willkommen auf Simia

Willkommen auf Simia, der neuen Website von Denny Vrandecic. Nachdem ich in meinem Blog seit gefühlten drei Zeitaltern nix mehr geschrieben habe, und auf meinen Seiten seit Anbeginn der Zeiten keine neuen Inhalte eingestellt habe, kann ich euch jetzt sagen, es lag daran, dass ich die ganze Technik umstellen wollte.

Womit ich endlich gut vorangekommen bin. Zur Zeit finden sich hier alle Blogeinträge von Nodix und die Kommentare. Die Funktion zum Erstellen neuer Kommentare funktioniert noch nicht, aber ich arbeite daran. Ihr werdet auch merken, dass deutlich mehr Inhalte auf der Seite in Englisch sind als früher.

Technisch gesehen ist Simia eine Semantic MediaWiki Installation. Damit gehört dieser Blog auch zu meiner Forschung, indem ich ein wenig Erfahrung aus erster Hand sammeln möchte, wie es ist, sein Blog und seine persönliche Homepage mit Semantic MediaWiki zu führen. (Insofern ist das natürlich kein Blog mehr, sondern ein so genanntes Bliki, aber wen schert's?). Und da das ganze semantisch ist, will ich herausfinden, wie so eine persönliche Website ins Semantic Web passt...

Um Up to date zu bleiben, gibt es eine Reihe von feeds auf Simia. Wählt Euch aus, was ihr wollt. Schöne Grüße, und ich hoffe, Ihr habt Euch gut durch die Weihnachtszeit gemampft! :)

San Francisco and Challenges

Time is running totally crazy on me in the last few weeks. Right now I am in San Francisco -- if you like to suggest a meeting, drop me a line.

The CKC Challenge is going on and well! If you didn't have the time yet, check it out! Everybody is speaking about how to foster communities for shared knowledge building, this challenge is actually doing it, and we hope to get some good numbers and figures out of it. An fun -- there is a mystery prize involved! Hope to see as many of you as possible at the CKC 2007 in a few days!

Yet another challenge with prizes is going on at Centiare. Believe it or not, you can actually make money with using a Semantic MediaWiki, wih the Centiare Prize 2007. Read more there.

First look at Freebase

I got the chance to get a close look at Freebase (thanks, Robert!). And I must say -- I'm impressed. Sure, the system is still not ready, and you notice small glitches happening here and there, but that's not what I was looking for. What I really wanted to understand is the idea behind the system, how it works -- and, since it was mentioned together with Semantic MediaWiki one or twice, I wanted to see how the systems compare.

So, now here are my first impressions. I will sure play more around with the system!

Freebase is a databse with a flexible schema and a very user friendly web front end. The data in the database is offered via an API, so that information from Freebase can be included in external applications. The web front end looks nice, is intuitive for simple things, and works for the not so simple things. In the background you basically have a huge graph, and the user surfs from node to node. Everything can be interconnected with named links, called properties. Individuals are called topics. Every topic can have a multitude of types: Arnold Schwarzenegger is of type politician, person, actor, and more. Every such type has a number of associated properties, that can either point to a value, another topic, or a compound value (that's their solution for n-ary relations, it's basically an intermediate node). So the type politician adds the party, the office, etc. to Arnold, actor adds movies, person adds the family relationships and dates of birth and death (I felt existentially challenged after I created my user page, the system created a page of me inside freebase, and there I had to deal with the system asking me for my date of death).

It is easy to see that types are crucial for the system to work. Are they the right types to be used? Do they cover the right things? Are they interconnected well? How do the types play together? A set of types and their properties form a domain, like actor, movie, director, etc. forming the domain "film", or album, track, musician, band forming the domain "music". A domain is being administrated by a group of users who care about that domain, and they decide on the properties and types. You can easily see ontology engineering par excellence going on here, done in a collaborative fashion.

Everyone can create new types, but in the beginning they belong to your personal domain. You may still use them as you like, and others as well. If your types, or your domain, turns out to be of interest, it may become promoted as being a common domain. Obviously, since they are still alpha, there is not yet too much experience with how this works out with the community, but time will tell.

Unsurprising I am also very happy that Metaweb's Jamie Taylor will give an invited talk at the CKC2007 workshop in Banff in May.

The API is based on JSON, and offers a powerful query language to get the knowledge you need out of Freebase. The description is so good that I bet it will find almost immediate uptake. That's one of the things the Semantic Web community, including myself, did not yet manage to do too well: selling it to the hackers. Look at this API description for how it is done! Reading it I wanted to start hacking right away. They also provide a few nice "featured" applications, like the Freebase movie game. I guess you can play it even without a freebase account. It's fun, and it shows how to reuse the knowledge from Freebase. And they did some good tutorial movies.

So, what are the differences to Semantic MediaWiki? Well, there are quite a lot. First, Semantic MediaWiki is totally open source, Metaweb, the system Freebase runs on, seems not to be. Well, if you ask me, Metaweb (also the name of the company) will probably want to sell MetaWeb to companies. And if you ask me again, these companies will make a great deal, because this may replace many current databases and many problems people have with them due to their rigid structure. So it may be a good idea to keep the source closed. On the web, since Freebase is free, only a tiny amount of users will care that the source of Metaweb is not free, anyway.

But now, on the content side: Semantic MediaWiki is a wiki that has some features to structure the wiki content with a flexible, collaboratively editable vocabulary. Metaweb is a database with a flexible, collaboratively editable schema. Semantic MediaWiki allows to extend the vocabulary easier than Metaweb (just type a new relation), Metaweb on the other hand enables a much easier instantiation of the schema because of its form based user interface and autocompletion. Metaweb is about structured data, even though the structure is flexible and changing. Semantic MediaWiki is about unstructured data, that can be enhanced with some structure between blobs of unstructured data, basically, text. Metaweb is actually much closer to a wiki like OntoWiki. Notice the name similarity of the domains: freebase.com (Metaweb) and 3ba.se (OntoWiki).

The query language that Metaweb brings along, MQL, seems to be almost exactly as powerful as the query language in Semantic MediaWiki. Our design has been driven by usability and scalability, and it seems that both arrived at basically the same conclusions. Just a funny coincidence? The query languages are both quite weaker than SPARQL.

One last difference is that Semantic MediaWiki is fully standards based. We export all data in RDF and OWL. Standard-compliant tools can simply load our data, and there are tons of tools who can work with it, and numerous libraries in dozens of programming languages. Metaweb? No standard. A completely new vocabulary, a completely new API, but beautifully described. But due to the many similarities to Semantic Web standards, I would be surprised if there wasn't a mapping to RDF/OWL even before Freebase goes fully public. For all who know Semantic Web or Semantic MediaWiki, I tried to create a little dictionary of Semantic Web terms.

All in all, I am looking forward to see Freebase fully deployed! This is the most exciting Web thingy 2007 until now, and after Yahoo! pipes, and that was a tough one to beat.

Comments are still missing on this post.

The benefit of Semantic MediaWiki

I can't comment on Tim O'Reilly's blog right now it seems, maybe my answer is too long, or it has too many links, or whatever. It only took some time, my mistake. He blogged about Semantic MediaWiki -- yaay! I'm a fanboy, really -- but he asks "but why hasn't this approach taken off? Because there's no immediate benefit to the user." So I wanted to answer that.

"About Semantic MediaWiki, you ask, "why hasn't this approach taken off?" Well, because we're still hacking :) But besides that, there is a growing number of pages who actually use our beta software, which we are very thankful to (because of all the great feedback). Take a look at discourseDB for example. Great work there!

You give the following answer to your question: "Because there's no immediate benefit". Actually, there is benefit inside the wiki: you can ask for the knowledge that you have made explicit within the wiki. So the idea is that you can make automatic tables like this list of Kings of Judah from the Bible wiki, or this list of upcoming conferences, including a nice timeline visualization. This is immediate benefit for wiki editors: they don't have to make pages like these examples (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or any of these) by hand. Here's were we harness self-interest: wiki editors need to put in less work in order to achieve the same quality of information. Data needs to be entered only once. And as it is accessible to external scripts with standard tools, they can even write scripts to check the correctness or at some form of consistency of the data in the wiki, and they are able to aggregate the data within the wiki and display it in a nice way. We are using it very successfully for our internal knowledge management, where we can simply grab the data and redisplay it as needed. Basically, like a wiki with a bit more DB functionality.

I will refrain from comparing to Freebase, because I haven't seen it yet -- but from what I heard from Robet Cook it seems that we are partially complementary to it. I hope to see it soon :)"

Now, I am afraid since my feed's broken this message will not get picked up by PlanetRDF, and therefore no one will ever see it, darn! :( And it seems I can't use trackback. I really need to update to a real blogging software.

Comments are still missing on this post.

DL Riddle

Yesterday we stumbled upon quite a hard description logics problem. At least I think it is hard. The question was, why is this ontology unsatisfiable? Just six axioms. The ontology is availbe in OWL RDF/XML, in PDF (created with the owl tools), and here in Abstract Syntax.

Class(Rigid complete restriction(subclassof allValuesFrom(complementOf(AntiRigid))))
Class(NonRigid partial)
DisjointClasses(NonRigid Rigid)
ObjectProperty(subclassof Transitive)
Individual(publishedMaterial type(NonRigid))
Individual(issue type(Rigid) value(subclassof publishedMaterial))

So, the question is, why is this ontology unsatisfiable? It is even a minimally unsatisfiable subset, actually, that means, remove any of the axioms and you get a satisfiable ontology. Maybe you like to use it to test your students. Or yourself. The debugger in SWOOP actually gave me the right hint, but it didn't offer the full explanation. I figured it out, after a few minutes of hard thinking (so, now you know how bad I am at DL).

Do you know? (I'll post the answer in the comments if no one else does in a few days)

(Just in case you wonder, this ontology is based on a the OntOWLClean ontology from Chris Welty, see his paper at FOIS2006 if you like more info)

Comments are still missing on this post.

Zur Macht der Blogger

sympatexter hat einen Eintrag dazu geschrieben, dass sich Blogger gerne für zu wichtig nehmen (als Antwort auf ein Stück von Robert Basic, der darüber schreibt, dass sich Blogger noch nicht wichtig genug nehmen). Als Randbemerkung: es ist amüsant zu sehen, dass ausgerechnet sympatexter auf diesen Missstand hinweißt, insbesondere da die Tagline des eigenen Blogs sympatexter rules the world ist. (Mein Fehler, sorry)

Was ist der Sinn des Bloggens? Das würde vielleicht zu weit führen. Aber einzelne Argumente des sympatexters möchte ich doch genauer beleuchten:

• "Was die Blogger interessiert, interessiert auch leider NUR die Blogger." Stimmt nicht ganz - oder zumindest würde ich dafür gerne mehr Beleg sehen. Blogger werden von der Werbewirtschaft als Multiplikatoren betrachtet - eine Eigenschaft, die sie nur haben können, wenn mehr Leute Blogs lesen als sie schreiben. Außerdem bloggen viele über allgemein interessante Themen, von Lost über Britney Spears, Verbrauchererfahrungen mit Produkten und Dienstleistungen, die Bundestagswahlen bis hin zu Menschenrechtsverletzungen in Guantanamo oder direkten Berichten aus Krisengebieten im Nahen Osten oder Thailand. Glaubt Ihr nicht? Schaut auf Technorati nach, die haben eine aktuelle Liste von populären Themen. Heutige Favoriten: die Oscars, Antonella Barba, und Al Gore. Alles Themen die auch außerhalb der Blogosphäre relevant sind.
• Meine Zustimmung zu der Beobachtung bezüglich der Statistiken. Die Zahlen, die in den Medien genannt werden, sind häufig irreführend, aber das ist eine Eigenschaft von Statistiken und Medien. Verfolgt man die Zahlen auf die Quelle, wird man oft enttäuscht sein.
• "In Deutschland lesen sehr wenige Menschen Blogs." Auch hier hätte ich gerne Zahlen. Ich bin mir sicher, dass ein großer Teil der webnutzenden Bevölkerung schon mal einen Blog gelesen hat, schlicht, weil sie bei Anfragen bei den Suchmaschinen häufig auf Blogeinträge stoßen. Vielleicht sind sich die Leser nicht mal bewusst, dass sie einen Blog lesen (ebenso wie der Anteil der Wikipedia-Leser, der nicht weiß, dass die Wikipedia von jedem verändert werden kann, stark zugenommen hat). Einige meiner bestbesuchten Einträge haben mit dem Kochen von Milchreis, den Machenschaften des Kleeblatt-Verlags, und Filmen zu tun. Die Leute, die das Lesen sind nicht die üblichen Leser meines Blogs -- aber ein wichtiger Anteil.
• "Die meisten Blogs haben noch nicht mal dreistellige Zugriffszahlen pro Tag und werden meistens von Freunden gelesen." Zustimmung, und gleichzeitig die Frage: na und? Ich erwarte ja, dass dieser Blog hier eigentlich nur von Leuten gelesen wird, die mich kennen. Das kann wieder für einzelne Beiträge anders sein, aber im Allgemeinen trifft das zu. Und das, was ich schreibe, interessiert auch meistens nur diese Wenigen -- wenn überhaupt. Aber das ist OK. Blogs werden vielfach dafür verwendet, die Kommunikation zu Freunden und Bekannten, oder gar zur Familie, zu vereinfachen, gar zu ermöglichen, oder sie schlicht aufrechtzuerhalten. Und das ist gut so. Nicht jeder Blog muss Hunderttausende von Lesern haben, das wäre nicht mal möglich. Man darf halt als Blogger dann aber auch nicht erwarten, dass Hunderttausende lesen und durch die Einträge beeinflusst werden.
• "Etwas zu verlinken, was älter als eine Woche ist, ist ja schon fast Blasphemie - so versinkt das meiste, kaum wahrgenommen, in den Archiven." Zurecht beanstandet. Man sollte häufiger in die Archive verlinken, und strukturierte Einträge machen, die langfristig von Interesse sind. Semantische Technologien, wie ich sie auch in meiner Arbeit entwickle, sollen auch konkret an diesen Baustellen arbeiten. Ein Probekapitel zu semantischen Blogs und Wikis aus einem jüngst erschienen Buch über Wikis und Blogs gibt dazu ein wenig Einsicht, wie man sich das vorstellen kann. Leider sind nur die ersten 8 Seiten online verfügbar. (Achtung Werbung!) Kauft das Buch! (Werbung Ende) Solche Technologien sollen helfen, Blogeinträge dann verfügbar zu machen, wenn sie relevant sind. Einen ersten Vorgeschmack bietet die Firefox Extension Blogger Web Comments von Google.

Letztlich aber bleibt ein Argument vor allem: selbst wenn es wenige lesen, und es viel zu häufig Nabelschau ist, was die Blogger machen -- dieser Eintrag mit eingeschlossen, ironischerweise -- ist das Bloggen eine Technik, die es zum ersten Mal in der Geschichte der Menschheit tatsächlich so vielen Leuten konkret ermöglicht, aktiv eine Stimme zu haben. Ob das, was diese Leute damit anfangen, gut ist oder nicht, dass sei eine Entscheidung des Einzelfalls. Aber allein die Tatsache, dass heute Klein-Gretchen aus Hintertupfingen ihre handgekrakelten Bilder hochladen kann, und sie sofort weltweit zugänglich sind, ist ein Schritt auf dem Weg zu einer globalen Gesellschaft. Ein kleiner, ja, aber ein notwendiger und auch wichtiger.

Talk in Korea

If you're around this Tuesday, February 13th, in Seoul, come by the Semantic Web 2.0 conference. I had the honour to be invited to give a talk on the Semantic Wikipedia (where a lot is happening right now, I will blog about this when I come back from Korea, and when the stuff gets fixed).

Looking forward to see you there!

Mail problems

The last two days my mail account had trouble. If you could not send something to me, sorry! Now it should work again.

Since it is hard to guess who tried to eMail me in the last two days (I guess three persons right), I hope to reach some this way.

Building knowledge together - extended

In case you did not notice yet -- the CKC2007 Workshop on Social and Collaborative Construction of Structured Knowledge at the WWW2007 got an extended deadline due to a number of requests. So, you have time to rework your submissions or finish yours! Also the demo submission deadline is upcoming. We want to have a shootout of the tools that have been created in the last few years, and get hands on to the differences, problems, and best ideas.

See you in Banff!

Nutkidz Jubiläum

Die 50. Folge der nutkidz ist erschienen! Und zum Jubiläum haben wir uns was besonderes einfallen lassen.

Viel Spaß! Und übrigens, ja, sie erscheinen wieder regelmäßig. Zwar nur monatlich, aber immerhin regelmäßig. Und wieviele monatliche Webcomics gibt es schon?

Collaborative Knowledge Construction

The deadline is upcoming! This weekend the deadline for submissions to the Workshop on Social and Collaborative Construction of Structured Knowledge at the WWW2007 will be over. And this may be easily the hottest topic of the year, I think: how do people construct knowledge in a community?

Ontologies are meant to be shared conceptualizations -- but how many tools really allow to build ontologies in a widely shared manner?

I am especially excited about the challenge that comes along with the workshop, to examine different tools, and to see how their perform. If you have a tool that fits here, write us.

So, I know you have thought a lot about the topic of collaboratively building knowledge -- write your thoughts down! Send them to us! Come to Banff! Submit to CKC2007!

Was für ein Zufall!

Ich schreibe einem Kollegen in den Niederlanden. Der Antwortet mir, dass er bald nach Barcelona zieht, auf eine neue Stelle. Keine zwei Minuten später schickt mir Sixt eine eMail mit einem Spezialangebot, Hotel und Mietwagen für drei Tage Barcelona für nur X Euro.

Was für ein Zufall!

Semantic MediaWiki goes business

... but not with the developers. Harry Chen writes about it, and several places copy the press release about Centiare. Actually, we didn't even know about it, and were a bit surprised to hear that news after our trip to India (which was very exciting, by the way). But that's OK, and actually, it's pretty exciting as well. I wish Centiare all the best! Here is their press release.

They write:

Centiare's founder, Karl Nagel, genuinely feels that the world is on the verge of an enormous breakthrough in MediaWiki applications. He says, "What Microsoft Office has been for the past 15 years, MediaWiki will be for the next fifteen." And Centiare will employ the most robust extension of that software, Semantic MediaWiki.

Wow -- I'd never claim that SMW is the most robust extension of MediaWiki -- there are so many of them, and most of them have a much easier time of being robust! But the view of MediaWiki taking the place of Office -- Intriguing. Although I'd put my bets rather on stuff like Google Docs (former Writely), and add some semantic spice to it. Collaborative knowledge construction will be the next big thing. Really big I mean. Oh, speaking about that, check out this WWW workshop on collaborative knowledge construction. Deadline is February 2nd, 2007.

Click here for more information about Centiare.

Comments are still missing on this post.

Goldener Würfel

Nein, kein Rollenspielpreis, das war der Goldene Becher. Vielmehr hatte Schwesterchen von der Post einen Brief abgeholt, während ich in Indien war, und nun, da ich zurück bin, habe ich ihn endlich aufgemacht, und deswegen kann ich jetzt nicht über Indien schreiben sondern widme mich diesem Brief.

Der Inhalt? Ein Würfel, scheinbar mit goldener Folie überzogen, und wo die Eins sein sollte ist ein kleines Bild von etwas kaum erkennbaren. Ich dachte im ersten Moment, es sei eine Rorschach-Figur. Nachdem Schwesterchen ja schon letztes Jahr beim Hustle-the-Sluff dabei war, nehme ich an, dass es diesmal etwas ähnliches ist. Also, ab zu Googles Blogsearch, und danach gesucht, und, wer sagt's denn, gleich ein Treffer, bei Daniel Gramsch, dem Zeichner von Alina Fox.

Aus einem Kommentar ist zu entnehmen, dass Daniel Rüd ebenfalls einen solchen Brief enthalten hat, aber noch nicht darüber gebloggt hat. Ein weiterer Kommentar von Angie enthält sogar einen Link, auf dem man erkennt, dass der vermeintliche Rorschachtest doch eine Kuppel ist, von Schloss Charlottenburg in Berlin, mit der Fortuna drauf. Passend für einen Würfel, durchaus.

Laut dem Fuchsbau deutet das ganze auf ein sogenanntes Alternate Reality Game hin, eine Art elaborierter Mischung aus Live-Rollenspiel und Schnitzeljagd. Etwas, für das ich zur Zeit überhaupt nicht die Zeit habe, aber dann wiederum klingt es so spannend, dass ich sehr viel Lust darauf habe. Ich habe erst unlängst das spannende Buch Convergence Culture von Henry Jenkins vom MIT CMS verschlungen, in dem er solche und ähnliche Phänomene beschreibt.

Drum fänd ich's spannend, doch dabei zu sein. Also, auf zu der von Angie entdeckten Webseite, um mehr Informationen auszugraben. Angie, wenn Du das liest -- wie hast Du die Seite ausfindig gemacht? Und wer bist Du?

Wer sonst hat noch einen Würfel erhalten?

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Frohes Neues Jahr!

Letztes Jahr schrieb ich einen langen 2005er Abschiedseintrag. Dieses Jahr nicht, nicht etwa weil das Jahr nicht gut zu mir war -- es war sehr gut zu mir! -- sondern einfach, weil mir die Zeit fehlt. Ich muss noch packen. In weniger als zwei Stunden beginnt meine Reise nach Indien. Nein, nicht wegen der Arbeit, ganz privat. Langsam werde ich nervös, dass ich das mit dem Packen nicht mehr packe.

2006 war unglaublich gut. Ich konnte von mancher Arbeit die Früchte ernten, und andere Pflanzen weiter wachsen sehen. 2007 und 2008 stehen dann weitere Ernten an. Allerdings fällt mir auf, dass ich wahrscheinlich einer der schlechtesten Blogger des Planeten bin. Da schreibe ich an Büchern mit, und hier erwähne ich die nicht mal! Das werde ich nächstes Jahr nachholen müssen. Allerdings hängt das auch ein wenig mit dem geplanten Relaunch von Nodix zusammen. Viele Inhalte warten noch darauf, dass ich sie wieder hochlade, aber das mache ich erst, wenn ich die neue Software eingerichtet habe. Den Wunschtermin - zum Nodix-Geburtstag - werde ich wohl nicht mehr schaffen, schade. Aber ich lenke wieder ab, ich sollte wirklich packen. Wir hören uns ja wieder, in ein paar Wochen. Vielleicht erzähle ich sogar von Indien. Und von ein paar anderen Reisen von diesem Jahr. Zu erzählen gäbe es zumindest manches.

Allen Lesern meine besten Wünsche zum Neuen Jahr! Allen eine schöne Feier, einen guten Rutsch, mögen ein paar Eurer Wünsche für 2007 in Erfüllung gehen.

Five things you don't know about me

Well, I don't think I have been tagged yet, but I could be within the next few days (the meme is spreading), and as I won't be here for a while, I decided to strike preemptively. If no one tags me, I assume to take one of danah's.

So, here we go:

1. I was born without fingernails. They grew after a few weeks. But nevertheless, whenever they wanted to cut my nails when I was a kid, no one could do it alone -- I always panicked and needed to be held down.
2. Last year, I contributed to four hardcover books. Only one of them was scientific. The rest were modules for Germany's most popular role playing game, The Dark Eye.
3. I am a total optimist. OK, you knew that. But you did not know that I actually tend to forget everything bad. Even in songs, I noticed that I only remember the happy lines, and I forget the bad ones.
4. I co-author a webcomic with my sister, the nutkidz. We don't manage to meet any schedule, but we do have a storyline. I use the characters quite often in my presentations, though.
5. I still have an account with Ultima Online (although I play only three or four times a year), and I even have a CompuServe Classic account -- basically, because I like the chat software. I did not get rid of my old PC, because it still runs the old CompuServe Information Manager 3.0. I never figured out how to run IRC.

I bet no one of you knew all of this! Now, let's tag some people: Max, Valentin, Nick, Elias, Ralf. It's your turn.

Comments are still missing on this post.

Semantic Web patent

Tim Finin and Jim Hendler are asking about the earliest usage of the term Semantic Web. Tim Berners-Lee (who else?) spoke about the need of semantics in the web at the WWW 1994 plenary talk in Geneva, though the term Semantic Web does not appear there directly. Whatever. What rather surprised me, though, is, when surfing a bit for the term, I discovered that Amit Sheth, host of this year's ISWC, filed the patent on it, back in 2000: System and method for creating a Semantic Web. My guess would be, that is the oldest patent of it.

Der am schnellsten gebrochene Vorsatz

1. Keine Vorsätze haben.

Schneller als den kann man keinen Vorsatz brechen.

Supporting disaster relief with semantics

Soenke Ziesche, who has worked on humanitarian projects for the United Nations for the last six years, wrote an article for xml.com on the use of semantic wikis in disaster relief operations. That is a great scenario I never thought about, and basically one of these scenarios I think of when I say in my talks: "I'll be surprised if we don't get surprised by how this will be used." Probably I would even go to state the following: if nothing unexpected happens with it, the technology was too specific.

Just the thought that semantic technology in general, and maybe even Semantic MediaWiki in particular, could relief the effects of a natural disaster, or maybe even safe a life, this thought is so incredible exciting and rewarding. Thank you so much Soenke!

All problems solved

Today I feel a lot like the nameless hero from the PhD comics, and what is currently happening to him (begin of the storyline, continuation, especially here, and very much like here, but pitily, not at all like here). Today we had Boris Motik visiting the AIFB, who is one of the brightest people on this planet. And he gave us a more than interesting talk on how to integrate OWL with relational databases. What especially interested me was his great work on constraints -- especially since I was working on similar issues, unit tests for ontologies, as I think constraints are crucial for evaluating ontologies.

But Boris just did it much cleaner, better, and more thorough. So, I will dive into his work and try to understand it to see, if there is anything left to do for me, or if I have to refocus. There's still much left, but I am afraid the most interesting part from a theoretic point is solved. Or rather, in the name of progress, I am happy it is solved. Let's get on with the next problem.

(I *know* it is my own fault)

Semantic Wikipedia presentations

Last week on the Semantics 2006 Markus and I gave talks on the Semantic MediaWiki. I was happy to be invited to give one of the keynotes at the event. A lot of people were nice enough to come to me later to tell me how much they liked the talk. And I got a lot of requests for the slides. I decided to upload them, but wanted to clean them a bit. I am pretty sure that the slides are not self-sufficient -- they are tailored to my style of presentations a lot. But I added some comments to the slides, so maybe this will help you understand what I tried to say if you have not been in Vienna. Find the slides of the Semantics 2006 keynote on Semantic Wikipedia here. Careful, 25 MB.

But a few weeks ago I was at the KMi Podium for an invited talk there. The good thing is, they don't have just the slides, they also have a video of the talk, so this will help much more in understanding the slides. The talk at KMi has been a bit more technical and a lot shorter (different audiences, different talks). Have fun!

Rollenspiel und Web 2.0

Letzte Woche hielt ich in Wien einen Vortrag auf der Semantics 2006. Danach wurde ich um ein Radio-Interview gebeten, und dabei sprachen wir über das Semantic Web, Web 2.0 und ähnliche Themen -- meine Arbeit halt. Semantic Web, das Web der Daten, Web 2.0, das Mitmach-Web (ganz grob).

Plötzlich aber wechselte die Reporterin das Thema, meinte, ich würde ja auch an Deutschlands beliebtestem Rollenspiel Das Schwarze Auge arbeiten. Ob ich den Zuhörern erklären könnte, was denn Rollenspiel sei. Und da erklärte ich Rollenspiel als Geschichtenerzählen 2.0 -- Geschichtenerzählen zum Mitmachen, wo es darum geht, in der Gruppe eine gemeinsame Geschichte zu erzählen.

Na, wenn das mal keine neue Definition ist.

Zeitverschiebung

Es ist Mittag in Hawaii, und ich bin müde! Herrje.

Liegt wahrscheinlich daran, dass ich in Karlsruhe bin.