Own your identity

ownyouridentity.com is a blog about owning your online identity in a world with an increasing amount of software that wants to own it for you. It's written by the chi.mp team and friends.

Wondering about Scoutle

Scoutle was pushed to my attention through the "social networks" Twine. I was not aware of the quantity of new software and concepts popping up in this area. I found the concept of "automated social networking" quite interesting, so I tried it here, as well as on univers immedia and lingvoj.org. On first day, the smart agents (scouts) have already brought a few interesting hits. Curious to see how this stuff will scale. One advantage is that you don't waste time in networking. Your scouts do that for you. And I find the little "stage" widget interface quite cool. Scroll down the left menu if you have not noticed it yet.

Managing Co-reference (Was: A Semantic Elephant?)

One more public thread on SW list on our favourite issue. But some interesting points to note in the current discussion, well summed up by Aldo Gangemi at mid-course.

• We definitely need some property or mechanism, weaker as owl:sameAs, to assert that two URIs have similar referents.
  
• The semiotic aspects of co-reference are more and more acknowledged, even by formal logic gurus.

Hopefully this thread will eventually have some follow-up on some standardization track.

Knowledge from Engineering to Gardening

If the link on the title does not lead you to "Planète Jardin - Garden Planet" twine, it means you are not yet a twiner. In this case, you can at least read some explanations on the knowledge gardening metaphor by Jack here.

Hubjects on Twine

Starting to explore Twine, with the status of 'universal hubjector'. Feeling a twine is something close to a hubject, created of course a twine on hubjects (among others). Proposed an updated non-technical definition of a hubject as being a "hub connecting various representations of the same thing". Such a general idea can have a variety of implementations. Needs more to be used as an architecture guideline than to be specified in any kind of formal language (this is where I stand for now).
BTW for those who would be still looking for Twine invitations, I got three of them left. Just ask.

URIs for languages

I've eventually given up trying representing hubjects at all, at least for the moment. I had a serious try at it at lingvoj.org. But after discussions in the Linking Open Data forum, I eventually surrendered and published the languages description in a way conformant to W3C recommandations for Semantic Web architecture, with content negociation, 303 redirects and the like. I've even suppressed the previous post here saying otherwise, which would be now full of dead links and would bring about confusion.
So we'll see how this flies. Feed your favourite tool with the URI http://www.lingvoj.org/lang/zh, and figure by yourself if it provides a useful description of the Chinese language, both for humans and machines.

Using owl:sameAs in Linked Data

It's been a very long and interesting thread on Linking Open Data forum and elsewhere, about the use and semantics of owl:sameAs. I just suggested the following best practices :

1. Assertions such as "a:foo owl:sameAs b:bar" should be grounded on some form of agreement of the owners of a:foo and b:bar, on whichever basis they both decide to agree.
2. For outsiders (owning neither a: or b: domains), such agreement could be shown by the presence of the assertion in symmetrical way in both domains, each domain using its own URI/resource on subject side, and the other's on object side, that is :
   (a) asserts "a:foo owl:sameAs b:bar"
   (b) asserts "b:bar owl:sameAs a:foo".
3. If one side (a) pushes the assertion first, the other side (b) should be at least made aware of it by (a), and is entitled to say she agrees or not : (a) says that "a:foo owl:sameAs b:bar", but as the owner of (b), I do not necessarily agree. Such lack of agreement could be implicitly entailed from the absence of the reciprocal assertion on (b) side.

Granted, from a pure logical viewpoint, those assertions are strictly equivalent since owl:sameAs is a symmetrical property, but from a social/trust viewpoint, having each side declaring it in a specific direction could be interpreted as a formal proof of agreement. It's what have been done e.g. between DBpedia and GeoNames. The title thread shows once again by its sheer length, and if necessary, that there is no universal way to ground such agreement, which belongs to the realm of language and social communication.