An insightful Paul Graham quote (from this essay): Ironically, though open source and blogs are done for free, those worlds resemble market economies, while most companies, for all their talk about the value of free markets, are run internally like communist states. This is a sufficient explanation for the success of open source, in my [...]
Is this cool or what? xml.rss(”version” => “2.0″) do xml.channel do xml.title(@feed_title) xml.link(@url) xml.description “Basecamp: Recent items” xml.language “en-us” xml.ttl “40″ for item in @recent_items xml.item do [...]
How do we find out that two bits of RDF describe the same resource? The usual approaches are either to agree on a common URI scheme (which is often impractical), or to use inverse functional properties and smushing (which is complex and brittle). Phil Dawes describes another approach: The recent folksonomy phenomenon has shown [...]
Hell froze over! After 8 years of my nasty, crufty, hodge podged together HTML, last night we finally switched over to clean HTML 4.01 with a full complement of CSS. While there are a handful of bugs and some lesser used functionality isn’t quite done yet, the transition has gone very smoothly. Good to see [...]
Read this. It’s priceless. Look folks, I know that software rot (sometimes called “progress”) keeps growing, and backwards compatibility is not always possible. At one point I changed my TeX78 system to TeX82 and refused to support the older conventions. [...] But in this case I see absolutely no reason why system people [...]
Meike Klettke, Uni Rostock: XML schema evolution and incremental validation (Slides, in German) XML documents and document schemas change over time, that’s just a fact. Compare to SQL databases: Data is updated all the time, schema changes happen, columns are added to tables etc. Update languages for XML are far from being standardized, and evolution of XML [...]
Daniel Fötsch, Uni Leipzig: Operator hierarchy concept for XML transformation Daniel reviews transformation methods for XML. You can do it on the plain text level with regular expressions etc, with APIs like DOM and SAX, with specialized languages like XSLT, STX, XUL and XUpdate. He talks about this last category. The idea behind “operator hierarchies” is to [...]
Andreas Almer: Improving data quality in XML documents of desktop applications (Slides, in German) Andreas works in a DaimlerChrysler lab. The problem: In specialised areas, like the automobile industry, XML documents are quite often directly exchanged between end users. Data quality then often suffers because there’s no strong validation in the chain. He looks at different XML [...]
Thomas Müller: Passing XQuery sequence sections Thomas talks about the roadmap of SQL with regard to XML support. (Slides, in German) The current version of SQL (SQL 2003) has an XML datatype and some functions for converting between XML bits and relational data. SQL 2007 will adapt the XQuery data model for the XML datatype and will allow [...]
Very timely after Erik Wilde’s talk about conceptual models for XML, Elias Torres cites from Nature Biotech Journal: The [above] problem originates from the limited expressiveness of the XML language. This claim may appear to contradict the often proclaimed ’self-descriptive’ nature of XML. But XML, designed as a language for messaging encoding, is only [...]
Look at these Office 12 screenshots. Microsoft imitates the Brushed Metal look of Mac OS X, just as Apple seems to be moving away from this look. I just don’t understand why anybody would want their OS to look like a cheap ripoff of the previous version of someone else’s OS. Microsoft’s UI design team has no [...]
Erik Wilde, ETH Zürich: Towards Conceptual Modeling for XML (Slides) XML schemas don’t contain enough semantic information. Too much meaning is only present in the documentation. Erik wants a conceptual model for modeling with XML. Like the ER model in the database world, but better suited to XML — hierarchical and referential. This becomes more important as [...]
Harald Schöning from Software AG, is chief architect of the Tamino XML database and talks about the history of this software product. (Slides, in German) They started development in 1997, before XML became a W3C recommendation. This was before XPath, XQuery, XML Schema etc. existed. Tamino was positioned as a “web database” to clearly differentiate it [...]
The fine people at 37signals propose to just forget feature requests. Don’t bother to track them, just read them and throw them away. If something is really important, users will keep telling you over and over again, so you will remember anyway. I don’t fully agree. A tracker for feature requests can focus discussion and “collaborative [...]
Chris Hübsch, TU Chemnitz: XQuestXML — an XML grammar for describing questionnaires Chris presents an XML based system for online questionnaires. This is not very exciting to be honest, but I like the talk anyway. Like Chris’ talk from last year (page in German), it’s a great lesson in how computer systems should be built: Evalutate [...]
Yay! This is very close to my D2RQ and sparql2sql work and one of the talks I’ve been looking forward to. Cristian is from the Heinreich Heine Universität Düsseldorf. He wants to make the data in relational databases available as RDF. This is the same idea as D2RQ. But they do the mapping completely automatically. This [...]
Here (in German) He sits next to me and it’s his fault if I run out of battery on my laptop.
Stefan Audersch: Semantic Web technologies for visual exploration and fusion of multivariate data [I missed the first few minutes] It’s about data integration in a network of small companies and research institutes. They want to share medical and biological data. Their system integrates data from two organizations. The data lives in a MySQL database. They describe the database [...]
Elena Paslaru is from Freie Universität Berlin, that’s my university. (Slides, PDF) She asks the audience to see an ontology as the result of an engineering process, just like a piece of software. There are many decisions to be made when a complex ontology is needed: Build? Buy? Extract from natural language documents? All at once or incremental? [...]
This is today’s invited talk. Nicola Henze is a professor at Uni Hannover, which is Germany’s second-best Semantic Web research location, according to Robert Tolksdorf. She talks about the “people” in TBL’s famous definition of the Semantic Web: “… an extension of the current Web … better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.” (Slides, [...]