The knowledge engineering community has moved on since the expert systems of the 1980s, and techniques for handling uncertainty and inconsistency are now commonplace. The SW draws heavily on this experience.
The Semantic Web as envisaged by the W3C is based on the RDF and OWL languages; the latter has a Description Logic as its underlying formalism, which is a subset of first order predicate logic with computationally attractive properties that lead to tractable decision procedures for satisfiability.
Distribution is a separate issue. While assembling the parts of a distributed ontology may be expensive, it doesn't affect the algorithmic complexity of determining whether a set of axioms contain a contradiction.
Ditto the University of Southampton. I've been working on a SW-related project, AKT, for the last four years; as part of this work, I was a member of the W3C working group (along with Jeff Heflin) that wrote the OWL Web Ontology Language.
Other places to look at are Jim Hendler's MIND group in Maryland, which has been doing some sterling work over the last few years (as an aside, Jeff used to be Jim's PhD student).
There has been a considerable amount of work on ontology mapping within the knowledge engineering community, but the evolutionary aspects of ontologies have been largely overlooked. Ontology mapping is a harder problem than graph isomorphism, since classes from different ontologies may have extensions that overlap rather than cover each other. It's a difficult problem, certainly, but it's worth noting that game theory isn't applied here.
Game theory tends to appear more within the multi-agent systems community than the semantic web community; they've been looking at the social models for trust for some years now.
As a discipline within artificial intelligence, (multi-)agent systems are about fifteen years old, although they have roots in the distributed artificial intelligence discipline from some years beforehand.
A seminal early paper that gives an overview of the discipline is M. Wooldridge and N.R. Jennings Intelligent Agent: Theory and Practice, The Knowledge Engineering Review, 10 (2), pp. 115-152, 1995. (postscript). Other good sources are the proceedings of the main conference series on agents, AAMAS.
In fact, most library tags have very early generation RFID tags in them. basically there's only one switch inside them (one = not checked, zero = checked out).
Very true. The technology you describe (often known informally in the UK as tattletape) has been in widespread use for at least the last decade and a half, and is functionally equivalent to anti-theft devices in most shops. A growing number of libraries in the UK are already moving to encoding the accession number of a book on RFID-like tags, primarily for stock control.
# Photocopy the pages requires
Isn't that already illegal? A violation of copyright? DMCA or some such?
In the UK, the Copyright Licensing Agency makes provisions for limited copying of certain types of copyrighted material by business, government and education (the standard higher education license is available online as an example).
I would be extremely surprised if there were not similar provisions in the USA.
Many academic libraries in the UK already use RFID or similar for stock control. Typically, they encode the accession number of the object (a unique serial number which is used as the primary key in the library catalogue). ISBNs are not used for several reasons. For example, a library may hold more than one copy of a object (ISBNs are not unique identifiers for the physical volumes). Similarly, many books do not have ISBNs (particularly older volumes, although there are new publications in the grey literature which also do not).
The issue is not the use of RFID tags, but rather who reads the reader records in the library system (which record who has borrowed which book), and whether historical data is kept indefinitely or discarded when no longer useful.
[...] apart from the lamentable Johnny Mnemonic and the little known New Rose Hotel (both based on Gibson short stories rather than novels) there have been no major films based on [Gibson's] work
There is a third, even less known adaptation of Gibson's work, namely Tomorrow Calling. This short (11m) film is a fairly faithful adaptation of the Gernsback Continuum, if you ignore the change of location from California to the British northwest (plenty of Art Deco buildings in Blackpool), that was made for Channel 4 (UK broadcaster) and featured a post-pop career Toyah Wilcox. Well worth watching if you can track it down.
We also use mailscanner here at Southampton (unsurprisingly, given that it's developed locally). It's a capable piece of software, and has a sizeable number of installations worldwide (the maintainer's current conservative underestimate is 7000-8000 sites with a throughput of around 3.5 billion messages per day).
It is immoral to ask the public to fund research with their tax dollars and then ask them to pay for it again if they want to see its results, via subscription costs.
This is more of a problem at an institutional level. My partner is an academic subject librarian (for chemical engineering and material science), and tells me that it is common for universities to pay for research (through academic salaries) that produces publications which they then cannot read because they cannot afford to subscribe to the journals in which the articles appear.
This is nothing new, however. Journal subscription fees have risen above inflation for several decades, with the result that only the larger institutions can afford to subscribe to all the journals that they need for research. Consortium buying schemes (such as the CHEST agreement in UK HE) help the situation to an extent, but the fact remains that many smaller institutions are suffering purely because they cannot afford to access the scholarly literature.
See also Stevan's page at Southampton (his current home - the Department of Electronic and Computer Science) and some of the projects which he is involved with, particularly the ePrints project, which is building an infrastructure for facilitating the self-archiving of academic papers in the way that Stevan suggests.
This is also called a scale-free network, and the research on it, by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (currently at Notre Dame U) is in this week's New Scientist.
There are a quite few papers on this topic (behaviour of disordered networks) by Barabasi and one of his research students, Reka Albert (now probably graduated), most of which are available from his research group's website or from arXiv.
Perhaps more interesting, it seems the experimental parameters are somewhat different in the case of Eden. I figure they must already be using external air to support all of the visitors.
The story summary is misleading on this matter. The Eden Project is not a sealed environment like Biosphere, but rather a big greenhouse (as a previous poster wrote).
Still impressive, though.
Re:Referrer tells you who's following the links
on
Emergence
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· Score: 1
HTML links which use the A element are unidirectional primarily because they are embedded in the source document (the webpage at the start of the link).
There is a branch of hypermedia research which deals with what is known as Open Hypermedia, in which links are objects which exist independantly of the documents that they link. This allows more complex link types, such as bidirectional or n-ary (many-ended) links, and promotes a degree of flexibility in the hypertext because links may be applied to many different documents (simplifying link maintenance).
Because the links are stored separately from documents, the resolution of links can be performed both forwards (when following a link in the normal manner) and backwards (when asking "what links point at this page?") with equal ease. The relative paucity of the Web with respect to this type of links has historically been an issue in the hypermedia research community, and it is due to this that the W3C has taken steps to rectify the situation by introducing the XLink recommendation, which allows the creation of open hypertext links.
I should have made this more clear in my original post. The company from whom I rent a 35mm print to show to my film club have agreed with the film distributor (Warner, for example) the right to distribute that print for non-theatric hire. They may own that particular print, but they have also paid a premium in order to have those distribution rights (and they pass this cost onto me in the rental charge). In return for my payment, I get the right to exhibit that film in certain conditions (closed screening to the membership of an organisation).
This is no different to a video rental outfit; they own the physical media, and through purchasing a premium priced copy of the media they also have bought the right to distribute that particular copy for home exhibition.
That is Warner's complaint - that the rental outfits are not paying for the distribution rights on the DVDs (as opposed to the exhibition rights that you would get if you bought a retail copy).
In the UK at present, it is not uncommon for film distributors to charge different amounts for the non-theatric hire (film clubs, schools, oil rigs etc) of a film based on the physical medium. A 35mm print of a film might cost £250 for a single screening, compared to £80-100 for a 16mm print and £50-80 for a VHS or DVD print. They're all still films, but the different media command different prices. Interestingly, a rental agreement for a film in one format does not permit exhibition in a different format - often different formats are distributed by different companies.
However, that is not the issue behind this Australian case, where (cheaper) retail prints are being used in place of (more expensive) rental prints. The price does not reflect the 'value' of the physical print or of the film therein (although for VHS, the recording quality of rental prints is generally better than that of retail), but rather the rights which are permitted to the owner of the print.
IMHO, Warner is entirely justified in attempting to stamp out unlicensed rental of retail prints, just as it already makes non-theatric hire licenses available at a lower price than that of theatric hire licenses (as would be required of a cinema or other commercial exhibitor). I say again, the cost of a print (for sale or rent) depends on the exhibition rights which are given to its owner.
Oram's speech is interesting, but offers little that is new.
His assertion that academia was uninterested in p2p technologies because university administrations acted (responsibly, imho) to prevent the use of tools designed for the illegal redistribution of copyright works is a little disingenuous. Certain areas of computer science research are extremely interested in these technologies (I count myself amongst these - my PhD research involved p2p resource discovery techniques), in particular those which deal with developments in distributed systems.
However, there is a great deal of hype about the efficacy and efficiency of p2p systems (I consider Oram's article to be an example of such), so it is right that academia should judge these systems on their merits rather than simply accepting the claims at face value.
For example, Oram's article contains the (uncontroversial) statement that peer-to-peer technologies cannot only distribute files, it can also distribute the burden of supporting network connections and then goes on to claim that the overall bandwidth remains the same as in centralised systems - which is rarely the case (in the p2p domain I have studied - resource and service discovery - even the more efficient decentralised systems have a significantly greater communication complexity than do centralised systems).
Valid research cannot be founded on spurious claims such as these. p2p technologies may have a number of advantages, but forgive us in academia if we don't get very excited about their disadvantages.
wasn't the addition of hyperlinks to the page without the author's knowledge one of the features that was widely critizied in the upcoming version of Internet Explorer?
Yes, but because the links went only to Microsoft-designated sites and the feature wasn't well documented (so that other could also use it).
The ability to annotate the work of others with links is a central feature of open hypertext systems which dates back as far as Vannevar Bush's Memex and Ted Nelson's Xanadu, and such functionality is provided on the Web by the W3C XLink standard. It is not the technology itself which is "wrong", but rather how it is used.
It is, or rather, it uses PICS to express the labels that are created using the ICRA vocabulary. The distinction to be made here is between a specific rating vocabulary (ICRA/RSACi or SafeSurf for example) and the language used to define that vocabulary or express rating written using that vocabulary (for example, PICS or its successor-in-kind, RDF).
Rating systems can be very good, as they provide a short, distilled summary of the information contained in the thing rated. And face it, given the massive amounts of information available out there, everyone (not just kids) needs help sorting out what's valuable, and what's crap.
The PICS system was a great proposal, and honestly, one that I think needs to have a much greater push with it. It allowed for this independent ratings network to be set up, didn't require a single centralized ratings system, and was easily parsable by any "filtering" software. It even allowed for multiple ratings from different raters for the same site.
This view is very much at the heart of parts of the W3C's Semantic Web effort; pluralistic descriptions (both ratings and annotations) by many participants, with a view to providing better ways of navigating the information space that is the Web.
The ICRA rating vocabulary appears to be based on the old RSACi vocabulary (chief addition being chat facilities), which was commonly expressed in PICS.
It is perfectly feasible for web developers to describe their own pages using PICS metadata (or indeed RDF, the foremost successor to PICS) by embedding the expressions as META tags in the manner you describe. In fact, the self-rating service that ICRA provide on their site simply gives you as output an HTML fragment that is a META tag containing a PICS expression.
PICS is not a "turing complete lisp-language" - it simply uses lisp-like s-expressions to encode structured data, mainly because it predates XML.
PICS was both a system for expressing content ratings and schemas for defining new types of content ratings (much like RDF, which has largely supplanted PICS).
This new ICRA rating vocabulary appears to be a rehash of the old RSACi system, which was originally specified using PICS, but could be written using other metadata formats (such as RDF). The same is likely to be true of ICRA.
Re:Astute observations with hope for a solution: y
on
The Shockwave Rider
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· Score: 2
Shockwave Rider sounds like an American book. Ever notice how all american movies have happy endings? I think it's because
we all migrated here with hope for a better future. European stuff is pretty dreary in comparison. More real, but more dreary.
The Shockwave Rider is probably the most upbeat of Brunner's dystopian novels, and uncharacteristic as such. Stand on Zanzibar (recently reissued in the UK by Orion in their SF Masterworks series) takes a much more pessimistic view, and The Jagged Orbit (reissued in the UK by Gollancz in a yellow jacket tp) is scarcely any more cheerful.
In my opinion, the most downbeat - and the most thought-provoking - of Brunner's dystopias is The Sheep Look Up. The Sheep Look Up is an environmental dystopia, set in a US with perpetual smog, little drinkable fresh water, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, pesticide-resistant crop pests, chemical weapon residues entering the food chain, climate change - the whole works - and draws its inspiration from Silent Spring in much the same way that The Shockwave Rider was inspired by Toffler's Future Shock.
It's a powerful novel that hasn't aged appreciably, and has become more relevant if anything. Much recommended.
Unfortunately, it's not in print at the moment, as is also the case for The Shift Key.
(I can remember where I was when I heard that John Brunner had died)
Slashdot Mirror
The knowledge engineering community has moved on since the expert systems of the 1980s, and techniques for handling uncertainty and inconsistency are now commonplace. The SW draws heavily on this experience.
The Semantic Web as envisaged by the W3C is based on the RDF and OWL languages; the latter has a Description Logic as its underlying formalism, which is a subset of first order predicate logic with computationally attractive properties that lead to tractable decision procedures for satisfiability.
Distribution is a separate issue. While assembling the parts of a distributed ontology may be expensive, it doesn't affect the algorithmic complexity of determining whether a set of axioms contain a contradiction.
Ditto the University of Southampton. I've been working on a SW-related project, AKT, for the last four years; as part of this work, I was a member of the W3C working group (along with Jeff Heflin) that wrote the OWL Web Ontology Language.
Other places to look at are Jim Hendler's MIND group in Maryland, which has been doing some sterling work over the last few years (as an aside, Jeff used to be Jim's PhD student).
There has been a considerable amount of work on ontology mapping within the knowledge engineering community, but the evolutionary aspects of ontologies have been largely overlooked. Ontology mapping is a harder problem than graph isomorphism, since classes from different ontologies may have extensions that overlap rather than cover each other. It's a difficult problem, certainly, but it's worth noting that game theory isn't applied here.
Game theory tends to appear more within the multi-agent systems community than the semantic web community; they've been looking at the social models for trust for some years now.
As a discipline within artificial intelligence, (multi-)agent systems are about fifteen years old, although they have roots in the distributed artificial intelligence discipline from some years beforehand.
A seminal early paper that gives an overview of the discipline is M. Wooldridge and N.R. Jennings Intelligent Agent: Theory and Practice, The Knowledge Engineering Review, 10 (2), pp. 115-152, 1995. (postscript). Other good sources are the proceedings of the main conference series on agents, AAMAS.
Thanks for the posting - I'm glad to see that we have a library professional here to correct the worst of the misconceptions in this story.
Very true. The technology you describe (often known informally in the UK as tattletape) has been in widespread use for at least the last decade and a half, and is functionally equivalent to anti-theft devices in most shops. A growing number of libraries in the UK are already moving to encoding the accession number of a book on RFID-like tags, primarily for stock control.
In the UK, the Copyright Licensing Agency makes provisions for limited copying of certain types of copyrighted material by business, government and education (the standard higher education license is available online as an example).
I would be extremely surprised if there were not similar provisions in the USA.
Many academic libraries in the UK already use RFID or similar for stock control. Typically, they encode the accession number of the object (a unique serial number which is used as the primary key in the library catalogue). ISBNs are not used for several reasons. For example, a library may hold more than one copy of a object (ISBNs are not unique identifiers for the physical volumes). Similarly, many books do not have ISBNs (particularly older volumes, although there are new publications in the grey literature which also do not).
The issue is not the use of RFID tags, but rather who reads the reader records in the library system (which record who has borrowed which book), and whether historical data is kept indefinitely or discarded when no longer useful.
There is a third, even less known adaptation of Gibson's work, namely Tomorrow Calling. This short (11m) film is a fairly faithful adaptation of the Gernsback Continuum, if you ignore the change of location from California to the British northwest (plenty of Art Deco buildings in Blackpool), that was made for Channel 4 (UK broadcaster) and featured a post-pop career Toyah Wilcox. Well worth watching if you can track it down.
We also use mailscanner here at Southampton (unsurprisingly, given that it's developed locally). It's a capable piece of software, and has a sizeable number of installations worldwide (the maintainer's current conservative underestimate is 7000-8000 sites with a throughput of around 3.5 billion messages per day).
This is more of a problem at an institutional level. My partner is an academic subject librarian (for chemical engineering and material science), and tells me that it is common for universities to pay for research (through academic salaries) that produces publications which they then cannot read because they cannot afford to subscribe to the journals in which the articles appear.
This is nothing new, however. Journal subscription fees have risen above inflation for several decades, with the result that only the larger institutions can afford to subscribe to all the journals that they need for research. Consortium buying schemes (such as the CHEST agreement in UK HE) help the situation to an extent, but the fact remains that many smaller institutions are suffering purely because they cannot afford to access the scholarly literature.
See also Stevan's page at Southampton (his current home - the Department of Electronic and Computer Science) and some of the projects which he is involved with, particularly the ePrints project, which is building an infrastructure for facilitating the self-archiving of academic papers in the way that Stevan suggests.
(yes, I'm a researcher at Soton)
There are a quite few papers on this topic (behaviour of disordered networks) by Barabasi and one of his research students, Reka Albert (now probably graduated), most of which are available from his research group's website or from arXiv.
Particular highlights:
A-L. Barabasi and R. Albert, Emergence of scaling in random networks, Science 286, 509, (1999)
A-L. Barabasi, R. Albert and H. Jeong, Scale-free characteristics of random networks: The topology of the World Wide Web, Physica A 281, 69-77 (2000).
A-L. Barabasi and R. Albert, Topology of evolving networks: local events and universality, Physcal Review Letters 85 5234 (2000).
This work is an interesting counterpoint to the 'small world' networks of Watts and Strogatz:
D.J. Watts and S.H. Strogatz, Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks, Nature 393, 440-442, (1998).
D.J. Watts, Small Worlds, Princeton University Press, (1999).
The story summary is misleading on this matter. The Eden Project is not a sealed environment like Biosphere, but rather a big greenhouse (as a previous poster wrote).
Still impressive, though.
HTML links which use the A element are unidirectional primarily because they are embedded in the source document (the webpage at the start of the link).
There is a branch of hypermedia research which deals with what is known as Open Hypermedia, in which links are objects which exist independantly of the documents that they link. This allows more complex link types, such as bidirectional or n-ary (many-ended) links, and promotes a degree of flexibility in the hypertext because links may be applied to many different documents (simplifying link maintenance).
Because the links are stored separately from documents, the resolution of links can be performed both forwards (when following a link in the normal manner) and backwards (when asking "what links point at this page?") with equal ease. The relative paucity of the Web with respect to this type of links has historically been an issue in the hypermedia research community, and it is due to this that the W3C has taken steps to rectify the situation by introducing the XLink recommendation, which allows the creation of open hypertext links.
I should have made this more clear in my original post. The company from whom I rent a 35mm print to show to my film club have agreed with the film distributor (Warner, for example) the right to distribute that print for non-theatric hire. They may own that particular print, but they have also paid a premium in order to have those distribution rights (and they pass this cost onto me in the rental charge). In return for my payment, I get the right to exhibit that film in certain conditions (closed screening to the membership of an organisation).
This is no different to a video rental outfit; they own the physical media, and through purchasing a premium priced copy of the media they also have bought the right to distribute that particular copy for home exhibition.
That is Warner's complaint - that the rental outfits are not paying for the distribution rights on the DVDs (as opposed to the exhibition rights that you would get if you bought a retail copy).
In the UK at present, it is not uncommon for film distributors to charge different amounts for the non-theatric hire (film clubs, schools, oil rigs etc) of a film based on the physical medium. A 35mm print of a film might cost £250 for a single screening, compared to £80-100 for a 16mm print and £50-80 for a VHS or DVD print. They're all still films, but the different media command different prices. Interestingly, a rental agreement for a film in one format does not permit exhibition in a different format - often different formats are distributed by different companies.
However, that is not the issue behind this Australian case, where (cheaper) retail prints are being used in place of (more expensive) rental prints. The price does not reflect the 'value' of the physical print or of the film therein (although for VHS, the recording quality of rental prints is generally better than that of retail), but rather the rights which are permitted to the owner of the print.
IMHO, Warner is entirely justified in attempting to stamp out unlicensed rental of retail prints, just as it already makes non-theatric hire licenses available at a lower price than that of theatric hire licenses (as would be required of a cinema or other commercial exhibitor). I say again, the cost of a print (for sale or rent) depends on the exhibition rights which are given to its owner.
Oram's speech is interesting, but offers little that is new.
His assertion that academia was uninterested in p2p technologies because university administrations acted (responsibly, imho) to prevent the use of tools designed for the illegal redistribution of copyright works is a little disingenuous. Certain areas of computer science research are extremely interested in these technologies (I count myself amongst these - my PhD research involved p2p resource discovery techniques), in particular those which deal with developments in distributed systems.
However, there is a great deal of hype about the efficacy and efficiency of p2p systems (I consider Oram's article to be an example of such), so it is right that academia should judge these systems on their merits rather than simply accepting the claims at face value.
For example, Oram's article contains the (uncontroversial) statement that peer-to-peer technologies cannot only distribute files, it can also distribute the burden of supporting network connections and then goes on to claim that the overall bandwidth remains the same as in centralised systems - which is rarely the case (in the p2p domain I have studied - resource and service discovery - even the more efficient decentralised systems have a significantly greater communication complexity than do centralised systems).
Valid research cannot be founded on spurious claims such as these. p2p technologies may have a number of advantages, but forgive us in academia if we don't get very excited about their disadvantages.
Yes, but because the links went only to Microsoft-designated sites and the feature wasn't well documented (so that other could also use it).
The ability to annotate the work of others with links is a central feature of open hypertext systems which dates back as far as Vannevar Bush's Memex and Ted Nelson's Xanadu, and such functionality is provided on the Web by the W3C XLink standard. It is not the technology itself which is "wrong", but rather how it is used.
It is, or rather, it uses PICS to express the labels that are created using the ICRA vocabulary. The distinction to be made here is between a specific rating vocabulary (ICRA/RSACi or SafeSurf for example) and the language used to define that vocabulary or express rating written using that vocabulary (for example, PICS or its successor-in-kind, RDF).
This view is very much at the heart of parts of the W3C's Semantic Web effort; pluralistic descriptions (both ratings and annotations) by many participants, with a view to providing better ways of navigating the information space that is the Web.
The ICRA rating vocabulary appears to be based on the old RSACi vocabulary (chief addition being chat facilities), which was commonly expressed in PICS.
It is perfectly feasible for web developers to describe their own pages using PICS metadata (or indeed RDF, the foremost successor to PICS) by embedding the expressions as META tags in the manner you describe. In fact, the self-rating service that ICRA provide on their site simply gives you as output an HTML fragment that is a META tag containing a PICS expression.
Does this answer your comments?
PICS is not a "turing complete lisp-language" - it simply uses lisp-like s-expressions to encode structured data, mainly because it predates XML.
PICS was both a system for expressing content ratings and schemas for defining new types of content ratings (much like RDF, which has largely supplanted PICS).
This new ICRA rating vocabulary appears to be a rehash of the old RSACi system, which was originally specified using PICS, but could be written using other metadata formats (such as RDF). The same is likely to be true of ICRA.
Shockwave Rider sounds like an American book. Ever notice how all american movies have happy endings? I think it's because we all migrated here with hope for a better future. European stuff is pretty dreary in comparison. More real, but more dreary.
The Shockwave Rider is probably the most upbeat of Brunner's dystopian novels, and uncharacteristic as such. Stand on Zanzibar (recently reissued in the UK by Orion in their SF Masterworks series) takes a much more pessimistic view, and The Jagged Orbit (reissued in the UK by Gollancz in a yellow jacket tp) is scarcely any more cheerful.
In my opinion, the most downbeat - and the most thought-provoking - of Brunner's dystopias is The Sheep Look Up. The Sheep Look Up is an environmental dystopia, set in a US with perpetual smog, little drinkable fresh water, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, pesticide-resistant crop pests, chemical weapon residues entering the food chain, climate change - the whole works - and draws its inspiration from Silent Spring in much the same way that The Shockwave Rider was inspired by Toffler's Future Shock. It's a powerful novel that hasn't aged appreciably, and has become more relevant if anything. Much recommended.
Unfortunately, it's not in print at the moment, as is also the case for The Shift Key.
(I can remember where I was when I heard that John Brunner had died)