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Update: Sorry I have *no* invites left. None whatsoever

For the last year and a bit I’ve been working on Joost (formerly known as the Venice Project), an IPTV product, in various capacities, most of them managery. Great fun, very cool people, so very very tired… There’s a lot of RDF under the hood, including Jena and Redland (see Leo’s post for some more detail), plus there’s a lot of open source stuff in there too, and the whole player is based on Mozilla (Allan has a little more on that). There’s SVG in there too…
If you want to see what we’ve been working on I have a bunch of invites to give out, mail me at Joost if you want one – I figured that’d be preferable than spamming friends with invites they don’t want.

Actually 30 of us, in the Isle of Wight, open street mapping. Great fun, with ginger beer, cakes, bacon and eggs, actual beer, bikes, cars, feet and lots and lots of gps devices and cameras. An interim version of the map is on the workshop site, and here’s a quick screenshot – lots more was done today – this is just the version from yesterday with mine and Damian’s track on it from today as well.
Lots of interesting metadata capture problems too but I’m too tired from sitting in a car for 3 days to blog about them right now (and I know that’s a rubbish excuse…some people were cycling 50 miles a day or walking 20 miles, or concentrating on driving even – thanks Damian! – all I did was take pictures of road signs and work the gps. But hey, sitting around taking photos is hard work y’know, oh yeah…).
More photos are on my site (friday, saturday and sunday) and a selected few on flickr. Thanks to all the organisers, especially David and Simon. Hope we can do it again somewhere – and I’m inspired to help Lawrence with Bristol too.

200 years old tomorrow – but the fireworks are tonight (terrible site; details are on pdf or word). There’s a flickr group too.

[Damian wrote this]
So Libby and I have been redecorating Dan’s room. Before you run away screaming from this depiction of domestic bliss, please bear with me.
Dan has quite a few books, and we had planned to install enough shelving to hold all of them. But since we were moving so many dead trees why not find out what’s there? The inspiration, in some ways, was Delicious Library. However although Delicious library’s use of the iSight for scanning was cunning, it would have been really slow.

Happily Dan has a barcode scanner, so we could capture the barcode numbers easily. Ultimately armed with ~900 numbers, it was time to look them up…
The best lookup site I found was ISDBdb. As far as I can tell it uses Amazon (US) and Library Of Congress to grab as much useful information as it can, including classifications and descriptions. It includes a simple api, and will deal with 13 digit numbers for you. 13 digit numbers?
Well, when you scan you don’t get the 10 digit ISBN. What you get is a 13 digit European article number. It’s pretty easy to convert (although I have found cases where the EAN and ISBN were unrelated), but I’m happy the ISBNdb will cope with them.
However ISBNdb wasn’t finding everything. We did have some CDs and DVDs in the mix, but many UK books weren’t turning up. I couldn’t change ISBNdb, so tried reproducing it. The result is appalling, frankenstein code, but it mostly works. Here’s roughly what it does:

1. (If required) convert EAN to ISBN
2. If that isn’t possible, try Amazon.de, then Amazon.co.jp, which provide EAN lookups, and get the Amazon id (ASIN, which is identical to the ISBN for books). This finds DVDs and CDs.
3. Try to find the item in the UK, then US, then CA, then DE, then JP stores (and yes, we have a couple of books only in the Japanese store). Grab details, including subjects and editorial review.
4. Also try a z39.50 lookup in the Library of Congress.
5. Merge everything, and spit out as N3

I’d like to add the British Library, and COPAC, to the z39.50 lookups, but baby steps.
Here’s an example run (trimmed):

$ echo 9781851683321 | ruby lookup_amazon_z3950.rb
Skipping: 0
Line: 1 Found: '9781851683321' (1851683321) [UK]
<urn:isbn:1-851-68332-1>
a ex:Book ;
rdfs:seeAlso <http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=ws%26l...> ;
dc:identifier """1851683321""" ;
dc:subject """956.9405""" ;
dc:subject """DS119.7""" ;
dc:subject """Arab-Israeli conflict""" ;
dc:subject """Asian / Middle Eastern history: postwar, from c 1945 -""" ;
dc:subject """Asian studies""" ;
dc:subject """Foreign Relations""" ;
dc:subject """Palestine""" ;
dc:subject """World - General""" ;
dct:issued """2003-07-01""" ;
dc:creator """Dan Cohn-Sherbok""" ;
dc:creator """Dawoud Sudqi El Alami""" ;
dc:identifier """1851683321""" ;
dc:description """Of all the intractable and inflammatory world conflicts, ...""" ;
dc:title """The Palestine-Israeli Conflict: A Beginner's Guide""" ;
dc:identifier """9781851683321""" ;
ex:pages """256""" ;
dct:hasFormat """Paperback""" ;
dc:publisher """Oneworld Publications""" ;
.

This is mostly amazon, but includes Dewey and LOC subjects from LOC. You can feed it more than one number (it just loops over STDIN). I’m not happy with the output, but RDF modeling issues are the easy bit. It will change to indicate LOC vs Dewey, and (hopefully) use skos for the amazon subjects.
The script is lookup_amazon_z3950.rb. You need an Amazon dev token (insert it at the start of the script), Ruby/ZOOM, and REXML (which comes with ruby 1.8). It will also have a go at DVDs and CDs, so have a play.
The final score was 934 numbers, 64 not found. A pretty good total, all in all, but other z39.50 sites are calling me…

I have a virus on my mobile phone if you got a weird MMS from me I’m sorry – I don’t think the MMSs it’s distributing contain the virus – which I got via bluetooth – but probably best to destroy without reading anyway.
boo.
For those at the conference – do NOT accept anything that purports to be from me via bluetooth!

Sorry to go on about it, but for UK people: the third and final reading of the Identity Cards Bill is next tuesday, 18th October. If you think it’s important, now would be a good time to write to your MP, or join No2ID or Liberty.

While I’m in the blogging mood: XSLT-meister Max Froumentin has written a neat PDF album generator from flickr. From a username, you get a title page with thumbnails and then a page per photo with the title and description. Uses XSL FO and you can run it yourself…very cool indeed and very nice results (I’ve often admired iPhoto’s similar thing – but from Flickr is much cooler. Max should make his fortune. Maybe HP are interested?

I’ve just come back from a very jolly week in Nottingham at the “Pervasive and Locative Arts Network” meeting – about 15-20 of us, most of us there all week.
This was a really interesting mix of artists and technologists interested in mapping, mobiles, GPS. The network is funded by EPSRC and the aim of the week was to try and create 3 or 4 possible proposals for future work, though there was no pressure to do anything in particular with those.

So we split into 3 groups and over the week came up with three ideas. One was about following GPS tracks made by other people and being able to play the music they played while they were moving along at the speed they were moving along (so if you were walking and they had been running it sounded fast to you; if you moved away from the track it was quieter etc). Amazingly they got it working with a PDA, GPS. They did a brilliant presentation with video examples and a system so we could have a go.
The second was based on some work by Christian Nold, who had made his own ‘lie detector’ and brought it with him. They were interested in making maps of a place with information such as ‘I feel good here’, sharing the info and visualising it in interesting ways. Again they used a PDA, bluetooth GPS and Christian’s sensor to create the maps – there are some pictures. I was very taken with their unusual visualisations of the data.


The group I was in was me, Steve Coast from openstreetmap and Mikel Maron who did the flash-based geodata viewer Worldkit.
I think it’s fair to say that Steve is obsessed with open map data, and openstreetmap have created a wiki where you can annotate maps with roads, based on GPS trails provided by individuals and – in London – by a courier company. Mikel’s toolkit can display any map and also any annotations on a map, taking as input geo-RSS1 or 2.
I made a little demo using worldkit, events in Bristol and the Skatemap basemap.
(that’s a bit crap; I could not develop much interactivity on this map currently because of a problem on mac with js and flash, but you could imagine selecting part of a map and getting a calendar view; or creating events or adding oneself to events using this interface, all ideas from the group).
Mikel got his stuff working with openstreetmap maps; and also working on a PDA and a rather specific type of mobile phone. He also did a map of flickr geo tags. Pictures and things are here.

Steve hacked up a geo rss aggregator which you can ask for a bounding box and it returns an rss2 feed of points and annotations within that – so that could be used with worldkit for example. An RDF version might be better – allowing better types of filtering; Jo Walsh has been working on something like this. Though most of the geo RSS data available is rss2.
A potential thing we might do is to to something for another PLAN thing – futuresonic in manchester in about 9 months time – it’s an art/music event with multiple locations, ‘spontaneous’ events as well as scheduled ones. I’d like to make something that allows people to create events, say they’re going, filter them by person, location etc etc. It all seems pretty doable (and to an extent has been done). I’ll probably try and hack something similar up for foaftown Bristol.
Anyhow, that’s a quick summary. More stuff is on the wiki
It was terrific to meet and work with such a diverse and creative group of people. I was particularly taken with Mika Raento‘s work with 2D barcodes and context-based moblogging for symbian series 60. I just love that kind of stuff and he let me have a play with it. It was a delight and an education to meet all of the people there and I look forward to seeing what they come up with next. Many thanks to Ben for inviting me; and Drew, Ben and Steve for facilitating.

On Friday I nipped down into bristol town centre for a protest against ID cards, sparked by the government’s somewhat secret ID card roadshow and organised by Bristol NO2ID. I don’t usually like demonstrations, prefering to rant on my blog and annoy my friends instead (though I made an exception for the anti-war demos). I was a bit nervous about what might happen, after Gateshead. But it was very civilised. David Gould did a bit of a Paxman on the minister Andy Burnham (“how much will it cost, minister?”) but the rest of us gave out a few leaflets, had a bit of a chat with some passers-by, held up some banners for the cameras, and made the BBC local evening news in a rather lighthearted piece, and a bit in the Bristol Evening Post. After about an hour, the security guard asked us very politely to leave, and we’d run out of leaflets any way, so we left, happy that we’d provided a bit of a counterpoint to the government information.
Very nice to meet people – about half were women, and there were a few geeks too. Blue Lou: “you’re all so respectable!”
My photos, NO2ID site, Liberty.
Update: mp4 of BBC Points West news item (thanks shellac!).