Month: August 2003

Categories
RDF

Edd Dumbill: I like RDF Dammit!

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Edd Dumbill has a new essay on why he continues to support RDF. Much of it has been heard before, but I like what he had to say on RDF being failure-friendly:

Processing RDF is therefore a matter of poking around in this graph. Once a program has read in some RDF, it has a ball of spaghetti on its hands. You may like to think of RDF in the same way as a hashtable data structure – you can stick whatever you want in there, in whatever order you want. With XML, you expect to get a tree with its elements in a predictable order. If an expected element is missing, then it tends to render your whole XML document invalid with respect to the schema you are using. If an element you don’t expect to be there is present, then again your document becomes invalid. With RDF, you have no particular expectations; if the particular strand of spaghetti you’re looking for isn’t there, the rest of the ball remains. If there are new strands you don’t expect, you won’t even notice their presence if you don’t go looking for them.

All too true. That’s another reason I like to use RDF/XML for all my applications – it’s dead simple to process, and doesn’t require specialized vocabulary handling to process all that vocabulary dependent dead-tree structures of vanilla XML.

I wonder at the timing of Edd’s essay? Do we think it has anything to do with the recent conversation about namespaces, when you consider the following:

My “find the title” processor can still deal with your description just fine, as all it cares about is the dc:title property. All RDF processors are automatically future compatible, and all RDF descriptions are automatically backwards compatible. This is a huge benefit over traditional XML processing.

This is the main reason I was strongly behind the use of RDF for RSS. Everyone wants to extend and play with RSS for their own purposes, and RDF gives them the chance to do that without breaking everybody else’s software.

Yes, yes, yes!

I’ve said that I’m not a greek chorus for RDF – too much of that at times – but I also have little tolerance for people trying to re-invent sophisticated features in an XML vocabularly like RSS 2.0 that are included free of charge with the RDF/XML version of RSS, RSS 1.0. With all RDF/XML vocabularies when it comes to that.

Gah! Go bang your head against the wall if you like pain.

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Bye Bye Wiki Necho or Pie

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I am finishing the Permalink essays as you read this (well, depending on when you read this, I may be finished), though about to take a break because the words are running away with me. I’m glad I waited on Part 4 until today because the essay is writing itself – I’m just there to move the keys on demand.

In the meantime, Christian from Radio Blogistan, better known as xian, wrote Blogistan Pie to the tune of American Pie – a song I dislike, and much improved by xian’s effort.

Verse 6:

I met this person, Burningbird,
And I asked her for an ontologically meaningful word
But she just smiled and made a sound

I went down to the Scripting News
Where some years before I’d seen the clues
But the server said the file wasn’t found

In LiveJournals children screamed,
The lovers cried and the poets dreamed
But not a word was trusted
The permalinks were busted

And the three men I admire most,
Phil Wolff, Mark Pilgrim, and Steve Yost
Kept editing their final post
The day the blogging died
And they were singin’…

(Thanks to Sam for pointing it out.)

Categories
RDF

Jon Udell on RSS and namespaces

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I love being nothing more than a whiteboard at times….

Jon Udell writes today:

What we have now is ‘entity escape and stuff in description’ and I doubt anyone will argue that’s good. Like Dan, I don’t know which of the other two options is best. I do know, however, that I can easily shred an XML document with XPath and XSLT, pick out subsets – whether or not they’re namespace-qualified – and do useful things with them. I don’t believe that doing that, without first settling on a higher-order semantic model, is a bad idea. Far from it. It’s abundantly clear to me that we’ve wasted years, that we must do that experiment ASAP, and that it will yield new killer applications. No agreement on the higher-order model need be reached as a precondition. If some higher-order model is going to ultimately prevail, then a lot of existing data will have to get converted into it. Would you rather convert ‘entity-escaped-and-stuffed-in-the-description’ data, which is all we have now, or XML data that you can at least shred and manipulate? That choice seems transparently clear to me.

Finally, a plea to all concerned. Let’s stop punishing RSS syndication for its success by asking it to carry the whole burden of XML usage in the semantic Web.

I wasn’t aware that any of us were asking RSS to carry the burden of the semantic web – I’ve long said that RSS is a simple syndication format, and that we should stop trying to stuff the world into it because extraneous data is outside the syndication business domain.

Having said this, I have no problems with the RSS folk, or the Pie/Echo/Atom folk, working on namespace issues and wish them the best. However, I don’t think we, who use and prefer RDF/XML have to wait for them. Or break a working model just to play with the boys who would prefer to play by themselves.

I understand where Dan Brickley is coming from, and it sounds like communication has again moved from the weblog to private emails, without the messiness of us all that don’t ‘go with the flow’ getting in the way. However, Dan has not come back to me with how we’re going to handle context.

Dan? I’m here. Let’s chat.

If you can get XML namespaces to work and don’t have to use encoded blobs of text to work around limitations with RSS, great. But I won’t see the RDF model broken to get there.

Categories
Weblogging

To hear them read

This is marvelous! Aquarion did an audioblog reading of my Parable of the Languages, and did a wonderful job of it. In the companion post, he writes that he did the Parable as warmup for the recording of Mockingbird’s Wish, something I’ve been waiting with anticipation.

To hear someone else speak what you write has got to be the greatest thrill to a writer. What a lovely gift, to hear that fun little story read with Aquarion’s wonderful voice. He was especially good with FORTRAN and XML, I thought. The outtake was funny, too.

Thanks Aquarion. You’re a Prince – and not the C# kind, either.

Categories
Weblogging

Neighborhood Changes

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

If you notice me quiet at Burningbird, look around and you’ll most likely see me busy in the other quiet little nooks that I’m building into the Burningbird Network. I’ve long had an interest in moving my old web resources over into MT content management, and am finally accomplishing this. I am also organizing my photos in such a way that they are more easily accessible for those interested in them.

In addition, I’ve had some ideas, talked about here and elsewhere, that I’m also finally getting around to implementing. If I was of a delicate condition, one could almost call this flurry of activity the product of a ‘nesting instinct’, but no worries — no little Burning Birdetts are in the offing. Just me wanting to finish all that I’ve started.

I’m also trying to write the three final essays to the Weblog linking series, a task made more challenging by the thoughtful comments in response to the last posting on deleting archived entries. I find it easier, much easier, to write about the technology of a broken link, than to write about the possibility of a broken trust or a fragmented history. Hopefully all of the essays will be finished in a day or so. Pester me if I’m late.

In the meantime, though I don’t know if I need to specifically point this out due to the number of pings I’ve received from essay links, Jonathon Delacour has returned from his weblogging hiatus. From the warm greetings he’s received, Jonathon should count himself a lucky man.

To begin as he means to go, he’s also posted his own weblogging ethics, an interesting and thoughtful read.

Welcome back Jonathon.