Wilted buttercup, grey skies, and geek

So, MIT has recently put out a service which via animating some pretty colours presents a user with a pictorial description of their “online persona”. The service is called Personas, and my persona can be found below. I like the thought of being aware of your digital persona, due to my interest in the topic during my PhD studies, my involvement in the Memories for Life network, and my current role work at Garlik, I give lots of thought to what it means to capture a snap shot of a someones digital persona or to even attempt to capture it in its entirety. I guess this could have implications to the way we are force fed online advertising, through to the thought of one day having a digital nomenclature, which feeds information about everyone you encounter, letting you judge for yourself…

Anyways, so I typed in my first and last name into the Personas site, and low and behold, this is result I was shown :

Mischa Tuffield's MIT Personas 240809

Apparently, the three most prominent of my online characteristics are : “online, sports, illegal”. Hehe, I guess the online bit makes some sense, and after scratching my head, and re-running the service I think I have sussed it :

• Online: yeah well …
• Sports: I must be due to this article I was mentioned in in the Telegraph. It was a feature in a technology section, which a part of motoring technology supplement. So, I guess that makes some sense
• Illegal: Well this one puzzled me for a while, but I think the people at MIT think I am a identity thief, hehe…

Which would definitely not be a good thing given that I am currently working trying to help people defend themselves from ID Fraud. So why, does Personas come to this conclusion? I think it is down to a blog post which a friend of mine Tom Heath wrote a while back, where you used the following words “was trying to steal my identity (presumably because he had a fragment of RDF about me in his FOAF file)”. This is a perfect example of how natural language processing can fail, and how much more sophisticated metrics must be used if we are to identify accusations, opinions, or any more complex statements from free text. Tom’s blog post was actually going on about how Google’s Social Graph API failed to understand his FOAF file, merging myself and Tom into one person, another technological fail, but I guess they follow on nicely from each other…

I should note that Google’s SocialGraph API is doing a better job than when it started, and as far as I am aware it now understands RDF natively, via libraptor.

I have been looking for a set of links for all of the (Linked Open Data) LOD clouds so that I could have a pictorial description of how the LOD cloud has evolved since it was first assembled. Sadly there are no links to the old LOD clouds on from the LOD cloud’s home on the web.

So I hacked together a dirty perl script to see if I could guess the URLs for the old clouds, the code looks like so :

#!/usr/bin/perl

$rootUrl = ‘http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/’;

#now to brute force the URL mangling to grab all of the pictures

for ($i = 2007 ; $i < 2010; $i++) {
for ($j = 1 ; $j < 13; $j++) {
for ($k = 1; $k < 32; $k++) {
$stringToFetch = $rootUrl.”lod-datasets_$i-”.make_big($j).”-”.make_big($k).”.png”;

`wget $stringToFetch`;

}
}
}

#padding out string …
sub make_big($) {
my $string = shift;
if (length($string) == 1) {
$string = “0″.$string;
}
return $string;
}

After running the script I have found the following old instances of the LOD cloud :

• http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/lod-datasets_2007-10-08.png
• http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/lod-datasets_2007-11-07.png
• http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/lod-datasets_2007-11-10.png
• http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/lod-datasets_2008-02-28.png
• http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/lod-datasets_2008-03-31.png
• http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/lod-datasets_2009-07-14.png

Finally, I still don’t think I have the first LOD cloud, would love to know its URL if anyone out there knows it!

Meh,

So we now have more links from dbpedia to other RDF resources on the web. Dbpedia now links from dbpedia classes to freebase ones, this example SPARQL query gives some examples of the described linkage. None of these make any sense to me. Why have people decided to use owl:equivalentClass and not owl:sameAs (ducks behind computer screen). Neither of the two seem correct to me, am guessing there is a skos:broader relationship (or something similar) which would be more appropriate, but at least we have come to accept that owl:sameAs tends to get abused, do we really need to loose faith in the semantics of the other OWL classes. Does anyone know why dbpedia decided to go this way?

The OWL spec defines owl:equivalentClass to be :

“A class axiom may contain (multiple) owl:equivalentClass statements. owl:equivalentClass is a built-in property that links a class description to another class description. The meaning of such a class axiom is that the two class descriptions involved have the same class extension (i.e., both class extensions contain exactly the same set of individuals).”

I really don’t think these links are suitable for the knowledge at hand. Perhaps even rdfs:subClassOf would be more fitting.

I have long been thinking about how the interweb affects the notion of practical obscurity and how one can no longer expect to be forgiven for a crime after they have served their sentence.

An example I have used for a while now is the Georgia Sex Offenders mashup

http://www.georgia-sex-offenders.com/maps/offenders.php

IMHO sites like the above one will just end up creating ghettos of sex offenders as real-estate agents start to adopt such online resources to help sell properties to future homeowners. Eventually we will see neighbourhoods of sex offenders as no family would ever choose to live next to a rehabilitated offender. The key word in the previous sentence being “rehabilitated”, as they have been released by the judicial system into the community as reformed human beings.

Now one can install an iPhone App, which tells the phone own about sex offenders in their local area, GPS/web magic, note that this only works in the US :

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/5918923/iPhone-app-tracks-sex-offenders.html

I believe that practical obscurity is a dying concept. At this point in the post I should stress that I DON’T classify sex offences are petty crimes, but I believe that the advent of such data on the web will set a president for other forms of crimes to be being posted to the public domain. I can easily imagine a future where all crimes committed in some US state X are posted to the web.

For example, high-school student Bob gets arrested for shop-lifting and gets a minor punishment that could be community service or something of a similar vain. Alice a classmate of Bob’s finds this so funny that she posts it to whatever cool social network she is currently a member of, pushing it into the public domain. Now after Bob has served his sentence in pre-interweb days this information would have been practically obscure, it would have been logged in a filing cabinet in some local magistrate court, and unless you had the impetus to seek out this information you would probably never have found out about it. Alice would have been able to communicate the “funny story” to her social network, but those conversation’s would not have been in the public domain. And now they would be.

Well that is all from me, would love to know if people in the US have installed this APP, and wonder how many linch mobs are going to run around US cities taking following their trusty iPhone and taking the law into their own hands. Here is a link to an article which describes some of the vigilantism which occured in the UK after the tabloid new paper “The News of the World” published a list of sex offenders in the year 2000. Do excuse the fact that I am pointing to a document on the “world socialist web site”, but it seems to report the story well

Furthermore, Kieron O’Hara, Nigel Shadbolt and I wrote a paper touching on this a while back, it can be downloaded from ECS eprints.