Well, the point of Unhosted modules and being explicit about your data schema in modules is so that other developers can reuse them, to make it possible for users to switch between frontend apps that consume the same kinds of data.

Well, duh*.

But there seem to be loads of people making the same kinds of apps over remoteStorage (mostly todo apps or notetaking kind of things) and making their own modules every time!

If one module doesn't offer everything a dev needs for their new app, they should hook in anyway and extend it with their own module on top. That should be pretty straightforward.

So I love LiteWrite, but for notetaking maybe I need a few more organisational facilities. McNotes looked awesome and I was poised to start using it. Then I saw Laverna offers remoteStorage support and that is pretty much a straight up port of Evernote (but ten times as sexy), with tags and notebooks and everything!

When I switched from Evernote to something to something to Springpad (the ones in between didn't do the job, and I've since forgotten what they were) I had all kinds of mess importing my Evernote data, and a lot of it was done manually due to limitations of the various importers. If I'd actually started storing anything useful in LiteWrite, and wanted to move to McNotes and then to Laverna I would have gone through the exact same process... which is a horrible thought, because that's one of the problems remoteStorage is supposed to solve.

So, please, if you're making an app over remoteStorage, look at the other modules that exist first, and use them. And if you're making a new module, please publish it! Otherwise we're missing a butt-ton of opportunities for giving users choices about their UIs, and for mashing things up in amazing ways.

(On that note, I'm keeping a list of Unhosted mashup ideas).

* Although this is kind of obvious, I explicitly came to this realisation after it occurred to me, when trying to work out how to make schema definitions conform to proper JSON-LD, that you go to all the trouble of defining your data schema in your module, but then there's nothing to stop you just storing any old object. You can validate an object against a schema, but there's nothing to do this by default. So I thought why then do I need to bother with this JSON-LD schema faff if I can just store prefixes at object creation time? Then I remembered other people, and reuse and stuff. It took a surprisingly long time (like an hour of frowning) to get to that though. Especially surprising given that all I've been thinking about this evening is Linked Data. Clearly all this JavaScript is obscuring coherent thought.

If people release their models and data schema for remoteStorage apps, we can mash them up with much ease! I'm maintaining a list here of ideas that I may or may not get around to implementing:

• Notetaking app + bookmarking app = WebClipper functionality and/or annotation of webpages
• Todo app + calendar app = duh.

Since most of the early Unhosted apps are life-organise-y ones, can we just have a dashboard that combines everything? Can we call it SORT YOUR LIFE OUT?

I had an idea for a tiny wee project to do with quantified self. More on that later.

Because I'm trying to use linked data for everything, for reasons beyond the scope of this post, the first thing I did was sketch out the data I need to store in a graph structure. I need to record emotions, so I did a quick search for ontologies that represent emotions, figuring psychologists and the like must have been at this for years already.

Sure enough I found a few, but the most convincing one, the HUMAINE Emotion Annotation & Representation Language (EARL) is in XML rather than OWL.

Note: There's apparently a lot of disagreement about terms and stuff in this area. Not something I'm invested in, so I'm just going to roll with this XML.

Yay! Time to convert a well structured and useful dataset into RDF. Always a Good Thing.

EARL
EARL comes as many files, and goes beyond what I need. But it's not huge, and with a little effort (and looking some stuff up on Wikipedia) I think I can understand what's going on enough to convert the lot.

There are:

• Categories (names of emotions)
• Dimensions (ways of describing intensity, I think)
• Modality types (the means through which the emotion was expressed, eg. face)
• Regulation attributes (response to an emotion)
• Appraisal attributes (a list of other descriptive terms; emotional metadata, if you will)
• Emotion times (start and end)

Emotional occurrences can have all of the above as properties, as well as probability and intensity. Complex emotional occurrences have times, and contain a minimum of two emotional occurrences with the above properties.

The terms are all taken from various different psychological experiments or schools of thought. There are alternative versions of some of these things from something called AIBO. Arbitrarily I'm ignoring everything prefixed AIBO for now.

Converting
I'm going through the files and writing everything relevant out, then drawing it as a graph.

First juncture: do I use all the attributes (like the list of 55 emotions) as properties (as they are demonstrated in the original XML) or use classes? Properties seems messy, and feels less extensible, even though technically I suppose it's not.

Maybe they should be properties. Except the categories, they all (or at least most) have corresponding DBPedia entries that it would be stupid not to take advantage of. But the dimensions, regulation and appraisal might be better suited to being properties, otherwise I'm having pointless identifiers or blank nodes everywhere. And nobody wants that.

I adjusted the Samples thing a bit, mostly to simplify it, and I may have got it wrong, but I think it makes sense.

Then I typed it all into WebProtege. As a result, I think quite a few things are overspecified. What do you think? Check it out: http://vocab.amy.so/earl.

I'm visiting the Information Access research group at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam for a week.

I walked around a bit, and discovered that a lot of roads look like pavements, or pavements don't stop being pavements even when they cross over a junction a car can turn down.

Also I keep looking the wrong way when crossing roads and cycle paths.

Fortunately all of the cars and bikes I've stepped out in front of so far have been going very slowly.

Also I don't know if there's a heatwave or if I'd just acclimatised to Scotland more than I thought. Everyone else is going around wearing coats, but I'm sweltering.

I've been here before in 2008, but only have vague memories of tourist attractions and the city hadn't left a lasting impression on me. Hopefully I can pay more attention this time.

Expect more posts about my research-related adventures soon.

An update; sort an explanation of why I haven't posted anything recently.

I really want more control over my blog data.

I think Linked Data is great and the only way to make it more useful is to use it more.

I'm sick of Blogger's JavaScript heavy wysiwyg editor that doesn't work properly on low-bandwidth connections, or on my Kindle in emergencies.

I want to author blog posts in markdown, add whatever metadata (like tags) I need, and publish them via whatever means I have to hand. From a browser, from a text editor and command line, from an email, from a tweet?

So I'm working on Slog'd: Semantic Blog from Markdown.

I already wrote a wee Python script to convert my existing Blogger posts to linked data: Blogger2LD. I'm making a web interface for this so you can do yours... and I'll do it for Twitter, too. Then who knows what else will follow.

I'm still twiddling with Slog'd itself - which I'm writing in PHP and storing triples in a MySQL database using the ARC2 library, because I want anyone with any bog-standard shared hosting and no understanding of linked data to be able to use this. You can watch progress on Bitbucket.

I've been blogging every detail as I go along. These are in the posts directory in the Slog'd repo, rather than on here.

My first paper has been accepted to the SOCM14 workshop at WWW.

That means I get to go to Seoul, South Korea, in April!

I'll post a pre-print at some point.

I ventured to Glasgow for the second Open Knowledge Foundation meetup on Monday 18th. It was well attended, and there were six short talks:

Lorna Campbell from Cetis talked about Open Scotland. I understood this to be a collaboration between Cetis, the SQA, JISC and the ALT Scotland, to do with the opening up of education, and influencing policy and practicein this area. Here's a blog.

Grianne Hamilton from JISC talked about Mozilla's Open Badges. You can use them to reward learning, skills and achievements in all sorts of areas, and any organisaiton can create and issue badge packs to people who have earned them. Recievers can then show them off anywhere they can put HTML.

Graeme Arnott talked about a collaboration between Glasgow Womens' Library and Wikimedia, which resulted in the Scottish Women on Wikipedia event. This was a group of Scottish women getting together to edit Wikipedia articles about Scottish Women, and there was very positive feedback. They have more events planned. Graeme also reminded us about Wikimania, which is taking place next August in London.

Jennifer Jones told us about the Digital Common Wealth project. She pointed out that with media-saturated global events like the Olympics, the official story is already decided before the event even starts. An alternative to relying on what is broadcast by the mainstream media is to turn the camera on the crowd, and get the 'real' version of what is going on. The Digital Common Wealth project will encourage citizen journalists to work together to craft the story of the Glasgow Commonwealth Games from their perspective. Jennifer also raised the point that although free tools like YouTube, AudioBoo and Twitter are great for spreading stories, the data is still held by third parties - what happens if they disappear? How should initiatives like this safely archive their stories, and keep them in context?

Pippa Gardner talked about Glasgow's Future Cities project, for which they have £24 million to develop. It's about "people and data", but she was here to talk about data. There's the Data Innovation Engagement (which apparently needs a better acronym) and Glasgow's data portal which has already launched. Not all of the data on their is 'properly' open, but it's more open than it was before. There's a maps portal coming soon. Follow @openglasgow to keep up to date. Someone asked how they can avoid inadvertantly widening the digital divide by making all this data available - as it will only improve things for people who already have understanding and access. Pippa said there's a dedicate group in the Council working on widening digital participation, so they're involved.

Duncan Bain, and MPhil student at the University of Edinburgh, talked about Open Architecture. He says it's hard to define 'knowledge' and 'data' in architecture; architects create drawings/representations, not buildings. There are efforts towards opening certain aspects of this, like wikihouse.cc and the Open Architecture Network, but the culture of the architecture world, and where the money is, seems to be preventing things from going in the same direction as software development any time soon.

Here are livestreams of the talks by Jennifer Jones: one and two and a twitter timeline by Sheila Macneill.

The post I wrote about EdinburghApps, the City of Edinburgh Council's awesome hackathon, is on the OKFN Scotland blog!

Our third Prewired event went smoothly, with 20 young people (about 4 new) and 7 or so parents attending, plus 8 mentors. So lower signups than usual (a few cancellations due to school commitments), but we decided not to do a big publicity push and see how it ran with a smaller group. I didn't notice much difference, since they organise themselves into smaller groups anyway to work on different things. I think next time we'll try to reach our capacity of 40.

We had a big group working on a variety of Python projects (games, basics, algorithms, I'm not sure what else..), a small group doing front-end web, and quite a few doing amazing things with Scratch.

Every week I discover new things these super-talented young people are doing with their time, and it won't be long before many of them are spending a lot of time mentoring their peers as well as working on their own projects.

Nantas came by to talk about what he does with the University's Robotics lab, including the challenges of making humanoid robots play football, and the state of the art, two-million-pounds, full sized humanoid robot that is moving to Edinburgh in the near future. Definitely stuff to get young people excited about learning to code.

We've been trying to encourage them to code between Prewired sessions, too, and about half of them said they had. I hope by the next time all of them have, and I'm really excited to see what they're capable of making in a few months time!

But...

Some of the young people attending are disadvantaged by not being able to bring their own laptop, or having only really old laptops which can't support modern browsers and therefore have trouble even executing the JavaScript their writing (true story).

We'd love to be able to pay for a set of simple but up-to-date laptops that we could lend to the attendees who don't have their own during sessions.  This at least will put them on a level playing field with the others during the sessions, and I suspect that many of them have adequate desktop machines or family laptops at home.

Prewired runs on a budget of volunteer blood, sweat and tears, and zero pounds.  We're lucky enough to be able to use space in the University Informatics building for free, and there are no shortage of keen mentors and helpers willing to chip in their time (and in some cases cash for snacks).

So if you work for a company who might be able to support the purchase of resources for our young coders, or know someone who does, then please get in touch!