Blog do Fernando Meyer

Transitioning from a web of links and a sequence of words to a web of content, meaning and knowledge is probably the next great moving that we are going to see on the next two or maybe three years.

I was chatting with a friend, how can we bring knowledge to the web, how can we use the web to make a really efficient human driven search engine, last week a few former Googlers made some noise about a totally new SE named cuil, I tried some queries on that page, but it does work almost like google, you must be pretty much binary to retrieve some interesting information, in another words, nothing has changed since 90’s on this area. This problem is around researcher’s minds for a long time, trust, influence, authority when applied to the web are essentially people based issues.

The propose is the content being an asset with information about what it really means running against the link/words algorithms with no explicit meaning and a simple assumption “yes … we know you’re a good reference because you have a lot of links”.

Make yourself a question, how to ask something? How do I ask for information?

You ask your close friend: “Sunday night guitar red cap TV?” when you really want to know about the Sunday night TV show where a girl with a funny red cap playing a guitar. Things does change when you bring meaning to it, thats what a human being does.

Indeed, Google is still leading this running, with several fields under extreme research, articles about Data Mining, Collective Intelligence and AI being published denotes the new approach.

Yes … things are about to change

Como varias pessoas próximas a mim ja sabem eu deixei a RedHat em abril deste ano por motivos pessoais, o trabalho remoto mesmo tendo suas vantagens não conseguiu despertar em mim a mesma proatividade e cumplicidade que eu teria trabalhando com pessoas reais durante o dia-a-dia. Trabalhar em uma empresa em que eu pudesse estar fisicamente locado com um time e desenvolvendo um software incremental foram os motivos que me levaram a globo.com.

Dentro da gcom trabalhamos usando a metodologia Scrum, temos varios casos de sucesso e uma boa reputaçao no mercado brasileiro com a adoção desta metodologia. Mas o sucesso dos projetos não vem apenas do uso de uma metodologia agil, pessoas com otimas noções de negócio e tecnologia fazem o barco andar de forma gloriosa. Tive a sorte de participar logo no primeiro contato na empresa com profissionais que valorizam a qualidade de seu código, alem de entregar algo rápido e funcional também olham para o como fazer melhor, refatorar um algoritmo que não ficou bom em uma primeira abordagem, ou seja fazemos software.

Sempre brinco pelos corredores, que hoje em dia que as empresas se preocupam mais em vender a imagem que fazem o negocio de uma forma diferente das demais e deixam totalmente de lado as boas praticas de desenvolvimento que foram esculpidas durante anos de tentativas, erros e evoluções. Nasce ai o Scrume, a desculpa de usar a metodologia e/ou a abordagem agile com pessoas que não levam à paixão seu trabalho. Conversas que tive com o Philip calçado e artigos como “The Decline and Fall of Agile” veem apenas confirmar esta visão, anos de evolução sendo deixadas de lado por modismos.

Se você pensar de uma maneira racional, software vem sendo desenvolvido ao longo dos anos possibilitando avanços significativos em vários campos como biologia, astronomia e finanças para não me alongar, a não adoção do “scrum” não fez projetos como linux ou colocar o homem na lua com um tubo de 8088 por exemplo ser fadado ao fracasso. Ocorreram erros, acertos e em alguns momentos pessoas precisaram se sobrepor para trazer o bom senso a tona.

Concordo plenamente que a adoção do scrum por exemplo, aumenta a visibilidade dos problemas que ocorrem no desenvolvimento de features por termos um feedback rápido do cliente ou da organização, mas não é tendo apenas essa abordagem que fara seu projeto ser bem sucedido.

Os projetos hoje que dão certo, estão envoltos em uma gama de outros fatores que equilibram essa equação. Fica meu conselho, não é trazendo um evangelista e adotanto Scrum para sua empresa que fará seus projetos darem certo, mas se e somente se as pessoas envolvidas acreditarem no que estão fazendo.

I was looking for some documentation about using TDB and Pellet
reasoser on Jena without pet peeves, didn’t found anything usable at all, so after a few
attempts I was still fighting against an ambiguity error,
whenever Joseki tries to build a dataset, the following exception pops up

18:18:49 WARN  Configuration        :: Failed to build dataset from
description (service name: reason): cannot find a most specific type
for file:///joseki-config.ttl#dataset_reason, which has as
possibilities: ja:RDFDataset ja:InfModel.
com.hp.hpl.jena.assembler.exceptions.AmbiguousSpecificTypeException:
cannot find a most specific type for file:///Users/fmeyer/projects/semantic/
servicos/joseki/joseki-config.ttl#dataset_reason, which has as possibilities: 
ja:RDFDataset ja:InfModel.
 at com.hp.hpl.jena.assembler.assemblers.AssemblerGroup$PlainAssemblerGroup.
 open(AssemblerGroup.java:104)
 at com.hp.hpl.jena.assembler.assemblers.AssemblerGroup$ExpandingAssemblerGroup.
 open(AssemblerGroup.java:70)
 at com.hp.hpl.jena.assembler.assemblers.AssemblerBase.open(AssemblerBase.java:41)
 at com.hp.hpl.jena.assembler.assemblers.AssemblerBase.open(AssemblerBase.java:38)
 at org.joseki.DatasetDesc.newDataset(DatasetDesc.java:65)
 at org.joseki.DatasetDesc.initialize(DatasetDesc.java:60)
 at org.joseki.Configuration.processModel(Configuration.java:112)
 at org.joseki.Configuration.(Configuration.java:83)
 at org.joseki.Dispatcher.setConfiguration(Dispatcher.java:130)
 at org.joseki.Dispatcher.initServiceRegistry(Dispatcher.java:100)
 at org.joseki.Dispatcher.initServiceRegistry(Dispatcher.java:93)
 at org.joseki.RDFServer.init(RDFServer.java:79)
 at org.joseki.RDFServer.(RDFServer.java:64)
 at joseki.rdfserver.main(rdfserver.java:85)

We just need to define a GraphTDB as a subclass of a Model as follow to fix this issue

@prefix ja:     <http ://jena.hpl.hp.com/2005/11/Assembler#> .
@prefix tdb:     </http><http ://jena.hpl.hp.com/2008/tdb#> .
 
## Initialize TDB.
 
[] ja:loadClass "com.hp.hpl.jena.tdb.TDB" .
tdb:DatasetTDB  rdfs:subClassOf  ja:RDFDataset .
tdb:GraphTDB    rdfs:subClassOf  ja:Model .
 
## ---- A whole dadaset managed by TDB
< #dataset_reason> rdf:type      ja:RDFDataset ;
  ja:defaultGraph < #inf_graph> .
 
< #dataset> rdf:type      ja:RDFDataset ;
  ja:defaultGraph < #def_graph> ;
  .
 
< #inf_graph> rdf:type  ja:InfModel ;
    ja:reasoner [
        ja:reasonerClass
            "org.mindswap.pellet.jena.PelletReasonerFactory" ;
       ] ;
    ja:baseModel < #tdbGraph> .
 
< #def_graph> rdf:type  ja:InfModel ;
    ja:baseModel < #tdbGraph> .
 
< #tdbGraph> rdf:type tdb:GraphTDB ;
    tdb:location "DB" ;
    .

I just did a post into Mark Proctor’s Blog covering a short tutorial about BRMS (Business Rules Management System).

http://markproctor.blogspot.com/2007/07/discount-insurance-brokers-example-for.html

Check this out.

Drop all your computer science books (including that damn algorithm book), forget about you time reading the linux kernel sources and all the time across the night you’ve lost mining the internet looking for useful information, (even that black screen with gray letters using vi + C), now you can be a hacker just binding components and/or creating a web page with a nice css style. It reminds me a nice antonym to the hacker meaning,

Talkers: A person who speaks more than effectively do something useful.

missing the old times

This puzzle just poped on my screen when I was googling http://worrydream.com/AlligatorEggs/ it’s a nice puzzle
alligator game.

This game represents the untyped lambda calculus. A hungry alligator is a lambda abstraction, an old alligator is parentheses, and eggs are variables. The eating rule corresponds to beta-reduction. The color rule corresponds to (over-cautious) alpha-conversion. The old age rule says that if a pair of parentheses contains a single term, the parentheses can be removed.
I’m sure that after 4.0 drools release I’m going to implement this game as a drools DRL.

I just ordered these four books in amazon store, and will do some reviews as soon as possible probably I’ll be busy for a while

Expert Systems: Principles and Programming, Fourth Edition: Principles and Programming (Hardcover)

Jess in Action: Java Rule-Based Systems (In Action series) [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (2nd Edition) (Hardcover)

Principles of the Business Rule Approach (Paperback)

The English language has been at the forefront of globalization. English is celebrated as the language of global corporate management, the Internet, youth culture and science. At the same time, there appears to be a crisis in foreign language learning amongst native English speakers – it seems that there is no need any more to learn foreign languages if everyone now speaks English. But if you want to learn another language like Spanish, German or even Brazilian Portuguese, you can access these podcasts.
Note: You must have ITunes installed in your computer.
Learn Arabic Learn Chinese Learn Chinese Learn Chinese Learn Chinese English As a Second Language ESL English For Business Beginner French Learn French Learn French Learn French Learn French Verbs Learn German I II III IV Learn German Grammar Learn German Learn Greek Learn Hindi Learn Italian Learn Italian Learn Japanese With Video Japanese for Beginners Learn Japanese Symbols Learn Korean Learn Portuguese Learn Brazillian Portuguese in Spanish Learn Russian Learn Russian For Businesses Russian Literature Learn Spanish Learn Spanish Learn Spanish

I’m changing my default RSS reader from the web-based bloglines to Vienna, a rss reader for Mac OS X, Vienna keeps following RSS feeds simple and functional with smart folders, groups, an integrated browser and item flagging. It’s the perfect tool for offline readers like me.

ps: Yeap, I’m having some problems to get an internet connection here in Colombia; (sic)

Written by a leading developer and maintainer of the Linux kernel, Linux Kernel in a Nutshell is a comprehensive overview of kernel configuration and building, a critical task for Linux users and administrators.The book is available for download in either PDF or DocBook format for the entire book, or by the individual chapter.

To quote of the book’s author:

If you want to know how to build, configure, and install a custom Linux kernel on your machine, buy this book. It is written by someone who spends every day building, configuring, and installing custom kernels as part of the development process of this fun, collaborative project called Linux. I’m especially proud of the chapter on how to figure out how to configure a custom kernel based on the hardware running on your machine. This is an essential task for anyone wanting to wring out the best possible speed and control of your hardware.

http://www.kroah.com/lkn/