Author Archive for Cloud

New start date for the boards.ie SIOC Data competition…

Published
by
Cloud
on 26/8/2008
in Boards, SIOC, Semantic Web and Social Software
. 0 Comments

…will be the 1st September. I sincerely apologise for the delay; due to technical difficulties (we needed a signup mechanism in place), my holidays during the first two weeks of August, and settling into the new job.

To enter, you should sign up for a user account at data.sioc-project.org; we will ring to confirm your details; then after your account is enabled, you will be able to access the data sets from the 1st September. We will also have an entry submission system available from that date (in case you make something really cool on the first day)! You can make as many submissions as you wish, but use of the data sets is restricted to the duration of the competition and during the demonstration period in November…

My new job in Electronic Engineering! Will still collaborate with DERI…

Published
by
Cloud
on 31/7/2008
in DERI, Education, Electronics, Galway, Ireland, NUI Galway, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Software and Web
. 4 Comments

Next month, I will begin a tenured lectureship position at the Department of Electronic Engineering here in the College of Engineering and Informatics at the National University of Ireland, Galway. However, I will still do joint research with the Digital Enterprise Research Institute, continuing (amongst other things) to work with the Social Software Unit (on SIOC, SCOT, etc.) and with the TripPlanr project. In my new role, I will also be researching with the NCBES Bioelectronics Research Cluster in NUI Galway.

For those of you who have just come across me and my blog as a result of my work with DERI, you may not know that my background was in electronic engineering, having studied it at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and I also lectured for four years full time in the Department of Electronic Engineering before joining DERI in 2004. When I joined DERI initially, I imagined that I would be working on some intersection between electronic engineering and the Semantic Web. In fact, I fell into the world of the Semantic Web and social software, after an interesting discussion about semantic social networks with Stefan Decker, who was a senior researcher in the Institute at the time. I realised that my “hobby” interests in creating community websites could be combined with interesting research challenges around the Semantic Web, and although I (and then director Dieter Fensel) was unsure about how I would fare in a new research area, I’m glad to say that it worked out okay! Now I’m back to thinking about the convergence between electronics and semantics again, with some social software thrown in the mix (e.g. wearable communities).

Below is a collage of some memories from the past four-and-a-half years: including the FOAF Galway workshop, a Semantic Web cluster meeting, ESWC and a DERI offsite meeting, Wikimania, DERI Stanford, BlogTalk, meeting timbl, BarCamp, DERI drinks, the ITAG awards, and our Social Software summer / christmas parties.

I’ve really enjoyed working with all the smart and cool people in DERI, and I shall continue to do so, while strengthening ties between the Institute and NUI Galway’s College of Engineering and Informatics through my new job. (It’s my last day before holidays, so if you’re in Galway this evening, we’re going out for a few drinks in the Westwood Hotel after work at 5:30…)

DERI, NUI Galway launches the boards.ie SIOC Data Competition

Published
by
Cloud
on 30/7/2008
in Boards, DERI, FOAF, NUI Galway, SIOC and Semantic Web
. 8 Comments

Please note that the start date for this competition has been delayed while we install a secure authentication mechanism for accessing the data sets

The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at NUI Galway is running a unique competition from 1st August to 30th September 2008 in conjunction with boards.ie, Ireland’s largest discussion forum site. The competition is an open contest in which entrants can win over €4000 in Amazon.com vouchers by submitting an interesting creation based on a data set of discussion posts from boards.ie over the past ten years:

  • The first prize is an Amazon voucher for $4000 (~€2500)
  • The second prize is a voucher for $2000 (~€1250)
  • The third prize is a voucher for $1000 (~€625)

Read the rules and find out more information on the contest at:

The data set (approximately 9 million documents) has been represented in the Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC) open data format developed by DERI, NUI Galway for expressing the information contained in social websites (forums, mailing lists, blogs, etc.). Entrants may create whatever they feel is interesting based on this data: it could be a novel web application that makes use of the data set, a report on analyses performed on the data, a tool that allows one to visualise or browse the semantic structure, or whatever else the imagination can come up with!

The data reflects ten years of Irish online life, collected between 1998 and 2008 from boards.ie. boards.ie is one of Ireland’s busiest websites, with over a million unique visitors a month. The most popular discussion areas are ‘after hours’, soccer, motors, poker, and computers. Popular topic threads include one about a virtual pub (over 4000 pages), member discussions (2800 pages), poker stories (1800 pages), Liverpool rumours (1250 pages), recruitment in the Gardaí (800 pages long), and a freebie list (250 pages).

To enter the competition, go to data.sioc-project.org to access the data sets and view the guidelines. There will be three prizes for the top entries, as judged by an independent panel of three experts. The contest is open to anyone except current / former researchers with DERI and employees of boards.ie Ltd. One person may make multiple entry submissions. The closing date is the 30th September 2008.

The purpose of this contest is to generate interesting applications or creations that make use of community data represented in the SIOC Semantic Web format. All rights to these creations will remain with the contest participants (not including the underlying data, whose copyright remains with the creators). Neither DERI nor boards.ie Ltd. will acquire any commercial rights to these applications or creations as submitted through this contest. Up until now, this data has been publicly viewable, but it was difficult to leverage it without any added semantics due to the fact that it was embedded in heavily-styled HTML pages.

[DERI is a Centre for Science, Engineering and Technology (CSET) established at NUI Galway in 2003 with funding from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI). After five years of operation, DERI has become an internationally-recognised institute in Semantic Web research, education and technology transfer.]

Two new toys: Nabaztag and Chumby

Published
by
Cloud
on 15/7/2008
in Electronics, Internet, Photos, RSS, Social Media, Social Software and Web 2.0
. 2 Comments

As you may know, I’m a bit of a gadget freak. I haven’t gotten around to blogging about my Nokia 770 internet tablet (which I got cheap last year and happily use to check e-mail and listen to internet radio via radioten.com) or my little wifi-enabled Nikon S51c digital camera, but last week I acquired two new friends in my office, a Nabaztag and a Chumby.

The Nabaztag is a wifi enabled “rabbit”, that can read out text and RSS feeds, plays music, displays lights to represent different conditions (e.g. weather, new mail), and it has an RFID reader in its ears which can enable the detection of different objects (e.g. it could read an RFID-enabled book to you if you wave it by the ears of the rabbit). While some aren’t happy, I think it’s a cool device with many applications for those who may not want or need a video interface. My Nabaztag is called Babbitty.

The Chumby has been touted as an Internet alarm clock, but it’s much more than that. It has a touch screen which displays and allows you to interact with a set of multimedia widgets which can be grouped into channels. For example, my default channel shows my Flickr photos, tweets from my Twitter contacts, an NHK-style clock, and news from the BBC and the Onion. There’s even a talking Tim O’Reilly widget in there somewhere! I got it from international-orders.com, and named it after me (Cloud)!

You can see them both above. I haven’t gotten them to talk to each other yet, but many things are now possible…

David Price (debategraph.org) visits DERI

Published
by
Cloud
on 11/7/2008
in DERI, SIOC, Semantic Web and Video Games
. 0 Comments

We had a presentation at DERI today from David Price, one of the people behind the argumentation visualisation site Debategraph. Since modelling and visualising argumentative discussions is something that we have wanted to do in DERI with SIOC for some time, this talk was very interesting to us.

The goal of Debategraph is “to make the best arguments on all sides of any debate freely available to all and continuously open to challenge and improvement by all”. It’s a really nicely designed tool considering it is the work of just two people over the past few years, and was tested by Downing Street on their website last year following a speech by Tony Blair. The maps can be embedded into blogs posts, which is a useful feature. David pointed to some related work from Walton on argumentative schemes and also from Stanford’s Robert Horn.

Be Bert. Be Ernie. Just be.

Published
by
Cloud
on 8/7/2008
in Television
. 3 Comments

I’ve had this Bert and Ernie t-shirt for 12 years, but it was lost in a press for a while and it’s starting to get very worn. So, since I haven’t been able to find anywhere online that sells them, I scanned in the picture. Now I can make some backups (and remixes)!

You can see the results above. The first image is the original scan; the second is a vectorised version (via CorelTRACE and some hand editing / filling in CorelDRAW); the third and fourth are just with some background and illumination effects in Paint Shop Pro. I lost some of the original shadows and finer details but can probably add those later…

Explaining science and engineering to future students and the public

Published
by
Cloud
on 4/7/2008
in Education and NUI Galway
. 0 Comments

I read two articles today that explained the need to better illustrate the interesting and exciting aspects of science and engineering subjects to the public (and to also attract future students).

The first is from Engineers Ireland where Dr. Jim Browne, president of the Irish professional body for engineers (and also president of NUI Galway), said: “We focus more on the downside of the Internet rather than appreciating the work of the software and telecommunications engineers whose creativity gave us the world wide web and which has such a positive impact on the lives of so many people. It is amazing to me that young children are so quick to adopt the new technologies and to grasp the opportunities they create and never seem to ask: where did this come from? How does it work?” You can read more here.

Secondly, there was an article in the Irish Times “American Business 2008″ supplement today entitled “Science and technology need to foster interest and enthusiasm in schools”. It doesn’t seem to be on the new free irishtimes.com website, hence the scan below. Dr. Peter Hetherington of the American Chamber of Commerce said: “The perception at times is that you spend your life at a bench or an IT terminal, but if you look at the diversity of careers that are there, it’s quite phenomenal. People are following the so-called money at the moment, and going into careers like commerce or law, but all those services are essentially fed by science and engineering - because if they weren’t there, there would be no manufacturing, no new ideas, no companies.” Read more below.

GalwayFirst.ie: Lost in Galway / Stars at Galway Film Fleadh

Published
by
Cloud
on 26/6/2008
in Galway, Movies, NUI Galway and Television
. 1 Comment

From Galway First:

Star Trek fans are called Trekkies, but watch out for the Lost-ies. Fans of the inexplicable and never-ending TV series are planning to come to Galway this week to honour the conferring of the star of several episodes of the series, who is receiving an honorary degree at NUI, Galway.

Fionnula Flanagan is an Emmy Award-winning and Tony Award-nominated Irish actress. She trained in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin and has appeared in numerous films, including The Others with Nicole Kidman, Transamerica and Waking Ned Devine, as well as television series and stage productions. She came to prominence in Ireland in 1965 as a result of her role as Máire in the Teilifís Éireann production of the Irish Language play, An Triail. Ms Flanagan established herself as one of the foremost interpreters of James Joyce in the 1967 film version of Ulysses.

But as far as fans of Lost are concerned, she will forever be that mysterious white-haired woman Ms Hawking who appeared in the “Flashes Before Your Eyes” of Lost. Message boards online pertaining to the series have revealed that dozens of Irish Lost fans are to come to Galway to congratulate her on her conferring.

So, if you see any black smoke, polar bears or see Mutton Island being moved mysteriously this Friday, don’t panic. It’s just all in a day’s happenings on Lost.

The honorary conferrings are on tomorrow here in NUI Galway. Funnily enough, I think the first thing I saw Fionnula Flanagan in was actually Star Trek (The Next Generation). But I loved her best in Paddywhackery on TG4 in her role as Peig Sayers!

In other news, it was announced yesterday that the 2008 Galway Film Fleadh will play host to some international stars including Peter O’Toole, Jessica Lange, (President!) Bill Pullman, and Alex Gibney, the 2008 Oscar winner for Best International Documentary.

Press release: “NUI Galway and Tourist Republic to Make Travelling Tailor-made”

Published
by
Cloud
on 24/6/2008
in DERI, NUI Galway and TripPlanr
. 0 Comments

http://www.nuigalway.ie/news/main_press.php?p_id=760


TripPlanr will be aimed at the more adventurous traveller who wants more than a weekend for two in one of Paris’s main hotels

NUI Galway’s Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) is to develop a new intelligent trip planner in collaboration with Irish start-up Tourist Republic Ltd. The internet tool, TripPlanr, will allow travellers to plan more complex trips than existing technology allows, such as combining multiple destinations on a fixed budget and timeline. The cost of this initiative is €200,000 and has received support funding under Enterprise Ireland’s Innovation Partnership programme.

TripPlanr will be aimed at the more adventurous traveller who wants more than a weekend for two in one of Paris’s main hotels. The technology will combine Touristr.com’s traveller recommendations with information from airlines and accommodation providers, suggesting the most perfectly-attuned trip possible.

Jan Blanchard is CEO of Tourist Republic and sees huge benefits in the partnership: “We knew that to build the intelligent trip planner which we have in mind, we needed a team to rival the in-house expertise at Google or Yahoo! Through Enterprise Ireland we have this opportunity to bring our vision to reality with DERI, which is the largest Semantic Web research institute in the world”.

DERI’s specialised expertise in Information Mining, the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 applications will allow TripPlanr to filter data and make recommendations based on the preferences of the traveller and their social network. Building on Touristr.com’s existing destination review site, the new solution is expected to increase the probability of the traveller booking the targeted option suggested.

According to Dr. John Breslin, Project Leader with DERI at NUI Galway, and founder of the popular online forum boards.ie, “The pre-internet problem of information deficit has been replaced with the problem of information overload. We are faced with an overwhelming surfeit of similarly sounding destination descriptions and offers. We hope to make online trip planning much more personalised by enabling networked knowledge using the latest technologies developed here at DERI.”

The TripPlanr project has a skilled team in place to research and develop the application, and the project is currently recruiting for web developers to join this exciting work. TripPlanr is expected to be in beta testing by the end of the year.

-ends-

Google Trends for Websites: boards.ie, ireland.com, independent.ie

Published
by
Cloud
on 24/6/2008
in Boards, Internet and Ireland
. 0 Comments

Via Damien, I tried out Google Trends for boards.ie in comparison to the two main Irish newspaper sites.

Here are the stats for Ireland only from Google Trends (blue = boards.ie; red = ireland.com; yellow = independent.ie):

Here are the stats for all regions from Google Trends:

Here is the worldwide graph from Compete:

And finally, here is the worldwide graph from Alexa:

There are a lot of variations! Although ComScore also do rankings, I am not sure is the service publicly available, and Quantcast’s analysis seems more US-focussed. While some people are not so sure about the figures (1, 2), it is an indicator of sorts - even if it’s just to see if you are in the same league…