. Plazes has removed the “places” Atom feed and just puts a “activities” feed online. This is not what I expect to get provided by a location service. Thanks for all, need to have a look at fireeagle…

So find me at: http://identi.ca/goern

A moat server is a piece of software accessible via HTTP and delivery HTML, RDF/XML or JSON representations of the meaning of a tag. moat server by Alexandre Passant drives my installation. It leverages PHP, MySQL and ARC2 do to its job. One feature I do miss is something like a scutter to gather data I may have published earlier.

Update xmlgrddl could be a good thing to extract tags from every post… need to have a look

• Flickr.com – is good for sharing photos, but their time has come. Most important the censorship issues mark the point to flag flickr as “need to migrate away from it”. By now it is still in my accounts file
• del.icio.us – good and thats it… keep it
• jaiku.com – is aggregating other services and trying to give a timeline of my online footsteps. This is a good services from the point of “declarative living”, but: delete account, because:
• noserub has been implemented at #B4mad.Net this is good, as I take back control of my data back from jaiku
• mugshut.org is kind of the same thing, never really used it…
• I will use twitter for this microblogging thingy…
• all this SIP and VoIP accounts need to be deleted: mobile phones are not replacable
• plazes.com is kind of good as a location/presence services. I need to figure out how to do that with geonames.org and noserub by myself!
• openbc.com or xing… what is the value add of this service?
• upcoming.com and calendar.google.com – upcoming supports venues and is more like “calendar sharing” google calendar is … do I really need this?

I will try to consolidate even more and provide one web view of all that and one xmpp infrastructure to deliver updates to interessted agents/persons.

So I will check back in half a year, anyway: thanks for the service and for investments made!

mugshot provides a wiki to discuss ideas for the mugshot API. Time to give them ideas…

Subscribe to my brain was brought up by Leigh Dodds in June 2005. His goal was to consolidate different (subscribable) source of information a user published. The key he used to join this sources was the user’ mailbox IRI sha1 checksum. So he sent on and did it the semantic web way and provided a webservice to fulfill the task and provide a OPML file that may be imported directly into a aggregator.

Red Hat”s solution is to provide a single web pages to replace the aggregator and no webservice but user configurable source to aggregate from. This is nice, from a web design point of view. But it is basically redundant. For a semantic web guy, most of the information mugshot requests (by forcing me to fill in my user profile) is available on the web and maintained anyways:

• Accounts at flickr, del.icio.us et al – I have this written down in a RDF/XML FOAF file, as may others do on the web. Advantage: that foaf file is gnupg signed by me, it is verifiable if that account do really belong to me. Any user may open up a account at mugshot or flickr and predent his is me. The only authorative source for that information is my FOAF file.
• Personal Information – like my blog url, my picture and the user name and passowrd I”d like to use is requested by mugshot. Again, most of this information is stored in my FOAF files. Username and authentication may be provided by OpenID and friends.

Next interessting architectural decission of mugshot was to poll data by retrieving it from the sources I manually configured in my user profile. Feels like stone age now we have Ping the Semantic Web.com (PTSW). mugshot aggregates feed, so doing it the right way(tm) would be to monitor PTSW for updates of this feeds. If they are not pinging PTSW make them ping, that would help a bigger community than just the mughot guys and girls.

And finaly, it’s just a me too project, I did it in 2006: haha :) There is no need to let others consolidate a single page about myself.

PS: and why the hack is my email address spammer readable on mugshot??

It is a browser extension (for Fireofx only by now) which inspects web pages for links to Semantic Web metadata and informs the user about their presence by showing an icon in browser’s status bar.

Originally developed to detect presence of SIOC metadata it has been extended to cover other types of data. Currently it supports SIOC, FOAF and DOAP metadata.
The current version of Semantic Radar also pings the Semantic Web Ping Service when metadata is detected. This allows a community based discovery of the semantic web data and a notification of a central ping service.

UPDATE: Fred also has a post on Semantic Radar…

So how may a export of the URL having pinged in the last 2 hours look like?

<rdf:RDF xmlns="http://purl.org/net/scutter/"
 xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
 xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
 xmlns:scutter="http://purl.org/net/scutter/">

 <rdf:Description>
  <rdf:type rdf:resource="http://purl.org/net/scutter/Representation"/>
  <localCopy>cache/b4mad.net/datenbrei/index.php_sioc_type=post_sioc_id=300</localCopy>
  <source rdf:resource="http://b4mad.net/datenbrei/index.php?sioc_type=post&sioc_id=300"/>
  <origin rdf:resource="http://ping.semanticweb.org/ping/http://b4mad.net/datenbrei/index.php?sioc_type=site"/>
  <fetch rdf:parseType="Resource">
   <rdf:type rdf:resource="http://purl.org/net/scutter/Fetch"/>
   <dc:date rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#dateTime">2006-08-06T14:35:11+0200</dc:date>
   <contentType>application/rdf+xml</contentType>
   <rawTripleCount>68</rawTripleCount>
   <status>200</status>
  </fetch>
  <fetch rdf:parseType="Resource">
   <rdf:type rdf:resource="http://purl.org/net/scutter/Fetch"/>
   <dc:date rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#dateTime">2006-08-05T19:23:16+0200</dc:date>
   <contentType>application/rdf+xml</contentType>
   <rawTripleCount>68</rawTripleCount>
   <status>200</status>
  </fetch>
 </rdf:Description>
</rdf:RDF>

And what does it all mean? The export above says:

http://b4mad.net/datenbrei/index.php?sioc_type=post&sioc_id=300 has been fetched two times: on 2006-08-06 and on 2006-08-05 always giving 68 statements and HTTP return code 200. A local copy has been stored to cache/b4mad.net/datenbrei/index.php_sioc_type=post_sioc_id=300. The crawler knew about the ping because of its origin.

Another valuable extension would be a RSS feed having all fetched items in it.

Currently enabled datasets:

• apassant.net – Alex’s Joseki
• sparql.captsolo.net – CaptSolo’s Joseki
• b4eg.mine.nu – B:\datenbrei development Joseki

Try this!

The GUI is pretty simple, you may get or set the current position of a user. The username (and if available) the passowrd may be set in the Preferences dialog. It you get the current position of a user the landmark combobox is updated with the landmarks of the user. That’s it, not much but a start.

next step: find foaf file location of user and display his menow status :)

What about an application that shows hiking or biking tracks on a map, with media annotation like photos/videos or sound per waypoint or per a region. The trancks themself may be edited online using a web application or a standalone client which reads in GPS data from some device. After the user finished editing the track a publish subscribe mechanism (xmpp?) is used to notify the aggregator that a new track is available for a user, maybe only available for the user’s client application or in a server centric storage – depends on user’s decision. If the user uses the standalone (local) client he may configure a access control system based on some web of trust or some friend of friend of friend relation.

If some foreign web user selects a track of a user to be shown it is either stored on the server or only available via the user’s local client (which may be offline hmm.) Note: I want to put in SPARQL/XMPP here!! Maybe only the access control system resists on the user’s local client and is queried by the server based web application, with a default of “access” or “no access”.

This needs work, just blogged to get it writen down…

The .jar contains the full source but no documentation jet…

TODO: write documentation.

I will implement the web service using a JBoss Application Server and a variant of J2EE technologies. TODO: figure out the url of the web services…

UPDATE 20051024: First steps have been successful completed: There is a Servlet that returns all trustsRegarding statement for a given foaf:mbox_sha1sum.

The archive of witw.scpt also contains widw.py and supporting files, just set your username and password in witw.scpt and go…

Accessing WITW via HTTP, onlineAccount and depiction information from the Jena Model has been seperated into so called Data Access Objects (DAO) which return Value Objects (VO) containing the actual data.

XMPP communication starts retrieving information and sends back the content of Value Objects to (at the moment) a Multi User Chat (MUC) at #b4mad@conference.jabber.ccc.de

That’s it… source code for this can be found… happy for any feedback! Thanks to ldodds and AndyS for the support. The jabber id of the bot is gnu-0000-000-a@b4mad.info

UPDATE 2005-10-07: I you want to enable your FOAF File to contain the required information for the WITW service add something like

  <foaf:holdsAccount>
    <foaf:OnlineAccount>
     <rdf:type rdf:resource="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/OnlineAccount" />
     <foaf:accountServiceHomepage rdf:resource="http://norman.walsh.name/2005/02/witw/is/"/>
     <foaf:accountName>goern</foaf:accountName>
    </foaf:OnlineAccount>
   </foaf:holdsAccount>

to your foaf:Person .

The result of my investigation is a cool script for Safari and a Greasemonkey user script which integrates a google map right below any photo in flickr. Using this google map I may add geotags right to the photo displayed. For each tour I did I also add a tag like “phwn-2″ to each photo which was taken on that tour. A little bit of prosa for each tour is done over at #B7erge, each post will have the same tag as the photos…

Next things to do:

• get a rdf feed of flickr photos having a specific tag, incl. geo tags in this rdf feed
• mash up this rdf feed with #B4maps

UPDATE:
task number one is done. I have implemented a web service that delivers a RSS 1.0 feed of the photos taken, tagged and geotagged by me and a friend. try it! first access may take a while as local flickr caches get updated…

related images:

In the past two weeks I hacked a little Google Maps application called #B4maps which shows some tracks driven lately. Tracks and the Images used to annotate some waypoints are stored in some semi-good XML file…

Today I also finished some XML/XSLT stuff to represent the tracks in an general semantic way using the Locative Packets approach. With some help from #swig I figured out how to preserve the order of the Packets… a bunch of packets is worth nothing without an ordering!

So what we got? An application to show and edit tracks on a map: #B4maps (see its features), a webservice to represent this tracks using RDF, a nice query (which help from Dave Beckett) to figure out the waypoints:


PREFIX geo: <http ://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#>
PREFIX rdf: <http ://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
PREFIX dc: <http ://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/>
PREFIX l: <http ://locative.net/2004/packet/loc#>
PREFIX m: <http ://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/>

SELECT ?lat, ?long, ?img
WHERE { ?seq a rdf:Seq .
?seq ?prop ?x ?x geo:lat ?lat . ?x geo:long ?long . OPTIONAL { ?x l:media ?img } }
ORDER by ?prop


And a nice reuse of an existing web service to query rdf data.

My next step will be to move the #B4maps internal storage away from my legacy xml flat file stuff to a RDF backed storage and to experiment with the Redland PHP binding on my webhosters server.

1. start a gateway between WITW webservice and a jabber pubsub node, this will look for updates on the jabber node and update WITW according to the informations received.
2. use a python program to update a jabber pubsub node, to let others know that my geo positions has been updated
3. and finaly take a look at where I am

Next Step: build a GUI to set the geo position, maybe using Python and wxPython

The source for the new releae is here (I love here-links).

Next Step: a Gnome based desktop applet that subscribes to the XMPP node and displays data received from it.

UPDATE: there are some things going on, lost boy hacked up some WITW to GoogleMap service [via: Phil Wilson].

getUserAsHTML() – will return the given user’s current location

getUserAsMeNow() – will return the given user’s current location using the MeNow RDF Schema

getLandmarksAsXML() – get all landmarks of the given user

setUserLongLat(lon, lat) – set the given user’s long and lat

Please find the .tar.bz2 and test it…

1. Norman has chosen the wrong name for the service and it must be named “Where in the World was”, or
2. some enhancements must be introduced.

I have chosen the second option for now and would like to introduce “Where in the World”/goes/goern. This means I would like to see a webservice which will return information about where I will be in some amount of time. The interface should be something like .../witw/goes/goern?in=2 and the unit for in would be days.

Some XML as proposed by Norman is good and in addition to that a XSLT style sheet to output (RDF)iCal would be great.