2008 is going to be a very exciting year for our development group at Talis. We have a number of interesting projects that we are working on in addition to extending and improving our Platform technologies – to that end I think it’s great that Tom Heath has joined us as a researcher. For those who don’t know him, Tom is one of the people behind Revyu.com, which won the 2007 Semantic Web Challenge. I’ve been an admirer of Tom’s work since first meeting him last year and I genuinely think he brings a great deal of expertise on recommendation systems to the team. I’ve spent a few days working with him last week on some R&D work we are doing and what strikes me about Tom is firstly that he is great fun to work with, and secondly that he is extremely passionate about his areas of interest. I’m really looking forward to working more closely with him and learning a lot from him.
I’ve gone Mac
It’s been a busy month for a number of different reasons – mostly I’m still trying to come to terms with the death of my father – I’m not entirely sure if burying myself in work is the best way of dealing with it but so far it seems to be working, everyone @ Talis has been really supportive and the current R&D project I’m working on with a small team has helped me to totally immerse myself in a single problem and that’s made it easier to deal with things … plus what were working on is very innovative and so it feels really rewarding at the moment.
Anyway, as the heading of this post suggests I’ve gone Mac! and I love it!! When I returned to work this year I had a shiny new 17″ Mac Book Pro waiting for me. I have never used a Mac before I’ve always been firmly entrenched in the PC world, and for most of my development needs I would often run flavours of Linux inside of VM’s. The problem with this though is Windows has a host sucks and there’s only so many VM crashes I can put up with. Many of my colleagues chose to go down the route of wiping Windows off their laptops and installing Ubuntu. I seriously considered doing this but was convinced, primarily, by Rob and Chris and pairing with them or watching them do development work on their Mac Book Pro’s that Mac’s are a great alternative.
I spend a lot of time inside a terminal window and with Mac you have a fully featured bash shell which makes a huge difference in terms of productivity, on Window’s to get anywhere close I had to run CYGWin, or work in a Linux VM, … anyone who thinks that the Windows Command Shell is comparable needs to seriously seek help!
I spent a fair bit of time getting development tools installed and getting used to how different Mac OS X is to Windows or anything else I have used. So far Leopard has been a pleasure to use there’s been the odd quirk now and again, but nothing worth mentioning. Rob published a wonderful list of tool’s he installed on his Mac, which I basically used as a check list to get up and running. To his list I’d like to add the following:
CCMenu 1.0
Displays the project status of CruiseControl continuous integration servers as an item in the Mac OS X menu bar.
Lab Tick
Have you ever been annoyed by the fact that you could not turn on your PowerBook or MacBook Pro’s keyboard illumination in daylight? If so, here’s your solution. Lab Tick gives you total control over the backlit keyboard.
iComic Life
Only really started using this recently, but it’s a wonderful tool for quickly storyboarding scenario’s as Comic Strips. If you do choose to you this you might also want to download this set of stock images produced b Sun’s User Experience Team.
BatchResize’em all 1.1
A great little tool for quickly resizing a batch of images.
Dock DR
Wonderful little utility for customising your dock on Leopard.
There’s lots more which I’ll post up from time to time. If there’s one thing I do miss though, its Windows LiveWriter, which for offline blog editing was a wonderful tool and sadly isn’t available on the Mac. Instead I’m using Ecto which is good but nowhere near as simple to use or nice as LiveWriter was. Sad isn’t it? That’s honestly the only thing I miss … after spending the last few weeks developing on my Mac I don’t think I will ever go back to a Windows based machine.
MARC, RDF and FRBR
My colleague Rob has spent a couple of weeks putting together some his thoughts on how we can structure bibliographic data semantically using RDF. The paper was written as a submission for the Linked Data on the Web 2008 workshop @ WWW2008. For me what’s great about this paper is that it provides an insight into the excellent work Rob has been doing in trying to find relationships in MARC data, his work allowed us to do some pretty amazing things with Bibliographic Data last year and we are now, as an organisation, building upon that in some of our commercial applications. At it’s, core though, the issues that the paper covers are not specific to just MARC Data, in order to create linked data we need to start using Links and not just Literals. Whilst Rob was writing this paper, I was busy trying to take some data we had been given and import it into our platform, with Rob’s help I found that by applying the techniques that he describes in the paper and thinking about the granularity of the data itself and the linkages I could create by generating URI’s to represent identities an concepts rather than simply storing those elements of the data as Literal’s – I found that I could exploit relationships in the data that I would not have been able to otherwise.
If anyone has any thoughts or feedback on the paper please let us know.
Mohammed Shabir 12-05-1951 to 29-12-2007
“There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man—with human flesh”
… He taught me how to be strong in all the broken places.
An Introduction to the Semantic Web
Came across this wonderful little introduction to the Semantic Web by Manu Sporny of Digital Bazaar.
The Lady of Shalott
Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott is easily one of the most beautiful and memorable poems I’ve ever read. I love reading the poem but it always leaves me feeling more than just a little grief stricken – as a theme unrequited love can be pretty painful. Whenever I pick up one of the various collections of Tennysons work’s that I have, no matter what else I read, I feel drawn to this poem it’s as though I have this terrible fixation with it – I’ll always read it. There’s something about it … it’s hard to articulate, erm … actually its probably not hard to articulate I’m simply choosing not to 😉
Nevertheless I was introduced to some of Loreena McKennitt’s musical works recently, amongst her many songs is this absolutely mesmerising adaptation of Tennyson’s poem:
All I’ll say is it pretty much moved me to tears … I wasn’t listening to the YouTube video itself (I bought her album on iTunes) so whilst the imagery in the video is pretty, I don’t find it particularly moving. I was listening to the song on my iPod and following the words in the poem. It really is one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard, and she succeeds in bringing each stanza of the poem to life …
The Coming Age of Magic
A really interesting and enlightening podcast with Mike Kuniavsky, co-founder and Principal of ThingM:
“I do not advocate that we pretend that technology is a kind of magic, but that we use our existing cultural understanding of magic objects as an abstraction to describe the behavior of ubiquitous computing devices.”
Talis and Creative Commons launch new Open Data licence
Yesterday we, at Talis, announced some wonderful news – Talis has been working in partnership with the Science Commons project of Creative Commons and we are all pleased to announce the release of the new Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence.
As an organisation Talis have been interested in the licensing issues surrounding Open Data for quite some time now, we’ve been talking about Open Data at conferences and also writing about many of these issues. In 2006 we began this process by launching our own attempt at an Open Data licence called the Talis Community Licence – this helped to shape some of our initial thoughts. Earlier this year we even convened a special workshop on Open Data at the World Wide Web conference in Banff which helped us to understand the direction we wanted to move in and who we needed to work with to make this a reality.
This new licence represents a real milestone for us. For the Semantic Web to succeed there needs to be more data coming online marked up for linking and sharing in this web of data, hopefully the licence can serve as a tool that enables more of us to share and contribute data.
Google takes on Wikipedia
Google has announced that it has begun testing a new tool called ‘Knol’ that allows users to write authoritative online articles. You can view a screenshot of the tool here. Credibility and authority have long been a stumbling block preventing the adoption of Wikipedia in education or as a credible source for citations etc.
Knol will still allow anyone to add entries, just like Wikipedia, but it’ll allow people to have bylines and author profiles so you know precisely who has penned and reviewed the entry. Which would you trust more an entry by a hobbyist or a published Professor in the relevant subject matter.
I haven’t made up my mind as to whether I like this initiative or not the cynic in me feels that Google, which is funded through revenue generated from adverts, has entered into this arena because so much traffic is directed to Wikipedia which is Ad-free.
Interesting times ahead …
Oaktree Shoot
Had a wonderful time today, took part in the Oaktree Archers Shoot just outside Droitwich. Everyone had a great time, I was pretty happy with my score for the day have to confess I really struggled in the second half because it was so cold. Cliff was the best of our archers today only beating Richard by 14 points. It was Simon and Alex’s first shoot and both did extremely well.
I’ve posted a load of pictures up here.