This made my day.
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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Web 2.0 is group therapy
Posted in General
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No, it’s not simple
This started as a comment on Danny Ayers’ Crystal post, in which he defends RDF against Les Orchard’s punch:
Why don’t we have a Xanadu web run on Lisp serving up perfect, crystalline RDF?
Danny:
RDF is pretty much at the point of the minimum structure needed to express data – the simple 3-part statement.
I somewhere have a hefty printout that vehemently disagrees with this assertion. It’s called “RDF Semantics.”
If all you want is the minimum structure needed to express data, then that’s about 45 pages of semantic conditions too much. True, I don’t have to know all of them to use RDF. But think of the implementers!
And don’t even get me started on RDF/XML.
RDF is in the Xanadu-Lisp-SGML-ISO/OSI camp. Let’s figure out which parts of it are fit for the purpose and which are not.
[Update:] Danny answers, and I continue the thread. But Bill de hÕra says it best:
“The model itself is conceptually simple”
Yeah, but if what you said was true, we’d be awash in RDF backed systems. We’re not. Crap like RSS and microformats can come along and wipe the floor with RDF in terms of deployments. RDF is not getting adopted en masse and RDF is as old as XML as makes no difference. Something’s fundamentally wrong.
And invoking the benefits of the open world assumption won’t change these facts. RDF is not getting adopted en masse. Something’s fundamentally wrong.
Posted in General, Semantic Web
5 Comments
Semantic Desktop Workshop in Kaiserslautern
Ah, it’s this time of the year again … The next Semantic Desktop Workshop will be held at April 21.-23. in Kaiserslautern. If you’re interested in the Semantic Web on the desktop, or its application for personal information management, then this is for you!
Posted in General, Semantic Web
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If Danny says we should use OPML, it must be true
A couple of days ago, Danny Ayers asked the SemWeb community to embrace crappy data exchange formats:
I’d like to humbly ask that anyone exposing RDF services on the web consider also emitting the following :
1. Content supplied as RSS 2.0 and Atom
2. Simple resource relations as OPML
Both of these should be made available through a simple HTTP GET. […] Make SemWeb data available for viewing through RSS readers and the like. Give the innocents a bit of knowledge. Hey, they’ve got the coolest UIs, they deserve some Earthly Delights.
His reasonging:
- Everything Web 2.0 gets tons of attention these days
- Emitting RSS and OPML is very 2.0ish
- Lots of folks do good things with RSS and OPML
- Emitting RSS and OPML is not hard if you already have RDF
- Thus, it’s a great way to show everybody what RDF is all about (and RDF developers get some cool UIs).
Yep. Who builds the first RDF-to-OPML service?
Posted in General, Semantic Web
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The sharpest knives in the drawer
Here’s an inspiring piece about OXO, the company that arguably produces the best kitchen tools in the world. How do they do it? Evolutionary improvement and fanatic attention to detail.
If you’re developing software, that’s not the worst model you could emulate.
(via 37signals)
Posted in General
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Which sci-fi crew would you best fit in?
I’m only slightly embarrassed.
You scored as SG-1 (Stargate). You are versatile and diverse in your thinking. You have an open mind to that which seems highly unlikely and accept it with a bit of humor. Now if only aliens would stop trying to take over your body.
| SG-1 (Stargate) |
|
88% | |
| Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) |
|
81% | |
| Serenity (Firefly) |
|
81% | |
| Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) |
|
69% | |
| Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) |
|
69% | |
| Enterprise D (Star Trek) |
|
63% | |
| Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) |
|
63% | |
| Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) |
|
50% | |
| Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) |
|
44% | |
| Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) |
|
38% | |
| Moya (Farscape) |
|
38% | |
| FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files) |
|
31% |
Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics)
created with QuizFarm.com
(via Martin Ott)
Posted in General
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How I wish I could write one of those
Dominik Wagner, one of the minds behind SubEthaEdit, wrote a retrospective on his six years of studying computer science at a german university.
Being in my sixth year myself (but not at one of Germany’s finest universities), I can confirm most of what he says.
Posted in General
2 Comments
Assembler not dead yet, apparently
pagetable.com is a new blog about assembly language. They even do puzzles!
I think I kind of know the answer to the first one. Wouldn’t something like this work, with x and y in ax and bx?
mul ax, bx jz label
Well, probably not. I haven’t touched x86 assembly since 1995 or so, my memory is not good, and I have absolutely no clue how things with more than 16 bit are done. Um, use two registers for 32 bit? And my solution is bad anyway because multiplication is so expensive. At least it was back in my days. Or has Intel fixed that by now?
16 bit should be enough for anybody, really.
(via Martin Ott)
Posted in General
3 Comments
Perfectly organized
I love this ad campaign for an office furniture company. Very clever.
(via Information Aesthetics)
Posted in General
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Analysing multiple CVS modules with StatCVS
This just came up on the StatCVS mailing list and is worth a blog post. Sometimes you want to create a cumulative StatCVS report that summarizes multiple projects. This neat little trick works if they are all from the same repository. Just checkout the root module:
cvs co .
Running StatCVS on that will produce a nice report for all modules.
If you want some, but not all modules from the repository, and are on Unix, then you can create a “virtual” module that contains only symbolic links:
/cvs
CVSROOT/
module1/
module2/
module3/
combined_modules/
module1 -> ../module1/
module2 -> ../module2/
module3 -> ../module3/
Then run a report on combined_modules.
(Thanks to Brian Peterson for the tip.)