Media wiki and semantic media wiki

http://download.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.17/mediawiki-1.17.0.tar.gz
http://sourceforge.net/projects/semediawiki/files/semediawiki/Semantic%20MediaWiki%201.6.1/SemanticMediaWiki1.6.1.zip/download

posted to
http://www.permies.com/bb/index.php?topic=4292.msg96690#msg96690
on 8th October:

This topic is fascinating and I really hope the project takes off.

I'm a developing permaculturalist farming/growing on 11.3 acres of land near my home.  Planning to do my first permaculture design course next month. In an earlier (part of my) life I did research into Mathematical Logic and taught in a computer science department for many years and I've been following progress on the Semantic Web for a long time. Only last night I installed a Semantic Media Wiki (SMW) on the servers I'm using for my websites, to get to grips with the technology and see if I can understand the issues and potential applications. I'm impressed, I must say, and my hunch is that this is the right way to go primarily because of the social and collaborative opportunities it presents and because of the great flexibility of the Semantic Web approach. I've worked with relational database (RDB) theory and technology and RDB management systems (RDBMS)s and with Drupal and Wordpress in the past so I've some experience, if not a great deal of wisdom, in this area. There isn't an exact match within a SMW installation to a relational database (and the SMW people are aware of this and have their reasons) but there is a great match to other kinds of database (c.f. SPARQL and RDF stores, [url]http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Using_SPARQL_and_RDF_stores[/url]).  One key point is that the structure of the database naturally evolves over time (as Berners-Lee anticipated many years ago when he proposed the Semantic Web) while this is much harder to accommodate in traditional RDMBSs.  The structure is a collaborative effort (and can be edited wiki-style!) and doesn't require a developer to know in advance what works best.  It also allows internationalisation so that permaculturalists speaking different languages (learning and using other languages is one of my favourite hobbies :-)) can still communicate effectively. And I expect local dialects to develop and mirror the local climate and ecologies; using Semantic Web technology makes this all possible.

One thing I've observed is that old technologies seem better when I have lots experience of them yet new technologies are very seductive for people like me who mostly absorb positive reviews and the temptation to commit early to a particular technology, be it MySQL, Wordpress, Drupal or SMW, is very strong.  And it does take someone to take an initiative even when the "best" approach isn't clear; it sounds as if Lawrence is doing this; I'm not clear if an alternative/complementary system is going to be developed out of this topic?

I'm very keen to learn more about local guilds and I'd be happy to contribute (in a relatively small way because of my other commitments) to this project if that turns out to be sensible. Whatever we do with our local permaculture project (and we want to learn, understand and share a lot from it), it seems to make a lot of sense to make it easy to collaborate with existing projects rather than re-inventing the wheel ourselves.

Villiers website copy

a triarchy press publication

Leading from example: A short guide to the lessons of literature
by Peter Villiers
Publication Date: tba in July 2011
No of pages: tba
Book type: Paperback
Print ISBN: tba
List Price: £tba
Pre-Publication Price: £tba

How could reading literature be of practical benefit to a busy, modern manager or leader? Surely a leader's reading should be of business reports and financial statements, not fiction! This book shows us how misguided such a view would be.

Indeed, the aim of Leading from Example is to help the reader to perform more effectively in his or her sphere of influence. This book is intended to stimulate reflective practice and to extend it beyond personal experience to learn from the experience of others. Those others include people who exist purely in the sympathetic imagination of the writer.

The process of falling for a character, becoming irrevocably intrigued and sympathetic, seems out of place in organizational life, where it must be juxtaposed with the norms of bureaucratic impersonality. But most organizations are awash with gossip and storytelling, much of it scurrilous. When people spend time talking about what is going on behind the closed doors of the management meeting, or what motivates their leaders, or speculating about the outcomes of a current change programme, they are creating fictions, and using them to conjure a place for themselves as both authors and characters in a constantly woven narrative.

So when we read compelling works of fiction, we immerse ourselves in processes not so different from those of normal organizational life. The predicaments are perhaps more carefully selected, and the inner lives of the characters more exposed to our gaze. This is especially important for those interested in leadership, because in fiction, and particularly the stories included in Leading from Example, we come to see how the situations that people get themselves into are seldom a matter of mere happenstance, but are intimately connected to the kinds of people they are. At the same time, who they become is revealed as bound up in their circumstances. How much more satisfying this is, than the dry lists of leadership skills and virtues with which we are all too often regaled!

In Leading from example Peter Villiers teases out lessons for leadership using a diverse yet coherent set of readings from, among others:

• Rudyard Kipling (Kim, Stalky & Co., Captains Courageous)
  
• Jack London (The Sea Wolf)
  
• Ernest Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls)
  
• Joseph Conrad (The Secret Agent)
  
• George Orwell (Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four)
  
• R C Sherriff (Journey's End)

‘Leadership is like a prism, projecting individual characteristics onto the big screen of organisational and public life. But what drives people into leadership, and the choices they make? Great novels illumine the motives and human stories of leaders in ways that are impossible by mere science, with its obsession for what can be modelled and measured.  In Peter Villiers' excellent book you will find full-blown characters in all the complexity of their circumstances, facing dilemmas that are immediately recognisable. Anyone with experience of leadership will find the resonance far more instructive than any number of 'how to be a leader' text books; and it's a lot more fun too!’  Professor Jonathan Gosling, Director of the Centre for Leadership Studies, The University of Exeter

About the Author

Peter Villiers served in the army and merchant service and began to publish on leadership, ethics and human rights when a tutor at the national police staff college at Bramshill in Hampshire.  His publications include biographies of Joseph Conrad, and of Gavrilo Princip, the assassin who started the First World War. He lives in Devon.

Anyone who thinks it must be easy to predict the path of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano might want to look at this record of the cloud movements during a 10 day period in May 2010.

Is it piggy?

Got the flu. Friends don't want to see me. Feeling guilty about probably spreading it to others. Can't work out if it's even likely to be swinish. Luckily not too ill or feverish but I really don't like the cough (history of bad bronchitis).