Next meeting: March 24th

[Dawn Foster]

I put the next meeting on upcoming as a placeholder to make sure that
people get it on their calendars. Any ideas for the agenda?

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/2123566

Thanks,
Dawn

[Ron Barrett]

An idea for the next meeting is on the topic of "semantic search." Not that
I can speak on the topic anymore competently than anyone else, but it is
something I have a very strong interest in and want to learn more about.

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

A fair number of us, including me, were at cre8camp today, so in
addition to semantic search, we could talk about what we learned and
how it links up with "data plumbing".

--
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
http://www.linkedin.com/in/edborasky

I've never met a happy clam. In fact, most of them were pretty steamed.

[Leif Warner]

You mean things like tagging, creating RDF triple queries in something
like SPARQL, using OWL rules... or there's the more Englishy "Ace
Wiki"? http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/acewiki/

Otherwise, there's attempts to put semantic data on existing web
content with, well, some natural language parsing, heuristics... And
tags are pretty common.
-Leif

[Ron Barrett]

"Semantic web", of course, covers many topics, for instance
- Ontologies
- Thesauri & Taxonomies
- Semantic Search
- Semantic Storage
- Semantic Ecosystems
- Machine Learning

My personal interest is related to semantic search that results in
discovery, contextual understanding, and question answering and reporting.
(Actually, my strong personal interest lies in the design of an interactive
visual semantic browser.)

If the idea for the next meeting were "semantic search," an overview of RDF,
OWL and SPARQL would be a nice start. An open project that I've been
studying more recently is DBpedia (www.dbpedia.org). DBpedia "is a
community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to
make this information available on the Web. DBpedia allows you to ask
sophisticated queries against Wikipedia, and to link other data sets on the
Web to Wikipedia data."

Nova Spivack, of Twine.com, wrote on his blog today that Stephen Wolfram (of
Mathematica fame) will soon be introducing Wolfram Alpha "something new -
and it is really impressive and significant. In fact it may be as important
for the Web (and the world) as Google was, but in a different purpose."
http://www.twine.com/item/122mz8lz9-4c/wolfram-alpha-is-coming-and-it-could-
be-as-important-as-google

So, there is a strong wave moving beyond RSS and mashups to derive
understanding and answers based upon existing knowledgebases.

Ron

[Ron Barrett]

Another idea for the next meeting would be a presentation/discussion about
DBpedia.org, such as this is what it is, this is how it is structured, this
is how you can use it, and let's collectively create some query/result
examples.
Ron

-----Original Message-----
From: portland-da...@googlegroups.com
[mailto:portland-da...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Leif Warner
Sent: Saturday, March 07, 2009 6:58 PM
To: Portland Data Plumbing

Subject: [pdpug] Re: Next meeting: March 24th

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 8:06 PM, Ron Barrett <ronab...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Another idea for the next meeting would be a presentation/discussion about
> DBpedia.org, such as this is what it is, this is how it is structured, this
> is how you can use it, and let's collectively create some query/result
> examples.
> Ron

Sounds good to me ... can you put that together? Actually, I thought
the Wolfram thing was interesting, but I'm guessing it's still Top
Secret and certainly not open source. :)

I'll be pretty talked out since I'll be talking about GGobi on the 23rd. :)

[Bill Jackson]

Okay, so who actually wants to speak tomorrow night?  I was suddenly reminded that Dawn is going out of town today, so I'm supposed to be minding the schedule tomorrow.  ;)

Anyone who has a topic, let us know what it is and how long you expect to spend on it.

Thanks!
-Bill

[Bram Pitoyo]

At SXSW, I met and became friends with Philip “Flip” Kromer, native
Austinian and founder of http://infochimps.org/

Us data plumbers aren’t only concerned with how data can be filtered
and curated, but also with how they can be obtained. Here’s a thought:
today, many datasets are publicly available from the internet
(especially from government agencies) that we can extract and play
around with. Here’s the problem: most of these datasets aren’t machine
readable. Here’s the solution: 1) sites like infochimps, Numbrary and
Amazon AWS collect and spider the internet, annotating these datasets,
2) tools and browsers like Kirix’s Strata allows you to play around
with it, 3) IBM’s ManyEyes allows you to visualize it.

I will be doing a similar talk tonight at the Data Visualization
group. If there isn’t an overlap with this user group, I would be more
than happy to give it again.

–Bram

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 2:31 PM, Bram Pitoyo <bramp...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> At SXSW, I met and became friends with Philip “Flip” Kromer, native
> Austinian and founder of http://infochimps.org/
>
> Us data plumbers aren’t only concerned with how data can be filtered
> and curated, but also with how they can be obtained. Here’s a thought:
> today, many datasets are publicly available from the internet
> (especially from government agencies) that we can extract and play
> around with. Here’s the problem: most of these datasets aren’t machine
> readable. Here’s the solution: 1) sites like infochimps, Numbrary and
> Amazon AWS collect and spider the internet, annotating these datasets,
> 2) tools and browsers like Kirix’s Strata allows you to play around
> with it, 3) IBM’s ManyEyes allows you to visualize it.
>
> I will be doing a similar talk tonight at the Data Visualization
> group. If there isn’t an overlap with this user group, I would be more
> than happy to give it again.
>
> –Bram

Well, I'll probably be at the Social Media Club meeting tomorrow, so
I'll have to see your InfoChimps presentation tonight, I guess. I
buzzed by the InfoChimps site a week or so ago and joined all their
mailing lists, but it wasn't clear to me how one could use the
resources or even figure out what's there. I may have to drink from a
firehose, but I at least want to be able to pick which firehose!! :)