Packages ready for shipping
The time has come to say goodbye to Ireland and move back to Poland. We have just packed our last 5 years into 40 boxes which will be shipped today.
see http://www.flickr.com/photos/skruk/3111459782/ for the second group of boxes … 
Google Translator cannot translate ?
Last week I was attending a very interesting presentation on Google Translate.
As could expect – statistical approach to translations is not perfect.
But I did not dream that Google can translate:
- Mazury as Hawaii
- Gdańsk as Atlanta
- Wawelski Smok as George Washington
Or even decide that it cannot translate at all
(see for yourself – the Polish translation is “I cannot translate”)
Getting my teeth into HDR
HDR is a cool technique – even though some of the photos look artificial/artistic – usually it is worth trying.
You can view a slideshow with it here
Leopard supporting Java programming
The problem I usually have when starting to use a new library/API is which JARs to include so that only those required are included, and none else. Usually this is a wild guess, or listing content of all available JARs.
With Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) this is no longer the case. The new “Preview” comes very handy in times like that.
Is Semantic Web Technology Taking the Wrong Turn?
This is the question Chris Bussler asks in his recent article in the IEEE Internet Computing “Peering” column, edited by Charles Petrie, from DERI Stanford. It is interesting that among few examples of successful, ongoing products of Semantic Web research, Chris mentions JeromeDL. I personally, consider it great success, since it is more than two years now since met the last time. That time JeromeDL was a little more than a rough idea. Now, it can even impress (maybe not everyone – but I do not care about these maggots).
Yesterday I got a chance to present JeromeDL and notitio.us to Nova Spivack from Radar Networks (I am still waiting for my beta account to Twine). He was clearly impressed, with access control module (Extensible Access Control – to be published soon) in JeromeDL, IKHarvester, SSCF (how isn’t?), and last but not least – recommendations in notitio.us. TagsTreeMaps and MultiBeeBrowse weren’t left without positive impression either. I think this were the best 15 minutes (stretched a little, I know) of sales pitch. Ok, meeting with INEK in Korea was jaw-dropping experience as well, but I had much more time than.
Tomorrow, I should be ready to announce the results of the our evaluation of Semantic and Social technologies in JeromeDL. Stay tuned – you might got surprised if you thought that semantic web technology has gone astray.
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Snow in Ireland (First Day of Spring)
If you ever been to Ireland long enough you know certain facts:
- there is so much rain – you could start inventing names for different kinds
- the temperature (almost) never drops below 0C – so there is proper winter
- the seasons in the Celtic Calendar are different. Spring, for example, starts on Feb, 1st.
And there you go – today is Feb, 1st – and we had quite a “snow storm” in the morning
What is keeping me so busy recently? (2)
Another missing piece of my PhD Thesis was evaluation – which for obvious reasons could not have been done before
The first phase has just finished – I have managed to convince 25 victims to finish the evaluation.
Now it is my time to process all the data (I still hope from some help from Ewelina – as usual 
)
Irish Digital Libraries Summit
We would like to invite everyone interested in the research and development of digital libraries in Ireland to participate in the Irish Digital Libraries Summit on 20th April 2007. This one-day forum explores the future of digital libraries at the eve of the next generation Internet.
The event is organized by the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), NUI Galway, a campus company with an excellent international reputation for research and teaching on the semantic web. Further details of DERI are available at http://www.deri.ie/
The goal of the summit is to bring together researchers, librarians, library systems suppliers, and policy makers in order to facilitate the implementation of cutting edge technological developments in libraries. This four-way interaction is necessary for the future development of digital libraries in Ireland.
Expected outcomes from the summit include:
- new digital projects in individual Irish libraries, and
- the basics of an application for funding of a national digital libraries initiative under the EU FP7 Digital Libraries theme.
Speakers at the summit will present current research on digital libraries in the context of next generation Internet technologies (Semantic Web, Web 2.0), such as JeromeDL, Fedora, and BRICKS. JeromeDL allows institutions to easily publish documents on the Web. Further details are available at http://www.jeromedl.org/ . There will also be presentations by practitioners and researchers on current Irish digital libraries projects.
The summit will be held at DERI, NUI Galway, IDA Business Park, Lower Dangan, Galway, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Friday 20th April 2007. Details of the summit are available at: http://wiki.corrib.deri.ie/index.php/SemDL/IrishDLSummit
If you intend attending the summit please register in advance by email sebastian DOT kruk AT deri.org or phone +353 85 7126591 (M). If you would like to give a short presentation about digital libraries, please provide details so that we can include you in the programme.
prof. dr. Stefan Decker
Director of DERI & Cluster Leader Semantic Web
Sebastian Kruk
Lead Researcher, Project Manager: Digital Libraries
prof. Mary Burke
School of Information and Library Studies (SILS)
University College Dublin (UCD)
technorati tags:jeromedl, digitallibraries, summit, meeting, ireland, bricks, fedora
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JeromeDL and Semantic Museums
I would like to follow up (finally) on my ideas, which were crowding on my mind map since I came back from London, on how solutions, such as JeromeDL, can be used to build Semantic Museums.
One of differences between digital libraries and museums, which can be easily spotted, is less restrictive and probably, more open-minded approach presented by the museum community. The same technologies presented at DL meetings are either not understood at all or rejected as ‘ve been there, done that already, didn’t work ; while museums are more willing to allow semantic web technologies into their domain.
There is another, I think, very important difference: there is clear distinction between library and digital library; this distinction, however, tends to disappear when it comes to museums. The support semantic solutions can offer is not constrained to virtual tours delivered through museum portals. What many museums do, at the moment, is building their existence on the Internet; with technologies, such as Second Life, we can imagine aforementioned virtual tours to come to existence. What is interesting about museums, is that new technologies can, and in my opinion should, support visitors in the real life.
A simple scenario: when I visit a museum, I usually try to be very precise in reading and listening all auxiliary material delivered along with the exhibition items. Depending on particular solution provided by the museum I am at the moment, I can usually read short, sometimes very short, descriptions of, e.g., paintings I am looking at. Sometimes, the audio guide, synchronized with my tour, gives me better understanding of what I am looking at, at the moment.
And usually this is where all it ends. Unless, I have a very broad and deep knowledge of the topic, and can track most of important exhibitions related, somehow, to the one I am at the moment, there is no way I can get any further with my visit. It is like all that interesting information is veiled before me, so that I could not find it.
Now imagine, that instead of just an audio guide for my tour I would have a ubiquitous guide; I could it access with my, or provided by the museum, PDA or a smart phone. The sensors, such as camera, GPS, or accelerometer, build in or delivered along with my device, can track my current position and my current subject of interest. Now, looking at a painting and moving my smart phone camera in front of it, I can see regions of interest (similar to those we know from Flickr), overlayed on the view presented by my device; this ROIs are heavily annotated with information I can be interested in. If my device holds my profile, it can even filter out those that would I would not be interested in, or those I already know. These additional information bits can also allow me to start a virtual tour from the place where I am at the moment. I can browse through a picture of a dog, an allegory of trust-fidelity, to other paintings where the same allegory is presented. My personal guide, running on my mobile device, can also tell me if any of these paintings are being now on display anywhere near to where I am at the moment. I can also share my thoughts, knowledge, ideas with other people that will come across this painting.
Semantic Web, Web 2.0, adaptable interfaces, ubiquitous computing, all these technologies come handy to develop a service as described in my scenario. I was puzzled at first, when I heard about soft and hard semantic web, but I was glad to know that JeromeDL was already addressing these, and similar, requirements. We work at the moment, to deliver similar browsing features, as presented in the scenario, in JeromeDL. So far they are constrained to the Web, but who knows maybe one day I will managed to gather a consortium of other research institutes and museums, willing to deliver a museum x.0 platform, where an average user would finally make real use of the Semantic Web, … in the real life
technorati tags:jeromedl, museums, semanticweb, reallife, scenario, ideas
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Description Logic vs Object Oriented Programming for the Semantic Web
When in 2003 I worked on the HTML library management component for the prototype (Elvis-DL) for my master’s thesis I have stumbled upon something very weird. I had a simple ontology describing concepts I wanted to manage in my library. I was using Jena (at that time) to render structures to be displayed as HTML forms based on the ontology. All was fine, until I had to handle subClassOf and subPropertyOf relations. The results I got from Jena when constructing the objects where completely wrong (in my opinion) and I ended up writing some fall back code to make the interface work as I expected.
More than a year later, when I moved to DERI Galway one of my colleagues, Knud, told me how OWL and RDF Schema (DL) are different from the way I was used to (OO). Basically they work back-to-forth.
Recently Eyal had a presentation on that matter during the Semantic Web cluster meeting. I have learned about it from Knud email (I am no longer an official member of SW cluster).
If your Jena or any other reasoning engine does not work the way you expected it to work – better check following documents first:
technorati tags:descriptionlogic, oo, objectorientedprogramming, semanticweb, why
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"Libraries begin to realize that they are not alone"
I just read a short report from the Semantic Web and Digital Libraries (ICSD 2007) by Ivan Herman.
It was a little to far for me to go; even though the organizers “invited” me to do presentation on JeromeDL. I was wondering about the quality of this event, and eventually decided together with more senior people from DERI that we should wait and see.
I hope there will be a follow up, and then we will surely go – by all means – JeromeDL is the Semantic Digital Library, and my tutorial on Semantic Digital Libraries (and soon the book) are just yet another activities that should support this movement.
It is nice to hear that DL community finally acknowledged our presence, however, I am still not sure if we are ready for that. My cooperation with this community proved that this is not an easy task, but I have learned and I am still learning a lot from them. I guess, until we will be able to understand what has been achieved so far, and address problems of the DL community, we are sentenced for more misunderstanding.
technorati tags:semanticweb, digitallibraries, conference, blog, india, report
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Car Insurance in Ireland … yes, but …
Yeah, I know I have not been blogging for a long time – but one of my new year’s resolutions is to keep this blog alive by posting at least once a week.
I am pretty sure everyone remembers that old joke:
“Have you heard that they give away Mercedes-Benz cars on the Red-square in Moscow? Yes, but … not on Red-square in Moscow but in front of the Winter Palace in Sankt Petersburg, not Mercedes-Benz but bicycles, and they do not give – they still“
Well actually I felt like this for the last couple of days trying to finalize my car insurance in Ireland. I believe this is part of the answer-quick-forget-if-it’s-right culture in Ireland but this time it went way too far.
Before we bought our car some time ago we asked around all our friends if there is any way to get a cheaper car insurance. And we have been told that if we will get it from Tesco/Hibernian they will acknowledge my 6 years of no-claims and get us a huge discount. We did so, compared with others – and it was really true (well, we thought so at that time). It turned out that we only had to get PZU (a polish insurance company) to send a letter confirming that no claims have been made for the last 5+ years, and got it translated by the Polish Embassy; and our car insurance will drop from €1000 to €400.
Cool, piece of cake we thought. PZU’d send the letter pretty fast, I translated it, and sent off to the Polish Embassy for confirmation (together with a check on €60). They sent it back pretty soon as well, but since we were gone for almost a month, I called Tesco to make sure they will wait for this letter another month. “No problem” they said.
Once we got back, I’d collected the letter with the translation and re-sent it together with my car insurance agreement to Tesco. Everything according to the schedule…
And all started to go wrong. First Tesco could not find my letter (it was a registered post so I know they got it on time). Finally, they told me that I can get the no-claims bonus but … I have to cancel my other insurance (from my previous insurer on my second car). I thought “what a hack?“. l It took me a while to understand that obviously there is a rule that you cannot get discount on insurance on more than one car. Stupid, isn’t it? Anyway, I was trying to explain that it is not possible to unregister my second car in Poland because I do not own it just by myself. It did not help.
I went over the whole agreement, all documents attached to the agreement, small caps notes – there was no saying I cannot get discount if I own another car that has insurance with no-claims bonus. Finally I found it – they put this information in the FAQ. Pretty professionally, isn’t? But AFAIC FAQ is not a part of an agreement.
Anyway, I tried to save what I could by finding another company. I went to AXA. I knew what to ask about – my second car. Surprisingly, I have been transfered to a polish speaking person (so I am pretty sure there was nothing lost in translation). I have stared with my question. They told me – it is ok. You can have two cars, well, the discount will not be so big, but still. So I said – carry on with the quote … €500. Pretty nice I thought. What is more – they do not need the translation from the Polish Embassy (cool!, but I already have it)
I went to AXA the next day to sign the agreement (you cannot do it over the Internet 
). And I have heard that I cannot get the no-claim bonus, because the car is going to be insured on myself and my wife as the named driver (another strange Irish custom I have to get used to – you cannot drive a car that is not insured on your name)… but I got a quote from you! Well, yes, I can get a no-claims bonus (around €1000) with my second car insured back in Poland, but … I cannot insure anyone else as the named driver on this one. Well, Ewelina would not be to happy if she could not drive the car.
And, so defeated by the stupid Irish law (I do not claim Polish is any smarter most of the times) I came back to Tesco, paid what was missing to the full insurance.
technorati tags:irishjoke, car, insurace
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Geotagging made easy
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I was always jealous for all those people that had their photos annotated with GPS positions – especially since I travel quite often and after some time it would be very nice to see where I’ve been precisely.
Now I can ! With Flickr geotagging – that is as easy as you can imagine.
I do not have to take care about GPS, geo-positions, etc. Just drag-and-drop – and you can easily place your photo anywhere on the Planet
Plus, other people can not only see where it was taken (click the map link in the metadata section of e.g. this photo on Flickr page) – but can also know the name of the place where it was taken.
Cool, isn’t it? Now you can see where is my in-law’s garden where this photo was taken
And, btw. I managed to geotag about 1000+ photos so far (more coming soon) which is just a fraction of what has been geotagged by the whole Flickr community within last 24h.
Calling all del.icio.us people
I am just in the middle of research on how to better represent tags than just with tag-cloud. My prototype is up-and-running, however, I would like to introduce some more smarted clustering and filtering techniques.
(help me to speed-up my research)
In order to do so – I need your help – all del.icio.us people – if you want to experience better way to browse your del.icio.us posts – send me your del.icio.us IDs (no passwords :) – so that I can add you as friends.
It will allow me to gather more data so that I can improve my current algorithms.
I appreciate any help – and I promise to give you a credit on the project web page and source code once I will announce this component.
Thanks in advance
Not so wet in Galway, afterall
(Galway Eyre Square by Kopretinka)
Jacek says it still rains in Galway – but I bought a bike 2 weeks ago – and so far I did not managed to get wet while biking to/from DERI
technorati tags:galway, wet, biking
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KDE and Beagle
I have been wating quite a long time to be able to use Google Desktop Search-like in my Linux box. There were two candidates: Beagle and Kat. Until Fedora Core 5, Beagle was crashing all the time, and was hardly performing any indexing. FC5 added Beagle as a part of distribution.
The last thing I needed was some KDE front end – and Kerry is nice enough.
But there was one flaw – I do not like neither Thunderbird nor Evolution. And the way Kerry tried to open emails was resulting in new emails with the content I wanted to read as attachments.
The solution is quite simple – write own wrapper for KMail to handle that. Since I did not know at first wheather the content of the email is piped to the program or just referenced, I make a small script that handles both ways. I hope others will find it usefull.
#!/bin/sh
if [ ! $1 ];then TMPFILE=`mktemp -q /tmp/emailpreview.XXXXXX` if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then echo "$0: Can’t create temp file, exiting..." exit 1 fi
while read -u 0 TMP do echo "$TMP" >> $TMPFILE doneelse TMPFILE=$1fi
/usr/bin/kmail --view "file://$TMPFILE"
if [ ! $1 ]; then rm -f $TMPFILEfi
DMoz vs RDF Repository (Sesame)
What can you do – there are just some days that just should not happen. I think one of them was when I decided to integrate DMoz ontology into JeromeDL and FOAFRealm. It all looked so harmless – especially when I got (small !) part of the ontology from Andreas. I build the whole mind model around that, finally even set up a JOnto project to deliver unified API to handle taxonomies. And …
I decided to download DMoz RDF, or what ever they claim to be an RDF It took me some time to realize what was wrong. And eventually I got some help from Hee Chul and Krystian with nice converting scripts. I though that it was the end of the problems – I had a sample RDF (a true one) that worked. And a real RDF version of full DMoz ontology. But it was not the end of the problems
I decided to upload the 800MB RDF-DMoz file to Sesame. But after a couple of hours of waiting, 100% CPU usage, almost 80C CPU temperature of my laptop, I gave up.
Daniel suggested I should just point to the RDF file and make the memory repository. Well – it went quick that way – “out of heap memory” error Later I took the “divide and conquer” approach. Cut this 800MB file into 10 smaller. First one got uploaded very quickly (relatively). And so, encouraged by that example I started uploading the rest 9. Each next of them was taking much much longer to be uploaded, until the 10th one that obviously must had make Sesame hanging – as there was no progress for the whole night (I went to sleep btw).
I cleaned the repository and uploaded only the first chunk again. But trying to use it – with browsing or SeRQL querying was way to sluggish. Finally I came to my brains and “slimed” the DMoz RDF removing (with modified Krystian’s script) all information that was not defining dmoz:Topic or using dc:title and dmoz:narrow{12}. Luckily I got 200MB RDF file that went smoothly into Sesame.
And now JOnto-DMoz is finally kicking the ass
[I will upload the scripts and the final RDF file to jonto.sf.net soon]
Carnival 2006
pict8974
Originally uploaded by skruk.
And so we made it. Everyone said it would be a shame to be in Rio during the Carnival and miss the Samba Schools Parade.
Luckily I have even managed to convince myself to take my precious camera with me, shot almost 600 photos, and bring them all home safe.
The funny thing is that what ever people say about Brazil, although you can get easily paranoid with respect to ones safety, Carioca are really nice people. During the parade the only hostile people where two geyish Englishmen trying to quarrel with everyone (including myself) that was trying to get too close to the fence (as they claimed to be the only ones that should occupy that place and shot photos). Weird, isn’t it?
Any way – presentation was magnificent – we were only sorry we could not make it to the end – after 5 school we decided to go home (it was 6am BTW) – as I could not see a thing (600 photos / 6h can make your eyes hurt – believe me) and Ewelina was tired as well.
DigiMe – personalization vs privacy
Contemporary recommender systems derives most of their power from the profiling information on the user. The problem that usually arise is that by amassing infomation about users – recommender systems became a threat to our privacy. The more intuitive and effective search/recommendation system we want to get – the more information about ourselves, our fancies, our friends and foes we need to provide to the system.
Since I always believed that this is to much to pay for just a recommendation – I have came up with the Social Semantic Collaborative Filtering idea that users themselves have control over their profiles. The current implementation in FOAFRealm/D-FOAF project is still far away from what I would like to achieve.
Our aim is to deliver a true identity management (DigiMe) that will not only identify a user in the Internet but also will provide better trade off between personalization and privacy.
I have just came across the presentation DoDEA_Emerging_pt1.ppt
that presents similar opinion to mine in that aspect: we must build identity management system that will allow personalization of services keeping the privacy the same time.
Music for free (almost)
Recently I have convinced myself to buy a MP3 player with 1GB and radio, just to keep me entertained on the plain when I cannot use my mobile phone and in any other occasion where it is going to be more handy.
But soon I have come to the point where all my MP3s generated out of my legal CDs were no longer cool and entertaining anymore. Buying a new CD is not an option this days, so I went Internet-shopping.
Luckily “legal mp3″ query in Google led me to http://www.tunster.ru/ which turned out to be the coolest (and cheapest – please correct me if I am wrong) places.
An average mp3 costs around $0.10 which means that I can stuff my MP3-player for around $15. And the quality is really good – 192 bit rate.
Polish community in Galway
Today was the first polish mass I attended in Galway. Great thing that we can finally have one. But I was also said that not so many people were there – probably because that did not even know about it.
So to change this situation I decided to set up a blog [http://poloniawgalway.blogspot.com/] where polish community in Galway notify others about events like that.
How to advertise a school of motoring
How to advertise a school of motoring
Originally uploaded by skruk.
Ever wondered how to do that? Try to squeeze your car in a small alley, park it inch beside the fence … and there you have it – it just screams: “no other school will teach you how to park that good”
