My recent thumb injury is healing but the nerve damage is causing a lot of problems. Imagine constant, intense pins and needles in your thumb, not being sure if you’re holding something with adequate grip pressure and lastly severe shooting pains on the slightest touch. Yes I know, boo hoo, wah wah.

Prentice Hall was nice enough to send me a bunch of books (of my choosing) free gratis in the hope I’d read them and provide some feedback. I barely have time for food let alone reading but one book that’s been cracked a few times is "SOA Principles of Service Design". [LINK] I’ve even come up with a horrible joke on the topic…

"Did you hear the one about the anti-social WSDL?….He was a real pain in the SaaS".
Ugh, *groan* that’s almost too bad to write down.

So I’m working through this book and will publish some thoughts when I’ve gotten through enough of it to do it justice.

I’ve come up with a number of projects ideas which I’m hoping to develop on a common framework. I need an outlet more to rid my mind of this stuff than to achieve anything particular. Not sure if that statement objectively makes sense but hopefully if folks know me they’ll understand what I mean.

I have (finally) gotten access to Nova’s Twine Beta [LINK], I have high expectations and will post more on my experiences in the coming weeks.

Lastly, I have a pit in my stomach this morning as Karen is undergoing another round of chemo today. I cannot convey in words how hard this is for all involved (Karen, our kids and if I’m feeling selfish, myself also).

http://www.francisshanahan.com/sixdegrees/rdf.aspx?&startTag=Australia&endTag=Dell

So little did I know that IRELAND was at the bleeding edge of this next chapter of the internet and is in fact leading the charge in research.

Nova’s recent post describes his visit to DERI in Galway, Ireland [LINK] and all the interesting things he saw there. Some note-worthy items are…

"Semantic Reality. …perhaps one of the most eye-opening demos I saw at DERI, is the Semantic Reality project. They are using semantics to integrate sensors with the real world. They are creating an infrastructure that can scale to handle trillions of sensors eventually. Among other things I saw, you can ask things like "where are my keys?" and the system will search a network of sensors and show you a live image of your keys on the desk where you left them, and even give you a map showing the exact location. The service can also email you or phone you when things happen in the real world that you care about — for example, if someone opens the door to your office, or a file cabinet, or your car, etc. Very groundbreaking research that could seed an entire new industry."

"Semantic Web Services.  One of the big opportunities for the Semantic Web that is often overlooked by the media is Web services. Semantics can be used to describe Web services so they can find one another and connect, and even to compose and orchestrate transactions and other solutions across networks of Web services, using rules and reasoning capabilities. Think of this as dynamic semantic middleware, with reasoning built-in."

Seems Ireland is still living up to its history as "The island of Saints and Scholars" (although there’s less evidence for the former).

This is an interesting topic and not one I’m sure I can fully comment on in one sitting. The first task in defining such a scale would be to define "intelligence". Is recognizing a pattern a form of intelligence? Say a 2D pattern vs 3D? What about 4D? E.g. A pattern of events over time?  Is learning from prior behaviour? Is it the ability to sustain one’s own life? Or is it something else?

In thinking about this I become aware of the limited view or dimensions I as a human have on such a topic. For example, if I asked a dolphin (in dolphin language of course) to define intelligence, they might say it’s the ability to communicate through motion in the water, or the ability to form a relationship with a human.

But an ANT for example has no concept of humans, or any other species to my knowledge. Do ants communicate (in a combative form) with bees for example? Cross-species communication seems to be a higher form of intelligence. Maybe a bees’ definition of intelligence is being able to follow orders given out by the queen?

Like time, is intelligence relative to a particular viewpoint? For example, do ants see intelligence as the ability to participate as part of the collective? if so, this would call into question OUR ability as humans to define what intelligence is.

Is intelligence driven by goals? Or productivity? The ability to achieve what you want? Or is it a side-effect? Acting "intelligently" often results in being more productive or in a faster-track to achieving an objective. E.g. a monkey can eat tasty ants with less effort by utilizing a tool than by digging out the ant-hill. So it intelligence driven by efficiency? Or laziness? Or effective use of resources?

What about higher-order beings? Say beings that transcend 4 dimensions and exist in say 5? what would they consider intelligent? The ability to optimize time spent in a particular version of the universe? 

Or tangential measures of intelligence, for example, if creation of tools is a measure, (manipulating the physical surroundings) would an act of betrayal (manipulating other beings) be an even higher form?

Intelligence itself first needs to be defined somehow before it can be measured but this itself may prove the most challenging task of all.

On top of this they’ve layered Natural Language Processing so you don’t need to learn complex syntax to ask a question.

If the answer is unknown, the system has a sort of Wiki contribution mechanism by which you can contribute new facts to the repository.

Over time facts are corroborated through using the system and the results get better and better.  Not only that, through usage, new facts can be inferred and themselves corroborated. Thus over time the sophistication of the queries that the system can answer grows.

Twine aims to do something similar with personal data but I think for me, True Knowledge is far more compelling. I had made Six Degrees [LINK] a while back with this type of thing in mind but the problem space was just too large for me.

Here’s a Webcast I snagged from their website.  I wonder what Jeff Jonas [LINK] thinks of this?

Twine aims to be the first main-stream application built on the Semantic Web whereby data is not just indexed and cataloged but converted into machine-readable form. The result is a graph of data on which inferences can be made and relationships built. Ultimately the goal is to better understand the data and draw new conclusions from it that otherwise would go unnoticed. The whole surpasses the sum of the parts so to speak.

This sort of intersects with one of my other interests, namely the Identity Metasystem. I see a number of new uses for such semantics when applied to social networks. For example, Facebook is sitting on a huge graph of FOAF (friend of a friend) data and I will not be surprised if this is somehow leveraged in a Semantic Web manner sometime in the near future.  Claims based on vouching for one an other and human trust for example.

Through RDF, FOAF, etc a Semantic Agent could build a digital reputation of a principal. I wonder will we ever see INDIVIDUALS with digital reputation acting as Security Token Services, essentially vouching for others just as the mob does today?

http://www.francisshanahan.com/sixdegrees

SixDegrees is a Semantic Web experiment using Ajax, RSS and RDF combined creatively with the Content Analysis services of ClearForest. It’s a mashup but not in the typical sense.

SixDegrees uses the notion that there are Six Degrees that separate everyone in the world. My idea takes this to a new level by trying to figure out the degrees of separation in terms of everything rather than everyone.

Here’s how it works.

A repository of RSS feeds is stored in my database. These feeds are polled periodically for new content. The latest content is then parsed by ClearForest which classifies the content and returns a set of relevant tags classified by type e.g. people, company, etc.  These are then stored along with sundry other meta data. For example, a given story on Windows Vista might return the tags "Seattle", "Microsoft" and "Bill Gates" depending on the content.

Hundreds of blog entries are processed in this manner and over time a repository is established. This is where the SixDegrees service comes in.

The front end website allows you to choose a start and end entity. These are essentially Tags queried from the database. The web service will then determine if these entities are linked in any way, through common references within the database.

For example, if the term Bill Gates appears in story AAA and also in story BBB, then those two stories can be thought of as linked to one another through the common reference of Bill. If these stories then contain other key terms for example Windows and Steve Ballmer, then a link between Steve Ballmer and Windows would be established through Bill Gates. The more references, the more confident we can be that semantically this link makes sense.

As you can see the data created forms a non-directed graph. My service processes this graph efficiently to be able to return results in a real-time fashion. I also use Ajax techniques to improve the user interface.

All data is user generated, essentially from blogs. By processing data from the blogosphere in this manner and combining it with the services of ClearForest the semantics of the content can be determined. This is essentially a very small step towards the semantic web.

Once a connection has been found, the resulting link is documented in RDF. The RDF essentially describes the triples within the link. Developers will be glad to learn I have validated the RDF using the w3C RDF validator located here [LINK].

The RDF validator can generate a graph representing your RDF triplets. As an example of the output and proof that this works, checkout the graph generated between the country "Australia" and the company "Dell". [LINK]

Lastly, should you so desire, I have exposed the capabilities of the service through SOAP and REST interfaces so that developers can build on top of the data collected.  I need to document these better but for now here’s a few sample queries:

http://www.francisshanahan.com/sixdegrees/rdf.aspx?&startTag=Australia&endTag=Dell
http://www.francisshanahan.com/sixdegrees/rest.aspx?api=getTagsByType&tagType=Product
http://www.francisshanahan.com/sixdegrees/rest.aspx?api=findConnection&startTag=Microsoft&endTag=Amazon
http://www.francisshanahan.com/sixdegrees/rest.aspx?api=getStoriesByTag&startTag=United States
http://www.francisshanahan.com/sixdegrees/rest.aspx?api=getStoryById&storyId=632

and of course the connection WSDL is located here [LINK]

This is an experiment and I have already thought of a number of ways to improve it, time permitting. I hope you find this tool as interesting as I do.