open access – Data Science, Data Analytics and Machine Learning Consulting in Koblenz Germany

My List of People who I admire and which I find truly inspiring

Rene — Wed, 27 Aug 2014 14:44:59 +0000

This is my personal list of people that I admire. In a sense I would say if you want to know what I stand for you can just have a brief look at this list and at the values, norms and ideas the people of the list stand for. I have been heavily criticised that this list contains too many white men and not people from other cultures and sex. I think the main reason is that I am a western person and even though I lived in China I can just see to the horizon of my culture and of course I am being influenced by my culture. This is also where my values come from. So if you know people with a similar set of ideas and beliefs from other cultures feel free to contact me or leave a comment and point them out to me. I am very excited to “meet” more exciting people especially outside of my current horizon.
Also the following list has a randomised order.

Tank man

from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man

A man who stood in front of a column of tanks on June 5, 1989, the morning after the Chinese military had suppressed the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 by force, became known as the Tank Man or Unknown Protester. The tanks manoeuvred to pass by the man, and he moved to continue to obstruct them, in something like a dance. The incident was filmed and seen worldwide.

further info:

own reason:
This is an unbelievable example of civil courage. Obviously his actions did not really change how things have been going on around tiananmen but I think this is truly heroic and brave.
I wish I will always have a similar courage when it comes to the point of fighting for a good thing or idea.

Aaron Swartz

from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

Aaron Hillel Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was an American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet Hacktivist.
Swartz was involved in the development of the web feed format RSS, the organization Creative Commons, the website framework web.py and the social news site, Reddit, in which he became a partner after its merger with his company, Infogami.
Swartz’s work also focused on sociology, civic awareness and activism. He helped launch the Progressive Change Campaign Committee in 2009 to learn more about effective online activism. In 2010 he became a research fellow at Harvard University’s Safra Research Lab on Institutional Corruption, directed by Lawrence Lessig. He founded the online group Demand Progress, known for its campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act.
On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested by MIT police on state breaking-and-entering charges, after systematically downloading academic journal articles from JSTOR. Federal prosecutors later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and 11 violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution and supervised release.
Swartz declined a plea bargain under which he would serve six months in federal prison. Two days after the prosecution rejected a counter-offer by Swartz, he was found dead in his Brooklyn, New York apartment, where he had hanged himself.
In June 2013, Swartz was posthumously inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.

further info:

own reason:
Just read the Guerilla open access manifesto. Writing something like this and understanding the impact of open access is terrific. But living it through the PACER project and also through the JSTOR case at MIT is a complete different story.
I strongly believe that unjust laws exist but we have to understand that law is a relative thing. It is us in our society who make the laws. So it is also us to change them. I think norms and values of a society should stand above a particular law. So what Aaron did is following a very strong set of norms and values and fighting for a better law. One might doubt if his actions have been to radical and not in the way how we as a society decided to live our democratic processes but I am sure Aaron was driven by the deep wish to make the world a more place with more justice.

Lawrence Lessig

from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Lessig

Lawrence “Larry” Lessig (born June 3, 1961) is an American academic and political activist. He is a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark, and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications, and he has called for state-based activism to promote substantive reform of government with a Second Constitutional Convention. In May 2014, he launched a crowd-funded political action committee which he termed May Day PAC with the purpose of electing candidates to Congress who would pass campaign finance reform.
Lessig is director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University and a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Previously, he was a professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of the Center for Internet and Society. Lessig is a founding board member of Creative Commons and the founder of Rootstrikers, and is on the board of MapLight. He is on the advisory boards of the Democracy Café, Sunlight Foundation and Americans Elect. He is a former board member of the Free Software Foundation, Software Freedom Law Center and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

further info:

own reason:
I have to admit that I did not come around to read his book code2.0 which is said to be excellent. But from his talks and actions I love how Lessig points out problems within society and how he is trying to educate people about it. He seems to have a very similar set of norms and values as Aaron did (and I do) but he is following “the protocol” of our society to fight for them. Especially he seems to be a true intellectual and not just a person who made a career in academia.

Geschwister Scholl

from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geschwister_Scholl

Hans and Sophie Scholl, often referred to in German as die Geschwister Scholl (literally: the Scholl siblings), were a brother and sister who were members of the White Rose, a student group in Munich that was active in the non-violent resistance movement in Nazi Germany, especially in distributing flyers against the war and the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler. In post-war Germany, Hans and Sophie Scholl are recognized as symbols of the humanist German resistance movement against the totalitarian Nazi regime.

further info:

own reason:
It always is hard to pick a single person or in this case siblings when it comes to role models in opposing a regime that is harmful for the people of a society. Of course the Geschwister Scholl have not been the only people in the resistence movement of Nazi Germany and there have been other regimes in other places that also had resitence movements. Still I believe their actions are very remarkable. I think it is the role of students to point out problems in our society. Nowadays many students seem to just accept everything that is happening. Distributing the fliers with the “truth” about Nazi Germany was not only brave but also at the university attracting many people that could multiply the message
I think it is similar to Aaron Swartz. Students and young people are in the role of more radically pointing out problems within society and the Geschwister Scholl most certainly fulfilled this role.

Randy Pausch

from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Pausch

Randolph Frederick “Randy” Pausch (October 23, 1960 – July 25, 2008) was an American professor of computer science, human-computer interaction, and design at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Pausch learned that he had pancreatic cancer in September 2006, and in August 2007 he was given a terminal diagnosis: “3 to 6 months of good health left”. He gave an upbeat lecture titled “The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” on September 18, 2007, at Carnegie Mellon, which became a popular YouTube video and led to other media appearances. He then co-authored a book called The Last Lecture on the same theme, which became a New York Times best-seller. Pausch died of complications from pancreatic cancer on July 25, 2008.

further info:

own reason:
It might be the American optimism that is behind Randy Pausch’s lecture and talk but I actually do not admire him for giving an inspiring lecture even though he was dying. I admire him much more for the fact that he seemed to have lived his life in a very positive way. His goal of enabling the dreams of others sounds very honest to me. I also like the statements that he made about “If you life your life in the right way, the dreams come to you”. I think Randy is a very good example to show that no matter what fate did with a person it is the person’s responsibility to answer to this. When people cry out they might receive pitty but probably not really improve their situation. I guess one can summarise Randy with his quote:

We cannot change the cards we are dealt with only the way we play them.

By the way I especially like the idea that he gave this talk for his kids to teach them a lesson at a time when they are grown up and he would not be around anymore.

Tim Berners-Lee

from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee

Sir Timothy John “Tim” Berners-Lee, OM, KBE, FRS, FREng, FRSA, DFBCS (born 8 June 1955), also known as “TimBL”, is an English computer scientist, best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He made a proposal for an information management system in March 1989, and he implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet sometime around mid November of that same year.
Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the Web’s continued development. He is also the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, and is a senior researcher and holder of the Founders Chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He is a director of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI), and a member of the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.
In 2004, Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his pioneering work. In April 2009, he was elected a foreign associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences. He was honoured as the “Inventor of the World Wide Web” during the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, in which he appeared in person, working with a vintage NeXT Computer at the London Olympic Stadium. He tweeted “This is for everyone”, which instantly was spelled out in LCD lights attached to the chairs of the 80,000 people in the audience.

further info:
Even though he is a bad talker and reading his book (weaving the web) will help much more I link a video here:

own reason:
In my opinion there are many reasons to admire Tim Berners Lee. Of course he is famose for inventing the world wide web. But I think the time was due for this invention. Internet itself was not very useful. The ideas of hypertext where around and similar systems existed. As always on the internet we have a strong the winner takes it all phenomenon. So bringing us the world wide web is certainly something Tim should get credit for but it is not the main reason why I admire him.
What is really cool about Tim Berners Lee is that he seems to have a very clear sense and abstraction of technical things and especially about their impact. Maybe it is easy to develop this sense after creating a technology that literally everyone on the Internet is using but still I like his activism for openess, ineroperability, net neutrality and freedom in general but freedom of speech in particular. Also he addressed me directly after asking a question in a Q&A session at a conference. His attitude of saying if you want to change the world you have the tools don’t talk just go geek and do it will certainly stick to me for the rest of my life.

Other than that I like that he does not fear to make a political statement about the problems with the web and where it should go and that he seems to have no interest whatsoever in becoming a multi billionaire which he could have easily achieved after sitting on the invention of the world wide web and being so central in its development.

Albert Einstein

from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein

Albert Einstein (/ˈælbərt ˈaɪnstaɪn/; German: [ˈalbɐt ˈaɪnʃtaɪn] ( listen); 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist and philosopher of science. He developed the general theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics (alongside quantum mechanics). He is best known in popular culture for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2 (which has been dubbed “the world’s most famous equation”). He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect”. The latter was pivotal in establishing quantum theory.
Near the beginning of his career, Einstein thought that Newtonian mechanics was no longer enough to reconcile the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. This led to the development of his special theory of relativity. He realized, however, that the principle of relativity could also be extended to gravitational fields, and with his subsequent theory of gravitation in 1916, he published a paper on the general theory of relativity. He continued to deal with problems of statistical mechanics and quantum theory, which led to his explanations of particle theory and the motion of molecules. He also investigated the thermal properties of light which laid the foundation of the photon theory of light. In 1917, Einstein applied the general theory of relativity to model the large-scale structure of the universe.
He was visiting the United States when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 and, being Jewish, did not go back to Germany, where he had been a professor at the Berlin Academy of Sciences. He settled in the U.S., becoming an American citizen in 1940. On the eve of World War II, he endorsed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt alerting him to the potential development of “extremely powerful bombs of a new type” and recommending that the U.S. begin similar research. This eventually led to what would become the Manhattan Project. Einstein supported defending the Allied forces, but largely denounced the idea of using the newly discovered nuclear fission as a weapon. Later, with the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, Einstein signed the Russell–Einstein Manifesto, which highlighted the danger of nuclear weapons. Einstein was affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, until his death in 1955.
Einstein published more than 300 scientific papers along with over 150 non-scientific works. His great intellectual achievements and originality have made the word “Einstein” synonymous with genius.

further info:

own reason:
He was probably one of my first role models. I admire him for two reasons.
The first – which I nowadays actually find a stupid reason to admire someone – is just his pure intellect. Creating relativity theory was an amazing achievement of ignoring what we seem to know and just following the facts (as all good mathematicians and computer scientists should do all the time) But the list of his physical achievements does not stop at relativity theory (actually David Hilbert brought us general relativity much quicker and before Einstein (after he had talked to him on a conference) DOUBLE CHECK FACT) Further than that the list of various independent fields that he was working on in physics is just incredibly long.
The second reason is the way Einstein behaved about the development of the nuclear bomb. He first pointed out – by signing a letter to the American president of that time Roosevelt – that there is the danger that Nazi Germany might create a nuclear weapon. This led to the Manhatten project. The interesting part comes at the moment where Einstein regrets signing the letter. He said that if had known that this weapon would have been used against civil people and that Nazi Germany would not be successful in developing such a bomb he would have done nothing.
Many scientists have a great responsability. Knowledge can quickly become very dangerous or can be misused for a strategic advantage in harmful actions. Unfortunately I have the feeling that many scientists do not have the time or courage to think about ethics and the real impact of their research (I mean the impact that is not measured by citations and impact factors…). Even Einstein seemed not to be aware of his impact by writing this letter that led to the Manhatten project. Still he took responsibility after the Bombs had been used in Japan. I think many people in Einsteins position would have found a way of justifying how the americans had used the bomb against Japan. He did not. He publicly regreted what he did and had started. Finally he was a key player and intellectual of this open letter which pledges to the governments of this world to resolve conflicts in a peaceful way

Chelsea Manning

from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelsea_Manning

Chelsea Elizabeth Manning (born Bradley Edward Manning, December 17, 1987) is a United States Army soldier who was convicted in July 2013 of violations of the Espionage Act and other offenses, after releasing the largest set of classified documents ever leaked to the public. Manning was sentenced in August 2013 to 35 years confinement with the possibility of parole in eight years, and to be dishonorably discharged from the Army. Manning is a trans woman who, in a statement the day after sentencing, said she had felt female since childhood, wanted to be known as Chelsea, and desired to begin hormone replacement therapy. From early life and through much of her Army life, Manning was known as Bradley; she was diagnosed with gender identity disorder while in the Army.
Assigned in 2009 to an Army unit in Iraq as an intelligence analyst, Manning had access to classified databases. In early 2010, she leaked classified information to WikiLeaks and confided this to Adrian Lamo, an online acquaintance. Lamo informed Army Counterintelligence, and Manning was arrested in May that same year. The material included videos of the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike, and the 2009 Granai airstrike in Afghanistan; 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables; and 500,000 Army reports that came to be known as the Iraq War logs and Afghan War logs. Much of the material was published by WikiLeaks or its media partners between April and November 2010.
Manning was ultimately charged with 22 offenses, including aiding the enemy, which was the most serious charge and could have resulted in a death sentence. She was held at the Marine Corps Brig, Quantico in Virginia, from July 2010 to April 2011 under Prevention of Injury status—which entailed de facto solitary confinement and other restrictions that caused domestic and international concern—before being transferred to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where she could interact with other detainees. She pleaded guilty in February 2013 to 10 of the charges. The trial on the remaining charges began on June 3, 2013, and on July 30 she was convicted of 17 of the original charges and amended versions of four others, but was acquitted of aiding the enemy. She is serving her sentence at the maximum-security U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth.
Reaction to Manning’s disclosures, arrest, and sentence was mixed. Denver Nicks, one of her biographers, writes that the leaked material, particularly the diplomatic cables, was widely seen as a catalyst for the Arab Spring that began in December 2010, and that Manning was viewed as both a 21st-century Tiananmen Square Tank Man and an embittered traitor. Reporters Without Borders condemned the length of the sentence, saying that it demonstrated how vulnerable whistleblowers are.

further info:

own reason:
Obviously I did not have the time to read everything that Manning has made public so I might be blinded by media coverage of his case. From what I know I can say that many others on the list Manning was bound to her moral and not to what she was allowed to do or not. I think she was truly trying to point out unjust things and I think especially the way she did it was actually pretty smart. I guess there is a lot of structural violence in politics and military. Pointing out problems in the “correct way” seems to not really change something. Therefor she just had to release the video of american soldiers randomly shooting civilians. Did she have to make public everything else? Who knows. Actually who cares? Making this video itself public is heroic and should have a much bigger impact than it did.
Going to jail for 35 years and having the society accepting this makes me just said. I really wonder what has to happen for people to make a revolution. Not that I believe in such a drastic action but having Manning in prison for 35 years is f*** up. I strongly hope that one day Chelsea Manning will receive the peace nobel price at some time.

Noam Chomsky

from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky (/ˈnoʊm ˈtʃɒmski/; born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician, political commentator and activist. Sometimes described as the “father of modern linguistics”, Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy. He has spent most of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is currently Professor Emeritus, and has authored over 100 books. He has been described as a prominent cultural figure, and was voted the “world’s top public intellectual” in a 2005 poll.
Born to a middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish family in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from relatives in New York City. He later undertook studies in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he obtained his BA, MA, and PhD, while from 1951 to 1955 he was appointed to Harvard University’s Society of Fellows. In 1955 he began work at MIT, soon becoming a significant figure in the field of linguistics for his publications and lectures on the subject. He is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, the universal grammar theory, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem. Chomsky also played a major role in the decline of behaviorism, and was especially critical of the work of B.F. Skinner. In 1967 he gained public attention for his vocal opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, in part through his essay The Responsibility of Intellectuals, and came to be associated with the New Left while being arrested on multiple occasions for his anti-war activism. While expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also developed the propaganda model of media criticism with Edward S. Herman. Following his retirement from active teaching, he has continued his vocal public activism, praising the Occupy movement for example.
Chomsky has been a highly influential academic figure throughout his career, and was cited within the field of Arts and Humanities more often than any other living scholar between 1980 and 1992. He was also the eighth most cited scholar overall within the Arts and Humanities Citation Index during the same period. His work has influenced fields such as artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science, logic, mathematics, music theory and analysis, political science, programming language theory and psychology. Chomsky continues to be well known as a political activist, and a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy, state capitalism, and the mainstream news media. Ideologically, he aligns himself with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.

further info:

own reason:
Chomsky is very new on the list so I cannot say very much about him. I have watched several interviews and talk by him and I just find it amazing how he turned completely towards ethics and political activism and is highly educated, rational and fact driven (he seems always to just have the better argument). In particular I like his point of view on power systems (As far as I understand him he is not blaming single people for injustice but he is seeing the problem of structural violence). I also like his critical view on mass media therefor I am eager to read his book: manufacturing consent
I particular like his very clear view on fundamental issues and how certain policies inevitably lead to certain abuse.

Melinda Gates (also Bill Gates)

from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF or the Gates Foundation) is one of the largest private foundations in the world, founded by Bill and Melinda Gates. It was launched in 2000 and is said to be the largest transparently operated private foundation in the world. It is “driven by the interests and passions of the Gates family”. The primary aims of the foundation are, globally, to enhance healthcare and reduce extreme poverty, and in America, to expand educational opportunities and access to information technology. The foundation, based in Seattle, Washington, is controlled by its three trustees: Bill Gates, Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett. Other principal officers include Co-Chair William H. Gates, Sr. and Chief Executive Officer Susan Desmond-Hellmann.
It had an endowment of US$38.3 billion as of 30 June 2013. The scale of the foundation and the way it seeks to apply business techniques to giving makes it one of the leaders in the philanthrocapitalism revolution in global philanthropy, though the foundation itself notes that the philanthropic role has limitations. In 2007, its founders were ranked as the second most generous philanthropists in America, and Warren Buffett the first. As of May 16, 2013, Bill Gates had donated US$28 billion to the foundation.

further info:

own reason:
Ok I admit it is not fair to just name her. I mean it is still the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. But from my perception it is Melinda who was the driving force and the eyeopener for Bill Gates. I always realised Bill Gates as one of the coldest and disgusting business man out there (On the same list as Steve Jobs and Marc Zuckerberg). Using Patents and Licence agreements and closed systems just for the purpose of becoming incredibly rich. Like other computer scientists he already had a deep impact on people and bringing us the operating systems and office suite was probably not that bad after all. I mean they were still useful tools for most people. Still he could have chosen a more ethical business model. Well how should he have seen these things when he was young. I guess he was even bound to investors and to what they wanted.
I guess with the help of Melinda he also realised that it would be to late to make drastic changes to Microsoft so he changed the focus in his life to create something new. Something that is much more sustainable and that feels very good.
Now using their wealth Bill and Melinda Gates start to tackle really important issues that we as humans can all tackle but which seem economically unimportant to tackle. This feels a little bit like a modern version of Robin Hood. Microsoft is pulling money out of the rich part of the world with nowadays ok software at high cost and vendor lockin but Bill and Melinda are distributing this money e.g. to fight diseases in areas of the world where the western world simply doesn’t care to fight these diseases. Also they act as multipliers to convince other rich people to do similar. I think this contributes a lot to more justice and progress.
Besides my love for technological topics the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is besides the Wikimedia Foundation probably the only interesting NGO I am aware of and that I would be willing to work for and sacrifice my tech career. But I guess this could still even be done after a successful tech career (:
By the way fun fact: The rich get richer principle holds so incredibly in the case of bill and Melinda gates. Warren Buffet the “opponent” to Gates of being the wealthiest person in the world donated almost all his money to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation which I think is an incredible trust provider to what Bill and Melinda are doing.

Uncertain candidates – since its had to say

There are some borderline candidates which I am still not sure about.

Julian Assange

I do not even know how to make up my mind. On the one hand Julian Assange seems to be an incredible important person and really doing a lot of good. On the other hand he seems very self centered and sometimes not authentic. I understand that he of has course operational costs and no fixed income. Still I am not sure how much is real

RAF – resp. Ulrike Meinhof

I guess in Germany it is almost as impossible to say that one sympathises with the RAF as it would be to state that one sympathises with the NSDAP. Yet I liked the fundamental problems the RAF addressed. Their methods where stupid and I guess there where a lot of “dead fish” swimming with the RAF and pursuing all the terror the RAF did but from their core beliefs and problems with the German society they seemed to have some really valid points.

Richard Stallman

Inventing the GPL was an an incredible smart move. I am not sure if this was the first copyleft licence and if Stallman really came up himself with the idea. Still he probably could and would have if he didn’t.
Stallman is often perceived to be too radical and not able to make a compromise. From what I understand (and within this article I believe that this is the topic with my biggest expertise) this is just the only way. There cannot be such a thing as “half free software” you are free or you are not free. The impact of being free is so incredibly big that I think it is indeed one of the view points in life where people really should not make a compromise. So I think that what Stallman is frequently being criticised for is actually one of his strongest points.

Linus Torvalds

I am not sure if he is just a winner takes it all guy or if there is more to him. Besides linux bringing git to the hacker community is the second and maybe on the long term even more impactful innovation by Linus Torvalds. Also the processes how he seems to work how he seems to understand the dynamics and social processes of the open source community is crazy.

Larry Page

People might ask: “Rene why is Steve jobs and Zuckerberg on your bad list and Larry page not? Where did he donate his money do and did he do all the philantropic work like Bill Gates?” My only response is: Yes that is a problem and that is part of the reason why I am still undecided about Page. What speaks for Page is his creativity combined with his strong will to use technology, and financial power to change the world and make it more automised and efficient. By pursuing this goal he seems to ignore economical principles. Google has released a bunch of products that are hard to monitise (even indirectly) or really “moonshot” projects. I have the feeling that page cannot donate money or give up power within google unless he has brought the amount of innovation to the world that he wanted.

Self driving cars (probably as shared economy with taxi, logistics, online shopping and not for sale)
a better “semantic” search (in combination with android and more knowledge of user context)

Web science education and web science mooc

Rene — Wed, 01 May 2013 08:38:14 +0000

The slides of my talk in the web science education workshop can be found here. The talk was about two things:

Our application for the web science mooc (<-- vote now!) which I already blogged about this morning
Teaching web architecture and web ethics to high school students

Organization of the Open Access event 2013 in Oxford.

Rene — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 19:08:07 +0000

During the past two months I invested quite some of my spare free time to contribute to the organization of the open access event Rigor and Openness in 21st century science which will take place in the University of Oxford on April 11th and 12th.
The Idea of the conference came up during Heinrich’s time in Oxford where he and me have been working a lot on related work and he was working closely together with people from the Akorn project (c.f. Heinrichs blog article why openess benefits research)
Thanks to a great effort of the organizing team (mostly students from Oxford + Heinrich and me) we can finally publicly announce the conference.
As you can see from the web page
http://www.rigourandopenness.org/
we have been able to attract quite some famous speakers to Oxford for the various sessions, keynotes and the debate. I am particularly proud that we could even get hold of Amelia Andersdotter MEP and member of the Swedish pirate party for the public debate together with people from publishers…

Please help us to spread the word of the conference. Even if you cannot come to Oxford or live abroad some of your friends might be close and might want to attend.
The topic of open access is important since we have to preserve or knowledge (c.f. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Knowledge)

Slides of Related work application presented in the Graphdevroom at FOSDEM

Rene — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 15:13:02 +0000

Download the slidedeck of our talk at fosdem 2013 including all the resources that we pointed to.
Most important other links are:

was great talking here and again we are open source, open data and so on. So if you have suggestions or want to contribute feel free. Just do it or contact us. We are really looking forward to meet some other hackers that just want to go geek and change the world
the video of the talk can be found here:

Experiences on semantifying a Mediawiki for the biggest recource about Chinese rock music: rockinchina .com

Rene — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 09:38:45 +0000

During my trip in China I was visiting Beijing on two weekends and Maceau on another weekend. These trips have been mainly motivated to meet old friends. Especially the heads behind the biggest English resource of Chinese Rock music Rock in China who are Max-Leonhard von Schaper and the founder of the biggest Chinese Rock Print Magazin Yang Yu. After looking at their wiki which is pure gold in terms of content but consists mainly of plain text I introduced them the idea of putting semantics inside the project. While consulting them a little bit and pointing them to the right resources Max did basically the entire work (by taking a one month holiday from his job. Boy this is passion!).
I am very happy to anounce that the data of rock in china is published as linked open data and the process of semantifying the website is in great shape. In the following you can read about Max experiences doing the work. This is particularly interesting because Max has no scientific background in semantic technologies. So we can learn a lot on how to improve these technologies to be ready to be used by everybody:

Max report on semantifying

Max-Leonhard von Schaper in Beijing.

To summarize, for a non-scientific greenhorn experimenting with semantic mediawiki and the semantic data principle in general, a good two months were required to bring our system to the point where it is today. As easy as it seems in the beginning, there is still a lot of manual coding and changing to be done as well as trial-and-error to understand how the new system is working.
Apart from the great learning experience and availability of our data in RDF format, our own website expanded in the process by ~20% of content pages (from 4000 to above 5000), adding over 10000 real property triplets and gaining an additional 300 thousand pageviews.
Lessons learnt in a comprised way:

DBPedia resources are to be linked with “resources” in the URI not with “page”
SMW requires the pre-fix “foaf:” or “mo:” or something else for EACH imported property
Check the Special:ExportRDF early to see if your properties work
Properties / Predicates , no difference with SMW
How to get data to freebase depends on the backlinks and sameas to other ontologies as well as entering data in semantic search engines
Forms for user data entry are very important!
As a non-scientific person without feedback I would not have been able to implement that.
DBPedia and music ontology ARE not interlinked with SAMEAS (as checked on sameas.org).
Factbox only works with the standard skin (monoskin). For other skins one has to include it in the PHP code oneself.

Main article

The online wiki Rock in China has been online for a number of years and focusses on Chinese underground music. Prior to starting implementing Semantic Mediawikia our wiki had roughly 4000 content pages with over 1800 artists and 900 records. We used a number of templates for bands, CDs, venues and labels, but apart from using numerous categories and the DynamicPageList extension for a few joints, we were not able to tangibly use the available data.
DPL example for JOINT between two Wikipedia Categories:


category = Metal Artists
category = Beijing Artists
mode     = ricstyle
order  = ascending

Results of a simple mashup query: display venues in beijing on a Google Map

After having had an interesting discussion with Rene on the benefits of semantic data and Open Linked Data, we decided to go Semantic. As total greenhorns to the field and with only limited programming skills timely available, we started off googeling the respective key terms and quickly enough came to the websites of the Music Ontology and the Semantic Mediawiki, which we decided to install.
Being an electrical engineer with basic IT backgrounds and many years of working on the web in PHP, HTML, Joomla or Mediawiki, it was still a challenge to get used to the new semantic way of talking and understanding the principles behind. Not so much because there might not be enough tutorials or data information out in the web, but because the guiding principle is somewhere but not where I was looking. Without the help of Rene and several feedback discussions I don’t it would have been possible for us to implement this system within the month that it took us.
Our first difficulty (after getting the extension on our FTP server) was to upgrade our existing Mediawiki from version 1.16 to version 1.19. An upgrade that used up the better part of two days, including updating all other extensions as well (with five of them not working anymore at all, as they are not being further developed) and finally getting our first Semantic Property running.
Upon starting of implementing the semantic approach, I read a lot online on the various ontologies available and intensively checked the Music Ontology. However Music Ontology is by far the wrong use case for our wiki, as Music Ontology is going more into the musical creation process and Rock in China is describing the scene developments. All our implementations were tracked on the wiki page Rock in China – Semantic Approach for other team members to understand the current process and to document workarounds and problems.
Our first test class had been Venue, a category in which we had 40 – 50 live houses of China with various level of data depth that we could put into the following template SemanticVenue:

{{SemanticVenue
|Image=
|ImageDescription=
|City=
|Address=
|Phone=
|Opened=
|Closed=
|GeoLocation=
}}

As can be seen from the above template both predicates (City) and properties (Opened) are being proposed for the semantic class VENUE. Semantic Mediawiki is implementing this decisive difference in a very user-friendly way by setting the TYPE of each SMW property to either PAGE or something else. As good as this is, it somehow confuses if one is talking with someone else about the semantic concept in principle.
A major problem had been the implementation of external ontologies which was not sufficiently documented on the semantic mediawiki page, most probably due to a change in versioning. Especially the cross-referencing to the URI was a major problem. As per Semantic Mediawiki documentation, aliases would be allowed, however with trial and error, it was revealed that only a property with a domain prefix, e.g. foaf:phone or owl:sameas would be correctly recognized. We used the Special:RDFExport function to find most of these errors, everytime our URI referencing was wrong, we would get a parser function error.
First, the wrong way for the following two wiki pages:

Mediawiki:smw_import_mo
Property:genre

Mediawiki:smw_import_mo:

http://purl.org/ontology/mo/ |[http://musicontology.com/ Music Ontology Specification]
activity_end|Type:Date
activity_start|Type:Date
MusicArtist|Category
genre|Type:Page
Genre|Category
track|Type:String
media_type|Type:String
publisher|Type:Page
origin|Type:Page
lyrics|Type:Text
free_download|Type:URL

Property:genre:

[[Has type::Page]][[Imported from::mo:genre]]

And now the correct way how it should be actually implemented to work:
Mediawiki:smw_import_mo:

http://purl.org/ontology/mo/|[http://musicontology.com/ Music Ontology Specification]
activity_end|Type:Date
activity_start|Type:Date
MusicArtist|Category
genre|Type:Page
Genre|Category
track|Type:String
media_type|Type:String
publisher|Type:Page
origin|Type:Page
lyrics|Type:Text
free_download|Type:URL

Property:mo:genre:

[[Has type::Page]][[Imported from::mo:genre]]

The ontology with most problems was the dbpedia, which documentation did not tell us what the correct URI was. Luckily the mailing list provided support and we got to know which the correct URI was:

http://www.dbpedia.org/ontology/

Being provided that, we were able to implement a number of semantic properties for a number of classes and start updating our wiki pages to get the data on our semantic database.
To utilize semantic properties within a wiki, there is a number of extensions available, such as Semantic Forms, Semantic Result Formats and Semantic Maps. The benefits we were able to gain were tremendous. For example the original JOINT query that we had been running at the beginning of the blog post with DPL was now able to be utilized with the following ASK query:

{{#ask: [[Category:Artists]] [[mo:origin:Beijing]]
|format=list
}}

However with the major benefit that the extension would NOT be broken after setting the inline query within a page. Dynamic Page List breaks the , rendering a lot of information lost. Other examples of how we benefitted from semantics is that previously we were only able to use Categories and read information of joining one or two categories, e.g. Artist pages that were both categorized as BEIJING artists and METAL artists. However now, with semantic properties, we had a lot of more data to play around with and could create mashup pages such as ROCK or Category:Records on which we were able to implement random videos from any ROCK artists or on which we were able to include a TIMELINE view of released records.

Mashup Page with a suitable video

With the help of the mailing list of Semantic Mediawiki itself (which was of great help when we were struggling) we implemented inline queries using templates to avoid later data changes on multiple pages. That step taken, the basic semantic structures were set up at our wiki and it was time for our next step: Bringing the semantic data of our wiki to others!
And here we are, asking ourselves: How will Freebase or DBpedia actually find our data? How will they include it? Discussing this with Rene a few structural problems became apparent. Being used to work with Wikipedia we usually set the property same:

Owl:sameas (or sameas)

On various of our pages directly to Wikipedia pages.
However we learnt that the property

foaf:primaryTopic

is a much better and accurate property for this. The sameas property should be used for semantic RDF pages, i.e. the respective DBPedia RESOURCE page (not the PAGE page). Luckily we already implemented the sameas property mostly in templates, so it was easy enough to exchange the properties.
Having figured out this issue, we checked out both the freebase page as well as other pages, such as DBpedia or musicbrainz, but there seems to be no “submit RDF” form. Hence we decided that the best way for getting recognized in the Semantic Web is to include more links to other RDF resources, e.g. for our Category:Artists we set sameas links to dbpedia and music ontology. For dbpedia we linked to the class and for music ontology to the URI for the class.
Note on the side here, when checking on sameas.org, it seems that music ontology is NOT cross-linked to dbpedia so far.
Following the recommendations set forth at Sindice, we changed our robots.txt to include our semantic sitemap(s):

Sitemap: http://www.music-china.org/wiki/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&feed=atom
Sitemap: http://www.rockinchina.com/wiki/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&feed=atom

Going the next step we analyzed how we can include external data on our SMW, e.g. from musicbrainz or from youtube. Being a music-oriented page especially Youtube was of particular interest for us. We found the SMW extension External Data that we could use to connect with the Google API:

{{#get_web_data:
url=https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/search?part=snippet&q=carsick+cars&topicId=%2Fm%2F03cmgbv&type=video&key=Googlev3API&maxResults=50
|format=JSON
|data= videoId=videoId,title=title
}}

And

{{#for_external_table:
{{Youtube|ID={{{videoId}}}|title={{{title}}} }}

{{{videoId}}} and {{{title}}}

}}

See our internal TESTPAGE for the live example.
Youtube is using its in-house Freebase ID system to generate auto-channels filled with official music videos of bands and singers. The Freebase ID can be found on the individual freebase RESOURCE page after pressing the EDIT button. Alternatively one could use the Google API to receive the ID, but would need a Youtube internal HC ID prior to that. Easy implementation for our wiki: Include the FreebaseID as semantic property on artist pages within our definitions template:

{{Definitions
|wikipedia=
|dbpedia=
|freebase=
|freebaseID=
|musicbrainz=
|youtubeautochannel=
}}

Voila, with the additional SQL-based caching of request queries (e.g. JSON) our API load on Google is extremely low as well as increasing speed for loading a page at our wiki. Using this method we were able to increase our saved YOUTUBE id tags from the original 500 to way over 1000 within half a day.

A big variety of videos for an act like carsick cars is now available thanks to semantifying

With these structures in place it was time to inform the people in our community not only on the changes that have been made but also on the additional benefits and possibilities. We used our own blog as well as our Facebook page and Facebook group to spread the word.

Open access and data from my research. Old resources for various topics finally online.

Rene — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 05:19:53 +0000

Being strong pro on the topic of open access I always try to publish all my work on my blog but sometimes I am busy or I forget to update so today I took the time to look at all my old drafts and the stuff that hasn’t been published yet. So here is a list of new content on my blog that should have been published long ago I also linked it in the articles of interest:

The slides of my Graphity talk at FOSDEM 2012
The slides of my Graphity talk at SocialCom 2012
The slides of my Oberseminar talk on Typology.
We consolidated the source code for related work into a git repo.

In the last month I have created quite some content for my blog and it will be published over the next weeks. So watch out for screen casts how to create an autocompletion in gwt with neo4j, how to create ngrams from wikipedia, thoughts and techniques for related work, reasearch ideas and questions that we found but probably have not the time to work on

Report of Socialcom2012 online in our new WeST blog

Rene — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 06:31:33 +0000

Hey everyone,
longtime no see! Well yeah the summer time usually means vaccation and traveling and so on. But I also have been busy creating some cool content and visiting some conference!
So first of all together with my friend Leon Kastler I have established our new WeST Blog. The goal is to be more transparent with the research of our institute! Quite some people in our institute already shared some nice information. So why don’t you give our blog a try and follow it at:
http://blog.west.uni-koblenz.de/
Since our institute now has its own blog I will in future publish some of my articles over there and will just point to them from this blog. This will happen especially if the content of the articles is founded by research money from our institute. So my presentation at SocialCom 2012 is most certainly founded by our institute so thats why you can read my summery together with some suggestions of interesting paper at my article:
http://blog.west.uni-koblenz.de/2012-09-20/west-researchers-summary-of-socialcom-2012-in-amsterdam/

Big step towards open access by Great Britain and a comment from Neelie Kroes

Rene — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 18:33:39 +0000

During my vaccation a lot of stuff has been happened and it was just for today that I came along the following article and discussion: http://royalsociety.org/policy/projects/science-public-enterprise/report/. Yes you read correctly the royal society wants to create open access to all publications financed by the British government. What a big step! Congratulation to all British people for being such a role model.
It fits perfectly to my project related work and other discussions I was joining e.g.

Even though this development is very good to see I am not happy about how the following discussion is going on about models how to fulfill the goals from the royal society.

Neelie Kroes from the European comission posted a really nice answer!

I am glad to see this step forward. After my successful submission of Graphity and reading the copyright form of IEEE which I had to sign I really did have concerns publishing my work with them.
I am still considering not submitting to big journals and conferences anymore but just publishing on my universities website, my blog and/or on open preprint archives.

How Tim Berners Lee told me in front of thousand people: “Go geek and do it”

Rene — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 12:50:12 +0000

The statement already got twittered by my colleague Thomas Gottron and retweeted by many others

I am at www2012 conference and after the keynote by Neelie Kroes there was a panel discussion with her, Tim Berners Lee and Gille Babinet.
The discussion was about the question “Weather access to an open internet should be a human right?”
Clearly knowing where I am standing on this issue (yes it should be!) I was very happy that this question was discussed in front of such an audience. Tim Berners Lee obviously agreed on this point and Neelie Kroes really had some great and very diplomatic insights.
But for some reason the discussion always drifted up to the drawbacks of the web like copyright infringement. I was starting to get annoyed by this. Especially because it was always going as Free web vs copyright protection. So I decided to ask a question during Q&A which I am now about to blog.

During Q&A I also gave a litte background on the actuall question but I want to be a bit more detailed in my blog:

So yes I wish the “open web” to be a human right.
And I also think it is really important to protect the copyrights of artists, musicians and other people creating stuff. Working together with In Legend I really know how hard it is for a musician to survive and it is really important that he gets paid for what he does and shares.
BUT: the discussion is always an “eather – or” discussion and goes in the wrong direction! Bastian Emig from In Legend is very open minded about new ways to use the web working for the musician. Already in the plenary session Tim pointed out that he did not invent the Web to harm the record industry. But it is rather the record industry that refuses to think about new business models and just wishes everything to stay in the old ways which used to work quite well for them.
I made the experience that a band still needs to have a record label. You don’t get booked without the label. You don’t get articles in big print mags. The label gives you trust within the industrie and without that you are not seen by many people. And so on…
But just in my experience I see that the record label does big harm to a musician. As a member of this musicband I want to share our music on the web. Since there is piracy – which I cant change – I just have to think about a way how I could profit from it. Obviously by sharing the music myself I can increase my reach. This could significantly increase my chances for direct marketing (making the record label kind of obsolate) and this is what the labels seem to be afraid of. The web offers several huge opportunities for musicians to become recognized and an established act. But Labels own the licences and block musicians in doing smart and wise moves on the web.
I realize this problem exists due to the fact that labels have a monopoly on the product and too much power but pretending to protect the interests of the artists. Thereby hiding the fact that they are just fighting for their very own interests which do not neccessarily correlate whitch those from artists.

Here my question / point

It is not about copyright vs free / open internet. It is much more about a new model of copyright that can coexist with a free internet. In This new model licence owners (e.g. the labels) wouldn’t build those exclusive monopolies giving them such a high power. I asked what can be done to establish a new way of thinking about copyright. Since it really does not make sense that itunes gets 50% royalties for a digital distribution that is almost free of cost which I could easily run myself!
First of all – to my surprise – this won me a big applause from the audience which happened very rarely during the conference.

The full panel and discussion can be found at: http://www2012.wwwconference.org/media/videos/keynote-neelie-kroes/
Gille – to whom the question was originally directed – who is very friendly to the record industry answered some stuff I don’t even remember but he was basically stumbling around.
But then two really great answers came along:
Neelie:
“We are working on this and we see that the biggest issue is the record industrie. They pretend to protect the artists and they are not! We need legislation but maybe we need new forms of legislation. Models that worked well in the past may not serve our needs in todays world. I agree with you that you are pointing to the most cruicial point in this discussion.”
Me being totally satisfied with her answer sat down but Tim Berners Lee wanted to say something:
“You know it! Think of a world that you want. Just imagine it!

What would be the distribution?
what would be the user interface?
What would be the processes?
What third parties would be involved.

Go out and build it! Talk to the people here. Install an apache server and just go geek and make it happen!”

what a great statement!

It is always nice to have ideas and see solutions to problems. And yes you can always wine around and do nothing. But as a matter of the fact right now the web is still open an free! The technology is there. It really is just a matter of going out an building it. This is what I always said: This is why big traditional media companies didn’t built the youtube, google, facebooks, twitters, flickr,… applications in this world.
This statement gave me a lot of confidence to stronger believe in my ideas and even one day later I am really feeling that this statement will change my future life. It is really interesting that a man – who I value a lot – tells me something I always felt, hardly did and hits right a way to one of my weekest points!
After the sesion I got my copy of Tim Berners Lee’s book signed and he asked me to send him an email once my site is up. It is really amazing to receive this kind of feedback by such a great person.
That was one of the most inspiring moments in my life! So anyone who wants to join me going geek on the next generation music web app is very welcome to contact me or leave a comment! There really is a lot of stuff in my mind and I have already dreamt a lot and seen what is possible…

Tim Berners Lee signing my Copy of his book at www2012 in Lyon

Keynote on www2012 by Sir Tim Berners Lee

Rene — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:30:12 +0000

disclaimer: this is a very sloppy summary of the keynote speech of Sir Tim Berners Lee. It is neither spellchecked it was taking as notes while sitting inside. I hope I find the time after www2012 to go over it and improve it.

take aways

Decentralized design that is very important. and if you talk about the centralized system like DNS vs internet there are really social issiues that you are talking about.
look at the way w3c builds standards it is hard. It is a huge organizsation and they have to work together but also be split into modular groups.

IDEA 1 Mobile web apps

he gave a lot of interesting insights about the freedom of programmers and the limits of programing models. (Closely related to my thoughts on query languages for graph data bases) He says the easier the programming model the more you restrict people the more they can achieve.
But he also points out there is an ongoing battle between being universal and just being a tool like a refrigerator. he didn’t say it directly but if you listented carefully to him he says don’t support closed blocked systems like apple or even android but make it a open html5 javascript webapp. You decide weather the web stays open. I think he really sees how the mobile web is beeing more and more closed.
He warns: Make open mobile web apps. Join the working groups for setting the standards…
takeaway: VERY VERY important and interesting part of his speech! especially for typology.
My Question: “As a company building something. if it is open you don’t get as much benefit (like access to the friendship graph) as in the case of going for android / iphone systems…”

IDEA2 Standards centralized vs decentralized – power

He talked about the importance of having the same standards for the low level like html, http, and so on. He compares this to people not speeaking the same language. He says it is cool to build all the cool stuff ontop of it.
He says it is hard to build the standards but also important because it made it possible for the web to scale and win against goopher and other things from the early web.
he says the standards are great because anyone can build something on it. it contributes to be decentralized. You don’t have to ask anyone to build something.
My Question: “SPDY seems better / faster and more mature than http. but of course it is hard to change a running system. ”
Value of being completely independend (decentralized) vs the value of working together in a common way (centralized) and this is a huge fight.

IDEA 3 Trust

Ananomous are not quite sure what they are fighing for. is it complete anarchie or fight against corruption. is it the fight against certain goverments or against goverments in general. again. central vs decentral.
Very technical part of his talk that I unfortunatly could not really follow. The main idea was clear. It was about trust, the role of social networks and the methods that could build and propagate trust.
He hopes decentralized trust systems can be found but the battle is not over. (Remark from me: Of course Google+ is better than facebook but both systems are centralized I guess there needs to be low level standards like http to olve the problem but they are hard to implement.) He already said that the semantic web people tried to do it but haven’t successed yet.

IDEA4 openess especially in UK

he talks a lot about open goverment data.
“I spend a lot of time to governments talking to governments to publish data on the web. But a lot of people are pushing back trying to hold back data an maintain power.”
he says it is your responsability to ask parties before the election to have a commitment on making government data open.
open licences. Companies complain about open licenses since they want to use it but not open up their own data.
As a member of the pirate party I can only emphisize on his statements!

Idea 5 Privacy

hes says there are three different forms of privacy:
1.) Of ourse having the shop remembering me and my shoe size is common practise and nice for me. That is one way of privacy. of course those companies if they want to have a good relation with me will not give away my data.
2.) you never know what data will be out there in the future. It might be possible that anonymous data now will become transparent through other data sets coming up in the future…
3.) invasion / tracking / sells to highest bidder / or to the goverment or whoever asks. In the first days of the web this was hard routers couldn’t do this but now it is impossible. But in my oppinion tbl was talking about the facebook’s and googles of this world.
he says this is as dynamite. If someone wants to use this data against you. you will be toasted.
And you cannot stop this. because there are institutions that collet this information and once it is collected it is not save by definition.
he basically says that you cannot collect data about users by default unless you have a similar powershare of “executive legislative and judicative” if this is not happening we should not allow anyone to make such data tracking.
We have to spend 90% time to do cool stuff on the web be innovative. but 10% of the time we have to deal with theses issues otherwise the web will be locked down at some time.
It is about blocking, spamming, twitter bombing, data stealing and so own. This is a huge challange and a big risk of our open web! It is not only the open market depending on it but also democracy and human discourse that depends on it. “I call that net neutrality”
“cispn” americans do this in trying to controll the web and close communication…. go out and look for this. This things happen quick go out and defend the internet and fight for it. This is a duty we have to do in the 10 % of our time.
“I want you to see discussing these things. Think about what you are leaving for the next generation of this. i am happy to do this in the next web conferences but I really want to see ”

questions

on distributed decission making:
How do we move from hirarchical system like our goverments are to a decentralized system which is possible due to all the connections that we have. We should be able to
people naturally don’t go out an break these boundaries of locallity. (there is also a youtube paper on this) Social networking site should rather suggest to spread friends in stead of building those communities of you have 81 friends in common. go out and meet people that are far away from you. use the connections that are being made. (what is the macroscopic effect of this little change in microscoping behaviour)
I think we should do research on new democratic systems like wikipedia (or in my opinion: pirate party) there was the story that people who didn’t vote for barack obama. It turned out those who wouldn’t vote for him didn’t because they couldn’t imagine to have a black president. There was a high correlation of those people and those who have never worked together with people from different ethnical beackground. so go out and spread friendship.
Idea: liquid feedback for W3C as a working group!
question on openess an facebook and the request on tbl’s thoughts
TBL why would you build an app on facebook or a closed world if there is still the open jungle out there. Peopole already asked my that question on netscape and internet explorer. They always ask me this if monoplies rise up.

Funny/interesing Quotes by Tim Berners Lee:

“There is only one person that has been to all web conferences and that is me”
“I recieved a mail recently saying: We had to do a project on an inventor and we decided to do it on you because you are not dead!”
“Values that made the web possible: Openess, concencious about openess, transparency, privacy,”
“If you have questions it is much more interesting for me. Because I have heard myself talking before.”
“Please develop HTML5 mobile web apps rater than native mobile apps!”