David Allen: Everybody would be further ahead if they made email like they made answering machines, have it blow up if you got more than 42. The whole piece is worth listening to – a 17-minute discussion between productivity blogger Merlin Mann and Getting Things Done author David Allen about the productivity problems associated with […]
… in which I backpedal quite a bit, after helpful comments from Laurens Holst on my previous post. Clarification 1: I don’t think that namespaces are bad. They are good and important. I just think that sometimes you want to ignore them in queries. Clarification 2: My proposal doesn’t stop anyone from using namespaces and doesn’t change […]
One of the nice things about blogging is that you get people to review your ideas, for free. Yesterday I claimed that you don’t need URI prefixes in RDF queries. Instead of writing this: PREFIX foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/> PREFIX doap: <http://usefulinc.com/ns/doap#> SELECT DISTINCT ?projectName ?personName WHERE { ?person foaf:name ?personName . ?person doap:project ?project . ?project doap:name […]
Update: Everyone hates the idea; some for good reasons. Properties and classes in RDF are identified by URIs. This is important because we want to be able to say additional things about them. But it has a cost. It makes RDF harder and uglier. Just think about the time you’ve spent copy and pasting prefix declarations […]
(Copy’n’pasted from a poster I’ve done recently – I thought it’s worth re-posting here) Public and private organizations can benefit from making data available in machine-readable formats. Such data is most valuable when it is easily accessible and can be re-used by integrating it with other data. Semantic Web technologies support this through built-in globally unique identifiers […]
This is in response to a discussion in the comments to my recent post on geonames.org. I criticized the use of the same URI for concepts and documents in the Geonames RDF output; this post describes in detail how to fix that kind of issue. The problem: Geonames uses URIs to identify places. For example, this […]
Any regular users of BibSonomy around? Del.icio.us totally works for me as a bookmark manager, and BibSonomy is similar, and now I wonder if I should use it to manage the papers I’m reading. I’m looking for opinions, what works well, what doesn’t? Maybe I should install Semantic MediaWiki instead and manage my notes in there?
Now that we have a large database of places on the Semantic Web, I want to link to my place from my FOAF file. To find a place, go to geonames.org, enter the name in the search box, find the right place on the result page. Click the small multicolored place markers near the left border (not […]
The Geonames database is available on the Semantic Web. Announcement, Details, Discussion, notes about the ontology. In summary, this means a whole lot of places with their names and geo coordinates and links to other places are now available on the Semantic Web. For example, this is a URI for Berlin: http://ws.geonames.org/rdf?geonameId=2950159 And now I can linkt to […]
Ze Frank is particularily funny today.
Interesting piece on topic maps, KR and Cyc by Eliot Kimber: Thus my conclusion that topic maps, by themselves, do not in any really meaningful way “capture knowlege”. They can at best provide identifying objects for concepts, express simple facts about those concepts in relation to each other, and bind those facts to instances […]
This is so fun. (via information aesthetics)
A bunch of introductory links for students doing a thesis in the Semantic Web area (in no particular order). What would be your picks?
Memories, memories … I got an Ebay package today and it put me into story writing mood. The content: a used ATX power supply. So here’s a rambling tale about long-dead computers and how I became a Mac zealot, followed by an admission that Windows 98 actually wasn’t as bad as I remember it. How I got […]
StatCVS has been almost dormant for two years. Today (and after much prodding from Dave Gilbert) I’ve packaged a new release. The most significant new feature is that CVS tags are now shown in all timelines. For example, in the StatCVS report for the project itself you can marvel at the amount of inactivity between the […]
The haunting title’s a six-word short story, attributed to Ernest Hemingway. Catherina Fake asks her readers to write their own, and the results are priceless. My favourites: Lucky, yes, but my twin wasn’t. That’s how winter came that year. The last man on Earth sits in his house. […]
Microsoft often gets bashed for their clueless interaction design, often unfairly, but they really make it too easy for their detractors. Look at the first screenshot here: Account Reports – Generate reports about accounts. Competitor Reports – Generate reports about competitors. Invoice Reports – Generate reports about invoices. … If I were […]
The problem was this: My computer would do some heavy lifting (like importing a couple M records into a MySQL database), and I would sit over at another desk (with BastianQ) doing something else. Now, I got tired of walking over to my machine every five minutes to see if it was done yet. So I […]