Categories (tags):

Semantic web

semantic_web

A Semantic Mobs Manifesto for the (r)Evolutionary Web: rejected!

One night, many days ago, Bru and I had a night divertissement (as I liked to call it). During a funny Skype session, we created a paper for SWAP2005 (Semantic Web Applications and Perspectives, 2nd Italian Semantic Web Workshop, Trento, Faculty of Economics,14-15-16 December, 2005). The title of the paper is "A Semantic Mobs Manifesto for the (r)Evolutionary Web" (pdf). Since the conference is in Trento, I'll probably go anyway so the idea was to get one more publication (is there another reason for sending a paper to a conference? ). As I already said, it was a night divertissement, it took us few hours creating it, well, most of the time was spent in chatting about the possible title. We skyped really improbable titles I think I remember. And it was a lot of fun.
Anyway I received few days ago an email saying that the paper was rejected (in the following there are the reviews in case you are curious). I think reviewers did the right thing in rejecting it. It was not a serious contribution to science but more a provocation (and a funny-for-us night divertissement).
So how we created the paper? We took verbatim a blog post by Ryan King titled "An Evolutionary Revolution - On the shoulders of giants" and we inserted it in the paper. Since the blog post was resealed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 licence, we could import it legally, in fact we of course gave credit to Ryan King in the paper, we re-released the paper under the same licence and the paper was not a commercial work.
Then we added a short quibbling about how with the Semantic Web envisioned in the conference, a paper like this one would be easily creatable by some software tool, expecially when i a short future the number of creative commons released text works will be huge. The last lines of the abstract hinted a matrix-like scenario in which (human) researchers will be no more needed. The title was entirely Bru's fault. Don't tell him but I think we got rejected because of the title
So, well, enjoy it, it is released under a creative commons licence, respect the licence and do whatever you want with it, yes you might even want to cite it in a "real"paper, that would be a larger point about "what are conferences for in an era of free, decentralized publishing?" but I guess you will have to wait another post for it. Anyway, don't worry, it is not a unexpected or clever post, nothing more that our rejected submission for SWAP

In the following you find the reviews we got and at the really bottom the text version of the paper.
I wonder if Danny Ayers was one of the reviewer since he writes "I nearly had a dilemma over whether to give something a positive rating simply because it was really cool, rather than bringing significant academic value to the field. Again fortunately for me the material in question did have value in the latter sense as well, so I could call it a Clear Accept without any ethical worries." But it can't be because our paper has no value in the latter sense

Reviews

Dear Author,

On behalf of the Programme Committee opf SWAP2005, we are sorry to inform you that your paper, titled

A Semantic Mobs Manifesto for the (r)Evolutionary Web

has not been accepted. We received many excellent papers this year, and were limited in the number we could accept. We hope you'll still be able to join us in Trento for the workshop.

At the end of this email you will find a set of comments from the anonymous paper reviewers. We hope that they will be of help for future papers. If you have questions about the comments, please contact the Program Chair.

Sincerely,
Program Committee Chairs,
xxxxxx

***************************************************************

There is an interesting project at MIT (http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/), whose aim is to develop a a program that generates random Computer Science research papers (one of those papers was accepted to SCI 2005 conference) - I encourage you to cite this project in your paper and to critically compare it with your work.

Detailed comments:

- "PaoloMassa": missing blank;
- "...the all idea sound..." should be "...the whole idea sound...";
- "What is missing at the moment is just an automated tool that could automatically create...": eliminate the repetition 'automated' 'automatically';
- what do you mean by "derative work"?

***************************************************************

Independently of any legal aspects (such as license issues), the authors have obviously not understood the basic ideas of research, namely creating things that have NOT existed before and publishing ORIGINAL work.

Plagiarism has been existing probably as long as humans have acquired the ability to write. So neither the work presented in this paper, nor the authors' idea of copying other peoples' publications (manually or automatically), are inherently new or original.

Due to this fact, this paper is not even controversial, it's merely a try to shift an ethical issue (plagiarism) to a legal one (the "Creative Commons License").

At any rate, if the authors are seriously attempting to invest further work into their ideas, I propose to move to another audience, e.g. from the area of Philosophy of Science.

***************************************************************

***************************************************************

I appreciate the provocative aim of the paper, but I cannot really understand from the introductory part what you are aiming at demostrating. You should have focused more on that part and write it more clearly.

----------------------------------

Paper:

A Semantic Mobs Manifesto for the (r)Evolutionary Web

Riccardo Cambiassi
University of Eastern Piedmont
Alessandria - Italy
Blog: http://www.codewitch.org
Email: bru@codewitch.org

PaoloMassa
ITC/iRST
Trento - Italy
Blog: http://moloko.itc.it/paoloblog/
Email: massa@itc.it

Abstract
The future envisioned by the Semantic Web will
allow anyone (shall we better say anything?) to combine services
and data in order to automatically build new services and new
data. In the very spirit of this revolution, we created this paper by
relying on someone else published knowledge. The fact that the
content we reused is released under a Creative Commons licence
makes the all idea sound from every phylosophical perspective
(you might want to read legal, i.e. adherent to current but already
outdated laws). What is missing at the moment is just an automated
tool that could automatically create an interesting paper
for a conference given the great amount of data already published
and freely available out there, some of it also in Semantic Web
formats such as RSS or CreativeCommons metadata. For the sake
of this paper, we, human authors, decided to invest some effort
into looking for the information and assembling in a coherent
way. This abstract is in fact nothing more than a republishing of a
blog post "On the shoulders of giants..." by Ryan King (currently
sitting at http://theryanking.com/blog/archives/2005/04/07/anevolutionary-
revolution/) about the revolution and the Semantic
Web. The original blog post is released under Attribution-
NotCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons licence and this
gives us the complete right to republish that work, as long as we
give credit as we are doing now and we don't do it commercially.
The licence also demands we re-release this derative work under
the same licence and we happily do it (see at the end). Thus it is
easy to imagine a not-so distant future when simple automated
intelligent tools will be able to do what we have done for creating
this paper. Hereafter, we researchers will be needed no more and
this, hopefully thought-provoking paper, aims to make the case
for what really Semantic Web is about.
On the shoulders of giants...
A revolution, slowly, is happening to the Web.
Many call the changes that are occuring Web 2.0 and I think
the analogy is quite useful. It seems that the Web has reached a
degree of stability- browsers are relatively compliant and usefulstuff
generally works, which opens up the opportunity for people
to innovate.
One vision for the next iteration of the Web is called the
Semantic Web. The idea is that we'll build a web that is
structured and meaningful (to computers, not humans). The
vision for this comes from Tim Berners-Lee and is essentially
distributed knowledge system based on a markup format called
RDF, a way to encode logical statements in XML about anything.
It is, of course, also extensible on the edges (meaning anyone can
add content and meaning to it). That is, if they understand the
formats.
The Semantic Web would be a discontinuity from the current
Web that we all know, mainly because its primarily for machines
and only secondarily for humans. I think we can do better.
The ideas I'm putting across are by no means new to many
people, but I've been thinking about them this evening in response
to a paper [1] we read for class and would like to distill and
summarize my viewpoint here.
The above paper presents some interesting technology built on
a prototype Semantic Web. The problem is that their rationale
for building the Semantic Web is wrong:
"...because HTML marries content and presentation into a
single representation..."
Certainly, HTML can be an intermixing of content and
presentation, but it doesn't have to be - it actually shouldn't
be.
With the advent of CSS and XHTML, markup can now be
semantic (notice lowercase 's')- it can have meaningful structure
which is independent of how the content is presented in a browser.
So, we already have a web - a web which can be used to create
semantic content, yet is, at the same time, presentable to users in
its native form. As Tantek C¸ elik has said, "users first, computers
second."
Going the route of the Semantic Web would be like throwing
out the source code for a mature product and rewriting it from
scratch. Ask Netscape how well that works!
The Revolution Has Begun
Led by Tantek C¸ elik, Matt Mullenweg, Eric Meyer, Kevin
Marks and others who I'm sure I insult by omitting, a new
set of standards, deemed microformats are appearing [2]. These
standards specify ways to markup XHTML in ways that give
the content some meaning. Some examples include: Votelinks,
NoFollow, hCard, hCalendar, podcasting, blogchalking, xfn, Rel-
License, RelTag xFolk, and online news.
The promise of microformats is that they offer machine-usable
data while at the same time providing human-usable, presentable
content.
I think what we're seeing is a stage of evolution which will have
revolutionary impact. This movement toward having semantic,
well structured markup which is separated from the presentation
will have other fruit as well. In many ways, AJAX, the new
buzzword that encompasses all sorts of cool client-side Javascript
magic, has been enabled by the maturing of CSS.
Please, let's forget about trying to build a new Semantic Web,
let's make the one we already have (and love) semantic.
The revolution will be evolutionary.
Viva la revolution!
I. LICENCE
This paper is released under an Attribution-NotCommercial-
ShareAlike Creative Commons licence. The complete licence
text can be found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync-sa/2.0/
REFERENCES
[1] D. Quan and D. R. Karger, How to Make a Semantic Web Browser
http://www.www2004.org/proceedings/docs/1p255.pdf
[2] Microformats homepage http://microformats.org

Categories (tags):

PhD	phd
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Presentation in standard format, S5

Some days ago I had to give a presentation for the 2K* symposium, a joint initiative of research groups from different IT institutions, based in Trento and in Genova. The 40 mins presentation was titled "Trust in Recommender Systems: an historical overview and recent developments" (check the source code!). It is heavily based on an old presentation, I just added some slides about microformats, a concept I wanted to convey to the audience.
Anyway, I took the occasion to try to create the presentation in HTML using S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System developed by Eric Meyer. I think I will create all my future presentation in S5 from now on. The advantages: it "forces" you to keep the slides simple (no unnatural flow of information) and short (however you can have animations, check this slide); it is easy to publish the presentation on the Web, anyone can link to a specific slide, search engines find the information and index them, it is highly standard, evolutionary and small-pieces-loosely-connected-philosophy-like (for exaple it would be possible to create a small piece of javascript code that collect slides from different presentations in some meaningful automatic way to create a new presentation, but the possibilities are endless of course, especially if using the S5 format based on XOXO microformat), I can create the presentation with whatever text editor (perfect if you are in text mode), it does not require the viewer to have some fancy program (openoffice for the freedom lovers, powerpoint for the others) but a browser suffices.
You can find many presentations in S5 format in the microformats wiki; I also liked this presentation of Firefox, with style vulpes-flagrans or with style greenery. Yes, I know the stile I used for my presentation is not that great, if someone with graphical skills would like to create a style for me, it will be very appreciated of course.
For starting playing with S5, I suggest you S5 primer (you need to download HTML code and edit it) or S5present, an open-source web-based slideshow application (you just create an identity there and then use the site for creating the presentation). Guess what? S5 Presents was written in under 10 hours and 500 lines of code using the fantastic Ruby on Rails framework.
[question about English: "take the occasion to"? "take the chance to"? I wanted to say that I used this fact as an opportunity to try the technique. How do you say it in English?]
Tag: s5

Categories (tags):

Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software

A Microformat for grouping all your identities?

Jesse comments on my Identity Burro post in which I spoke about OpenId as a possible method for tieing together various ids you have on social sites (flickr, del.icio.us, ...). I want to be able to say that on flickr I'm phauly and on del.cio.us I'm paolomassa and on 43thing I'm mariah, etc. He ponders 2 solutions, a centralized and a decentralized one. I'm totally for the decentralized solution. I was suggesting OpenID but, to be sincere, I still need to interiorize well OpenID, I can feel it is a great idea but still need to understand all its power (and how to use it).
Actually I think a microformat would be killer for this. Jesse says # Distributed solution - people can embed their information on their homepage, which can be mined by a greasemonkey script. If I want to know Paolo's del.icio.us, flickr, 43thigns, ... I need to visit his homepage and grab his list.
I would add: they can embed this information ... using a microformat and hence adding some simple semantics and a possibility to thousands of services to bloom!
So according to the microformats process I'm going to send an email in the mailing list to see if there is interest, then we will Document current human behavior on the microformats wiki: are people already writing on their blogs which are their identities on social sites? Do they already do it using some formats? There are already formats for expressing your identities? And then I guess we'll see what happen.
I can hear someone asking "Attacks? Spamming?". Yes, on my blog I can claim my identities are boingboing (blog), danah (photos), ethanzuckermann (URLs on del.icio.us), etc. But it is just as now I can open a blog on blogger and claim I'm bill gates or the pope. Or I can leave comments on anyone's blog as Scoble writing "Microsoft is watching you", no? Read "What about spam?" on OpenID.net homepage to get an idea.
Technorati tag: microformat

Categories (tags):

Semantic web

semantic_web

A lot of available RDF data

I think RDF is a bit too complicated to be embraced in these times of "bottom-up" evolution. Anyway the biggest problem was (at least in my mind) lack of data.
But today I found a lot of RDF data at rdfdata.org. I didn't even start thinking of all the cool services you could build with them since I don't want to spend the next days diverting from what I should do (writing the thesis). And yes, some are more interesting than
Metadata about Elvis impersonators [RDF] (2005-04-01) At last, the semantic web is complete. Extensive metadata about 81 Elvis impersonators, some with scary videoclips. (slurred southern accent "Thank you, thank you very much."
(via Leigh Dodds)

Categories (tags):

Folksonomy	folksonomy
Free software	free_software
PhD	phd
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

AAAI05: terrific talk by Marty Tenenbaum

AI Meets Web 2.0: Building The Web of Tomorrow Today by Dr. Jay M. Tenenbaum.
Terrific terrific talk, fascinating. I should have podcasted it because you really missed something (except I have nothing to record audio on, would you consider sending me your old mp3 recorder pen?). I was so excited during the talk that I happened to take a photo of almost any slide. Actually the slides were 94 and I photoed 59 of them! Incredible to me as well.
Anyway, you might want to read the slides (pdf) or maybe you want to have a look at my pictures (possibly as a slideshow).
He introduced all the stuff I enjoy, such as Blogs, RSS, wiki (wikipedia), folksonomies, tags, flickr, Del.icio.us, microformats (aka Lower case semantic web), technorati, pubsub, greasemonkey (bookburro, greasemap) and much more; all tied together in a fascinating, convincing, making-sense manner!
After his presentation, we spoke about my research and he seemed interested. He invited me to visit commerce.net for one month or so and I have to say that I really like the idea. I spoke also with Rohit Khare that is actually working with Tenenbaum and he has a whole bunch of very clever, fascinating, realizable ideas that would really make an impact. They also underline more than once that this kind of architecture/language-of-web2.0 projects should be open source and I totally agree with them and like it.
Actually after the presentation, while I was speaking with Marty and Rohit, there was also Jesse Andrews, the creator of the mind-blowing book burro (actually he got most of the attention, totally deserved by the way). I guess it should be too cool having someone presenting your hack on a conference and then go to meet that person and say "You know the Book Burro extension you presented? Well, I'm the creator of it!". Cool! If you want to see how Jesse looks like, here is a picture of him and wait some more great hacks from him in few days.

Categories (tags):

Free software	free_software
Metadata	metadata
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

My suggestion to Google: getoutfoxed('s author)

Google, do hire Stan before Yahoo! does it. Stan is the author of "Outfoxed - Personalize your internet." I didn't play with the code yet (seems a Linux version is not yet ready at the moment, but on the way). Yes, the code is open source (Mozilla Public Licence), sweet! Anyway, the detailed description is fantastic! It is a bit like what I want to do for my PhD thesis. The difference? Stan did it! Check the site: it has a lot of interesting pages such as The Outfoxed Idea (A collection of thoughts on the theoretical aspects of Outfoxed, and the whole idea of using social networks for metadata distribution). Or at least the page A Third Phase of Internet Search in which Stan pictiorally shows the 3 phases: Naive trust --> PageRank and inferred quality --> Social networks to determine subjective quality

Every search query is a question: "What pages are most related to X?" Current search engines assume there is a single correct answer to each query. But consider a query like "Britney Spears." (The most popular Google query for 2004.) If you're a fan, you probably want to see her official site and maybe lyric pages. If you're a musician, you probably want to see reviews and music tabs. Of course, current search engines can't do this because they only consider "objective" measures like the number of links to a page. (See The good, the bad, and the subjective) What is needed is subjective, trusted ratings of the pages.

Categories (tags):

Semantic web

semantic_web

GreaseMonkey on Trenitalia.com

Trenitalia.com (Italy's public railways) has some links that works only on IExploder. Few weeks ago you could do nothing but sending tons of email asking Trenitalia.com to support standard (you can also sign a petition for Making Internet Explorer Standards Compliant and hope).
BUT NOW you can GreaseMonkey it! [you need the great Firefox browser] Install the Trenitalia Link Fixer script that fixes wrong links in Trenitalia website.
(via blackbirdblog)

Categories (tags):

Free software	free_software
Mozilla	mozilla
Semantic web	semantic_web

GreaseMonkey is the real Semantic Web (and now works on HospitalityClub)

GreaseMonkey is an extension for Firefox that allows you to totally (and easily) change the layout of any received web page. Don't like the color of the banner of that_site.com? You can change it! Do you prefer to have the login link on the_other_site.org on the right? You can place it wherever you want! While visiting the page of a certain book on Amazon.com, do you want to see the prices other sites ask for the same book (with this information embedded on "original" Amazon page)? You can do it (with BookBurro extension)! Want to hide forever every Google AdSense ad? You can do it! You find hundreds of scripts (for hundreds of different sites) over at GreaseMonkey UserScripts wiki or you can easily create yours (as I did, see the end of this post).
Oh yes, this will blow up your business model and "any kid with a bright idea and a knack for DHTML can create a new interface for your site, and it will probably be better than yours."
And yes, this is much much more real (and useful) than all the Semantic Web you listen about at conferences (with tons of papers and tons of highly funded programs that, at least at the moment, produces almost nothing you can use and play with; if I'm wrong, use the comment to point out interesting stuff).
Anyway, I played a bit with GreaseMonkey. I recommend you diveintogreasemonkey by Mark Pilgrim and I suggest you to follow it step by step (this is faster than trying to jump to what you need because you will jump back to understand that what you skipped was important).
And eventually, I created 2 GreaseMonkey scripts for HospitalityClub, that I think can save me a lot of time in using the site. I used HospitalityClub for finding hospitality in Trieste when I was attending the School on Networks (thanks truesmile and inquis), I used it in order to find hospitality in Pittsburgh where I'll be for the AAAI conference (thanks roder) and yesterday I wanted to use it for finding hospitality for my (short) holidays in Italy [not going to tell where]. The problem with HospitalityClub is that the interface is not too usable. My usual use case is the following: I search all the people offering hospitality in the place where I want to go, and I send to all of them the same request. This requires visiting the list of users, clicking on every username to go to her userpage and, on the userpage, click on "send message to this user" that leads to a new page, then copying my name in a field, my passport number in another field, the request text in a text area and push Submit. All these steps must be done for all the users!
So I created a GreaseMonkey extension that add a link near every username: the link allows to go directly to the "send message" page.
      [ script: hospitalityclub_addSendMsgLink.user.js ]
And I created another extension that prefill the values in the "send message" page with the default ones (my username, my passport number, the request message).
      [ script: hospitalityclub_defaultValuesInMsg.user.js ]
In this way you just have to push Submit. It would be possible to push Submit automatically with the extension but I wanted to keep some control ... interestingly GreaseMonkey gives you so much power that then your small brain is no more able to manage it. I mean, for example, I have at least 4 extensions that modify google.com pages and I'm no more able to tell which extension inserts what in which cases... this is something I need to think a little bit more about.
Anyway the 2 extensions are released under GPL (software that gives you freedom) so you are free to play with them, free to study them and free to modify them. Enjoy!

Categories (tags):

Bookmarks	bookmarks
Folksonomy	folksonomy
Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software

Visualizing time trends in how a site is tagged on del.icio.us: cloudalicious

The previous entry was about "powerlaws in the use of tags on del.icio.us". Then at http://del.icio.us/tag/powerlaw, i found Pietro Speroni's great post Tagclouds and cultural changes that (also) introduces cloudalicious, a one-night project of Terrell Russell. Cloudalicious shows the evolution in time of the tags used to tag any page on del.icio.us. Very very cool!!!
I tried to find a URL that was showing a non-converging behaviour but I failed. (Pietro was already providing some examples of sites presenting interesting trends in tags use.) Are your able to find at least one controversial URL? A site for which there was a great swift in time in the tags used for it.
For your information, I already tried with sites tagged on del.icio.us under controversial tags (such as abortion, scientology, jew), I tried with microsoft.com (as I was thinking may people would have tagged it as evil but this is not the case [in general people tend to tag what they like and less what they don't like in order not to increase the visibility of it, so I tried with "terri schiavo blog" that was very visible for a short period of time and I was suspecting the "tasteless" or "awful" tags were much more and growing over time but this is not the case]).
The only one with a little bit of variance over time I was able to find is boingboing.net. See cloudalicious for http://boingboing.netDel.icio.users seem to recognize it as a news site as time passes by. And it also seems that Del.icio.users are moving from "blogs" to "blog" as tag (common pattern or just for boingboing?).
There is some variance also with http://del.icio.us itself: see cloudalicious for http://del.icio.us
So I just repeat the small challenge: Can you find a URL that presents non-converging tags use?

Small suggestion for Terrell Russell (I write it here since I was not able to find his email address on his web site). [I'm sure he probably has already figured out by itself this suggestion since he was so good to put together in one night a great tool!]
Cloudalicious interface at the moment asks for These URLs (that) can be found at del.icio.us - they're the red "and X other people" links. (for example, http://del.icio.us/url/ec08a8ddfda4f2f9cad3a142dc49e23b represents http://boingboing.net/).
ec08a8ddfda4f2f9cad3a142dc49e23b is the md5sum of http://boingboing.net/
There are 2 easy way to obtain it automatically: (1) run md5sum on the server, (2) use http://del.icio.us/url?url=http://... (in which http://... can be replaced by the website we want to cloudicious).
In this way, users could enter in the Cloudicious interface, the real URL they are interested in (http://boingboing.net) and not the less easy to find (http://del.icio.us/url/ec08a8ddfda4f2f9cad3a142dc49e23b)
A bookmarklet and a greasemonkey extension (working on the site the user is browsing) are left as easy exercise for the reader as well

Lastly, let me mention that one of the key point of Clay Shirky in Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags that is also present is Pietro's post is that the correct way of categorizing something does not exist (initial Yahoo! approach was trying to force this and failed and librarians still (must) try to adopt this semplifying but wrong assumption). Instead there are as many correct ways of categorizing a thing as there are users. This resonates with my study on controversial users on Epinions (pdf): the idea that there is a global value of trustworthiness/reputation for every user/peer in the system does not make sense but still most of the papers in the reputation/trust literature start with this wrong and misleading assumption.

UPDATE: I just found it now but Pietro in
On Tag Clouds, Metric, Tag Sets and Power Laws was already mentioning that the paper by Clay Shirky "Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality" started to be tagged as longtail only after the article from Wired: The Long Tail came out

http://www.terrellrussell.com/projects/cloudalicious/cloudalicious.php?button=Graph+Tag+Cloud&delurl=http%3A%2F%2Fdel.icio.us%2Furl%2Fab415cb7529f139795401054ee2e6899

Categories (tags):

Bookmarks	bookmarks
Folksonomy	folksonomy
Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software

Use of Tags on del.icio.us follows a powerlaw

I read the wonderful Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags by Clay Shirky (highly recommended! Read it all!). Near the end, he speaks about "Tag Distributions on del.icio.us" and shows a graph that resembles a powerlaw (even if this is about only 2 hours of activity of 64 del.icio.users). After 2 weeks of powerlaws, I see powerlaws everywhere and I thought "let's try to test the hypothesis on a bigger dataset from del.icio.us". Well, few googling-minutes told me that many people had already had this idea and already performed tests on del.icio.us.
And of course many of them can be found looking at http://del.icio.us/tag/powerlaw (the del.icio.us page that shows all the URLs tagged under "powerlaw") [this is kind of uber-cool-self-referentialism].
Among the many, I just cite http://www.cozy.org/d/
(from which the image shown here is taken), where 84 popular URLs are studied and shown to exhibit a powerlaw structure (in the tags used for them). I suspect the value of del.icio.us can be found in the long tail of tagging as well.
Each dot on the log-log charts represent a tag. The most used tag appears to the left while the least appears to the right. All charts have the same x and y range, .5 to 1350; so the slope of these lines is about -1.

Categories (tags):

Blogging	blogging
Metadata	metadata
PhD	phd
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Reviews	reviews
Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software

hReview: a semantic microformat for reviews

Some weeks ago, Tantek was introducing a new microformat hReview.
We are pleased to announce the first public draft (v0.1) of hReview, jointly co-authored by representatives from America Online, CommerceNet Labs, Microsoft, Six Apart, Technorati, and Yahoo!. hReview is an open microformat standard for publishing and indexing distributed reviews on the Web. This standard enables users to contribute, identify, and aggregate review content on their own web sites and blogs as well as on community sites.
I didn't have time yet to dig into it but it is good that they analyzed previous attempts (I was trying to use RVW by Alf Eaton and to keep my list on Allconsuming but I didn't put too much effort into this) and that they ask for Feedback; almost all the links are to Wikipages so you can edit them directly there.
In general I really appreciate the work of Technorati (I also wrote a paper backing their proposal of VoteLinks, submitted to Web Intelligence 2005: "Page-reRank: using trusted links to re-rank authority" (pdf)).
Some other link I'll try to digest later on: jluster on hreview, hreview on technorati, hreview on del.icio.us, organizedshopping on hreview, adriancuthbert suggested to use this_is_an_hreview as common tag (tagspace?).
It would be great to have this format widely adopted so that the amount of decentralized published reviews will become soon huge and I will have a large amount a data for what I'm working on in my PhD: Trust-aware decentralized Recommender Systems. If interested, check my (a bit outdated) PhD proposal at my papers page.

Categories (tags):

Folksonomy	folksonomy
Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software

Folksonomies criticism

I tend to be enthusiastic about folksonomy and forget considering in what they are good and in what they are not, basically I forget to keep asking myself questions instead of blatantly state "Here we need a folksonomy! Yeahhey!!!". Anyway, as a sort of balance, you might want to read a post by Gene Smith and one by danah that are more critics than I am (unfortunately).

Categories (tags):

Blogging	blogging
Folksonomy	folksonomy
PhD	phd
Semantic web	semantic_web

New paper: Learning Contextualised Weblog Topics

I forgot about another paper I wrote: Learning Contextualised Weblog Topics (pdf) will be presented at WWW 2005 2nd Annual Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem: Aggregation, Analysis and Dynamics in Chiba, Japan, May 10th 2005. My boss was going to WWW2005 for presenting another paper and so we decided to submit our ongoing work to this workshop to get some feedback. We are still working with the system but we should be ready for prime time soon enough ... stay tuned!
[I would have loved to meet Ethan Zuckerman that is the invited speaker at this workshop and whose work on media attention is just delicious. (I even proposed to help him in coding something for monitoring the Italian media world but it's too bad I'm so lazy)]

If you like, check the paper Learning Contextualised Weblog Topics (pdf)
Abstract: In this paper, we examine how a topic-centric view of the Blogosphere can be created. We characterise the problems in aligning similar concepts created by a set of distributed, autonomous users and describe current iniatives to solve the problem. We introduce the Tagsocratic project, a novel initiave to solve the concept alignment problem using techniques derived from research in language acquisition among distributed, autonomous agents.

Categories (tags):

Folksonomy	folksonomy
Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software

Tag your friends

The interface of Rojo is totally unusable (at least to me), i don't understand the interface metaphors. What attracted me was the ability to tag your friends. So a curiosity: how would you tag me?
Our vision is that the next generation of feed reading requires new forms of organization so we built in the ability to tag your world, your content, your feeds, and even your friends.

Categories (tags):

Folksonomy	folksonomy
Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software

FolkOS: Folksonomy Operating System

We were used to organize our bookmarks in folders, then del.icio.us came and we now appreciate folksonomies (flat taxonomies, just a set of free keywords you can attach to URLs). We are used to operating systems that allow us to categorize files (knowledge) on folders, would it make sense to have an operating system that allows us to categorize files only based on taxonomy (just add keywords to any file, all the files are in a flat pool)? I don't know.
What I know is that the total lack of concurrency in the Operating Systems domain (actually just one global monopoly) is depriving all of us of new ideas, new paradigms, progress. If you compare it with the vibrant Web, where a new idea gets implemented and proposed almost daily, you can maybe see how far we would be if there were a free market for Operating Systems.
Anyway, how could we call it? What about FolkOS? FolkOS, the Folksonomy Operating System, I can already see the advertisements.... And, yes, I patented the idea, I got every possible TradeMark and not only on Earth. I patented FolkOS also on Venus and Alpha Centauri (venusians and alphacentaurians be aware! Don't use my patented ideas! I have the best lawyers of the galaxy!).
[I tend to overload my emails of smilies (for expressing when I'm joking) but I don't like them on blog posts, so I'm not sure my 4 readers understand when I (try to) make a joke. So, just to be sure, this is a joke ... I think patenting computational ideas is a total nonsense (maybe a video can help in understanding why)].

Categories (tags):

Folksonomy	folksonomy
Metadata	metadata
Semantic web	semantic_web

"Tag_the_tag" tag and metadadaism

In Tagwebs, Flickr, and the Human Brain, Jakob argues "a neuron in your brain is a lot like a tag in a tagweb". A tagweb is a network of tags whose edges are the "this tag is tagged with this tag" relationship, for example he tags the tag "Victoria" with the tag "female". He states that it is not possible to tag tags on flickr but there is a workaround. If you tag a page that "represents" a tag, you are implicitly tagging that tag and you can do it with del.icio.us. I tagged some pages representing tags with the new tag "tag_the_tag" (metatag has already another meaning due to HTML). It can be a sort of wordnet but bottom up. I'm skeptical about the rise of "tagging tags" but, if this happen, then tag spam will be an issue. Jacob ends with "I now understand how my brain works, and I can act in ways that embraces that knowledge." that really seems an enormous excess of "technology-driven optimism".
[New word you find in the text: metadadaism (search for metadadaism and write metadadaism in wikipedia).]
[Note for myself: an online article with colorful pictures is more likely to attract attention (at least for me) but .mov videos are bad since I have many problems watching them on my operating system libre]

Categories (tags):

PhD	phd
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

CiteULike: A free online service to organize your academic papers

[I'll write something about my trip in Israel later on, as time permits]
I just found on HubLog an online service I was really waiting for: CiteULike (a prototype service to manage your personal library of academic papers). When you are logged in and visiting a page related to a paper, you can post that paper to your online library using a bookmarklet. In doing so, you can also specify tags, a list of keywords you'd like to associate with this article (a la del.icio.us and flickr) and optional notes. The service is very similar to del.icio.us (simple, tag-powered and social), but precisely tailored for academic papers. You can also see all the papers tagged under a certain tag (for example networks). Cool!

You can see your library (see mine), and see which other users are reading the papers you find interesting. The about page tells you what is coming soon. I think that "exporting those data in semantic web formats" and "opening the API" can be interesting additions to the list. This would be great for creating Trust-aware Recommender System tailored for researchers.
The big problem I see is that only papers in (PubMed, HubMed, JSTOR, arxiv, IngentaConnect) can be added for now. Most of the papers I'm interested in are not stored on those online repositories.
I wish it would be possible to add Citeseer (I'm involved in a project whose goal is to relaunch citeseer), eprints archives and Springler (see my last paper page on Springler for a typical paper page).
I'd like also to be able to keep some blog posts (not published) in my online library and papers that researchers keep in their homepages: using the URL as key for the "paper" could do the work but this will make the site just as del.icio.us is now and I think this is not the goal of the online service. Maybe it would make sense to introduce two levels of papers: certified (by some recognized authority such as PubMed) and uncertified (such as my papers I keep on my blog) but I'm not sure this is a good idea.

Categories (tags):

Blogging	blogging
PhD	phd
Semantic web	semantic_web

Repository of category-tagged blog posts: anyone?

Some colleagues of mine are working on "how people can reach a shared common dictionary/language to denote concepts" (or at least understand each other still using their keywords). See Advertising games. We want to test ideas using real data from the blogosphere. The idea is to detect when 2 bloggers are posting about the same concept/topic but use different names to tag it (the post's category). For example, I use "trust and reputation", someone else uses "reputation" but we may speak about the same concept.
The questions:
- There is an aggregated repository of posts with categories?
- If not, Have you any idea about how can I collect this information?
Requirement:
- posts must have a category associated (livejournal and blogger don't let do this, while MovableType and Wordpress yes).
Some ongoing web search about the topic we're doing can be found at this wiki page, and this too. Thanks for help!

Categories (tags):

FOAF	foaf
PhD	phd
Semantic web	semantic_web
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

(Late) report on FOAF workshop

The FOAF workshop in Galway was almost 20 days ago, so the following report is a little bit late. Hope it can be useful at least as an historical memory.
It was fantastic to meet in flesh many people I just learnt to appreciate through their blogs. Many of the papers were very interesting. I especially like the idea of "Semantic cookies" (you keep your profile [as FOAF file] in a cookie and, with some trick, you give access to every site to it, sites can read it and give you a personalized experience) and "Bootstrapping the FOAF-Web: An Experiment in Social Network Mining" by Peter Mika (the idea is to use Google to infer social relationships among people). And there was also my paper of course. The presentation was so and so, I think I try to put too many concepts for a 15 minutes presentation. The only stuff I liked was the subtitle I wrote at the last second on the first slide: "Moleskiing: Climbing the peaks of FOAF".
Almost half of the workshop was devoted to very interesting Breakout sessions.

They were self-organized sessions where everyone was free to propose a topic (writing it on a paper on the wall) and everyone was free to join any of the sessions. Then based on numbers of interested people and topics, organizers were trying to suggest putting together different sections, if needed. I guess the FOAF and Trust session should have interested me but I was busy creating the presentation I gave the day after and I miss almost all of it (remind for myself: always prepare slides before conference!)
Something very thrilling was also the use of a backchannel on IRC. Many of us were connected to the Internet via WiFI during the talks and we were discussing, adding links, writing down talks. It was the first time I was using such a parallel real-time discussion space and I seldom use IRC so it was a strange and new experience for me, a kind of "augmented" conference. And it was strange to read the IRC log of what was said on the IRC channel #foaf during my presentation.
I met very interesting people. In the picture you can see Marc Canter moving around data, as he said). Marc is really as you could imagine him from his blog, he really says "coolio" and the lesson he gave us about how to deal with venture capitalists in front of a Guinness (picture) was very insightful, or maybe it was just the Guinness I don't remember... his foafnet effort is really worthwhile, check it and contribute to it as you can.
Meeting who began all this "I want my data back" movement was ipercool as well: Libby Miller and Dan Brickley (creator of the first version of FOAF format) are our real FOAF queen and king. You can check my pictures of the workshop or find more of them tagged as #foaf-galway on del.icio.us.
Moreover, now that I have some real <foaf:knows> relations I promise I'll update very soon my FOAF file.
I also got 2 t-shirts so the goal I chose for the workshop was partially accomplished
Last thing I want to mention is: "never go to a restaurant in Galway!". I spent 35 + 42 +65 euros for the dinner. Every time (but the second dinner in the castle) it was kind of self-organized. Of course the goal of a workshop is to stay with other people and discuss, share ideas so going back to the hostel or eat something alone in some very cheap place was not an option but next time I'll be more reactive and suggest to everyone to go to cheaper places. The problem was that I was paying the workshop with my money and so almost 150 euros for 3 dinners were really too much for me! However I should mention that lunches were kindly offered by the DERI institute and that the hostel I found (sleepzone) was cheap enough (15 euros per night) and with free internet connection (8 computer with RedHat!) and free wireless connection to Internet as well.
All considered, it was a great workshop and I had fantastic time.

Categories (tags):

Blogging	blogging
FOAF	foaf
Semantic web	semantic_web

OpenMedia and Galway

[still looking for a friend(-of-a-friend)* offering me hospitality in Larnaca, Cyprus, from 25 to 29 Oct 2004.]
Marc is working on OpenMedia. The project is very interesting but what catched my eye is that in the picture explaining OpenMedia there is my picture (the one representing me on WebJay).
I'll meet Marc at the FOAF conference in Galway, Ireland (we will have a dinner in the castle you can see in the image). I'm looking forward to meet Marc and the other people in the committee. It will be fun!

Categories (tags):

FOAF	foaf
Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software

FOAF Camp in The Netherlands

There will be a FOAF Camp (19-20 August 2004, Campus UTwente, The Netherlands).
In short, Two days of talking, hacking, socializing and making FOAF better. and more importantly W're doing this for fun, not for profit, on a pure cost recovery basis - so bear with us as we sort out some details.
Together with 1st Workshop on Friend of a Friend, Social Networking and the Semantic Web (FOAF'2004), it will be a ubercool FOAF summer here in Europe!

FOAF Camp - 19-20 August 2004, Campus UTwente, The Netherlands

WARNING

This is the first time we do this - we reserve the right to make changes and/or cancel the event; see below for the full restitution of the fee in that case. W're doing this for fun, not for profit, on a pure cost recovery basis - so bear with us as we sort out some details.

In short

Two days of talking, hacking, socializing and making FOAF better. Held in the parklike surroundings of Twente University, hometown of the Grolsch beer brewery.

This gathering will be loosely based on the ideas pioneered at the BSD and Apache Hackathons and last years FooCamp; i.e. a self organizing group (though do suggest topics) working on cool things together while having fun. And using the Face to Face time to understand people and issues better, work on things which require people from different continents to be in a room together and to build enough trust and understanding to make even greater things when you get home. (If you are also looking for something with a bit more structure, organisations and formalisms; do check out the FOAF workshop in Galway, Ireland.)

Organized by the FOAF community for the FOAF community.

The programme starts on Thursday the 19th of August 2004 at 9.00; and continues until Friday the 20th of August 2004 at 16.00.

The camp will be held at the Logica Facility; a tiny, somewhat secluded, conference center (which is just big enough for us) in the woods.

Friend of Friends help a Friend

We are organizing this on a personal and non-profit/cost recovery basis. So if you can help out; if you want to do something specifically; show something, help out organising something, sponsor a t-shirt, beerbash or a lunch, whatever, do let us know. We need the community to make this work.

Note that the site we are at is a private Campus away from any public roads and normal citizens; so even if you have very wild, noisy or strange ideas - we can propably accomodate them.

Conference Fee

150 Euro which includes lunch on both days and a dinner (or BBQ weather permitting) on thursday. Breakfast is included in the roomrates quoted below.

We prefer payment ahead of time, but see cut-off dates below into:

IBAN: NL64ABNA0481301186
Account: 48.13.01.186 / WebWeaving
Bank: ABN AMRO, Stationstraat 31, Leiden, The Netherlands
Swift/FAST sorting code: ABN ANL 2A

using an internatioanl SWIFT or IBAN transfer, with the transaction set in Euro's and with any cost paid by the sender. Contact us to make alternate arrangements, in case of hardship, or if you need things such as a proforma invoice.

Or alternatively in cash on-site. In any case; you will receive your receipt from the registration desk at FOAF camp.

In the unlikely, but possible event that, we need to cancel the event we will fully restitute de amounth paid; and/or any banking fee's up to a maximum of 15 E upon presentation by email or fax of the receipts.

If you have to cancel - and let us know before the 15th - we'll restitute the full amount paid. Any cancelations after that point will be restituted up to 50%.

A registration form will be provided as soon as possible; meanwhile you can help us tremendously by sending us an expression of interest.

Lodging is not included in the above conference fee; see below for the options and how to make reservations. It is up to -you- to arrange your own accomodation. A fair number of rooms are suitable for sharing; use your friend of a friend network as appropriate.

Important Dates

15 of July premillary registration cut-off. Registrations after this date will be served on a first-come, first served basis provided there is still space.

1st of August registration closed.

2nd of August Deadline for presentation requests.

3st of August If you've not yet wired your conference fee at this point; then be prepared to pay cash at the conference.

Location

FOAF camp will be held at the Campus of Twente University, near Enschede, The Netherlands.

Which is located at the very east of the Netherlands, on walking distance from the current border with Germany.

Amsterdam Schiphol is the nearest main airport; though note that some budget carries also fly to Munster Osnabruck Airport (FMO) just across the boarder in Germany. The connection between FMO en Hengelo is a bit more awkward than the direct train between Schiphol and Hengelo; though generally doable for experienced travelers .

Schiphol is about 200 km (150 miles) west of Enschede, Munster airport about 75 km (60 miles) to the South East. Either airport and the campus are connected directly to the highway and it is well signposted.

Facilities

Dial-in: none; though avialable in most hotel rooms (some rooms however have ISDN)

GSM: Europe standard; i.e. 900 and 1800 Mhz; a US 1900Mhz phone will -not- work. You need a european one (prepaids start at 35 Euro's without contract; best sourced from a supermarket) or a triband.

Network: The entire campus is covered by WiFi - exact arrangements will be announced later. (please confirm if you need wired access too).

Beamer: yes, up to XVGA; VGA style connector only.

Audio: not plannned. Let us know if needed.

Power: 230 volts, 50 Hz. DIN41494 or DIN 57620 which looks like this: .

Food

Carnivore and Western Vegetarians are catered for - if you have any other dietary needs - let us know before the 21st of April.

We expect to provide you with a Lunch on Thursday and Friday, and a dinner of sorts (or BBQ, loaction and weather permitting) on Thursday evening.

Breakfast is included in the room rates below.

There will be coffee, tee or water during the sessions.

Route - from Amsterdam Schiphol Airport

The easiest way to reach Enschede is by Train; as the most highways between Amsterdam/Rotterdam and the Hauge are are clogged during rush hours; and you have little use for a car while on Campus (which is more or less a single pedestrian zone).

In short the train station is below the airport; underground. There are direct trains to Hengelo and Enschede once an hour and more often if you do not mind changing midway. This is generally well anounced and clear. The trip will take a bit over two hours and set you back 22.50 Euro (about 25 USD). The campus is located in between Hengelo and Enschede and has its own train station called Drienerloo. There is a very regular bus/shuttle service from the train station to the campus.

More details provided by the university , a routeplanner university, short table and the schiphol airport web site.

Meanwhile at the airport follow the signs for the trainstation which is below the terminals. Note there there are also Tickes vending machines in the luggage reclaim area which are generally less crowded and with less of an issue to be besieged by pickpockets and other big-city folklore.

Vending machines require coins, make change, take most ATM and a few of credit cards. More details on these vending machines found here.

A one way ticked will be E 22.50 which is awkward to pay with coins.

There are also manned ticked booths during the day at the area above the train station. These people generally pretend -not- take credit cards (but will relent if you get stroppy). If you get your ticked here also ask for a Strippencard (see below) which is valid for all busses in the whole of the Netherlands.

Note that that this area (like Amsterdam Central Station) is rife with pickpockets.

Use the timetable, enter Schiphol and Enschede. Virtually all trains depart from platform 2. You want to go into the direction Amersfoort or Enschede. The direct train departs at 51 past the hour; at 21 past the hour there is a train which requires a change at Amersfoort. This change is easy; the train you have to get into will be waiting for you on the other side of the platform. Once you get to Hengelo you can either change to the Enschede Drienerloo train (a 5 minute train ride) or continue to Enschede and take a taxi or bus from there.

Schiphol to either Hengelo or onto Enschede, twice an hour from 5.51 until 23.21:

from Schiphol to Hengelo
(2 hours, 3min later) Enschede
(2 hours, 11min later)
Departure: 5.51
6.21
6.51
7.21
7.51
....until..
21.51
22.21
22.51 Arrival: 7.54
8.24
8.54
9.24
...
23.54
00.24
00.54
01.24

Arrival 8.02
8.34
9.02
9.34
...
00.02
00.34
01.02
1.34

There is a connecting bus at 09 or 39 minutes past the hour from Enschede (Line 1, direction Hems), a 14 minute ride.

If you get out in Hengelo you can wait 25 minutes (until 18 or 48) for a train onto Drienerlo, which is the station nearest to the Campus from where you can also pick up that same bus 1 to the campus (a 4 minute ride):

fromHengelo to Enschede Drienerlo
18 minutes past the hour 23 minutes past the hour
48 51

The choise of sitting in the train until Enschede; and taking the connecting bus from there; or chaning at Hengelo and take the connecting bus from Drienerlo is one of personal preference.

If you want to take a Cab stay on board until Enschede; there are generally more taxies at the stand in Enschede and generally a bit cheaper.

Bus tickets are called "strippenkaart" and are valid throughout The Netherlands. The ticket contains 15 so called "strips". The city is divided into zones and you need to have stamped the number of strips that is equivalent to the number of zones you travel through, plus one. For the above trip from Hengeloo station to Campus this is three strips. Only the last strip of that number is stamped, usually by the bus driver who knows how many strips you need. Strippenkaarten can be bought at the ticked counter of the station. A more elaborate guide is made available by the transport authority - or use this more colloqial guide.

By international train

From southern europe; take a train direction Amsterdam and change at Schiphol; from Germany or from Scandinavia; know that Hengelo-Osnabruck is on the main East/West train connection. Or change at Arnehm.

Osnabruck/FMO airport to the campus

Generally easiest to take the bus to Osnabruck or Munster and then take any train direction Netherlands; and get out at Hengeloo.

By car

Schiphol airport, Munster Airport and the Campus are all directly on the main highway system. Simply follow the signs to Enschede/Hengelo. Once there follow this description. There are parking pacilities next to the conference area.

Staying at the Campus

We have two levels of accomodation available; at 67 Euro (including VAT and breakfast) in the Drienerburg Hotel and at 46 Euro (including VAT and breakfast) at the Logica facility.

Secondly we'll expect to be able to allow you to pitch a tent and use the nearby sports facilities for toilets/showers on a nearby sportsfield. Pricing to be announced. If you plan on bringing a (very small) campervan or caravan - please secure approval ahead of time.

You can book through this form directly with them. Do add the code 'FOAFCAMP' in the comment block at the bottom.

A link and reservation reference code to our room block will be made available as soon as possible.

All locations are within a 10 minute walk from each other.

For those craving for more luxery; there is a 4 start hotel just off campus site: the Broeiert as well as lot of choise in Enschede or Hengeloo. This hotel is 50 meters from trainstation Drienerlo.

Other things to do

If you are staying on - you can travel the usual sights of the Netherlands; Amsterdam beeing a well known one; visit one of the textile industry museums in Enschede itself (add more..)

Contact

The event is organized by members of the FOAF community on purely for fun and a not for profit basis: Libby Miller, Dan Brickley with a bit of logistical assistance thrown in by @Semantics S.R.L..

Dirk-Willem van Gulik, +31 (0) 71 514 9564, Libby Miller and Dan Brickley. Fax is at +31 71 514 9564

© 2004 FOAF Camp, Asemantics, All Rights Reserved. Contact foafcamp@asemantics.com for more information.

Categories (tags):

FOAF	foaf
PhD	phd
Semantic web	semantic_web
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

Workshops Committees

I'm writing a paper for Coopis2004 and have not too much time to blog. By the way, I'm in committee of 2 very interesting workshops:
- Trust, Security, and Reputation on the Semantic Web (held at the 3rd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) from 7-11 November, 2004 in Hiroshima, Japan.)
Deadline for Submissions: July 16, 2004
- Trust, Recommendations, Evidence and other Collaboration Know-how (TRECK) Track (track of the 20th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, Santa Fe, New Mexico, March 13 -17, 2005)
Deadline for Submissions: Sept. 3, 2004

You are of course invited to submit challenging and innovative ideas!
I guess I should also update our wiki list of trust related conferences. In the meantime I ping http://topicexchange.com/t/calls_for_papers/

Categories (tags):

Blogging	blogging
FOAF	foaf
Peer to peer	peer_to_peer
PhD	phd
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Semantic web	semantic_web
Social Software	social_software
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

PhD Research Proposal: Trust-aware Decentralized Recommender Systems

I realised today I didn't write yet an entry about my PhD Research Proposal "Trust-aware Decentralized Recommender Systems" (TaDRS).
So here it is the PDF file. If you have any comment or criticism, I'll be happy to hear from you.
The PhD research proposal is a little bit outdated (29th May 2003) but I didn't have a blog at that time. Enjoy and let me know what you think.

UPDATE:
Abstract
This PhD thesis addresses the following problem: exploiting of trust information in order to enhance the accuracy and the user acceptance of current Recommender Systems (RS). RSs suggest to users items they will probably like. Up to now, current RSs mainly generate recommendations based on users' opinions on items. Nowadays, with the growth of online communities, e-marketplaces, weblogs and peer-to-peer networks, a new kind of information is available: rating expressed by an user on another user (trust). We analyze current RS weaknesses and show how use of trust can overcome them. We proposed a solution about exploiting of trust into RSs and underline what experiments we will run in order to test our solution.

Categories (tags):

Blogging	blogging
CoCoA	cocoa
Movable Type	movable_type
Recommender Systems	recommender_systems
Semantic web	semantic_web
Trust and Reputation	trust_and_reputation

blam! rocks

I've just used blam! in this review of Revolution OS.
Basically blam! add some semantic information to your blog entry when this is a review. The semantic information can be understood by a computer program so that it will be possible to, for example, aggregating all the reviews about a certain book or movie.
Read about OpenReviews and their possible uses from Accordion Guy.
I'm planning to do something similar for my project CoCoA.

The semantic format for reviews is RVW (Review Module for RSS 2.0), created by Alf Eaton. Read an explanation of RVW from Corante.

The RVW specification is a module extension to the RSS 2.0 syndication format. RVW is intended to allow machine-readable reviews to be integrated into an RSS feed, thus allowing reviews to be automatically compiled from distributed sources. In other words, you can write book, restaurant, movie, product, etc. reviews inside your own website, while allowing them to be used by Amazon or other review aggregators.

There should be more than enough RVW metadata out there floating around at this point. The next step is for someone to build a decent aggregator that collates reviews of a particular topic or two. Because of RVS, creating aggregate rating scores and summarizing opinions should be very straightforward. It's really not in the best interests of Amazon, epinions and the like to lose control of their review content, but RVW makes controlling review content impossible in the long term. Anyone got some pull at the Google skunkworks?

Blogware supports the new format and there is also a RVW plugin for Movable Type but I don't understand how it works.

Seb likes RVW and also point out how this semantic information could be used to generate personalized recommendations.

In the case of item types that describe reviews, overall average ratings on any particular product are easy to look up. However, if you choose to provide a description of your personal web of trust to those interfaces (think of blogrolls as a proto-example), you can efficiently get a sense of what your tribe of like-minded individuals thinks of that product. It's the microblogosphere idea again - look up Recommender systems and the microblogosphere for more.

This is essentially what my PhD Research Proposal: Trust-aware Decentralized Recommender Systems is about.