the web 2.0 will speak for the Semantic Web

Ok, folksonomies are the super-simple way allowing people to annotate their documents. And when we use tags in blogs, flickr, wiki, ets, the world is better and way cooler. Websites like technorati can show us what is hip at the moment and I can customize these services to work together. I can even add a photo to flickr and then press the “blog this” button there and it will blog here. Cool, they use web-services, they provide their services in standardized interfaces and it works.

But then …

people find out that the tags aren’ so really good, because they miss stemming.

A stemmer is a computer program or algorithm which determines a stem form of a given inflected (or, sometimes, derived) word form — generally a written word form. The stem need not be identical to the morphological root of the word; it is usually sufficient that related words map to the same stem, even if this stem is not in itself a valid root.
wikipedia – stemmer

So all these tags aren’t right and people use different word forms for tags. One uses “book” the other chooses “books”. Or “surfing” “surfed” “surfs” etc. which all mean similiar things. So horray for the programmer that added stemming to services like technorati.

Then people see that they mean the same things with their tags, they use “surfing” and “browsing” to reference web browsing. This is the problem of synonyms.
Synonyms (in ancient Greek syn ‘συν’ = plus and onoma ‘όνομα’ = name) are different words with similar or identical meanings and are interchangable.

And the next thing would be that two words have different contexts – surfing can be the watersport or web surfing. These are Homonyms.
Homonyms (in Greek homoios = identical and onoma = name) are words that have the same phonetic form (homophones) or orthographic form (homographs) but unrelated meaning.

Ok, and if I search for “surfing” and I mean the watersport, then it might be good to include terms like “bodyboarding” and “surfspot” and “surfer” and “bigwavesurfing” into my search terms. Or if I search for “surfboard” I might also want items tagged with “longboard” “shortboard” “bodyboard” etc.

To structure terms that belong to each other, we use something called taxonomies. The homonyms and synonyms are usually in a thesaurus. The stemmer is a basic tool used before we start. Alltogether, we would like a dataformat to exchange and store those taxonomies and thesauri. Hey, there is one, its called RDF and you can even store Ontologies with it. I know, its hard to learn and you can’t really do everything you want, but its a start and there are tools out there that work with it.

So what will happen? I predict, that major tools that build today on what we know as folksonomies will include the core elements of the semantic web, and at a certain point in time, the necessarity for RDF and the good stuff will be obvious to the masses of developers and users out there. The good thing in all this is the learning approach: If someone knows what tags are, really knows what tags are because using them for a year, really knowing what the problem of synonyms, stemming, taxonomies are, because the somone has tried searching for something, than this someone will understand what the semantic web is about.

iPod nano installieren

nun, heute ist es endlich soweit: Ingrid hat ihren neuen Schatz bekommen, einen iPod nano, der von uns auf den Namen “Eve” getauft wurde.

ipod nano info: |wikipedia en |apple

ipod nano eve auf flickr

der ist so grün, weil er in eine grüne nano-tube gestöpselt ist.

beim installieren sollte man darauf achten, dass wir ja windows und MacOS parallel verwenden. Dann ist es sinnvoll, zuerst den iPod an die Windows kiste zu hängen, damit diese das Dateisystem mit Fat32 formatiert. Mit HFS ist halt nix mit MemoryStick Funktion, kann ja keiner lesen.

wie das genau geht (wenn mans zuerst am apple anschliesst, so wie wir) steht in diesem tutorial.

Das heißt: zuerst iPod Software unter Windows installieren danach iPod anschliessen, dann iTunes am besten unter Windows wieder deinstallieren oder zumindest das ganze Taskbar zeug wegmachen. Dabei hilft einem der nützliche Autostart configuration wekrzeug von Microsoft, das alle programme findet die sich anfangs starten (also auch den nervigen quicktime): einfach windows+r und “msconfig” ausführen.


Du kannst zwar einen Franzosen aus Frankreich heraus holen, aber nicht Frankreich aus einem Franzosen

erklärung folgt später



a site (which I stumbled upon) with some statistics which sites are often requested on this cache server. very neat.

semapedia – tagging the real world

yeah, cyberspace has started!

netrunners, here we come: we tag the real world with links to cyberspace and back. this is by far the coolest thing available today: print links to wikipedia on physical places!!!

then use your mobile phone (your ono sendai 2005) to surf the matrix. oh, i am hot now.

Our goal is to connect the virtual world with the physical world by bringing the best information from the internet to the relevant place in physical space.

We do this by combining the physical annotation technology of semacode with the availability of high quality information using the free encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Imagine your cellphone as your smart travelguide. The promise is to provide free relevant ad-hoc high quality information to mobile users in the real world.

Gnowsis Hands-On Workshop in Berlin Dec2005


Again we meet in Berlin to program together a semantic desktop. An event consisting of RDF, Java developing, hacking small demos, drinking, eating, chatting, music, photos, annotation, meeting new people, updating foaf files.
9-13 December 2005
Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (HUB ), Campus Adlershof, Rudower Chaussee 25 / Magnusstraße, Room “Humboldt-Kabinett”, House 3, Level 1.
Anybody who wants to bring the Semantic Web alive on desktop computers



Send an e-mail to Thomas Roth-Berghofer.

Early registration is October 31, 2005

Latest possibly registration: November 18th, 2005

The workshop is restricted to 20 participants, registering early is suggested.

All information is at the official website

gnowsis gui framework released

Features of the gnowsis gui framework are

Version 0.8.3

  • supports Jena framework
  • bind Jena models to swing components
  • tables and trees
  • text-edits
  • lists, JLists
  • Drag-Drop
  • simple editing of complex RDF resources

Download: in the gnowsis download page
or use the direct link to

A small documentation can be found inside the distribution or in the online tutorial

source is included in the distribution or can be received via SVN from the main gnowsis project svn

questions can be asked on the gnowsis yahoo group: