“Design depends largely on constraints.” — Charles Eames
Thursday, 5 April 2007
We’ve announced the program for this years’ Developers’ Track, and I’m very excited about the lineup. For example, Ryan Boyd from Google will be presenting about GData right before Pasha Sadri talks about Yahoo! Pipes. These are two cutting-edge...
Thursday, 22 June 2006
Recently, there’s been a resurgence for the Link element in HTML; everything from Microformats to Atom autodiscovery is using it. This isn’t surprising; as machines start processing Web documents more, it’s necessary to use hyperlinks — the foundation of...
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Monday, 29 August 2005
I’m happy to announce that version 0.8 of sparta, a simple API for RDF, is now available. As always, feedback and suggestions are appreciated. This revision requires rdflib 2.2.1, as the APIs sparta relied upon have changed. It also...
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Saturday, 13 August 2005
When I worked in the financial industry, I quickly noticed that Excel spreadsheets contain the bulk of the data in the enterprise. It may make IT execs tear their hair out, but having the data nearby and ready for...
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Wednesday, 10 August 2005
For some time, I’ve noticed that people defining XML formats spend an inordinate amount of time talking about the structure of the format. This is especially apparent in standards working groups, where hours — no, days — can be...
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Friday, 1 July 2005
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has announced that as of today, their online publications and tables are now free to download, instead of requiring an account and a per-download charge, as before. Considering the breadth of statistics they’re involved...
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Friday, 29 April 2005
Today’s release of Tiger includes a new but little-discussed framework for developers, CoreData. What’s most interesting to me is its similarities — and differences — to SDO, IBM and BEA’s* effort to abstract away the specifics of how data...
Friday, 1 April 2005
RDF has a simple, usable, universal model; everything’s nodes and arcs, so it avoids the problems of the Infoset, which IMO are brought by its complexity and special cases. Years of disquiet about attributes by portions of the XML...
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Thursday, 17 March 2005
I’m happy to announce that version 0.7 of sparta.py, a simple API for RDF, is now available. As always, feedback and suggestions are appreciated. My goal for this release was to clean up cardinality. In particular, I wanted to...
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Wednesday, 2 March 2005
So, you’ve got some data that you need to give to somebody else, and you want to use XML to do it; good for you, you’ve seen the light / hopped on the bandwagon / drunk the Kool-Aid. At...
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Monday, 6 December 2004
Based on feedback (thanks, John), it's now mapped to an object that implements a subset of the interface of sets.Set, and produces a full sets.Set when you call the copy() method. rdf:Seq is mapped to a list, joining rdf:List; this allows Sparta to work with RSS 1.0, along with other formats that use Seq. The factory takes an optional schema_store argument, so you can store schema hints for Spara separately, if you wish.
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Saturday, 21 August 2004
Version 0.5 of sparta.py is now available; with this release, it's roughly feature-complete.
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Thursday, 5 August 2004
(Another instalment in “XML Heresies.”) One of the foundations of most vendors’ approach to Web services is called document-oriented messaging. This is the notion that interoperability is improved by describing a protocol in terms of the artefacts that are exchanged...
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Friday, 28 May 2004
I’ve been talking with a few people about my previous assertion that the Infoset is a bad abstraction for data modelling, and my subsequent post about the informational properties of the Infoset. The feedback has been positive, especially regarding the...
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Saturday, 15 May 2004
After a short pause (OK, nearly three years), I’ve released version 0.4 of sparta.py. Sparta is a simple API for RDF that binds RDF nodes to Python objects and RDF arcs to attributes of those Python objects. As such, it...
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Saturday, 24 April 2004
This is why heuristics aren't such a hot idea. UPDATE: For those wondering what this is about, the original version of this article had a picture of Madonna, the actor/singer/etc., and links for more information about her, not the famed...
Tuesday, 30 December 2003
Browse through the W3C Semantic Web pages and you’ll see this notice in a few different forms: Additional support for this activity has been provided by DARPA under the DAML program. Dig a bit further on the DAML site, and...
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Sunday, 7 December 2003
I spent a little time on the plane the other day reading the latest WD of the RDF Primer. I didn’t attempt to review the entire document set, as reading a 71 page primer is quite enough! I haven’t followed...
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Thursday, 29 May 2003
Jo Walsh has created a Semantic Web system that appeals quite strongly - a means of using RDF to map to the real world in "gonzo geographical data collection". Very nice. I've been thinking about RDF-izing the Travel bookmarks for...
Friday, 9 May 2003
Before, I was wondering about the intersection of Wikis and the Semantic Web. I've since done some noodling and prototyping, and the idea came together on the train home tonight. You *can* build some semantics using just WikiNames. For example,...
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Monday, 28 April 2003
Anybody else notice how you can use a Wiki like a Semantic Web engine? For example, define a WikiName, say PersonThing. Only use the PersonThing WikiName on pages that identify... person things! You're basically saying a :PersonThing . OK, it's...
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Saturday, 16 November 2002
Jack William Bell makes a precise, short and readable effort at explaining why RDF is simple and important. In the article and subsequent discussion, it's clear that RDF model and syntax are very different topics. EVERYONE that I talk to...