Raven's blog

The blog has been moved

2009-05-21T23:24:00.001-07:00

Greetings - just to let you know that I have moved my blog to my private Wordpress instance:

http://www.sebastiankruk.com/

For two reasons:

1) I will just have to handle only one (combo=blog+site) service
2) I will be able to turn on SIOC support :)

See you there

Next week: my PhD defense (Semantic Digital Libraries )

2009-05-11T00:25:00.000-07:00

The day has come to wrap up the research I have been doing for the last couple of years. After closing the write up and submitting my thesis in February this year, my PhD defense is approaching very soon.

Here is some information about it. If you are around Galway next Monday - you are welcome to come and watch my presentation at the open session.

When: May, 18th 2009

Where: Conference Room, DERI, NUI Galway (IDA Business Park, Lower Dangan, Galway, Ireland)

Schedule:

10.00 - 10.30 - Open session

10.30 - 11.30 - Closed session - you & the 3 examiners (fingers crossed!)

11.30 - 12.00 - Closed session - examiners only

Abstract:

Until recently, libraries were the prime source of information for both students and scholars. Now this information is published using online with digital library systems. Current digital libraries have to provide efficient information discovery solutions to adapt to the fast development of new technologies; they also have to cater to the current generation of students. The research on the Semantic Web and online social networks contributes to the digital libraries domain by supporting interoperability with formal semantics, improving interlinking of information and encouraging users to contribute and share knowledge.

Semantic technologies support more flexible information management than that offered by classic digital libraries. Information on library resources can be gathered from heterogeneous sources, including contributions from the communities of library users. These annotations, combined with legacy data, build the foundations for more efficient information discovery in digital libraries.

This thesis reviews architectures, abstract models, metadata standards, and various technologies for building digital library management systems. We derive requirements for advanced digital libraries and propose an architecture model and a set of ontologies for semantic digital libraries. Finally, we present information discovery services using semantic and social technologies, and the prototype implementation of a semantic digital library that fulfills the aforementioned requirements.

Our hypothesis is that semantic and social technologies applied to a digital library management system deliver more efficient information discovery solutions, while the library users become more satisfied and can remember more of the information they have learned when using the library. We present two information discovery services that use semantic and social technologies; we also show a prototype of a semantic digital library. We support our hypothesis by discussing the results of initial evaluations of both services and a comprehensive evaluation of the semantic digital library prototype.

new knowledge management on Web 3.0 services

2009-02-27T00:58:00.000-08:00

I have been extremely busy recently. Probably this is why I was not blogging too much.
But here is the reason:
The last two months I have been building a new software platform for knowledge management on Web 3.0 called digi.me.

It is based on the research of my team (formerly Corrib.org, now KnowledgeHives.com) on semantic digital libraries, collaborative filtering, social networking and semantic web.
digi.me follows and extends certain ideas we have implemented in the research prototype, http://notitio.us/, presented at the Semantic Web Challenge 2007.

The core idea is to use explicit social network of each user and semantic annotations to discover, share and recommend interesting information.
We encourage users to annotate and classify (not just tag) interesting sites; their friends can subscribe to folders representing different topics.

If you know social bookmarking services (like del.icio.us) - think about it as a social bookmarking site on steroids and without letting users to get lost in the cloud of tags.

There are two services which have been set up using digi.me platform already:

http://www.węzełki.pl/ - a service designed for the Polish users
http://digi.me/ - a service for the international audience

Both services operate feature English and Polish translation. If you register to one - you gain access to the other one as well.

Both services are in the private beta phase at the moment, but I have a number of invitations to this service to distribute. Please reply to this post.

what I have been up to lately ?

2009-02-11T08:02:00.000-08:00

I hear people asking - how are things? I tell ya - things have never been that busy (so you can imagine ...).

But it is getting better. There were three projects ahead of me when I was living DERI in December 2008:

finish furnishing our new apartment and move in
submit my PhD thesis
deliver the private beta of the węzełki.pl service - the next generation of notitio.us

I am happy to report that all these tasks have been completed. More or less in the order provided.
And all of them kept me very busy in Jan 2009.

So what’s now?

First of all - improve, disseminate, improve, disseminate, ... - all about setting up the service węzełki.pl and the upcoming international version - digi.me.
In the mean time - it is time to incorporate. There are a few roadblocks or rather slowing-bumbs ahead - but it is just a matter of getting right documents to right offices.
But I won’t mind if you will contact me or my upcoming company with cooperation proposal ☺

Will keep ya posted. Be patient ☺

Packages ready for shipping

2008-12-15T11:51:00.001-08:00

Packages ready for shipping
Originally uploaded by skruk

The time has come to say goodbye to Ireland and move back to Poland. We have just packed our last 5 years into 40 boxes which will be shipped today.

see http://www.flickr.com/photos/skruk/3111459782/ for the second group of boxes ... :)

Google Translator cannot translate ?

2008-10-28T06:40:00.000-07:00

Last week I was attending a very interesting presentation on Google Translate.
As could expect - statistical approach to translations is not perfect.
But I did not dream that Google can translate:

Mazury as Hawaii

Gdańsk as Atlanta

Wawelski Smok as George Washington

Or even decide that it cannot translate at all

(see for yourself - the Polish translation is “I cannot translate”)

Getting Things Done

2008-10-10T02:15:00.001-07:00

Weź to k***a zrób

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: agora 25)

Powerful again

2008-09-22T09:52:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago my MacBook Pro battery decided it is too old (1 year !) and needs to retire. After many unexpected drops for power from 40% to 0% in a second I decided it will not heal itself magically.

Colleague of mine suggested I should not buy an Apple replacement (which I should got for free btw. but I was one (1 !) day late in calling their helpline after Galway 3G store send me away) - and I was happy to exercise this idea. I simply love MacOSX - but certain ideas about the way Apple treats their customers is unbearable.

After some googling I’ve stumbled on http://fastmac.com/ and today the battery has arrived. Looks very much like my previous one - but I have already tested that it lasts much longer than the Apple original ever did. Well done guys. When I am fed up with my processor power - I will call ya again :)

Getting my teeth into HDR

2008-09-03T12:21:00.000-07:00

HDR is a cool technique - even though some of the photos look artificial/artistic - usually it is worth trying.

You can view a slideshow with it here

Call me homophobic - but this is too much ...

2008-08-15T06:04:00.000-07:00

Usually I do not care too much about politics, etc.
And in most cases I agree that people have their right to live their own way as long as they do not affect the way other people live.

Call me homophobic - but I cannot stand when I head more and more countries in Europe allow homo-couples to adopt children? This does affect other peoples’ lives, i.e., these poor children. It hurts. That is for sure.

I could probably write hundreds, if not thousands, of verses showing how irrational is this behavior of some governments, but today I simple wanted to write about two cases that really gave me a hearth attack:

1) Recently a catholic adoption agency in UK announced that they will have to consider adoptions by homo couples; otherwise the government might close them. It is surely against the teaching of the Church - but they can either accept that or close down and eventually, let down all those catholic (hetero) couples that would like to adopt children.
Many people say about dividing church from the government; but they usually mean that the church should not try to influence the government. First of all - church is the people - who elect and are elected to the government. How are you going to separate that? Second of all - isn’t that the governments are just trying to impose their rules over the moral rights preached by the church ?

2) UPDATE: Apparently the URL that was provided by one of the contributors is outdated (see comments); it only proves my case that some people are trying to sell a picture that is suppose to convince everyone that they are homophobic.
I am just putting together a web page promoting our book on semantic digital libraries. Part of the task is to prepare a list of all online references in the book. While processing them I have stumbled upon the digital library of The Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC). The first page greets you with only few links, almost like Google. But, among those - it is hard not to spot those marked below. I will simply leave this without a comment .....

On SVN, sf.net and MacOSX

2008-08-05T06:16:00.000-07:00

Just a short note to everybody who is struggling with either (or both) problems:
* since only recenly was unable to use your sourceforge.net hosted subversion account with strange response 403
* was trying to use SCPlugin for MacOSX with https:// repositories without success

The solution to the first problem is pretty simple - you are probably using http://...sf.net/... address for your repositories - this is no longer supported.
To solve your problems - do

svn switch --relocate http://...... https://.......

The second problem might (as in my case) arise from the SSL certificate problems with the subversion server. If you enter your repository URL to the web browser and it asks you to confirm the certificate than this is exactly the problem I was facing, and ... good news - here is the solution for you. Apparently SCPlugin still cannot ask you to confirm the certificate through GUI, so you have to do it yourself manually.

The easiest way is to call

svn ls https://.....

and answer (p)ermanently to the given question.

However, since neither MacOSX (Leopard 10.5.4) nor Fink provides subversion in the new (backward incompatible!), endorsed by sf.net version 1.5 you might consider using the one (1.5.1) provided by SCPlugin at the following location:

/Library/Contextual\ Menu\ Items/SCFinderPlugin.plugin/Contents/Resources/SCPluginUIDaemon.app/Contents/bin/svn

The new SmartSVN 4 is also compatible with SVN 1.5 so your command line SVN might soon be incompatible with your repositories (if you use SmartSVN 4 at least once with this repository!)

Drag and Drop in MacOS X

2008-07-27T08:22:00.000-07:00

One think I simply love about Mac is the consistency of UI interaction design.

For example, you can drag and drop files - right simple. But you can also use the same paradigm to copy color code from one editor to another. It is much easier than retyping it, or twisting arm to get it to the text editor.

Here is a short example:

Running fresh Leopard might solve your AirPort problems

2008-07-27T08:01:00.001-07:00

I could not stand it any longer - certain issues which worked on Ewelina’s Mac somehow did not work on mine, e.g., no auto-connect to known WiFi networks.

I thought to myself - this have to be because I did Tiger-to-Leopard upgrade. Time to reinstall my precious Leo and see what will happen.

The whole procedure started on Friday night, and I got it operational few hours later with my stuff seamlessly migrated thanks to the wonders of TimeMachine/TimeCapsule (sweet - trust me).

I have saved a lot of space as a side effect - this time I knew what NOT to install ☺

And the Wifi apparently worked just fine.

At least until .... I came downstairs where a separate WiFi network is setup (our walls as so tick the signal can hardly go from one floor to other). To my surprise - autoconnect to the network downstairs did no work. I was trying everything - from changing network settings to fiddling with KeyChain access.

Nothing helped.

Than, following an old and very good advice of my old friend and Unix guru in one person, i.e., Dorota, I have checked LOGs using Mac’s Console.
And I have found this:

7/27/08 15:16:44 SystemUIServer[122] Error: _ACNetworkCopyKeychainItem() expected password for "WiSkrukDownstairs" not found: -25300 (The specified item could not be found in the keychain.)

After some googling I have came across a post suggesting that moving “System Preferences” from /Applications to /Applications/Utilities/ can be the cause.

Really ?! I mean - this application should be in utilities in the first place.

Well, anyway - I gave it a shout.

Result?

Now it works

On AJAX problems with prototype.js v1.5+ (till 1.6.0.2 at least)

2008-06-05T11:17:00.000-07:00

My (a little tiring now) work on JOnto 2.0 is getting closer to the finish line. I can almost see the crowd cheering.
Many changes, including WordNet in RDF/OWL and OpenThesaurus (non-English thesauri) support, full-text index, etc.

I decided to check the current version (let’s call it JOnto 2.0 PR 1) with the most recent prototype.js.

To my surprise it did not work. Hanged with no logs whatsoever (as usually with prototype.js).
The bug was not, however, in my code.
It took me a while to recall the details of this deja-vu feeling.

To make sure I will not forget it next time, and for other people to know what is going wrong, here a short description:

If you catch exception with onException(resp, ex) you will see that your script is trying to perform illegal operation.
Firebug reports “Component returned failure code: 0x80070057”
Safari is a little more precise - reports problems with an attempt to set illegal header in the HTTP request.

Where is the bug?

Apparently since prototype.js v1.5, i.e., the first time I have discovered it (since it worked in v1.4) the setRequestHeaders method uses following implementation:

for (var name in headers)
this.transport.setRequestHeader(name, headers[name]);

which does not catch any exceptions

My fix is the following, change this two lines to

var transport = this.transport;
$H(headers).each(function (header){
        try{
                 transport.setRequestHeader(header.key, header.value);
        }catch(ex){
//                 YAHOO.log(header.key, header.value, ex);
        }
});

The question remains how is that possible that some invocations of Ajax.Request do and some don’t produce this problem.
For now - I’d rather patch the script and live on.

Ordering cafe in Starbucks - be sure to spell your name right ...

2008-05-27T14:21:00.000-07:00

Otherwise your surname might become “Cru” (instead of Kruk)

And, never, ever say your name is the “same” as the person who was ordering just before you ☺

Fat frog

2008-05-27T14:16:00.000-07:00

Ever wondered how to make a fat frog cocktail?

In case you've spent too much time abroad...

2008-05-27T14:06:00.000-07:00

(Part 2) Wizzair teaches us new, unified language Polenglish

This is a photo of a boarding card. The whole card is in English, except for the large-font caption, which reads:
“Please go to the gate immedietally” in Polish. The only problem is that word “gate” can no longer be translated into Polish, right? It had to stay “Gate” (instead of “Bramka”). At least someone was trying to make it a Polish-kind of word and did declension (Gate’u).

Some problems with geography ?

2008-05-27T13:55:00.000-07:00

This is the first post (of many coming) with stuff that is so funny I could not resist myself to capture the moment with mobile phone camera ...

Part 1: Hertz and the the lesson of geography

I never knew for my whole life I was Czech, not Pole. Apparently, Hertz is convinced I am.
And this is not just the labels being switch. The prices sounds right - €50 for “the region I called Poland” and €34 for “the region I used to call Czech Republic”.

Leopard supporting Java programming

2008-05-26T02:34:00.000-07:00

The problem I usually have when starting to use a new library/API is which JARs to include so that only those required are included, and none else. Usually this is a wild guess, or listing content of all available JARs.

With Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) this is no longer the case. The new “Preview” comes very handy in times like that.

Is Semantic Web Technology Taking the Wrong Turn?

2008-03-06T12:46:00.001-08:00

This is the question Chris Bussler asks in his recent article in the IEEE Internet Computing "Peering" column, edited by Charles Petrie, from DERI Stanford. It is interesting that among few examples of successful, ongoing products of Semantic Web research, Chris mentions JeromeDL. I personally, consider it great success, since it is more than two years now since met the last time. That time JeromeDL was a little more than a rough idea. Now, it can even impress (maybe not everyone - but I do not care about these maggots).

Yesterday I got a chance to present JeromeDL and notitio.us to Nova Spivack from Radar Networks (I am still waiting for my beta account to Twine). He was clearly impressed, with access control module (Extensible Access Control - to be published soon) in JeromeDL, IKHarvester, SSCF (how isn't?), and last but not least - recommendations in notitio.us. TagsTreeMaps and MultiBeeBrowse weren't left without positive impression either. I think this were the best 15 minutes (stretched a little, I know) of sales pitch. Ok, meeting with INEK in Korea was jaw-dropping experience as well, but I had much more time than.

Tomorrow, I should be ready to announce the results of the our evaluation of Semantic and Social technologies in JeromeDL. Stay tuned - you might got surprised if you thought that semantic web technology has gone astray.

Blogged with Flock

Why do I prefer ntriples?

2008-02-10T08:11:00.000-08:00

A thought experiment (actually I had to do that just a minute ago): you have a number of publications backed up from JeromeDL. Each publication is in a separate folder, named as an ID of this publication. Inside you will find dublin core file (XML), couple of binary files (PDFs and such), and RDF description of the resource.

The task: Map a title to each resource using anything you can get on MacOSX or Linux.

Solution: The RDF description in JeromeDL is exported using ntriples format. Which means - one statement per line. Therefore a solution is a very simple workflow:

find the RDF files

prepare grep command

execute

Which on any UNIX system will translate into:
find . -name "rdf.abstract.ntriples" | awk '{print "grep \"xontology#hasTitle\"",$0}' | sh -

Teaser: Try to do that spending only as little time as I did with either RDF/XML serialization or/and Windows. Good luck.

Snow in Ireland (First Day of Spring)

2008-02-01T02:27:00.001-08:00

Snow in Ireland (First Day of Spring)
Originally uploaded by skruk

If you ever been to Ireland long enough you know certain facts:

there is so much rain - you could start inventing names for different kinds
the temperature (almost) never drops below 0C - so there is proper winter
the seasons in the Celtic Calendar are different. Spring, for example, starts on Feb, 1st.

And there you go - today is Feb, 1st - and we had quite a "snow storm" in the morning :)

What is keeping me so busy recently? (2)

2008-01-26T09:24:00.001-08:00

Evaluation results [23 participants]
Originally uploaded by skruk

Another missing piece of my PhD Thesis was evaluation - which for obvious reasons could not have been done before :)

The first phase has just finished - I have managed to convince 25 victims to finish the evaluation.

Now it is my time to process all the data (I still hope from some help from Ewelina - as usual :D)

What is keeping me so busy recently? (1)

2008-01-26T03:47:00.001-08:00

One of the things missing in my PhD Thesis was a chapter on an architecture of a generic SemDL. But before one can move to SemDL architecture, first you need to understand the research in "classic" DLs, and what are the plans for the future. In order to do that, I had to:

1) Take this pile of almost 100 articles on digital libraries architectures, read them, annotate them

DL Arch (source)
Originally uploaded by skruk

2) Compile all this information into a mindmap

DL Arch (mindmap)
Originally uploaded by skruk

3) Write up the results into a missing chapter in my thesis :)

My Thesis [minus] SemDL Arch (yet)
Originally uploaded by skruk

Why social Internet in Poland might not be a good idea ?

2008-01-15T09:12:00.000-08:00

Before I came to DERI, I was working on the semantic digital library project called Elvis-DL (now JeromeDL). My idea was to add a feature allowing registered users to share their opinion on the resources in the digital library, and hence, build up the knowledge around it.

The response I got at that time was - that it would be a bad ideas - as free comments will lead only to “spam” texts, or worse - comments expressed with bad language, etc. In other words useless.

Shortly after I started developing social features for JeromeDL in DERI, I have also added this “blog-around” feature. Everyone was pleased.

Why?

Because in the social Internet around the world, your comments on blogs present who you are, and people tend to express themselves politely. Hence, their comments are if not useful, at least nice to the others.

Compare comments on Flickr with comments on wp.pl (large polish information portal). Huuge difference, right?

I am in the process of evaluating my solutions (both semantic and social) for digital libraries; these that have been implemented in JeromeDL. I have sent information around, using any possible information channels I could think about. Most of them were social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, GoldenLine; and mailing lists of all known to me social and semantic web groups.

One of my colleagues, helping me with the evaluation, suggested I should also send this information to the new and fast growing social networking site called nasza-klasa.pl.

I have to confess, I was not too much convinced to this idea; but since I wanted more people to help me, reluctantly, I have sent the information also there. The fora of my universities (GUT and NUIG) and the high school.

Shortly after, a very stupid (and frustrated, if you ask me) comment appeared at the GUT forum.

For me it is a clear example that social solutions build in Poland cannot be left without moderation.

Sad, isn’t it?

 ---

16 January 2008 17:46

As an after match of this stupid conversation, sadly enough supported by other people with strange attitude, and having no answer from the moderators of the system, I have decided to do the only reasonable thing - remove my profile from that site, since it was impossible to continue the conversation as it went.

Shame on you nasza-klasa.pl.

---

16 January 2008 23:59

Maciej’ve just sent me a copy of the conversation that continues on nasza-klasa.pl. It is nice to see that other people share my understanding of “cultural” conversation.
I could re-register to the portal - but I will not do that.
Consider this my protest against zero-reaction from moderators.
I do not claim that people who behave wrong should be removed out of the sudden, but tuning in to close a pointless conversation would be enough.
As Jaroslaw said - I removed my account as being part of the social network means for me to identify with the people there, and use the SN for the purpose. If I cannot talk to other people without being abused for using technical language, what is the purpose of using such a SN? Good luck nasza-klasa - but you just lost a very strong supporter of social networking. I am getting back to Facebook, LinkedIn, and GoldenLine - see you all there.

---

17 January 2008 09:28

As I can see - the discussion continues. This time the feather was taken by some weird guy who cannot even spell “evaluations” - congratulations - how such a person can be subscribed to university forum? The most funny is that he claims that my evaluation was set up only for computer science; well, it was not. It was set up for people who have some more understanding of the current Internet. The truly sad is that the people who felt offended by not understanding my post were actually computer scientists (or so they claim). And of course, he could not write even a short post without using “french” (yeah, I still know what “chgw” means)

Evaluation of social and semantic technologies in digital libraries

2008-01-11T15:10:00.000-08:00

I would like to invite everyone to take part in the evaluation of the semantic and social technologies for digital libraries. The evaluation benchmarks search and browsing solutions delivered in our semantic digital library called JeromeDL [http://www.jeromedl.org/] against standard services offered by one of most popular open-source libraries - DSpace.

Please feel free to enter http://q.digime.name/ and help us with evaluating our prototype solutions.

Building thread-safe code with SimpleDateFormat

2007-12-12T10:38:00.000-08:00

The scenario is simple.

Each resource in JeromeDL has an upload and update dates; each is stored in a very simple format yyyyMMdd, e.g., 20071212 (for today).

From time to time - we need to get a Java Date object of out this information.

What we do?

Use SimpleDateFormat object parse and format date, getting it back and forth between Java and RDF.

Simple, right?

Yes, as long as your read the whole documentation of the SimpleDateFormat class - to discover that the objects are not synchronized. In other words - what will run on a standalone application with one processor - might very easily break when you try it on a server with multiple processors (or Intel HT).

Luckily, the solution is equally simple - use synchronized block, and you’re done.

Who is using my system?

2007-11-21T16:43:00.000-08:00

If you have a web application, based on Servlets/JSP (JEE), which sits behind the Apache/mod_jk, and you would like to track who is using your system, here is what to do:

1. In the Apache configuration (probably Vhost definition, as in my case), you will need:
        • JkMount /* NAME_OF_YOUR_WORKER
        • JkEnvVar REMOTE_USER "<NOTSET>"
The second entry will pass the information about user logged in on the Apache level down to your web application
2. In your application you can check who is using it, with credentials on the Apache level, with:
        • ${ REMOTE_USER } (JSP/EL)
        • request.getAttribute("REMOTE_USER") (Servlet or JSP/Scriptlets)
3. In your application you can also check who is using it, with credentials on the Tomcat level, with:
        • ${ pageContext.request.remoteUser } (JSP/EL)
        • request.getRemoteUser() (Servlet or JSP/Scriptlets)

That’s it.

Unless, your system is DSpace - where more problems will arise. You will need to, e.g.,
1. The register user is hidden in request.getAttribute("dspace.current.user"), and is of type org.dspace.eperson.EPerson
2. In order to get some human-readable description of this user you can call getEmail() method to get the email of the user.

Deadly Sins (when using email)

2007-11-18T07:02:00.000-08:00

I have just read this post. I subscribe to this opinion. And on the top of his 7 sins:
1. Hanging Questions
2. Buried Requests
3. Wrong Medium
4. Trying to Be Clever
5. Sending Urgent Requests Through E-Mail
6. Bulky Paragraph
7. Playing E-Mail Tag

I would surely put “Attach Huge Emails”. Seriously, this is very annoying. My mailbox is no 5GB+.

Mac vs PC (by Umberto Eco)

2007-11-18T04:31:00.000-08:00

…Insufficient consideration has been given to the new underground religious war which is modifying the modern world. It’s an old idea of mine, but I find that whenever I tell people about it they immediately agree with me.
The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ‘ratio studiorum’ of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach–if not the Kingdom of Heaven–the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: the essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.
DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can reach salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: a long way from the baroque community of revellers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.
You may object that, with the passage to Windows, the DOS universe has come to resemble more closely the counter-reformist tolerance of the Macintosh. It’s true: Windows represents an Anglican-style schism, big ceremonies in the cathedral, but there is always the possibility of a return to DOS to change things in accordance with bizarre decisions; when it comes down to it, you can decide to allow women and gays to be ministers if you want to…..
And machine code, which lies beneath both systems (or environments, if you prefer)? Ah, that is to do with the Old Testament, and is talmudic and cabalistic…
[ Being a Mac user and a Catholic - I leave no comments to that ;) ]

Java6 for Leopard

2007-11-13T06:14:00.000-08:00

My two cents - I really miss that - anyone also interested - please put
13949712720901ForOSX
on your web page/blog

2007-10-30T02:25:00.001-07:00

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Looking for a Researcher - Software Developer [JeromeDL project] (position closed)

2007-09-25T13:57:00.000-07:00

Researcher - Software Developer

(please note that the recruitment process is now closed)

The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) is the largest semantic research organisation in the world. DERI offers a stimulating, dynamic, multi-cultural research environment with excellent ties to research groups worldwide. This is a unique opportunity to join the effort of bringing research prototypes to industry ready within DERI, in collaboration with our research and industrial partners will play a key role in making next-generation semantic computing systems a reality. DERI offers a unique opportunity to develop one’s career in the world-wide renown and industry strong research environment.

The Person
• Ability and willingness to work in a international team based environment developing state of the art software solutions on time and to specification
• Motivated and proactive attitude to take ownership and initiative in all work assignments
• Excellent analysis and problem solving skills
• Strong design, development & testing skills
• Excellent communication skills, verbal and written
• Excellent command of English, both verbal and written
• Ability to tackle wide and varied tasks
• Creative Thinking

Essential Skills
• Solid industry experience using many of the following:
• Very strong core Java
• Web based UI: JSP/Servlets/Applets/JavaScript/AJAX
• Good expertise with automated testing frameworks such as JUnit
• Good knowledge and experience with Semantic technologies
• Good knowledge of object-oriented design principles and design patterns with an understanding of their application within Java

Desirable Experience & Background (inc. qualifications):
• Knowledge/Experience with distributed systems and service-oriented design principles
• Knowledge of user interface design principles
• Experience/Knowledge of document processing and search techniques
• Experience/Knowledge of XML processing and related technologies
• A relevant post graduate degree (MSc) or relevant industrial experience

The position is full-time, located at DERI Galway. The duration of the post will be for 9 months in the first instance. The salary is commensurable with qualifications and experience. An early start date is preferable as the position is now open. A panel for future similar positions may be formed.
Informal enquiries about these positions may be made to:
Sebastian Ryszard Kruk, Researcher and Project Manager, Tel +353-91-495213 sebastian.kruk@deri.org

Application procedure: Candidates are requested to submit a covering letter, CV (Word or PDF format only) and the names and addresses of at least three and not more than five referees via e-mail to;
hr.ie@deri.org

Healing you windows after Skype-virus

2007-09-11T12:40:00.000-07:00

I do not have PC, what for? Mac is cool enough.
But since I just healed two PC of my friends, a short description on what to do when you catch the Skype virus yourself:

Expert users — and only expert users — who know what they’re doing can also remove the worm manually.

1. Restart the PC in safe mode
2. Run regedit
3. Go to HKLM/software/microsoft/windows/currentversion/runonce find entry with mshtmldat32.exe. Delete this entry. [Actually there might be some other *.exe reference there - remove it just in case]
4. Go to Windows\System32 directory and delete following files: wndrivs32.exe, mshtmldat32.exe, winlgcvers.exe, sdrivew32.exe
5. Go to windows/system32/drivers/etc
6. Find file hosts
7. Open it with notepad, ctrl+a and delete all entries (this will resume your antivirus updates), save, close.
8. Restart the PC.

[Source: http://heartbeat.skype.com/2007/09/the_worm_that_affects_skype_fo.html]

Bank of Ireland - New Online Banking Services Coming Soon!

2007-09-10T04:07:00.000-07:00

I guess it had to happen eventually. BoI has introduced multilingual support and international payments for their online banking service. See below.

Btw. have you noticed something interesting ? English, Polish, Chinese,... what about Gaelic ?

New Online Banking Services Coming Soon!

Bank of Ireland 365 online is launching a range of new services in October 2007 to improve your online banking experience.

You will soon be able to:

Register new beneficiaries for domestic and international payments
Make international payments to over 40 countries worldwide
Top up your mobile phone online with Vodafone, O2 and Meteor
Set up, cancel and amend standing orders

Take a tour of our new 365 online demo - available in 3 languages - English, Polish and Chinese. Our specially designed step-by-step guide will show you how easy it is to use these exciting new services. You can access this by selecting the "365 online Demo" link on www.365online.com

Is my accent not irish enough?

2007-09-08T00:44:00.000-07:00

Now I'm really pissed.

These jerks from above had their party till 3am (? at least this is when I managed to get to sleep) - and the fecking Gardai did literally nothing with it - even after our 2 calls.
I am asking myself why? But I guess the answer is simple, and I conclude it based on experience of myself and my fellow non-Irish colleagues: My accent is still not irish enough, right?
When it comes to clamping in Galway - you are on the safe side if you have irish plates; you can park in any, most stupid, and usually dangerous for the safety of others places. But beware, Polish plates will get you a bill in a don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it time, even if you think you can safely park there, and you do not really see any P&D signs or ticketing machine. Having problems on the road, like driving in the night, or in the fog, without your lights turned on; at least not in the dip-lights position, so that it is either hard to see you, or we see-you-hell-too-well? No problem - cause you have your irish plates; try to do that on non-Irish ones - and you are lucky to get away without the fine.
And finally, you see someone damaging cars and bikes on the parking lot; be sure you sound Irish, otherwise no one will take your report seriously.
If you think it is just my imagination - you are wrong - this things did happen, and I can see them happening all the time; and believe me - I have seen both versions of each story already, over the last 3 years.

Conclusions? I am getting sick and tired of this place. I can get used to bad drivers (and bad “parkers” too), but I just cannot stand law enforcement forces (oh, sorry, here I should say - peace keeping forces) doing literally nothing when your neighbors decide that you do not deserve a good night sleep after a VERY hard week.

I just wonder, what would happen if the same situation was in my country? I know that Police will come quite quickly to silent noisy guys. But will they when my accent does sound foreign? Hard to tell; but even if they we be reluctant as here - it means that everyone is better off in their own country...

Bill is back

2007-09-06T08:07:00.000-07:00

Just a short note, to share my state of mind.

Today, we’ve met Bill in the office. He came just for a short while, but it was plain to see - he does feel better than before.

I am very happy. I hope he will fully recover from his illness.

In the meantime, welcome back Bill.

Ontology Development - Do we collaborate?

2007-08-19T05:06:00.000-07:00

One of the still unresolved problems in MarcOnt Portal is how to integrate suggestions from the community into new release of the ontology; which suggestions will conflict, how to choose the ones to be used, etc. MarcOnt Portal group still fights with the code base: switching to new SemVersion, fighting with FOAFRealm+SemVersion integration, and hardening the implementation. And we keep forgetting about that question - how to design and algorithm for semi-automated agreement on new versions of ontologies.

I guess, we should start with the definition of the ontology:

An ontology is a specification of a conceptualization. (...) Practically, an ontological commitment is an agreement to use a vocabulary (i.e., ask queries and make assertions) in a way that is consistent (but not complete) with respect to the theory specified by an ontology.
Tom Gruber “What is an Ontology?”

In other words - ontology is should be based on the agreement among the community of experts in the specific domain.

Should we try to talk to as many domain experts from various ontology development groups as possible, and see how they do that in practice?

There is some research done in that area already; have following article as an example.

But, when we look into an average ontology development - is it always based on the community agreement? I hope we will figure it out soon, as it is the cornerstone of our future research on MarcOnt Portal.

3 years in DERI (and counting ...)

2007-08-11T04:38:00.000-07:00

It is hard to imagine, but it is precisely 3 years since I joined DERI Galway.
Man, ... 3 years ago I was almost certain I will be packing myself, and heading home.
I would never actually thought that we are going to stay longer, and that these 3 years will be so full with various, colorful events.

Let’s try to sum up the projects first:
• I came here with a prototype of my semantic digital library (Elvis-DL), which I built at GUT; now JeromeDL, next step in evolution of Elvis-DL, (Adam many thanks for the hint on the name) is getting nearer to version 2.1, and is full with various components I’ve would never dreamed of. A lot of people contributed to the project; somehow everyone is gone now, and I have to start head-hunting again ☹
• My idea of MarcOnt Initiative I brought we me that time, is still growing; thanks to Maciej, who took over from me, and our MarcOnt working group teams; from an idea of a collaborative ontology management environment (MarcOnt Portal), and bibliographic ontology (MarcOnt Ontology), with Marcin’s help we extended MarcOnt Initiative with MarcOnt Mediation Services and RDF Translator library. Piotr added Rule Generator to the stack of components.
• The quick hack (2 nights) of FOAFRealm library is also much alive; I did it before I came to DERI, and later presented at the FOAF Workshop in Galway. Based on the research, mine and D-FOAF working group, we’ve got enough stuff to put together version 2.0; Sławek, who took over from me on this, is now preparing the final version of FOAFRealm 2.0
• While morphing Elvis-DL into JeromeDL by, among the others, delivering support for multiple languages, I managed to prototype something that I wanted to do a long time before, ever since I worked with GUT - a collaborative space in a digital library. From the 3 components: shareable bookmarks annotated with established classification schemata, mini-blog, and resources ranking, the first one is now primarily identified with what I christened as Social Semantic Collaborative Filtering (SSCF). My prototype was simple and dirty, but got enough attention and we decided to give it a new face. Ever since then, Adam makes sure that SSCF looks better and better, and delivers more and more nice features, including support for SIOC, stored faceted navigation queries, del.icio.us bookmarks, and recommendation engine delivered by Daniel and Vinicius from PUC-Rio.
• In late December 2004 the idea of our own lightweight implementation of HyperCuP protocol was born. Thanks to Sławek and Paweł, we now have a pretty stable component, that has already empowered both JeromeDL and FOAFRealm in distributed computing capabilities.
• With eLITE project [see later] even more ideas and opportunities emerged. The first one to come was Didaskon project. Initiated as a GUT group project with great help from Adam, the project is currently being managed by Jacek (who also works on his SemPerKit and Copernicus). I hope in the near future we will hear about the first release, but till now, Didaskon already gave life to two spin-off projects:
• Informal Knowledge Harvester (IKHarvester) - delivered by Jarek to support aggregation of knowledge from various Social Semantic Information Sources, and delivering them as Learning Objects Metadata.
• IKAR (Informal Knowledge AdapteR) - delivered by Filip, allows to deliver auxiliary information on related resources, and toggle visibility of this information based on current level of the knowledge of the user
• Since both JeromeDL and SSCF were in desperate need of an annotation component that could seamlessly support both WordNet and various taxonomies, I hacked together JOnto, which handles RDF representation of various knowledge organization systems, and delivers nice (?) AJAXy components to access this information.
• Last year, together with Stefan, we came with an idea of TagsTreeMaps, as an alternative representation of TagCloud. We almost got TTM patented, but in the result, we are year late with publication process; I hope to get some interesting paper out within next month.
• In early fall 2006 Bill told me about his idea of HoneyCombTM, which was so brilliant I had to give it a try. This is how another JavaScript-AJAX component emerged, giving me finally a concrete ground to finally build ....
• faceted navigation component - MultiBeeBrowse. Don’t blame me for the name - when you put together honeycomb, faceted view, and busy bee (aghm, that is me ☺ ) you can’t expect anything else. To be frank, the idea of MBB was something I was waiting for the last 2 years. The early implementations of Jerome-Photo faceted navigation component, and a similar struggle with faceted component for SWSE (at the time I was an active member of the team), where not wrong, but they were missing bits and pieces; basically, they were missing collaborative space which would fit nicely to my idea of S3B [see later] services. Even though the current prototype might, and should be, improved in various places (hopefully Wladek will contribute here and there within his thesis) - I finally managed to close the loop of the ...
• Social Semantic Search and Browsing (S3B) - from the early start of my work on the PhD thesis I wanted to concentrate on this topic. Digital libraries seemed to be a perfect framework to investigate it. My MSc delivered semantic query expansion algorithm, which is now being refurbished by Jakub, Lukasz, and Mateusz, it already had both social and semantic touch. SSCF was all about social and semantics. I was missing one piece of this puzzle. I quickly learned that it was the faceted navigation. Yah, so what? I saw semantics, but where was the collaborative space? With MBB on board I am all set to finally do evaluation of this beast ☺

I guess that would be it for software prototypes (for now at least ...)

Working groups and master thesis:
Thanks to collaborative nature of both prof. Krawczyk and Stefan (should I say prof. Decker to match the context?) we managed to establish an ongoing exchange program. It consists of establishing 3-person group project at GUT, summer internship in DERI, another internship in DERI during 10th semester, and joint MSc diploma with thesis in English.
We are in the third year of this program now. The first 3 groups: W2W (JeromeDL), WMap (MarcOnt), and D-FOAF (FOAFRealm) gave foundations to Corrib Cluster Project. What has started as a joint R&D initiative between DERI Galway and GUT, slowly attracts other researchers, e.g., from prof. Hong-Gee Kim group.
I have already wrote about Didaskon (group project 2006). Currently members of 3rd group projects (JeromeDL 2, MarcOnt 2, and SQE) set up (2007) work with us in DERI. Good luck guys ☺
I will not go in to too many details about the MSc diplomas.
You can easily find them here.

Conferences and exchange programs:
There was a lot of traveling for the last 3 years, and it would be hard to list it all here. But the most important visits (mainly for the development of my research) were:
• ISWC2004 - where I discovered that my extension to JeromeDL is actually a collaborative filtering component
• exchange visit to DERI Innsbruck - where I networked with many interesting people. Together with Kerstin we wrote a paper that received the Best Paper Award, and Axel and Michael had their contribution to JeromeDL, while we now research with Ying, and her team, on the tagging.
• ESWC2005 followed by KnowledgeWeb meeting, was a great opportunity to meet even more renown researchers.
• I will never forget DEXA2005, where I met Bernhard, with who we started building the Semantic Digital Libraries community - there results are quite encouraging: 3 tutorials (JCDL2006, WWW2007 (!), and ESWC2007), 1 workshop session (NKOS2006) and ... a book with which I struggle at the moment.
• Finally, my exchange visit to PUC-Rio, where I worked with prof. Daniel Schwabe. The visit was so valuable, I wish it could be longer; on the other hand, I still struggle with implementing and evaluating all the ideas we crafted together with Daniel and his team ☺.

I have started my adventure with DERI as a PhD student.
In January 2006, however, 5 of the aforementioned projects (JeromeDL, MarcOnt, FOAFRealm, SSCF, and HyperCuP) became the corner stones of the eLITE grant from Enterprise Ireland; thanks to this grant even more people can now work with me on my projects, and in January 2006 I was promoted from a PhD Student to a Researcher (Computer Science) , leading research on the Semantic Web and Social Networking technologies, in the newly established eLearning cluster.

Now, we created notitio.us, and I wonder what the future brings ...

What is the difference?

2007-07-30T06:57:00.000-07:00

The concerns around RDF Storages efficient are not new; many people I meet, ask me if they are scalable enough, so that they could used them in the industrial solutions.
I was not sure about it for a long time. I was not happy with Jena, we have switched JeromeDL and FOAFRealm to Sesame. I showed some improvement. I was hoping to switch to YARS, but being unable to write to this storage kept me at bay.
Anyway, over the time my confidence in the scalability of the RDF storages grew. When DERI announced the break through with SWSE/YARS2, I felt pretty confident that we have reached the stage, where the industrial world can start building upon Semantic Web technologies.

And so, I became reckless. Until only recently ...

During my summer holiday, just to play around a little, I did some changes in the TagsTreeMaps (TTM) component, preparing it for the evaluation, which I will need for my thesis. Since broadband connection and a sunny environment are mutually exclusive (at least they were in my case), I have switched from the original del.icio.us tagging provider module, developed last year, to an internal notitio.us provider module. The later one operated on the RDF storage (Sesame) with a copy of my, and some of my colleagues, taggings from del.icio.us. The graph with taggings was build following Tom Grubbers Tagging ontology (TagCommons).

If you happened to play with TTM anytime in the past, you know that what is required in the first step is a list of all tags by given user, with a number of times each tag has been used. Since none of RDF query languages (at least to my knowledge), supported by Sesame, allows for aggregations like COUNT(*), I decided to do the counting myself. Still, I needed a list of all tags.

The obvious, to me, query was following:

SELECT term
FROM
{document} tagging:hasTagging {tagging},
{tagging} dc:creator {<USER-ID>};
tagging:hasTerm {} rdfs:label {term}
USING NAMESPACE
tagging = <http://ttm.corrib.org/tagging#>,
dc = <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/>

In other words, for all documents tagged by user with give USER-ID, get all literals representing tags used in this tagging.

To my surprise the whole application slowed downed to a snail pace. Why? A quick profiling with Logger in the right places of the algorithm (I could not get Tomcat profilers in Eclipse running on my Mac), gave a hint that it is the query execution by Sesame that takes ages.
I have even posted this query through the web interface of Sesame. The result was even worse: 25k ms (!) to compute the query for roughly 400+ documents with 2.5 tags per each (on average). That is BAD.

Luckily, I am blessed with a group of smarter than me (apparently) people working under my supervision in my SemInf Lab in DERI.
I told the problem to Maciej, and asked him what question would he wrote. His response was:

SELECT term
FROM
{tagging} dc:creator {<USER-ID>};
tagging:hasTerm {} rdfs:label {term}
USING NAMESPACE
tagging = <http://ttm.corrib.org/tagging#>,
dc = <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/>

... and Sesame managed to compute it, giving the same results (!) in 200ms (!!!!!).

The question is if I can use his query instead of mine? Quick answer: YES,

... but what if the RDF will not conform our ontology? Like e.g., there will be resources with dc:creator and tagging:hasTerms properties, where will not be of a type Tagging, associated with a document? Unlikely to happen in the old world of SQL, but not in the open Semantic Web environment.

For the purpose of the evaluation of TTM I will stick to Maciej’s query. Hopefully, there will be some better solution out there, by the time notitio.us will go commercial.

Unofficial Anthem of Polish Community in Ireland

2007-07-07T06:51:00.000-07:00

Well, it is surely unofficial, but I must admit that this is the only song that came with us, 3 years ago, to Ireland: Kowalski “A Irlandia jest taka zielona” (“But Ireland is so green”).

Sebciok sent it to us when we were packing for Ireland. Now, Szymon pointed, on his blog, to the movie clip for this song.

Be careful when google-ing for LaTeX

2007-06-25T14:37:00.001-07:00

I know LaTeX is cool, and I cannot imagine publishing my research with out it.
But from time to time, I am getting caught in a trap of non-personal enough and case insensitive search in Google.

Today I was trying to find how to insert a ^TM symbol in LaTeX (\texttrademark). A simple query "LaTeX trademark" occurred to be too simple ... (you can imagine what I mean, or check it yourself).

When will be the times where the search engine will actually know what I mean?!

Technorati Tags:
LaTeX, Google, meaning

How I love Tomcat (did I say love? I hate it)

2007-06-23T16:26:00.001-07:00

This is not the first time that Tomcat team decided to make our life easier and change the way Tomcat 6 works (compared to T5.5)

A couple of notes from our (just finished) session on how to make JeromeDL working on T6.

apart from small changes required here and there in JSP (like changing ${ (test)?one:two} -> ${ (test)?(one):(two)} ) - T6 seems to be much faster than T5.5

T6 introduced new way (they say it is a features) of handling internationalization, but it breaks common sense way of how fmt:bundle worked. Now, you cannot do .getKeys(), or bundle.keys - as this new object, that says it is a ResourceBundle is somehow mapped in EL to something behaving like a Map. so bundle.keys - returns ???keys??? indicating that such a translation has not been found - stupid.

Together with Adam we wrote a helper function in Tag Lib to make sure we get Enumeration from bundle - it was required by JavaScript internationalization style we have e.g. in SSCF

T6 has problems with handling long URL that contains URLEncoded fragments. If you have %2F as a result of URL encoding a slash - it will fail to load the page, with error 400 -> wrong URL no Slash - again stupid. I will try to find some solution soon.

Please let me know if anyone has any idea how to fix point 3.

Technorati Tags:
jeromedl, features, tomcat, problems

Hello word from MacBook Pro

2007-06-07T10:12:00.001-07:00

OK, I have finally made it.
If you read this post - it means that I am now 100% MacSkruk [or at least this is how my Mac is called].
There were several reasons to switch; I cannot event try to rank them. But believe me - it was for the best :)

Irish Digital Libraries Summit

2007-04-01T02:34:00.001-07:00

We would like to invite everyone interested in the research and development of digital libraries in Ireland to participate in the Irish Digital Libraries Summit on 20th April 2007. This one-day forum explores the future of digital libraries at the eve of the next generation Internet.

The event is organized by the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), NUI Galway, a campus company with an excellent international reputation for research and teaching on the semantic web. Further details of DERI are available at http://www.deri.ie/

The goal of the summit is to bring together researchers, librarians, library systems suppliers, and policy makers in order to facilitate the implementation of cutting edge technological developments in libraries. This four-way interaction is necessary for the future development of digital libraries in Ireland.

Expected outcomes from the summit include:

new digital projects in individual Irish libraries, and
the basics of an application for funding of a national digital libraries initiative under the EU FP7 Digital Libraries theme.

Speakers at the summit will present current research on digital libraries in the context of next generation Internet technologies (Semantic Web, Web 2.0), such as JeromeDL, Fedora, and BRICKS. JeromeDL allows institutions to easily publish documents on the Web. Further details are available at http://www.jeromedl.org/ . There will also be presentations by practitioners and researchers on current Irish digital libraries projects.

The summit will be held at DERI, NUI Galway, IDA Business Park, Lower Dangan, Galway, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Friday 20th April 2007. Details of the summit are available at: http://wiki.corrib.deri.ie/index.php/SemDL/IrishDLSummit

If you intend attending the summit please register in advance by email sebastian DOT kruk AT deri.org or phone +353 85 7126591 (M). If you would like to give a short presentation about digital libraries, please provide details so that we can include you in the programme.

prof. dr. Stefan Decker
Director of DERI & Cluster Leader Semantic Web

Sebastian Kruk
Lead Researcher, Project Manager: Digital Libraries

prof. Mary Burke
School of Information and Library Studies (SILS)
University College Dublin (UCD)

technorati tags:jeromedl, digitallibraries, summit, meeting, ireland, bricks, fedora

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JeromeDL and Semantic Museums

2007-03-31T09:06:00.001-07:00

I would like to follow up (finally) on my ideas, which were crowding on my mind map since I came back from London, on how solutions, such as JeromeDL, can be used to build Semantic Museums.

One of differences between digital libraries and museums, which can be easily spotted, is less restrictive and probably, more open-minded approach presented by the museum community. The same technologies presented at DL meetings are either not understood at all or rejected as 've been there, done that already, didn't work ; while museums are more willing to allow semantic web technologies into their domain.

There is another, I think, very important difference: there is clear distinction between library and digital library; this distinction, however, tends to disappear when it comes to museums. The support semantic solutions can offer is not constrained to virtual tours delivered through museum portals. What many museums do, at the moment, is building their existence on the Internet; with technologies, such as Second Life, we can imagine aforementioned virtual tours to come to existence. What is interesting about museums, is that new technologies can, and in my opinion should, support visitors in the real life.

A simple scenario: when I visit a museum, I usually try to be very precise in reading and listening all auxiliary material delivered along with the exhibition items. Depending on particular solution provided by the museum I am at the moment, I can usually read short, sometimes very short, descriptions of, e.g., paintings I am looking at. Sometimes, the audio guide, synchronized with my tour, gives me better understanding of what I am looking at, at the moment.
And usually this is where all it ends. Unless, I have a very broad and deep knowledge of the topic, and can track most of important exhibitions related, somehow, to the one I am at the moment, there is no way I can get any further with my visit. It is like all that interesting information is veiled before me, so that I could not find it.

Now imagine, that instead of just an audio guide for my tour I would have a ubiquitous guide; I could it access with my, or provided by the museum, PDA or a smart phone. The sensors, such as camera, GPS, or accelerometer, build in or delivered along with my device, can track my current position and my current subject of interest. Now, looking at a painting and moving my smart phone camera in front of it, I can see regions of interest (similar to those we know from Flickr), overlayed on the view presented by my device; this ROIs are heavily annotated with information I can be interested in. If my device holds my profile, it can even filter out those that would I would not be interested in, or those I already know. These additional information bits can also allow me to start a virtual tour from the place where I am at the moment. I can browse through a picture of a dog, an allegory of trust-fidelity, to other paintings where the same allegory is presented. My personal guide, running on my mobile device, can also tell me if any of these paintings are being now on display anywhere near to where I am at the moment. I can also share my thoughts, knowledge, ideas with other people that will come across this painting.

Semantic Web, Web 2.0, adaptable interfaces, ubiquitous computing, all these technologies come handy to develop a service as described in my scenario. I was puzzled at first, when I heard about soft and hard semantic web, but I was glad to know that JeromeDL was already addressing these, and similar, requirements. We work at the moment, to deliver similar browsing features, as presented in the scenario, in JeromeDL. So far they are constrained to the Web, but who knows maybe one day I will managed to gather a consortium of other research institutes and museums, willing to deliver a museum x.0 platform, where an average user would finally make real use of the Semantic Web, ... in the real life

technorati tags:jeromedl, museums, semanticweb, reallife, scenario, ideas

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Description Logic vs Object Oriented Programming for the Semantic Web

2007-03-05T05:46:00.001-08:00

When in 2003 I worked on the HTML library management component for the prototype (Elvis-DL) for my master's thesis I have stumbled upon something very weird. I had a simple ontology describing concepts I wanted to manage in my library. I was using Jena (at that time) to render structures to be displayed as HTML forms based on the ontology. All was fine, until I had to handle subClassOf and subPropertyOf relations. The results I got from Jena when constructing the objects where completely wrong (in my opinion) and I ended up writing some fall back code to make the interface work as I expected.

More than a year later, when I moved to DERI Galway one of my colleagues, Knud, told me how OWL and RDF Schema (DL) are different from the way I was used to (OO). Basically they work back-to-forth.

Recently Eyal had a presentation on that matter during the Semantic Web cluster meeting. I have learned about it from Knud email (I am no longer an official member of SW cluster).

If your Jena or any other reasoning engine does not work the way you expected it to work - better check following documents first:

technorati tags:descriptionlogic, oo, objectorientedprogramming, semanticweb, why

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"Libraries begin to realize that they are not alone"

2007-02-28T14:17:00.001-08:00

I just read a short report from the Semantic Web and Digital Libraries (ICSD 2007) by Ivan Herman.

It was a little to far for me to go; even though the organizers "invited" me to do presentation on JeromeDL. I was wondering about the quality of this event, and eventually decided together with more senior people from DERI that we should wait and see.

I hope there will be a follow up, and then we will surely go - by all means - JeromeDL is the Semantic Digital Library, and my tutorial on Semantic Digital Libraries (and soon the book) are just yet another activities that should support this movement.
It is nice to hear that DL community finally acknowledged our presence, however, I am still not sure if we are ready for that. My cooperation with this community proved that this is not an easy task, but I have learned and I am still learning a lot from them. I guess, until we will be able to understand what has been achieved so far, and address problems of the DL community, we are sentenced for more misunderstanding.

technorati tags:semanticweb, digitallibraries, conference, blog, india, report

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Car Insurance in Ireland ... yes, but ...

2007-01-21T03:34:00.001-08:00

Yeah, I know I have not been blogging for a long time - but one of my new year's resolutions is to keep this blog alive by posting at least once a week.

I am pretty sure everyone remembers that old joke:

"Have you heard that they give away Mercedes-Benz cars on the Red-square in Moscow? Yes, but ... not on Red-square in Moscow but in front of the Winter Palace in Sankt Petersburg, not Mercedes-Benz but bicycles, and they do not give - they still"

Well actually I felt like this for the last couple of days trying to finalize my car insurance in Ireland. I believe this is part of the answer-quick-forget-if-it's-right culture in Ireland but this time it went way too far.

Before we bought our car some time ago we asked around all our friends if there is any way to get a cheaper car insurance. And we have been told that if we will get it from Tesco/Hibernian they will acknowledge my 6 years of no-claims and get us a huge discount. We did so, compared with others - and it was really true (well, we thought so at that time). It turned out that we only had to get PZU (a polish insurance company) to send a letter confirming that no claims have been made for the last 5+ years, and got it translated by the Polish Embassy; and our car insurance will drop from €1000 to €400.

Cool, piece of cake we thought. PZU'd send the letter pretty fast, I translated it, and sent off to the Polish Embassy for confirmation (together with a check on €60). They sent it back pretty soon as well, but since we were gone for almost a month, I called Tesco to make sure they will wait for this letter another month. "No problem" they said.

Once we got back, I'd collected the letter with the translation and re-sent it together with my car insurance agreement to Tesco. Everything according to the schedule...

And all started to go wrong. First Tesco could not find my letter (it was a registered post so I know they got it on time). Finally, they told me that I can get the no-claims bonus but ... I have to cancel my other insurance (from my previous insurer on my second car). I thought "what a hack?". l It took me a while to understand that obviously there is a rule that you cannot get discount on insurance on more than one car. Stupid, isn't it? Anyway, I was trying to explain that it is not possible to unregister my second car in Poland because I do not own it just by myself. It did not help.

I went over the whole agreement, all documents attached to the agreement, small caps notes - there was no saying I cannot get discount if I own another car that has insurance with no-claims bonus. Finally I found it - they put this information in the FAQ. Pretty professionally, isn't? But AFAIC FAQ is not a part of an agreement.

Anyway, I tried to save what I could by finding another company. I went to AXA. I knew what to ask about - my second car. Surprisingly, I have been transfered to a polish speaking person (so I am pretty sure there was nothing lost in translation). I have stared with my question. They told me - it is ok. You can have two cars, well, the discount will not be so big, but still. So I said - carry on with the quote ... €500. Pretty nice I thought. What is more - they do not need the translation from the Polish Embassy (cool!, but I already have it)

I went to AXA the next day to sign the agreement (you cannot do it over the Internet :( ). And I have heard that I cannot get the no-claim bonus, because the car is going to be insured on myself and my wife as the named driver (another strange Irish custom I have to get used to - you cannot drive a car that is not insured on your name)... but I got a quote from you! Well, yes, I can get a no-claims bonus (around €1000) with my second car insured back in Poland, but ... I cannot insure anyone else as the named driver on this one. Well, Ewelina would not be to happy if she could not drive the car.

And, so defeated by the stupid Irish law (I do not claim Polish is any smarter most of the times) I came back to Tesco, paid what was missing to the full insurance.

technorati tags:irishjoke, car, insurace

Blogged with Flock

Recreational computing

2006-10-27T09:06:00.000-07:00

There is so much going on recently in DERI/eLITE/Corrib - so many things I would like to write about ... but I can't. At least until all those strange IP policies will get firm borders stating what we researchers can tell and what we should not tell.

Until then, trying to avoid any NUIG IP policies land mines I might stuble upon, I can only tell that I came back to unlimited-fun-generating activities: research & developement. I have managed attract a group of skillfull researchers to take care about each of the projects I set up some time ago: JeromeDL (Tomasz), FOAFRealm and HyperCuP (Sławek), MarcOnt and a very new one S3B (Adam).

Now I can relax slightly from some the management responsibilities and spend some time on "recreational computing". For me it is a combination of all the I really like: maths, user interface design, web programming/prototyping, and ... inventing.

I hope I will be allowed to publish some of my recent ideas and prototypes. Untill that time, unless you are from NUIG/DERI, sorry ... you got to trust me - I am having great fun (although it employs working 10-12h/day)

Beware of CVS tags

2006-10-19T06:25:00.000-07:00

It took me a while before I realized what went wrong.
Recently we have finally announced a stable version of JeromeDL 2.0. I was so happy about that.
So the only thing that was left was to tag our current sources with stable tag and keep on rolling with further development.
All went well, until Mariusz was trying to update library.deri.org server (and other) when we realized that something was not right. It occurred that some time in the past we also used stable tag to annotate stable version at that time. Since then a lot of files were refactored, moved, etc. But they still retained the stable tag - which caused why they got into our recently updated servers when cvs-updating to stable tag.
The only way I found to fix that ASAP was to go over all files with errors, warnings, and those we knew were removed and ... remove the stable tag.
Now everything works fine. But, the lesson was learned - be careful when re-using tags in CVS....

Geotagging made easy

2006-08-30T01:58:00.000-07:00

I was always jealous for all those people that had their photos annotated with GPS positions - especially since I travel quite often and after some time it would be very nice to see where I've been precisely.

Now I can ! With Flickr geotagging - that is as easy as you can imagine.

I do not have to take care about GPS, geo-positions, etc. Just drag-and-drop - and you can easily place your photo anywhere on the Planet :)
Plus, other people can not only see where it was taken (click the map link in the metadata section of e.g. this photo on Flickr page) - but can also know the name of the place where it was taken.

Cool, isn't it? Now you can see where is my in-law's garden where this photo was taken :)

And, btw. I managed to geotag about 1000+ photos so far (more coming soon) which is just a fraction of what has been geotagged by the whole Flickr community within last 24h.

Calling all del.icio.us people

2006-08-23T02:58:00.000-07:00

I am just in the middle of research on how to better represent tags than just with tag-cloud. My prototype is up-and-running, however, I would like to introduce some more smarted clustering and filtering techniques.

(help me to speed-up my research)

In order to do so - I need your help - all del.icio.us people - if you want to experience better way to browse your del.icio.us posts - send me your del.icio.us IDs (no passwords :) - so that I can add you as friends.
It will allow me to gather more data so that I can improve my current algorithms.

I appreciate any help - and I promise to give you a credit on the project web page and source code once I will announce this component.

Thanks in advance

Not so wet in Galway, afterall

2006-08-11T11:02:00.000-07:00

(Galway Eyre Square by Kopretinka)

Jacek says it still rains in Galway - but I bought a bike 2 weeks ago - and so far I did not managed to get wet while biking to/from DERI :)

technorati tags:galway, wet, biking

Blogged with Flock

KDE and Beagle

2006-04-20T08:19:00.000-07:00

I have been wating quite a long time to be able to use Google Desktop Search-like in my Linux box. There were two candidates: Beagle and Kat. Until Fedora Core 5, Beagle was crashing all the time, and was hardly performing any indexing. FC5 added Beagle as a part of distribution.
The last thing I needed was some KDE front end - and Kerry is nice enough.
But there was one flaw - I do not like neither Thunderbird nor Evolution. And the way Kerry tried to open emails was resulting in new emails with the content I wanted to read as attachments.
The solution is quite simple - write own wrapper for KMail to handle that. Since I did not know at first wheather the content of the email is piped to the program or just referenced, I make a small script that handles both ways. I hope others will find it usefull.


#!/bin/sh

if [ ! $1 ];
then
      TMPFILE=`mktemp -q /tmp/emailpreview.XXXXXX`
      if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
           echo "$0: Can’t create temp file, exiting..."
           exit 1
      fi

      while read -u 0 TMP
      do
              echo "$TMP" >> $TMPFILE
      done
else
      TMPFILE=$1
fi

/usr/bin/kmail --view "file://$TMPFILE"

if [ ! $1 ]; then
      rm -f $TMPFILE
fi

DMoz vs RDF Repository (Sesame)

2006-03-13T05:45:00.000-08:00

What can you do - there are just some days that just should not happen. I think one of them was when I decided to integrate DMoz ontology into JeromeDL and FOAFRealm. It all looked so harmless - especially when I got (small !) part of the ontology from Andreas. I build the whole mind model around that, finally even set up a JOnto project to deliver unified API to handle taxonomies. And ...
I decided to download DMoz RDF, or what ever they claim to be an RDF :( It took me some time to realize what was wrong. And eventually I got some help from Hee Chul and Krystian with nice converting scripts. I though that it was the end of the problems - I had a sample RDF (a true one) that worked. And a real RDF version of full DMoz ontology. But it was not the end of the problems :(
I decided to upload the 800MB RDF-DMoz file to Sesame. But after a couple of hours of waiting, 100% CPU usage, almost 80C CPU temperature of my laptop, I gave up.

Daniel suggested I should just point to the RDF file and make the memory repository. Well - it went quick that way - "out of heap memory" error :( Later I took the "divide and conquer" approach. Cut this 800MB file into 10 smaller. First one got uploaded very quickly (relatively). And so, encouraged by that example I started uploading the rest 9. Each next of them was taking much much longer to be uploaded, until the 10th one that obviously must had make Sesame hanging - as there was no progress for the whole night (I went to sleep btw).

I cleaned the repository and uploaded only the first chunk again. But trying to use it - with browsing or SeRQL querying was way to sluggish. Finally I came to my brains and "slimed" the DMoz RDF removing (with modified Krystian's script) all information that was not defining dmoz:Topic or using dc:title and dmoz:narrow{12}. Luckily I got 200MB RDF file that went smoothly into Sesame.
And now JOnto-DMoz is finally kicking the ass :)

[I will upload the scripts and the final RDF file to jonto.sf.net soon]

Carnival 2006

2006-03-01T08:58:00.000-08:00

pict8974
Originally uploaded by skruk.

And so we made it. Everyone said it would be a shame to be in Rio during the Carnival and miss the Samba Schools Parade.
Luckily I have even managed to convince myself to take my precious camera with me, shot almost 600 photos, and bring them all home safe.
The funny thing is that what ever people say about Brazil, although you can get easily paranoid with respect to ones safety, Carioca are really nice people. During the parade the only hostile people where two geyish Englishmen trying to quarrel with everyone (including myself) that was trying to get too close to the fence (as they claimed to be the only ones that should occupy that place and shot photos). Weird, isn't it?
Any way - presentation was magnificent - we were only sorry we could not make it to the end - after 5 school we decided to go home (it was 6am BTW) - as I could not see a thing (600 photos / 6h can make your eyes hurt - believe me) and Ewelina was tired as well.

DigiMe - personalization vs privacy

2006-02-09T06:44:00.000-08:00

Contemporary recommender systems derives most of their power from the profiling information on the user. The problem that usually arise is that by amassing infomation about users - recommender systems became a threat to our privacy. The more intuitive and effective search/recommendation system we want to get - the more information about ourselves, our fancies, our friends and foes we need to provide to the system.
Since I always believed that this is to much to pay for just a recommendation - I have came up with the Social Semantic Collaborative Filtering idea that users themselves have control over their profiles. The current implementation in FOAFRealm/D-FOAF project is still far away from what I would like to achieve.
Our aim is to deliver a true identity management (DigiMe) that will not only identify a user in the Internet but also will provide better trade off between personalization and privacy.
I have just came across the presentation DoDEA_Emerging_pt1.ppt
that presents similar opinion to mine in that aspect: we must build identity management system that will allow personalization of services keeping the privacy the same time.

Music for free (almost)

2006-01-30T15:41:00.000-08:00

Recently I have convinced myself to buy a MP3 player with 1GB and radio, just to keep me entertained on the plain when I cannot use my mobile phone and in any other occasion where it is going to be more handy.
But soon I have come to the point where all my MP3s generated out of my legal CDs were no longer cool and entertaining anymore. Buying a new CD is not an option this days, so I went Internet-shopping.
Luckily "legal mp3" query in Google led me to http://www.tunster.ru/ which turned out to be the coolest (and cheapest - please correct me if I am wrong) places.
An average mp3 costs around $0.10 which means that I can stuff my MP3-player for around $15. And the quality is really good - 192 bit rate.

Polish community in Galway

2006-01-29T14:27:00.000-08:00

Today was the first polish mass I attended in Galway. Great thing that we can finally have one. But I was also said that not so many people were there - probably because that did not even know about it.
So to change this situation I decided to set up a blog [http://poloniawgalway.blogspot.com/] where polish community in Galway notify others about events like that.

How to advertise a school of motoring

2006-01-23T11:43:00.000-08:00

How to advertise a school of motoring
Originally uploaded by skruk.

Ever wondered how to do that? Try to squeeze your car in a small alley, park it inch beside the fence ... and there you have it - it just screams: "no other school will teach you how to park that good"

DDict - Desktop Proxy for Online Dictionaries

2006-01-19T15:46:00.000-08:00

For a long time I was using a nice desktop interface of the dict.org service for KDE. But it was of no use when trying to come up with a translation from Polish. While there is a lot of good online dictionaries - none of them had an similar proxy for the linux desktop.
I have decided to take appropriate action - one night of hacking and I have developed DDict - Desktop Proxy for Online Dictionaries [http://sf.net/projects/ddict/]. This small tool written in Java/JDIC resides in System Tray allowing user quick access to a number of predefined (and easily extendable) list of online dictionaries.

Check out the ready to use packages at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=157520 and screenshots at http://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?group_id=157520

History of MarcOnt

2006-01-16T08:32:00.000-08:00

I have just realized that although so much has been said about MarcOnt in many places, I have never said the full story of that initiative. It all stared when I came for the interview to Galway in April,2004. I meet a lot of interesting people from DERI - current colleagues. Among them I meet Anna. We have briefly discussed what we are working on. She told me that since the ontology has to be build based on the community agreement - she is building a portal where a community/e-society can collaborate on the ontology. At that time I had problems with librarians accepting the idea of the Semantic Web. The only remedy was to create an ontology based on their favorite MARC21. But how to do that? Then it struck me - we can get librarians to create the ontology for themselves. But we need a smart process, with negotiations, collaboration and versioning. And this is where MarcOnt Initiative and MarcOnt Portal were born. It was somewhere over Germany on my way home from Galway (through Frankfurt) ...

Rainbow

2006-01-11T07:13:00.000-08:00

Rainbow
Originally uploaded by skruk.

No wonder Ireland is such a rich country: Rain -> Rainbows -> Irish Pixies + Pots of Gold -> Lots of Gold !

A hole

2006-01-11T07:01:00.000-08:00

A hole
Originally uploaded by skruk.

I am just curious - is this the way to cover the hole or to warn pedestrians about the danger?

Do not fly to/from Bydgoszcz

2006-01-06T12:21:00.000-08:00

When 3 weeks ago I was land in Gdansk instead of my destination - Bydgoszcz - it was kind of funny, since I got a coach that dropped me out in my hometown on the way from Gdansk to Bydgoszcz. The weather was horrible - first snow - and we appreciated the care Ryanair took to handle the problem of its passengers.
But what happend today was a completely weird story - the weather was good - not perfect - but you could see clearly for miles - so we were sure there were going to be no problems. How wrong were we ... the plane decided not to land in Bydgoszcz due to fog (what FOG?!) - and fly to Poznan instead - leaving all of us on the ground - helpless :(
What came next was like a horror - of course we were offered to get our money back but when you book your tickets early - the price then and for the nearest flight was like 1:10 - nice solution. Or to re-schedule our flights - problem was - 200 people waiting in an endless queue - hearing that the next available flight was no sooner that in a weeks time.
In addition if you were to have a flights connection to e.g. Shannon or Derry like some of us did - you were in even more trouble - no help at all - no money return for the second flight - unless your private insurance covers that (mine claims it does - I hope so).
To cut down the number of passengers waiting to be servered - we were given small pieces of paper with Ryanair web site (wonder how I book my tickets without it) and a phone number to Dublin where we were supposed to be served.
So I decided to check the flights myself immediately - there was Orange.HotSpot and since I am used to using airport WIFI services - I was trying to connect to that one. To my surprise Orange do not provide online service to buy the access time - the only way to do that is to buy one of those scratch cards- but ... surprise ... you will not find one on THAT airport :(
Finally I got home - and find two possible connections I could you next week - reasonable expensive - but as you could suspect - not provided by Ryanair. I decided to do the last thing I could - call the phone number we were given and arrange reimbursement - to my surprise the line was dead with information stating that I should call between 9-14 and 15-19 Mon-Fri - since it is already Friday, 9pm - there is nothing I can do about that, Damn!!
Take my advice - DO NOT FLY TO/FROM Bydgoszcz

Linux Fedora Core 4, Headset Jabra BT500, Bluetooth and Sound

2005-12-28T04:39:00.000-08:00

I finally got it - a bluetooth headset - cool thing...
But it is very hard to convice a geek like me that this is going to work only with my Nokia phone and/or M$ operating system installed on my IBM box. So I took a quest for finding an answer how to make it working with my Fedora.

Making sure everything is installed

To make it working - one will need to:

install bluetooth (BlueZ stack) support: # yum install bluez-libs bluez-pin bluez-utils bluez-hcidump bluez-utils-cups
install ALSA with devel packages: # yum install alsa-tools alsa-lib alsa-utils alsa-lib-devel
install automake-1.7
make sure you are running kernel 2.6.x (kernel.org)

Install BTSCO (bluetooth sound for ALSA)

Check btsco out from cvs:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sf.net:/cvsroot/bluetooth-alsa login
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sf.net:/cvsroot/bluetooth-alsa co btsco

Compile btsco:

./bootstrap
./configure
make
make install
make maintainer-clean

For SCO (two-way voice quality audio) you need a kernel with the emu10k1 driver selected (this is one of the drivers that forces the inclusion of the implementation of "snd_hwdep_new"). Build the kernel module:

cd kernel
make
make install
depmod -e
make clean

Connect and start using your headset

Turn on your bluetooth dongle, activate paring on your headset and scan for the head set

hcitool scan

Next try to connect your box to headset (change 00:00:00:00:00:00 to MAC of your headset):

hcitool cc 00:00:00:00:00:00

If you have any problems with paring check your /etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf, it should look like that:

options {
   autoinit yes;
   security user;
   pairing multi;
   # PIN helper
   pin_helper /etc/bluetooth/feed-pin.sh;
   # D-Bus PIN helper
   #dbus_pin_helper;
}

device {
   name "%h-%d";
   # Local device class
   class 0x120104;
   # Inquiry and Page scan
   iscan enable; pscan enable;
   lm accept;
   lp rswitch,hold,sniff,park;
   # Authentication and Encryption (Security Mode 3)
   auth enable;
   encrypt enable;
}

... and the /etc/bluetooth/feed-pin.sh should look like that (with 700 access rights; remember to change 0000 to your headset PIN number):

#!/bin/sh
echo "PIN:0000"

When you box is paired with headset you can proceed with the rest of sound set up commands. insert the module (or better, set up the alsa configuration to load it)

 modprobe snd_bt_sco

stop the esound controller if it's running via

 esdctl stop

run (in case of problems you might change 0x0060 to 0x0040)

        hciconfig hci0 voice 0x0060

run the handler (let it keep running if you run in the foreground)

 btsco -v 00:00:00:00:00:00

... and that's it - easy, isn't it? You may want to restart kmix if you are using one, and look for the BT Headset audio device. At Skype - look for a new DSP device - probably /dev/dsp1 or /dev/dsp2.

Alternatively you can take a shortcut but using Skype hijacking solution by Andreas Beck.

Finally a couple of web pages worth visiting:
[1] http://bluetooth-alsa.sourceforge.net/
[2] http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~jp/snd-bt-sco/
[3] http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-75978.html
[4] http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/bluetooth-guide.xml
[5] http://www.thelinuxpimp.com/main/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=668
[6] http://www.gurulabs.com/goodies/Using_Linux_and_Bluetooth_DUN_with_the_Treo650.php
[7] http://www.greatestjournal.com/users/amiatrome/22941.html

Needle - Digital Libraries go Semantics

2005-12-06T10:57:00.000-08:00

Needle - Digital Libraries go Semantics
Originally uploaded by skruk.

The day has finally come, long anticipated Needle - SemaNtic BackbonE for European Digitial LibrariEs starts up.

Two European semantic digital library projects JeromeDL and BRICKS gather together with joint initiative that aims to promote semantic web technologies in librarian network.

In the first step, we would like to gather community [see blog and wiki] that would aggregate ideas and scenarios for Needle, and disseminate the semantic digital libraries research back to librarian community.

Following the community building we will come with concrete actions for building European-wide open, semantic backbone for digital libraries.

Is this winter or spring?

2005-11-25T05:09:00.000-08:00

Is this winter or spring?
Originally uploaded by skruk.

This is a kind of question one can ask after seeing the snow melting on the cars and then this perfect view [compare to Frozen Mist].

It really looks like spring to me - but do not be cheated - it is an Irish winter :)

First snow

2005-11-25T05:07:00.000-08:00

First snow
Originally uploaded by skruk.

This is what I did not anticipated for sure, but it happend - a true snow in Ireland. First this winter.

Although it got almost completely melted by the time I was walking to work - I managed to capture a life proof.

See for yourself.

Frozen mist

2005-11-21T02:40:00.000-08:00

Frozen mist
Originally uploaded by skruk.

As the whole Galway wake up frozen today - even the mist came along

Frozen spider web

2005-11-21T02:39:00.000-08:00

Frozen spider web
Originally uploaded by skruk.

Poor spider - I hope it's got warm socks at least

Clamping Vehicle

2005-11-21T02:36:00.000-08:00

Clamping Vehicle
Originally uploaded by skruk.

I had to shot this photo - the best contradiction I have seen so far: "Clamping Vehicle" == "Keeping Galway Moving" :D

Not a snow but it will do

2005-11-21T01:23:00.002-08:00

Not a snow but it will do
Originally uploaded by skruk.

Well, there you have it. In Poland - a lot of snow. In Ireland - the best it can be achieved in the mild country - a heavy frost.

Not a snow but it will do
Originally uploaded by skruk.

Is there going to be a white X-mass in Ireland? I hope it will be in Poland at least :)

Not a snow but it will do
Originally uploaded by skruk.

Some people aim to high

2005-11-17T12:16:00.000-08:00

I have just learned that one of the most controversial Polish priests Father Rydzyk aims to be nominated with the highest Polish national award: "The Order of the White Eagle".
This is the most prominent award given only to people that did a lot good to our country.
On contrary this priest is (was - before latest elections) not only in conflict with the government but also with the Polish Catholic Church.

My friends say I am happy to be abroad and they would like to leave as well. Are we (Poland) going in to the right direction? I doubt.

For more information check: http://wiadomosci.onet.pl/1197431,11,item.html

typhoid libby & the virusmobile

2005-11-09T04:59:00.000-08:00

typhoid libby & the virusmobile
Originally uploaded by danbri.

Now you have it - you can get a virus on your phone. Luckily our cars do not have OSes with bluetooth installed [otherwise we would need to stop the engine, go out of the car, come back - several times on the way] :)

Semantic Web Workshop

2005-11-06T11:24:00.002-08:00

Semantic Web Workshop
Originally uploaded by skruk.

The day was great. A lot of cool stuff presented. And although the Semantic Web Workshop is over - the challenge has just begun.

Semantic Web Workshop
Originally uploaded by skruk.

Presentation on FOAFRealm [http://www.foafrealm.org/] with its Social Semantic Collaborative Filtering idea has risen some important questions on the idea of similarity of interests in the social network.

Semantic Web Workshop
Originally uploaded by skruk.

Faith suggested contributing to FOAFRealm to support a new ideas of ACL for the community she is working with.

Looking forward for the main ISWC 2005 conference presentations...

Vienna by Night

2005-11-05T03:35:00.000-08:00

Vienna by Night
Originally uploaded by skruk.

It is the second time I've been to Vienna. And the second time - I was to busy to see this marvelous city. Well, not quite, I have seen it by night. Will do for now. Next time I have to stay longer and see it, definitely.

eContentPlus 2nd F2F meeting in Vienna

2005-11-02T10:43:00.000-08:00

It was intended to be the first one, but since there where no new faces then during the initial meeting a month ago - there you have it - a second F2F meeting. After 9 hours of banging our heads against the wall we have came up with the first version of the pre proposal (finally).

Tomorrow, meeting day two ... I hope it will finish sooner - I have already seen Vienna by night :)

Anyway, Bernhard and Kerstin did a really good job.

To start with ...

2005-11-01T02:51:00.000-08:00

Yap, the day has come I have set up my own blog... but the world will need to live for the next couple of days still without much of my blogging - but I promisse to come back with interesting texts asap.

Raven's blog

The blog has been moved

Next week: my PhD defense (Semantic Digital Libraries )

new knowledge management on Web 3.0 services

what I have been up to lately ?

Packages ready for shipping

Google Translator cannot translate ?

Getting Things Done

Powerful again

Getting my teeth into HDR

Call me homophobic - but this is too much ...

On SVN, sf.net and MacOSX

Drag and Drop in MacOS X

Running fresh Leopard **might** solve your AirPort problems

On AJAX problems with prototype.js v1.5+ (till 1.6.0.2 at least)

Ordering cafe in Starbucks - be sure to spell your name right ...

Fat frog

In case you've spent too much time abroad...

Some problems with geography ?

Leopard supporting Java programming

Is Semantic Web Technology Taking the Wrong Turn?

Why do I prefer ntriples?

Snow in Ireland (First Day of Spring)

What is keeping me so busy recently? (2)

What is keeping me so busy recently? (1)

Why social Internet in Poland might not be a good idea ?

Evaluation of social and semantic technologies in digital libraries

Building thread-safe code with SimpleDateFormat

Who is using my system?

Deadly Sins (when using email)

Mac vs PC (by Umberto Eco)

Java6 for Leopard

Looking for a Researcher - Software Developer [JeromeDL project] (position closed)

Healing you windows after Skype-virus

Bank of Ireland - New Online Banking Services Coming Soon!

Is my accent not irish enough?

Bill is back

Ontology Development - Do we collaborate?

3 years in DERI (and counting ...)

What is the difference?

Unofficial Anthem of Polish Community in Ireland

Be careful when google-ing for LaTeX

How I love Tomcat (did I say love? I hate it)

Hello word from MacBook Pro

Irish Digital Libraries Summit

JeromeDL and Semantic Museums

Description Logic vs Object Oriented Programming for the Semantic Web

"Libraries begin to realize that they are not alone"

Car Insurance in Ireland ... yes, but ...

Recreational computing

Beware of CVS tags

Geotagging made easy

Calling all del.icio.us people

Not so wet in Galway, afterall

KDE and Beagle

DMoz vs RDF Repository (Sesame)

Carnival 2006

DigiMe - personalization vs privacy

Music for free (almost)

Polish community in Galway

How to advertise a school of motoring

DDict - Desktop Proxy for Online Dictionaries

History of MarcOnt

Rainbow

A hole

Do not fly to/from Bydgoszcz

Linux Fedora Core 4, Headset Jabra BT500, Bluetooth and Sound

Needle - Digital Libraries go Semantics

Is this winter or spring?

First snow

Frozen mist

Frozen spider web

Clamping Vehicle

Not a snow but it will do

Some people aim to high

typhoid libby & the virusmobile

Semantic Web Workshop

Vienna by Night

eContentPlus 2nd F2F meeting in Vienna

To start with ...

Running fresh Leopard might solve your AirPort problems