The conference was well organized and interesting. The venues were quite unique: I gave my keynote talk in the grand auditorium of the Finnish National Museum, and also listened to other presentation at Kiasma, the National Museum of Contemporary Art.
As for the background of this question of "isolation" of data (specifically, semantic isolation), I have had endless conversations with my colleague Ian Oliver abut the topic. Ian has now written a very nice series of blog posts on this, you will find them worth reading (part 1, part 2 and part 2½).
]]>So far, the thinking goes like this: "apps" are the concrete manifestation of locking data, logic and/or presentation in a proverbial "silo", and as such contribute to the fragmentation of information space. "There's an app for that" should be thought of as a curse, not as something positive.
Read Ian's blog entry on this, it goes more into details about our idea of "isolation", how apps isolate data and prevent access, reuse and integration.
I will give a keynote talk at the CIDOC 2012 conference in June, and will discuss these thoughts. This has been long time coming, and I look forward to discussing/debating this with folks.
]]>Now I have been thinking mostly what existing software I could use in the reimplementation. Last few years, many good quality libraries for Common Lisp have emerged. Here's my current thinking about the most critical bits:
Many other libraries also under consideration (URIs/URLs, EXIF metadata extraction, JSON, etc.).
On a slightly different topic, someone suggested I should consider reimplementing Wilbur in Clojure. Certainly then the availability of libraries would not be a problem.
]]>If I were to redesign and reimplement Wilbur (probably as "Wilbur 3" this time), I would like to base it on
I also have some ideas about how to take the code written for OINK and use it as some kind of an "object-relational mapper" (or RDF equivalent thereof).
]]>The workshop was very interesting, revealing a couple of things of particular interest (to me):
If everything goes well, we will start some new work on clarifying what Linked Data applications will look like, and how to build them. Another small step towards my real goal, the adoption and deployment of Semantic Web technologies.
]]>The Wilbur toolkit is now at least 10 years old, and during its lifetime the project yielded one Ph.D and almost a dozen conference papers. It also served as a foundational experimentation tool and helped us develop a better understanding of the problems and solutions of RDF processing and storage. The spirit of Wilbur will continue to live on in the Piglet toolkit, released as part of the Smart-M3 system.
I will continue to answer questions about Wilbur should somebody have any...
]]>Many thanks to everyone who participated (it was standing room only!). My particular thanks go to Lalana Kagal of MIT who did most of the work to get this workshop together.
]]>It has been an interesting year, with many interesting discussions on context-awareness, Semantic Web, pervasive computing, etc. Mikko's work on "audio contexts" is quite cool. We have an upcoming paper in UBICOMM 2008.
]]>I hate picking names...
For now, I am renaming the Python wrapper "piglet" as well. We'll see how confusing that will be.
Some people also wrote to me about other RDF triple stores and toolkits written in Python. I should note that I am not implementing yet-another-Python-RDF-toolkit. Instead, I wrote a Python interface to the Piglet library (libpiglet) to allow us to start using it with our existing Python software. I think of it as an interim solution.
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