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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 foobarâ€, 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 [...]
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 [...]
This excellent (in content and style) short video by Michael Wesch is making the rounds. It perfectly captures the essence of the Web at its state circa 2007. I’d love to see this extended with another 30 seconds devoted to RDF. Or maybe not, because RDF on the Web is still more a vision than a [...]
Free software community site Advogato now generates FOAF profiles for all users, thanks to work by Steve Rainwater.
Yaron Koren comments on our dbpedia project: I created a query to get a list (including image) of all extinct birds whose name contains the letter “dâ€. Does that seem like a pointless list? Well, it is, though on the other hand this is also, as far as I know, the first time in [...]
Nick Gall, VP Gartner, complains that Middleware vendors simply slapped a “Web†label onto their overcomplicated products and, thanks to W3C’s blessing, managed to create yet another wave of hype: Unfortunately, Web Services, at least the WS-* style, are “Web” in name only. While WS-* enables tunneling over HTTP (used merely as an XML [...]
Mike Bergmann has set up a list of Semantic Web tools that can be viewed, searched and filtered through SIMILE Exhibit. Some background on how he did it here – it combines Google Spreadsheets, Wordpress and Exhibit. Pretty cool. If you haven’t seen Exhibit in action yet, then check it out, and keep in mind that [...]
David Weinberger: In fact, perhaps we could use a microformat for technical problems and solutions. The first thing I do when I get some funky error message is to google for it. Even for the most arcane problem, there’s a forum thread somewhere that will shed some light on the issue. A little more structure [...]