I agree with Stephen, if you are into e-Learning, and you listen to one talk this year, listen to this one. He begins his talk with “if you are using a computer or a cell phone right now, please continue.” As he says these words, you initially assume he is about to ask you to turn off your computer and your cell phone. No. Stephen wants you to feel connected. Stephen Downes is no ordinary man.

VLDB 2007 will be held in Vienna.

VLDB 2007 is a premier international forum for database researchers, vendors, practitioners, application developers, and users. We invite submissions reporting original results on all aspects of data management as well as proposals for panels, tutorials, and demonstrations that will present the most critical issues and views on practical leading-edge database technology, applications, and techniques. We also invite proposals for events and workshops that may take place at the conference site between September 23th and 25th before the VLDB 2007 conference.

Larray Seltzer points out that Java lost to Flash and AJAX:

Mostly, in the end, it appears that Java on the client lost out to Flash of all things! (…) It couldn’t even be competitive in the most inessential of tasks.

Let this be a lesson to all of us. You can have the nicest framework in the world, you can have the best arguments in the world, but if you are not providing immediate value to your users, you are dead in the water.

The DOLAP 2006 preliminary technical program is out. Rokia Missaoui and Omar Boussaid have a paper in called “Enhanced Mining of Association Rules from Data Cubes”. There is one paper on wavelets and range sum queries. At this point, we do not even have the abstracts so I will wait before commenting further on the papers.

The European WorkShop on Data Stream Analysis will be held in Italy in March 2007.

A growing number of applications in areas like networking, retail industry or sensor networks are dealing with a challenging type of data: data is produced over time in an unpredictable fashion, representing streams of network traffic, retail transactions or sensor-measured values. A key requirement of such applications is to continuously monitor and react to interesting phenomena occurring in the input streams. Streaming applications are usually characterized by transient relations, continuous queries, approximate answers and one-pass evaluation. These characteristics make them incompatible with several assumptions usually made in traditional databases as well as in statistical techniques. Indeed, simply storing the arriving data into a traditional database management system and manipulating the stored data is impossible. This special European Workshop seeks to bring together researchers working on knowledge discovery problems in data streams. While the primary objective of this Workshop is to provide an avenue for dissemination of research results and works in progress, we also seek to discuss the future development of knowledge discovery in data streams, and how the research will benefit applications. We invite authors to submit their work that demonstrates current research and novel applications in this area.

Fred responded to my recent anti-Semantic Web post by saying that the “Semantic Web landscape is changing.”

I really like Fred’s post. Here is where he agrees with me:

The proof that both RDF and web ontologies are useful is yet to be done.

Here is where we disagree:

Everything is changing, and everything should explode… soon!

I honestly do not see the Semantic Web being about to take off. As Bob DuCharme pointed out, people are doing “ontologies for the sake of ontologies”. This will get old very quickly. If 8 years and millions of dollars was not enough to produce a single remotely useful application, what will it take?

Are semantic web researchers becoming semantic web implementers? I do not see this happening. The papers are every bit as theoretical and as disconnected from real-world problems as they ever were.

Here are some common myths:

• Google is getting worse every day. Only the Semantic Web can save us. (False: Google is not getting worse, it is constantly improving and at an alarming rate at that.)
• Inference engines and ontologies are more sophisticated or somehow more intelligent than current database solutions such as relational databases, data mining algorithms, and so on. (False: Current database technology is highly sophisticated and built on lots and lots of theory.)

Kamel was reviewing some code I wrote and through a question he asked, I realized that some code I wrote would not compile under Visual C++. Further investigations showed that the following is valid under GCC, but not under Visual C++:


#include
using std::cout;
using std::endl;
int main(int argv, char ** args)
{
int a = 7;
int b = 3;
cout << (a and b) << endl;
cout << (a or b) << endl;
cout << (a xor b) << endl;
return 0
}


Can anyone help us out? Is this correct code?

Update: It looks like you can get this result under Visual C++ by including “iso646.h”. It includes the following definitions:

#define and &&
#define and_eq &=
#define bitand &
#define bitor |
#define compl ~
#define not !
#define not_eq !=
#define or ||
#define or_eq |=
#define xor ^
#define xor_eq ^=


In the last two weeks, I have been offered various opportunities as an expert on ontologies or inference engines. Short of being one of the organizers for the last two Canadian Semantic Web conferences, I am not an expert on ontologies or inference engines. Please stop. There are plenty of very qualified people in this area. I am not one of them.

I will repeat here what I tell anyone who comes up with such an invitation. Before I become interested in anything that has to do with web ontologies, I need to be convinced that, at least, RDF is a useful idea. So, first take Tim Bray’s RDF challenge:

To the first person or organization that presents me with an RDF-based app that I actually want to use on a regular basis (at least once per day), and which has the potential to spread virally, I hereby promise to sign over the domain name RDF.net.

But see, the rdf.net domain name is still down. Tim Bray, who can be seen as one of the initiators and early promoters of RDF, is still waiting for a useful RDF application. So am I.

I am sorry, but if the expert system debacle taught us anything, it is that, in Computer Science, it is not enough for an idea to sound intuitively useful. Ideas must be put to the test and they must provide value to users. Otherwise, users do not want to be bothered with it. In this sense, Information Technology is an experimental science. Some ideas are useful, others are not. So far, RDF and ontologies have not been shown to be useful. The burden of the proof is not on the users or on those who do not believe. The burden of the proof lies squarely on those promoting the idea. I do not have to argue against ontologies or RDF: if you disagree with me, you have to prove me wrong. That is how Information Technology works: you convince people by changing their life for the best. The reason for this is simple: there are too many good looking ideas out there for us to consider them all, and so we prune them out by whether or not they are proving useful in practice.

Disclaimer: yes, I teach my students all about RDF, even covering the most important applications, in my INF6450 course. Yes, you can teach something and yet be very critical of it. In a university setting, it is not a contradiction.

Downes came up with a new target for terrorists. Forget the airplanes: blow up the airport!

You have the equivalent of a dozen 747 flights crammed in a tiny room there, and there is utterly nothing stopping a terrorist from walking in there and taking out the whole building.

VLDB 2007 will be held in Vienna.

VLDB 2007 is a premier international forum for database researchers, vendors, practitioners, application developers, and users. We invite submissions reporting original results on all aspects of data management as well as proposals for panels, tutorials, and demonstrations that will present the most critical issues and views on practical leading-edge database technology, applications, and techniques. We also invite proposals for events and workshops that may take place at the conference site between September 23th and 25th before the VLDB 2007 conference.