Writeup imminent...

Young Rewired State is a week-long hack event for under 19s.  There are centres all over the UK, and the week finishes with a giant sleepover in the Custard Factory in Birmingham, presentations and prizes.

I was helping out with running the Edinburgh centre this year, between the 5th and 11th of August.  We had 15 young people taking part, and a few parents popping in and out as well.  Not to mention several fantastic mentors.

Every day we gathered in one of the University of Edinburgh Informatics computer labs.  On the first day we did some brainstorming, introduced the young people to Open Data, and they sorted themselves into teams.

We had a diverse range of projects by the end of the week.

The Weatherproof app was written in Scala with a Web frontend, and as well as telling you the weather forecast, gives you practical advice on what to wear and what to take with you.

Stuff Index was a Python Web app that lets people photograph and upload stuff they've left out on the street that they want to get rid of, so anyone browsing the site can opt to take it away if they fancy it.  Helping to keep stuff out of landfill, and without the dreaded social interactions that come with Freegle.

Tag is a game by a one-man team, with a Python game server and a JavaScript front end that lets you chase your friends around the real world, and automatically tags them when you're in range.

PokeGame is a real-world Pokemon simulator that lets you roam IRL and capture virtual Pokemon.

Great stuff!

On Friday we crammed into a coach along with the participants from Aberdeen, Dundee and Glasgow, and set off on a seven hour road trip to Birmingham for the finale.

The Edinburgh teams didn't win anything, but the presentations were fantastic and everyone had an amazing time.  The young people made new friends, learnt tons of new stuff, and hopefully remain enthused about coding.

Next year we're going to do more to walk through the creation process of some example apps to get them started off, and maybe do a better job of introducing Open Data and the possibilities it holds.

We're also thinking about starting a regular under 19s code club in Edinburgh - weekly or bi-weekly - so stay tuned for more info about that.  (And if you want to help or participate, get in touch!)

The 10th Summer School for Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web

Sunday

Arriving by train into Cercedilla, north of Madrid, we immediately encountered other confused looking folk with poster tubes.  So we shared taxis (EUR 10) from Cercedilla station to the summer school residence further north, in the forest.

After getting keys for our pleasant, single, en-suite rooms, arrivals congregated in the shade by the building  to introduce ourselves.. Again, and again, and again, as new people continuously arrived over the space of a few hours.

A really broad mix of people are here in terms of nationalities and places and levels of study, but I still haven't quite got used to the fact that answering 'Semantic Web stuff' is not specific enough in this crowd, when someone asks you what your research is about.  Nobody needs convincing that these technologies are useful!

Later we received schedules, maps, ill-fitting t-shirts* and very helpful name badges, and headed for dinner at the bar down the road.

As is traditional when I write about my experiences in new places, I will describe the food every day.  It has become apparent, at this residence at least, that variety of ingredients is not ordinary, so in this respect meals are simple.  Dinner that first night started with a salad (lettuce, olives, tomato, onion, shredded beetroot and a single slice of hard boiled egg; no dressing), followed by - for the majority - slices of meat (beef? Pork? I dunno..) and fries.  Mine was a plate of mushy green vegetables with a little seasoning, that was pretty tasty.  Dessert was a single pear, delivered with ceremony, but otherwise unadorned.  Healthy, at least.

Yet we were all (those I sat with at least) were left feeling a little unsatisfied.

I shared a table with a French, Spanish, Italian and Irish guy.  Conforming appropriately to stereotypes, and setting up reputations for the rest of the week, the French and the Italian shared the bottle of wine on the table; the rest of us went without.

I returned to bed after a couple of hours of socialising and enjoying the cool air in and around the bar.

* For next year, they could ask for t-shirt sizes when they ask for dietary preferences?

Monday

The day started early, and with no hot water or wifi for anyone.  Breakfast was combinations of sweet pastries, coffee, tea, juice and bread.

Punctuated variously by coffee breaks, the learning began in earnest.

During the introduction by Mathieu D'Aquin, I found out that I am one of 53 students selected out of 96 applicants to attend this year's Summer School of the Semantic Web!  I had no idea it was that selective, or that there had been that much competition.

The first keynote was by Frank van Harmelen, about all the Semantic Web questions we couldn't ask ten years ago.

Slides:

Semantic Web questions we couldn't ask 10 years ago from Frank Van Harmelen

Frank started by saying that the early Semantic Web vision has morphed into the more manageable vision of a Web of Data, or a Giant Global Graph, and outlined the principles of the Semantic Web as they appear to stand at present:

1. Give everything a name (entities).
2. Relations form graph between things.
3. Names are addresses on the Web (so we inherit properties of Web like AAA).
4. Add semantics.

Frank pointed out the advantages of the fact the Linked Data crowd, grown naturally and not designed, is now so big we don't know how many triples it contains, nor how fast it is growing.  Companies and organisations (like Google, NXP, BBC, DataGov) are using Semantic Web technologies to achieve their own ends, for a variety of different use cases, without caring much about the Semantic Web, and this is contributing to the growth.

This growth has given rise to a number of research areas that were impossible to realisitically ask questions about ten years ago, including self-organisation, distribution of data, provenance, dynamics and change, errors and noise (how to deal with disagreements).

Frank asserted that rules and structures, algorithms and patterns in data, exist whether we are looking at them or not.  He used the analogy that OWL is our microscope, and it may be the tool that distorts our vision of the information universe rather than properties of what we are looking at (for example, structures in data presenting themselves well in some domains but not others).

He went on to promote the roll of the Informatician to be to test theories, hypothesis and falsify, as scientists rather than engineers.  To discover, rather than build.

I struggle with this view of the world, and feel instinctively that theory and practice are intrinsically linked; one can't exist without the other, not just in the grand scheme of things, but in day to day work and research.  This is one of the main points of contention with my own PhD, and I've no doubt there will be many more blog posts about this issue in the near future as I reconcile my need to create something immediately useful with the necessity of producing a contribution to knowledge at large.

See my raw notes here.

We had an Introduction to Linked Data by Mathieu D'Aquin (raw notes here), followed by a workshop.  We wrote SPARQL queries to populate a pre-written web page with information about Open University courses, sub-courses and locations thereof.

Lunch, similar to the previous night's dinner, was a starter salad, an entire half chicken (or something) plus fries for the carnivores and the most unappealing risotto of my life for (not that I'm ungrateful, but I have never been unable to finish a meal due to boredom before).  I went for a walk with some others to grab some fresh air before the afternoon's work, and missed out on watermelon.

Manfred Hauswirth presented some really exciting stuff about annotating and using streams of data.  Particularly challenging is how to integrate this with static data and make inferences over the lot.  Streams include sensor data, as well as ever-flowing social media streams for example; anything that changes over time.

They've built some systems to process this kind of data, and one of them is available as middleware.

My raw notes are here.

In the afternoon we had a poster session, where all participants pinned up posters about their work, and discussed at length with anyone who was interested.  Here's evidence that I participated.

And here's Paolo's:

I wrote a few notes about things from other peoples' posters that I need to look up.

The main feedback I received was about making sure I focus, narrow down my topic, and concentrate on some evaluatable deliverables that are PhD-worthy.

Questions like (paraphrasing) "why should we care about digital creatives?" threw me, because I thought the obvious answer - that they are people too, Web users, technology users, contributors to culture and an ecosystem of digital content and data - was apparently not enough from an academic standpoint.

I was simultaneously told to focus more, and to explain why the problem I'm trying to solve is applicable to all domains, not just digital creatives.  But some of the problems I'm looking at have been (or are being) solved in other domains (like e-health, biological research, education) and the reason what I'm doing is interesting is because none of these solutions quite work for digital creatives, and I want to find solutions that do, and try to figure out why.

I'm still stuck in some sort of struggle between theory and practice; thinking and doing.  And the long-standing problem of how to decide which doing actually worked.

I've started scribbling notes about the narrowing down problem.  I'll need to have this figured out before my first year review in August anyway, so stay tuned for another post all about it.

Then I sneaked off for a nap.

Dinner at the bar again; the usual salad, plus some eggy fish thing for most.  I got a plate of artichoke.  Artichoke is great, I love it, and I'm all for simple meals.  But I remain unconvinced that a plate of only artichoke constitutes an acceptable level of effort on the part of caterers.  And the sheer quantity made it start to taste a bit funny after a while.  But not to worry; we rounded off with a solitary peach apiece.

Further socialising, and appreciation of the night sky, before returning to bed write blog posts.

I'm super excited and inspired by the talks, work I've heard about so far, and the atomsphere of the place.  I'm excited to learn a helluva lot, and remind myself that I'm not facing impossible problems, and am not facing many problems alone.  I remember that I am instinctively passionate about the Web and the possibilities it holds (and indeed has already realised) for the empowerment of individuals.  I remember how lucky I am to be able to sustain myself through studying something I love so much, and to have the potential to make a change, and through my work maybe even facilitate others to be able to make a living doing what they love, as well.

20th - 26th May

Continued to work on literature review.  Nothing much to report.

Went to MCM Expo in London and managed to find time (around non-stop merch selling for TomSka and Eddsworld) to ask between 30 and 40 content creators - a wide variety of ages, experience, types of content - about their process and collaborative practices.  The thing they all had in common (I randomly picked people as they were waiting in the two hour long queue to get autographs from Tom) was that they all do what they do because the love it, want to entertain people, and if the could earn a living from it too that would be amazing; but that's not why they do it.  For many it's the dream, but not one they expect realistically to achieve.

That is why this is important to me.  Because everybody should be able to make a living from doing what they love*, and the technology exists to allow it.  How exciting.

* Unless they're really bad at it.  There's only so much technology can do.  But they should definitely have the chance to get good before caving in to a ninetofive that they're not totally passionate about.

I had an amazing evening at the Starting up in IT panel discussion, followed by Innis & Gunn beer tasting on Thursday evening.  It was held in the shiny MMS Quartermile One offices.  (When I'm rich, I want a flat on Quartermile.  A turret-y one, not a glass one.  Or maybe both).

I felt chronically under-dressed when I arrived - a majority were suited - but everyone was really friendly and forthcoming with advice.

Anyway, speaking of being rich.  There were lots of interesting business-wise people to talk to at this event, including CEO of Skyscanner Gareth Williams, and Craig Anderson of Pentech Ventures.  Plus lawyers specialising in things like IP, employment, company formation, from MMS.  The panel discussion was enlightening; I'll go through some highlights raw notes...

Funding

• Skyscanner - 2 mil from Scottish Equity Partners 2007.
• Getting funding isn't a goal or validation.
• Best way to get funding is not to need it.
• Scottish Enterprise: match funding.
• Give as much as you get. Confide in investor.

Getting wise

• Don't pitch too early. Build traction first.
• Prove potential marketshare one way or another.
• Preparing business plan is productive.  Converting to a vision to a plan when you get funding.
• Subscribe to investment bloggers.
• Networkiiiing. Find someone to champion you to an investor.
• Gareth: As many people are delusional as have a key insight. How to know which you are yourself?

Employees

• Do you need employees or contractors? Casual employees in between.
• Consultant / contractors own IP for work they do. Unless contract says otherwise.  Employees don't, employer owns it.

I heard about some really interesting ventures, too, like Identity Artworks which looks like they're making a huge difference to young people, and have really inspiring stories to tell.  Plus ShareIn, soon launching an equity crowdfunding platform. Veeerrry interesting...

The panel was followed by beer tasting hosted by Innis & Gunn.  I don't drink, but I would have sipped along to be sociable.  However, it turned out the beer wasn't vegetarian (filtered through isinglass).  This, at least, meant more for everyone else on my table.  MMS had come up with a written seating plan, by the way, that separated people who had arrived together.  Forced networking!  Excellent.

This served as great chance for Steve and I to independently practice our GeoLit elevator pitching, and I think we'd got it down to perfection by the end of the evening.  Extremely encouragingly, we were consistently met with enthusiasm and responses like "that's an amazing idea!".  We left pretty buzzing.

Just notes from a three-hour workshop about how to write an Informatics thesis, on the 16th of April.


State contributions (to knowledge) explicitly.  Intro, conclusions; each chapter should have some (probably not all) contributions discussed.  Be obvious; use headings.

Knowledge - background:

• justify choices
• explain methods
• acknowledge alternatives
• evaluate

Evidence, well-reasoned arguments, acknowledge limitations.

Clear openings for future work.  Be clear where they are.

Make it reproduceable.

Short / concise.  Examiners like short theses.

Introduce what's interesting and important.

When outline thesis, look at structure of main argument, not of document.

Background material must have point.  Only include as much detail as you need to make point.
Points, eg:

• Explain method you use.
• Novelty of your approach. Similarities with existing work.
• Justify choices (evaluate other work).
• Don't tear down others' work. 'Build on'.
• Cite examiners, they've probably published something relevant.. (but not for the sake of it).

Then we had five minutes to write down what our PhDs are about and what we have already found out.  I wrote:

How do the futures of the Semantic Web and amateur digital content creation fit together?
Can Semantic Web tools and technologies be used to enhance collaborative creative partnerships and encourage fruitful outputs?

There are knowledge sharing systems and collaborative tools for scientific fields and in education, but nothing for creative artsy things.

Attitudes towards data sharing and privacy amongst content creators are in flux.  There are lots of projects and energy around open data and decentralised social networks that allow data to become portable and not tied to one platform.  One of TBL's visions for the Semantic Web is the dissolution of data silos and 'walled' applications that disadvantage the user, and as such the promotion of the 'ownership' of a user's data by the user themselves, rather than the software or organisation that uses the data.

There are lots of reasons people make content.  There are lots of reasons people don't make content (who could / would like to).

[Notes resume]
Use backreferences; don't repeat yourself.

Info / advice
...homepages.../sgwater/resources.html
..homepages.../imurray2/teaching/writing
Style: Toward Clarity & Grace (book)
The Craft of Research (book)

When to start writing thesis?

• Do you already have papers?  Slot them into a thesis template asap.
• Maybe a year beforehand.  Slower pace is better.

Don't assume appendices will be read.  More for extra info if needed by people trying to reproduce your work (not your examiners).

Too many direct quotes look like you don't understand and are avoiding explaining yourself.

Keep copies of web resources and cite access dates in case they change / disappear.
Figures might be copyright if you just copy them from papers, even if you cite them.  Remake them, and put 'adapted from' as citation.

Examiners?

• Depends on your supervisor.  Discuss.  Student might be able to suggest someone to examine.
• Maybe a balance between internal and external knowledge.
• Won't be someone junior, even if they're considered an expert in the field.
• Helpful if supervisor knows how that person will behave in viva.  Might be a good reason to avoid someone you think would be perfect from their background.
• Conflict of interest regulations.  You can know them personally though.  External can't have been affiliated with UoE in the last three years, or substantially involved in your research (like co-authoring a paper).  No ex-supervisors, from any university.

No grading system (ie no different levels of passed PhD).  Might be external prizes if you want extra recognition.

The UK Ontology Networks Workshop took place over one day in the Informatics Forum.

There was a mix of people there; some talks were way over my head and very technical, and some talks were by people who confessed they had had to look up "ontology" that morning.  And things in between.

Lazy writeup, but following are notes as I scribbled them:



John Callahan

US navy research.
Focused information integration.
Human intervention to keep predictive part on track. Tweaking.

Alan Bundy

Interaction of representation and reasoning.
Changing world so agents must evolve. How to automate? What would trigger a need for change:
Inconsistency
Incompleteness
Inefficiency
how to diagnose which?
Interested in language and perception change.
Unsorted first order logic algorithm called Reformation. Based on standard unification algorithm.
Allows blocking and unblocking unification.


Phil Barker

Schema.org
Cetis (JISC funded)
learning resource metadata initiative.
Big names behind schema.org.
= ontology + syntax
Big and growing ontology.
Dumbed down for people.
LRMI adds to it. W3C go through it. It's creeping, how much do the big names actually care about stuff that's added?
don't know how Google uses it.
People should consider using it for more sophisticated search and disambiguation.

Gill Hamilton

Doing more with library metadata. Learnt from OKFN. Had to convince people in charge.
Dublin core, didn't like; not specific enough. Instead RDF > OWL. "We know best how to structure our data"

Hardest was convincing marketing people that there was no commercial value. Metadata is advert to actual resource.

Enrico Motta

Traditionally top down approach. So now so many people interacting with semantic structures, so should involve users.
Recognise there isn't a unique or best way of doing things.
Initial study included modeling task with binary relations.

Patterns that are more or less intuitive. 4D least, 3D+1 most.
N-ary most widely used by experts.

Relationship between reasoning power and intuitiveness of writing? More creativity needed for simpler ones. (Not really sure what he's saying)

Email him for copy of study.

Chris Mellish

Ontology authoring is hard. Better ways to do it.

Controlled language input (mature tech); responsive reasoning (also mature, information as you're editing); understanding the process (beginning to understand more).

Hypotheses:
users don't know what they're doing. What if questions.  Many answers, what is relevant? Depends on context.

Authoring as dialogue.
Todo list.

Useable in the same ways as protégé.

Peter Winstanley

UN classification schemes.
Various vocabularies.
Allow development of cross mapping between government administrations.

Mostly internal currently. Moves to bring externalizing data into the 21st century.

Peter Murray-Rust

Fight for your Ontologies.
Ontologies in physical sciences. Chemists don't want ontologies. They'll sue you.
Crystallography uses 'dictionary'. Written in CIF. 20 years to build CIF.

Compare physical sciences to government.

Every program author writes dictionaries that work for them. When different parties agree, promote to communal dictionary. Provide conventions to help disagreements.

Show a company can do it as opposed to a rabbiting academic ..

Jeff Pan

Tractable ontological stream reasoning.
Need to be more efficient, scaleable, as things change. Inputs from web.

Dealing with complexities: approximate owl2.
Dealing with frequent updates: to-add stream and to-do delete stream. Truth maintenance. Evaluation criteria.

Trowl.EU can use with protégé, also supports jena.

Edoardo Pignotti

Semantic web tech to support Interdisciplinary research.
ourSpaces VRE
Provenance crucial.
OPM prov ontology.

Deployed since 2009, 180 users. Comprehensive ontologies but people unwilling to provide metadata.
paper! Edwards et al. ourSpaces.

Tom Grahame (BBC) @tfgrahame

Content arrangement on BBC sport by tagging, automatic to free up editors to write.
LD API so systems don't need to know about each other.
Growing from simple rdfxml to more complex ontology.
Can ask much more general and much more detailed questions about sport.

Mapping incoming data is outsourced.
Lots of errors, sometimes system alerts, sometimes manual.

Working on opening the data. Maybe a dump, but licensing issues.

Ewan Klein

Mining old texts for commodities, adding place and time and putting in structured database.
Transcriptions of customs import records.

Skos for synonyms.
Dbp concepts.

Why? Want to query.
Visualisations.

Tools? Python script.

Janice Watson

Harnessing clinical terminologies and classifications for healthcare improvements.

Bob Barr

Geographical addressing.
Addressing and address geocoding is important and broad. Not always postal, but this not addressed (punlol) in ontologies.
Different contexts change meaning of address (for delivering, you only care about postbox; property sale whole building).
Loads of things to address. Loads of reasons why.
Work held up as national address file is owned by royal mail and might be sold!

Fiona McNeill

Run time extraction of data. Failure driven. Looking at extraction of specific information.
Emergency response. Lots of data, timely sharing of data required.
From domestic level to humanitarian disasters.
How can it be automated?
Multilayered incompatibility.
Format
Terminology
Structure
...

Richard Gunn

Towards an intelligent information industry.

Elena Simperl (Soton, sociam)

Crowdsourcing ontology engineering.

CSrc: Brabham 2008.

Distribute task into smaller atomic units.

Humans validating results that are automatically detected as not accurate.
What are the costs? What resources?

Games with a purpose. Like quizzes.
Micropayments or vouchers.
MTurk. CrowdFlower.
Paper about useage of microtask crowdsourcing.  ISWC 2012.

Claudia Paglieri

Ontologies in ehealth.

Enrico Motta - Rexplore
Klink algorithm mines relations between research topics.
Use this!  Nope, it's not public.   Uees MS Academic research.

Peter Murray-Rust

Content mining expands regular text mining.
Focus on academic stuff.
Chemical Tagger. Takes chemistry jargon and annotated it, knows actions, conditions, molecules etc.. NLP. Uses ontologies and contributes to ontologies.
In chemistry,  no need to put everything in rdf because there are already lots of formalisms.
Proper cool PDF to sensible format conversion. Amy the kangaroo. Looking for collaborators.

Yuan Ren

Ontology authoring in whatif project.

Reasoning with protégé and trowl .

Tractable reasoning. Trowl v fast.


Notes from conversations / breakout discussions:

BBC use owlm triplestore  .
Store all their datasets in svn. But they have reads and writes to the live triplestore all the time.

Lots of people saying minimise owl use because of unpredictable output.

Versioning ontologies (available in owl2) in case third parties change stuff you use. You're dependent on their software engineering practices. Only good if they're ahead of the game.

IRIs, Arabic characters in ontologies!
Semantic heavy, maybe make a decision to abstract away to ids and make heavier use of labels.

Difference between importing and using someone else's.

There's no (practically useful) software that lets you reason over stuff you haven't imported? (over HTTP?)

Build ontology from reality (data), don't start with no data.

Lode.

Problems with dbpedia URIs changing or disappearing.

Hard to visualize massive graphs. Relational, tabular much easier to understand.

Which was hosted by the National Library of Scotland. (Information).

I reported on the 1st International Open Data Dialogue in Berlin that I'd been to in December, but then had to immediately leave, so I don't have any notes on the rest of the talks..

I spent the last few days in Edinburgh College of Art, helping out at the Remediating the Social conference.  I was in charge of making sure everyone's microphones were on, and slides were being projected, which turned out to be more work than anyone anticipated.  Only minor hiccups occurred though, usually when I unplugged something I shouldn't have by accident.  I couldn't have done it without my glamourous assistant José, who was the master of fiddling with Macbook screen resolutions to make them play nice with the projector.

More importantly, I saw some super interesting talks, and met and talked to some fantastic smart people about electronic literature, and other things.

I also presented about Palimpsest, in front of the biggest audience I have ever talked in front of.  Go me.

Videos of everything from the conference are here.

On the last day I implemented an idea that had been kicking around the back of my mind for a while, which was the Uninformative Twitter Wall, or Twitter Squares.  It's nothing particularly complex; it uses jQuery and probably has memory leaks.  I'd love for people to help themselves to the code and improve it. Converting a hash of a tweet text into a hex code, I generated coloured squares for the results of a search term.  If the feed you choose is updating a lot, then the squares move around quickly and it looks pretty funky.  If there are only occasional new tweets, then it looks less exciting, but is still equally useless for seeing what people are saying.  (Unless you hover over the squares).  That's okay though, because it's Art.