pointrel-discuss — Discussions about the Pointrel Social Semantic Desktop and related applications.

[Pointrel-discuss] DocumentCloud, OpenCalais

[Paul D. F. <pdf...@ku...>]

http://www.documentcloud.org/home
"DocumentCloud runs every document you upload through OpenCalais, giving 
you access to extensive information about the people, places and 
organizations mentioned in each. ... Annotate documents to highlight key 
passages. Use public notes to compose annotations that will be part of 
your published reporting, and private notes to organize your own 
thoughts. Every note has a unique URL, so you can point readers right to 
the passage you want to highlight. ... Everything you upload to 
DocumentCloud stays private until you're ready to make it public, but 
once you decide to publish, your documents join thousands of other 
primary source documents in our public catalog. Use our document viewer 
to embed documents on your own website and introduce your audience to 
the larger paper trail behind your story. ... From our catalog, 
reporters and the public alike can find your documents and follow links 
back to your reporting. DocumentCloud contains court filings, hearing 
transcripts, testimony, legislation, reports, memos, meeting minutes, 
and correspondence. See what's already in our catalog. Make your 
documents part of the cloud. ..."
http://www.documentcloud.org/opensource

http://www.opencalais.com/
http://www.opencalais.com/blogs/kristathomas/introduction-opencalais
"We want to make all the world's content more accessible, interoperable 
and valuable. Some call it Web 2.0, Web 3.0, the Semantic Web or the 
Giant Global Graph - we call our piece of it Calais.
Calais is a rapidly growing toolkit of capabilities that allow you to 
readily incorporate state-of-the-art semantic functionality within your 
blog, content management system, website or application."
"Introduction to OpenCalais
   The free OpenCalais service and open API is the fastest way to tag 
the people, places, facts and events in your content.  It can help you 
improve your SEO, increase your reader engagement, create 
search-engine-friendly ‘topic hubs’ and streamline content operations – 
saving you time and money.
   OpenCalais is free to use in both commercial and non-commercial 
settings, but can only be used on public content (don’t run your 
confidential or competitive company information through it!). OpenCalais 
does not keep a copy of your content, but it does keep a copy of the 
metadata it extracts there from.
   To repeat, OpenCalais is not a private service, and there is no 
secure, enterprise version that you can buy to operate behind a 
firewall. It is your responsibility to police the content that you 
submit, so make sure you are comfortable with our Terms of Service (TOS) 
before you jump in.
   You can process up to 50,000 documents per day (blog posts, news 
stories, Web pages, etc.) free of charge.  If you need to process more 
than that – say you are an aggregator or a media monitoring service – 
then see this page to learn about Calais Professional. We offer a very 
affordable license.
   OpenCalais’ early adopters include CBS Interactive / CNET, Huffington 
Post, Slate, Al Jazeera, The New Republic, The White House and more. 
Already more than 30,000 developers have signed up, and more than 50 
publishers and 75 entrepreneurs are using the free service to help build 
their businesses.
   You can read about the pioneering work of these publishers, 
entrepreneurs and developers here.
   To get started, scroll to the bottom section of this page. To build 
OpenCalais into an existing site or publishing platform (CMS), you will 
need to work with your developers. ...
   Why OpenCalais Matters
   The reason OpenCalais – and so-called “Web 3.0” in general (concepts 
like the Semantic Web, Linked Data, etc.) – are important is that these 
technologies make it easy to automatically connect the people, companies 
and concepts in your content to the related content on the rest of the Web.
   So when you’re writing about Twitter's new Promoted Tweets offering, 
you can be automatically connected to the other stories about Twitter's 
Promoted Tweets without having to embed links along the way.
   Creating standardized metadata is about revealing the connections 
between people, companies, concepts and events and forging connections 
to relevant and related content automatically – streamlining your 
editorial processes and saving you time and expense along the way.
   Ultimately, this new set of technologies is driving the next wave of 
innovation in digital media, and has the potential to inspire yet 
another “boom” similar to what we saw with SEO and SEM.
   As innovators like MediaCloud, ViewChange.org and Hedgehogs.net 
(three more OpenCalais early adopters) lead the way, we will see more 
and more publishers, entrepreneurs and developers learning how to work 
with the new tools.
   Why OpenCalais is Free
   OpenCalais is a strategic initiative from Thomson Reuters to support 
the interoperability of content across the digital landscape.
   Our goal with this initiative is not to make money, but rather to 
make it easy for folks to categorize and tag their content in a uniform 
and consistent fashion that complies with Semantic Web standards."

Mentioned here:
http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/
http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5678611/what-are-my-options-for-building-a-rich-web-application

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies 
of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.

[Pointrel-discuss] About Fluidinfo

[Paul D. F. <pdf...@ku...>]

http://fluidinfo.com/about/
"""
The thinking behind Fluidinfo
   Humans are diverse and unpredictable. We create, share, and organize 
information in an infinite variety of ways. We've even built machines to 
process it. Yet for all their capacity and speed, using computers to 
work with information is often awkward and frustrating. We are allowed 
very little of the spontaneity that characterizes normal human behavior. 
Our needs must be anticipated in advance by programmers. Far too often 
we can look, but not touch.
   Why isn't it easier to work with information using a computer?
   At Fluidinfo we believe the answer lies in information architecture. 
A rigid underlying platform inhibits or prevents spontaneity. A new 
information architecture can be the basis for a new class of 
applications. It can provide freedom and flexibility to all 
applications, and these advantages could be passed on to users.
   We've spent the last several years designing and building Fluidinfo 
to be just such an architecture.
   Fluidinfo makes it possible for data to be social. It allows almost 
unlimited information personalization by individual users and 
applications, and also between them. This makes it simple to build a 
wide variety of applications that benefit from cooperation, and which 
are open to unanticipated future enhancements. Even more importantly, 
Fluidinfo facilitates and encourages the growth of applications that 
leave users in control of their own data.
"""

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies 
of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.

[Pointrel-discuss] SemanticXO: Is a Semantic Web for XO-1 Laptop Possible? - OLPC News

[Paul D. F. <pdf...@ku...>]

http://www.olpcnews.com/software/applications/semanticxo_is_a_semantic_web_f.html

Mentioned in the comments, by Shirky, questioning the semantic web:
http://www.shirky.com/writings/semantic_syllogism.html

More on the XO Semantic web project:
http://semweb4u.wordpress.com/2011/04/05/clustering-activity-for-the-xo/
http://semweb4u.wordpress.com/2011/04/12/status-of-semanticxo-droit-de-reponse/

I would think the XO could benefit from earlier Pointrel system 
implementation ideas, related to using integers instead of strings to 
define triples, with a common lookup of the integer into a common string 
pool.

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies 
of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.

[Pointrel-discuss] DeepaMehta Blog » on the edge

[Paul D. F. <pdf...@ku...>]

Interesting graphic about types of links:
   http://blog.deepamehta.de/?p=141

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies 
of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.

[Pointrel-discuss] A technical need for cloud database design that flows out of a social design about scarcity?

[Paul D. F. <pdf...@ku...>]

Consider:

"GemStone Systems » We Solve the Hardest Problems - java caching, 
distributed caching and event processing"
   http://www.gemstone.com/hardest-problems
"In addition to these prior art approaches by Web 2.0 vendors, 
GemStone’s perspective on distributed system design is further 
illuminated by 25 years of experience with customers in the world of 
high finance. Here, in stark contrast to Web user-oriented applications, 
financial applications are highly transactional, automated, and 
consistency of data is paramount. Eventually consistent solutions are 
frequently not an option. Business rules do not permit relaxed 
consistency, so invariants like account trading balances must be 
enforced by strong transactional consistency semantics. In application 
terms, the cost of an apology[8] makes rollback too expensive, so many 
high-speed financial applications must limit workflow exposure 
traditionally by relying on OLTP systems with ACID guarantees."

This desire for all of Consistency, Availability, and Partionability 
(CAP) mentioned in the link (saying all real systems are tradeoffs 
between those), especially to manage financial data, perhaps flows out 
of a scarcity paradigm for our society? You can't just accept having a 
peer-to-peer gift economy in our dominant culture right now -- you need 
accurate accounting that relates to "ownership" of resources perceived 
as scarce.

Ironically, fiat dollars that are just blips in computer memory and 
could be arbitrary amounts -- fiat dollars are artificially scarce by 
design, and these systems built on abundant computing are being designed 
to enforce that artificial scarcity.

So, here we see a technical need for database architecture driven by a 
social paradigm of scarcity and "ownership" and a desire for a high 
degree of globe spanning control. So, here is a crossover between my 
thinking about the Pointrel system and notions of abundance.

See also:
   "The Mythology of Wealth"
   http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies 
of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.

[Pointrel-discuss] What will Web 3.0 be? | Thought Palace

[Paul D. F. <pdf...@ku...>]

From:
   "What will Web 3.0 be?"
   http://jens.mooseyard.com/2009/02/what-will-web-30-be/
"There’s really no such single thing as “Web x“, of course. And all 
predictions are really just wishes. That being said, my wish is that Web 
3.0 will be about distributed systems. To oversimplify:
   Web 1.0 built up big brand-name websites with their own 
content—things written by them, or repurposed from the media companies 
that owned them, or stuff to buy.
   Web 2.0 embraced “user-created content” and interaction between 
users. The content creation has become less centralized, outsourced to 
whomever wants to register an account and post stuff, but the sites 
managing, storing and serving the content are still centralized.
   Web 3.0, I hope, will take the decentralization to the software, and 
the storage. Monolithic web apps run by huge server farms—Facebook, 
Blogger, Twitter, Flickr, etc.—will be at least in part supplanted by 
apps that users run locally (or at least ‘nearby’) and which share data 
among each other."

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies 
of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.

[Pointrel-discuss] NEPOMUK lessons learned

[Paul D. F. <pdf...@ku...>]

Just poking around NEPOMUK as I think about CouchDB and using existing 
systems somehow, also thinking about this issue of context and how do 
people agree where to go to get their resources and transactions when 
they have a common shared space where the URI/URN resources might not be 
in that space (I'm not sure anyone has a general solution other than the 
web of URLs as locations).

 From NEPOMUK's: "Using the Personal Semantic Desktop" 20.10.2008
http://dev.nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/raw-attachment/wiki/NepomukTutorial/d2-3.pdf
"""
4.2 RDF Repository and PIMO Service
   The delivered RDF Repository has the conventional features of an RDF 
store. Main functionalities are adding and deleting triples, and 
searching for facts. The implementation goes beyond the state of the art 
by providing a scalable implementation of a limited NRL inference 
engine. The details of this are described on the page about inference14. 
The approach to inference is satisfactory: it provides a limited set, 
but is faster than the default inference engine of the underlying store, 
especially in the case of deleting triples. Similar is our approach to 
full-text indexing: we extended (together with the open-source community 
around Aduna-Software.com) the Sesame RDF store with fulltext-indexing 
capabilities. Again, this approach is fairly scalable (it slows down 
with increased database size). There is a wikipage documenting fulltext 
indexing15, we can say it provides satisfactory fulltext search.
   A problematic area is the communication with the database. Relational 
databases have an optimised scheme to communicate. Well-known commands 
exist to manipulate data (creation of rows, deletion, and updates) and a 
clear transaction scheme allows to commit and roll-back multiple 
operations. On RDF, the manipulation of stores is usually done on the 
level of adding and removing individual triples. To abstract from this, 
many applications add a "business layer" API on top of relational 
databases offering object-level operations.  Typical operations would be 
to add, remove, and update items, or to invoke more complex commands. In 
NEPOMUK we have these commands on the level of the PIMO service. 
Developers can use either the RDF Repository directly of the "business 
layer" provided by PIMO service. At the beginning of the project, we 
discussed the possibility of having a single interface that
offers access to the database, on the level of a "business layer" and 
prohibit direct manipulation of triples. On hindsight, we have seen that 
a business layer would have reduced the programming effort and claried 
how exactly the store has to be used. This would mean to remove access 
to the repository on the level of individual triples and instead only 
allow operations on the level of resources (and classes, properties, 
ontologies). Manipulations would then also work in bigger chunks, making 
each call veriable (the state before and after the change have to keep 
the RDF data valid, this is not possible when allowing single-triple 
operations). The advantages of a "high-granular" API would be:
* Being able to verify operations on a higher level.
* Optimising database operations: when operations have to be on "one
resource" level, indexing and inference can be optimised.
* Developers do not have to know about the semantics on the level of
individual triples but can concentrate on higher-level tasks.
* Signals about changes are more coarse-granular, allowing better 
listening architectures.
   The last point is related to the problem of signalling and messaging 
between services. At the moment, NEPOMUK only offers a method-invocation 
based service-to-service communication. Therefore the RDF Repository 
only supports very basic ways of listening to changes. A service which 
reacts to changes in data has to register a listener on the level of 
triples (a triple was changed). Having a higher-level API would allow 
listeners to get informed on the level of resources (a resource has 
changed). ...
   Summing up the issues already addressed above in the lessons learned, 
the most important aspect would be to restrict access to the RDF 
Repository to methods on a higher-level business-layer API. Instead of 
allowing single-triple operations (add a triple, remove a triple), 
operations should always be on the level of resources (add this 
resource, remove this resource) and provide more convenience to the 
developer by providing a clear object-oriented API.
"""

NEPOMUK has a lot of interesting service ideas that would be useful on 
top of the Pointrel System -- and that issue with changes is 
interesting. As for the aspect of "high-granular", that is what is 
accomplished by Pointrel20090201 transactions (and also transactions in 
earlier version that were not stored as individual files but integrated 
into the triple store database but could be rolled back).

Anyway, with CouchDB (looking at now) focused on documents (resources), 
with NEPOMUK saying this, with HTTP talking about this, and with the 
version of Pointrel from two years ago having moved in this direction, 
it seems this ideas of resources both for their own sake and as 
transactions that I have been exploring is a promising area. The idea of 
resources as transactions though is different from the seeming intent of 
CouchDB, HTTP, and NEPOMUK as they are commonly used though. But the 
Pointrel20090201 system has two layers in that sense, resources as files 
and resources as transactions of triples if they are in a special file 
format (.pointrel). But the resources as files could support other 
usages -- like resources in RDF used as transactions.

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies 
of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.

[Pointrel-discuss] Triple-based Computing by Dieter Fensel

[Paul D. F. <pdf...@ku...>]

Triple-based Computing
Dieter Fensel
DERI Research Report 2004-05-31
May 2004
http://www.deri.org/TR/2004-05-31

===

Also, I've been looking at Apache's CouchDB, inspired by Max Ogden's 
talk on it and work with it. Wondering about it as a platform to put the 
Pointrel system on perhaps. It has some aspects of earlier Pointrel 
system versions.

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies 
of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.

[Pointrel-discuss] Fwd: [Open Manufacturing] Metaweb CC Semantic Web and Google

[Paul D. F. <pdf...@ku...>]

Just noting this here.

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of
abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [Open Manufacturing] Metaweb CC Semantic Web and Google
Date: Sun, 29 Aug 2010 17:43:51 -0400
From: Paul D. Fernhout <pdf...@ku...>
Reply-To: ope...@go...
To: Open Manufacturing <ope...@go...>

Background:
   "YouTube - Welcome to Metaweb"
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJfrNo3Z-DU

That video talks about giving a unique ID to a concept.

Mentioned here:
http://wiki.freebase.com/wiki/What_is_Freebase%3F
"Freebase is an open, Creative Commons licensed repository of structured
data of more than 12 million entities. An entity is a single person, place,
or thing. Freebase connects entities together as a graph. "

Related online development environment:
http://wiki.freebase.com/wiki/Acre

Anyway, any big open manufacturing system will have similar issues to deal
with as mentioned in the video -- coming up with agreed on pointers about
concepts. Metaweb's "Freebase"  is under a Creative Commons CC-BY license.

WordNet and Pointrel have aspects of that too... WordNet has senses for a
word. Pointrel always had the notion of a unique concept identifier. Bill
Kent talked about some of these issues in his book "Data and Reality".

Google recently bought Metaweb (July 2010):
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_buys_semantic_web_database_metaweb.php
"The Semantic Web is all about structuring data so that humans and computers
can more easily interpret the Web and discover relevant data for a wide
variety of purposes. Google, a company built on the ability to advertise
based on contextual data, announced today a major acquisition in the
Semantic Web space. As of today, Metaweb, maker of Freebase and a leader in
the Semantic Web, has joined forces with Google. Freebase is a massive
open-structured database of information about almost anything, including
books, movies and music. In fact, Google already has a relationship with
Freebase, pulling in its information to provide intelligent search results
within Google News. With the acquisition of Metaweb, Google can now leverage
the company's tools and data even further, especially within basic Web
search results. "This is a huge win for the Semantic Web," Alex Iskold,
founder and CEO of AdaptiveBlue, the semantic technology company behind
GetGlue.com  (and occasional ReadWriteWeb contributor), told us. "It could
not be bigger, because really, we had the biggest company on the Web buy the
biggest player in the Semantic Web space." ..."

Anyway, aspects of open manufacturing information could be seen as an
extension to Metaweb. Of course, there are lots of other ways to do that,
too. :-) And to some extent, all these systems overlap or should be
inter-convertable.

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of
abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.

[Pointrel-discuss] Google Wave: A Pissed Off Tutorial

[Paul D. F. <pdf...@ku...>]

http://www.cracked.com/video_18209_google-wave-pissed-off-tutorial.html

Discussed here:
http://digg.com/comedy/Google_Wave_A_Pissed_Off_Tutorial

Top major issue was lack of email integration...

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of
abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.

[Pointrel-discuss] "Save Google Wave!" website comments

[Paul D. F. <pdf...@ku...>]

Interesting comments by people (generalizing :-) seeing significant value in 
new collaboration platforms:
   http://www.savegooglewave.com/
"""
Listen to the People!

"I am a Theoretical Physicist and I use google wave for collaborating with 
my colleagues who are in different places around the world. Google wave has 
to be saved ... it is such a brilliant tool ... unfortunately, badly 
advertised (not at all ...). A lot of people would quickly realize its 
potential and the way it can really change collaborative working in a 
positive way."

"Google should just integrate Google Wave's features directly into GMail and 
it will take off big time! "

"I use the wave as a way of communicating with my friends and officers of an 
association that I am in. It has been a lot easier than email to keep up 
with and helps other people working together more."

"I convinced my advisor to use GWave to collaborate on my master's thesis, 
papers, and so on. I also made a Google Docs Apresentation showing how grad 
students could use GWave for papers. I'm very very devastated! please, SAVE 
GOOGLE WAVE"

"I am a technology student and have been working on a fiction novel for past 
few months. I collaborate with my girlfriend for the story who lives across 
the world. Google wave gives us a great way to Add, edit, argue, change, 
disagree and elaborate on the story all at once in real time. I see no other 
tool can provide that in present date. I love it. It's a bit ahead of time 
product for sure, I think it should be worth waiting for people to come up 
with ways to use it in time. "

"I'm a software developer and I use Wave to co-ordinate my team and talk to 
my clients. It's given us much faster feedback than we ever had before, and 
a permanent, shared log of all our discussions. I don't know how I'd be able 
to work without it, as no other tool offers the same combination of features 
(IM, email, wiki)." - Ashley Moran

"I am a teacher in an online school (http://bit.ly/ckjyMy) and use wave as 
part of my class for discussion (led by my questions). The students 
discussions in wave is 40% of their grade. If wave shuts down, I will have 
to find some other online program that does what wave does (don't know of 
one right now)."

"I was very excited when I heard about Wave as it struck me as a 
"fundametally right" approach to collaboration. Due to other personal 
projects I have not yet explored it and it saddens me that it may disappear 
before I even have the chance. I am sure there are millions of other 
not-so-early-adopters like me who will join the party if it is allowed to 
continue. It's probably a slow burner and just needs a bit more time to gain 
traction - not unlike many other truly disuptive technologies."

"Google wave was going to revolutionise the way students, lecturers and 
researchers interacted at university. The extensible nature of wave allowed 
it to be the glue that brought many aspects of day to day tasks together in 
one place. There is nothing else that allows you to collaborate so easily, 
with an ever changing group of people, while embedding a variety of content 
such as links, videos, equations, documents and images. Wave may not have 
been suited to the average Joe, but it was just starting to appear useful to 
'for-profit' organisations. Google have missed out big time by cancelling 
wave before such businesses could asses, test and implement Google wave on 
their Google apps domain. 2 months of public release was not long enough!"

"We use Google Wave to WORK in our little organization. There is NO other 
product that can be compared to Google Wave, thats the very problem. Please 
don't close it! And yes, it should be integrated to gmail, at least with 
labs. Thanks from Chile!"

"Nothing is more cumbersome in an organization than sifting through 
countless email chains with everyone's thoughts and comments. We've found 
Google Wave to be invaluable at my company for providing us a single 
location where we can comment and discuss issues in real-time. If Google 
Wave goes away, then I guess it's back to old-fashioned email..."

"Because I believe in this project and I can see the real possibilities of 
this tool. Wave should be integrated in Gmail and then we would choose the 
tool that suit better for each case of communication."

"My girlfriend was injured in the army, currently almost completely 
quadriplegic, she is also an honor student and has appeared in the dean list 
for 4 years straight. we use google wave for almost all her work as the key 
by key synchronization saves us tons to of time as I help her type her 
assignments and we can enter notes in between etc. save the wave!!!"

"I run a corporate consulting business, providing financial and corporate 
advisory services to a number of small to medium-sized clients. I have 
convinced a number of my corporate clients to adopt Google Wave (indeed, the 
entire Google Apps for Domain Premium suite). Google Wave is incredibly 
useful for project management for our clients. I have found that the Google 
Wave environment offers the perfect balance of structure and free-form. I am 
able to manage agendas, allocate tasks and maintain communication and 
accountability, all within a single, intuitive environment."

I spent way too much time trying to figure out how to use the Wave, just to 
find that it's already going obsolete????? That's crazy, the use of this 
application should be in sci fi series to get it more attention. This 
application isn't perfect, but neither was Email when it first came out. 
Everybody thought that was crazy, even old grannies had a hard time learning 
to use it. We are the "old grannies" of the Wave age, this application is 
meant for our grandchildren to abuse. They'll get it. It's the way of the 
future!!!!!!

"Dear Google, First off I want to THANK you for the creation of the 
ultra-useful utility that is Google Wave. I cannot even describe how 
wonderful it has been for my band to post discussions and important topics 
in real time messages. When we used to just email each other honestly, I 
NEVER read the emails and was often left out of anything important. Not to 
mention the many other uses for Wave with the gadgets and add-ons and 
whatnot. I don't know what it would take, but I would be truly disappointed 
as an avid Google user if Google Wave was taken down for good. I hope that 
countless emails just like this keep pouring in and your Google Mind will 
change. Thank you for your time, Hoping I made a difference, "

"I've recently begun project managing my new startup with Wave - would be a 
massive loss. The very least we deserve is the ability to preserve/export 
Waves so the work and effort we've piled in won't go to loss."

"GW is just GREAT for academics... we usually work in small but 
international teams, often have long-term projects that we need to return to 
after short, medium or long-term absences and often accumulate a lot of 
ideas, references etc that need to be organized into threads but are not 
structured enough to make a document.
Perhaps GW could be re-focussed as an academic tool - then when it is 
refined and improved, re-release to the general public.."

"Wave is so perfect for writers and filmmakers! I'm developing a sketch 
comedy show and we conduct all business through Wave; we use it as a message 
board, IM client, Wiki of new sketch ideas, and just as Wave to do the more 
intense side of collaboration; things like brainstorming, even in person. 
The realtime text means that with one person typing, and everyone else with 
their own screen, we can get all of our ideas down. I was really 
disappointed to hear they were shutting it down, I've gotten such immense 
value out of it, I was looking forward to watching it grow."

"I am a computer systems engineer and I do lots of voluntary work with lots 
of my colleagues. We use Google Wave as our basic communication tool and 
collaboration. It's just too amazing! I check my wave before checking my 
email. I was shocked when I heard that Google is shutting it down. Such an 
amazing tool! I have no idea how we used to collaborate before Google wave! 
Bring back Google Wave!"

"I am a telecommunications postgraduate and was following Wave's development 
until its release as I was eager to see how it will change the web. And it 
certainly triggered some changes. An integration with Gmail would've been 
logical from my point of view and more people would've used it. I see ways 
of using it for my freelance job as a web technician as Wave provides users 
with extended collaboration tools and I was looking forward to see more from 
3rd parties developers.!"
"""

Anyway, with the reporting plans to discontinue Google Wave (although Google 
says it plans to still use/support some underlying technology), I have a 
little bit more energy to go back to Pointrel.

I also put some comments here:
"The need for open source sensemaking tools (Score:5, Interesting)"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1746980&cid=33177866

I've started some experimental coding on a "many worlds" approach to 
managing triples.

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of 
abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.

[Pointrel-discuss] Slashdot | Key Web App Standard Approaches Consensus

[Paul D. F. <pdf...@ku...>]

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/03/13/1659223/Key-Web-App-Standard-Approaches-Consensus
""Browser makers, grappling with outmoded technology and a vision to rebuild 
the Web as a foundation for applications, have begun converging on a 
seemingly basic but very important element of cloud computing. That ability 
is called local storage, and the new mechanism is called Indexed DB. Indexed 
DB, proposed by Oracle and initially called WebSimpleDB, is largely just a 
prototype at this stage, not something Web programmers can use yet. But 
already it's won endorsements from Microsoft, Mozilla, and Google, and 
together, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome account for more than 90 
percent of the usage on the Net today. 'Indexed DB is interesting to both 
Firefox and Microsoft, so if we get to the point where we prototype it and 
want to ship it, it will have very wide availability,' said Chris Blizzard, 
director of evangelism for Mozilla. ... Microsoft publicly endorsed Indexed 
DB on its IE blog: 'Together with Mozilla, we're excited about a new design 
for local storage called Indexed DB. We think this is a great solution for 
the Web,' said program manager Adrian Bateman.""
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20000376-264.html
http://www.w3.org/TR/IndexedDB/
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/03/09/Working-with-the-HTML5-Community.aspx

IndexedDB has aspects of some Pointrel system versions.

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of 
abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.

[Pointrel-discuss] SourceForge.net: Blog entry on MondoDB and Ming

[Paul D. F. <pdf...@ku...>]

From:
   "SourceForge.net: Blog entry on MondoDB and Ming"
   http://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-releases-ming/
"""
There’s a whole nosql movement these days looking to replace relational 
database management systems,
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDBMS
with “something else,” where that something else can be anything from 
key-value stores
   http://sourceforge.net/projects/tokyocabinet/
to document databases
   http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Home
to flat files and map-reduce frameworks,
   http://hadoop.apache.org/
or column-oriented databases.
   http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/DataModel
"""

Just interesting because of the talk of moving on to new things.

I've got a simple implementation of a Pointrel-like system (with triples) 
I'm using on the Android platform on top of sqlite for an application I am 
writing there.

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of 
abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.

[Pointrel-discuss] Generating Clojure from an Ontology - Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra

[Paul D. F. <pdf...@ku...>]

From:
   http://stuartsierra.com/2009/10/08/generating-clojure-from-an-ontology
"""
I’ve been fascinated with RDF for years, but I always end up frustrated when 
I try to use it. How do you read/write/manipulate RDF data in code? Sure, 
there are lots of libraries, but they all represent RDF data as its 
primitive structures: statements, resources, literals, etc. Working with 
data through these APIs feels like using a glovebox. To get anything useful 
done, you have to define mappings between RDF properties/classes and normal 
data structures in your programming language — classes, maps, lists, 
whatever. In effect, you have to define everything twice. ...
   What I really wanted was a way to create and work with RDF data in 
Clojure, using the same map/set/sequence APIs that I use for any other 
Clojure data structure. I flirted with implementing RDF in Clojure but lost 
interest when I realized that 1) there’s a lot more to implementing RDF than 
datatype conversions; and 2) my Clojure library suffered from the same 
glovebox problem as the Java RDF libraries.
   The solution, however, was staring me in the face all along. Clojure is a 
Lisp. I can generate functions directly, without any intermediate “source” 
representation. I can use my own customized validation and type-checking 
functions. Furthermore, I can extend the definitions in my RDF schema with 
new Clojure functions.
"""

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/

[Pointrel-discuss] neo4j-clojure - Clojure | Google Groups

[Paul D. F. <pdf...@ku...>]

From:
http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/10027c09e419bf72/bc8746b438377cf1
"""
 > On Dec 6, 3:15 pm, Julian Morrison <julian.morri...@gmail.com> wrote:
 > > A wrapper for neo4j, which is a non-relational database using a
 > > network of nodes with properties and traversable relationships.
 > > This is my first Clojure wrapper library, I've tried to keep the
 > > spirit of Clojure by only wrapping things that were verbose or un-
 > > lispy. Please comment and critique. Patches welcome.
 > >http://github.com/JulianMorrison/neo4j-clojure/tree/master
 >
 > On Dec 6, 10:09 pm, jim <jim.d...@gmail.com> wrote:
 > Hey, I was just looking at neo4j last night.  Can you point me to any
 > papers about the theory behind those kinds of a databases?
Not papers, but...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_database
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navigational_database
Neo4j is basically a really old design refreshed. The advantages are
that it's fast, dynamic, and schema-free, and fairly lispy in its
inherently recursive structure. The disadvantages are that it's messy,
can't be "joined" but only traversed (this is bad especially for data
mining and reporting), is hard to data dump, and at the moment neo4j
runs in-process with no multi-user access.
"""

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/

[Pointrel-discuss] Slashdot | Getting Students To Think At Internet Scale

[Paul D. F. <pdf...@ku...>]

http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/10/13/0114230/Getting-Students-To-Think-At-Internet-Scale
"The NY Times reports that researchers and workers in fields as diverse as
biotechnology, astronomy, and computer science will soon find themselves
overwhelmed with information — so the next generation of computer scientists
will have to learn think in terms of Internet scale of petabytes of data.
For the most part, university students have used rather modest computing
systems to support their studies, but these machines fail to churn through
enough data to really challenge and train young minds to ponder the
mega-scale problems of tomorrow. 'If they imprint on these small systems,
that becomes their frame of reference and what they're always thinking
about,' said Jim Spohrer, a director at IBM's Almaden Research Center. This
year, the National Science Foundation funded 14 universities that want to
teach their students how to grapple with big data questions. Students are
beginning to work with data sets like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope,
the largest public data set in the world. The telescope takes detailed
images of large chunks of the sky and produces about 30 terabytes of data
each night. 'Science these days has basically turned into a data-management
problem,' says Jimmy Lin, an associate professor at the University of Maryland."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/technology/12data.html
http://www.lsst.org/lsst/science/datamgmt_products

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/

[Pointrel-discuss] Still Don't Know WTF Google Wave is All About? This Two Minute Animation Might Help - Google Wave Animation - Gizmodo

[Paul D. F. <pdf...@ku...>]

http://gizmodo.com/5372786/still-dont-know-wtf-google-wave-is-all-about-this-two-minute-animation-might-help
-- 
--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/

[Pointrel-discuss] Slashdot | Initial Reviews of Google Wave; Neat, But Noisy

[Paul D. F. <pdf...@ku...>]

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/09/10/01/2121228/Initial-Reviews-of-Google-Wave-Neat-But-Noisy
"Reviews of Google Wave are out, and opinions are that it has potential as a 
development platform but is noisy to use for real-time communication. Robert 
Scoble calls it overhyped, claiming it's useful for little more than 
personal IM or small-scale project collaboration. He complains about the 
noisiness of tracking dozens of people chatting him at once in real-time and 
calls trying to use it a 'productivity killer' compared to simpler mediums 
like email and Twitter."

Is this the end of the Pointrel system? Or just the beginning? :-)

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/

[Pointrel-discuss] What Works: The Web Way vs. The Wave Way - Anil Dash

[Paul D. F. <pdf...@ku...>]

http://dashes.com/anil/2009/08/what-works-the-web-way-vs-the-wave-way.html

[Pointrel-discuss] Slashdot | Google Open Sources Wave Protocol Implementation

[Paul D. F. <pdf...@ku...>]

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/07/28/1553234/Google-Open-Sources-Wave-Protocol-Implementation
"Certainly one of the most important steps in adopting a protocol is a 
working open source example of it. Well, google has open sourced an 
implementation of the wave protocol for those of you curious about Google's 
new collaboration and conversation platform. It's been reviewed, skewered 
and called 'Anti-Web' but now's your chance to see a Java implementation of 
it. The article lists it as still rapidly evolving so it might not be 
prudent to buy into it yet. Any thumbs up or thumbs down from actual users 
of the new protocol?"

--Paul Fernhout

[Pointrel-discuss] Slashdot | The Web of Data, Beyond What Google and Yahoo Show

[Paul D. F. <pdf...@ku...>]

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/07/26/2211222/The-Web-of-Data-Beyond-What-Google-and-Yahoo-Show
"Both Google and Yahoo have been supporting Semantic Web markup (RDFa, RDF 
and Microformats) for weeks and months respectively. What they do, at the 
moment, is use the markup only for visual feedback by returning better 
looking, more functional 'page snippets.' But how would it look if you could 
get all these bits and compose them automatically to form a single 
structured information page about what you're searching for? The folks at 
the DERI institute have just released Sig.ma, a visual browser and mashup 
generator that will go all over the web of data and find dozens of sources 
to combine together when answering a user query. It also comes in API mode 
to reuse the information Sig.ma finds inside applications. Here are a 
screencast and a blog post, with semantic-web-geek details."

--Paul Fernhout

[Pointrel-discuss] Slashdot | Google Wave Reviewed

[Paul D. F. <pdf...@ku...>]

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/09/07/22/220226/Google-Wave-Reviewed
"Developers are finally getting their hands on the developer preview of 
Google's Wave, which means we can finally get some first-hand accounts of 
what it's really like to use, unfiltered by Google's own programmers. Ben 
Rometsch, a developer with U.K. Web development firm Solid State, blogged 
that, it's 'probably the most advanced application in a browser that I've 
seen.' Wave is like giant Web page onto which users can drag and drop any 
kind of object, including instant messaging and IRC [Internet Relay Client] 
clients, e-mail, and wikis, as well as gadgets like maps and video. All 
conversations, work product and applications are stored on remote servers — 
presumably forever. 'It's like real time email. On crack,' he wrote. And 
unlike the typically minimalist Google UI, 'It feels a lot more like a 
desktop application that just so happens to live in your browser.'"
http://industry.bnet.com/technology/10002763/google-wave-like-real-time-e-mail-on-crack/

Google Wave is a bit like the intent of the Pointrel Social Semantic Desktop 
(though not as distributed).

--Paul Fernhout

[Pointrel-discuss] Google's Rich Snippets Starts the Semantic Snowball Effect | Digital Media Buzz

[Paul D. F. <pdf...@ku...>]

http://www.digitalmediabuzz.com/2009/06/googles-rich-snippets-snowball/
"Almost lost in May’s whirlwind launches of Wolfram|Alpha and Microsoft’s 
Bing and the unveiling of Google Wave, was a quieter announcement that may 
bring a seismic shift toward the realization of Web 3.0. While some aspects 
of the next generation of the Web are taking place, there are major physical 
and cultural challenges to bring it about. Google’s launch of Rich Snippets 
may well be a watershed moment in resolving these problems. ...
This may resonate with some in the Semantic Web community; a number have 
seen the task of retrofitting the current Web into machine-friendly markup 
so daunting that the global database might need to be built from scratch. 
But on face value, Wolfram|Alpha violates one of the cardinal precepts of 
the Semantic Web: that the proprietary hoarding of databases behind walls 
must end — data must flow freely from and to all sources.
And the vision of W3C’s Semantic Web isn’t to replace the current Web, but 
to enhance it. The question is how to get the work done. There was no 
organized plan to build the Web. To be sure, there were plans to create the 
technology and the infrastructure. But most of those tens of billions of 
indexed Web pages were built by corporations, small businesses, non-profits 
and individuals, each for their own reasons. Persuading websites to recode 
Web pages to Semantic Web specifications — or even to do so going forward — 
will take a powerful motivator.
Google breaks the ice
Google may have provided such a motivator with its May 12 announcement of 
Rich Snippets. “Snippet” is the name Google uses for the short block of text 
appearing below a search result, giving more information about the Web page. 
  Google announced in its Webmasters Central Blog (a bookmark for anyone 
interested in making his or her website more visible to the leading search 
engine) that it is now applying Google’s algorithms to “highlight structured 
data embedded in web pages.” Translation, content marked for the Semantic 
Web. The “rich snippets” will be based on the structured data."

--Paul Fernhout

[Pointrel-discuss] Slashdot | Oracle Beware — Google Tests Cloud-Based Database

[Paul D. F. <pdf...@ku...>]

Between Google Wave and Fusion Tables, Google continues to move in on the 
aspirations of the Pointrel Social Semantic desktop:

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/09/06/12/1658206/Oracle-Beware-mdash-Google-Tests-Cloud-Based-Database
"On Tuesday, the same day Google held a press event to launch its Google 
Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, the company quietly announced in its 
research team blog a new online database called Fusion Tables. Under the 
hood of Fusion Tables is data-spaces technology, which would 'allow Google 
to add to the conventional two-dimensional database tables a third 
coordinate with elements like product reviews, blog posts, Twitter messages 
and the like, as well as a fourth dimension of real-time updates,' according 
to Stephen E. Arnold, a technology and financial analyst. 'So now we have an 
n-cube, a four-dimensional space, and in that space we can now do new kinds 
of queries which create new kinds of products and new market opportunities,' 
said Arnold, whose research about this topic includes a study done for IDC 
last August. 'If you're IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, your worst nightmare is 
now visible.'"

http://www.itworld.com/saas/69183/watch-out-oracle-google-tests-cloud-based-database
http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/06/google-fusion-tables.html

--Paul Fernhout

[Pointrel-discuss] Alarming Development : What if Smalltalk were invented today?

[Paul D. F. <pdf...@ku...>]

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3290
"Awesome blog post by Jonathan Edwards in the novel literary style of mock 
paper review comments."
http://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=209#comments

--Paul Fernhout