Integrating laconi.ca to SMOB

Gautier (aka lespetitescases) just hacked his SMOB client to make it post on identi.ca as well as on twitter. He’s using the new laconica API combined with the same method that SMOB uses at the moment to post on twitter (CURL + HTTP-Auth). As this feature was on the TODO list and some people were asking for it (a thread was also started by John recently on both SIOC and identi.ca mailing-lists) that was a really great news !

I just added those changes to the SMOB client (get it or update from svn) , so that it can now be used to post on identi.ca ! Moreover, I added the ability to post not only on identi.ca but on any laconi.ca based microblogging platform. You’ll see news parameter in the config_dist.php file, that let you set-up a list of servers with dedicated user / pass, as follows. Then, when publishing an update, you’ll be able to choose those servers as well as the previous ones (including twitter), and enjoy multiple-posting:

Then it’s browsable everywhere, but you still own it locally as RDF data so that you can re-use it later, etc.

Once again, merci Gautier !

Social Music meets the Semantic Web

No much time to blog at the moment, as I’m mainly concentrated on writing my PhD thesis (and so I wish best of luck - and motivation - to the ones in the same case !)

Yet, I gave a talk at a Center For Digital Music seminar last week, invited there by Yves Raimond.  The goal was to showcase how the usual suspects of the Social Semantic Web (FOAF / SIOC / MOAT / LOD) can be used in the context of music-related services and can provide new ways regarding music recommendation. If you’re interested in music-related computing (not only from a SW point of view), you may also be interested in browsing the lab homepage and various projects they host (as the Giant Instrument and others like 3D-sound modeling, automatic mixing or human-synth beat-box)

SDoW2008 deadline extended

The SDoW deadline have been extended to the 4th of August, so that you have two additional weeks to submit your paper, demo or poster.

The 1st Social Data on the Web workshop (SDoW2008) co-located with the 7th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2008) aims to bring together researchers, developers and practitioners involved in semantically-enhancing social media websites, as well as academics researching more formal aspect of these interactions between the Semantic Web and Social Media.  

Complete details about the workshop can be found on its website. Also note that the poster and demo submissions can be up to 3 pages in LNCS format, while it was 2-pages only at the begining.

ESWC2008 slides

I finally uploaded the slides of the various talks I gave at last ES(W)C in Tenerife:

• “FOAF and SIOC applications“, invited talk at Harry Halpin’s “Social Networks” tutorial (embeds at the end of that post)
• “MOAT: Meaning Of A Tag“, lightning talk at the LOD BOF
• “Towards and Interlinked Semantic Wiki-Farm“, SemWiki2008 (paper will be online later on the workshop proceedings and was awarded best paper - thanks for the kiwis )
• “Microblogging: A Semantic Web and Distributed Approach“, SFSW2008 (paper)
• “Social Network Portability panel introduction“

As you can see, it was a busy but - once again - really valuable week. Lots of quality papers, especially, from my point of view, the ones about querying (esp. distributed approaches like DARQ - more details on Orri Erling’s blog), LOD-related (Semantic Sitemaps) and the OntoGame one. Readers of this blog should also be interested in xOperator, an approach combining LOD, social networking and instant messaging.

Interesting things were also presented during the workshops, as SWOOKI (a Semantic P2P wiki), ACEWiki (a wiki using controlled natural language to model both ontology and instances from the wiki, with reasoning capabilities using Pellet) and the use of semantic wikis for mathematics, which was particulary interesting from the use-case point of view, as for Flyspeck. Also nice (and sometimes fun) papers and demos in the SFSW workshop (congrats to Benjamin!) and in the demo session, as RDBToOnto that mine ontologies (and instances) from relational databases.

Another interesting fact for LOD-ers are the first steps of voiD, a vocabulary to describe datasets (which could efficiently combined with the previously mentioned work on distributed SPARQL: send your query on the Web, let the system find datasources, query and merge).

Finally, as in Beijing, it was a great opportunity to meet people I knew only online. Hope to see you in Karlsruhe!

Choose WordPress RSS format in admin interface

Here’s a patch for WordPress 2.3 (SVN version) to allow admin choose the format of RSS feeds:

Moving to WordPress

I’m currently moving my blog and other services on this website to a complete WordPress architecture. I used DotClear since I started to blog, but wanted to try WP and some of its templates and plug-ins for a long time.

The blog is online, services should be back soon, and are temporary available at http://tmp.apassant.net. Blog feed is still available - using redirect - at http://apassant.net/blog/feed (now in RSS 1.0), but some URIs changed, so the feed may be updated in your agregator. I’ll try to generate rewrite rules for old posts.

Finally, feed URLs may change in a near future as I plan to provide differents feeds on this website (blog feed, services feed …) and maybe use feedburner to get some stats about it.

Using Twitter from irssi

There’s a lot of ways to update your Twitter status / browse friends without going on their website (which is sometimes really slow !). You can also simply use curl in bash.

I choosed wd, to make it work through irssi.

In irssi type:

 /alias twit /exec wd $*
/save 

Then you can use

 /twit 
/twit myfriend 

to see your friends status (no arg = all friends, arg = one friend), or

 /twit -sv my new status 

to update yours .

Laneo, le Web 2.0 au service de l’écologie

Disponible dans de nombreuses langues et basé en France, Laneo propose une initiative intéressante de site participatif:

Comment fonctionne Laneo?

Vous répondez à des questionnaires concernant vos activités en plein air. Nous compilons les résultats de ces recherches.

Des organisations nous achètent ces résultats. Nous reversons l’argent récolté à des initiatives écologiques de nettoyage.

Vous votez pour l’organisme qui recevra ces dons. Nous vous tenons au courant de leurs avancées.

La planète devient un terrain de jeu plus propre.

Le site compte actuellement un peu plus de 1000 inscrits, c’est le moment de devenir membre !

A reference for folksonomies

This page is a static permanent web document. It has been written to provide a place to cite the coinage of folksonomy.

By Thomas Vanderwal, who first used the term folksonomy.

BlogTalk Reloaded

I’ll flight to Vienna tomorrow morning to attend BlogTalk Reloaded.

My talk about “Folksonomies, Ontologies and Corporate Blogging” is planned to be monday at noon, while Uldis should present the one dedicated to SIOC (co-writen with John^[1] and myself) on thurdsay morning.

There should be a lot of interesting talks during these two days, I’m especially waiting for the ones about social software in companies, presentation of the Google-Data API, but also about social aspects of blogging. Well, I also hope to meet new people, so if you’re frequently reading this blog, just come to say hello.

Next Page →

• About

  This is the personal website of Alexandre Passant, PhD student in the Semantic Web and Social Software area.

• Websites

  • doap:store
  • FOAFMap
  • MOAT Project

• Current highlights

  

• Recent Posts

  • BBC, LOD and the Music Ontology
  • Integrating laconi.ca to SMOB
  • Social Music meets the Semantic Web
  • SDoW2008 deadline extended
  • ESWC2008 slides