MilStan’s blog

In the global overload of predictions for 2009, I taught it would be nice just to tell one New Year’s wish for a change. As you might know the regular mail is highly popular in France (it’s used even for paying your bills, ordering products and all other sorts of things that Web can be more efficiently used for). That made me think about the place of the postal service in the modern world. It will always be a useful thing for sending physical objects, gifts and similar stuff, but the problem occurs with people, who travel a lot – how to deliver regular mail to them on time, wherever they are. So that is my New Year’s – Future of the Web wish. I wish to have a postal service that will bring me my packages and letters wherever I be.

You might say that I’m asking too much. Yes, sometimes I do that , but if you think for a second that I publish my exact location on FireEagle, and that my future trips are published on Dopplr, it is very easy to imagine a postal service that takes a letter addressed with my URI instead of a physical address, and then delivers it to the appropriate place. It would be a postal service that delivers mail from one person to another instead of delivering it from one address to another.

Last week in Karlsruhe, I’ve got an honorable mention for the poster designed by my friend Uros in Hagenberg, following the conception I’ve sent him from Paris, describing the ontology I’ve published in Wien and created earlier in the SpeakEasy cafe in Belgrade.

Dear friends, dedicated readers, citizens of the word, here is my new hedonist list for Paris, hopefully only the first in the series:

• The ultimately expensive, full of nougat and chocolate, creamy Le Nôtre cakes
• Bateaux-Mouches on a sunny day
• Café Viennois at Le Flore en Ile, Ile Saint-Louis with the view on the Notre Dame
• A full moon night at Parc Monceau
• Early autumn lunch at Bagatelle, Bois du Boulogne
• A surprising walk in the Parc de Sceaux
• 30, avenue Montaigne
• Wine and cheese on the Pont des Arts
• Cheese shop at Rue Montorgueil
• Ile des Cygnes on a sunny autumn day
• Wim Wenders and Denis Hopper at La Cinémathèque Française

Recently I’ve noticed how my friends and I spend more and more time on the internet. Even when we are just using some desktop applications, we are logged on some chat programs so that our friends can see that we are there – in the online world.

Twitter and the way how it attracted a lot of users to share their current activities and thoughts was at first a big surprise to me, but then I realized how important it was for people to create an image of themselves in the online world and present themselves to others.

In that sense it became clear how necessary it is to model all those pieces that make an image of somebody’s presence in the online world, so I have started a new project for modeling the Online Presence and enabling the interoperability between applications where Online Presence data is declared. Please see the project website for more details: http://www.milanstankovic.org/opo/.

I expect that the field will gain even more significance with mass adoption of mobile devices that will make us almost constantly present online. Then the precise definition of our presence and attitude towards contacts will be crucial.

For true hedonists, an introduction to this post is quite unnecessary; they can pass directly to the list. For the others let there be known that Vienna in the summer is one of the best places of the world for feeling great. Delights of every kind, brought from all parts of the world are available here for quite a reasonable price (or no price at all). Here is the unordered list of things to taste and do:

·        Mozart ice-cream with marzipan at Fratteli il gelato, Schwedenplatz

·        A summer afternoon at Schönbrunn Gardens

·        Espresso at Julius Meinl am Graben

·        Profiterole at Fratteli, Schwedenplatz

·        Semifreddo (preferably with hazelnuts) at Zanoni in Rotenturmstraße

·        Wind in your hair at a Hydrolyser for Bratislava (Twin-City Liner) – take a seat outside!

·        A walk by the Donaukanal, like in a painting by Renoir

·        Sitting on the lawn in Burgarten

·        Raffaello ice-cream at Fratteli il gelato, Schwedenplatz

·        A 3 € Rosé sparkling wine at Spar

·        A cake at Gerstner, Kärnter Straße

·        Measuring your weight on a big green scale in Augarten

·        A cake at Heiner, Kärnter Straße

·        Sitting by the lake in Stadtpark, watching the ducks play in summer afternoon

·        A fruit salad at Schober, Wahringerstraße

·        Getting lost in the world of chocolate, marzipan and other delights from all parts of the world in Julius Meinl am Graben, a specialized boutique for hedonists and hedonists to be

And maybe the best things were those I forgot to mention

I was standing in Albertina, Vienna, looking at a Picasso’s work, A Woman in a Green Hat, just admiring the remarkable approach of representing the knowledge about an object (its looks from different perspectives) in a limited medium. When I taught about it, the part “representing knowledge” sounded kind of familiar. The thought lead me first to similarity with the idea of the Semantic Web and its effort to represent knowledge about things.

 Then I moved to the next painting. It was a work of Kazimir Malevich whose work belongs to the Suprematism movement – “a type of art based on pure form, which is meant to be generally understood, independent of the observer’s cultural or ethnic background” – an explanation from Albertina that I wrote in my Moleskine.

It led me to thinking that there are similar grounds in the ideas applied in arts and ideas that define the tracks of technical sciences. Maybe the scientific thought and artistic expression are just instances of the same genius.

Then I saw a painting of René Magritte, one of my favorite artists, a representative of Surrealism.

From the current perspective, I cannot imagine the future Web after the semantic Web. What course of development would make sense after all possibilities of Semantic Web being achieved?

But if I let myself think about the Semantic Web as the Cubist Web, why not think about the possibility of the Surrealist Web, modeling the unconscious of the Web?

It’s been a long time since I have been so excited about an application. It’s Digsby, a multiprotocol IM client that allows you to integrate your chat contact lists from various IM platforms. I’ve used this kind of applications before (Meboo, etc.) but was never really satisfied with the interface (I prefer the minimalistic gTalk interface).

A part from being an IM client to rule them all (ok, all except skype), Digsby connects to social networks (like Facebook, Myspece, Twitter, etc.). So it is not just an enhanced IM client, but also a gathering point for notifications from various services (e.g., mailboxes and social network newsfeeds). I think that the application brings a huge shift in the way we connect to others on the Social Web, by reducing the need to visit social networking sites to get informed and brining information to us.

What I find to be the most important characteristic of this promising application is the usability. The e-mail notification functionality is actually more usable and practical than Gmail Notifier because it allows you to preview a message, than mark it as read directly (something I always wished to see in Notifier). It also provides a Compose mail link, also lacking in Notifier. However, there could be some usability improvements – like the status (Available, Busy) in the chat window (for now chat windows only display status changes in small font letters, instead of status information being indicated on top of the window like in gTalk).

I think we can expect a large numer of users accepting Digsby, and a large numer of applications addopting the same integrating approach for various sources of contacts and notifications.

In the just released Encyclopedia of Information Communication Technology, edited by Antonio Cartelli, you can find an article of Uros, Jelena and me about software agents, written more then a year ago. (See the list of contributors.)

Well spring has its rainy days (and nights), so I’ve managed to find a little time and create a webpage to represent my recent project - TagFusion, as I announced earlier.

Please feel free to leave your comments about it, as well as any suggestions for future work. I am myself aware of some possibilities for improvement, especially regarding the integration with new services (e.g., Open Calais).

I hope you’re all enjoying the spring

A lot of time has passed since I last blogged, and a lot of time since I had what to blog about but I didn’t. I have finished my graduation thesis in December, and since then many people were asking for some details about it, so here they are.

My project is about collaborative tagging. It refers to the current state in the world of collaborative tagging systems (e.g., del.icio.us, Flickr, Technorati, etc.) which are pretty much isolated and cooperate very little or not at all. Tagging metadata would have been much more useful if collaborative tagging systems had been collaborating and allowing for integration of their collected annotations.

The aim of my work was to create a system (called TagFusion) that would allow the integration of metadata from various collaborative tagging systems. Special attention has been given to the strategies for attracting collaborative tagging systems to integrate using TagFusion, as well as to the possibility to involve artificial entities into the annotation process in accordance with the Semantic Web vision.

I am planning to put up a page about all the details concerning the project as well as some papers made to present it. But here is spring in Belgrade, so do not expect it soon