Category: Semantics

Categories
Semantics

Visual Feedback

From the Semantic Web mailing list:

Every time I work on logos, I learn something new! The main
lesson so far from the Semantic Web logos: Get more feedback on usage policy before deploying. Thank you all for your comments. Most of them related to the usage policy, so you will find a proposal for a new one below.

As the W3C discovered, kids love empty boxes. Of course, the example of logo morphing pointed out in the mailing list was the most innocuous and plus speak of the bunch, so we’ll have to see how far we can really push this ‘box’ in the future.

via Sam

Categories
Semantics

Better living through chemistry

I find it funny that I’m currently being inundated with drug comment spam, just after Danny Ayers pointed out the fact that the pharmacy industry is adopting the ‘orphaned’ semantic web:

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Internet standards arbiter that developed the HTML content description protocol, released a new standard several years ago called the semantic Web. Operating on linkages between data called triplets, in which two URL-based pieces of information are connected by a recognizable relationship in a kind of subject-verb-object arrangement, the semantic Web gained far less momentum with programmers than did HTML, which can be searched on the basis of written language.

However, the so-far-neglected standard, which relies on extensive and standardized coding of Web-searchable data and documents, may soon be adopted by the big drug companies, where a coterie of information technology (IT) specialists see its potential in organizing R&D data and expediting drug discovery and development—where a triplet might include a specific compound and a functional relationship of that compound to a specific cellular receptor.

“Many pharmaceutical companies are exploring the use of the semantic Web,” says Susie Stephens, principal research scientist for discovery and development informatics at Eli Lilly & Co. It is one of many avenues Lilly is investigating to develop a research IT regime, she says.

The entire article is surreal. And funny! Triplets!

Perhaps someone went home with one too many “semantic web” samples.

Categories
JavaScript Semantics

Lists of good stuff

I love lists of good stuff:

Danny Ayers, Week of Semantic Web. I hope, I hope, I hope, Danny continues this.

Agile Ajax links several GWT tutorials, all in one post — handy if you’re into the Google Web Toolkit, or want to give it a try.

Categories
RDF

Encyclopedia of Life

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Missouri Botanical Garden has partnered with other scientific institutions on the creation of the Encyclopedia of Life. The purpose of this site is to provide a free, publicly accessible site with a page for every species of animal and plant on Earth. According to an article at PNN Online:

Over the next 10 years, the Encyclopedia of Life will create Internet pages for all 1.8 million species currently named. It will expedite the classification of the millions of species yet to be discovered and catalogued as well. The pages […] will provide written information and, when available, photographs, video, sound, location maps, and other multimedia information on each species. Built on the scientific integrity of thousands of experts around the globe, the Encyclopedia will be a moderated wiki-style environment, freely available to all users everywhere.

“The Encyclopedia of Life will be a vital tool for scientists, researchers, and educators across the globe, providing easy access to the latest and best information on all known species,” said Jonathan F. Fanton, President of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. “Technology is allowing science to grasp the immense complexity of life on this planet. Sharing what we know, we can protect Earth’s biodiversity and better conserve our natural heritage.”

“For more than 250 years, scientists have catalogued life, and our traditional catalogues have become unwieldy,” said Ralph E. Gomory, President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “The Encyclopedia of Life will provide the citizens of the world a ‘macroscope’ of almost unimaginable power to find and create understanding of biodiversity across the globe. It will enable us to map and discover things so numerous or vast they overwhelm our normal vision.”

From one of the demonstration page, this site looks to be one of the better designed and organized of its kind, and a rich source of data about the natural world. It incorporates an amazing array of media and resources, and turns around and makes all available to anyone, without limitation.

The EoL is an expert driven wiki site–top down, not bottom up like Wikipedia. Contributions will be welcomed from all, but the overall effort is authenticated by trained scientists. I imagine that media files, in particular, will be welcome. The Missouri Botanical Garden is providing most of the information about the plants from its store of data it has been gathering for over 100 years. Much of this data is already available for botanists via the MBG’s own library, and available for everyone at the Botanicus Digital Library.

(The Botanicus Digital Library features pages scanned from many (if not all) of the MBG books. Through this effort, the organization has developed a metadata model that will now be used in the new effort for the EoL. More at the Botanicus Weblog. )

Bill Moyers did an interview on the EoL with the concept creator, E. O. Wilson. Wilson talked on this at the recent TED conference, and gave a demo of the end product that just blew me away. Find the interview at FastTrack Musings.

The EoL is an incredibly exciting project, probably one of the most important on the internets. The plan is to start putting pages online mid-2008. Even now, the list of sources for the site is a rich information resource.

update

More on the EoL and how RDF will play a part at an earlier post I missed.

Rich times, indeed, from a metadata perspective.

second update

Another post on the early framework.

Categories
RDF Technology

Accessibility, Microformats, and RDF as the Bezoar stone

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Really nice writeup on the conflict between Microformats use of abbr with hCalendar and accessibility:

The datetime-design-pattern is a way to show a readable date (such as “March 12, 2007 at 5 PM, Central Standard Time”) to humans and a machine-readable date (such as the ISO 8601 formatted “20070312T1700-06”) to the Microformat parsers. When crossed with the abbr-design-pattern, the result is this.

<abbr class=”dtstart” title=”20070312T1700-06″>
March 12, 2007 at 5 PM, Central Standard Time
</abbr>

As you may have guessed from the previous examples, screen readers expanding the abbreviation will try to read the title element. JAWS helpfully attempts to render numeric strings into human-readable numbers, so “1234” is spoken “one-thousand two-hundred thirty-four” instead of “one two three four.” Given a title value of “20070312T1700-06”, JAWS and Window Eyes both try to read an ISO date string never intended to assault human ears:

Twenty million seventy-thousand three-hundred twelve tee seventeen-hundred dash zero six. (JAWS 8 on IE7: MP3, Ogg)

I particularly liked this article because it provides details as to exactly how the concept in question is being rendered in screenreaders. You’re not left to guess, based on some vague, “Doesn’t work with screenreaders”. It really gives weight to the authors’, Bruce Lawson and James Craig, concerns.

I can’t figure out, though, why RDF always gets slammed whenever discussions of this nature arise:

Some have proposed using custom attribute namespaces for Microformat data, but the Microformats group is strongly opposed to this, and for a simple and valid reason. Microformats are intended to be “simple conventions for embedding semantic markup in human-readable documents.” Opening the floodgates to custom DTDs and namespaces would quickly raise the complexity level of Microformats to that of RDF, greatly reducing its adoption and therefore its relevance.

Here I was, tripping along on a well presented argument defining a tricky problem when, bammo: it could have been worse, it could have been RDF.

It’s as if RDF has become the bezoar stone of metadata–people invoke RDF to draw out all the evil.

“Ohmigod, an asteroid is going to hit the earth and we’re all going to die!”

“It could have been worse. It could have been RDF.”

“You’re right. Whew! I was really worried for a moment.”

First update

We’re going to be coming at you with …AAAAARRRRGGGGGHHHH!… custom DTDs! The horror!!!

Damn near stopped my heart with that one. You want to be more careful, Tom.

Second Update

Here is the first entry of the microformats discussion thread on this item. It gets quite interesting as the thread progresses.

I’m not making any editorial comment on the thread. Nope, not a word. Not a single word. I’m just going to sit back and play with my triples.