The European Semantic Web Conference is over and I’m back in Galway. It was a lot of fun, two hundred smart and interesting people in a sea-side tourist resort, and the thought “I can’t believe I’m getting paid for this” crossed my mind a few times. It was good to see that some of the topics […]
I was debugging some content negotiation related issue the other day and made a little tool that allows me to find out what Accept header different RDF-aware HTTP clients send. If you ever need to know the Accept header of a particular RDF-aware HTTP client, just make it show the RDF loaded from this URI: http://richard.cyganiak.de/2008/03/rdfbugs/accept.php The […]
In my podcasted chat with Danny Ayers the other day I said that Tabulator doesn’t support N3, the highly readable RDF serialization syntax developed by Tim Berners-Lee. It turns out I was wrong. I thought Tabulator supported RDF/XML only. But it turns out Tabulator has excellent support for N3 as well. I’m not sure how I […]
Simon Spero on the SKOS list: The meaning of “document” in this context is extremely broad; if we follow Otlet’s definition of a document as anything which can convey information to an observer, the term would seem to cover anything which can have a subject. By this standard, timbl is a document, but only when someone’s looking. Ah, […]
61 (via Dominik Wagner)
Bernard Vatant: A challenge for semantic query wizzards: Find the smallest connected graph having at least a node in each LOD data set. Interesting. The hardest part might be finding paths through the FOAF bubble. Any takers?
Rahoon is a nondescript area of Galway, the third-largest city in the Republic of Ireland. Unsurprisingly, I had never heard about Rahoon before last week, when I moved there, to join Giovanni Tummarello’s team at DERI Galway. Moving is stressful. But being an RDF geek, I not only have to drag physical stuff around, but I […]
a) A Sudoku solving web service. b) A Sudoku generating web service. c) Hook them up to each other.
Via Troy Self’s introduction to the Linking Open Data list I came across the Objectviewer, yet another Semantic Web browser based on the linked data principles. This increases the number of available Semantic Web browser prototypes to four: Tabulator, Disco, the OpenLink Ajax Toolkit browser, and now ObjectViewer. ObjectViewer has quite a nice visualization of the […]
Neil Batlett has an interesting take on StatSVN and StatCVS: One problem that startup companies often have is demonstrating to investors that they’re actually doing something productive rather than just pouring away money on office plants, Herman Miller chairs, and playing foosball all day. … One thing you can do is show the evolution […]
Keith Alexander experiments with using eRDF markup to populate HTML templates: I was writing a php template, marking it up with eRDF, and I realised that what I was doing was describing variables with triples - which is essentially what I would be doing to write a SPARQL query to retrieve data for the […]
The German readers will appreciate my mix of surprise and horror when I realized I had just typed this word in an email: folksonomymäßig A word that is certain to hurt the sensibilities of every lover of either the English, Latin, or German language. Now if I manage to sprinkle a little bit of french […]
Andy Seaborne announces a first draft of SPARUL, the SPARQL/Update Language: This document describes SPARQL/Update (nicknamed “SPARUL”), an update language for RDF graphs. It uses a syntax derived form SPARQL. Update operations are performed on a collection of graphs in a Graph Store. Operations are provided to change existing RDF graphs as well as […]
Aren’t URNs much more elegant than those brittle HTTP URIs? Why is everyone yapping about 303 redirects? Hash vs. slash? What’s the deal with content negotiation and the Semantic Web? Shouldn’t we use blank nodes anyway? There’s a lot of confusion around URIs on the Semantic Web. You have to do quite a bit of reading and trial-and-error to arrive […]
Over in the comments to Henry Story’s bug ontology post, I wrote: There should be RDF representations of program error reports, such as Java exceptions. Then I could SPARQL for “NullPointerException in class so-and-so of project foobar”, and possibly a solution has been filed, or at least I will find a related bug. Drew Perttula […]
Congrats, Chris!
Henry Story considers design alternatives for a FOAF-enabled personal address book that works as a desktop application. How will it publish the users’ FOAF profile to the Web? The first scenario considered by Henry is an individual who wants to publish to her own webspace. Here, in my eyes, FTP is king. Henry is right when […]
Ze Frank explains the art of procrastination. Procrastinating may seem easy, but you have to practice a bit before you become good at it. … Beginning procrastinators should start with small, solvable tasks that are related to, but not identical to the thing that’s being put off … If you get very good at […]
Steve Jobs: Thoughts on Music The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all […]
Here at our group we spend a lot of time preaching the benefits of dereferenceable URIs. We often want to know if a certain URI supports all the fancy HTTP tricks that are the cornerstones of RDF publishing best practices, like 303 redirects and content negotiation. My tool of choice for this is cURL, a command-line […]