Jukka Villstedt’s Kaivo now has a website. It’s a GUI prototype for navigating and editing RDF-like data and subject of Jukka’s master’s thesis. Similar to Tabulator, Kaivo displays graph data in an outline form. But unlike Tabulator, it can be configured to display nodes within the outlines as tables that afford much quicker scanning and […]
Sean B. Palmer on #swig: I wonder if it might be a good rule of thumb to “reuse properties until it hurts; and then change”, in order to propel the property consensus that’s meant to be such a central feature of the Semantic Web Spot on. (Credits for the title go to danbri)
This would be funny if it was not so sad. Development of Windows Vista’s shutdown menu took more than a year and 41 people. And what they produced is an utter design failure according to Joel Spolsky. If Moishe Lettvin’s description of the development process at Microsoft is to be believed, then the place truly must […]
Andy Seaborne announced yesterday that he is working on a SPARQL algebra for inclusion in the spec. His current draft is here: SPARQL Algebra. I have criticized SPARQL’s lack of a formal semantics before, and I’m glad to see the working group addressing this. Andy’s draft is based on the “compositional semantics” introduced by Pérez et al., […]
My colleague Tobias Gauß dug this up while exploring the Amazon APIs: Test ASIN, by John Doe. Apparently it’s going to be published by Test, Inc. on 07/07/07, and you can preorder NOW for only $19.99.
I’m trying to understand Mark Baker’s criticism of yesterday’s SPARQL Update proposal. To me his criticism seems to boil down to “it’s not RESTful”, which is true, but not necessarily a problem. Why insist on applying REST to everything that goes over HTTP? So here are some questions to REST proponents. To set the tone, an […]
SPARQL Update Language at the ESW Wiki, started by Max Völkel and me. So far the wiki page is just a few notes about the trivial part (syntax), but it might be a good place for collecting relevant links and ideas and requirements. Hopefully the DAWG will be able to tackle this after finishing the query […]
Warning, WebArch nerdery ahead. The short version is, I’ve managed to convince myself that there is no problem with content negotiation on hash URIs. And if you want to do it, you should follow the Best Practices Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies, the method outlined there is correct and makes sense. You can skip the […]
Triggered by recent events, I’ve written a little script that backs up my del.icio.us bookmarks to my local disk. It’s a Ruby script and runs only on Unix systems such as Mac OS X. When run, it will do this: Call the del.icio.us API to check if your bookmarks have been updated, if there are new posts, fetch […]
Does the httpRange-14 resolution imply that HTTP PUT and DELETE are in general not allowed on resources that answers to GET with a 303 redirect? I take the answer to be yes, because asking a server to delete something that may be a real-world object seems unreasonable. (POST seems less clear-cut. POSTing to my URI, for example, […]
A year ago, I wrote a little script that runs a couple of times per day and records the number of emails in my inbox into a database. I did this because I noticed that this number is a fairly reliable indicator of how good I feel in general. When I feel great, the number […]
Ze Frank: How to hire a web developer First, a good web developer does the minimum amount of work to achieve an acceptable result. To test this, start by just looking at your interviewee …
StatSVN has had its first public release. It’s a port of our venerable StatCVS statistics tool to Subversion. Cool! It’s being developed by Jean-Philippe Daigle, Jason Kealey, and Gunter Mussbacher. We considered Subversion support, but Subversion doesn’t include the all-important lines of code numbers in its logfiles. Tammo and Steffen even put together a patch for […]
I believe in free and open wifi. Ever since moving to my current appartment, I’ve kept my wireless network open for anyone to join. Friends and colleagues tell me I’m nuts, and that I will go to jail because evil neighbours will download kiddie porn. Today I’ve closed the access point. The network has become too popular. […]
Andrew Newman has annonced his thesis on a relational model for SPARQL. Sounds like a must-read. (Having printed it, I’m getting a kick out of seeing my name between E. F. Codd and C. J. Date in the references.) (Observation: During ISWC, the must-read stack grows by 50-60 pages a day.)