Royal Mail comes through

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The Royal Mail has had a lot of bad press recently with strikes, postal delays and ‘modernisation’. However, it is easy to forget the revolutionary nature of the “Penny Post“: one price and one service to deliver anywhere in the country.  Living  in Tiree, one of the western Scottish islands, this is particularly pertinent.  Many carriers do not deliver here or only do so at a higher rate; those that do are often delayed waiting for the ferries, but so long as the plane comes in so does the post.

Our shower was leaking water and on Friday at around 12:42pm we ordered spare parts from Shower-Warehouse.  I had assumed that they would not arrive before I set off back to Lancaster on Tuesday morning and so it would be Christmas before I could actually do the repair.

But, at 1pm today, they were delivered

So top marks for both the Royal Mail and Shower-Warehouse and may modernisation never change the wonder of universal post.

back to Tiree

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I’m on the ferry on my way to Tiree.  I’ve not been back home for nearly 8 weeks and have a long weekend before heading back down to Lancaster until Christmas.  Since I left in mid September I’ve slept in 19 different places and had 23 moves between places; however, my main home has been the camper van, a Ford Transit Auto-Sleeper Duetto, small enough to manoeuvre easily, but with everything on board from cooker and fridge to its own toilet and shower!

I’ve also not blogged since I was last at home. I have a half-written entry from Paris, I was at a lecture by John Searle in Eindhoven and really want to write about that, and I also need to write a retrospective on my sabbatical year, but not had a moment; indeed on my office desk is an iPhone, which has sat waiting to be unpacked for the last 2 months, no time even to play :-/

Perhaps over the next few days I can catch up with the half-written blogs amongst the unanswered email, overdue papers, and pressing admin; and also take some time to appreciate the sea and wild wind.

Paris and the redemption of the French restaurant

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I have been in Paris for a review meeting for the VisMaster project. I arrived the afternoon before the meeting started and so unusually had half a day to wander around, mainly to check out the location of the meeting places, but also to see Notre Dame, which was really just outside my hotel window. The hotel “Hotel Les Rives De Notre Dame Paris” was somewhat higher budget than I intended, but there was clearly some big meeting on this week as everything seemed booked solidly for the days I needed. However, given its location and it was a double room, it would be an ideal location for a couple visiting Paris: wonderful views, furnishing that made you believe you were in Paris and breakfast in a cellar that had clearly been there since the days of Victor Hugo.

I mention Hugo as one of the highlights of my half-day wander is the Shakespeare and Co bookshop just opposite Notre Dame. The books are all English but there is a special section of English translations of French authors and here I bought a copy of Hugo’s “Notre Dame de Paris“, the fateful tale of Quasimodo and Esmarelda and inspiration for the “Hunchback of Notre Dame” films. As well as Hugo I also bought a copy of one of Montaigne’s essays, which strangely haven’t yet found their way to Hollywood.

Having bought two books to load my already overburdened suitcase destined for its 15 kilo Ryanair weight limit I was drawn back and this time looked through the second hand section. It was fascinating to see what the English speaker in Paris reads, and I was again tempted and came away with Edna O’Brien’s “Mother Ireland” and also an old psychology book “Thinking and Reasoning”. It is an overused title (a bit like “Human Computer Interaction”) and I almost passed it by as it was clearly an old book and so obviously “out dated”. However just in time I noticed the editors, Wason and Johnson-Laird, and realised this was a collection of classic papers from the late 1950s and early 1960s, a real treasure capturing the period when cognitive psychology flowered.

However, the high spot for me1 was the first evening when I ate on my own in a small restaurant, next door to the bookshop. In the past I have been critical if not dismissive of French cooking. Not French food — cheese and bread from even the most basic supermarket is an epicurean joy, but the food you get in French restaurants.

Now by French restaurant I think I mean self-consciously “French” restaurants and in particular Parisian restaurants, as I have mainly been in Paris and in Toulouse twice. The regional food in Toulouse was wonderful (once you get over the fat), but even there “French” restaurants were a disappointment. It was not that I have only been to the Parisian tourist haunts, where the contempt of the non-Parisian can be apparent and where they serve the kind of lump of meat and pile of potatoes meal that I last saw in the UK thirty years ago, with the sole exception of some highly flavoured sauce instead of the customary British gravy. On many occasions I have been with French and Parisian natives who have selected carefully and taken us to well-classed restaurants, but they have still left me disappointed. In Italian restaurants, even the most basic Formica-tabled trattoria, the food itself is not treated with the reverence of the French, but as a more homely pleasure. Not unlike the everyday Catholicism of Italy compared to the more austere cathederals of France. In Italy, like the restaurants I find today in the UK (not 30 years ago), the appreciation is of the food; the food is the focus; the food is what you eat and what you enjoy. In contrast, in French restaurants it is always the chef that is king, the centre stage, the impresario.

That is I would have always said this until now.

Opposite the Notre Dame, set back from the busy Seine-side, in thoroughfare by small jardin, is “Le Petit Châtelet“. It is crushed on one side beside the brash tourist restaurants that cluster round Notre Dame like flies once did round the fetid sewers of mediaeval city rivers. On the other side it flanks Shakespeare and Co., which feels a closer bedfellow.  The service was impeccable and friendly and the food divine including sorbet in unexpected flavours such as lavender.  Out of the dirty mire that had been my previous experience of Paris, like Notre Dame itself rising from the foetid streets in Hugo’s account of 15th century Paris, Le Petet Châtelot has redeemed French cuisine in my eyes.

  1. That is of course apart from the review meeting, which was very productive – and those of you who have been at an EU project review might not believe me, but really it was![back]

Justice and mercy: al-Megrahi

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I’ve been away most of the last two weeks with just a few days at home in between.  However, just before I was first away I heard the Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill announce the release of al-Megrahi.  The decision was clearly hard and arbitrating the balance between justice and compassion is an unenviable task.

Whether the final decision was right or wrong, hearing MacAskill’s explanation of his decisions made me proud to be living in Scotland. Rather than bowing to the clear political pressure he was under, instead he kept his focus on what justice means in a land where compassion is at the heart of who we are.  In a world often ravaged by war and terror, suffering under human cruelty, and governed by the twins of aggression and revenge, MacAskill put himself under a  higher order and demonstrated the clear difference between a country still under the influence of its Christian past and those, from all sides, who besmirch the names of their own countries and religions by terror and violence.

Since then the grubby world of UK deals over oil and US deals over billions of dollars of compensation payments have both been aired, but it appears that MacAskill’s decision stood against pressure from all sides.

It was perhaps inevitable that the release would provoke some controversy, but disappointing nonetheless; one always hopes that integrity will triumph over knee-jerk reactions.  However, it has been especially galling to hear US voices raised in protest, a country which for so many years acted as safe haven for IRA fund raising; bankrolling the London bombings of the 1970s and beyond.  While Gaddafi supplied the weapons, the US public supplied the dollars1.  I was only young at the time, but these were vicious attacks in crowded tube trains and on the streets of London and elsewhere, designed specifically to cause maximum death and injury; and all the while, in the US, the IRA were allowed to operate freely due to political support in high places.

Obama came to power with the promise of a new attitude and a principled approach to politics, so it is doubly disappointing that he has failed this early test of principle over public opinion.  If the current White House staff cannot accept the independence of the Scottish justice system over politics, what hope in other parts of the world.

  1. Of course, while the Libyan involvement in the Lockerbie bombing and al-Megrahi’s guilt have been a matter of debate, the involvement of Libya in IRA terrorism was indisputable.   Since those days the IRA have become part of the Northern Ireland political process and Libya itself has been welcomed into the allied camp of the ‘war on terror’.  Whether in India, Israel or Ireland, yesterday’s terrorists become today’s politicians.  This makes the focus on al-Megrahi seem even more like that of a scapegoat.[back]

data types and interpretation in RDF

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After following a link from one of Nad’s tweets, read Jeni Tennison’s “SPARQL & Visualisation Frustrations: RDF Datatyping“.  Jeni had been having problems processing RDF of MP’s expense claims, because the amounts were plain RDF strings rather than as typed numbers.  She  suggests some best practice rules for data types in RDF based on the underlying philosophy of RDF that it should be self-describing:

  • if the literal is XML, it should be an XML literal
  • if the literal is in a particular language (such as a description or a name), it should be a plain literal with that language
  • otherwise it should be given an appropriate datatype

These seem pretty sensible for simple data types.

In work on the TIM project with colleagues in Athens and Rome, we too had issues with representing data types in ontologies, but more to do with the status of a data type.  Is a date a single thing “2009-08-03T10:23+01:00″, or is it a compound [[date year=”2009″ month=”8” …]]?

I just took a quick peek at how Dublin Core handles dates and see that the closest to standard references1 still include dates as ‘bare’ strings with implied semantics only, although one of the most recent docs does say:

“It is recommended that RDF applications use explicit rdf:type triples …”

and David MComb’s “An OWL version of the Dublin Core” gives an alternative OWL ontology for DC that does include an explicit type for dc:date:

<owl:DatatypeProperty rdf:about="#date">
  <rdfs:domain rdf:resource="#Document"/>
  <rdfs:range rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#dateTime"/>
</owl:DatatypeProperty>

Our solution to the compound types has been to have “value classes” which do not represent ‘things’ in the world, similar to the way the RDF for vcard represents  complex elements such as names using blank nodes:

<vCard:N rdf:parseType="Resource">
  <vCard:Family> Crystal </vCard:Family>
  <vCard:Given> Corky </vCard:Given>
  ...
</vCard:N>

From2

This is fine, and we can have rules for parsing and formatting dates as compound objects to and from, say, W3C datetime strings.  However, this conflicts with the desire to have self-describing RDF as these formatting and parsing rules have to be available to any application or be present as reasoning rules in RDF stores.  If Jeni had been trying to use RDF data coded like this she would be cursing us!

This tension between representations of things (dates, names) and more semantic descriptions is also evident in other areas.  Looking again at Dublin Core the metamodal allows a property such as “subject”  to have a complex object with a URI and possibly several string values.

Very semantic, but hardly mashes well with sources that just say <dc:subject>Biology</dc:subject>.  Again a reasoning store could infer one from the other, but we still have issues about where the knowledge for such transformations resides.

Part of the problem is that the ‘self-describing’ nature of RDF is a bit illusary.   In (Piercian) semiotics the interpretant of a sign is crucial, representations are interpreted by an agent in a particular context assuming a particular language, etc.  We do not expect human language to be ‘sef describing’ in the sense of being totally acontextual.  Similarly in philosophy words and ideas are treated as intentional, in the (not standard English) sense that they refer out to something else; however, the binding of the idea to the thing it refers to is not part of the word, but separate from it.  Effectively the desire to be self-describing runs the risk of ignoring this distinction3.

Leigh Dodds commented on Jeni’s post to explain that the reason the expense amounts were not numbers was that some were published in non-standard ways such as “12345 (2004)”.  As an example this captures succinctly the perpetual problem between representation and abstracted meaning.  If a journal article was printed in the “Autumn 2007” issue of  quarterly magazine, do we express this as <dc:date>2007</dc:date> or <dc:date>2007-10-01</dc:date>  attempting to give an approximation or inference from the actual represented date.

This makes one wonder whether what is really needed here is a meta-description of the RDF source (not simply the OWL as one wants to talk about the use of dc:date or whatever in a particular context) that can say things like “mainly numbers, but also occasionally non-strandard forms”, or “amounts sometimes refer to different years”.  Of course to be machine mashable there would need to be an ontology for such annotation …

  1. see “Expressing Simple Dublin Core in RDF/XML“, “Expressing Dublin Core metadata using HTML/XHTML meta and link elements” and Stanford DC OWL[back]
  2. Renato Iannella, Representing vCard Objects in RDF/XML, W3C Note, 22 February 2001.[back]
  3. Doing a quick web seek, these issues are discussed in several places, for example: Glaser, H., Lewy, T., Millard, I. and Dowling, B. (2007) On Coreference and the Semantic Web, (Technical Report, Electronics & Computer Science, University of Southampton) and Legg, C. (2007). Peirce, meaning and the semantic web (Paper presented at Applying Peirce Conference, University of Helsinki, Finland, June 2007). [back]

Birthday

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It was my birthday last week.  First thanks to everyone who sent greetings through Facebook etc.  Got some new books to read as well as two new mugs: one that says “exterminate” and one that is becoming my wee dram beaker.

This evening going for a belated birthday dinner at Cèabhar (booked up until tonight!), a lovely restaurant overlooking the Atlantic sunset.

The books …

The Kerracher Man, Eric MacLeod — Just reading this now.  A family who go off to live in a remote scottish croft.

Pilgrims in the Mist: The Stories of Scotland’s Travelling People, Sheila Stewart — Tales once told beneath a bender.

Nella Last’s Peace: The Post-War Diaries Of Housewife 49 — This is the follow-on to Nella Last’s War, which was one of the books on my Rome bookshelf

Calum’s Road, Roger Hutchinson — A couple of years ago we spent Easter on Skye and visited the little island of Raasay.  At the north end a precipitous little road leads round headlands to a small beach.  We had heard that the road had be created over many years by the labours of a single man … Calum.

Welsh Pictures. Drawn with Pen and Pencil, Richard Lovett (editor), London: The Religious Tract Society, 1892 — A beautiful aniqurian book of images and text.

On the edge: universities bureacratised to death?

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Just took a quick peek at the new JISC report “Edgeless University: why higher education must embrace technology” prompted by a blog about it by Sarah Bartlett at Talis.

The report is set in the context of both an increasing number of overseas students, attracted by the UK’s educational reputation, and also the desire for widening access to universities.  I am not convinced by the idea that technology is necessarily the way to go for either of these goals as it is just so much harder and more expensive to produce good quality learning materials without massive economies of scale (as the OU has).  Also the report seems to mix up open access to research outputs and open access to learning.

However, it was not these issues, that caught my eye, but a quote by Thomas Kealey vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham,  the UKs only private university.  For three years Buckingham has come top of UK student satisfaction surveys, and Kealey says:

This is the third year that we’ve come top because we are the only university in Britain that focuses on the student rather than on government or regulatory targets. (Edgeless University, p. 21)

Of course, those in the relevant departments of government would say that the regulations and targets are inteded to deliver education quality, but as so often this centralising of control, (started paradoxically in the UK during the Thatcher years), serves instead to constrain real quality that comes from people not rules.

In 1992 we saw the merging of the polytechnic and university sectors in the UK.  As well as diffferences in level of education, the former were tradtionally under the auspices of local goverment, whereas the latter were independent educational isntitutions. Those in the ex-polytechnic sector hoped to emulate the levels of attaiment and ethos of the older universities.  Instead, in recent years the whole sector seems to have been dragged down into a bureacratic mire where paper trails take precidence over students and scholarship.

Obviously private institutions, as  Kealey suggests, can escape this, but I hope that current and future government can have the foresight and humility to let go some of this centralised control, or risk destroying the very system it wishes to grow.

the more things change …

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I’ve been reading Jeni (Tennison)’s Musings about techie web stuff XML, RDF, etc.  Two articles particularly caught my eye.  One was Versioning URIs about URIs for real world and conceptual objects (schools, towns), and in particular how to deal with the fact that these change over time.  The other was Working With Fragmented Overlapping Markup all about managing multiple hierarchies of structure for the same underlying data.

In the past I’ve studied issues both of versioning and of multiple structures on the same data1, and Jeni lays out the issues for both really clearly. However, both topics gave a sense of deja vu, not just because of my own work, but because they reminded me of similar issues that go way back before the web was even thought of.

Versioning URIs and unique identifiers2

In my very first computing job (COBOL programming for Cumbria County Council) many many years ago, I read an article in Computer Weekly about choice of keys (I think for ISAM not even relational DBs). The article argued that keys should NEVER contain anything informational as it is bound to change. The author gave an example of standard maritime identifiers for a ship’s journey (rather like a flight number) that were based on destination port and supposed to never change … except when the ship maybe moved to a different route. There is always an ‘except’, so, the author argued, keys should be non-informational.

Just a short while after reading this I was working on a personnel system for the Education Dept. and was told emphatically that every teacher had a DES code given to them by government and that this code never changed. I believed them … they were my clients. However, sure enough, after several rounds of testing and demoing when they were happy with everything I tried a first mass import from the council’s main payroll file. Validations failed on a number of the DES numbers. It turned out that every teacher had a DES number except for new teachers where the Education Dept. then issued a sort of ‘pretend’ one … and of course the DES number never changed except when the real number came through. Of course, the uniqueness of the key was core to lots of the system … major rewrite :-/

The same issues occurred in many relational DBs where the spirit (rather like RDF triples) was that the record was defined by values, not by identity … but look at most SQL DBs today and everywhere you see unique but arbitrary identifying ids. DOIs, ISBNs, the BBC programme ids – we relearn the old lessons.

Unfortunately, once one leaves the engineered world of databases or SemWeb, neither arbitrary ids nor versioned ones entirely solve things as many real world entities tend to evolve rather than metamorphose, so for many purposes http://persons.org/2009/AlanDix is the same as http://persons.org/1969/AlanDix, but for others different: ‘nearly same as’ only has limited transitivity!

  1. e.g. Modelling Versions in Collaborative Work and Collaboration on different document processing platforms; quite a few years ago now![back]
  2. edited version of comments I left on Jeni’s post[back]

fix for WordPress shortcode bug

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I’m starting to use shortcodes heavily in WordPress1 as we are using it internally on the DEPtH project to coordinate our new TouchIT book.  There was minor bug which meant that HTML tags came out unbalanced (e.g. “<p></div></p”).

I’ve just been fixing it and posting a patch2, interestingly the bug was partly due to the fact that back-references in regular expressions count from the beginning of the regular expression, making it impossible to use them if the expression may be ‘glued’ into a larger one … lack of referential transparency!

For anyone having similar problems, full details and patch below (all WP and PHP techie stuff).

Continue reading →

  1. see section “using dynamic binding” in What’s wrong with dynamic binding?[back]
  2. TRAC ticket #10490[back]