“One of the things the Web teaches us is that everything is connected (hyperlinks) and we all should work together (standards). Too often school teaches us that everything is separate (many different ‘subjects’) and that we should all work alone.” –Aaron Swartz, April 2001. So Aaron is gone. We were friends a decade ago, and [...]
A talk from London SemWeb meetup hosted by the BBC Academy in London, Mar 30 2012…. Slides and video are already in the Web, but I wanted to post this as an excuse to plug the new Web History Community Group that Max and I have just started at W3C. The talk was part of [...]
Ben Fry in ‘Visualizing Data‘: Graphs can be a powerful way to represent relationships between data, but they are also a very abstract concept, which means that they run the danger of meaning something only to the creator of the graph. Often, simply showing the structure of the data says very little about what it actually [...]
In the XMPP session at last february’s FOSDEM I gave a brief demo of some NoTube work on how TV-style remote controls might look with XMPP providing their communication link. For the TV part, I showed Boxee, with a tiny Python script exposing some of its localhost HTTP API to the wider network via XMPP. [...]
Lonclass is one of the BBC’s in-house classification systems – the “London classification”. I’ve had the privilege of investigating lonclass within the NoTube project. It’s not currently public, but much of what I say here is also applicable to the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) system upon which it was based. UDC is also not fully [...]
RDF is defined as an abstract data model, plus a collection of practical notations for exchanging RDF descriptions (eg. RDF/XML, RDFa, Turtle/N3). In theory, your data modelling activities are conducted in splendid isolation from the sleazy details of each syntax. RDF vocabularies define classes of thing, and various types of property/relationship that link those things. [...]
Subject classification and statistics share some common problems. This post takes a small example discussed at this week’s ODaF event on “Semantic Statistics” in Tilberg, and explores its expression coded in the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC). UDC supports faceted description, providing an abstract grammar allowing sentence-like subject descriptions to be composed from the “raw materials” defined [...]
Stéphane has just posted a call for feedback on the Drupal 7 RDFa design, before the first official alpha release. First reaction above all, is that this is great news! Very happy to see this work maturing. I’ve tried to quickly suggest some tweaks to the vocab, by hacking his diagram in photoshop. All it [...]
(This post is written in RDFa…) To the best of my knowledge, Ludovic Hirlimann‘s PGP fingerprint is 6EFBD26FC7A212B2E093 B9E868F358F6C139647C. You might also be interested in his photos on flickr, or his workplace, Mozilla Messaging. The GPG key details were checked over a Skype video call with me, Ludo and Kaare A. Larsen. This blog post [...]