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 !
Tags: identi.ca, laconi.ca, lespetitescases, microblogging, sioc, smob
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!
Tags: eswc, eswc2008, moat, semwiki, sfsw2008, sioc, smob
Fixig SMOB
Here are the scripts to fix the recent SMOB bug:
- http://apassant.net/home/2008/06/smobfix/bugfix-client.phps
- http://apassant.net/home/2008/06/smobfix/bugfix-server.phps
I remember a quote from Benjamin on #semsol (but I can’t find it in the logs - is there a related SPARQL endpoint ?) where he hoped that one day, people would consider RDF programming as ‘normal programming’. I think that SPARUL (especially at the triples level) is really helpful for that, since adding / deleting statements is more than easy. Combined with SPARQL capabilities and used, for instance, with ARC2 and its 3-lines-of-code endpoint, everyone should be able to go into SemWeb programming without aditional skills than the one required by usual PHP/MySQL applications.
Warning: SMOB bugfix
cc-ed on sioc-dev
If some of you are using SMOB publishing / aggregating tools [1],
please consider reading this.
The current prototype used sioc:MicroBlogPost class, while its URI in
SIOC spec is sioc:MicroblogPost.
I fixed it in SVN, but if you update some client or server now, it
won’t work with old data.
A patch to replace old URIs to new ones in existing applications will
be available soon.
But if you start developing code or implementing a server now, please
checkout the new svn code.Sorry for any inconvenience !
Alex.
SMOB en français
Un de mes tort sur ce blog est sans doute de ne pas publier assez en français. Heureusement certains s’en chargent, et plutôt bien. Voila donc 2 billets au sujet de SMOB, un premier par (l’inévitable 
) Gautier, et un second de Nicolas accompagné d’un excellent screencast. D’autre part, sur l’initiative de Got et avec l’appui d’Eric, un serveur a été mis en place sur smob.websemantique.org. Plus d’excuse pour ne pas l’utiliser !
Au niveau de SMOB lui-même, pas eu trop le temps de coder récemment, mais les choses devraient s’accélérer courant Juin (j’ai donc bien lu ton billet). En attendant, je le présenterai lundi prochain à SFSW, avec un programme toujours aussi intéressant pour ceux qui veulent des exemples d’applications concrètes du WS. Quand à la conférence principale, elle s’annonce riche en événements et présentations de qualité. Et pour ceux qui veulent en savoir plus sur le programme, il est bien sur disponible en RDF… à vos requêtes !
Promoting SMOB via Twitter
Any status update posted to Twitter from a SMOB client now features a ‘from SMOB‘ link, a good way for semwebbers to promote it.
A v0.1 release is planned soon, but if you already want to use it, just get the latest svn version.This one also features the firsts steps of RDFa integration in the client homepage, as you can see there.
SIOC-based microblogging
As John Breslin already detailed last week, we (Tuukka Hastrup, Uldis Bojars, John and myself) recently work on SMOB, a semantic microblogging architecture, that will be presented at next SFSW workshop, co-located with ESWC in Tenerife.
While there have been a lot of buzz recently regarding ways to provide open alternatives to Twitter, then fun thing is that we worked on this in last January while I visited DERI. Our main goal was to show how Semantic Web technologies could provide an open-platform for such way of publishing content, mainly using FOAF and SIOC. Moreover, one of our aim was also to demonstrate how such technologies can provide users a way to control, share and remix their data as they want, not depending on a third-party service, a goal also shared by the dataportability project. In that way, SMOB-published data really belongs to the user that wrote it. Indeed, while SMOB servers (which display a faceted view of agregated posts as you can see on the demo server) store data in their local triple-store, this information (i.e. each update) is hosted on the client side and available in RDF.
At the moment, the complete updates dataset is public, and can be browsed with any RDF browser as the picture below shows (with Tabulator) but we plan to introduce more advanced authentication and privacy issues, in which OpenID could have a role to play.
Users can parse it as any RDF data, mash-it up with other information, eg their FOAF profile (SMOB allows to re-use existing FOAF profile as the foaf:maker of each update), or any other RDF data. And most important, if a SMOB server closes, they still own their data.
Moreover, since SMOB content is SIOC-based, it becomes part of the SIOC-o-sphere, and could be merged with your other social media contributions (from any SIOC application) and discovered thanks to recent APIs and WordPress plug-in introduced by Sindice (automatic PTSW / Sindice pings will be soon in the code repository). This is one more advantage of getting a common semantics to model your data wherever they come from.
Finally, we just introduced in SMOB a way to publish not only to a dedicated server, but also to Twitter. So that you’ll get a real-time, self-hosted and long-life archive of your twits in RDF. Isn’t that cool ?
Tags: dataportability, microblogging, sioc, smob, twitter
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