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.

Through Bruce Spencer, I learned about the Walmart recommendation engine fiasco: people searching for Planet of the Apes were directed to movies about Martin Luther King Jr. Note that Walmart does not seem to use a collaborative filtering engine, but rather uses manually entered association rules, or so they claim. But there has been examples of offensive recommendations before which were based on collaborative filtering.

This brings about a new problem in collaborative filtering and recommender engines: how to avoid offensive recommendations.

This one is tough. What if people who like Martin Luther King movies are more likely to buy porn? It could be. (Please, don’t sue me, this is just an academic example.) What happens then?

How is Machine Learning to know that this is not a good association? How do we even know as human beings in the first place?

This is a hard and important problem.

The European Computing and Philosophy (ECAP) will be held at the University of Twente.

The topics include:

• Philosophy of Computer Science
• Computer-based Learning and Teaching Strategies and Resources &
  The Impact of Distance Learning on the Teaching of Philosophy and Computing
• Biological Information, Artificial Life, Biocomputation
• Philosophy of Information and Information Technology
• Ontology
• Computational and Post-Computational Approaches to the Mind
• Information and Computing Ethics
• IT and Globalization
• IT, Gender and Cultural Diversity
• Robotics
• Open Source and Usability
• Simulation and Virtual Reality
• Computer-Mediated Communication
• The Relation between Psychology and Psychometrics
• Intersections

Authors should submit an electronic version of an extended abstract (total word count approximately 1000 words).

CORIA 2007 will be held in March at the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Saint-Étienne. CORIA is the premier French Information Retrieval conference.

According to Gerry McGovern, the Web strips away authority from the establishment. In fact, the Web is leading a backlash against traditional authority figures. (Via Downes.)

Is this true? Can it be true? Notice that it says traditional authority figures and not bluntly authority figures. What is a traditional authority figure? I think he means someone you are required to meet face to face regularly, such as a teacher. If so, then I believe this statement is true.

The Web gives you access to other authority figures, some who may be more interesting to you. When I was a student in High School, I was limited to what my teachers would offer me. And frankly, as a general rule, it was poor despite the fact that I went to a private school. Right now, High School students can go much further than what their teacher allow in class. They can discover and meet new people online (through their web sites) who may be more knowledgeable or interesting than their teachers.

I think the same is true of doctors, lawyers, professors, teachers, and so on. They all lost a little to the Web because they now have to compete partially on a worldwide expertise market.