I've been doing alot of thinking (and prototyping) of Symmetric Multi Processor evaluation of RDF queries against large RDF datasets. How could you Map/Reduce an evaluation of SPARQL / Versa (ala HbaseRDF), for instance? Entailment-free Graph matching is the way to go at large volumes. I like to eat my own dog food, so I'll start with my toolkit.

Let us say you had a large RDF dataset of historical characters modelled in FOAF, where the Graph names match the URI's assigned to the characters. How would you evaluate a query like the follwing (both serially and in concurrent fashion)?

BASE  <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>
PREFIX rel: <http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/>
PREFIX rdfg: <http://www.w3.org/2004/03/trix/rdfg-1/>
SELECT ?mbox
WHERE {
    ?kingWen :name "King Wen";
             rel:parentOf ?son . 
    GRAPH ?son { [ :mbox ?mbox ] }.
}

Written in a the SPARQL abstract syntax:

Join(BGP(?kingWen foaf:name "King Wen". ?kingWen rel:parentOf ?son),Graph(?son,BGP(_:a foaf:mbox ?mbox)))

If you are evaluating it niavely, it would reduce (via algebra) to:

Join(eval(Dh, BGPa), eval(Dh, Graph(?son,BGPb)))

Where Dh denotes the RDF dataset of historical literary characters, BGPa denotes the BGP expression

?kingWen foaf:name "King Wen". ?kingWen rel:parentOf ?son

BGPb denotes

_:a :mbox ?mbox

The current definition of the Graph operator as well as the one given by Perez, Jorge et.al. seem (to me) amenable to parallel evaluation. Let us take a look at the operational semantics of evuating the same query in Versa:

map(
   (*|-foaf:name->"King Wen")-rel:parentOf->*,
   'scope(".-foaf:mbox->*",.)',
)

Versa is a Graph-traversal-based RDF querying language. This has the advantage a computational graph theory that we can rely on for analysis of a query's complexity. Parallel evaluation of (directed) Graph traversals appear to be an open problem for a deterministic turing machine. The input to the map function would be the URIs of the sons of King Wen. The map function would be the evaluation of expression:

scope(".-foaf:mbox->*",.)

This would seem to be the equivalent of the evaluation of the Graph(..son URI..,BGPb) SPARQL abstract expression. So far, so good. Parallel evaluation can be implemented in a manner that is transparent to the application. An analysis of the evaluation using some complexity theory would be interesting to see if RDF named graph traversal queries have a data complexity that scales.

Chimezie Ogbuji

[by Chimezie Ogbuji]

I've been doing alot of "Google reading" lately

Completing Logical Reasoning System Capabilities

With the completion (or near completion) of PML-generating capabilities for FuXi, it is becoming a fully functional logical reasoning system. In "(Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach)" Stuart Russel and Peter Norvig identify the following main categories for automated reasoning systems:

1. Theorem provers
2. Production systems
3. Frame systems and semantic networks
4. Description Logic systems

OWL and RDF are coverage for 3 and 4. The second category is functionally covered by the RETE-UL algorithm FuXi employs (a highly efficient modification of the original RETE algorithm). The currently developing RIF Basic Logic Dialect covers 2 - 4. Proof Markup Language covers 1. Now, FuXi can generate (and export visualization diagrams) Proof Markup Language (PML) structures. I still need to do more testing, and hope to be able to generate proofs for each of the OWL tests. Until then, below is a diagram of the proof tree generated from the "She's a Witch and I have Proof" test case:

# http://clarkparsia.com/weblog/2007/01/02/burn-the-witch/
# http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/90q4/burnher.html
@prefix : <http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/test/reason/witch#>.
@keywords is, of, a.
#[1]    BURNS(x) /\ WOMAN(x)            =>      WITCH(x)
{ ?x a BURNS. ?x a WOMAN } => { ?x a WITCH }.
#[2]    WOMAN(GIRL)
GIRL a WOMAN.
#[3]    \forall x, ISMADEOFWOOD(x)      =>      BURNS(x)
{ ?x a ISMADEOFWOOD. } => { ?x a BURNS. }.
#[4]    \forall x, FLOATS(x)            =>      ISMADEOFWOOD(x)
{ ?x a FLOATS } => { ?x a ISMADEOFWOOD }.
#[5]    FLOATS(DUCK)
DUCK a FLOATS.
#[6]    \forall x,y FLOATS(x) /\ SAMEWEIGHT(x,y) =>     FLOATS(y)
{ ?x a FLOATS. ?x SAMEWEIGHT ?y } => { ?y a FLOATS }.
# and, by experiment
# [7]   SAMEWEIGHT(DUCK,GIRL)

There is another test case of the "Dan's home region is Texas" test case on a python-dlp Wiki: DanHomeProof:

@prefix : <gmpbnode#>.
@keywords is, of, a.
dan home [ in Texas ].
{ ?WHO home ?WHERE.
  ?WHERE in ?REGION } => { ?WHO homeRegion ?REGION }.

I decided to use PML structures since there are a slew of Stanford tools which understand / visualize it and I can generate other formats from this common structure (including the CWM reason.n3 vocabulary). Personally, I prefer the proof visualization to the typically verbose step-based Q.E.D. proof.

Update: I found nice write-up on the CWM-based reason ontology and translations to PML

So, how does a forward-chaining production rule system generate proofs that are really meant for backward chaining algorithms? When the FuXi network is fed initial assertions, it is told what the 'goal' is. The goal is a single RDF statement which is being prooved. When the forward-chaining results in a inferred triple which matches the goal, it terminates the RETE algorithm. So, depending on the order of the rules and the order that the initial facts are fed it will be (for the general cases) less efficient than a backward chaining algorithm. However, I'm hoping the blinding speed of the fully hashed RETE-UL algorithm makes up the difference.

I've been spending quite a bit of time on FuXi mainly because I am interested in empirical evidence which supports a school of thought which claims that Description Logic based inference (Tableaux-based inference) will never scale as well the Logic Programming equivalent - at least for certain expressive fragments of Description Logic (I say expressive because even given the things you cannot express in this subset of OWL-DL there is much more in Horn Normal Form (and Datalog) that you cannot express even in the underlying DL for OWL 1.1). The genesis of this is a paper I read, which lays out the theory, but there was no practice to support the claims at the time (at least that I knew of). If you are interested in the details, the paper is "Description Logic Programs: Combining Logic Programs with Description Logic" and written by many people who are working in the Rule Interchange Format Working Group.

It is not light reading, but is complementary to some of Bijan's recent posts about DL-safe rules and SWRL.

A follow-up is a paper called "A Realistic Architecture for the Semantic Web" which builds on the DLP paper and makes claims that the current OWL (Description Logic-based) Semantic Web inference stack is problematic and should instead be stacked ontop of Logic Programming since Logic Programming algorithm has a much richer and pervasively deployed history (all modern relational databases, prolog, etc..)

The arguments seem sound to me, so I've essentially been building up FuXi to implement that vision (especially since it employes - arguably - the most efficient Production Rule inference algorithm). The final piece was a fully-functional implementation of the Description Horn Logic algorithm. Why is this important? The short of it is that the DLP paper outlines an algorithm which takes a (constrained) set of Description Logic expressions and converts them to 'pure' rules.

Normally, Logic Programming N3 implementations pass the OWL tests by using a generic ruleset which captures a subset of the OWL DL semantics. The most common one is owl-rules.n3. DLP flips the script by generating a rule-set specifically for the original DL, instead of feeding OWL expressions into the same network. This allows the RETE-UL algorithm to create an even more efficient network since it will be tailored to the specific bits of OWL.

For instance, where I used to run through the OWL tests in about 4 seconds, I can now pass them in about 1 secound using. Before I would setup a RETE network which consisted of the generic ruleset once and run the tests through it (resetting it each time). Now, for each test, I create a custom network, evaluate the OWL test case against it. Even with this extra overhead, it is still 4 times faster! The custom network is trivial in most cases.

Ultimately I would like to be able to use FuXi for generic "Semantic Web" agent machinery and perhaps even to try some that programming-by-proof thing that Dijkstra was talking about.

Chimezie Ogbuji

I've somehow found myself wrapped-up in this dialog about information resources, their representations, and the relation to RDF. Perhaps it's the budding philosopher in me which finds the problem interesting. There seems to be some controversy about what is an appropriate definition for an information resource. I'm a big fan of not reinventing wheels if they have already been built, tested, and deployed.

The Architecture of the World-Wide Web says:

The distinguishing characteristic of these resources is that all of their essential characteristics can be conveyed in a message. We identify this set as "information resources."

I know of at least 4 very well-organized upper ontologies which have readily-available OWL representations: SUMO, Cyc, Basic Formal Ontology, and DOLCE. These are the cream of the crop in my opinion (and in the opinion of many others who are more informed about this type of thing). So, let us spend some time investigating where the poorly-defined Web Architecture term fits in these ontologies. This exercise is mostly meant for the purpose of reference. Every well-organized, upper ontology will typically have a singular, topmost term which covers everything. This would be (for the most part) the equivalent of owl:Thing and rdf:Resource

Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO)

Sumo has a term called "FactualText" which seems appropriate. The definition states:

The class of Texts that purport to reveal facts about the world. Such texts are often known as information or as non-fiction. Note that something can be an instance of FactualText, even if it is wholly inaccurate. Whether something is a FactualText is determined by the beliefs of the agent creating the text.

The SUMO term has the following URI for FactualText (at least in the OWL export I downloaded):

http://reliant.teknowledge.com/DAML/SUMO.owl#FactualText

Climbing up the subsumption tree we have the following ancestral path:

• Text: "A LinguisticExpression or set of LinguisticExpressions that perform a specific function related to Communication, e.g. express a discourse about a particular topic, and that are inscribed in a CorpuscularObject by Humans."

The term Text has multiple parents (LinguisticExpression and Artifact). Following the path upwards from the first parent we have:

• LinguisticExpression: "This is the subclass of ContentBearingPhysical which are language-related. Note that this Class encompasses both Language and the the elements of Languages, e.g. Words."
• ContentBearingPhysical: "Any Object or Process that expresses content. This covers Objects that contain a Proposition, such as a book, as well as ManualSignLanguage, which may similarly contain a Proposition."
• Physical "An entity that has a location in space-time. Note that locations are themselves understood to have a location in space-time."
• Entity "The universal class of individuals. This is the root node of the ontology."

Following the path upwards from the second parent we have:

• Artifact: "A CorpuscularObject that is the product of a Making."
• CorpuscularObject: "A SelfConnectedObject whose parts have properties that are not shared by the whole."
• SelfConnectedObject: "A SelfConnectedObject is any Object that does not consist of two or more disconnected parts."
• Object: "Corresponds roughly to the class of ordinary objects. Examples include normal physical objects, geographical regions, and locations of Processes"

Objects are a specialization of Physical, so from here we come to the common Entity ancestor

Cyc

Cyc has a term called InformationBearingThing:

A collection of spatially-localized individuals, including various actions and events as well as physical objects. Each instance of information-bearing thing (or IBT ) is an item that contains information (for an agent who knows how to interpret it). Examples: a copy of the novel Moby Dick; a signal buoy; a photograph; an elevator sign in Braille; a map ...

The Cyc URI for this term is:

http://sw.cyc.com/2006/07/27/cyc/InformationBearingThing

This term has 3 ancestors: Container-Underspecified, SpatialThing-Localized, and InformationStore. The latter seems most relevant, so we'll traverse its ancestry first:

• InformationStore : "A specialization of partially intangible individual. Each instance of store of information is a tangible or intangible, concrete or abstract repository of information. The information stored in an information store is stored there as a consequence of the actions of one or more agents."
• PartiallyIntangibleIndividual : "A specialization of both individual and partially intangible thing. Each instance of partially intangible individual is an individual that has at least some intangible (i.e. immaterial) component. The instance might be partly tangible (e.g. a copy of a book) and thus be a composite tangible and intangible thing, or it might be fully intangible (e.g. a number or an agreement) and thus be an instance of intangible individual object. "

From here, there are two ancestral paths, so we'll leave it at that (we already have the essense of the definition).

Going back to InformationBearingThing, below is the ancestral path starting from Container-Underspecified:

• Container-Underspecified : "The collection of objects, tangible or otherwise, which are typically conceptualized by human beings for purposes of common-sense reasoning as containers. Thus, container underspecified includes not only the set of all physical containers, like boxes and suitcases, but metaphoric containers as well"
• Area: "The collection of regions/areas, tangible or otherwise, which are typically conceptualized by human beings for purposes of common-sense reasoning as spatial regions."
• Location-Underspecified: Similar definition as Area
• Thing: "thing is the universal collection : the collection which, by definition, contains everything there is. Every thing in the Cyc ontology -- every individual (of any kind), every set, and every type of thing -- is an instance of (see Isa) thing"

Basic Formal Ontology (BFO)

BFO is (as the name suggests) very basic and meant to be an axiomatic implementation of the philosophy of realism. As such, the closest term for an information resource is very broad: Continuant

Definition: An entity that exists in full at any time in which it exists at all, persists through time while maintaining its identity and has no temporal parts.

However, I happen to be quite familiar with an extension of BFO called the Ontology of Biomedical Investigation (OBI) which has an appropriate term (derived from Continuant): information_content_entity

The URI for this term is:

http://obi.sourceforge.net/ontology/OBI.owl#OBI_342

Traversing the (short) ancestral path, we have the following definitions:

• OBI_295 : "An information entity is a dependent_continuant which conveys meaning and can be documented and communicated."
• OBI_321 : "generically_dependent_continuant"
• Continuant : "An entity that exists in full at any time in which it exists at all, persists through time while maintaining its identity and has no temporal parts."
• Entity

The Descriptive Ontology of Linguistics and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE)

DOLCE's closest term for an information resource is information-object:

Information objects are social objects. They are realized by some entity. They are ordered (expressed according to) by some system for information encoding. Consequently, they are dependent from an encoding as well as from a concrete realization.They can express a description (the ontological equivalent of a meaning/conceptualization), can be about any entity, and can be interpreted by an agent.From a communication perspective, an information object can play the role of "message". From a semiotic perspective, it playes the role of "expression".

The URI for this term is:

http://www.loa-cnr.it/ontologies/ExtendedDnS.owl#information-object

Traversing the ancestral path we have:

• non-agentive-social-object: "A social object that is not agentive in the sense of adopting a plan or being acted by some physical agent. See 'agentive-social-object' for more detail."
• social-object: "A catch-all class for entities from the social world. It includes agentive and non-agentive socially-constructed objects: descriptions, concepts, figures, collections, information objects. It could be equivalent to 'non-physical object', but we leave the possibility open of 'private' non-physical objects."
• non-physical-object : "Formerly known as description. A unitary endurant with no mass (non-physical), generically constantly depending on some agent, on some communication act, and indirectly on some agent participating in that act. Both descriptions (in the now current sense) and concepts are non-physical objects."
• non-physical-endurant: "An endurant with no mass, generically constantly depending on some agent. Non-physical endurants can have physical constituents (e.g. in the case of members of a collection)."
• endurant : "The main characteristic of endurants is that all of them are independent essential wholes. This does not mean that the corresponding property (being an endurant) carries proper unity, since there is no common unity criterion for endurants. Endurants can 'genuinely' change in time, in the sense that the very same endurant as a whole can have incompatible properties at different times."
• particular: "AKA 'entity'.Any individual in the DOLCE domain of discourse. The extensional coverage of DOLCE is as large as possible, since it ranges on 'possibilia', i.e all possible individuals that can be postulated by means of DOLCE axioms. Possibilia include physical objects, substances, processes, qualities, conceptual regions, non-physical objects, collections and even arbitrary sums of objects."

Discussion

The definitions are (in true philosophical form) quite long-winded. However, the point I'm trying to make is:

• Alot of pain has gone into defining these terms
• Each of these ontologies is very richly-axiomatized (for supporting inference)
• Each of these ontologies is available in OWL/RDF

Furthermore, these ontologies were specifically designed to be domain-independent and thus support inference across domains. So, it makes sense to start here for a decent (axiomatized) definition. What is interesting is that SUMO and BFO are the only upper ontologies which treat information resources (or their equivalent term) as strictly 'physical' things. Cyc's definition includes both tangible and intangible things while DOLCE's definition is strictly intangible (non-physical-endurant)

Some food for thought

Chimezie Ogbuji

This is a very brief demonstration motivated by some principled arguments I've been making over the last week or so regarding Web Architecture dictates which are ill-concieved and may do more damage to the Semantic Web than good. A more fully articulated argument is sketched out in "HTTP URIs are not Without Expense" and "Semiotics of RDF Signs". In particular, the argument about why most of the httpRange-14 dialog is confusing dereference with denotation. I've touched on some of this before.

Anywho, the URI I've minted for myself is

http://metacognition.info/profile/webwho.xrdf#chime

When you 'dereference' it, the server responds with:

chimezie@otherland:~/workspace/Ontologies$ curl -I http://metacognition.info/profile/webwho.xrdf#chime
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2007 06:29:12 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Debian) DAV/2 SVN/1.4.2 mod_python/3.2.10 Python/2.4.4 PHP/4.4.4-8+etch1 proxy_html/2.5 mod_ssl/2.2.3 OpenSSL/0.9.8c mod_perl/2.0.2 Perl/v5.8.8
Last-Modified: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 03:09:22 GMT
Content-Length: 6342
Via: 1.1 www.metacognition.info
Expires: Thu, 30 Aug 2007 07:28:26 GMT
Age: 47
Content-Type: application/rdf+xml

According to TAG dictate, a 'web' agent can assume it refers to a document (yes, apparently an RDF document composed this blog you are reading).

Update: Bijan points out that my example is mistaken. The TAG dictate only allows the assumption to be made of the URI which goes across the wire (the URI with the fragment stripped off). The RDF (FOAF) doesn't make any assertions about this (stripped) URI being a foaf:Person. This is technically correct, however, the concern I was highlighting still holds (albeit it is more likely to confuse folks who are already confused about dereference and denotation). The assumption still gets in the way of 'proper' interpretation. Consider if I had used the FOAF graph URL as the URL for me. Under which mantra would this be taboo? Furthermore, if I wanted to avoid confusing unintelligent agents such as this one above, which URI scheme would I be likely to use? Hmmm...

Okay, a more sophisticated semantic web agent parses the RDF and understands (via the referential mechanics of model theory) that the URI denotes a foaf:Person (much more reasonable). This agent is also much better equipped to glean 'meaning' from the model-theoretic statements made about me instead of jumping to binary conclusions.

So I ask you, which agent is hampered by a dictate that has all to do with misplaced pragmatics and nothing to do with semantics? Until we understand that the 'Semantic Web' is not 'Web-based Semantics', Jim Hendler's question about where all the agents are (Where are all the agents?) will continue to go unanswered and Tim Bray's challenge will never be fulfilled.

A little tongue-in-cheek, but I hope you get the point

Chimezie Ogbuji

Update: I realized i posted this with a typo-title

So the short writeup I intended to finish this weekend ended up becoming a multi-part essay. The first part is up: "Automating a Highly Expressive Knowledge Space: Dual Representation".

Chimezie Ogbuji

[by Chimezie Ogbuji]

I've been working with roll-your-own content repositories long enough to know that open standards are long overdue.

The slides for my Semantic Technology Conference 2007 session are up: "Tools for the Next Generation of CMS: XML, RDF, & GRDDL" (Open Office) and (Power point)

This afternoon, I merged documentation of the 4Suite repository from old bits (and some new) into a Wiki that I hope to contribute to (every now and then).
I think there is plenty of mature, supporting material upon which a canon of best practices for XML/RDF CMSes can be written, with normative dependencies on:

• GRDDL
• XProc
• Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One
• URI RFCs
• Rich Web Application Backplane
• XML / XML Base / XML Infoset
• RDDL
• XHTML 1.0
• SPARQL / Versa (RDF querying)
• XPath 2.0 (JSR 283 restriction) with 1.0 'fallback'
• HTTP 1.0/1.1, ACL-based HTTP Basic / Digest authentication, and a convention for Web-based XSLT invokation
• Document/graph-level ACL granularity

The things that are missing:

• RDF equivalent of DOM Level 3 (transactional, named graphs, connection management, triple patterns, ... ) with events.
• A mature RIF (there is always SWRL, Notation 3, and DLP) as a framework for SW expert systems (and sentient resource management)
• A RESTful service description to complement the current WSDL/SOAP one

For a RESTful service description, RDF Forms can be employed to describe transport semantics (to help with Agent autonomy), or a mapping to the Atom Publishing Protocol (and a thus a subset of GData) can be written.

In my session, I emphasized how closely JSR 283 overlaps with the 4Suite Repository API.

The delta between them mostly has to do with RDF, other additional XML processing specifications (XUpdate, XInclude, etc.), ACL-based HTTP authentication (basic, and sessions), HTTP/XSLT bindings, and other miscellaneous bells and whistles

Chimezie Ogbuji

So, I'm going to do something which may not be well-recieved: I'm going to push-back (slightly) on the Linked Data movement, because, frankly, I think it is a bit draconian with respect to the way it oversells the HTTP URI scheme (points 3 and 4):

2. Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names.
3. When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information.

There is some interesting overlap as well between this overselling and a recent W3C TAG finding which takes a close look at motivations for 'inventing' URI schemes instead of re-using HTTP. The word 'inventing' seems to suggest that the URI specification discourages the use of URI schemes beyond the most popular one. Does this really only boil down to an argument of popularity?

So, here is an anecdotal story that is based part in fiction and part in fact. So, a vocabulary author within an enterprise is (at the very beginning) has a small domain in mind that she wants to build some concensus around by developing an RDF vocabulary. She doesn't have any authority with regards to web space within (or outside) the enterprise. Does she really have to stop developing her vocabulary until she has selected a base URI from which she can gurantee that something useful can be dereferenced from the URIs she mints for her terms? Is it really the case that her vocabulary has no 'semantic web' value until she does so? Why can't she use the tag scheme (for instance) to identify her terms first and then worry later about the location of the vocabulary definition. Afterall, those who push HTTP URI schemes as a panacea solution must be aware that URIs are about identification first and location second (and this latter characteristic is optional).

Over the years, I've developed an instinct to immediately question arguments that suggests a monopoly on a particular approach. This seems to be the case here. Proponents of a HTTP URI scheme monoploy for follow your nose mechanics (or auto discovery of useful RDF data) seem to suggest (quite strongly) that using anything else besides the HTTP URI scheme is bad practice, without actually saying so. So, if this is not the case, my original question remains: is it just a URI scheme popularity contest? If the argument is to make it easy for clients to build web closure then I've argued before that there are better ways to do this without stressing the protocol with brute force and unintelligent term 'sniffing'.

It seems to be a much better approach to be unambigious about the the trail left for software agents by using an explicit term (within a collection of RDF statements) to point to where more aditionally useful information can be retrieved for said collection of RDF statements. There is already decent precedent in terms such as rdfs:seeAlso and rdfs:isDefinedBy. However, these terms are very poorly defined and woefully abused (the latter term especially).

Interestingly, I was introduced to this "meme" during a thread on the W3C HCLS IG mailing list about the value of the LSID URI scheme and whether it is redundant with respect to HTTP. I believe this disconnect was part of the motivation behind the recent TAG finding: URNs, Namespaces and Registries. Proponents of a HTTP URI scheme monopoly should educate themselves (as I did) on the real problems faced by those who found it neccessary to 'invent' a URI scheme to meet needs they felt were not properly addressed by the mechanics of the HTTP protocol. They reserve that right as the URI specification does not endorse any monopolies on schemes. See: LSID Pros & Cons

Frankly, I think fixing what is broken with rdfs:isDefinedBy (and pervasive use of rdfs:seeAlso - FOAF networks do this) is sufficient for solving the problem that the Linked Data theme is trying to address, but much less heavy handedly. What we want is a way to say is:

this collection of RDF statements are 'defined' (ontologically) by these other collections of RDF statements.

Or we want to say (via rdfs:seeAlso):

with respect to this current collection of RDF statements you might want to look at this other collection

It is also worth noting the FOAF namespace URI issues which recently 'broke' Protege. It appears some OWL tools (Protege - at the time) were making the assumption that the FOAF OWL RDF graph would always be resolvable from the base namespace URI of the vocabulary: http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/ . At some point, recently, the namespace URI stopped serving up the OWL RDF/XML from that URI and instead served up the specification. Nowhere in the the human-readable specification (which - during that period - was what was being served up from that URI) is there a declaration that the OWL RDF/XML is served up from that URI. The only explicit link is to : http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/20070114.rdf

However, how did Protege come to assume that it could always get the FOAF OWL RDF/XML from the base URI? I'm not sure, but the short of it was that any vocabulary which referred to FOAF (at that point) could not be read by Protege (including my foundational ontology for Computerized Patient Records - which has since moved away from using FOAF for reasons that included this break in Protege).

The problem here is that Protege should not have been making that assumption but should have (instead) only attempted to assume an OWL RDF/XML graph could be dereferenced from a URI if that URI is the object of an owl:imports statement. I.e.,

http://example.com/ont owl:imports http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/20070114.rdf

This is unambigous as owl:imports is very explicit about what the URI at the other end points to. If you setup semantic web clients to assume they will always get something useful from the URI used within an RDF statement or that HTTP schemed URI's in an RDF statement are always resolveable then you set them up for failure or at least alot of uneccessary web crawling in random directions.

My $0.02

Chimezie Ogbuji

The hosting of Planet Atom has moved (perhaps temporarily) over to Athena: Christopher Schmidt's excellent hosting service.
Metacognition is hosted there. In addition, the planetatom source was extended to support additional representational modes for the aggregated Atom feed: GRDDL, RDFa, Atom OWL RDF/XML (via content negotiation), and Exhibit.

The latter was the subject of my presentation at XTech 2007. As I mentioned during my session, you can go to http://planetatom.net/exhibit to see the live faceted-browsing of the aggregated Atom feed. An excerpt from the Planet Atom front page describes the nature of the project:

Planet Atom focuses Atom streams from authors with an affinity for syndication and Atom-specific issues. This site was developed by Sylvain Hellegouarch, Uche Ogbuji, John L. Clark, and Chimezie Ogbuji

I wrote previously (in my XML 2006 paper) on this methodology of splicing out multiple (disjoint) representations from a single XML source and the Exhibit mode is yet another facet: specifically for quick, cross-browser, filtering of the aggregated feed.

The Planet Atom pipleline as a whole is pretty interesting. First an XBEL bookmark document is used as the source for aggregation. RESTful caching minimizes load on the sources during aggregation. The aggregation groups the entries by calendar groups (months and days). The final aggregated feed is then sent through several XML pipelines to generate the JSON which drives the Exhibit view, an HTML version of the front page, an XHTML version of the front page (one of the prior two is served to the client depending on the kind of the agent which requested the front page), and an RDF/XML serialization of the feed expressed in Atom OWL.

Note in the diagram that a Microformat approach could have been used instead to embed the Atom OWL statements. RDFa was used instead as it was much easier to encode the statements in a common language and not contend with adding profiles for each Microformat used. Elias's XTech 2007 presentation touched a bit on this contrast between the two approaches. In either case, GRDDL is used to extract the RDF.

These representations are stored statically at the server and served appropriately via a simple CherryPy module As mentioned earlier, the XHTML front page now embeds the Atom OWL assertions about the feed (as well as assertions about the sources, their authors, and the Planetatom developers) in RDFa and includes hooks for a GRDDL-aware Agent to extract a faithful rendition of the feed in RDF/XML. The same XML pipeline which extracts the RDF/XML from the aggregated feed is identified as a GRDDL transform. So, the RDF can either be fetched via content negotiation or by explicit GRDDL processing.

Unfortunately, the RDFa is broken. RDFa can be extracted by an explicit parser (which is how Elias Torrez's Python-based RDFa parser, his recent work on operator, and Ben Adida's RDFa bookmarklets ) or via XSLT as part of a GRDDL mechanism. Due to a quirk in the way RDFa uses namespace declarations (which may or may not be a necessary evil ), the various vocabularies used in the resulting RDF/XML are not properly expanded from the CURIES to their full URI form. I mentioned this quirk to Steven Pemberton.

As it happens, the stylesheet which transforms the aggregated Atom feed into the XHTML host document defines the namespace declarations:

xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" 
  xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/" 
  xmlns:aOwl="http://bblfish.net/work/atom-owl/2006-06-06/#" 
  xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#" 
  xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"

However, since there are not any elements which use QNames formed from these declarations, they are not included in the XSLT result! This trips up the RDF -> RDF/XML transformation (written by Fabien Gandon, a fellow GRDDL WG member) and results in RDF statements where the URIs are simply the CURIEs as originally expressed in RDFa. This seems to only be a problem for XSLT processors which explicitly strip out the unused namespace declarations. They have a right to do this as it has no effect on the underlying infoset. Something for the RDF-in-XHTML task group to consider, especially for scenarios such as this where the XHTML+RDFa is not hand-crafted but produced from an XML pipeline.

[Uche Ogbuji]

I'm writing this on my flight back from XTech 2007, Paris, France. This gives me a decent block of time to express some thoughts and recent developments. This is the only significant time I've had in a while to do any writing.

Between raising a large family, software development / evangelism, and blogging I can only afford to do two of these. So, blogging loses out consistently.

My paper (XML-powered Exhibit: A Case Study of JSON and XML Coexistence) is now online. I'll be writing a follow-up blog on how http://planetatom.net demonstrates some of what was discussed in that paper. I ran into some technical difficulties with projecting from Ubuntu, but the paper covers everything in detail. The slides are here.

My blog todo list has become ridiculously long. I've been heads-down on a handful of open source projects (mostly semantic web related) when I'm not focusing on work-related software development.
Luckily there has been a very healthy intersection of the open source projects I work on and what I do at work (and have been doing non-stop for about 4 years). In a few cases, I've spun these 'mini-projects' off under an umbrella project I've been working on called python-dlp. It is meant (in the end) to be a toolkit for semantic web hackers (such as myself) who want to get their hands dirty and have an aptitude for Python. There is more information on the main python-dlp page (linked above).

Some of the other things I've been working on I'd prefer to submit to appropriate peer-reviewed outlets considering the amount of time I've put into them. First, I really would like to do a 'proper' write-up on the map/reduce approach for evaluating SPARQL Algebra expressions and the inner mechanics of Ivan Herman's sparql-p evaluation algorithm. The latter is one of those hidden gems I've become closely familiar with for some time that I would very much like to examine in a peer-reviewed paper especially if Ivan is interested doing so in tandem =).

Since joining the W3C DAWG, I've had much more time to get even more familiar with the formal semantics of the Algebra and how to efficiently implement it on-top of sparql-p to overcome the original limitation on the kinds of patterns it can resolve.

I was hoping (also) to release and talk a bit about a SPARQL server implementation I wrote in CherryPy / 4Suite / RDFLib for those who may find it useful as a quick and dirty way to contribute to the growing number of SPARQL endpoints out there. A few folks in irc:///freenode.net/redfoot (where the RDFLib developers hang out) have expressed interest, but I just haven't found the time to 'shrink-wrap' what I have so far.

On a different (non-sem-web) note, I spoke some with Mark Birbeck (at XTech 2007) about my interest in working on a 4Suite / FormsPlayer demonstration. I've spent the better part of 3 years working on FormsPlayer as a client-side platform for XML-driven applications served from a 4Suite repository and I've found the combination quite powerful. FormsPlayer (and XForms 1.1 specifically) is really the icing on the cake which takes an XML / RDF Content Management System like the 4Suite repository and turns it into a complete platform for deploying next generation rich web applications.

The combination is a perfect realization of the Rich Web Application Backplane (a reoccurring theme in my last two presentations / papers) and it is very much worth noting that some of the challenges / requirements I've been able address with this methodology can simply not be reproduced in any other approach: neither vanilla DHTML, .NET, J2EE, Ruby on Rails, Django, nor Jackrabbit. The same is probably the case with Silverlight and Apollo.

In particular, when it comes to declarative generation of user interfaces, I have yet to find a more complete approach than via XForms.

Mark Birbeck's presentation on Skimming is a good read (slides / paper is not up yet) for those not quite familiar with the architectural merits of this larger methodology. However, in his presentation eXist was used as the XML store and it struck me that you could do much more with 4Suite instead. In particular, as a CMS with native support for RDF as well as XML it opens up additional avenues. Consider extending Skimming by leveraging the SPARQL protocol as an additional mode of expressive communication beyond 'vanilla' RESTful operations on XML documents.

These are very exciting times as the value proposition of rich web (I much prefer this term over the much beleaguered Web 2.0+) and semantic web applications has fully transitioned from vacuous / academic musings to concretely demonstrable in my estimation. This value proposition is still not being communicated as well as it could, but having bundled demos can bridge this gap significantly in my opinion; much more so than just literature alone.

This is one of the reasons why I've been more passionate about doing much less writing / blogging and more hands-on hacking (if you will). The original thought (early on this year) was that I would have plenty to write about towards the middle of this year and time spent discussing the ongoing work would be premature. As it happens, things turned out exactly this way.

There is a lesson to be learned for how the Joost project progressed to where it is. The approach of talking about deployed / tested / running code has worked perfectly for them. I don't recall much public dialog about that particular effort until very recently and now they have running code doing unprecedented things and the opportunity (I'm guessing) to switch gears to do more evangelism with a much more effective 'wow' factor.

Speaking of wow, I must say of all the sessions at XTech 2007, the Joost session was the most impressive. The number of architectures they bridged, the list of demonstrable value propositions, the slick design, the incredibly agile and visionary use the most appropriate technology in each case etc.. is an absolutely stunning achievement.

The fact that they did this all while remembering their roots: open standards, open source, open communities leaves me with a deep sense of respect for all those involved in the project. I hope this becomes a much larger trend. Intellectual property paranoia and cloak / dagger completive edge is a thing of the past in today's software problem solving landscape. It is a ridiculously outdated mindset and I hope those who can effect real change (those higher up in their respective ORG charts than the enthusiastic hackers) in this regard are paying close attention. Oh boy. I'm about to launch into a rant, so I think I'll leave it at that.

The short of it is that I'm hoping (very soon) to switch gears from heads-down design / development / testing to much more targeted write-ups, evangelism, and such. The starting point (for me) will be Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose. If the above topics are of interest to you, I strongly suggest you attend my colleague's (Dr. Chris Pierce) session on SemanticDB (the flagship XML & RDF CMS we've been working on at the Clinic as a basis for Computerized Patient Records) as well as my session on how we need to pave a path to a new generation of XML / RDF CMSes and a few suggestions on how to go about paving this path. They are complementary sessions.

JSR 170 is a start in the right direction, but the work we've been doing with the 4Suite repository for some time leaves me with the strong, intuitive impression that CMSes that have a natural (and standardized) synthesis with XML processing is only half the step towards eradicating the stronghold that monolithic technology stacks have over those (such as myself) with 'enterprise' requirements that can truly only be met with the newly emerging sets of architectural patterns: Semantic / Rich Web Applications. This stronghold can only be eradicated by addressing the absence of a coherent landscape with peer-reviewed standards. Dr. Macro has an incredibly visionary series of 'write-ups' on XML CMS that paints a comprehensive picture of some best practices in this regard:

However (as with JSR 170), there is no reason why there isn't a bridge or some form of synthesis with RDF processing within the confines of a CMS.

There is no good reason why I shouldn't be able to implement an application which is written against an abstract API for document and knowledge management irrespective of how this API is implemented (this is very much aligned with larger goal of JSR 170). There is no reason why the 4Suite repository is the only available infrastructure for supporting both XML and RDF processing in (standardized) synthesis.

I should be able to 'hot-swap' RDFLib with Jena or Redland, 4Suite XML with Saxon / Libxml / etc.., and the 4Suite repository with an implementation of a standard API for synchronized XML / RDF content management. The value of setting a foundation in this arena is applicable to virtually any domain in which a CMS is a necessary first component.

Until such a time, I will continue to start with 4Suite repository / RDFLib / formsPlayer as a platform for Semantic / Rich Web applications. However, I'm hoping (with my presentation at San Jose) to paint a picture of this vacuum with the intent of contributing towards enough of a critical mass to (perhaps) start putting together some standards towards this end.

Chimezie Ogbuji

[by Chimezie Ogbuji]

Committed to svn

<CIA-16> chimezie * r1132 rdflib/sparql/ (Algebra.py bison/Processor.py bison/SPARQLEvaluate.py): Full implementation of the W3C SPARQL Algebra. This should provide coverage for the full SPARQL grammar (including all combinations of GRAPH). Includes unit testing and has been run against the old DAWG testsuite.

Tested against older DAWG testsuite. Implemented using functional programming idioms: fold (reduce) / unfold (map)

Does that suggest parallelizable execution?

reduce(lambda left,right: ReduceToAlgebra(left,right),{ .. triple patterns .. } => expression

expression -> sparql-p -> solution mappings

GRAPH ?var / <.. URI ..> support as well.

The only things outstanding (besides the new modifiers and non-SELECT query forms), really, are:

• a pluggable extension mechanism
• support for an exploratory protocol
• a way for Fuxi to implement entailment.
• other nice-to-haves..

.. Looking forward to XTech 2007 and Semantic Technology Conference '07

Chimezie Ogbuji