Archive for February, 2007
Questions posed
Tomorrow, the seminar-class has been canceled as our professor is attending a seminar of his own. It has been rescheduled to Thursday I’ll come back to that then.
While our professor is currently out of town, and even out of our country, we’ve stumbled upon several important questions regarding the transformation of XBRL into OWL, and thus ontologies.
Due to the fact an ontology is designed with several questions which cannot be answered easily in mind, and an XBRL-taxonomy is already set to answer some very specific questions (What was last year’s revenue? How much did we spend on housing? and so on), developing an ontology from that taxonomy is not of any use. When it is just to keep us busy, we can understand but while our professor isn’t able to explain to us what the added value of an ontology is during the group-sessions, we might as well ask him through an email.
And so it is. I’ve just sent an email to him posing several questions with the same subject: Why?
As we get to grips with our more existential questions, we also combined the already constructed ontologies and ‘instances’ to come to a better, more comprehensive and more elaborate version. We are very curious as to how our professor will grade our creation.
I’ll be posting updates soon!
In an ever changing world
Things do change.
They also do in the digital world, and so does this blogging software. I’ve recently upgraded my software to a newer version and have taken the opportunity to check out solutions to issues I’ve been encountering during the use of this blogsoftware.
Luckily for me, I’ve managed to at least solve one of my issues, which is the way I can write the posts in the admin-interface. Out-of-the-box, WordPress offers the administrator a default ‘rich text editor’, however it wasn’t rich enough for me. I was missing some essential parts like the placement of an image (inline vs. wordwrap) and several minor things.
As of today, and I’ve jotted this down often, this is no longer the case. Due to installing a richer editor, FCKeditor, I now have several added functionalities which will make my life easier. It’s going to take me some getting used to though. 
After today’s college
After showing our professor the, slightly adopted, schema’s displayed in my previous post, we came to the conclusion we were on the right path although some adjustments would have to be made to make up the intelligent solution we aimed for.
Our main concern is converting the different ‘parts’ of a balance, assets and liabilities, into a generic resource or generic resources capable of reuse and/or being inherited from. We’ve come up with a sufficient solution, although it’s still in it’s unpolished state and still neds some TLC in order for it to be ok. As mentioned earlier, there is no tight schedule to adhere to concerning this problem so it might take a while for it to be solved. However, we’re (still) feeling confident. 
OWLing away
Dealing with several packages of software, most of them currently available under public licences is an art, and most definately an underestimated knowledge. As most software runs on JAVA, which is not a bad thing, the VM very often needs some modifications to be fully up to speed. With my 1Gb of RAM I’m currently experiencing quite a lot ‘out of memory heap’ errors with the JAVA-enabled programs. It can often be fixed by setting the maxHeapSize to a little more agressive behaviour or simply to a lager maximum, but this requires some knowledge and creative thinking.
Being an information technology student this is ok, but for the average user, fiddling about with the java.exe commandline switches might be a barrier which is too steep. Anyway, that was my rant on programs such as Protegé and currently Owl2Prefuse, a beta-release created by one of my fellow students.
Not being able to do what I want is pretty frustrating, especially if you know it has to work, and it might work if the programmer hasn’t been sloppy in actually programming it. This way I had to focus more on getting my stuff right, instead of focussing on the task at hand; converting an XBLR taxonomy into an OWL ontology.
My fellow students, using different software-titles came up with some pretty astonishing pictures, of which I posted two below.
It took a while…
But then it became clear to all of us: our professor is just trying to get our possible findings published!
(And he is right too! 
)
Anyway, today we had the group-session in which the semi-definitive object became clearer. As an assignment for again a group session next week we are to fiddle about with several programs and some XBRL taxonomy to create an ontology. The crux in this is that (of course) we jot our findings down and try to come up with a possibly automatable and hence ‘intelligent’ way of doing so.
As our subject we’ve chosen a taxonomy known to us under the title “DigiForce” which is a relatively simple XBRL-instance about a web shop accompanied by the relevant schema’s.
If we (or I) come up with something useful or otherwise postable I’ll let you know.