In the past, I’ve mentioned to friends some of the thinking I’ve had about the Semantic Web, RDF, and related stuff (FOAF, RSS, and so on). Yesterday’s stuff, for example. On more than one occasion the response has been along the lines of “where are the apps — why are you thinking instead of doing?”. [...]
Coming back from a short break from the tech world recently, I started to reacquaint myself with FOAF and RDF, amongst other things. Looking at the FOAF data for various people, I was reminded of the model of indirection that is used to identify a person. <foaf:Person> <foaf:mbox>dj.adams@pobox.com</foaf:mbox> … </foaf:Person> Actually, while I think on, [...]
Great stuff – Shelley‘s forthcoming book, “Practical RDF”, is going to be available for public review. I’m looking forward to it.
If nothing else, RSS 1.0 is a great source of contemplation and wondering. This morning, I’ve been considering the thoughts surrounding the rdf:about attribute in the channel element: <channel rdf:about=”…”> … </channel> What should the value of the rdf:about be? The URI of the RSS file itself or the URI of the document that the [...]
Walking on the beach this morning (yes we’re on holidays) I suddenly had a moment of clarity. It may be obvious to you, but I’ve been struggling to see what the theme was that lay beyond the clutter of the investigations into RDF and RSS, the contemplation of namespaces and the various recent discussions on [...]
RDF is a framework for describing resources. We know that. We also know (from various sources, such as the RDF Model and Syntax Specification, or Pierre-Antoine Champin’s RDF Tutorial (recommended!)) that an RDF document consists of a number of descriptions, and these descriptions look like this: <rdf:RDF … > <rdf:Description … > … </rdf:Description> <rdf:Description [...]
Here are two or three, er, thoughtbites, that I’ve come across over the past few days and that have stayed with me. I just thought I’d share them here as it’s the weekend and often a good time to think about things. Open thinking about deep-linking Tim Bray’s strawman defence of the principle that ‘deep [...]
I’ve just read Jon’s latest post on XML Scripting, which mentions Adam Bosworth’s thoughts about an XML scripting language that could natively support XML. While the advent of XML scripting sounds fascinating, I’ve also been wondering about RDF enabling us to “gracefully integrate with the world of objects” and enhance the “self-describing nature of XML”. [...]
Ironically, it’s only been the recent and ongoing hubbub about the direction of RSS that’s got me wondering what the real truth is about the RDF in RSS. In a still handwavy sort of way, I understand that RDF is important for the (semantic|data) web that is to form as a layer above the current [...]
Back in the spring of 2000, I wrote MySidebar, a concoction of Mozilla sidebars, XUL and RSS. It allowed you to specify an RSS URL and would generate XUL from it and install it in Mozilla’s sidebar. (XUL involves RDF. The interconnectedness of all things, eh?) Fozbaca recently pointed to something similar, which reminded me [...]