Information Poo

• Inspiron 910 hopefully will come out on Friday. Inspiron means cheap in Dell marketing? I guess it's better than Dell E. There's something wrong with looking forward to a Dell. I mean there is no Dell Insider or Inspiron Rumors.


• SearchMonkey Tutorials. SearchMonkey uses a format similar to RDF called DataRSS. The FAQ describes the parts of the Semantic Web that work with the parts of SearchMonkey - no reasoning just the triples.


• Introduction to High-Level Programming With Scala. A compiled language that is finally catching up with Ruby's duck typing.


• Dr Horrible Ringtones.


• Freebase and Parallax talks about the excellent demo making the rounds. It's available as an open source project. Who knew George Bush has had more than one assassination attempt made on him? That's the power of the Semantic Web.


• The goodness of Google apps talks about another happy corporate customer (except for Google Code - integrating GitHub does sound good) and mentions Guido's code review tool part of rietveld a Google App Engine application.


• ccREL: The Creative Commons Rights Expression Language. Using RDFa so you don't repeat yourself.


• SCOPE, Automatic Hadoop Optimization and Cassandra (Facebook's BigTable) all via Greg. Cassandra is a Google Code project and includes some good documentation.


• OWL ED papers including an ontology versioning system and OWL constraints.

I See Triples

Digg makes official its adoption of a 'semantic Web' standard "Other brief mentions on Digg's blogs over the past month have been the only indications the company has been giving to the world of its direct -- and perhaps even principal -- involvement in RDF and RDFa, besides a simple check of the site's own source code, where attributions such as rel="dc:source" property="dc:title" within <DIV> elements are now common. A few weeks ago, developer Bob DuCharme discovered these little attributions and began playing with them to discern their viability."

"The possibility exists for a kind of mega-meta-source to emerge from Digg, where interesting news topics are associated with cataloged resources. But for that to actually work, someone has to manage those resources -- and that effort will take a level of humanpower and resources of another kind (the kind symbolized with "$") that RDF won't provide even the most ambitious sites just on its own."

See Digging RDFa. More news about RDFa is available at RDFa.info.

To see Digg in all its RDFa glory one way is to copy this Javascript for highlighting or this one for getting RDF triples into you bookmark bar after the Digg front page has loaded.

So I still haven't finished writing up everything that I've saw at WWW2008 but the overall messages were:

• RDFa is easy and gets people going with RDF quickly (see "They knew the train would come"). Semantic wikis (links to the Semantic Mediawiki project) have also come a long way to making it more err user friendly.


• HTML5 and the end of the browser development winter seems like the death to plugins at last. I hadn't realized this before, but the message seems to be that a plugin is a way of saying to the Web "your browser isn't full featured enough".


• The Facebooks of the world and all those online communities really are a danger to the Web - the creation of data silos. And I'd really like to have the time to write some SIOC plugins to help open up these silos (or just change my blog template to have RDFa).