http://beckr.org Just another WordPress weblog Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:49:29 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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: ... http://beckr.org/2009/06/18/public-notice-i-do-not-make-balances/ 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, ... http://beckr.org/2009/06/01/marbles-released-on-sourceforge/ 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... http://beckr.org/2009/05/29/dbpedia-wikimania-2009/ 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. http://beckr.org/2009/05/14/dbpedia-mobile-and-marbles-featured-in-semantic-web-for-dummies/ 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 ... http://beckr.org/2008/09/09/bbc-interlinks-with-dbpedia/ Now for a really easy way to be notified when an URL goes down: email=$(/bin/cat <<! From: URL Monitor <urlmonitor@localhost> 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 <URL to check> <email address>. http://beckr.org/2008/08/17/simple-url-downtime-alert-with-bash-curl-and-sendmail/ 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 ... http://beckr.org/2008/07/27/talking-about-interfaces-to-the-semantic-web/ http://beckr.org/2008/05/16/launching-two-startups-in-two-days-with-140-people/ 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 ... http://beckr.org/2008/04/23/dbpedia-mobile-ldow2008/ 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: http://beckr.org/2007/11/15/slideflow/