RDF sequences … could they be more semantic?

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Although triples can in principle express anything (well anything computational), this does not mean they are particularly appropriate for everything1.

RDF sequences are one of the most basic structured types and I have always found the use of rdf:_1, rdf:_2 at best clunky.  In particular I don’t like the fact that the textual form embodies the meaning.

In the RDF schema, rdf:_1, rdf:_2, etc are all instances of the class rdfs:ContainerMembershipProperty and sub-properties of rdfs:member.  However, I was also looking to see if there was some (implicitly defined) property of each of them that said which index they represented.  For example:

<rdf:_3> <rdf:isSequenceNumber> “3”

This would mean that the fact that rdf:_3 corresponded to the third element in a sequence was expressed semantically by rdf:isSequenceNumber as well as lexically in the label “_3”.

Sadly I could find no mention of this or any alternative technique to give the rdf:_nnn properties explicit semantics 🙁

This is not just me being a purist,  having explicit semantics makes it possible to express queries such as gathering together contiguous pairs in a sequence:

<ex:a> ?r1 ?a.
<ex:a> ?r2 ?b.
?r1 <rdf:hasSequenceNumber> ?index.
?r2 <rdf:hasSequenceNumber> ?index + 1.

Without explicit semantics, this would need to be expressed using string concatenation to create the labels for the relations – yuck!

Have I missed something? Is there an alternative mechanism in the RDF world that is like this or better?

Mind you I don’t see what’s wrong with a[index] … but may be that is just too simple?

  1. see also previous posts on “It-ness and identity: FOAF, RDF and RDMS” and “digging ourselves back from the Semantic Web mire“[back]

tech talks: brains, time and no time

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Just scanning a few Google Tech Talks on YouTube.  I don’t visit it often, but followed a link from Rob Style‘s twitter.  I find the video’s a bit slow, so tend to flick through with the sound off, really wishing they had fast forward buttons like a DVD as quite hard to pull the little slider back and forth.

One talk was by Stuart Hameroff on A New Marriage of Brain and Computer.  He is the guy that works with Penrose on the possibility that quantum effects in microtubules may be the source of consciousness.  I notice that he used calculations for computational capacity based on traditional neuron-based models that are very similar to my own calculations some years ago in “the brain and the web” when I worked out that the memory and computational capacity of a single human brain is very similar to those of the entire web. Hameroff then went on to say that there are an order of magnitude more microtubules (sub-cellular structures, with many per neuron), so the traditional calculations do not hold!

Microtubules are fascinating things, they are like little mechano sets inside each cell.  It is these microtubules that during cell division stretch out straight the chromosomes, which are normally tangled up the nucleus.  Even stranger those fluid  movements of amoeba gradually pushing out pseudopodia, are actually made by mechanical structures composed of microtubules, only looking so organic because of the cell membrane – rather like a robot covered in latex.

pictire of amoeba

The main reason for going to the text talks was one by Steve Souders “Life’s Too Short – Write Fast Code” that has lots of tips for on speeding up web pages including allowing Javascript files to download in parallel.  I was particularly impressed by the quantification of costs of delays on web pages down to 100ms!

This is great.  Partly because of my long interest in time and delays in HCI. Partly because I want my own web scripts to be faster and I’ve already downloaded the Yahoo! YSlow plugin for FireFox that helps diagnose causes of slow pages.  And partly  because I get so frustrated waiting for things to happen, both on the web and on the desktop … and why oh why does it take a good minute to get a WiFi connection ….  and why doesn’t YouTube introduce better controls for skimming videos.

… and finally, because I’d already spent too much time skimming the tech talks, I looked at one last talk: David Levy, “No Time To Think” … how we are all so rushed that we have no time to really think about problems, not to mention life1.  At least that’s what I think it said, because I skimmed it rather fast.

  1. see also my own discussion of Slow Time[back]

French subvert democatic process to pass draconian internet laws

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Just saw on Rob @ dynamicorange, that the French have passed a law forcing ISPs to withdraw access based on accusations of IP infringement. Whether one agrees or disagrees  or even understands the issues involved, it appear this was forced through by a vote of 16 (out of 577) members of the French parliament at a time when the vote was not expected.  This reminds me of the notorious Shetland Times case back in the late 1990s, where the judgement  implied that simply, linking to another site infringed copyright and caused some sites to stop interlinking for fear of prosecution1, not to mention some early US patents that were granted because patent officers simply did not understand the technology and its implications2.

It would be nice to think that the UK had learnt from the Shetland case, but sadly not.  Earler this year the Government released its interim Digital Britain report. This starts well declaring “The success of our manufacturing and services industries will increasingly be defined by their ability to use and develop digital technologies“; however the sum total of its action plan to promote ‘Digital Content’ is to strengthen IP protection.  Whatever one’s views on copyright, file sharing etc., the fact that a digital economy is a global economy seems to have somehow been missed on the way; and this is the UK’s “action plan to secure the UK’s place at the forefront of innovation, investment and quality in the digital and communications industries”3.

  1. See “Copyright battles: The Shetlands” @ Ariadne and “Scottish Court Orders Online Newspaper to Remove Links to Competitor’s Web Site” @ Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.[back]
  2. and for that matter, more recent cases like the ‘wish list’ patent[back]
  3. UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport Press Release 106/08 “Digital Britain – the future of communications” 17th October 2008[back]

movie: Lars and the Real Girl

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Last night we watched Lars and the Real Girl.  It was unusual for a US movie, which are great for the blockbuster and escapism, but rarely manage to deal with sensitive issues without feeling they have to be told  in epic scale.  Lars is set in a small town and shows a community and family dealing with psychological problems.  Quirky without being screwball, and full of touching moments, whilst not drawing back from the humour of the situation.

As well as the screenplay, the cinematography reminded me of British films, with that sense of really being there rather than in an over-polished Hollywood screen-set.

sun on the sea

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Today is raining and overcast, but the last two days utterly glorious.  Yesterday the sun on the sea took my breath away, the waves turned to quicksilver.

the ordinary and the normal

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I am reading Michel de Certeau’s “The Practice of Everyday Life“.  The first chapter begins:

The Practice of Everyday Life (cover image)The erosion and denigration of the singular or the extraordinary was announced by The Man Without Qualities1: “…a heroism but enormous and collective, in the model of ants” And indeed the advent of the anthill society began with the masses, … The tide rose. Next it reached the managers … and finally it invaded the liberal professions that thought themselves protected against it, including even men of letters and artists.”

Now I have always hated the word ‘normal’, although loved the ‘ordinary’.  This sounds contradictory as they mean almost the same, but the words carry such different connotations. If you are not normal you are ‘subnormal’ or ‘abnormal’, either lacking in something or perverted.  To be normal is to be normalised, to be part of the crowd, to obey the norms, but to be distinctive or different is wrong.  Normal is fundamentally fascist.

In contrast the ordinary does not carry the same value judgement.  To be different from ordinary is to be extra-ordinary2, not sub-ordinary or ab-ordinary.  Ordinariness does not condemn otherness.

Certeau is studying the everyday.  The quote is ultimately about the apparently relentless rise of the normal over the ordinary, whereas Certeau revels in  the small ways ordinary people subvert norms and create places within the interstices of the normal.

The more I study the ordinary, the mundane, the quotidian, the more I discover how extraordinary is the everyday3. Both the ethnographer and the comedian are expert at making strange, taking up the things that are taken for granted and holding them for us to see, as if for the first time. Walk down an anodyne (normalised) shopping street, and then look up from the facsimile store fronts and suddenly cloned city centres become architecturally unique.  Then look through the crowd and amongst the myriad incidents and lives around, see one at a time, each different.

Sometimes it seems as if the world conspires to remove this individuality. The InfoLab21 building that houses the Computing Dept. at Lancaster was sort listed for a people-centric design award of ‘best corporate workspace‘.  Before the judging we had to remove any notices from doors or any other sign that the building was occupied, nothing individual, nothing ordinary, sanitised, normalised.

However, all is not lost.  I was really pleased the other day to see a paper  “Making Place for Clutter and Other Ideas of Home”4. Laural, Alex and Richard are looking at the way people manage the clutter in their homes: keys in bowls to keep them safe, or bowls on a worktop ready to be used.  They are looking at the real lives of ordinary people, not the normalised homes of design magazines, where no half-drunk coffee cup graces the coffee table, nor the high-tech smart homes where misplaced papers will confuse the sensors.

Like Fariza’s work on designing for one person5, “Making a Place for Clutter” is focused on single case studies not broad surveys.  It is not that the data one gets from broader surveys and statistics is not important (I am a mathematician and a statistician!), but read without care the numbers can obscure the individual and devalue the unique.  I heard once that Stalin said, “a million dead in Siberia is a statistic, but one old woman killed crossing the road is a national disaster”. The problem is that he could not see that each of the million was one person too. “Aren’t two sparrows sold for only a penny? But your Father knows when any one of them falls to the ground.”6.

We are ordinary and we are special.

  1. The Man without Qualities, Robert Musil, 1930-42, originally: Der Mann ohne Eigenschafte. Picador Edition 1997, Trans.  Sophie Wilkins and  Burton Pike: Amazon | Wikipedia[back]
  2. Sometimes ‘extraordinary’ may be ‘better than’, but more often simply ‘different from’, literally the Latin ‘extra’ = ‘outside of’[back]
  3. as in my post about the dinosaur joke![back]
  4. Swan, L., Taylor, A. S., and Harper, R. 2008. Making place for clutter and other ideas of home. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 15, 2 (Jul. 2008), 1-24. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1375761.1375764[back]
  5. Described in Fariza’s thesis: Single Person Study: Methodological Issues and in the notes of my SIGCHI Ireland Inaugural Lecture Human-Computer Interaction in the early 21st century: a stable discipline, a nascent science, and the growth of the long tail.[back]
  6. Matthew 10:29[back]

Touching Technology

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I’ve given a number of talks over recent months on aspects of physicality, twice during winter schools in Switzerland and India that I blogged about (From Anzere in the Alps to the Taj Bangelore in two weeks) a month or so back, and twice during my visit to Athens and Tripolis a few weeks ago.

I have finished writing up the notes of the talks as “Touching Technology: taking the physical world seriously in digital design“.  The notes  are partly a summary of material presented in previous papers and also some new material.  Here is the abstract:

Although we live in an increasingly digital world, our bodies and minds are designed to interact with the physical. When designing purely physical artefacts we do not need to understand how their physicality makes them work – they simply have it. However, as we design hybrid physical/digital products, we must now understand what we lose or confuse by the added digitality. With two and half millennia of philosophical ponderings since Plato and Aristotle, several hundred years of modern science, and perhaps one hundred and fifty years of near modern engineering – surely we know sufficient about the physical for ordinary product design? While this may be true of the physical properties themselves, it is not the fact for the way people interact with and rely on those properties. It is only when the nature of physicality is perturbed by the unusual and, in particular the digital, that it becomes clear what is and is not central to our understanding of the world. This talk discusses some of the obvious and not so obvious properties that make physical objects different from digital ones. We see how we can model the physical aspects of devices and how these interact with digital functionality.

After finishing typing up the notes I realised I have become worryingly scholarly – 59 references and it is just notes of the talk!

Alan looking scholarly

Alan looking scholarly

bookshelf

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Got some books to fill my evenings when I’m in Rome during May, mostly about physicality and relating to DEPtH project.

Several classics about the nature of action in the physical world:

  • James Gibson,. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. New Jersey, USA, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1979
    Actually a bit embarrassing as I have written about affordance and cited Gibson many times, but never read the original!
  • Martin Heidegger.  Being and Time. Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Reprint edition, 2008
    Similarly how many times have I cited ‘ready to hand’!  But then again how many people have read Heidegger?
  • Martin Heidegger.  Basic Writings. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008
    This is a ‘best bits’ for Heidegger!
  • Maurice Merleau-Ponty.  Phenomenology of Perception. London, England, Routledge, 1958
    Everybody seems to cite Merleau-Ponty, but don’t know much about him … except all that French philosophy is bound to be heavy!

A couple more with a human as action system perspective, that seem to be well reviewed (and I’m guessing easier reads!):

Finally three about memories: linking generally to memories for life and also designing for reflection, but looking at them more specifically in relation to Haliyana‘s photologing studies.

  • Paul Ricoeur.  Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago University Press; New edition,  2006
  • Paul Ricoeur.  Time and Narrative, Volume 1, Chicago University Press; New edition,  1990
    More classics … and I suspect heavy reads, got another Rocoeur already, but it is still on my “to read” pile.
  • Svetlana Boym.  The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books, 2008
    Just sounded good.

Will report on them as I go 🙂

IE in second place!

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Looked at web stats for this blog for first time in ages.  IE is still top browser in raw hits, but between them Firefox and Mozilla  family have 39% above IE at 36%.  Is this just that there are more Mac users amongst HCI people and academics, or is Mozilla winning the browser wars?