Tom Morris

I've been talking about this endlessly for the last week - but it's now happening. Planning for SemanticCampLondon is now underway. It's like a little BarCamp intended for anyone who's interested in the Semantic Web - the Web of Data - whatever you want to call it. The sort of technologies that I hope get covered at SemanticCamp are RDF/RDFS/OWL, the various ontologies built on top of the W3C stack, microformats and lightweight data formats (XML, JSON, YAML etc.) and interesting problems - aggregation, attention, comparison, portability and so on.

SemanticCamp is intended to be the BarCamp equivalent of events like XTech, ISWC, Semantic Technology Conference and ESWC and XML Conference.

Beyond that, we've got a lot of possible challenges on both the usability front - making the Semantic Web friendly and accessible for normal people (ie. anyone who doesn't know what qualified property cardinality restrictions are), making business models for the Semantic Web and how portable, linked data is relevant to a variety of current Web-based trends - including 'social media', wikis, tagging and so on.

Think of these as a guide - you can talk about anything that's vaguely related. The rules are similar to those at BarCamp - basically, have a conversation, not a product pitch.

Beyond a wiki page and some ideas, I haven't got much. SemanticCamp needs a venue, sponsorship and all the other stuff that is required for a BarCamp type experience. And we need volunteers. If you are interested in helping, please get in contact. I want to make this as open as possible on the planning front. There will occasionally be things which I have to keep quiet about in order to keep them surprising (like chocolate fountains, Segways, deckchairs - that kind of thing), but I want SemanticCamp to be run in a spirit of openness. Over the next few days, I'll be contacting a lot of different people and communities about getting this off the ground.

I'm hoping you can join in and help make this event a great success - both by helping share the organisation of it, and also by participating at the event and giving interesting talks to your fellow participants. There's nothing wrong with the vision of the Semantic Web - at least nothing that can't be fixed with a bit of BarCamp-style openness. Heh.

Tags: SemanticCampLondon, semantic web, microformats, london, BarCamp

This week I attended the excellent BarCamp, and just wanted to publish some unstructured thoughts from the event.

I apologise to the people I promised streaming to. Due to the layout of the venue (and my temparament), gonzo DIY conference streaming wasn't exactly appropriate. Perhaps next time. I did put up some small fragments over on my blip.tv profile though. There was some streaming going on though. All good.

I find it very strange - back when this "Web 2.0" thing (whatever that's supposed to mean) was new, everyone would pump their conferences out to the outside. I remember going to NOTCON 2004 in London and doing collaborative notetaking using SubEthaEdit (formerly Hydra) and publishing it almost afterwards. I checked on Technorati during the weekend and there was about 20 posts about BarCamp (compared to over 300 Flickr pics) - most of which came from the buildup, not from live-blogging the event. I find it strange that people don't really cover conferences. I'd like to know why. Nowadays, most conference wifi is so appalling that getting the text file out would be difficult - let alone live audio or video stream. At Google this weekend, that was not the case. 600Kbps upload on really widely-available wifi. Great stuff. It's important to do it properly.

We started a conversation (you know, a real conversation - not a Web 2.0 Conversation, where we talk about how zany we are for having a conversation about very little) at BarCamp about the future of BarCamp - which was followed by an announcement by friend and BarCamp organiser Ian Forrester that this weekend would be his last stint at organising BarCamps. Ian has been absolutely superb in binding the London geek community together, and organising three fantastic BarCamps in London - at Yahoo! last September, BT earlier this year and now at Google.

Well, how do we shape the next BarCamp? I'd suggest we have more focus on niches. I want to organise a 'SemanticCamp', a BarCamp that would be like a BarCamp for the Semantic Web (including the 'lower case' Semantic Web, whatever you think that means). There's social engineering involved here in BarCamp organisation, but if it's done right, you don't notice it. It's just called creating a great weekend. So, SemanticCamp would be a sort of mixture of some of BloggerCon rules (the 'no pitching' rule, specifically - because I don't really want guys in semi-suits wasting my time talking about how they are leveraging the social graph for authentic Ajaxy widgety community goodness or whatever the fuck the buzzwords are this week) as well as BarCamp openness. The opposite is the ArbCamp stuff which seemed to me like BarCamp being exploited by seedy marketing types. (Meta: blunt? I am always blunt about these kind of things.)

But SemanticCamp (working title - DataCamp, OpenDataCamp, YourDataCamp, SemWebCamp are all alternatives) is just one possibility. I'd love it if every month in London there were niche one-day BarCamps on all sorts of interesting things to do with computing, the Web and so on - APIs/mashups, accessibility, UI/UX/HCI/etc., design/typography, standards, 'hardcore' software development (the phrasing that people seemed to be using - which makes it sound rather dirty) and the many other interesting things people work and play at.

Another discussion we had at BarCamp was getting this stuff out to teenagers. I remember exactly what it's like being of a nerdy persuasion in a state sector secondary school. It's a little better than having your toenails ripped off with a pair of pliers, but not that much. There's social pressure to conform, and there's IT curricula that sucks worse than all of the Spice Girls put together. We need hack day for the 14-18 demographic (go leverage your social graph and build it, folks) with a handful of experts from different backgrounds to show people that computers are not just Facebook, Half Life and what they teach you on their crappy, government-approved curriculum - but a tool for creative and innovative human expression, just like a paintbrush or piano is. There are specialised art programs and sports camps for kids, but I think something like hack day for teenagers would rock. And it's something we should encourage. Problem is that with the current BarCamps we can't really have kids because of the alcohol and insurance and so on. We need to think about this, otherwise the next generation is going to be fucked by the pseudo-pragmatic PowerPointism of Nu Labour's gormless education policy regarding ICT. I wrote an angry blog post about this last month - so go read it.

Some talks I enjoyed from the weekend - Sheila's discussion of "Should we pander to the iPhone?" (answer: no, we don't pander, but that doesn't mean not building iPhone-specific stuff if we already have our proverbial standards house in order), Leisa Reichelt on DIY user testing, Cennydd Bowles on 'understanding social network' (he's as against the stupid 'social graph' meme as I am). Also good were "What should we be teaching the next generation of web designers/devs?" (simple: Git, unit testing, where to buy mail-order cheese and hasLayout) and what I got to see of Ian's data portability session. BarCamp is, of course, so much more than the sessions. But compared to other conferences, the sessions are actually good and we don't have to hang out in stupid dingy corridors to talk about the stuff that matters and avoid crappy product pitches.

And now for something completely different. Housekeeping note: I am not a werewolf.

The corporate culinary skills at Google are fucking leet. I'm concerned about one company knowing so much about me, but the availability of chocolate waffles and crepes at midnight makes all of that stuff okay. And a Segway? That's pretty darn awesome, especially the bit where really quite drunk geeks zipped around the reception area on it risking awards cabinet and pot plants alike.

I'm quite, quite knackered after having a bit of a sleep deficit from Thursday night (I went down to Bristol on Friday for a Semantic Web conference - and the first leg of my journey was a train at 4.58am), and sleeping in a deckchair in a brightly lit room in Google's offices didn't do masses to improve the situation this weekend.

I've found something new to loath - PHP character encoding issues. I use the DOM functions in PHP to manipulate the XML that stores the data on this blog, only PHP seems incapable of doing anything even vaguely sane with the data. utf8_encode was the first thing I tried, and doesn't really help. The problem is that I occasionally copy quotes from websites that contain things like emdashes and endashes. When I post them to the server, I get all sorts of problems with character encoding - usually ending in the XML library not outputting anything and deleting whatever I'd posted that day. I would then have to load up the RSS feed, convert the data back out into plain text with HTML and repost it. What a performance. I read messy78's post on character encoding, but since I'm not using the XML parser but the DOM, that didn't seem relevant - and I looked at Character Encoding Issues. After a bit of testing, it looks like the Iconv library solves the problem. Currently, I run the following:

htmlentities(iconv("", "ISO-8859-1//TRANSLIT", $string))

I hope this will solve the problem. But PHP hasn’t exactly made it easy. It’s only shown to me why all software and all formats needs to support full Unicode, now. Repeat after me: Unicode now. Of course, everybody’s favourite RDF format, Notation 3, requires Unicode.

Judge Andrew Napolitano interviewed at Reason: Remember that the British government permitted its soldiers to execute self-written search warrants. They called them “writs of assistance,” and they were one of the last straws that caused American colonist to rebel. It’s bitterly ironic that 230 years later a popularly elected government would authorize its own agents to do the same thing that when a monarchy did it, we fought a war of rebellion in reaction - which we won!

Government grows in wartime because people are afraid, and they accept the satanic bargain that government offers: Give us your liberty and we will keep you safe. Many people think that when government is suppressing speech or privacy or fair prosecutions, that since those usurpations are so drastic that they must be keeping us safer. (Via Right Thinking from the Left Coast, perhaps the best right wing blog out there…)

Sacrificing liberty is just fine, though. After all, there be terrrrriiiiisssts! In fifty years, if there’s any streak of liberty left in the young, they’ll be asking us: “What did you do to protect our civil liberties?” And we’ll say “Pretty much sweet F.A. We were all too absorbed in Paris Hilton and I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here.”

If you are doing the Amazon Marketplace thing, here are some words of advice from a third party who has just seen some Marketplace drama go on.

First of all, advertise only books that you actually can ship. There’s no point advertising something that you do not have.

Next, if someone then orders the book you do not have, do not send a different book on the same subject. Contact the customer by e-mail (you know, the near-instant communication medium that we use on the Internet) and explain apologetically to them that you do not have the book, offer them the similar books that you have in the e-mail or offer them an immediate full refund.

When you have not followed the above advice and sent the book unsolicited (and slowly) with a cover letter explaining that you have sent it as a replacement, be prepared to get a negative reaction - both on your Marketplace rating and in the feedback. You are engaging at that point in a form of inertia selling which is both unprofessional and a legal edge case. You have broken a contract that you entered into. Legally, you owe the customer money and you forfeit any right of ownership to the substitute book you have sent. Read the above linked law - The Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 s.24.

Then, having pissed off the customer sufficiently, don’t then play the victim card. The fact that you are a charity makes no difference - everyone who is selling things needs to be customer-focused, regardless of whether they are doing it to buy yachts or to help feed the third world. Trying to emotionally blackmail the buyer for leaving you negative feedback (and leaving an insulting response to the feedback on your profile) for your unprofessional conduct only goes to prove the point they were making. In this particular incident, the seller described how one of the people ended up crying as a result of reading the feedback provided. Not to be heartless, but this isn’t primary school.

Similarly, leaving an angry ‘seller response’ on your Marketplace profile is neither big nor clever. If you are an Amazon UK user, avoid buying books from scawapache, since he has yet to master the basics of customer service.

If you have got this far on the route, treat it as a learning experience. Learn that treating your customers in an unprofessional way is not in your best interests, especially on the Web where they can talk back. Don’t emotionally blackmail them - learn from it and don’t do it again.

A while back Jeremy Keith wrote about something I added to my blog - an OpenID whitelist for access to personal information. I’ve finally gotten around to properly implementing the full stack. I’ve added foaf:openid elements to my FOAF file. Then I run a SPARQL SELECT query over it (using ARQ, part of Jena - the Java RDF library - which I started writing a tutorial for the other day on GetSemantic). I save the results out as JSON (you can use the SPARQL XML format too). My blogging application can then read in the list of OpenIDs of my friends and acquaintances from the JSON file. I could read them in dynamically on the server, but since the FOAF is static, I may as well burn some Java cycles on my Mac than burn some PHP cycles on my server.

This is part of a new FOAF workflow that I’ve setup in order to try and get me to keep my FOAF up-to-date. It consists of a shell script that takes my Notation-3 file, converts it to XML, runs the query through ARQ and then gets me to sign the XML using GPG and the Web Of Trust Ontology. Then it uses SCP to upload the FOAF, the ASCII-armoured signature file and the JSON to the server. You can look at the OpenID JSON file.

What happens next? Well, I’m going to extend the process soon so that it pulls in data from Twitter, last.fm and Jaiku to grab OpenIDs from. As we map more social networks to RDF - Flickr, Digg and anywhere else with an API - these will all get rolled up into one’s FOAF file. I’m also planning to split up my FOAF into separate files, and also to run some smart rules over it to do other kinds of inference (ie. if you have a blog from LiveJournal or WordPress.com, that automatically becomes an OpenID identifier.

If you are not in my FOAF file and should be, don’t hesitate to ping me in any of the normal ways. I hope to publish it each few days. If you are on the list, come on in.

Rachel Clarke in the comments: A challenge to you Tom. Explain that post with no acronyms or jargon in a way that is understood by the layman. With a why attached. Please. I have no real idea what you are trying to do except grab a list of identities you trust and then do something with the list.

I apologise. I get into technical details quite quickly. I have been known to write very long and convoluted explanations, but people complain that I’m not terse enough. So I may have gone too far. Perhaps I need to spend more time out in the cool November breeze and less time reading convoluted W3C specifications.

Here’s what I’m trying to do. I have an hCard on my blog - over in the sidebar. I want to make it so that the people who want to get my contact details can. I’ve had the fun experience of auto-dialling with Skype when microformats are present, and being able to download phone numbers onto my phone. Basically, I want to simulate electronically the situation I have when one gives their business card out to someone without having to carry bits of card around with me. The user experience should something like this:

User: “I know Tom. I want to contact him by phone or send him something by post.” User goes to my blog and enters their OpenID. If user is on list, user sees extra information - my home address and phone numbers. This is all in an hCard, so they can use hCard tools like Operator to use the information in a more useful way.

This is important, as often people want to make data available, but not to everyone. OpenID is a good way of letting people authenticate, but not as intrusive as having them sign up and have to give you their e-mail and so on.

The post was describing all the back-end plumbing that goes into making that possible - using FOAF and SPARQL. It’s geeky because it’s new. Blogging about it is intended to help others identify it as a use case, so we can work on making it simpler. Eventually, we’ll have simple services that do a lot of the dirty work. As more social networks expose data either as RDF or using microformats, this will hopefully grow.

Ideally, when we have a few more pieces in place, we will have it so that we can do automatic OpenID inference - if you have a WordPress blog and I list you as a friend on say, Flickr and Twitter, then you can get access to my personal details. Personal details are also just the tip of the iceberg - everyone has things which they want only some of their friends to be able to see or use.

The general overall plan is to make it so that network connections can be used as a way of providing or denying services. Some people are using this ‘graph’ of connections to determine whether or not you are a comment spammer.

To see what other people are doing, have a look at FOAF Plus OpenID over on the ESW Wiki.

Oh, and Rachel, if you log in, you can see for yourself - either your blog or your MyOpenID should work.

Mapping the Internet is no new thing. xkcd did it with online communities. But nothing beats Paul Downey’s “The Web is Agreement” map. It’s for those people involved with standards, and it’s playing rather well over on Reddit.

Things like the Lost Tribes of UDDI and The Swamps of BPEL cement Paul’s new position as the visual Dante of the Web. As, of course, does putting RDF University as far left as possible (that means we’re good - even if we like to occasionally trek over to the Cave of Taxonomies occasionally).

Also, does this make Molly the Frodo Baggins of Web Standards?