beckr.org | Christian Becker

Public notice: I do not make balances

chris — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:30:05 +0000

What looked like cleverly personalized spam was indeed a honest request for a manual of an antique scale that went by my name:

June 18,09

To whom it may concern:
I have recently obtained a Christian Becker balance. Design #: 165996. Ser. #: A 8628. Style: AB5. cap. 200G
I need to know what all the knobs are and how to adjust, etc.
I need the instruction manual for the balance. Is such available or can you make a copy of one for me. I’ll be glad to pay for copying.
If no manual available, do you know of someone in the St. Louis, Mo. area who repairs them that might help me?
Thank you for your help.

Sure thing, I sent him the manual (”prepared as a service to laboratories worldwide”). Gotta love antique scientific instruments

Marbles released on SourceForge

chris — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 17:47:59 +0000

I’m pleased to announce the release of Marbles on SourceForge.

Marbles is a server-side application that formats Semantic Web content for XHTML clients using Fresnel lenses and formats. Colored dots are used to correlate the origin of displayed data with a list of data sources, hence the name.
By performing all formatting, data retrieval and storage activities on the server side rather than on a potentially thinly equipped client, the view generation can touch on large amounts of data and requests can be answered relatively quickly. Marbles provides display and database capabilities for DBpedia Mobile.

Data is retrieved from multiple sources and integrated into a single graph that is persisted across user sessions. When provided with the URI of a resource to display, Marbles tries to dereference it. In parallel, it queries Sindice and Falcons for datasources that contain information about the given resource, and Revyu for reviews. In a similar manner as the Semantic Web Client Library, Marbles follows specific predicates found in retrieved data such as owl:sameAs and rdfs:seeAlso in order to gain more information about a resource and to obtain human-friendly resource labels.

Thanks to Eli Lilly and Company for supporting the open-sourcing of Marbles in part by a research grant.

¡DBpedia @ Wikimania 2009!

chris — Fri, 29 May 2009 08:59:58 +0000

This just got in: I will be at Wikmedia’s Wikimania conference in Buenos Aires to talk about DBpedia and an ongoing mapping collaboration. Now on to learning a few bits of Spanish…

DBpedia Mobile and Marbles featured in Semantic Web for Dummies

chris — Thu, 14 May 2009 22:18:39 +0000

The Semantic Web is so mainstream now: Oracle’s Jeff Pollock has actually published a Semantic Web for Dummies book - and it has a whopping 2 pages on DBpedia and DBpedia Mobile! Kudos for what looks like a much-needed overview.

BBC interlinks with DBpedia

chris — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 08:50:06 +0000

The BBC is starting to embrace the Semantic Web. We were recently commissioned to create links between DBpedia and an internal BBC vocabulary, which enable the BBC to use DBpedia/Wikipedia as a controlled vocabulary. This allows them to suggest related content to their users across their multitude of content management systems (we hear there are 36 systems in use at the moment) and better integrate content from the web into their properties. This also means that third parties will gain access to BBC metadata and content in the very near future. Skeptics beware, this is reaching a tipping point!

Simple URL downtime alert with bash, curl and sendmail

chris — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 22:02:00 +0000

Now for a really easy way to be notified when an URL goes down:

email=$(/bin/cat < From: URL Monitor To: $2 Subject: $1 is down! !) /usr/bin/curl -f $1 || echo "$email" | /usr/sbin/sendmail -t

Just put it in your crontab as urlmonitor.sh .

Talking About Interfaces to the Semantic Web

chris — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 13:42:47 +0000

I recently had a guest appearance at the Semantic Web Gang podcast. Together with MIT’s David Karger and the regular “gang members”, we discussed interfaces to the Semantic Web. The discussion was really intense at points as the participants had very differentiated standpoints.
It was largely agreed that visualization is a key factor to show the benefits of the Semantic Web and to foster industry adoption. Some key discussions: Should we worry about applications first, or step back and consider visualization at this early stage? How many forms of visualizations are there for one ‘thing’? Who builds them? Where do you get data from? Should users worry about that? How are queries expressed?
The participants also agreed that there will be an industry of people that build visualization widgets for specific things, which I thought is a really interesting scenario.
I talked a bit about Marbles and DBpedia Mobile and pleaded for open environments where data published by anyone can be taken into account. (Podcast)

Launching two startups in two days, with 140 people

chris — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:32:25 +0000

I’m really excited to participate in StartupWeekend in Hamburg tomorrow, where 140 people will come together to build two web startups. The whole progress is crowdsourced - attendees are invited to pitch ideas, then two ideas are selected and developed over two days in teams that cover business and finance, programming, graphics, marketing and legal aspects.
At the end of the weekend, everybody becomes a shareholder in the companies, and management will be elected, which will receive a little seed funding to hopefully get off the ground. I’m moderately skeptical if this will work, but can’t wait to find out! Now on to contemplate about startup ideas…

Update (05/19): Hey, my idea made it into the top 5! These are the two final projects:

indawo.de, a platform that helps event organizers to find suitable locations - for both corporate and private events such as weddings.
lockerlernen.de, a community for tutorial videos targeted at pupils, where I took care of the video portion.

In the final meeting, indawo.de was chosen as the project that will be incorporated with a 60:40 vote, and everybody that attended is now a shareholder. lockerlernen.de was not short of praise and the team members are looking to incorporate it as well.
Programmers and graphic designers were incredibly scarce, so the implementations are at a very early demo stage. Most attendees are now back at their day jobs, but each project has a committed core group that will hopefully drive these projects forward in the nexts months.

I learnt a lot about crowdsourcing today. While I often felt that the sheer number people was slowing things down considerably and there were many disagreements, we ended up with two ideas that I can see surviving. Thanks a to the organizers Cem and Jason for pulling this off!

Read more feedback here, and Flickr evidence here!

DBpedia Mobile @ LDOW2008

chris — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 06:37:25 +0000

I’m in Beijing for WWW2008 where I just presented my diploma thesis, DBpedia Mobile at the Linked Data on the Web (LDOW2008) Workshop.
Based on the current GPS position of a mobile device, DBpedia Mobile renders a map containing information about nearby locations from the DBpedia dataset. Geographic locations are currently available for 300,000 of DBpedia’s 2.18 million “things”.
Starting from the map, users can explore background information about locations and can navigate into DBpedia and other interlinked datasets such as GeoNames, Revyu, EuroStat and Flickr.
I will write a bit more about it when I get a chance, but for now here are the slides:

More information:

Website: http://wiki.dbpedia.org/DBpediaMobile
Slides Paper

Update: Another Mashup of the Day at ProgrammableWeb!

Slideflow

chris — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 13:49:47 +0000

I’ve been pretty busy putting together a webcast interface for Leica Microsystems featuring Cover Flow in AJAX. We thought that it was so cool that we released the latter under Creative Commons.

Main screen:

Help overlay:

Live demo built with Slideflow: