ChEBI: Too much, too young?

Some dictionaries try to describe too much. When it comes to writing down knowledge, it isn't always easy to know where to stop. To define scope, the BI in ChEBI stands for "Biological Interest". So this begs the question, why does ChEBI describe all sorts of subatomic particles that are of little (or no) biological relevance? While electrons (ChEBI:10545) and protons (ChEBI:24636) play an important role in Biology, you have to wonder what the biological interest of neutrinos (ChEBI:36352) and bosons (ChEBI:36341) is. Who decides what is "biologically interesting" and how?

Then there is the inescapable legacy of IUPAC, which ChEBI aligns itself with closely, but unfortunately IUPAC is a bit dated and cumbersome (or so I'm told).

ChEBI: I just can't get enough?

Some people are never happy. Take any dictionary or ontology and they will pick holes in it. "It doesn't say this, it doesn't say that, this is wrong" etc. In no particular order:

• The master copy of ChEBI is stored in an Oracle database. However, a common way of sharing ChEBI is the be OBO flat file format, but this is difficult to reason with. This means you can't easily check ChEBI for contradictions and many of the relationships in ChEBI ("is-a" etc) have to be maintained by hand. This is a tedious and error prone process, where some relationships could be inferred by a reasoner. A mapping from OBO to OWL is available to make reasoning possible in the future.
• ChEBI could be much better aligned and related with other ontologies [2,3], like the Gene Ontology for example.
• ChEBI could also be aligned with wikipedia as well, no seriously, I'm not joking (and neither is Peter Murray-Rust)!
• Many of the structures shown are not what the id says, e.g. glucose-6-phosphate (ChEBI:17665) is not the acid in the picture and or the one represented by the inchi.
• Things like Mg-ADP and Mg-ATP which is the form most present in biology, are not currently present
• Sugar alcohols are poorly represented, are all the hexoses (ChEBI:18133) present as well?
• Could be more closely integrated with LIPID Metabolites And Pathways Strategy (lipidmaps.org), ChEBI already does this.

If I missed anything off the list, of things that are "wrong" with ChEBI, please let me know. If you're going to the workshop, see you there (alongwith Christoph Steinbeck and maybe Kirill Degtyarenko I suppose)

• In RESTful Web Services vs. Big Web Services: Making the Right Architectural Decision, Cesare Pautasso, Olaf Zimmermann and Frank Leymann, claim to be able to objectify the WS-* vs. REST debate by giving a "quantitative technical comparison based on architectural principles and decisions". It's an interesting read, especially if you find Big Web Services "bloated opaque and insanely complex".

• In Investigating Web Services on the World Wide Web Eyhab Al-Masri and Qusay H. Mahmoud from the University of Guelph describe some interesting results from their Web Service Crawler Engine (WSCE). They outline some of the problems of building service registries and offer some solutions too.

• Also, in Wishful Search: Interactive Composition of Data Mashups Anton V. Riabov, Eric Bouillet, Mark D. Feblowitz, Zhen Liu and Anand Ranganathan from the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center describe Mashup Automation with Runtime Orchestration and Invocation (MARIO), a new tool for composing Yahoo! Pipes! style mashups on the web.

In parallel to the main sessions, the W3C Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group (HCLSIG) held a successful workshop chaired by Susie Stephens and Ivan Herman has blogged about another Semantic Web session here. For a full description of WWW2008, see the program overview. Next year WWW2009.org will be in Madrid, Spain.

Mañana, mañana...

References

1. Liping Wei and Jun Yu [2008] Bioinformatics in China: A personal perspective PLoS Computational Biology 4(4): e1000020. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000020, pubmed.gov/18437216
2. Pautasso, C., Zimmermann, O., and Leymann, F. [2008] Restful web services vs. "big'' web services: making the right architectural decision. In WWW '08: Proceeding of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web, pages 805-814, DOI:10.1145/1367497.1367606
3. Al-Masri, E. and Mahmoud, Q. H. [2008] Investigating web services on the world wide web. In WWW '08: Proceeding of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web, pages 795-804, DOI:10.1145/1367497.1367605
4. Riabov, A., Bouillet, E., Feblowitz, M., Liu, Z., and Ranganathan, A. [2008] Wishful search: interactive composition of data mashups. In WWW '08: Proceeding of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web, pages 775-784. DOI:10.1145/1367497.1367602

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[Great Wall of China picture by d'n'c]

Dal transcript dell'intervista del 7 febbraio 2008 a Tim Berners Lee da parte di Paul Miller di Talis.

TBL chiarisce innanzi tutto il campo di azione del Semantic Web, che viene spesso visto come "estrazione di concetti dai testi", cosa vera ma non rappresentativa ne' esaustiva, ed indica che l'associare i dati (testi o dati nel senso piu' largo) ai concetti  chiave di un'azienda o di un mondo piu' largo puo' essere utile e praticabile con profitto in moltissime situazioni diverse per scopi diversi. Cito:

"I think the Semantic Web is such a broad set of technologies and is going to do so many different things for different people. It is really difficult to put it on one thing. What are the steps necessary right now for the life sciences community to be able to use it for their data about proteins is probably different from which steps do we need to be able to get interoperability between repositories of library data and museum data."
C'e' poi una frase che mi fa particolarmente felice, perche' conferma la visione che in Gruppoimola abbiamo sempre avuto delle tecnologie semantiche, che abbiamo interpretato come un vantaggio immediato nell'integrazione intelligente di forme diverse di dati, che permette di integrare dati da fonti diverse secondo una logica comune. Abbiamo usato queste tecnologie per integrare dati provenienti da repository diversi (file system, WebDav, blog, wiki, database) e permetterne navigazione, ricerca, elaborazione e modifica in ambienti diversi da quelli in cui i dati risiedono fisicamente, come ad esempio applicazioni e portali. Ecco la frase:

"So the Semantic Web is about integration, it is like getting power when you use the data, it is giving people in the company the ability to do queries across the huge amounts of data the company has."
Si accusa poi di un errore nella comunicazione riguardo a cosa il Semantic Web sia, dicendo che sarebbe stato molto piu' veloce da comprendere se avesse detto che era un approccio per la "enterprise and intra-enterprise data integration" , che e' esattamente la visione che abbiamo praticato da quattro anni a questa parte:

"....I think, that really what we have... the message has been... it was looking too far into the future. ....
... the gain from the Semantic Web comes much before that. So maybe we should have written about enterprise and intra-enterprise data integration and scientific data integration. So, I think, data integration is the name of the game. That's happening, it's showing benefits. Public data as well; public data is happening and it is providing the fodder for all kinds of mashups.
So, what we should realize is that the return on investment will come much earlier when we just have got this interoperable data that we can query over."
E alla domanda di che libro dovrebbe scrivere ora, dopo la strada gia' fatta dalle tecnologie semantiche, cioe' di quale e' l'argomento da fissare e organizzare, dimostra di nuovo di essere sui nostri stessi binari, parlando esplicitamete di architettura con cui il Semantic Web si deve integrare con il resto dell'esistente:

"I would like to write a whole bunch of technical books about actually practically how to do Semantic Web things. I'd like to write a book about Semantic Web Architecture. And I'd like to write a book sort of painting the path for people in the industry, because I get a lot of questions along the lines of "OK, I read the specs, OK, but here I am, I am the CIO of a company, what does it mean for us now, what should we do?""
Non casualmente ci siamo gia' occupati di questo argomento e ne parliamo al JavaOne.
Il tema e' una architettura standard di integrazione per produrre metadati e dati semantici al fine di produrre semantic web e semantic integration.

TBL enfatizza piu' volte che non vanno creati nuovi dati in forme nuove per avere il Semantic Web: il modo di trarre vantaggio dal Semantic Web c'e' gia' adesso e sta nell'utilizzare dati che gia' esistono in forme eterogenee, e' nell'integrazione dei dati attuali, presenti nei database, nei file system, nei dati interni delle applicazioni (CRM, ERP, sistemi documentali, wiki, blog, etc.):

"So, where is the data going to come from? It's already there. It's in databases. So, most of this data is in databases. Often the data is already available through some kind of a Web interface."

C'e' un punto dell'intervista in cui TBL si sofferma sul modo in cui si produce l'RDF (cioe' il dato standard semantico a fronte del dato proprietario nel database), che ci porta proprio sul caso d'uso dei componenti JBI per il Semantic Web, soluzione che supera la via che TBL propone, e che secondo me e' incongruente con la visione si architettura semantica detta sopra, perche' troppo legata alla scrittura custom di codice:

".... Well, there's a couple of ways of doing it. Say that you've got a database-type website. One way to do it is to look at it... let's stay with the printers, for example. When you look at the website you notice there's a page on the printer, which has got the specifications, and it's got a little table of the properties of the printer. And there's a PHP script somewhere, which produces that.
So, you get somebody who understands these things to write another PHP script which is totally parallel, which just expresses the same information in RDF. That's all. "

Lo scopo dei nostri BC JBI e' proprio quello di non dover scrivere quel codice ma di configurare il componente sull'ESB perche' cio' avvenga automaticamente quando si inseriscono, modificano o cancellano i dati sul database o nel repository proprietario, creando cosi' una architettura di integrazione semantica.

Commentero' successivamente la seconda parte dell'intervista, che e' lunghissima e densa di argomenti interessanti da approfondire.

Claudio Bergamini

Sono componenti che partendo da metadati proprietari producono strutture standard semantiche (FOAF per le persone, DOAP per i progetti, etc.). Sono un punto chiave per integrare in architetture SOA, ed in particolare Enterprise, dati interni ed esterni anche in grossi volumi ed all'interno di processi applicativi esistenti.

Non possiamo ancora rivelare troppo di questi progetti ma maggio non e' poi cosi' lontano.

Questo progetto e' il risultato dello sforzo congiunto di Imola Informatica e SensibleLogic, cioe' tra la visione architetturale enterprise e la ricerca sulle tecnologie semantiche.

Grazie a Raffaele Spazzoli, Christian Morbidoni, Giovanni Tummarello e Michele Barbera per aver fornito idee e supporto per arrivare a questo risultato.

Enabling semantic web technologies with JBI. Here is the abstract.

Semantic web is a way to represent and manipulate informations that allows very high flexibility on the way the information are aggregated, accessed and presented. To leverage existing information base we need ways to get these information and translate them into a semantic form. There many standard ontologies broadly accepted like FOAF (for representing person data and person relationships), DOAP (for representing project data), Dublin Core (for representing document data) etc.... The act of transforming information from a proprietary format to a semantic representation is called RDF-alization. An ESB JBI can be the right integration middleware to perform this task because it can easily collect data in proprietary format from different sources and, by redefining RDF-alizers as JBI component, can feed semantic web enabled application.

For the Semantic Web guys JBI (Java Business Integration) is a Java Standard for Enterprise Service Bus pltforms supported by Sun, Apache, Oracle, JBoss etc. for Service Oriented Integration. Imola is already releasing a series of JBI components: JBI4cics, JBI4corba, JBI4esb included or certified for Sun OpenESB, Apache ServiceMix, and working in all the JBI compliant ESBs.

Follow this track: this is an important step to introduce semantic standards and technologies in the current Enterprise Architectures!

Come molti di voi sapranno Gruppoimola e' da anni impegnato sul Semantic Web. SensibleLogic e' nata due anni fa proprio con lo slogan "Semantic Web now" a sottolineare come per noi iniziasse il momento in cui questi standard e queste tecnologie potevano trovare spazio nelle aziende. La percezione che il "momentum" stesse arrivando si e' rivelata corretta in occasione dell'evento I vantaggi della Semantica nel Business di Giugno 2007, quando oltre 50 partecipanti hanno confortato questa impressione.
In questi giorni altri episodi hanno confermato quella che ormai per noi e' una certezza: e' iniziata la vera introduzione delle tecnologie semantiche sia a livello Internet che a livello enterprise, e quindi da ora in poi la resistenza e gli scetticismi dovranno diminuire ancora di un po'.

Primo episodio

Tim Berners Lee rilascia l'intervista a ReadWrite Web, sito top del Web 2.0 in cui dice ".. the Time for the Semantic Web is Now". Potete leggere l'intervista, ascoltarla, leggere il transcript.

Secondo episodio

Reuters ha rilasciato un servizio online (web service) usabile gratuitamente chiamato Calais.
Le funzionalita' del servizio sono di annotare semanticamente i testi (anzi i "contenuti") producendo RDF in uscita. Ci sono i sorgenti che permettono di incapsulare questa funzionalita' nelle applicazioni.
E' solo in inglese per ora, ma e' un passo importante perche' dietro c'e' una azienda come Reuters a indicare la serieta' della direzione in cui il Semantic Web sta andando.

Terzo episodio

Cito testualmente Yahoo Serch Blog:

"we plan to support vocabulary components from Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, and others based on feedback. And, we will support RDFa and eRDF markup to embed these into existing HTML pages. Finally, we are announcing support for the OpenSearch specification, with extensions for structured queries to deep web data sources."
Ecco il post completo.

Una immagine di cosa ci possiamo aspettare lo si puo' vedere nell'immagine in testa al post.

I went down to the beach and saw Yahoo
She was, like, all “semantic web”
And I was, like, "whatever!"

References

1. Liam Lynch (2003) (Well this is my) United States of Whatever
2. Yours Truly (2007) Burn, Semantic Web Burn!
3. Yours Truly (2005) Rethinking the Semantic Web, The Semantic Web (stack): Will It All End In Tiers?

So, take a little Web 2.0, add some People 2.0, throw in some lashings of your favourite Science and you've got Science 2.0. See also Science -2.0, Science 2.0? and Why Web 2.0 is failing in Biology and Papers 2.0 for where and why Science 2.0 might fail.

References

1. Philip E. Bourne, J. Lynn Fink and Mark Gerstein [2008] Open Access: Taking Full Advantage of the Content PLoS Computational Biology 4(3): e1000037. pubmed.gov/18369428, DOI:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000037
2. Picture of e-Science hero Jim Gray from Esther Dyson

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OWL be there for you, when the rain starts to pour. Software engineer Leigh Dodds explains how:
"

Has anyone actually sat down and tried to elucidate the ways in which technologies like RDF and OWL actually help with data integration? I don't ever remember seeing one so here's a first attempt."

1. The One Where We Share Identifiers...
2. The One Where We're Describing the Same Thing...
3. The One Where We're Speaking Different Languages...
4. The One Where We're Using Different Units...
5. The One Where We're Speaking At Different Levels of Abstraction...

--Leigh Dodds

Read the rest in How Shall I Integrate Thee? Let Me Count the Ways... and Has Leigh Dodds been watching too many episodes of Friends?

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За последнее время я пробовал использовать в личных целях четыре довольно разных и нехарактерных CMS. Это следующие системы:

1. RDF Notes System
2. DLWiki
3. Backpack & Writeboard
4. TiddlyWiki

Первая была создана мною в виде наброска, акцент был на хранении метаинформации. Вторая — это адаптация свободной PmWiki, сделанная моим знакомым и работающая на PHP под Apache HTTP Server, третья — пара простых сервисов компании 37 Signals, четвёртая — локальная wiki в одном файле. Плюс к этому, я пробовал хранить простое содержимое в тектовом формате в файлах, а также думал над CMS на Python под CherryPy, которая походила бы каркасом на Apache Cocoon. Наконец, последние мысли были связаны с применением Atom Publication Protocol (APP) для приведения CMS хоть к какому-то общему знаменателю с точки зрения машинного, а не человеческого (Web GUI) интерфейса.

До сих пор нельзя работать с информацией, используя простые понятия и удобные инструменты, по аналогии с универсальностью интерфейса файловых систем.

Обнаруженные наиболее перспективные идеи:

• Стандартный протокол доступа и публикации (в стиле REST на основе HTTP, см. APP)
• Различные форматы содержимого, определяемые своим Content-Type
• Интеграция форматов за счёт XML и ссылок URI
• Использование либо интерфейсного сервера, выдающего пользователю веб-интерфейс к веб-сервису, либо расширения к браузеру
• Поиск возможностей использования технологий Semantic Web везде, где это ничего не усложняет

Как это соотносится с вашими мыслями? Что думаете вы о CMS в целом и об их роли в вебе?

LinqToRdf Changes:
- support for SPARQL type casting
- numerous bug fixes
- better support for identity projections
- more SPARQL relational operators
- latest versions of SemWeb & SPARQL Engine, incorporating recent bug
fixes and enhancements of each of them

I have also released a new graphical designer to auto-generate C# entity models as well as N3 ontology specifications from UML-like designs. This new download is an extension to Visual Studio 2008 beta 2, and should make working with LinqToRdf easier for those who are not that familiar with the W3 Semantic Web specifications.

Please let me know how you get on with them.

Con questo evento ci poiniamo l'obiettivo di fornire una visione chiara, indipendente e corretta del tema, esponendo i possibili scenati di applicazione e soprattutto evidenziando le opportunità di Business rispetto a cui le Tecnologie Semantiche risultano in qualche misura "abilitanti".
Siamo infatti convinti che le tecnologie semantiche possano svolgere già oggi un ruolo fondamentale per le realtà Enterprise con cui ci confrontiamo quotidianamente.

Le esperienze che stiamo avendo in ambito italiano ed internazionale ci confortano in tal senso ed avvalorano la nostra forte convinzione che il tema "Semantic Web", tipicamente presentato come futuribile ed adeguato ad ambiti "di ricerca", possa essere in realtà un elemento fondamentale all'interno di scenari attualissimi quali SOA, Information Portal e Knowledge Management; temi che nessuna realtà Enterprise può permettersi di ignorare.

Con il supporto di alcuni tra i migliori ricercatori italiani, cercheremo di rispondere a domande quali:

• Perchè devo interessarmi alle Tecnologie Semantiche? A cosa mi servono?
• Quale relazione c'è tra il Semantic Web, il Web 2.0 ed un ICT sempre più rivolto all'ottimizzazione dei costi, alla valorizzazione del business aziendale ed all'integrazione?
• Quali impatti hanno le Tecnologie Semantiche su discipline quali sicurezza ed integrazione?
• E' un modello rivolto alle aziende, agli utilizzatori o a entrambe le tipologie di soggetti?

A riprova dell'interesse relativo ai temi in agenda, abbiamo già raccolto partecipazioni da parte di Executive operativi presso molte aziende di importanza nazionale (gruppi bancari, assicurativi e telefonici). Alcune di queste hanno già avviato progetti significativi fondati su concetti e tecnologie "semantiche", altre hanno manifestato l'intenzione di avviarne a breve.

Per iscriversi alla Conference e per ulteriori dettagli
www.mokabyte.it

Gli altri contenuti notevoli della CEO Guide:

Domande e risposte con Tim Berners-Lee, il punto di ingresso.
Taming the World Wide Web, sulle esperienze Entrerprise di utilizzo del Semantic Web.

GruppoImola si occupa da oltre 2 anni di Semantic Web, e c'e' una sezione dedicata all'argomento sul Wiki Gruppoimola Tech Trends.

Stiamo pianificando per il mese di giugno 2007 un evento divulgativo su cosa oggi il Semantic Web puo' dare alle aziende, per scambiare idee e presentare lo stato attuale, con l'intervento di importanti speaker.

State collegati !!!

I'm a bit wary of the value of spending energy implementing validation on the client. The server-side processing always needs to implement this anyway. As far as I can tell, there's no mechanism for the application on the server to know that the content has been properly validated using a compliant agent in all instances. Therefore, the vo alue of any validation happening on the client is a shorter feedback loop for content-producers (users). However, in addition, in order for this feedback loop to be of use to users, they will need more information than the type and format of the correct input. The information most needed is why the particular application they are currently interacting with finds their input unacceptable.

I suggest creating protocol (perhaps based on atom publishing protocol) for exchanging messages between the client and application. This will allow users to continuously correct their input until the application responds that the impending submission will be processed faithfully. Then the users can commit their changes knowing that the application won't simply reject it, and developers can focus implementation energies on a single authoritative implementation. The strong typing characterized by the web forms 2 spec can be implemented as a base class available for application developers to subclass more appropriately to their own applications.

E' l'annuncio dei connettori jbi4corba e jbi4cics da noi realizzati che verranno inclusi nel prossimo Open-ESB e NetBeans Enterprise a partire dalla prossima Beta di aprile, che quindi conterra' anche plugin e wizard per l'utilizzo dei JBI Binding Component da noi realizzati all'interno degli ambienti Sun.

I componenti sono descritti sul sito di Open-ESB, il CORBA BC e il CICS BC.
Siamo molto orgogliosi del lavoro fatto e siamo fieri che una societa' italiana (Imola Informatica) sia riuscita a entrare finalmente in un'area core dei tool enterprise, anche se non ci definiamo e non ci definiremo una societa' di prodotto. I connettori sono infatti Open Source come i precedenti e quindi non verranno commercializzati in senso tradizionale, ma serviranno da incentivo per la consulenza Enterprise che e' e sara' il nostro core business.

I componenti verranno presentati per la prima volta al pubblico in occasione del JavaOne.

Approfittiamo di questa occasione per ringraziare per il grande lavoro svolto Raffaele Spazzoli, Marco Piraccini, Marco Cimatti, Mirco Casoni e Amedeo Cannone, i membri del Team JBI-BC.

Take a look at the current recipe efforts: http://microformats.org/wiki/recipe.
(If you are aspiring to create a microformat, this is an excellent example of how to do so.)

What makes the research useful is the list of URLs with the subject
material actually appearing on those pages. In http://microformats.org/wiki/recipe-examples we see a list of
recipes grouped by a useful qualification (in this case the type of
publisher). On the brainstorming page, there is ongoing commentary on
what these examples imply.

Notice that no format is being proposed, instead examples are
collected, and the most commonly authored items are proposed as future
properties in possible future format.

The reason for this post, however, is to highlight the need for
primary sources as evidence. While searching is a useful technique
for finding resources, I'm not convinced they constitute useful
evidence (unless you are researching how search engines markup
results)., because they don't contain any substantive material that
can be analysed in the brainstorming effort.

Some may argue that search results constitue evidence that a given
datatype is published, however, I'm not convinced this is true either.
The evidence for data or some property of data being published is
discovered by documenting and analyzing the pages they were actually
published on, and I've yet to see a public search engine capable of
performing this task.

-Ben West

POP3 could be a type of store. When a user wants to check their email, their email client software could ask the atom server "GET /email/messages?start=yesterday%20afternoon&count=100". The server would respond with a list of members fitting that description. Some meta-data could describe whether or not the message has been seen before, etc...

When the user wants to respond to an email, their client software might "POST /email/messages/02123/replies" with a response body representing a member entry: a single email message with the apropriate metadata. Or it might PUT /email/people/liz@example.com instead. The store could be a gateway to any email protocol.

The advantages of this over the traditional email systems aren't very clear. However, it could potentially lift a technical barrier to entry for an unknown generation of expert user interface designers, which could lead to simpler and more useful lives by making it easier to create user interfaces for complex systems. (Eg, your mail would be pervasive over the web, in addition to not-web. I know it's weak.)

I used amara to parse XML for me. This pretty much took care of all my message parsing concerns. I used sqlobject to provide me with an interface to databases. I created serializers and deserializers that could transform a sqlobject into or from XML, or a simple struct. This also provided a standardized way of describing the objects in my application. I was going to use XLINK within the xml in order to describe the location of joined or related objects. I used turbogears, and cherrypy to expose objects to the web (using fastcgi and lighttpd). I was also about to implement interfaces to hg, and then create a development environment utilising literate programming tools (either noweb or nuweb) to help me develop my applications and code. Part of the idea was to have self-documenting RESTful webservices. Visiting the root of the webservice would provide thorough documentation on how to use it. However, much of this may prove to be partially wasted effort, because ATOM and the Atom Publishing Protocol are capable of providing all of this. In addition, it's designed and engineered much better than the solutions I were working on.

While I'm sad that I didn't have a hand in developing what appears to be some really nice technology, I'm happy that I can work on bigger and better things now that the tools are already provided to me. Hopefully, I can add functionality to the provided implementations (amplee is the current favorite) with very little effort. I'd like to be able to add resources to the system using my favorite command line tools: mercurial and vim.

The next thing I suppose I believe is missing is a way to provide a nice presentation layer. I've grown fairly fond of XSLT as a templating language for transforming XML stored elsewhere. I like having a website rendered by an XSLT implementation of a webservice, and having the business and persistence logic elsewhere (in different webservices). However, I'm still quite noobish at XSLT, and haven't been able to think through all the issues required to design a well-engineered web site employing this pattern. If anyone knows, please tell me.

1. Use to describe yourself on a web page
2. People are more important than computers.
3. The "person" datatype, and implications for Search
4. Presenting Hcard
5. Hello World
6. Hcard Demystified

Using an hcard on your web page helps search engines learn more about you, can help people find your site, improves the computing ecosystem, and makes it easier for people to keep their contact information up to date. It's trivially easy to enrich your web pages with hcard, because it has only two rules: you must add two class names as a minimum, and you must list the name of the person being described. This post explains why this is important, how to add one to your site, and how to represent all kinds of information about the person.

People Are More Important than Computers

About a year ago, Timbl, the inventor of the web, advocated giving yourself a URI. There are a number of reasons why this is a good idea, and they arise from examining some philosophical principles. I'd like to examine a few of these, since they greatly shape my own methodology in the practice of computer science.

The Knuth school of thought posits that the chief consumer of of souce code is other humans. The WWWA posits that everything of importance deserves a URI. I've been greatly influenced in my ideas on usability by Jef Raskin, Bruce Tognazzini, Jakob Nielsen, and especially Don Norman.

When you add all of this together, you arrive at some interesting conclusions (at least in my head). My conclusion is that People are more important that computers.

Importance of the Person Datatype

The concept of a person must be one of the most important data types in existence. When I think of the basic questions that can be asked of something, the list goes "Who, What, When, Where, Why". "WHO" is the first one in the list. When meet new people, the first piece of information conveyed is usually their name. Introductions seems awkward when the name of the person is left out. When we're invited to an event, the first question often asked is "who else is going?" When a criminal is on the run, one of the first things they change is their name. When government operatives attempt to enforce justice, or protect the innocent, the information they trade is typically the names of people.

Searching for People

It's highly likely that most people that have read this blog have also had a hand in creating technology, and probably has a website or blog of their own. If this is true, you've probably created web pages to represent lots of things: products, ideas, even other people. When you mark up people, it's important to mark them up in such a way that search engines will be able to understand them.

I don't have any empirical evidence, but I've noticed that whenever a list of popular search queries are presented, names of people typically compose at least 50% of the list. This suggests that at least half of all search queries are performed by searching for people. If only there was a mechanism for website authors and publishers to clearly describe people to computers, so that computers could have a way to address those people.

Presenting HCard

The addressing bit is easy, that technology is capably provided by URIs. The human consumption part is also easy, it's already done in the form of the rendered HTML page. The only part of the triad missing is the technology to describe people to computers. Oh wait, we've got that too.

It's called hcard, it is a type of microformat, and it makes it possible to describe people to computers in the same way and in the same place that you describe people to other people. It's also really easy. The simplest way to create an hcard is to add two class names to your html.

Trivial HCard Demo

Let's say you have a paragraph that mentions someone's name. This paragraph might look like:

<p>This is a paragraph about Ben West.<p>

This is trivial to add an hcard:

<p class="vcard">This is a paragraph about <span class="n">Ben West<span>.<>

That's the minimum amount of effort it takes to create an hcard. There are a couple of important things to notice, even in this simple "Hello World"-style example.

• The page will look exactly the same before and after you added an hcard.
• The extra bits required to turn the example into an hcard is located are in the same place the information for humans is located.
• The extra bits already look familiar, a couple of class names, and a span tag. These components are already well known because they are also used for CSS.
• There are two class names: vcard, and n. The vcard is on an element that is an "ancestor" (in this case a parent) of the element that contains my name. This is one of few requirements of hcard.
• While I used "p", and "span" tags, any tag is valid. The important thing is that the "n" property is inside the element marked as a "vcard".
• A computer interpreting this hcard would know that there is person named "Ben West". In the before example it would be extremely difficult to get a computer to guess that a person is mentioned in the paragraph.

The names "vcard", and "n" might seem a bit strange. "n" stands for "name", and "vcard" stands for... well, I don't know what it stands for (maybe "virtual card"??). However, I do know where it came from and how it was chosen. The group that codified hcard believes that software re-use is a Good Thing(TM). They looked around for other standards, that already existed, that also described people. They found the icalendar standard, used by popular software such as Outlook, and ical, and many types of calendar and email software. They decided to re-use as many names from this standard as possible, and that is why some of the names may appear to be a little strange. However, it turns out that this is a feature, because there are free services that can add people found in a web page to your contacts list in Outlook, or other favorite mail software.

When "vcard" shows up in a class name (the class attribute takes a space delimited set of class names, not just one!), a computer that is looking at this web page can tell that this might be an hcard. It might not be, and there are guidelines to figure out whether or not it is. In this case, for example, a computer would be able to tell that this is an hcard because one of the children of this element has a class of "n", which is the one of the properties that compose an hcard. In addition, "n" is a special property, because it is the only one required by hcard.

That was a really trivial example, so we'll move on to a more exciting example. In real life you might want to describe the person in further detail. You might want to show an address, or the phone number, an email address, a home page, a description, etc... to explain more things about a person. However, if all you want to show is the name, and/or if the only information you possess is the name of a person, the example above is perfectly valid. Names are important, and if all you have is the name, it's a good idea to put it inside an hcard.

Complex Hcard Demo

If you do have more information about a person, and you want to encode it in an hcard, we can do that in a similar fashion to the example above. The same properties will also be evident: the mechanism to encode this information is located in the same place as the information displayed (meaning it is impossible for the two to get out of sync: what the computer interprets will be the same as what a human reads), the addition of some class names is all it takes, the class name can be on any element, and "vcard" will appear on an element that is a parent or ancestor of the other properties.

<p class="vcard">
  Hi, my name is <span="fn">Ben West</span> and you can learn more about me on
  <a class="url" href="http://www.siliconllama.com/">my defunct website.</a>,
  or by reading <a class="url" href="http://bewest.wordpress.com/">my geeky blog</a>.
  <span class="note">I have a degree in music, and like to sing, play piano, and conduct, among other musical activities.  I work for <a class="org" href="http://www.alexa.com/">Alexa Internet</a> a search engine company, where I develop web services to support user interfaces designed by co-workers, and implemented in collaborative processes.  I advocate web standards, and user-centric software design.  I'm <span class="age">25</span> years old, and less than a year ago, I moved from New Jersey to <span class="adr"><span class="locality">San Francisco</span>, <span class="region">California</span></span>.  I'm often bored and spend too much time on the computer to alleviate this boredom.  If you like to go to classical music concerts, make beautiful music, go to museums, go hiking, snowboard or ski, want to learn how to hanglide, like to sit around and code, or brainstorm, let me know.</span>
<p>

Which would look like:

Hi, my name is Ben West and you can learn more about me on my defunct website., or by reading my geeky blog. I have a degree in music, and like to sing, play piano, and conduct, among other musical activities. I work for Alexa Internet a search engine company, where I develop web services to support user interfaces designed by co-workers, and implemented in collaborative processes. I advocate web standards, and user-centric software design. I'm 25 years old, and less than a year ago, I moved from New Jersey to San Francisco, California. I'm often bored and spend too much time on the computer to alleviate this boredom. If you like to go to classical music concerts, make beautiful music, go to museums, go hiking, snowboard or ski, want to learn how to hanglide, like to sit around and code, or brainstorm, let me know.

HCard: Demystified

This hcard tells both humans and computers that there is a person named Ben West who has two websites, is part of Alexa Internet, can be found in San Francisco, California, with an additional note about what he like to do. In this particular case, "fn" is synonymous with "n". The exact meaning of these attributes is mostly explained in the Hcard Spec, as well as the adr spec. The latter is used to describe addresses, and you might notice that the same pattern where one class name appears on a "root" element is re-used. These specs aren't intended as tutorials, so your help in explaining the techniques, blogging about microformats, and even restructuring the information so it's easy to understand is greatly desired.

You might notice I also specified my age with class="age". This isn't part of the microformat. However, it also isn't harmful to do so. You can add semantic html to or around any microformat. Microformats are intended to codify how authors are already publishing on the web. If the number of people publishing some piece of data reachs what we call the "80/20" threshold, we'll add it in to the spec as an official part of the microformat. Don't restrain yourself to just the official values. Software and other authors can take advantage of your ideas.

The hcard microformat is capable of rich expression of a number of different properties. If you don't find the one you want to express, you can express it anyway using semantic html, just like I did with age. If you'd like to see all the things hcard is capable of representing, I suggest you check out the spec, or you can try out the hcard interactive creator to see how the properties work together with real html.

Giving yourself a URI

These techniques allow search engines to do really smart things with your search queries, and it is only a matter of time until neat features start showing up in search engines. Being a part of that will help your users find your information more easily. If you write software, please publish all names as microformats whenever possible. If you are an author/blogger/website owner, including an hcard can make your site more easily found, and with greater authority, when people search for your name. I suggest, as Timbl did, that you add an id to your hcard, so that the URI can represent you as a person, instead of the web page as a resource. However, I believe hcard is a much more sensible choice over foaf, because the code is located in the same place as the html, where work is reused, and the data fidelity is uncompromised using techniques with which most publishers are already familiar.

Questo incontro fa da seguito all'incontro dello Special Interest Group di SDforum di ieri sera, che ha portato in una aula/teatro di una High Scool di Mountain View un centinaio di persone a parlare informalmente di Semantic Web.
Ambiente entusiasmante, con gente di Google, Oracle, Ibm, Yahoo e molti ideatori o architetti o responsabili di applicazioni eccezionali come ad esempio l'ideatore di AppExchange di SalesForce.
La curiosita' e' massima e chi si occupa gia' di Semantic Web - e ce ne sono parecchi - tentava di eliminare la visione naif degli altri, che vedono nella Semantica un intermedio tra la aspirazione a classificare tutta la conoscenza del mondo, ovviamente ridicolo, e un ritorno ai tempi dell'intelligenza artificiale, assurdo.
Il tutto in un ambiente in cui ognuno si sentiva libero di fare domande anche da principiante senza avaere paura di essere preso per scemo o ridicolo, e gli altri si davano positivamente da fare per spigargli le cose, senza fare i professori, anche se lo erano.
Il tutto per 15 dollari (o gratis per gli iscritti all'SDforum) piu' 3 per una fetta di pizza e Coca a volonta'.
E sottolineo dalle 7 alle 10 di sera piu' le chiacchere successive.
Che mondo!
Dell'aspetto piu' professionale di questo evento parlero' sul Blog di Gruppoimola.

C'e' un grande fermento e la conferenza di stasera raccoglie imprenditori della Silicon Valley che sono interessati all'argomento per investire risorse tecniche o economiche.

Tra gli altri panelist Nova Spivack di Radar Networks, Peter Rip, General Partner di Crosslink Capital, Alain Rappaport, CEO of Medstory, e Ramana Rao, fondatore e CTO di Inxight Software.

La serata sembra interessante e qui c'e' molta curiosita' sul Semantic Web, che arriva anche sulla parte Business del New York Times.

Teniamo alti i colori italiani.