Category Archives: academic

practical RDF

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I just came across D2RQ, a notation (plus implementation) for mapping relational databases to RDF, developed over the last four years by Chris Bizer, Richard Cyganiak and others at Freie Universität Berlin. In a previous post, “digging ourselves back from the Semantic Web mire“, I worried about the ghetto-like nature of RDF and the need for “abstractions that make non-triple structures more like the Semantic Web”, D2RQ is exactly the sort of thing, allowing existing relational databases to be accessed (but not updated) as if they were and RDF triple stores, including full SPARQL queries.

As D2RQ has clearly been around for years, I tried to do a bit of a web search to find things the other way around – more programmer-friendly layers on top of RDF (or XML) allowing it to be manipulated with IDL-like or other abstractions closer to ‘normal’ programming. ECMAScript for XML (E4X) seems to be just this allowing reasonably easy access to XML (but I guess RDF would be ‘flat’ in this). E4X has been around a few years (standard since 2005), but as far as I can see not yet in IE (surprise!). I guess for really practical XML it would be JSON, and there’s a nice discussion of different RDF in JSON representation issues on the n2 wiki “RDF JSON Brainstorming“. However, both E4X and RDF in JSON still are just accessing RDF nicely not adding higher level structure.

Going back to the beginning I was wondering about any tools that represent RDF as SQL / RDMS in order to make it available to ‘old technology’ … but then remembered that SPARQL creates tuples not triples so, I guess, one could say that is exactly what it does :-/

material culture – textiles and technology

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A couple of weeks ago I was at a ‘Long Table’ discussion on Technology and Democracy at [ space ] in Hackney. The ‘Long Table’ format was led by Lois Weaver (I now note the name although didn’t at the time) and took the form of a simulated dinner art where the participants chatted about the topic. We were invited to write on the table cloth as we posed questions or espoused viewpoints – this later became part of the Not Quite Yet exhibition opening the next day.

Because of the table cloth sitting in front of me I was reminded of the role textiles have played both as significant technology themselves and in the development of technological society. It was the spinning jenny and the cotton mills that created the industrial revolution and it was needle manufacturing that was the inspirations for Adam Smith‘s division of labour. In the context of the discussion of ‘democracy and technology this is particularly poignant. Before the factories spinning and weaving were skilled cottage industries described so well in Silas Marner [G|A] and the importance of the textile factory was as more about exerting control over production than about efficiency of production.

The Object of Labout - cover imageToday a book arrived from The Book Depository for Fiona “The Object of Labour: Art, Cloth and Cultural Production”. It is a majestic tome and I’m looking forward into dipping into it sometime. It says it explores the “personal, political, social, and economic meaning of work through the lens of art and textile production”. Interesting its 408 pages are covered in words and the etymology of ‘text’ itself from Latin texere to weave 🙂

Somehow whilst my mind wandered over this I came to ponder the term material culture (maybe because have recently been re-reading Malfouris “The cognitive basis of material engagement” and Mike Wheeler’s response to it “Minds, Things, and Materiality“). The word ‘material’ has many meanings ‘raw materials’ for industry, ‘material evidence’ in law … but if you say the word to a person in the street ‘material’ means simply cloth. So interesting that cloth has played such a strong part in material culture and is ‘material’ itself.

This led me to wonder about the words (like text and textile) when the special meaning of material as cloth arose or even of they have different roots. Turning to the Shorter OED I looked up the definition of ‘material’. It is long, over half a column The etymology is again from Latin materia – matter – and there are meanings related to that (as in material culture), the legal and philosophical meanings, the sense of documents or sources used for writing, indeed the implements of writing ‘writing materials’ … but nowhere material as simply cloth, not even in the addenda of recent words.

The most common meaning of material, the most mundane, the one that sits next to my skin as I write – forgotten, written out of the dictionary, as the hand-loom weavers were written out of industrial production.

mirrors and estrangement

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One of my PhD students, Fariza, has been extensively studying a single person, a women not so disimilar from herself. In doing so they have become friends and much of Fariza’s thesis (soon to be submitted) concerns the methodological issues surrounding this.

pianoOne issue we have discussed at length is the importance of estrangement, that distancing oneself from the commonplace to make the taken for granted become apparent. We do not see the things closest to us: the dirty toenail, the crumpled sheet, the asymmetric fall of the piano music stand, the things lost because they are in the open.

Artists and comedians often open our eyes to the unseen-because-unnoticed aspects of life, such as Emin’s own crumpled sheets or the poignant woman on the platform in “The Fall and Rise of Reggie Perrin”1. Garfinkel’s breaching experiments attempt to bring this incisive comic eye to social science. Of novelists Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez is the master of this; through his true to life yet surreal accounts, with sometimes tenderness and sometimes almost cruel dispassion, he describes in intricate detail the intimate yet insignificant.

The Last Battle, C.S. LewisBerger talks about the way artists look at their work in a mirror to see it afresh and he himself sees the sunshine of lilacs in the mirror, lilacs that show him only their shadows2. I was reminded of one of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books where the supra-reality of the mirror image is more crystal sharp, more ‘real’ than the ordinary world3.

Mirrors bring to mind reflective practice, just as Fariza has to write herself into her own accounts, the mirror often shows not only the unseen side of an object but also oneself and oneself in relation to the object. The seer and seen are themselves seen and, like Berger’s lilacs, the partiality of one’s seeing becomes more obvious. The mirror is not so much important because it shows the hidden sun-glowed lilacs, but because it says that the shadowed petals are not the whole flower.

Arnolfini Mariage: mirror closeupI am reminded of that Dutch painting by van Eyck where the apparently pregnant woman and her husband stand in their home with their lap dog between them and discarded outdoor shoes untidily dropped4. On the wall behind the couple is a convex mirror capturing the whole scene from behind, and in the reflected doorway where you stand is the tiny image of van Eyck and another. Unlike supposedly ‘good’ scientific writing in incomprehensible passive speech, the artist has not painted himself out of his picture.

Arnolfini Mariage: dog closeupBerger also talks about paintings being painted for the moment of seeing, yet so many portraits do not look towards you, or even the artist, but through you, beyond you, to an unseen landscape. This may be because it is hard to paint eyes, or because it is hard to stare into the eyes of one’s painter. In life it is only with the deepest lovers or friends that we dare to share like this, hence perhaps the growing friendship that Fariza experienced when gazing deeply together into her subject’s life. Also, perhaps why the most intimate paintings have often been of the painter’s wives or lovers. Unusually in van Eyck’s painting, clearly of close friends, the couple do not gaze either aloof or uncaring past the viewer, but instead gaze within the painting demurely to one another … it is only the small dog that stares back.

Mona LisaThis may be part of the Mona Lisa’s allure. I have never seen it ‘in the flesh’, but everyone talks about the eyes that they follow you. However, look again, it is not so much that they follow you, but, unusual amongst paintings, they actually look at you and I suppose at Leonardo himself.

I know Fariza has found this, and I am sure it is universal, that if we look closely and honestly at those around us, we begin more clearly to see ourselves .

  1. This was a popular BBC TV series, but it is the book which I remember as most moving, I laughed out loud and shed tears equally.[back]
  2. John Berger, “and our faces, my heart, brief as photos“, Bloomsbury, 2005[back]
  3. end of Chapter 15 in “The Last Battle“[back]
  4. The page about the Arnolfini Portrait at the National Gallery site allows you to zoom into the image. It also explains that the woman is not actually pregnant, but simply in the full skirt style of the day.[back]

Childhood dreams: Randy Pausch’ last lecture

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Last week a link to Randy Pausch‘s last lecture “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” was posted on the CPHC mailing list. The lecture happened last September, so many of you will have seen this already, but I had not.

If I browse web stuff at all it is always a quick skim, certainly for videos, but with theses to read, marking to do, emails to answer … still this I had to watch end to end.

Randy Pausch final lecture

It is the most inspiring and challenging thing I have seen for years. While I have known aspects of Randy’s work, I don’t recall having met him in person, but he seems a truly remarkable man. While many achieve their dreams by trampling on the dreams of others, here is someone succeeding whilst building up those around him.

What is Computing? The centrality of systemics

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Recently I was in a meeting where the issue of ‘core’ computer science came up. One person listed a few areas, but then this was challenged by another member of the group who said (to be fair, partly in jest), that core computer science should certainly include computer architecture, but not the ‘human stuff’.

I felt a little like a teenager complete with T-shirt and iPod dropped into Jurassic Park arguments that I thought had been put to bed in the 1980s suddenly resurfacing – how do you explain this white thing that makes sounds from its earphones to a caveman wearing skins?

However, I also felt a certain sympathy as I often wonder about computer science as a whole; indeed it has its own arguments in the 1960s and ’70s as to whether it was a ‘discipline’ as opposed to just an application domain for maths or electronics, or just a tool for business. Maybe one of the clinchers was the theoretical foundations of computing in the work of Church and Turing … but strangely enough at Lancaster the closest to this, the course on algorithmic complexity, is taught by a HCI person!

One of my worries in computing is that these theoretical foundations are still weak, there is black hole in the theoretical centre of computer science1. However, these theoretical issues were certainly not what was bothering my colleague. To answer his challenge and my own worries about the discipline we really need to know – what is computing?

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  1. This demands a discussion of its own, but the basic problem is that while Church and Turing gave us understanding of disembodied computation, we still do not have clear understanding of generic computation when embodied in devices in general only particular architectures. [back]

HCI and CSCW – is your usability too small

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Recently heard some group feedback on our HCI textbook. Nearly all said that they did NOT want any CSCW. I was appalled as considering any sort of user interaction without its surrounding social and organisational settings seems as fundamentally misbegotten as considering a system without its users.

Has the usability world gone mad or is it just that our conception of HCI has become too narrow?

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robot friends

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Last night we watched Jurassic Park 3 and today found you can have a little dinosaur all of your own!

Pleo Dinosaur Sony have robot dogs, Phillips robot cats (albeit stuck sitting in one place) but Ugobe have little robot dinosaurs called Pleo. In the videos they do move like little baby creatures and the lady in the shopping mall coos over one as she strokes it.

Central to Pleo seems to be:

  1. Designing Sociable Robotsembodiment – they feel through 40 sensors and move in their environment
  2. emotion – they have a relatively complex model of basic drives rather like Cynthia Breazwal describes in her book “Designing Sociable Robots“.

This seems to pay off in people’s reactions, both on Pleo’s own videos (well they would!), but also in owner’s plogs (sic) … one owner says:

“she acts just like a cat concerning keyboards.. just crawl on the darn thing while I’m typing! I know Penny,. you’re so cute it doesn’t matter what you do. But you should have a little sensor strip in your butt to spank when you’re bad1 or to pat gently to urge you to go explore. Go to sleep my little love” ArcticLotus

people play wht Pleo
Pleos making friends :-/

For researchers there is an open architecture so it should be possible to play oops experiment with them 🙂 The API doesn’t seem to be published yet, so wait until you get your cheque books out!

people play wht Pleo

  1. This could get us into the territory of agent abuse![back]

I just wanted to print a file

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I just wanted to print a file, now it is an hour and a half later and I still have nothing … this is where all our time goes gently coaxing our computers in the hope they may do what we ask.

Such a simple thing to want to do … and so much pain on the process, and so many simple things that application designers could do it make it better.

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Christmas lights and crackers

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FireFly in at CityLabThe lights are on in Lancaster City Centre. After three years FireFly has its first real public outing. You can see them now and for the next few months in Dalton Square in the centre of Lancaster.

The initial idea for FireFly came after a meeting where we had been discussing various forms of public displays. For some reason, a thought struck – those tiny lights Individual lightsthat you see in trees outside hotels and in city centres throughout the year; what if you could turn those into a display?

That was in early 2004 and now after several years of Joe Finney’s ingenuity and Angie Chandler’s hard work, they are here. Behind each of the three thousand lights in the CityLab display is a microprocessor as fast as my first PC! If you are near Lancaster in the next few months do go see them, they are just by the City Hall, under the beady eye of Queen Victoria’s statue.

facebookIn another bit of Christmas technology, this year I ported crackers to facebook. The good old virtual crackers are still there, but now you can also send facebook crackers 🙂 Mostly this was a straight port, but there are interesting differences because of the way facebook works as a platform. I’ve been watching the stats I collect and it is interesting to see that whilst around 2/3 of email crackers are opened only about 1 in 5 are opened in facebook. I guess with so much food being thrown and the like, facebook users are far more used to ignoring things :-/

Links: Lights in City Lab | Crackers on Facebook | Email Crackers