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Crowdsourcing Event Detection in YouTube Videos

Below are the slides from a paper of Ruben Verborgh and me titled Crowdsourcing Event Detection in YouTube Videos at the Workshop Detection, Representation, and Exploitation of Events in the Semantic Web (DeRiVE2011) at the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2011).

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International Conference on Next Generation Web Services Practices (NWeSP 2011)

These days I'm attending the International Conference on Next Generation Web Services Practices (NWeSP 2011), which takes place in Salamanca, Spain. Together with Ruben Verborgh, I have two papers there, the first one is titled Adding Meaning to Facebook Microposts via a Mash-up API and Tracking Its Data Provenance, the second one is titled Efficient Runtime Service Discovery and Consumption with Hyperlinked RESTdesc, where RESTdesc is mainly a brain child of Ruben. The slides for the first paper can be seen below:



The conference's host city Salamanca is a beautiful town in the Castilla y León community. The old town was declared a UNESCO world heritage in 1988. What I specifically like about the city is a tiny detail. Most public and private buildings and even things like the municipal bike rental system SalEnBici all use a beautiful antique font: the freely available Universitas Studii Salamantini font, which historically was used for graffitis that were written with bull blood. So goes the legend at least.

Image source: photo courtesy of El Rey del Mambo, used under a Creative Commons license.

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Generating the ellipsis character on Mac, Windows, Linux

Maybe this comes in handy for someone else besides me: to generate the ellipsis character ("…")^* on a Mac keyboard, press [Option] + [;] on a QWERTY keyboard, and (more logic) [Option] + [.] on a QWERTZ keyboard. [Option] is also known as [Alt] for all Mac newbies. Typography geeks might love this, but I'm also looking at you, anonymous Twitter user, where every character counts... (<= three dots, pun intended).

Addendum 1: Danny Ayers points out that on Linux you can use [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [u] (for Unicode) and then [2], [0], [2], [6], [Enter]. Or &#x2026; in HTML.

Addendum 2: Georg Portenkirchner points out that on Windows you can press and hold [Alt], and then press [0], [1], [3], [3] on the numpad, and finally release [Alt]. He writes five keystrokes for three dots -- that's just stupid (and probably why nobody uses the correct ellipsis). Nothing to be added to that…

^*) The ellipsis character is also known as "three dots", "triple dots", "dot, dot, dot", or "\ldots" in LaTeX, or as HTML entity "&hellip;").

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JSON Emergency Brake

In the W3C RDF Working Group, we are discussing JSON serialization formats for the Resource Description Framework, RDF. There are two advanced formats being considered, JSON-LD and RDF/JSON. I repost an email that I have sent to the public-rdf-wg mailing list:

===
TL;DR: in my humble opinion, we should not continue with RDF/JSON, but fully focus on JSON-LD even if it might take longer, as JSON-LD feels like JSON, whereas RDF/JSON feels like RDF in a JSON camouflage.
===

First and foremost, I want to apologize for whatever toes I step on with this email. This email is in no way meant as an offense to the individuals and companies involved, and I want to highlight that I'm in the comfortable - but also unthankful - position of the (hopefully) neutral observer, who enters the discussion when all the foundational work has already been done. By this foundational work I mean RDF/JSON [1] by Talis, and JSON-LD [2] by PaySwarm (forgive the simplification of not mentioning persons, but companies). Thanks! It's excellent! I could not have done it.

Now, in ISSUE-2 [3], we came to the conclusion to "(1) Incubate on something like JSON-LD, (2) make a REC on something like Talis RDF/JSON [...]". The more and more I look at both specs, the more and more I feel like the resolution we agreed on for ISSUE-2 was wrong. Following ACTION-38 [4] where Ivan had asked me to become a co-editor on the to-be-REC'ed Talis RDF/JSON that I accepted, the proposed workflow was Ian to commit a first draft of the document ([1] effectively), that could then be discussed.

I have fully re-read both specs, but all honestly, the actual eye-openers for me were a blog post [5] by Alexandre Passant and a tweet by Christopher Gutteridge [6]. JSON-LD is(*) about objects, simple default assumptions, elegancy, and developers in mind, whereas RDF/JSON seems to be created with the premise to carry all the expressiveness of RDF over to JSON, whatever the cost might be. Coming more from a JavaScript camp than from an RDF camp myself, this feels wrong. Of course I can see where RDF/JSON came from, and it completely makes sense from that perspective. In the next paragraph, I explain why.

Let me try to explain my main concerns with a bad metaphor (there's a long tradition of those...). Web developers, JavaScript people, those who speak JSON natively, are the cool kids. We are the detached youth workers [7] who put on an adidas hoodie, read up on street slang on the Internet, and try to behave just like the cool kids. We serve them RDF/JSON (yes, yes, yo, homie), but we will probably fail. They see through our plan, we risk to get laughed at. RDF/JSON just does not feel natural to them, and this now, at a critical point, where semantics are kind of back in the section "cool" of the news. Of
course I'm referring to schema.org(**). If we get a syntax REC out now that does not feel native to the cool kids (even if we incubate on something better [3]), we risk on losing traction. I have asked some Google JavaScript people for advise, and they feel "at home" in JSON-LD. It is the language they speak. I feel at home in JSON-LD. Others do [8], [9], [10]. The Twitter feedback on the RDF/JSON draft release [1] is relatively critical [11].

Now, those are tough claims and vague feelings, but I considered them important enough to write this email. Apologies again to whomever toes I have stepped on. My concrete proposition is: we refrain from working further on the RDF/JSON REC, and fully focus on JSON-LD instead. I would also like to back out of being an editor of [1], as I have not done anything at all on that spec yet, and because I feel it is wrong at this point in time, as hopefully explained in this email. While I have done very, very limited amounts of work on JSON-LD (just following the discussion mainly), I am happy to serve as an editor thereof in fulfillment of what I agreed on in ACTION-38 [4], but it feels like adorning myself with borrowed plumes, as the German saying goes, and very much undeserved. Maybe we can discuss this during one of the next RDF WG meetings, maybe even in a joint RDF - RDFa WG meeting.

In the hope of not having hurt too many feelings, but rather started a productive discussion instead.

Best,
Tom

[1] http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/rdf/raw-file/default/rdf-json/index.html
[2] http://json-ld.org/spec/latest/
[3] http://www.w3.org/2011/rdf-wg/track/issues/2
[4] http://www.w3.org/2011/rdf-wg/track/actions/38
[5] http://blog.seevl.net/2011/08/18/about-json-ld-and-content-negotiation/
[6] http://twitter.com/cgutteridge/status/105894098023620608
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_work#Detached_youth_work
[8] http://twitter.com/orlin/status/104926442843934721
[9] http://twitter.com/orlin/status/104797459292753920 (note the hashtag #unsemanticweblike)
[10] http://twitter.com/terraces/status/105066802740080640
[11] https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/rdf%20json%20-RT (realtime, might have changed when you click the link)

(*) When I write "is", "seems", etc., basically all verbs, all this
reflects my impression that I personally got. You can add an "IMHO"
suffix to each sentence. The spec authors will probably disagree with
some assumptions.

(**) I was not at all involved in any of the schema.org discussions,
plannings, the concept at all. All what I'm writing here on this
topic, I do it with my Google hat off.

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Thesis Proposal Passed

After a tough rehearsal session with my tutor at UPC.edu yesterday evening, today I have successfully passed the thesis proposal defense in front of a university committee. The viva voce slides can be seen below. Thanks to my tutors Kim Gabarró Vallés from UPC and Michael Hausenblas from DERI for their very valuable input. Thanks to Arnaud Brousseau for taking over most of the I-SEARCH work in the last few weeks, so that I could focus on #TomsPhD. Yay, good day!

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