Categories
RDF

Bray and Symbols and Grounding

Tim Bray on the namespace fooflah that’s been happening:

Right now, in the context of the Pie/Echo/Atom/whatever project, people assert that crystallizing the meaning of embedded namespaces is the key to interoperability, the central problem, and so on. Huh? When someone proposes markup from another namespace for inclusion in a syndication feed, there are three possible outcomes:

Nobody pays attention and it isn’t much adopted.

It gets widely adopted, with semantics along the lines originally proposed.

It gets widely adopted, with some semantic drift away from the original proposal becoming evident in the implementations. (Note that this has already happened with some RSS 2.0 markup).

Oddly enough, this is exactly what will happen with proposed tags and attributes that aren’t in a different namespace.

I agree with Tim when he summarizes his essay with “…we shouldn’t try to kid ourselves that meaning is inherent in those pointy brackets, and we really shouldn’t pretend that namespaces make a damn bit of difference”. There is no ‘meaning’ behind markup, there is no ‘meaning’ behind namespaces.

But, there is behavioral assumptions associated with both – behavior that can be programmed into both producers and consumers of the markup. In the recent discussions about namespaces, as per Jon Udell, the programmatic behavior and assumptions might be getting a bit blurred about the meaning of it all, but within the Pie/Echo/Atom world, the discussion of namespaces is concrete: what signals a change, what works, what doesn’t, and what should be ignored.

For me, namespaces say:

I mark things that belong in a specific schema. This schema isn’t an extension to diddly squat – it can live on its own, thank you. If it didn’t, we’d have these psuedo-schemas floating around because the originators of Important Schema didn’t take the time to do their job right in the beginning. The opposite of analysis paralysis is … broken bits of schema floating around, desperately holding on to Big Brother, hoping to be acknowledged as part of the family and not the bastard add-on that crept in after darkness.

If you see a name like one of mine somewhere else that has a different namespace, this means that the two things aren’t the same. How they differ is up to organic side of this relationship to figure out. I personally don’t care. Because all I do, is mark things.

Come to think of it, there is a lot of ‘meaning’ in my understanding of namespaces, isn’t there?

Categories
RDF Writing

RDF and Grounding

I was so caught up in the Pie/Echo/Atom stuff yesterday that I missed Jon Udell’s discussion about my book. He wrote:

To get a better picture of how the CVM works, I read Shelley Powers’ very well-written new book, Practical RDF. I read it online, actually. Very cool to be able to do that. (Tank, I need a pilot program for a B-212 helicopter.) My eyelids fluttered for a while, and when I opened them again it was Chapter 10: Querying RDF: RDF as Data that emerged as pivotal.

Working through the chapter he finds:

This is cool. RDF triples are relations, and here we see that they’re amenable to relational processing. I can grok that.

Well, that made my morning. To hear others say they liked the book is a goodness, but when someone works through one of the chapters, and details an ‘Aha!’ moment, well, that’s what a writer lives for.

Jon also has some tough questions on grounding. What I should do is get with Simon St. Laurent and write an article on namespaces – the Meaning of it All – he from the tree structure, me from the graph point of view.

Categories
Connecting

Breaky Parts

My roommate flies in tonight and I pick him and the friend that traveled with him up at the St. Louis airport. However, he called to say the flight from Portland to Chicago was going to be late, and I’ll need to use the online airline system to track the flight, see if he makes the connection to St. Louis. Unfortunately, just, after he hung up, the internet connection went dead.

I dig around and find a phone number for the airline and call the flight status line. Instead of a person, I get a recording, one of those that ask you to say your options.

“Please enter your flight number”

“693″

“That’s flight 893 on August 12th. Is this correct?”

“No”

“I’m sorry. Please speak your flight number again.”

“6 9 3″

“That’s flight 69C. Is this correct?”

“No!”

“I’m sorry. Please speak your flight number again.”

“6 9 3!”

“I’m sorry, but I couldn’t understand you. Could you repeat the number please.”

“6 9 3!”

“That’s flight 893. Is this correct?”

“Shit!”

“I’m sorry, but that’s not a valid flight number. Would you like to speak to a company representative?”

As I was waiting for a company representative, the Internet connection came back on and I could look up the flight. Due to flight congestion, the plane is late, and they’ve missed their connecting flight. Now I wait to hear when they’re coming in. I wonder if they’ll be in before or after my nightly fire alarm beep test?

All I’ll say, is never piss off the Little People.

Categories
RDF

New IsaViz version out

One of the tools/utilities I covered in the book was Emmanuel Pietriga’s IsaViz, a nifty graphical tool for working with RDF models.

Emmanuel just sent me an email to let me know that a whole new version is out. This new version supports the latest last call working drafts for the RDF specification and also uses GSS – an RDF-based style language for rendering RDF models. It would be interesting to see the possibilities of this vocabulary’s use in other products.

IsaViz installs easily and is very easy to use, with a nice interface

Categories
RDF

PIE/Echo/Atom-seeing the light?

Thanks to some tweaks suggested by Aaron Swartz, the Pie/Echo/Atom folks are exploring the possibility of formating the syndication format in RDF/XML.

As I’ve said in comments – this is a very good thing. It unifies RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 beautifully and justifies having yet another syndication effort. Discussion on this continues at the syndication feed email list.

Good job Aaron, Sam, others in the group.