Category: Semantics

Speaking of Planet RDF, I spotted a link to Jamie Pitts posting about the new DropCash – a fundraising organization effort using TypeKey and PayPal.

Better not come back to this page if you use DropCash. No siree. If my page detects that you’re using a single sign-on proprietary, centralized service to manage your money collection, a hand will reach out of the page and slap you silly.

You be warned, now. I is in Missouri. We take these things seriously.

Did you know that when you search on the term “RDF weblog” in Google, this site is the first result? Does this mean I hold the fate of RDF and weblogging in my fragile little hands? Well, let’s see if I can do something with all that power.

RDF, or should I say RDF and OWL (since the two ran off to Vegas and got married a while back) are seen as the tools for the Semantic Web. Rather fine and dandy, but until that brilliant bit of lightning hits us from the sky, we’ll see if we can’t make the pampered little darlings put in a fair day’s work.

If interest in RDF is not waning, as I was assured in my last post, then where are the places one can find out information about what’s happening? I pulled my own small list together:

• Dave Beckett’s Resource Description Framework page, needs to be on any list for RDF resources, though I’m not sure all or even most of the real world applications of RDF are appearing in the page. However, it is a good resource for keeping up with the APIs, editors, tools, specs, and some of the more scientific work.
• Though RDFWeb focuses on FOAF, FOAF is it; where it’s happening right now when it comes to RDF.
• The RDF weblog aggregator Planet RDF is really the site that should own ‘RDF and weblog’. It pulls together entries from various RDF interest weblogs, including yours truly, into one spot. If anything can get the word of RDF as ‘real stuff’ out into the world, I think weblogs writing about ongoing efforts is the trick; using online or syndication feed aggregators such as Planet RDF to pull it all together into one easily accessible location.
• Once upon a time there was an RDF Interest group, but the W3C replaced it with the Semantic Web interest group. That’s because to the W3C, RDF and OWL are for the Semantic Web. Not the semantic web, which is really just people using RDF and OWL, a little bit here, and a little bit there to do interesting stuff (and someday all the bits will be all grow’d up and become Semantic Web). But still – always good to keep up with the eggheads. (Besides, what’s not to like about a group that uses words like ’smushing’?)
• O’Reilly’s XML.com is another resource, though the site focuses on all things XML not just RDF/OWL stuff. Still, it’s a decent resource.

So far, that’s what I have for good, centralized locations of information about what’s happening with RDF. A start, but incomplete.

In the comments to the last post, several commercial uses of RDF were mentioned; what I would like to see is some form of aggregation of RDF/OWL commercial application efforts. These are the ones that are hard to find; yet these are the spreaders of the meme – the bees, if you will, in the semantic web orchard, with bits and pieces of RDF/OWL stuck to their little furry bodies as they flit about, from venture capitalist to venture capitalist.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

After the book had been out for a while, I took a longish break from most RDF work, being both tired and more than a bit burned out re-writing the book through variations of the specs. Probably not as tired as the RDF specification authors, but tired.

When I started back up, I immediately went out to Dave Beckett’s RDF Resource page to see what new goodies have appeared based on the final release of the RDF specifications this last Spring. I was surprised to see that aside from a small flurry of activity related to RDF editors, there hasn’t been that many new projects associated with RDF.

I’ve also been following Danny Ayers weblog because if anyone keeps up with RDF work, it’s Danny. Of course, I also read his pages for the cat photos, too.

Danny has been making announcements of new work, such as the new version of RAP (RDF API for PHP). But other than some experimental stuff with RDF and groups, discussions about FOAF, Mozilla, and Edd Dumbill’s DOAP, there hasn’t been much applied use of RDF.

In fact, the earlier enthusiasm for RDF in 2001 and 2002 seems to have flickered in 2003, and is now drastically waning in 2004.

Where’s the real world use of RDF? Is it to be doomed to isolated proprietary applications, a few simple feeds, escoteric experimentation and endless debate, like so many other great ideas that started in R & D departments?

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Since I’ve worked with compiles of Redland before (though long ago), and have Visual Studio 6.0 and am experienced with its use, I’m going to take a shot at creating the PHP extension of Raptor and possibly Redland for Windows. These won’t be a general purpose binary of the libraries. They will be built specifically as extensions for PHP. If anyone has done this before, with VS 6.0, warnings of any odd quirks would be welcome.

C is a powerful language, and I have a lot of respect for it. But I like cross-platform solutions. I like not having to deal with binaries from OS to OS. That’s why I bought into Java long ago, and Perl, PHP, and environments like Mono/C#. However, with each of these languages, you hear folks talk about how they’re ‘too slow’. You ask for specifics, and you’re told they’re ‘too slow’. You ask for requirements, and all you get is ‘too slow’.

Well, sometimes all it takes is a little extra effort, or a fresh perspective, and you might be able to get a cross-platform solution that could work. But you’ll never know because all you get when you ask for details is, “it’s too slow”. Well, chances are the native libraries will also be ‘too slow’, too. How will we know? Without a formal requirement of what’s needed, and specific performance test cases, there’s no way to judge if the native library will even make a difference.

However, I haven’t previously tried creating a PHP extension; this will be a chance to learn something new. These will be external extensions, though, hopefully dropped into PECL, which should be good enough. I wouldn’t try to get PHP to bundle these with the PHP distribution. Too much weight for too little return.

Update: