Larsblog

Following the laptop theft I decided to put together a backup solution for myself to avoid getting into trouble in the same way if something similar should happen again. ...

I've been rating beer (using RateBeer) for well over a year now, as a way to keep notes on what I've drunk, and how it tasted. I wanted to write up a reminder for myself of the interpretation of the RateBeer scale that I've developed over this time. And since other people might be interested I decided I might as well write this up on the blog. ...

Russia and the Ukraine may sound like terrible destinations for anyone looking for a decent pint of beer, and while both countries are for the most part deserts of pale lager, things are not nearly as bad as they may seem. There are some interesting beer styles, some brewpubs, and the quality of the industrial beer (especially in the Ukraine) is not at all bad. And prices are low, of course. ...

Information about the structure of an ontology can be used for two different purposes: either for validation or for reasoning, and this is a distinction that it seems most people are not aware of yet. I'll try to clear up the confusion in this blog posting, as best I can. ...

Since nearly all the key people in the ISO committee were going to be in Leipzig anyway for TMRA 2006 it was decided to have an ISO meeting in conjunction with the conference. The meeting started the Friday after the conference, and continued for three days, finishing on Sunday. ...

Day two started right off with two parallel tracks, and I went to the track on "Portals and Information Retrieval", where the first speaker was Sam Oh. He has done a study where they built a Topic Maps-based portal to Korean folk music (known as Pansouri) with a quite detailed ontology of the domain. They then compared how easy it was for 20 test subjects to find information in the traditional portal and the new Topic Maps-based one. 10 subjects used the traditional one first, then the Topic Maps one afterwards, and the remaining 10 did it the other way around. They tested both objective measures (how many steps to find information on 6 assigned search tasks), and subjective measures (how did the test subjects feel about the portals). ...

Like last year, I will try to do a semi-live blog report from the TMRA 2006 conference on Topic Maps in Leipzig. This year the conference is in the Campus Villa Ida, which was finished just two weeks ago. TMRA is actually the first conference that is held in this shiny new conference center. (So far everything seems to be working smoothly. This is, after all, Germany.) ...

Losing a laptop is a traumatic experience, and Monday evening it was my turn. I was staying in a hotel in Amsterdam, and after the day's meetings I sat on the bed to quickly scan my email and look up the nearest good beer bar. Going out, I left the laptop on the bed, still running. I hesitated for a split second, wondering whether this was safe, but decided I didn't want the extra weight in my backpack, and left. ...

Today there was another meeting of the Topic Maps Users' Group on ontology modelling in Topic Maps. ...

"Why did you come to the Ukraine? Why? I cannot understand this." The question is put to us over breakfast by a Ukrainian fellow guest, and I have to admit that I had asked myself the same question several times already. The holiday started out great in Moscow, and from there we took the train to Kiev which we liked even better. Finally, we went to the Crimean Black Sea coast, which was more of a mixed bag. ...