More RDF scalability tests: "

We have lately been busy with RDF scalability. We work with the 8000 university LUBM data set, a little over a billion triples. We can load it in 23h 46m on a box with 8G RAM. With 16G we probably could get it in 16h.

The resulting database is 75G, 74 bytes per triple which is not bad. It will shrink a little more if explicitly compacted by merging adjacent partly filled pages. See Advances in Virtuoso Triple Storage for an in-depth treatment of the subject.

The real question of RDF scalability is finding a way of having more than one CPU on the same index tree without them hitting the prohibitive penalty of waiting for a mutex. The sure solution is partitioning, would probably have to be by range of the whole key. but before we go to so much trouble, well look at dropping a couple of critical sections from index random access. Also some kernel parameters may be adjustable, like a spin count before calling the scheduler when trying to get an occupied mutex. Still we should not waste too much time on platform specifics. Well see.

We just updated the Virtuoso Open Source cut. The latest RDF refinements are not in, so maybe the cut will have to be refreshed shortly.

We are also now applying the relational to RDF mapping discussed in Declarative SQL Schema to RDF Ontology Mapping to the ODS applications.

There is a form of the mapping in the VOS cut on the net but it is not quite ready yet. We must first finish testing it through mapping all the relational schemas of the ODS apps before we can really recommend it. This is another reason for a VOS update in the near future.

We will be looking at the query side of LUBM after the ISWC 2006 conference. So far, we find queries compile OK for many SIOC use cases with the cost model that there is now. A more systematic review of the cost model for SPARQL will come when we get to the queries.

We put some ideas about inferencing in the Advances in Triple Storage paper. The question is whether we should forward chain such things as class subsumption and subproperties. If we build these into the SQL engine used for running SPARQL, we probably can do these as unions at run time with good performance and better working set due to not storing trivial entailed triples. Some more thought and experimentation needs to go into this.

Last week I got an email from someone at Microsoft asking if my dad was the president of Nigeria. I almost deleted the email without responding until I looked at the person's email signature and it said 'Executive Assistant to Bill Gates'. So I responded and it turned out that Bill Gates was going to be in Nigeria over the weekend to meet with my dad and he wanted to chat before his trip.

We met on Friday and according to my mom he met with my dad over the weekend. After our talk I asked if it was OK if I blogged our meeting and he was fine with it. What follows are my impressions from our meeting and the topics we chatted about.

The last time I talked to Bill Gates in person was five years ago at the annual event for summer interns at Microsoft where we get to meet him at his house. When I was an intern they had to split the event into two seperate trips due to the number of interns. After introductions, I mentioned that we'd met before at the intern event in 2001 and asked if the event continued to this day. It still goes on today and has now grown to four separate rounds of visits. BillG said he appreciates hearing from college students about companies and trends they find interesting before their opinions get influenced by their employer when they get out of school.

BillG asked a couple of questions about me and my family such as how long I'd been at Microsoft, where I want to school, if my mom was Stella Obasanjo (she isn't), what my mom did, if I had any siblings back home and so on. I appreciated talking about myself and was put at ease before being asked about Nigeria or my dad.

BillG had read my dad's Wikipedia entry and thus was a little familiar with my dad's background story. This is my dad's second time around as president. The first time was between 1976 and 1979 when he became the military president because the sitting military president was killed in a failed coup. He made history by being the first African head of state to voluntarily relinquish power by having elections and stepping down once a winner was announced. He became president this time around after spending three years as a political prisoner. After the military president that jailed him died of natural causes, he was released. A number of others who were jailed at the same time as him were not as lucky and died in prison such as Moshood Abiola and Shehu Musa Yar'Adua before the military president that jailed them passed away.I talked about meeting my dad in Atlanta back in 1998 when he was released and hearing for the first time that he planned to run for president. I thought it was an insane idea given that Nigeria had never had a civilian president finish out their term without there being a miltary takeover of government. I can still remember my dad sitting there and saying 'If I don't do it who will?'. He won the election and also won a second term. My dad still gives me a hard time today because I never called to congratulate him. I did attend both inauguration ceremonies so that should count for something, I guess.

BillG wondered what my dad would do after he left the presidency. He mentioned that he'd had some angst about leaving Microsoft in two years and also gave an example of a good friend of his, Bill Clinton, who also had similar angst when he left the U.S. presidency. I pointed out that my dad had been a retired head of state for almost two decades before this time around and had found things to do. Besides becoming a large scale farmer, he still did the international statesman thing and once was in the running for the position of UN secretary general which he lost to Boutros Boutros-Ghali back in the early 1990s.

He'd read that my dad was a born again Christian and wondered if that extended to the entire family. It doesn't, I'm not terribly religious and my mom is a devout catholic which it turned out BillG's wife is as well. This segued into a conversation about religion and Nigeria. The country is about half Christian and half Muslim but over the past few years, the division has become more stark. Since I've been in the U.S., a number of states in the northern part of the country have embraced Sharia law which has led to some negative international responses. The religion issue is now divisive enough that questions about religion and ethnicity were removed from this year's census. It wasn't like this when I was growing up. Speaking of ethnicity, BillG asked about the national language and whether there was a major ethnic group in Nigeria. The national language is English since we were colonised by the British and although there were three large ethnic groups (Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo) there are hundreds of indigenous tribes with their own cultures and languages.

The reason BillG was visiting Nigeria was to talk about some of the work that the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation has been doing in Africa. One of the issues he wanted to discuss were the efforts they had been taking to eradicate polio in Nigeria via vaccination. There had recently been some rumors about negative effects of polio vaccines in the northern part of Nigeria which had actually lead to at least one state banning them. The problem with polio, BillG said, is that unlike diseases such as smallpox it may be hard to detect so an outbreak could occur with the authorities being none the wiser until it is too late. He said the tipping point is about 15% of the population being infected while containment is when < 5% are infected. He also mentioned that their foundation was working on vaccines for malaria and sleeping sickness. I mentioned having malaria a few times while growing up and thinking how weird it was when I heard people in the U.S. talking about malaria as if it was ebola. However there was a difference between how I grew up in the city and the average Nigerian who lives in the villages and rural areas. The main problem with malaria that BillG wants combated is preventing it in pregnant women. Not only is the chance of infant mortality increased but also if the child makes it, the baby is usually born having a low birth weight which contributes to a lifetime of problems. He feels they are close to breakthroughs in creating vaccines for these diseases especially since not a lot of research has been done in this area due to big pharma not investing a lot in research for diseases affecting the poor in Africa. BillG acknowledged that he was being an optimist when he says this and it may take a little longer in much the same way that his optimism about the future of Tablet PCs and voice recognition software has taken longer than he expected to become mainstream.

My comment about the differences growing up in the city versus the life in the villages reminded BillG of a similar contrast in another African country, South Africa. The life in places like Sun City [where most Americans go when they say they are going to South Africa] is radically different than the life in various South African townships. BillG took his children to some townships when they were in South Africa so they could see how the other half lived, his children were resistant to the idea but he thought that it would be a good idea to see what life is like in these places. We also talked about how widespread AIDs is in South Africa (affecting 30% of the population by some estimates) while it seems relatively contained in countries like Nigeria. I mentioned seeing the billboards for the ABC campaign (Abstain, Be faithful, use Condoms) while in Nigeria and he agreed that the campaigns seemed to have been working. Using condoms has seemed to be very effective but unfortunately there are some religious and social objections to the idea. Their foundation is working on creams and gels thatcan be applied just like spermicidal creams and gels which can be used to prevent AIDs and will be more acceptable to social norms [his exact words were 'eliminate the negotiation during encounters']. BillG also said that there seemed to be a strong correlation between improving healthcare and the number of children people had. This means that there is the double benefit of having healthy children and being able to afford to have them since you don't have that many. In addition to healthcare, BillG was also going to talk to my dad about their efforts around improving agricultural practices to improve crop yield and some of their suggestions for improving education.

We did talk about Microsoft a little. When I mentioned I work for the Windows Live platform group he mentioned that this would be an interesting area to be in over the next few years and commented on a number of Windows Live services such as Windows Live Spaces, Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Mail. He also talked about some of the leadership changes we've had across Windows and Windows Live.I asked if he'd continue with his biannual Think Weeks where employees from all over the company get to write him papers about ideas they have. He said he'd continue until he stepped down in 2008 and after that it would be up to Ray Ozzie [who will be replacing him as Chief Software Architect] to decide if he'd continue with the tradition or not. I did mention that I'd submitted a Thinkweek paper which he'd writen a response to, he hoped that he wasn't too harsh in his criticism and I replied that his feedback was quite favorable and has led to some good things happening in Windows Live.

The meeting ran over by 15 minutes and I felt bad for taking up so much of his time. As I was leaving the building I overheard the following exchange between the receptionist of the building and a visitor

Visitor: Where is Bill Gates's office?
Receptionist: I'm not at liberty to divulge that information.
Visitor: I need to see him, I just downloaded Windows Vista and I have a number of complaints.

(Via Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life.)

Enjoy MIT's Lecture Browser - a combination of Video Search and Speech Processing.

Enjoy MIT's Lecture Browser - a combination of Video Search and Speech Processing.

After the dot-com bust and IT slowdown nearly crushed the startup he co-founded, entrepreneur Alok Mittal realized India’s business environment had a major shortcoming. There was no money for early stage companies. He survived-selling the startup he co-founded, jobsahead.com, to Monster.com for $9 million in 2004—but his five-year roller coaster ride gave him another idea.

With even venture capitalists looking to invest as much as $1 million-$3 million, Indian entrepreneurs badly needed angel investors willing to commit smaller amounts in, and more importantly, provide guidance to, very early stage, pre-revenue companies.

To shore up the gap, together with Saurabh Srivastava and some other people, Mittal informally started Band of Angels, India, modeled on Band of Angels and Angel Capital Association, to provide not just money but also high-quality mentoring to budding entrepreneurs. The group that formally launched this April has 30 investors from a variety of industries and has made three investments.

The only one Mittal will name is Knowcross which makes software for the hospitality industry. The others, he says, are a technology retail chain and a heritage restaurant property that plans to scale up to a chain of high-end restaurants.

GigaOM recently chatted with Alok Mittal, who is also executive director at venture firm Canaan Partners’ India office, about the kinds of companies and the sectors Band of Angels is looking to invest in. Here are some excerpts of that conversation.

- On the minimum investment required by a Band member: Alok Mittal: There is no real minimum. We are setting an expectation that members will invest about $50,000 a year. Every member doesn’t have to invest in every company. Also, simply some one with $50,000 to spare is not the kind of member we are looking for. We are passionate about entrepreneurship and we want to help build companies as well so we want members with experience and a proven track record.

-On the sectors Band of Angels, India, is looking to invest in: AM: When we started out, the first set of members was strong in technology. Now only half of the 30 odd members are from the technology space. We always had a broad charter and want to support different kinds of businesses, because ultimately all of us are excited about entrepreneurship. We are looking at the Internet space, telecom technology and embedded domains, media and entertainment, BPO, retail and biotechnology, among others. -On some proposals they are currently looking at: AM: We are considering some projects on the Internet side, like e-learning and social networking. These startups need $100,000 to $300,00 and we are well designed to do these smaller investments. We are looking at telecom technology, like billing software, and also at smaller BPO plays but those that have demonstrated success.

-On the Band of Angels members being able to recoup their investments: AM: This is a very new concept for India where even the venture capital industry is so nascent. Very few companies can really expand with $200,000 from an angel investor. So unless the next stage (venture capital) is available an angel can incur losses. Our success in a sense will depend on how the rest of the ecosystem is developing.

With VC investments increasing in India, this may just be the right time for angel investors, so anyone wanting to approach Band of Angels with an idea read this first and go, get funded.

(Via GigaOM.)

N’cho has put together a great mashup covering connectivity across Africa. In it, he mashes up internet statistics with land and mobile phone usage numbers. All in all, a very compelling and useful tool for anyone looking to get a snapshot of the communications industry in any African nation.

By the way, great redesign of the blog too N’cho - it’s looking really good.

(Via White African :: a white african's view of the world.)

Business Week writes about entrepreneurs under 25 years of age:

Led by China and India, Asia's superfast economies have dazzled observers for the last decade. But until recently the defining feature of most of them was corporate bigness.
...
Divyank Turakhia, co-founder and director of Bombay-based Directi Group, was doing Internet consulting at age 14 before launching his domain-name registration and site-building company two years later with $600 he borrowed from his parents. At 24, he runs a profitable company with more than 250 employees and clients around the world.

(Via E M E R G I C . o r g.)

[via Atanu] Bloomberg writes:

As Gupta's rise illustrates, PepsiCo Inc., which last week named Indra Nooyi as its next CEO, isn't the first global corporation to recognize the caliber of Indian executive talent. The annual reports of many large companies show Indians are landing big jobs. Like Gupta and Nooyi, most are products of an investment in higher education the country made more than 40 years ago.

``There is a huge demand for Indian executives,'' says Rana Talwar, 58, former CEO of Standard Chartered Plc in London who runs Sabre Capital, a buyout firm. ``The quality of the education is very good. And Indians can adapt to any environment. When we grew up, we got used to adverse conditions such as power outages.''

"

(Via E M E R G I C . o r g.)

Excuse me, please, but I need a moment of pidgin.

Na wah oh! E be like say ndi-Arochukwu don vex well well. Them say 'all the Akata dey go Ghana, dey take their dollar go Ghana, say na slavery history tour'. We, nko? We no get slavery? We get am plenty. I beg bring your dollar come make slavery tour'. Ah beg. Dis one don pass man.

I read it in Naija Blog:

The Nigerian Tourist Development Commission's website has a page on an hypothetical slave tour for Nigeria. They write that 'Arochukwu has a distinguished reputation as a source for the supply of slaves.' I wonder if the good people of this town would like to be considered in this way. I'm not sure its quite something to be that proud of.

OK, to be sure we don't treat the history of the slave trade as gingerly in Nigeria as we do in the U.S. An old girlfriend of mine was from Arochukwu, and when I wanted to tease her (which was often) I called her 'slave trader'. She'd call me 'bushman' It's all good. Of course I didn't dwell on the fact that my Mom is from near Calabar, where the Aros would typically sell all the slaves they'd captured in their raids on the Igbo interior (where my Dad is from).

But even for those of us who can be that relaxed about it all (easy enough when your forbear was not the one shuffled off in a coffle to Calabar for a ghastly journey and a ghastlier existence abroad) the idea of building a tourism industry around all that sounds potty. Then again, I remember once traveling to New Orleans with a bunch of my Norwegian friends. They were dead set on going to see a plantation museum (I rememeber the flyer laid it on thick about 'witnessing the slave's experience'). I recoiled from the idea and excused myself from the expedition, preferring to sleep in the car, but they came back all a-twitter. I guess there might be some logic to the whole thing. The same logic that keeps Mme Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors and the Torture Museum in Amsterdam going. I also hear that many Black Americans visit Goree in Senegal and Ghana's coastal slaving fortresses, and that such tourism is supposedly Ghana's largest source of hard currency.

It's all about the Benjamins. Especially when Benjamin used to be named 'Baneji'.

And oh by the way... Whoever designed that Nigerian Tourism site? And whoever paid for it? I got something fo' dat ass. I don't remember the last time I saw anything that garish on the Web. It needs to be in a bad design competition.

(Via Uche Ogbuji.)

GeoRSS & Geonames for Philanthropy: "

I heard about Kiva.ORG in a BusinessWeek podcast. After visiting its website, I think there are few places where GeoRSS (in the RDF/A syntax) and Geonames can be used to enhance the site’s functionality.

Kiva.ORG Background

It’s a microfinance website for people in the developing countries. Its business model is in the intersection between peer-to-peer financing and philanthropy. The goal is to help developing country businesses to borrow small loans from a large group of Web users, so that they can avoid paying high interests to the banks.

For example, a person in Uganda can request a $500 loan and use it for buying and selling more poultry. One or more lenders (anyone on the Web) may decide to grant loans to that person in increments as tiny as $25. After few years, that person will pay back the loans to the lenders.

How GeoRSS and Geonames Can Help

I went to the website and discovered the site has a relative weak search and browsing interface. In particular, there is no way to group loan requests based on geographical locations (e.g., countries, cities and regions).

Took a look at individual loan pages. Each page actually has standard ways to describe location information — e.g., Location: Mbale, Uganda.

It should be relative easy to add GeoRSS points (in the RDF/A syntax) to describe these location information (an alternative maybe using Microformat Geo or W3C Geo). Once the location information is annotated, one can imagine building a map mashup to display loan requests in a geospatial perspective. One can also build search engines to support spatial queries such as ‘find me all loans with from Mbale’.

Since Kiva.ORG webmasters may not be GIS experts, it will be nice if we can find ways to automatically geocode location information and describe that using GeoRSS. This automatic geocoding procedure can be developed using Geonames’s webservices. Take a string ‘Mbale’ or ‘Uganda’, and send to Geonames’s search service. The procedure will get back JSON or XML description of the location, which include latitude and longitude. This will then be used to annotate the location information in a Kiva loan page.

Can you think of other ways to help Kiva.ORG to become more ‘geospatially intelligent’?
You can learn more about Kiva.ORG at its website and listen to this podcast.

The screencasts covered the following functionality realms:

1. SQL Query By Example (basic)
2. SQL Query By Example (advanced - pivot table construction)
3. Web Form Design (basic database driven map based mashup)
4. Web Form Design (advanced database driven map based mashup)

To bring additional clarity to the screencasts demos and OAT in general, I have saved a number of documents that are the by products of activities in the screenvcasts:

1. Live XML Document produced using SQL Query By Example (basic) (you can use drag and drop columns across the grid to reorder and sort presentation)
2. Live XML Document produced using QBE and Pivot Functionality (you can drag and drop the aggregate columns and rows to create your own views etc..)
3. Basic database driven map based mashup (works with FireFox, Webkit, Camino; click on pins to see national flag)
4. Advanced database driven map based mashup (works with FireFox, Webkit, Camino; records, 36, 87, and 257 will unveil pivots via lookup pin)

Notes:

• “Advanced”, as used above, simply means that I am embedding images (employee photos and national flags) and a database driven pivot into the map pins that serve as details lookups in classic SQL master/details type scenarios.
• The “Ajax Call In Progress..” dialog is there to show live interaction with a remote database (in this case Virtuoso but this could be any ODBC, JDBC, OLEDB, ADO.NET, or XMLA accessible data source)
• The data access magic source (if you want to call it that) is XMLA - a standard that has been in place for years but completely misunderstood and as a result under utilized

You can see a full collection of saved documents at the following locations:

• My Mashups demo directory (Google and Yahoo! demo variants but note these do not work with Safari or IE at the current time. IE7 issues will be resolved in the next day or so)
• My Pivots demo directory (other Pivots will be added as I build and save them)
• My Saved Queries (a collection of saved QBE generated queries)

With the above in mind (years of getting into trouble during OS installation and usage etc.. I expected the very worst when attempting to get Solaris 10, Linux (Debian), FreeBSD 6.x, and Windows XP installed on a Mac Mini such that I could have all of these operating systems at my disposal without quad-booting. To my utter disbelief (I am still trying to recover from the immense euphoria..) Parallels delivered to me the absolute simplest installation and usage experience across all said operating systems that I have ever experienced.

I now have a MacIntel Mac Mini (one of several that I will be stocking up on while I wait the Microsoft Universal Binary port of Office) that delivers me the long sought nirvana of having Solaris, FreeBSD, Linux, Windows XP, and Mac OS X on a single desktop!

If you want to enjoy one of the genuine innovations of our time, simply make parallels an integral part of your Mac OS X experience (whether you are an end-user, developer, administrator, or systems integrator).

Parallels Desktop Release Candidate 2, uh, released: "

Filed under: OS, Software

Get your mice clicking ladies and gentlemen, as Parallels has offered up the final test version of Parallels Desktop for Mac, their virtualization software that allows you to run almost any OS right within Mac OS X. With this version, however, Parallels has increased the app's final price to $79.99, as they have incorporated their Compressor Server tool (due to user feedback) into the software package for streamlining and optimizing your virtual machines and the amount of disk space they occupy. The beta testing pre-order price of $39.99 is still in place, and probably more appetizing than ever. Other new features and improvements in the Release Candidate 2 include:

• Significantly improved performance
• Improved USB performance and broader device support
• Improved Host-guest networking
• Automatic network adapters now switch on-the-fly
• Guest OS no longer steals host IP address in some DHCP servers
• Fullscreen mode is now customizable
• Integration with Virtue is now bug-free
• Customizable Ctrl + Click mapping
• Guest 32bit color is supported when Parallels Tools is installed
• Improved Shared folders performance
• Resolved shared folders/MS Office incompatibility issues
• Windows 98 no longer consumes 99% host CPU even when idle (in VT-x mode)

Also note that if you download this newest release, you must re-install the Parallels Tools for guest Windows installations (NT/2000/XP/2003). As with previous beta releases, this download is free before the software package goes official.

Read'|'Permalink'|'Email this'|'Linking'Blogs'|'Comments

"

(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)

Patent Office To Review Legitimacy Of Amazon's One-Click Shopping Patent: "Information Week May 22 2006 8:00AM GMT"

(Via Moreover - E-commerce news.)

Looks like the U.S. Patent Office is awakening from its sleep-beauty-like snooze!

Despite page ranking and other techniques, the scale of the Internet is straining available commercial search engines to deliver truly relevant content.' This observation is not new, but its relevance is growing.' Similarly, the integration and interoperabillity challenges facing enterprises have never been greater.' One approach to address these needs, among others, is to adopt semantic Web standards and technologies.

The image is compelling:' targeted and unambiguous information from all relevant sources, served in usable bit-sized chunks.' It sounds great; why isn’t it happening?

There are clues — actually, reasons — why semantic Web technology is not being embraced on a broad-scale way.' I have spoken elsewhere as to why enterprises or specific organizations will be the initial adopters and promoters of these technologies.' I still believe that to be the case.' The complexity and lack of a network effect ensure that semantic Web stuff will not initially arise from the public Internet.

Parellels with Knowledge Management

Paul Warren, in' '

(Via AI3 - Adaptive Information:::.)