About me
My name is Richard Cyganiak.
I'm a software engineer at TopQuadrant. I work on web technologies for managing data and am based in Dublin, Ireland.Links
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Monthly Archives: June 2006
BumpTop 3D Desktop
Not sure how useful this prototype virtual desktop (PDF, 2.7 MB) is, but it sure looks extremely fun: Video on YouTube, 6:49 min. (Thanks Paolo!) Update: Merlin Mann convincingly points out that BumpTop might be useful for many things, but … Continue reading
Calculating SHA-1 digests with AppleScript
This snippet calculates the SHA-1 digest of a string: set s to “mailto:richard@cyganiak.de” do shell script “echo -n ” & quoted form of s & “|openssl sha1” set digest to result This is useful for calculating foaf:mbox_sha1sum values, for example.
Posted in General, Semantic Web
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An RDF design pattern: inverse property labels
Dan Connolly complained on rdfweb-dev about FOAF’s redundant inverse properties (depicts/depiction, page/topic), and pointed to this TimBL post, which mentions a nice pattern for designing RDF vocabularies that should be adopted more widely. Avoid inverse properties. There’s no need to … Continue reading
Posted in General, Semantic Web
2 Comments
Flickr User Model
Flickr User Model, v0.3 A diagram of what Flickr is about. Stunning! How I’d love to produce this style of diagram instead of those boring UML things to document my software … (Via information aesthetics)
Posted in General
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The Perfect Apostrophe
Productivity blogger Merlin Mann of 43Folders tells the story (audio, 10:50 min) of how he ended up not writing the “Life Hacks” book for O’Reilly. A great warning to all fellow procrastinators, especially those who like to endlessly fiddle with … Continue reading
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How technology revolutions happen
Paraphrased from this Cory Doctorow piece: New technologies succeed by being good at the stuff that the old technology sucked at, not good at the stuff that made the old technology great. This happens to be a one-sentence summary of … Continue reading
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Gibsonian
On Bots: On 2005-06-30 Googlebot visited node 1, the leftmost node. It did not crawl the path from the root to this node, so how did it find the page? Did it guess the URL or did it follow some … Continue reading
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SquirrelRDF released
Damian Steer of HP Labs has released the initial version of his SquirrelRDF. The project homepage is the cutest ever. I talked about SquirrelRDF previously. Like our D2RQ/D2R Server, SquirrelRDF enables SPARQL queries against relational database content. In addition, it … Continue reading
Posted in General, Semantic Web
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More cool SPARQL+AJAX stuff
From Christoph Görn: A little query form for some SIOC. The cool thing is that results are displayed instantly while you type. (Try typing the names of some Planet RDF authors, e.g. “Tim” or “Dan”.) Who says that RDF stuff … Continue reading
Posted in General, Semantic Web
2 Comments
Developers Toolkit Guide updated
Chris has updated the Developers Guide to Semantic Web Toolkits for different Programming Languages. A bunch of toolkit descriptions were updated to the latest version, and the recent flurry of Javascript SPARQL clients (here, here) were added.
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