While at ESWC [@url:2012.eswc-conferences.org/] as well as complaining about the proceedings [@url:www.russet.org.uk/blog/2012/05/semantic-web-irony/] I started to think about an idea for what I call a NearCon, or "Nearly a Conference". Workshops and conferences have a specific and important place within science, and academic life more widely; they are good places to present early work, to get feedback rapidly. They are good places to find out about other peoples work, and to benefit from the random interchange of ideas with people who you do not already know. For instance, I often choose to go to the talks that I think will be most interesting, but then stay for the next or the whole session, just for serendipity. Mostly, I end up reading or writing, but sometimes, these lucky t…

Over the last couple of days, I have moved the host machine for this blog; many thanks to Dan Swan who provided me with pro bono hosting since I moved to Wordpress in 2009 [@url:www.russet.org.uk/blog/2009/05/new-day-new-blog/] As far as I can tell at the moment (assuming I do not discover anything broken), the move has gone very seamlessly. The only tricky bit is testing the new site --- the solution here is to fiddle with /etc/hosts to point the test client at the new site, without having to change the DNS. When I do change the DNS, everything should be ready. I have taken the opportunity to do some house-keeping at the same time, as I could this out on the new, non-live version. The riskiest thing that I have done is to move the permalink structure to a semantics-free version. I have tr…

Following up from somewhat combatative article of yesterday [@url:www.russet.org.uk/blog/2012/05/semantic-web-irony/] my colleagues Michel Dumontier and Bijan Parsia pointed out that my last post was technically wrong. Actually, Bijan said "you're an idiot who can barely use a computer". Still one of the reasons I publish my work and thoughts early in this journal is to get feedback about it, I can't complain about this. The file 978-3-642-30283-1_Book_PrintPDF.pdf is actually not just the table of contents as I had taken it to be, but all 900 pages of the proceedings. It isn't hyperlinked, but you can search or jump to page with your PDF viewer to get to the relevant article. The files with the form eswc2012_submission_nnn.pdf are for the demonstrations and the posters. My mista…

I am at the Extended Semantic Web Conference [@url:2012.eswc-conferences.org/] I haven't published or been to this conference for quite a while [@doi:10.1007/11431053_2] so I was interested to see how things have changed in the meantime. The first talk that I went to was from Yvew Raimond from BBC R&D on the Music Ontology [@doi:10.1007/978-3-642-30284-8_24] They are using this to drive parts of their website. He was talking about how to evaluate this ontology. Very interesting. Worth reading the paper, I thought. So, I decided to look it up. A short piece of Googling later, got me through to the paper on the web. Unfortunately, the conference organisers have decided to publish with Springer, so no access there. Of course, I might have access at my home institution. Fortunately, I knew…

It was interesting to go the ESWC 2012; it has been quite a few years since I have been to ESWC or, indeed, any semantic web conference. While I am not generally a live-blogger, I have already commented on some aspects of conference [@url:www.russet.org.uk/blog/2012/05/semantic-web-irony/] Here I will just consider a few of the talks which leapt out at me for good or bad reasons. I did enjoy the first keynote from Abraham Bernstein [@url:dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30284-8_1] it was a brave talk, not because it managed to wind Greek mythology into it, but because he started off with the opening credits from Star Trek. At a computing conference, this is setting yourself up with a hard act to follow. If I can over-simplify, the key thesis of the talk was largely that trying things out in pr…

I am pleased to announce that as part of my work on knowledgeblog [@url:www.knowledgeblog.org/] we now have two new tools --- Greycite and kblog-metadata --- and have extended kcite, our citation engine [@url:knowledgeblog.org/kcite-plugin] I will just give a brief overview here of the functionality here. Subsequent articles will describe these tools in more detail, explaining the rationale behind them. The kcite engine, which you can see in use in this article, produces a nicely formatted bibliography list, generated using only identifiers to these articles: DOIs, Pubmed IDs or arXiv IDs. One obvious absence from this list, however, is the ability to directly cite URLs. We have now started to address this, through our two new tools. Unlike other identifiers, we lack a centralised resource…

In this article, we will describe the rationale behind our new service, Greycite, that we have developed in general enable more formal citation of URLs, and specifically to back up the kcite citation engine. Authors [author]Phillip Lord[/author] and [author]Lindsay Marshall[/author] School of Computing Science Newcastle University Introduction As has been recently announced [@url:www.russet.org.uk/blog/2012/05/kcite-greycite-and-kblog-metadata/] the kcite citation engine [@url:www.russet.org.uk/blog/2011/12/kcite-the-next-generation/] now supports URLs directly, as can be seen in this sentence. While it can do this trivially, by simply putting a URL in the reference, we wanted something better; where possible, we wanted URLs to be referenced in a similar manner to arXiv [@url:arxiv.org/] o…

I have a PhD studentship available for anyone wishing to work on using the Semantic Web and linked data to improve the process of scientific publishing. I want to expand on the work that we have done with Kcite [@url:www.russet.org.uk/blog/2012/02/kcite-spreads-its-wings/] which links between different articles, and consider how we would link to and from both raw data and ontological resources. We will do this in a practical, real-world environment: we will be extending Wordpress server-side; all the tools that we generate we will be released as we go into the "wild"; we will be active at supporting users so that we can incorporate feedback. We will be targetting the academic blogosphere, in addition to working with the content on http://knowledgeblog.org. If you are interested, …

In my previous articles, I have talked about general problems with DOIs [@url:www.russet.org.uk/blog/2011/02/the-problem-with-dois/] about architectural issues with capturing metadata [@url:www.russet.org.uk/blog/2012/03/dois-and-content-negotiation/] and finally, about specific problem DOIs [@url:www.russet.org.uk/blog/2012/03/a-problem-doi] I have also described part of the difficulty is that it is hard to determine the registration agency associated with a specific DOI --- there are actually different kinds of DOI and they respond in different ways. I have, however, finally found a way to discover who is a responsible for a given DOI. One of my own papers [@url:www.jbiomedsem.com/content/1/S1/S7] declares its DOI to be 10.1186/2041-1480-1-S1-S7. Unfortunately, refering to this paper usi…

In this article, I consider the problems of semantics-free identifiers in OWL and suggest another (possible) solution to the problem. The problems of identifiers and their semantics are not new. I have written about these problems previously in the context of: blog permalinks [@url:www.russet.org.uk/blog/2011/05/permalink-semantics/] and with conversion between OBO format and Manchester syntax [@url:www.russet.org.uk/blog/2009/09/obo-format-and-manchester-syntax/] The basic issue is one of choosing your compromise. Identifiers with semantics in them (which this blog uses although I wish it did not) are considerably more human readable, but are not resiliant to change, as the semantics in the identifiers can become out of date with respect to the content they describe. But neither compromis…