Month: September 2005

Categories
Events of note Photography

Balloon Glow

Balloon Glow

Last night, I went to the Forest Park Glow: the lighting of the hot air balloons before today’s hound and hare balloon race. It was about the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. The weather was perfect–cool and overcast and without the heat that’s oppressed the area this summer. The crowd was mellow and excited and friendly, and the balloons! Dozens of them, dotting the hill at Forest Park below the World’s Fair Pavilion. I had my camera on my tripod and spent three hours dashing everywhere to take pictures, always with an ear for the signal to call all balloons to light ’em up; chatting with friendly folk every where I went.

More Glow

When I got home, I became quite sick–whether food poisoning or something else I don’t know, though I’m suspecting the something else. Because of it I had to forgo the actual balloon race today; more time to work on the projects, which makes me so very disciplined. Besides, I had so much fun at the Glow last night that I didn’t mind.

Forest Park Balloon Race Friday Glow

That last paragraph used a semicolon. I use these frequently, without being aware that semicolons are bad, according to US usage. Not, though, according to a great article written by Trevor Butterworth, pointed out by Tim Bray. Now, if I could only cure myself of comma overuse.

Crowded Skies

The fall rains started this week, bringing with them the cool of Autumn and the promise of hikes again in the woods among trees heavy with colorful leaves. I have forgotten these walks; this summer has been too long.

Night Sky and Glow

Categories
RDF Semantics Web

Semantic web lite: same great taste, less reified

Most of the time the feeds at Planet RDF reference isolated items with general interest. Other times, though, the thoughts featured strike sparks against each other, leading to a chain reaction whereby everyone jumps in and Things Happen.

Starting a few days ago, people have been referencing two stories, both of which I find very interesting. The first is Kendall Clark’s SPARQL: Web 2.0 Meet the Semantic Web; the second is Ian Davis Internet Alchemy Crises.

Kendall brings up what’s missing in Web 2.0 is a common query language and it just so happens SPARQL is a common query language, backed up by a common data model (RDF) and syntax (RDF/XML). He suggests that the Web 2.0 folks provide an RDF wrapper to their data, and both groups can then benefit from the same query language, which will make things a whole lot simpler:

So what, really, can SPARQL do for Web 2.0? Imagine having one query language, and one client, which lets you arbitrarily slice the data of Flickr, delicious, Google, and yr three other favorite Web 2.0 sites, all FOAF files, all of the RSS 1.0 feeds (and, eventually, I suspect, all Atom 1.0 feeds), plus MusicBrainz, etc.

And this leads us to Ian Davis and a cognitive crises he underwent at the DC2005 (DC as in Dublin Core), as relates to a pissy-ant, pick-a-une problem of dc:creator:

Danbri referred us to work he had done after the last DC meeting in 2004 on a SPARQL query to convert between the two forms. Discussion then moved onto special case processing for particular properties, along the lines of “if you see a dc:creator property with a literal value then you should insert a blank node and hang the literal off of that”. Note that I’m paraphrasing, no-one actually said this but it was the intent.

That’s when my crisis struck. I was sitting at the world’s foremost metadata conference in a room full of people who cared deeply about the quality of metadata and we were discussing scraping data from descriptions! Scraping metadata from Dublin Core! I had to go check the dictionary entry for oxymoron just in case that sentence was there! If professional cataloguers are having these kinds of problems with RDF then we are f…

Ian then recommended paring down RDF into an implementation subset, which focuses primarily on RDF, as it is used to define relationships. This means jettisoning some of the more cumbersome elements of the model — those that tend to send traditional XMLers screaming from the room:

What if we jilted the ugly sisters of rdf:Bag, rdf:Alt and rdf:Alt and took reification out back and shot it? How many tears would be shed?

What if we junked classes, domains and ranges? Would anyone notice? The key concept in RDF is the relationship, the property.

The end result would be an RDF-Lite: a proper subset of RDF that can be upwardly compatible with the model as a whole, though the converse would not be true. If this subset were formalized, then libraries could be created just for this it that would be significantly less complex, and correspondingly leaner, than libraries needed for the full featured RDF.

This, then, leads back to Kendall’s interest in seeing if Web 2.0 couldn’t be wrapped, morphed, or bridged on to RDF and thus allow us to assume one specific data model, and more importantly, one specific query language for use with all metadata easily and openly available on the web–not just the RDF bits. If a simple subset of RDF could be derived, it could be trivial to map any use of metadata into RDF. More importantly, since the capabilities of the technology is never the issue, those generating the disparate bits of XML or otherwise metadata might actually be willing to go this extra step.

True, an RDF-Lite would not have the same inferential power as the fully aspected RDF model, but frankly, most of our general web-based uses of RDF aren’t using this power anyway. And if we can make RDF tastier to the general web developer, we’re that much closer to an RDFalized web. To Kendall, an RDFalized Web 2.0 could be a powerful thing:

How powerful? Well, imagine being able to ask Flickr whether there is a picture that matches some arbitrary set of constraints (say: size, title, date, and tag); if so, then asking delicious whether it has any URLs with the same tag and some other tag yr interested in; finally, turning the results of those two distributed queries (against totally uncoordinated datasets) into an RSS 1.0 feed. And let’s say you could do that with two if-statements in Python and three SPARQL queries.

Pretty damn cool.

Well, not necessarily. What Kendall describes is something already relatively easy to access through Web services. And, as we’re finding, how tags are used with Flickr differs rather dramatically than how tags are used within delicious, and so on. I do agree that being able to do something like all of this with a couple of statements and SPARQL queries would be nifty; but the technology is still going to be limited based on a common understanding of the data being manipulated. Even with something as simple as tags, we have different understandings of what the term means across different applications.

I don’t necessarily agree across the board with Ian, either. For instance, you can take my blank nodes (bnodes to use popular terminology) only if you pry them from my cold dead APIs, but his general points are good. My own recent work has been focusing more on using RDF for its ability to map the relationships, and less on its participation in grander semantic schemes (though the data is available for any person/bot interested in such).

More, I’ve been exploring the capabilities of using RDF as a lightweight, portable, self-contained database–one to a unit, with unit being weblog page. I’ve been steadily pulling bits of metadata out of MySQL and embedding them into an RDF document, which then drives some of this site’s functionality.

There is a line between taking advantage of MySQL’s caching, versus managing my own with RDF but I’m finding that not only is a hybrid solution quite workable: it is a very effective solution for data that is meant to be open, unrestricted, and consumed by many agents.

The best aspect of all is that because of two specific aspects of RDF–ease of capturing a relationship, and the use of a URI to map the relationships correctly–it’s trivial for me to just ‘throw’ more metadata into the pot, and not have to worry about modifying existing tables in my database, or re-arranging a hierarchy and run into possible namespace collision in a straight XML document. I’m also not constrained by being dependent purely on primitive keyword-value pairs, a limitation that makes it difficult for me to make multiple statements about the same noun-object pairs.

It is all becoming very, very fun, and I am busy ripping the guts out of my current weblog tool implementation in order to incorporate the hybrid data store.

All of this effort, though, presupposes one thing: that I have a small subset of classes to manage the RDF bits, and to meet this, I experimented around with RAP (a PHP RDF library) until I had a trimmed, core set of functionality that, by happenstance, would meet Ian’s criteria for RDF-Lite. There isn’t a SPARQL implementation yet, but I know that this is on the way, and when released, I will use it to replace my use of the existing RDQL implementation.

Categories
Stuff

Focusing

I have several tasks that need finishing, and I’ve set myself a deadline to finish them. The projects include an overdue software documentation project (which should give hope to the poor soul waiting on it); an article on syndication feeds for O’Reilly; an outline of a presentation on RDF for XML 2005; a PHP nuSOAP interface for the new Newsgator API for a client. As such, posting will be light until all of it is finished.

 

 

Last night, I did take a break to go to the Forest Park Glow: the lighting of the hot air balloons before today’s hound and hare balloon race. It was about the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. The weather was perfect–cool and overcast and without the heat that’s oppressed the area this summer. The crowd was mellow and excited and friendly, and the balloons! Dozens of them, dotting the hill at Forest Park below the World’s Fair Pavilion. I had my camera on my tripod and spent three hours dashing everywhere to take pictures, always with an ear for the signal to call all balloons to light ‘em up; chatting with friendly folk every where I went.

 

When I got home, I became quite sick–whether food poisoning or something else I don’t know, though I’m suspecting the something else. Because of it I had to forgo the actual balloon race today; more time to work on the projects, which makes me so very disciplined. Besides, I had so much fun at the Glow last night that I didn’t mind.

 

That last paragraph used a semicolon. I use these frequently, without being aware that semicolons are bad, according to US usage. Not, though, according to a great article written by Trevor Butterworth, pointed out by Tim Bray. Now, if I could only cure myself of comma overuse.

 

The fall rains started this week, bringing with them the cool of Autumn and the promise of hikes again in the woods among trees heavy with colorful leaves. I have forgotten these walks; this summer has been too long.

Look for photos from time to time at my Flickr account.

 

Update:

Fine quip and counter-quip on punctuation and alcoholic beverages by Joe Duemer and Trevor Butterworth–the author of the aforementioned article on semicolons–here.

What I want to know from these masters of English and elixir is: if commas are beer and semicolons are single malt whiskey, then what are dashes and ellipses? Are exclamation points the jello shots of punctuation?

Categories
XHTML/HTML

Repeating

Dare Obasanjo writes:

Repeat after me, a web page is not an API or a platform.

Versioning APIs is hard enough, let alone trying to figure out how to version an HTML website so screen scrapers are not broken. Web 2.0 isn’t about screenscraping. Turning the Web into an online platform isn’t about legitimizing bad practices from the early days of the Web. Screen scraping needs to die a horrible death. Web APIs and Web feeds are the way of the future.

Consider it repeated. Just because people are using XHTML for their pages doesn’t mean that they’re following any specific data model. XHTML is meant to be both open and loose. As for screen scraping: ew, ew, ew.

Categories
Critters Events of note Weather

The last to be rescued

Excerpted from the Humane Society article After the flood, animals find way to survive in the Big Easy.

Adrift in this floating living room, the golden-coated pit bull found shelter in the only place the water couldn’t reach: a black-metal frame encasing the air conditioning unit in a nearby window. At least that’s where the rescue team found the frightened animal. He had somehow clawed his way through the accordion wing on the left side of the AC unit, and squeezed himself between the air conditioner and the metal bars.

Despite his dire predicament, the frightened dog was not about to leave his metal perch—at least not with strangers. Growling, barking and inching further back into his self-imposed jail, the dog fought every attempt by rescuers to grab him with a control pole, but the animal had literally backed himself into a tight spot, and the team was able to quickly collar him and pull him from the inhospitable house.

…

And yet, the hold on life for these animals who rely on the milk of human kindness for their survival, remains tenuous. Teams are already finding animals whose skin looks painted onto a skeleton. One, four-person team this week discovered, much to its horror, a dead bull dog in an upstairs bathroom. The owners, apparently thinking they would be gone for days and not weeks, locked the white-coated creature there, with limited food and water. He died beside the bathroom door, obviously hoping for an escape.

…

Team members heard the Jack Russell yipping as they walked along Monticello Avenue, near the canal that drains into Lake Ponchatrain. They chased the dog, white with a dashing brown patch over his left eye, under the brick house, where he refused to budge for minute after agonizing minute under the broiling Louisiana sun.

The rescuers mapped out their strategy on the fly. Earnest staked out the right side of the house, Moore and Anderson the left, and HSUS volunteer Jane Garrison monitored a small boxy hole in front of the house, through which the rescuers hoped to flush the terrier.

“Go the other way, Jack,” encouraged Anderson, in a tone meant to send the dog the opposition direction. “This is not the best way to go…It’s very bad for a Jack.”

“Go on, Jack,” yelled Earnest from the other side of the house. “Go through the hole.”

“I’m your best hope, Jack,” Garrison cooed at the animal, looking to entice him to her waiting leash.

For whatever reason, the dog followed orders. He eventually peeked his head through the boxy hole, just enough for Garrison to place a leash on him and hold on for dear life.

New Orleans resident Eugene Kaufman, re-united with this 20-year old blind dog, Samantha. At this time, the HSUS has rescued 2783 cats and dogs, 121 horses. and over a thousand other animals, mainly farm animals. But there are thousands more still to be rescued, and it could be weeks, even months, before these animals have a home again. (See slideshow of effort.)

You’re all tired out from giving: to the Red Cross, the United Way, so many other good and helping organizations. All I’m asking is that you give 5.00 to the Humane Society to help care for these animals. Just 5.00, that’s all I’m asking. But if you want to give more, I won’t argue with you.

I am donating 2 dollars for every picture pledged by the folks who volunteered for the Critters for Critters campaign–including this timely and charming picture of a dog dressed for Mardi Gras, donated by Neil at Life With Dogs and these lovely pictures from Baldur–in lieu of running the auction. I wish it could be more.

And if you have a pet or pets, now is the time to think about their care if you’re faced with a disaster. Remember, the rule of thumb is to have at least three days of supplies (a week is better) on hand for all living creatures in the house; have pet carriers within easy and quick access; and if you have to evacuate, evacuate early rather than late, and always assume it will be weeks before you can return.

If you don’t have a pet, you have a friend in need just waiting for you at your local shelter.

I have a difficult time going to the HSUS site and reading the stories anymore. As positive as so many are, others break your heart. There’s the one where the sherrif’s department searched a home for survivors and found two people dead, but the couple’s shepard was still alive, standing guard over their bodies. Chances are they did not evacuate because of their dog, and the bitter-sad irony is that the dog was the only one to survive.

The HSUS is pushing now to make pet rescue incorporated into all local, state, and federal evacuation procedures. There’s a petition you can sign at the site, as well as letters to send to Congress, FEMA, and your local government. You should also check your own state’s policy in this regard; several states include animal evactuation because they know that many people will put their lives at risk rather than leave their pets.

Another thing to consider is having microchips inserted into your cat or dog, just in case. Regardless, have a plan in place; don’t leave your pet behind.

Bid on the original artwork for a Mutts comic strip being auctioned by the cartoonist, Patrick McDonnell to raise money for the HSUS rescue operations.