Rachnaa did a great work on the interface of ShoutSpace. She implemented also a thread view and the icon/color code I was suggesting in the interaction design. Lots of small things to fix but we will have soon something to try out on the campus.

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This company is commercialising clothes with GPS embedded. This will allow the wearer to be tracked continuously and to transfer biometric parameters to pc and handhelds.

Found two nice links on connecting skype to an existing cordless phone. One is an hack which requires some soldering (via) and the other is commercial. Nice to see that a big company like Siemens is making a step towards VoIP. A cool plus is that they opened the SDK of their USB adapter to developers that want to implement new features on the existing platform.

New functionalities may include: intelligent routing of the phone calls; weather and stock info; SMS redirecting; but also intelligent integration of the house appliances: fridge, owen, etc. …

Seems that something is moving

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“Ogni popolo ha il governo e le leggi che si merita”

Il 12 e 13 giugno gli italiani saranno chiamati a votare per 4 differenti tematiche legate alla fecondazione, nascita, ricerca scientifica. In questo breve post vorrei evitare di entrare nello specifico delle scelte politiche che hanno portato alla definizione di queste quattro tematiche e tantomeno di entrare nello specifico di come intendo votare.

Quel che mi interessa qui approfondire sono le modalità di accesso al voto e le politiche referendarie facendo una piccola comparazione con il paese nel quale sto vivendo al momento: la Svizzera.

Tutti gli elettori residenti all’estero e regolarmenti iscritti ai registri A.I.R.E. ricevono a casa un plico contentente il materiale necessario per votare (vedi prima immagine).

Messa da parte una facile polemica sulla eccessiva complessità della procedura di voto e imbustamento (che richiede ben 2 fogli esplicativi), vorrei porre l’attenzione sulla presenza di un oggetto inutile e la mancanza di un oggetto fondamentale.

L’oggetto inutile è un manualetto di una decina di fogli contenente il testo di legge per il diritto di esercizio di voto per i residenti all’estero (chi se ne frega).

L’oggetto fondamentale e mancante è una guida esplicativa dei 4 referendum con una presa di posizione ufficiale del governo e del(dei) comitato/i referendari(o). Queste guide, che ho scoperto ed imparato ad apprezzare qui in Svizzera contengono le posizioni ufficiali del governo, del comitato per il NO e di quello per il SI (vedi successive immagini).

Ora mi domando: 1) perché non riusciamo anche noi a fare una cosa così semplice per aiutare e motivare al voto? Sarà forse perché in realtà non vogliamo assolutamente abituare i cittadini ad esprimere la propria opinione?

2) perché in Italia siamo ancora vincolati dalla stupida soglia del “quorum” affinché un referendum sia considerato valido? Qui in Svizzera, ad esempio, non esiste quorum, quindi gli astensionismi non vengono incoraggiati (cosa che trovo di enorme valore civico).

3) perché il nostro governo non si pronuncia mai chiaramente e ufficialmente riguardo le votazioni referendarie? Assistiamo spesso a dichiarazioni sbrigative ed approssimative da parte di quel o quel parlamentare ma mai ad azioni di informazioni sistematiche.

 

Come sempre ci dobbiamo affidare ad iniziative di privati che pubblicano delle guide su come il voto influenzerà la legge. Ovviamente tali sforzi, seppur ammirevoli presentano delle prese di posizione (vedi disegnini del bimbo triste e felice) che iniziative ufficiali potrebbero evitare.

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A meta-model is an explicit model of the constructs and rules needed to build specific models within a domain of interest. A valid meta-model is an ontology, but not all ontologies are modeled explicitly as meta-models. A meta-model can be viewed from three different perspectives:

1. as a set of building blocks and rules used to build models

2. as a model of a domain of interest, and

3. as an instance of another model.

When comparing meta-models to ontologies, we are talking about meta-models as models (perspective 2).

Note: Meta-modeling as a domain of interest can have its own ontology. For example, the CDIF Family of Standards, which contains the CDIF Meta-meta-model along with rules for modeling and extensibility and transfer format, is such an ontology. When modelers use a modeling tool to construct models, they are making a commitment to use the ontology implemented in the modeling tool. This model making ontology is usually called a meta-model, with “model making” as its domain of interest.

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People use the word ontology to mean different things, e.g. glossaries & data dictionaries, thesauri & taxonomies, schemas & data models, and formal ontologies & inference. A formal ontology is a controlled vocabulary expressed in an ontology representation language. This language has a grammar for using vocabulary terms to express something meaningful within a specified domain of interest. The grammar contains formal constraints (e.g., specifies what it means to be a well-formed statement, assertion, query, etc.) on how terms in the ontology’s controlled vocabulary can be used together.

People make commitments to use a specific controlled vocabulary or ontology for a domain of interest. Enforcement of an ontology’s grammar may be rigorous or lax. Frequently, the grammar for a “light-weight” ontology is not completely specified, i.e., it has implicit rules that are not explicitly documented.

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A thesaurus is a networked collection of controlled vocabulary terms. This means that a thesaurus uses associative relationships in addition to parent-child relationships. The expressiveness of the associative relationships in a thesaurus vary and can be as simple as “related to term” as in term A is related to term B.

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A controlled vocabulary is a list of terms that have been enumerated explicitly. This list is controlled by and is available from a controlled vocabulary registration authority. All terms in a controlled vocabulary should have an unambiguous, non-redundant definition. At a minimum, the following two rules should be enforced:

1. If the same term is commonly used to mean different concepts in different contexts, then its name is explicitly qualified to resolve this ambiguity.

2. If multiple terms are used to mean the same thing, one of the terms is identified as the preferred term in the controlled vocabulary and the other terms are listed as synonyms or aliases.

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Nice discussion today with my supervisor. We came out with this idea of building an algorithm that is able to find patterns in zones of the map. The idea is that messages are distributed on the map. The challenge is to find a system to define clusters among them based on their similarity [d1] or dissimilarity [d2]. To do it we can use several technique which avoid going to the edge of natural language processing and in particular: (1) spatial clustering; (2) social network analysis; (3) threads analysis.

Using concurrently these methods, we should be able to zone the maps and assign to each zone a set of meta-descriptors. Finally, messages in the same zone should have their content parsed by a Latent Semantic Analysis engine (4) which should generate “GeoSemantic Patterns”.

This outcome can be then feed into the search engine of the interface and to the spatial clustering engine to resolve conflicting zones.

Next challenge is then to find a good literature chunk for each of those topics.

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A taxonomy is a collection of controlled vocabulary terms organized into a hierarchical structure. Each term in a taxonomy is in one or more parent-child relationships to other terms in the taxonomy. There may be different types of parent-child relationships in a taxonomy (e.g., whole-part, genus-species, type-instance), but good practice limits all parent-child relationships to a single parent to be of the same type. Some taxonomies allow poly-hierarchy, which means that a term can have multiple parents. This means that if a term appears in multiple places in a taxonomy, then it is the same term. Specifically, if a term has children in one place in a taxonomy, then it has the same children in every other place where it appears.

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