Phil Jones, in my comments: I think the difficulty in RDF comes from […] confusion with the aims of upper-case SemWeb, means that it’s hard to find documentation that doesn’t throw you into the deep-end. (Maybe someone should produce a “how to hack RDF in 10 minutes without thinking about what it really means” […]
Leo: Note that an RDF database server (with inference) will probably look like this. Haha. So true.
You don’t have a FOAF file yet? No? Then go create one! You have a FOAF file, but it doesn’t have geo coordinates? Then go add them! This link leads to a little service that helps you locate the latitude and longitude of the place where you live. I’ve built it today. It’s based on the Google […]
Scott Adams, author of the Dilbert comic strip, started a blog a while ago, and it’s been one of the most enjoyable reads on my blogroll ever since. His pragmatic outlook on the world, his tendency to take everything at face value, to believe only what his own eyes can see, and to never overestimate […]
Dan Brickley experiments with using SPARQL queries to check on the vocabularies used in an RDF file. Here’s a query that checks my FOAF file for properties that are in the FOAF namespace, but not declared in the FOAF RDFS file. PREFIX foaf: PREFIX rdf: PREFIX owl: PREFIX rdfs: SELECT DISTINCT ?property FROM FROM NAMED foaf: WHERE { […]
Noticed today that Steffen Pingel, one of the guys behind StatCvs-XML, has started a blog.
… has to be satisfactorily. Displaced to the second rank: procrastination. I liked that one because it plays such a major role in my life, and my native language (german) has no word for that concept. It’s nice to learn a new foreign word and realize: “Oh, so that’s what I’m doing 90% of my time.”
John Sowa: RDF and OWL are legacy systems that must be supported, but semantics, pragmatics, and ontology are where the action is. RDF and OWL are too limited, clumsy, and inefficient to support any serious work in knowledge representation and reasoning. An enormous amount of effort in the SemWeb literature […]
Here’s Danny’s continuation of the “SemWeb types should embrace OPML/RDF is too hard” thread, in which he takes a step back to paint the big picture. The goal is the Web of Data, Web as a platform. An RDF-based semantic web could be one way to get there. Emerging “naive” technologies like RSS and OPML and […]
Jessica Clark: In many ways, “geeks” are the canaries in the New Economy’s coalmine. Programmers and knowledge workers often operate as free agents in the digital economy—self-employed or contract workers with little job security and a constant need to reinvent themselves for new employers. Working at home or remotely, they are overwhelmed by a […]
Here’s a short screencast demo of Dabble DB, one of the more exciting offerings in the endless stream of new Web 2.0 apps. It’s a web-based database, aimed at casual users. Microsoft Access on the web, kind of. It’s not public yet, but the screencast shows off the features very well: rich import and export options, […]
Just noted that one of my posts shows up on the first result page when I google for “perfectly organized.” Obviously, Google doesn’t have a clue. Update: Today I’m in the top ten for “cluttered homes”. Google may be slow on the uptake, but ultimately gets it right …
A nice little productivity hack for small teams: Todoque is a simple shorthand for writing down tasks, questions and ideas. Example: Alice<Bob [Q]:How much are the tickets to the Opera? [A] They are $200 and you need to book by tuesday. Mary<Alice [T]:Ring the bank and arrange 4th mortgage. Bob<Mary[T]: […]
Perl is the Linear A of the comping world. (from my silly little outburst in the comments over here (in German))
Why is Perl so successful, despite its obvious flaws? Danah Boyd: “Coolness” is about structural barriers, about the lack of universal accessibility or parsability. Structural hurdles mean people put in more effort to participate. It’s kinda like the adventure of tracking down the right parking lot to get the bus to go to the […]
(On starting a side business:) Many people worry that they’ll languish in obscurity. Don’t worry about having a great idea that no one knows about. Worry about having a bad idea that everyone knows about. –Jason Fried
Hilarious. This made my day.
This started as a comment on Danny Ayers’ Crystal post, in which he defends RDF against Les Orchard’s punch: Why don’t we have a Xanadu web run on Lisp serving up perfect, crystalline RDF? Danny: RDF is pretty much at the point of the minimum structure needed to express data - the simple 3-part […]
Ah, it’s this time of the year again … The next Semantic Desktop Workshop will be held at April 21.-23. in Kaiserslautern. If you’re interested in the Semantic Web on the desktop, or its application for personal information management, then this is for you! Announcement from Arne Handt
A couple of days ago, Danny Ayers asked the SemWeb community to embrace crappy data exchange formats: I’d like to humbly ask that anyone exposing RDF services on the web consider also emitting the following : 1. Content supplied as RSS 2.0 and Atom 2. Simple resource relations as OPML Both […]