RDF/XML sucks: People loudly complain about RDF/XML, the standard serialization format of RDF graphs into XML. It’s crufty, it’s buggy, it misses the point, it’s a royal pain. Turtle/N3 is better for reading and writing by humans, but writing a parser is still a lot of work. A number of simpler XML alternatives have been […]
The W3C’s public-sparql-dev mailing list is a bit underpublished (or rather, it’s in an abandoned cellar behind a cabinet with a sign reading “beware the tiger”). Nonetheless, it is the place where to discuss implementation and usage of W3C’s new RDF query language. Let the flaming begin!
Hats off to anyone who can watch this without laughing! Bonus link.
Wow, what a week! WWW: This is a fantastic conference, very high quality, excellent organisation, lots and lots of fascinating people. Edinburgh: The label “Athens of the North” is appropriate. It’s all there, the city sprawling over several hills, the mountain backdrop, the sea in the distance, the withering stone monuments. Just replace the light browns and […]
WWW2006 is starting tomorrow. I will be giving a demo of D2R Server on Thursday. To save money, I’m flying to Glasgow and take the train from there. Edinburgh is a beautiful city I hear. This is the first time I attend such a major conference. I’m looking forward to an enjoyable and interesting week.
Greg Knauss: My entire life has devolved into an endless, grinding slog through my back-log. Everything I do is about catching up, doing the stuff I didn’t get done the day before, plowing through some other goddamned thing that needs my attention. Ending the day without actually adding to the total aggregate […]
The Under Odysseus blog, a serialized retelling of the siege of Troy through the eyes of Eurylochus, an officer with administrative duties in Odysseus’ entourage, is one of my favourite sources of light entertainment these days. The story reaches a climax today with the Achaean champion being murdered while he and other nobles offer birthday […]
New in Semantic MediaWiki 0.4: inline queries. Syntax is quite simple and fits in well with other MediaWiki idioms. The queries produce comma-separated lists, bullet lists, or tables. Expressivity seems to be comparable with RDQL plus sort and limit. No optional patterns though, which sucks for tables. The lists on this page are auto-generated by inline queries. A […]
JUC2006 has been over for a few days. This is my wrapup post. First some linkage: Leigh’s summary Lots of photos from Anja and Libby (I stole a random selection for this post) More photos, from Libby too I think #swig chatlogs with lots of linkage and commentary: day 1, day 2 There were lots of good talks. The one […]
In many scenarios involving SPARQL endpoints, it would be great to have machine-readable metadata about the endpoint. What is it called, what is inside, what can it do? One place where this comes up is with generic SPARQL browsers. They should at least be able to display a human-readable title and description of the endpoint. Another […]
SquirrelRDF is quite similar to our D2RQ. There’s a lot of data out there, but much is not in RDF, but in databases. SquirrelRDF allows SPARQL queries against databases. Mapping from DB schema to RDF is done along the lines described in 1998 by TBL. The mapping is created automatically by a small tool that introspects […]
People have been talking about federated semantic web queries for a while. Here’s a working prototype … Bastian is an intern at HP Labs. The idea is to answer one SPARQL query using data from multiple SPARQL endpoints. The individual endpoints have to describe their capabilities with a simple service description. The federation engine then can […]
Semanlink is an RDF-based personal information management system. It’s a tagging system. You can tag files, bookmarks and text notes. Unlike most tagging systems, Semanlink lets you arrange tags into a concept hierarchy. It runs as a servlet. There’s a web page for each tag, but it doesn’t only list tagged items, but also “subtags” and […]
Eyeball is a command-line tool for finding typical problems in RDF files. A “lint for RDF.” Or the “jena rdf screwup detection utility,” in danbri’s words. Some of the errors that Eyeball can detect: datatypes errors (integers with letters in them etc.) weird-looking URIs weird-looking namespace declarations terms not declared in their schema file (can indicate typos) cardinalities (to work around […]
Steve wants to translate XML into RDF, and back. He tried to come up with the simplest possible mapping. And he hates inventing new languages. So he didn’t want to create a mapping language. The solution is to look at XML Schema. If the XML to be translated conforms to a schema, then you have enough […]
Slug is one of Leigh’s pet projects. It’s a crawler for the semantic web. There are lots of slug photos in the slides. A semantic web crawler works like a web crawler, but it fetches RDF files instead of HTML pages, and follows rdfs:seeAlso links instead of HTML links. Slug is multi-threaded and very extensible. Crawling and fetching […]
PortalCore is a web-pased portal toolkit that provides faceted browsing on RDF data. It was built at HP Labs and used in various customer projects. Unlike Longwell, which also provides faceted browsing of RDF datasets, PortalCore is highly configurable. Which facets to use for navigation, how the facets work, what templates to use to display instances […]
RDFReactor generates Java objects from RDF schemas. This makes RDF much easier to use for the 90% of Java developers who are not RDF experts. It’s hard to see the actual domain objects between all the triples. RDFReactor is like some glasses that let you view the triples through familiar Java objects. For example, you could create […]
Ginseng is a natural language query facility for RDF. The inspiration is “fridge poetry for the Semantic Web.” (a great tagline!) “The markup prisoner’s dilemma” – why should I do markup if there are no tools making use of it, and why should I build tools when there is no markup? “People do not understand formal logic. […]
I’m at the Jena User Conference in Bristol. For me, this is a return to the place where I lived and worked for half a year in 2005, and I’m catching up with a lot of folks I haven’t seen for a while. The organizers handed out USB drives containing the conference proceedings and the latest […]