(From the archives: I wrote this over 2 years ago, but never hit publish. At last, the tale can be told!) If you haven’t seen it, the keynote at MarkLogic World 2013 is worth a look. I was on stage demonstrating new Semantics features built into MarkLogic server. Two of the three demos were based on…
Category: intentional web
This week marked the MarkLogic World conference and with it some exciting news. Without formally “announcing” a new release, the company showed off a great deal of semantic technology in-progress. Part of that came from me, on stage during the Wednesday technical keynote. I’ve been at MarkLogic five years next month, and the first piece…
Naming is hard to do well, almost as hard as designing good software in the first place. Take for instance the term ‘node’ which depending on the context can mean A fundamental unit of the DOM (Document Object Model) used in creating rich HTML5 applications. A basic unit of the Semantic Web–a thing you can say stuff…
Some great data from my one-time colleague Peter Mika. Based on data culled from 12 billion web pages, RDFa is on 3.5 percent of them, even after discounting “trivial” uses of it. Just look at how much that dark blue bar shot up since the last measurement, some 18 months earlier. Also of note: eRDF…
I’ve seen lots of discussion for and against link shorteners, but not specifically this line of argument: Let me grab a random shortened link from Twitter. Don’t go away, I’ll be right back. http://bit.ly/b1fYi1 OK, that’s six characters in the domain, a slash, and six more characters. 50 years from now, if bit.ly is still…
This epic posting on MVC helped me better understand the pattern, and all the variants that have flowed outward from the original design. One interesting observation is that the earlier designs used Views primarily as output-only, and Controllers primarily as input-only, and as a consequence the Controller was the one true path for getting data…
As the world of web apps gets more framework-y, I need to get up to speed on contemporary automation testing tools. One of the most popular ones right now is the open source Selenium project. From the look of it, that project is going through an awkward adolescent phase. For example: Selenium IDE lets you…
Thought experiment: are there any commonly-expressed semantic queries–the kind of queries you’d run over a triple store, or perhaps a SearchMonkey-annotated web site–expressible in common type-in-a-searchbox query grammar? As a refresher, here’s some things that Google and other search engines can handle. The square brackets represent the search box into which the queries are typed,…
I wish I could say I had something to do with the planning of this: part of Balisage 2010 is a contest to “encourage markup experts to review and to research the current state of wiki markup languages and to generate a proposal that serves to de-babelize the current state of affairs for the long…
The xml-dev mailing list has been discussing XLink 1.1, which after a long quiet period popped up as a “Proposed Recommendation”, which means that a largely procedural vote is is all that stands between the document becoming a full W3C Recommendation. (The previous two revisions of the document date to 2008 and 2006, respectively) In…
One particular conversation I’ve overheard several times, often in the context of web and standards development, has always intrigued me. It goes something like this: You know, Ted Nelson’s hypertext system from the 60’s had unbreakable, two-way links. It was elegant. But then came along Tim Berners-Lee and HTML, with its crappy, one-way, breakable links,…
Another XForms site launched this week. This one seems pretty close to what I would like XForms Institute to become, if I had an extra 10 hours per week. -m
I enjoyed Nicole Sullivan‘s talk at the BayJax Meetup on Object-Oriented CSS, something I hadn’t run in to before. Adding predictability to CSS development seems like a huge win. I need to wrap my head around it better. Anyone with experience using this technique care to comment? -m
I’m noodling around with requirements and exploring existing work toward a solution for “decentralized extensability” on xml-dev, particularly for HTML. The notion of “Java-style” syntax, with reverse dns names and all, has come up many times in the context of these kinds of discussions, but AFAICT never been fully fleshed out. This is ongoing, slowly,…
On May 8 I wrote: it’s time for the W3C to show some tough love and force the two (X)HTML Working Groups together. On July 2, the W3C wrote: Today the Director announces that when the XHTML 2 Working Group charter expires as scheduled at the end of 2009, the charter will not be renewed….
A great introduction article. Maybe it’s just the crowd I hang with, but RDFa looks like it’s moving from trendy to serious tooling. -m
I spent 2 days at the Yahoo! campus at a VoCamp event, my first. Initially, I was dismayed at the schedule. Spend all the time the first day figuring out why everybody came? It seemed inefficient. But having gone through it, the process seems productive, exactly the way that completely decentralized groups need to get…
The new feature called rich snippets shows that SearchMonkey has caught the eye of the 800 pound gorilla. Many of the same microformats and RDF vocabularies are supported. It seems increasingly inevitable that RDFa will catch on, no matter what the HTML5 group thinks. -m
If you haven’t already, check out HTML: The Markup Langauge. Besides being a cool new recursive acronym for HTML, it is a reasonably-sane document. Also worth a look: Differences between HTML4 and HTML5. Many of the ideas from XHTML 2 (of which I was an editor at one point) are there. I think it’s time…
I’ve been experimenting with the preview version of Wolfram Alpha. It’s not like any current search engine because it’s not a search engine at all. Others have already written more eloquent things about it. The key feature of it is that it doesn’t just find information, it infers it on the fly. Take for exmple…
The remarkable (and prolific) Stephen Wolfram has an idea called Wolfram Alpha. People used to assume the “Star Trek” model of computers: that one would be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have it compute the answer. Which has proved to be quite distant from reality. Instead But armed with Mathematica and…
At least, that’s how I’ve summarized John Allsopp’s article on HTML5 semantics. -m
Implementing client-side forms libraries is, and has been, all the rage. I’ve seen Mozquito Factory do amazing things in Netscape 4, Technical Pursuits TIBET on the perpetual verge of release, UGO, and others. In a more recent time scale, Ubiquity XForms impresses me and many others, and it has the right combination of funding and…
Mark Birbeck, Web Backplane. Problem statement: You shouldn’t have to “scrape” government sites. Solution: RDFa <div typeof=”arg:Vacancy”> Job title: <span property=”dc:title”>Assistant Officer</span> Description: <span property=”dc:description”>To analyse… </span> </div> This resolves to two full RDF triples. No separate feeds, uses existing publishing systems. Two of the most ambitious RDFa projects are taking place in the UK….
Ronald Reck, SAP; Kenneth Sall, SAIC “I wish I knew when people were saying bad things about me.” Sentiment analysis. Kapow used initially. From 800k news articles (from 1996 and 1997), extracted 450M RDF assertions. The 13 Reuters standard metadata elements not used in this case. Used Redland for heavy RDF lifting. Inxight ThingFinder (commercial)…
I will talk about one or more sessions from XML 2008 here. Mark Birbeck of Web Backplane talking about Ubiquity XForms. Browsers are slow to adopt new standards. Ajax libraries have attempted to work around this. Lots of experimentation which is both good and bad, but at least has legitimzed extensions to browsers. JavaScript is…
I’m pondering implementing the computational parts of the XForms Model in XQuery. Doing so in a largely functional environment poses some challenges, though. Has anybody tackled this before? How about in any functional language, including ML, Haskell, Scheme, XSLT, or careful Python? I borrowed the book Purely Functional Data Structures from a friend–this looks to…
Haven’t mentioned here that RDFa is a W3C Recommendation. I’m thrilled that something that I’ve been thinking about for a while is ready for prime time. Also, as of this writing the first page of results at Google still prominently links to a terribly outdated draft of the spec. The first page of results at…
On the eRDF discussion posting, Toby Inkster, an implementer of eRDF, talks about why it’s bad to steal the id attribute, and why RDFa is better suited for general purpose metadata. Worth a read. -m
The W3C RDFa specification is now in Candidate Recommendation phase, with an explicit call for implementations (of which there are several). Momentum for RDFa is steadily building. What about eRDF, which favors the existing HTML syntax over new attributes? There’s still a place for a simpler syntactic approach to embedding RDF in HTML, as evidenced…