The motivation for this work comes from the fact that MIT is highly prioritizing what they can do to have a positive impact in Africa.  At the MIT Libraries, we hold a lot of research output, some of which specifically applies to issues and topics happening in African countries.  The question is whether our research is actually being seen by the people in those areas who would benefit most from it.  The first step is to build a reliable data-set representing the continent, countries, cities, and holding metadata about them all.

Here’s one data quirk, and an example of the type of thing one has to deal with when using linked data in general.

This query returns 99 countries in Africa, but there are actually only 54-56 *currently. Examples of things I wouldn’t want back are  things that are no longer relevant to modern geo-political questions, e.g.

{
 "Country": { "type": "literal", "xml:lang": "en", "value": "Roman Empire" }
 }

Here’s the actual query for the curious. I’m running this query on FactForge, which integrates roughly 8 LOD data-sets, including DBPedia, Geonames, NYT, CIA Fact Book, etc.

PREFIX ff: <http://factforge.net/>
 PREFIX rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
 PREFIX dbpedia: <http://dbpedia.org/resource/>
 PREFIX pext: <http://www.ontotext.com/proton/protonext#>
 PREFIX ptop: <http://www.ontotext.com/proton/protontop#>

SELECT DISTINCT ?Country
 where {
 ?Coun ff:preferredLabel ?Country ;
 rdf:type pext:Country ;
 ptop:subRegionOf dbpedia:Africa.
 FILTER ( LANG(?Country) = "en")
 }

* In order to easily distinguish what is the current representation of the world and what is historical, and subset either would require properties indicating this currently relevant status, e.g. (in short-hand) dbpedia:Roman_Empire dbpedia:current “false”^^xsd:boolean .

“As the MIT Libraries continue to modernize their data environment, there are numerous opportunities to define new workflows, form best practices, create novel services and integrations, and support the expanding need for discovery environments outside the confines of traditional library systems. This talk will discuss some of the projects and experiments currently underway, reflect on the new roles libraries can fulfill as the field evolves, and expose new and relevant opportunities for library engagement with our university communities.”

In case anyone is curious, here are the details of how I’m archiving for future reference the Flash-based conference stream from Semantic Web in Libraries (#SWIB12) happening in Cologne, Germany. The organizers of the conference generously set up a video feed so that the world (of Semantic Web professionals who were unable to travel to the event) can benefit from the great presentations happening there.

I’m using a tool called RTMPDump, which can take a stream URL and Flash Player URL, and write the contents of the stream to a local (.flv) file.

Following the instructions here, I was able to install the tool without issue (OS/X Mountain Lion) and test out the configuration for the SWIB12 stream.  The example command didn’t work right out of the gate and there were some command-line options that were order-dependent, and relied on certain quotation usage for parameters, but with a little help from the man page, I got a command that worked.

$ rtmpdump –live -r rtmp://62.113.221.5/servicevideotv-live/livestream -W “http://www.blitzvideoserver06.de/blitzvideoplayer6.swf” –flv “/Users/sands/Movies/SWIB12_day2_1.flv”

-r:  The actual RTMP stream URL

-W: The URL of the Flash Player

–flv: The local file to output to

–live: Specify that this is not a static remote video file, but a live stream.  (I’m guessing this helps with closing out the file when the stream interrupts.)

Once the stream is up and running (something I have to wait until 3am EST for) I can trigger the above command and get a clear read-out of the connection, parameters, and capture progress…

 Now all I have to do is make sure I’m awake when the stream drops for the lunch break so I can retrigger the capture once it is back online and have an archive of the second half of the day.  O.o

1.  Music_Metadata++;

First up is the glut of material I’m currently wading through/researching for Music Hack Day Boston 2012 at the MIT Stata Center.  You can learn about it here:

http://boston.musichackday.org/2012

Let’s see, what else.  There are all of the APIs & Data available for the Hack Fest/Competition:

The Echo Nest:  http://developer.echonest.com/

This Is My Jam:  http://www.thisismyjam.com/developers

Spotify:  https://developer.spotify.com/technologies/web-api/

MusiXmatch:  https://developer.musixmatch.com/

Auphonic:  https://auphonic.com/api-docs/

7Digital:  http://api.7digital.com/1.2/static/documentation/7digitalpublicapi.html

Roqbot:  http://roqbot.com/

Rdio:  http://developer.rdio.com/

Gracenote:  https://doors.gracenote.com/developer/

Free Music Archive:  http://freemusicarchive.org/api

Twillio:  http://www.twilio.com/docs

Rhapsody:  http://webservices.rhapsody.com/wiki/rds

Here’s how to get the EchoNest Hotness factor of an artist (in this case, 13 & God)…

http://developer.echonest.com/api/v4/artist/hotttnesss?api_key=FILDTEOIK2HBORODV&name=13+and+god&format=json

 

Here’s the EchoNest “Sandbox” of exclusive media for Air…

http://developer.echonest.com/sandbox/emi/air.html

 

Air – 10,000 Hz Legend – The Vagabond (feat. Beck).wmv from francisco batista on Vimeo.

 

There are the peripheral resources & projects that I’m gathering along the way, like APIify, TimelineJS, Git Extras.

Then things I just plain got distracted by and stashed for later pursuit:  EngineYard’s post entitled “What Is Data Science and What Does A Data Scientist Do?” (articles that I always like to read since everyone has a totally different idea about it), this Polar Clock (that I stumbled upon at exactly midnight), Google’s GeoChart (for a quick/easy/dirty tool), and my favorite graph/styling from a JavaScript Charting library tangent.

And on a CEMI-related note, this good technical description of Binaural Room Simulation, from some activity by an attendee of the Tapped NFC Hackathon, which happened today, speaking about Augs glitch-tripping (time-shifting all audio by minutes, hyper-filtering of visual field, flipping audio frequency bands) wearing Oculus Rifts and trading glitch/aug-configs via RFID bracelets.  (yeah.)

2.  LOD/LAM/RDF/NLP

Crashing forward, a slew (as usual) of Linked Data & Semantic Web content/news/tools.  The LODLAM (Linked Open Data for Libraries, Archives, and Museums)  SUMMIT 2013 & Challenge in Montréal, which I am intent on going to.  This tome on the advantages of RDF from one person’s perspective.  The LODGRefine tool from the LOD2 Project (who’s link seems to be dead ATM), which is an extension of  the Google Refine (formerly “GridWorks” from Metaweb, makers of FreeBase, before the Goog wisely snatched them up), and RDF Refine, that LODGRefine is partially built with, which can reconcile against SPARQL endpoints and RDF dumps (you know, for the next time you’re excited to do that).  OpenCalais for a bunch of meta-data enriching, discovery improvement, and NLP on text-based assets from (to start with) the Open Access collection in the repository I work on, DSpace@MIT.  Learning about the Open Annotation Data Model, and trying to remember the name of a temporal database platform that a colleague was talking about the other day.

3.  Music For Production/Momentum

I have been trying to keep track of music that makes me more productive.  Generally this has minimal verbiage, and is some form of electronic.  I always come back to Underworld as a rule.

Dan Deacon has been added to the list.

And I’d include some of the binaural beat tracks I’ve collected over time.  Also, “A Hawk And A Hacksaw” because it seems to match the pace of my life a lot of the time.

Also, when I have something in my clipboard, I can feel it in my left index finger and thumb.

Until the next overflow!

“#shadowgraph: A private graph of data, parallel to a public graph, linked but not published.”
- @sandsfish

Where this term comes into play (other than the original meaning of the phrase) is when you have a corpus of data that contain elements which semantically should be linked, but should not all be published to the web.  In earlier models of publishing data on the web, it was the interface that presented a new and separate representation of the underlying data, while the data itself remained in the database layer of the application.  In this way, only the data that was intended to be exposed was released to the user.

The difference when working with linked open data is that you are actually exposing the underlying data structure to the web of data.  The representation and the context for querying are one in the same.  Obviously one is not required to expose the entirety of the data held, nor would this frequently be desirable.  In this case, the sub-graph of data that should not be exposed/published, but remains semantically linked in the data, is the shadow graph.

There are a number of scenarios where one can imagine this being useful or absolutely required.  Certainly Google must have more data in the Knowledge Graph than they expose (though in this case, the UI layer is actually filtering/re-representing the data).  In an environment where an organization is incrementally opening up their data, maintaining all attributes about a given entity in graph form can still provide internal benefits (reporting, inferencing, etc.) while limiting what the public sees.  More specifically, in a theoretical product database, a company may want to publish technical metadata about their products for reuse, but maintain pricing or organizational metadata for internal use.

Shadow-graphing allows for querying and inferencing on the entire linked set of data, without the need or expense of maintaining and synchronizing a mirror copy for other purposes.  The actual implementation of a shadow graph is possible in a variety of ways, from using the same base URI and entity URIs in a separate triple store, or using privacy mechanics built into a graph platform.  I’m curious to know others’ thoughts on how best to accomplish the effect.

There is a set of solutions that exist in the fuzzy world between open and closed, such as the email hashing hack suggested in the “Variation: FOAF and rdfs:seeAlso” section of TBL‘s “Linked Data Design Issues“.

The full set can be found here:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/sandsfish/sets/72157630651535854/

More about the event can be found here and here.

1.)  An artwork’s ability to convey an emotional reality (or at least “internal” state) from the artists’ mind to the observer / consumer’s.

2.)  An artwork’s ability to represent knowledge (or information; the distinction between which I don’t intend to get into here) in a way that is abstracted from the direct, original representation of it, in a way that is more compelling, or conveys more (perhaps the thread that ties #2 into #1) than if it were to be simply echoed.

Daniel Libeskind‘s “eL Masterpiece” chandelier, for me, is a fascinating representation of the latter (specifically because of the scaled translation of time, and non-metaphorical use of light, (not to mention the use of super-computers to generate the data that it surfaces).

I also very much like that it is a real-world (what Aurelia Moser calls “analographic”) data visualization object, giving it more of a visceral “weight” than one that only appears on a screen.  This  does not add any ability or functionality, but it is hard for me to think that there isn’t something much more communicative or transmittal because of its actual presence.

It is difficult to say, not having experienced the “playback” (?) of it in person (or even on-screen; link anyone?) whether it is more compelling when one is standing in a room with the piece, which perhaps brings us to the realm of discussion in this Idea Channel webisode…