Categories
Photography Weblogging

Faux photoblog

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Six Apart has announced the preliminary release of TypePad, a hosted solution for those people partial to Movable Type. Prices look pretty decent, low enough to be competitive, but not so low that there’s thousands of weblogs on one server.

Among the features is HTML-free templating, moblogging, automated FOAF generation from the blogroll (hmmm – don’t agree with this one), as well as the ability to show what you’re reading and listening to. The best decision Six Apart made with TypePad was pointing the weblogger’s domain names at their weblogs. Depending on the web server used, this is a very doable thing, and I think other hosted solutions are going to have to look at this as an option.

One of the functionalities that TypePad has that Movable Type doesn’t is a ‘photoblog’, photography weblogging setup. I imagine this will interest quite a few folks who already have their own hosted MT sites. I liked the look and feel of many of the photoblogs I looked at, such as Joi Ito’s San Francisco photos, so I set out to re-create the look in a Movable Type weblog called MT Faux PhotoBlog. Once I figured out the templates, it was quite easy to create the album, and I may do this for other photo albums.

How does it work? The solution requires that the server have ImageMagick, and the ImageMagick Perl wrapper installed. Otherwise you’ll need to create your thumbnails yourself.

Categories are created for each photo, sans the photo extension. For instance, a photo such as tunnel.jpg would have a category called ‘tunnel’. When the photo is uploaded, it’s uploaded as a separate entry, and a thumbnail is created. When I create the thumbnails, I don’t constrain the image proportions, so that I can create square thumbnails. In the Faux PhotoBlog, I’m using thumbnails of 120 x 120px sizes.

To get the front page, I replaced the traditional MT entry listing with the following:

<div id=”content” style=”align: center”>
<div class=”blog” >

<MTEntries lastn=”20″>
<a href=”<$MTEntryPermalink$>”><img src=”<$MTBlogURL$>photos/<$MTEntryCategory$>-thumb.jpg” alt=”<$MTEntryTitle$>” class=”mainpage” /></a>
</MTEntries>

</div>
</div>

What this template code does is create the URL for the image by concatenating the category name, with the blog URL and photo thumbnail filename extension (jpg). Instead of category, you could also use entry title, but then this forces it into a title that might not be descriptive. Instead, I used entry title for the ALT tag for the image, and reserve category for the filename.

To force the images to line up and wrap without using an HTML table I created an img CSS class to use with the images that sets the image to inline display:

img.mainpage {
display: inline;
margin: 5px 5px 5px 5px }

I also gave the images 5px of space around them on each side. All the images are given a border, in this case a solid grey one.

(If your browser doesn’t support display:inline, you can also surround each photo with a SPAN tag, as this forces the image inline. However, if you do this, make sure your outer DIV block doesn’t have left padding or margin, or you’ll get uneven wrapping.)

This takes care of the main page. For each individual page, to get the lined up thumbnails, I used the following:

<div class=”side”>
<MTEntries lastn=”20″>
<a href=”<$MTEntryPermalink$>”><img src=”<$MTBlogURL$>photos/<$MTEntryCategory$>-thumb.jpg” alt=”<$MTEntryTitle$>” width=”50″ style=”margin-bottom: 10px” /></a><br />
</MTEntries>
</div>

I’m using the browser resize capability – resizing the thumbnails from 120 down to 50. However, that’s something you can change. It just seems to match the PhotoBlog look. Additionally, in this setup, I only list the most recent 20 photos, but you can change this, on the front page and in the sidebars.

That’s it. Then, to add a new photo, just upload a new photo, make sure you create and upload a square thumbnail the same name as your original photo with a ‘-thumb’ appended, and name the category for the photo the same name as the image file:

photo: tunnel.jpg
thumbnail: tunnel-thumb.jpg
category: tunnel

You’ll need to rebuild all entries each time you add a new photo, otherwise it won’t show in the sidebar. Chances are, you’ll want to consider keeping your photo albums smaller, less than 100 photos.

TypePad’s photo album feature probably has a lot more features, but for those of us on MT, at least we can capture the look.

(Access the individual and main index templates, and stylesheet. )

update 

Well, I left parts out, didn’t I? When you upload a photo, have MT create a new entry and use the embedded photo option. If you have the software installed, also have it create the thumbnail for you at the same time – making sure not to constrain the proportion, and make the thumbnail square.

In the entry, delete everything but the URL for the photo, converting it into an img instead of a hypertext link if you used a thumbnail when creating the entry.

Alternatively you can just create a fresh entry, and add the image yourself – but you’ll then have to provide a thumbnail. If you do, remember to name the thumbnail imagename-thumb. Don’t try and constrain the photo itself as a thumbnail using width and height in the img tag, unless the photo is square to begin with – browsers don’t do a great job of converting a big rectangular photo into an itty bitty square thumbnail.

To make the photos display properly, you’ll also want to change the chronological order to forward chronology, not the typical reverse chronological order of most weblogs.

Thanks to Al for correction to my earlier statement: MT will create thumbnails if you have either ImageMagick or NetPBM installed. Ask your ISP if you’re not sure.

And if you have problems, holler.

Categories
Diversity

Once you start shaking out the socks all sorts of toe fuzzies fall out

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

President Bush has spoken out against gay marriages , a move applauded by religious conservatives in this country and elsewhere. Some would say that he’s doing so in order to keep the loyalty of the fundamentalists within the Republican party. I can’t help thinking that it’s also because he’s trying to redirect conversation away from Iraq, the economy, and other things going bump in the night for him.

His discussion about having White House lawyers find a way of defining marriage to be for heterosexuals only is ludicrous – exactly what does he think he can do with White House lawyers? But I’m saddened to see so much Congressional effort in this regard when we’re faced with so many other issues our elected officials should be focusing on. I guess it’s easier to force one’s way into bedrooms than to face and fix real problems.

The Vatican has also called against gay marriages in this country, issuing a 12-page document on the issue. According to the Kansas City Star’s report on the document:

Gay adoptions “mean doing violence to these children, in the sense that their condition of dependency would be used to place them in an environment that is not conducive to their full human development,” it said.

The document calls on Catholic politicians to vote against laws granting legal recognition to homosexual unions and to work to repeal those already on the books.

“To vote in favor of a law so harmful to the common good is gravely immoral,” it said, although it did not specify penalties for Catholics who do.

Considering the Catholic Church’s recent problems with child molestation, one pauses when one reads a document saying that that gay adoptions are doing violence to children. I have to contrast the documented damage that has been done to children in the name of religion and by the religious over the years with such unsubstantiated claims of ‘violence’ on the part of gay parents – where is the proof? The statistics? Where is the documentation?

No, the damage being done ‘to’ the children of gay couples lies primarily in that they are new souls being raised to think for themselves, to question the dogma, to reject the blind reliance on faith, and most of all, to reject the status quo that forms so much of the foundation of the Religious Right.

I sometimes wonder if I support the right for gays to marry because I’m a feminist, or am I a feminist for the same reason I support gays being able to marry, and raise children – people’s potential should not be limited because of antiquated laws and beliefs narrowly interpreted and enforced by those with the most to gain. Too much oppression, violence, and bigotry has been committed in the name of “God”, no matter the names used to represent “God”; and the logic behind most of the oppression just doesn’t make sense.

For instance, where is the harm to society in two gay people being allowed to celebrate their love with a ceremony, as well as being treated as a couple in the eyes of the law? This doesn’t prevent heterosexual couples from sharing the same privilege. It doesn’t force homosexuality on anyone. It’s not going to suddenly make straight kids accept gayness into their lives. Why do we care so much for what happens between two adults who are in love?

The people who are anti-gay marriage remind me of the anti-abortionists – the same moralism, the same sense of ‘righteousness’. The anti-abortionist argue vehemently against abortion, and cry for the unborn children – but if they’re that concerned about children, why are there unwanted children still in this country? Why are there still children desperate for a home, or who are abused, hungry, and neglected? I’ve never understood a group of people who seem to care more for unborn children then they do the ones that are already here, and base their spurious reasoning for their actions on ‘God’.

(A loving God, at that, as they wire yet another abortion clinic with a bomb, or string another gay kid up to die in the desert.)

What started this chain of thought – gay marriage and feminism – wasn’t that Sheila recommended me for inclusion in the Ms. Magazine weblog roll (thanks, Sheila – get better); it was because while reading the reports of our President’s new moral commitment, I was also reading an excellent set of weblog writings having to do with feminism and religion, starting with Alas, a blog’s What to do with those “I’m not a feminist, but…, followed by Noli Irritare Leones, Why I call myself a feminist, and bean at Alas’s response.

In the first essay, bean discussed a really lovely Guardian piece about the truth behind feminism, not the stereotypes. According to Zoe Williams, the author of the Guardian piece, feminists are not, “…the humorless, lentil-eating battle-axe who won’t swallow and the power-dressing, self-seeking career bitch who uses the movement to justify and advance her relentless amassing of cash”. As bean reminds us, it is because of the bad, bad Feminists that we have the right to vote, to read and write, to not be property of some man, and, most importantly, to have control over our own bodies.

Sappho at Noli Irritare Leones answered with why she calls herself a feminist, even though at first glance this may seem to contradict her Christian beliefs:

Why do I call myself a feminist? After all, I’m an actively churchgoing Christian (which some would see as at odds with being a feminist). I have reservations (for men and women) about “free sex” (and lots of people say “feminism and the sexual revolution” as if they were pretty nearly the same thing). I’d like to see a world with fewer divorces and fewer abortions; shouldn’t I then reject feminism as the cause of divorces and abortions?

She cites reasons including gratitude that she may vote, go to school, have the right to use birth control, work in traditional male fields, protection against rape and abuse, and other fruits of early and contemporary feminist efforts (forget about these at times, don’t we?) At the end, the final reason she gives is:

…because as a Christian I believe that both men and women are in the image of God, that both are called to humility, service, and willingness to “wash feet” as Jesus did, and that both men and women are also called to not put our light under a bushel, sometimes to be Priscilla to someone else’s Apollos, and generally to share our gifts.

(The reference to Priscilla and Apollo is based on the biblical story of the 13 year old Priscilla who would not worship Apollo and was ultimately beaten, sprinkled with boiling oil, starved, thrown to the lions and ultimately beheaded for her ‘impiety’.)

What a marvelous way of looking at the issue: God gave you talents, skills, and intelligence – you have a moral duty to exercise them regardless of your sex. This means being a great nurse or stay at home parent, even if you are a boy; or being a great software engineer (ahem), CEO, and President, even if you are only a girl.

Bean from Alas responded to the new thread of feminism and religion, providing the following in addition to other good points:

Feminists believe in the maintaining (or bringing about) legal and financial access to abortions. However, the majority of feminists also want to see a reduction in the number of abortions. The difference between feminists views on reducing this number and conservative views are that for feminists, rather than reducing access to abortions, they simply want to reduce the need for them – through better access to sex education and birth control.

I agree totally. Might surprise people to know that though I’m pro-Choice, I think abortions should be the choice of last resort. I believe women and men should practice safe sex, use birth control, or practice abstinence. However, sometimes these fail, or mistakes are made, or a woman is raped; in which case women have the right to safe abortions, rather than having to depend on some fake doctor with a dirty kitchen table and spoon. They should consider all the alternatives, first; but they shouldn’t be denied any of them.

Certain gay rights supporters might wince that I brought feminism and pro-Choice into a discussion of gay marriage; and there are feminists who will wince because I bring the topic of gay marriage into discussions about a women’s body and her right to control it. However, at the root of both is the question of religion, and people using religion as a hammer to flatten diversity, to punish the different, and to beat down equality. Regarding feminism and gay rights, I can’t see supporting the one without supporting the other – not because I am a blanket liberal and therefore I have these issues that I must believe and support to stay a good stereotypical liberal; but because fundamentally I believe it’s the right thing to do.

When I see religion being used to force government intervention with either, I will speak out. Even if this discussion does make a good topic to sidetrack folks away from talking about Iraq and a certain Presidential address that mentions non-existent nuclear weapons; and rising unemployment; and disenchanted and abandoned service people; amd corporate fraud and lack of accountability; and ‘terror betting’; and a growing health care crises…

Categories
Weblogging

Blogging Holiday

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Phil Wolff’s bringing up David Weinberger’s old idea of a Blogging holiday – everyone take a week off in August. This is in response to some webloggers expressing what sounds like burn out.

This reminds me of when I worked for the tie factory in Seattle, spending all day long with big industrial irons pressing tie after tie, inhaling the fumes from the chemicals used in the material, trying to keep on my feet when the temperatures hovered near 100. Every summer during the hottest part of the year, the management would close the place down or otherwise people would start fainting from the heat. Everyone would have to take their vacations at the same time, and If I remember correctly, it was the first two weeks of August.

We’ve all gone beyond the time when we have to be here all the time, or have to provide excuses either to take a holiday, or return from a holiday. I would hope that each of us takes whatever time we need individually, without some kind of ‘group’ action, the thought of which is starting to get a bit scary at times.

(Okay at the count of three, let’s all reach up and scratch our noses. You know you want to, you know your nose itches. You can feel it, and your hand wants to reach up. Come on. Give in. Ready? One, two, three SCRATCH!)

But Phil is right, in that we do need time off here and again – even if for no other reason to wake our readers up and make them aware that we’re here as a gift, not as an obligation. He’s also right in that we’re going to burn out if we’re here day in and day out; we’re going to lose our sense of perspective, and our uniqueness and individuality. If we become too heavily immersed in this society, we’ll become too easily influenced by the buzz, the ‘leaders’, the comments, whatever. Time off can help us decide what we want this space to be when it’s spiraled out of our control.

Time off can also help us re-discover our personal lives when they’ve spiraled out of control.

You know, last week I found out a link to my weblog was removed from a blogroll of a person I called a friend, and it was a shock. Especially when I asked them why and they said it was because they never knew when I was going to erupt here – that my photos, pretty as they are, aren’t enough to cover the ugliness of these eruptions, and by this I assumed they meant tempermental explosions.

(I taked with AKMA about this – he did mention something about my ‘tempestuous nature’. I adore him and Margaret, I want them to adopt me.)

Reading the email was like getting hit by a wall. I wasn’t sure whether I even wanted to stay weblogging because I wasn’t sure what the point was any more. It seems as if I’m not writing about what I want to, my photos seem flat, my temper uncertain, and too much of my personal life is leaking through to this page – enough to make me reactive at times, but not enough for readers to understand why. So I took a long weekend, and stayed away from weblogging for the most part.

Did it help? A bit. The words still hurt, but I have a better sense of perspective about them. Reminded myself – again – that I’m supposedly here because I enjoy it, and should focus on what I want to write and not worry about the responses. Most of all I was reminded to stop reacting to people who know how to push my buttons, and who enjoy doing so.

I’m not going to take a group sanctioned blogging holiday, all respect to the good Dr. Weinberger. But I am going to walk away from the weblog when I find myself pushed into a corner, tired, or otherwise dull as dishwater. Or when I find that I’m allowing myself to be too influenced by the people around me.

Hmmm. In fact, I think I feel another long weekend coming up – I’m a bit miffed because weblogging has done absolutely nothing for my sex life – what a gyp.

Categories
RDF Writing

RDF: Ready for Prime Time

Originally published at O’Reilly, and recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Not long ago, Marc Canter, one of the early founders of Macromedia, talked about RDF and the Semantic Web in his weblog. Specifically, he wrote:

“I’ve been spending more and more time trying to grok the RDF folks. I have to say I like what I see and hear, but what I don’t see are many apps and services actually up and running and working.

…

We have a saying over here: “put up or shut up.” I’m still looking for two different RDF apps or services to work together in some meaningful way. Then bring on the books.”

Considering that I’m “bringing on a book” on RDF this month, I thought it appropriate to answer Marc’s plea for meaningful, working examples of RDF apps and services, especially those that work with other RDF-based services. My problem, though, is that I have only a limited amount of time and space in this article; I can only cover a few of them. However, best to just start, but first, a little digression into RDF and XML.

RDF/XML: The Syntax That Could

You probably know that RDF has both a defined model as well as a preferred serialization, RDF/XML. In many ways there’s been far less criticism of RDF than there has been of the RDF/XML syntax. Tim Bray, one of the creators of XML has said:

“Speaking only for myself, I have never actually managed to write down a chunk of RDF/XML correctly, even when I had the triples laid out quite clearly in my head. Furthermore, once again speaking for myself, I find most existing RDF/XML entirely unreadable. And I think I understand the theory reasonably well.”

Tim even went so far as to offer his own version of RDF/XML, which he called RPV.

I’ve found that the more a person works with markup such as XML, the more they dislike RDF/XML. I’ve also found that no matter the alternative proposed, someone else will dislike it just as much, which makes RDF/XML a bit of a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” proposition.

Ultimately, if RDF is ready for prime time, then so is RDF/XML. Regardless of our views of it, it’s official, it’s real, and it’s here now. So on to the RDF applications, starting with the basics: the APIs.

RDF APIs

For every programming language you’re interested in, there’s most likely an RDF API and a library implementing it. If you’re interested in Java, one of the most popular Java RDF libraries for RDF is Jena, from HP’s Semantic Web Research Lab. The current version of Jena is 1.6.1, which is the one I’ve used, but there is a beta-release of a new version (Jena2), and it’s the one you’ll most likely want to investigate. As you’ll see later, Jena is used for several utilities and applications.

For those interested in Python, the most popular RDF library — which also includes a triplestore with several different backends — is Daniel Krech’s RDFLib. Want something a little more unusual? Try Wilbur, a Common Lisp RDF library, written by Ora Lassila, one of the creators of RDF.

For those who work primarily with Microsoft development environments, there is a C# RDF Parser called Drive, which provides an API to parse RDF/XML into an in-memory RDF graph for manipulation. It’s fully compatible with the .NET platform, and it can also be used with the open source variant of .NET, Mono.

If Perl is more your thing, there’s Ginger Alliance’s PerlRDF, a library I’ve used in several small applications at my site. And other, popular applications like Six Apart’s weblogging application, Movable Type, are also using it. Six Apart extended the PerlRDF module by creating a new module, XML::FOAF, which enables autodiscovery and processing of FOAF files. FOAF, or Friend-of-a-Friend, is an RDF vocabulary for defining hierarchies of acquaintances and is now one of the most popular uses of RDF/XML.

If you want support for multiple RDF languages as well as a more sophisticated framework and data persistence, you’ll want to check out Dave Beckett’s Redland. In addition to providing a persistent data store, as well as multiple language support (Python, Perl, Java, Tcl, and Ruby), Redland also provides support for an independent RDF parser called Raptor. Raptor has been used, independently, in other applications, including several FOAF apps, as well as RDF Gateway, a commercial product I’ll discuss later in this article.

RDF Vocabularies

FOAF is one of the more popular vocabularies of RDF/XML. Just a quick perusal at the FOAF web site will show dozens of uses of FOAF in tools ranging from a FOAFBot, created by Edd Dumbill and used to provide services within chat forums, to uses of FOAF in desktop tools within the OS X environment for managing contacts. My own FOAF file is at http://weblog.burningbird.net/foaf.rdf, and consists of pointers to friends I know online, though the list is incomplete.

The beauty of FOAF lies in its simple way of describing personal information, including our work and academic affiliations. The power of FOAF lies in its ability to list acquaintances who themselves may have FOAF files. Over time, this interlinked network can expand until it’s a simple matter of mapping out who is connected, directly to indirectly, to each other.

Another RDF vocabulary in popular use is RSS 1.0. Webloggers and other online publications use RSS 1.0 to provide information about updates at their web sites, including the date of the update, the author, an excerpt of the material and so on.

A third RDF vocabulary is the RDF/XML used to describe Creative Commons licenses, a new way to provide more detailed information about use of copyrighted material.

All three vocabularies use, in one way or another, elements from the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), as defined in RDF/XML. However, these vocabularies aren’t the only ones available using RDF/XML. In fact, the W3C uses RDF/XML to define the underlying syntax for its own Web Ontology Language (OWL) effort. With RDF providing the underlying model, and OWL adding higher-level ontology support, it’s only a matter of time before a host of sophisticated, domain-specific ontologies spring up, all of them interoperable because of the underlying use of RDF/XML.

In fact, there’s a host of tools and utilities people can use right now to work with RDF/XML directly or with OWL.

Tools and Utilities to Work with RDF/XML

As much as I like RDF/XML, even I’ll admit that it requires time to understand and work with, and not everyone has either a desire or an inclination for this effort. Thankfully, there’s plenty of tools available to allow people to manually create or read RDF/XML.

The most commonly used RDF utility is the RDF Validator, a tool to check your RDF/XML to ensure that it’s valid, as well as to generate different views of the model data. I find that when working with an API, I’ll use the Validator to validate my sample RDF/XML, view the model to ensure I’ve created the appropriate one, and then create the triples to use as a pattern with my RDF/XML API calls, in whatever language I’m coding.

Another handy utility for working with RDF/XML is the BrownSauce RDF Browser. This web application uses Jena. It can open an RDF/XML document and provide easily readable and hypertext-linked pages of the RDF data contained in the document. Best of all, the browser also opens any associated RDF Schema documents that provide information about the RDF elements themselves, through the relationships described in the schema, and through comments provided with the schema elements.

A long-time advocate of RDF and a friend of mine, Danny Ayers, has been busy at work on Ideagraph, a tool for visually mapping ideas and then generating RDF/XML from the results. In addition to this effort, the tool can also act as a RDF-based weblogging tool, as well as an RSS aggregator.

Isaviz is another popular visual-editing tool for creating, importing, and working with RDF documents in RDF/XML, and within other serialization formats such as Notation 3 and N-Triple format. It’s particularly useful when you’re creating a new RDF vocabulary and want to use a visual tool for this effort rather than trying to create the vocabulary in RDF/XML manually. However, I prefer to use the tool to work with existing RDF/XML documents, particularly larger ones, because the tool has a way of being able to zoom in on components of a model, to create snapshots of particular paths, and to query on specific elements. In particular, if you’re documenting an existing RDF/XML vocabulary, Isaviz can be useful for providing snapshots of particular instances of data.

Most of these tools are geared more for working directly with RDF/XML vocabularies. If you’re working with an ontology instead, then you must look at Protege, from Stanford University. This tool not only allows you to define an ontology using an easy-to-use user interface, you can then create forms to capture the ontology data. Once the forms are defined, the tool can then be used to capture instances of data based on the ontology. Currently. effort is underway to provide support for OWL files, and mapping between Protege’s own ontology language and the W3C language. Regardless, the data captured by Protege can be output in multiple formats, most particularly RDF/XML.

Peripheral RDF Support in Other Tools and Utilities

Of course, tools that focus purely on RDF, whether to create RDF or to consume RDF, are handy when you’re starting work with RDF–but what about RDF in the real world?

Probably one of the first uses of RDF/XML was by those involved in the Mozilla effort, which still uses RDF/XML for all of its automated Table of Contents data and processing. In fact, it was through my interest in the Mozilla development environment that I became exposed to RDF/XML (see www.mozilla.org/rdf/doc/).

If you’ve worked with Linux then you’re most likely familiar with RPM, a way of packaging Linux applications for easy installation. What you may not know is that RDF has been used with RPM to provide metadata about the package being installed. A utility created by Daniel Veillard, rpmfind, uses RDF to discover RPM installations on Rpmfind.Net, a database of RPM packages maintained by the W3C. Though the original creator of the product is no longer maintaining rpmfind directly, the source is now located at sources.redhat.com, and I’m still using rpmfind for my own server.

Earlier I mentioned Movable Type and its use of RDF for autodiscovery of FOAF files. The application also uses RDF/XML to annotate weblog entries with trackback information, which can be used to document links from one weblog to another and provide reverse link information. This same functionality has been isolated for use by other tools, weblogging or otherwise.

Spring, a Mac OS X desktop tool created by Robb Beal, provides support for dragging and dropping FOAF files. Find an FOAF link in a web page? Click on it and drag it to Spring in order to automatically transform the FOAF contents into the tool.

As ubiquitous as RDF is becoming, creeping its way into a favorite tool or utility near you, the power of the RDF model’s inferential capability is particularly apparent when you look at some of the larger applications that are being built on RDF.

Larger Applications

People at MIT are working on an application, called DSpace, which will maintain a digital repository of information. The application is geared to any larger organization such as a college or university that wants to maintain a searchable index of publications from its members. DSpace is a freely available, open source application that makes use of an ontology, Harmony/ABC and RDF to maintain the historical subsystem. RDF Gateway is a Semantic Web application server that uses RDF as the core of all of its services. With the Gateway, you get access to a persistent data store that can be queried using an inferential engine that goes beyond normal SQL-like queries. Included with the application is support for server-side scripting similar in nature to both ASP (Active Scripting Pages) and JSP (Java version of same).

Siderean Software’s Seamark is another commercial application that makes use of RDF and a persistent data source, but Seamark focuses primarily on site navigation. Plugged In Software’s Tucana Knowledge Store provides sophisticated knowledge-based querying of large stores of data, again based on RDF.

These companies are just the first to start looking at RDF and the RDF data model for use in large-scale, sophisticated applications. And then there’s the Semantic Web.

The Semantic Web

It’s funny in a way, but I can sit down and rattle off a dozen uses for the RDF data model and the associated RDF/XML without once mentioning its primary purpose, which is to provide support for the Semantic Web efforts. All uses of RDF for any purpose are good because they increase our familiarity with the specification as well as the syntax. In addition, applications that increase the level of RDF/XML out on the web add to the pool of accessible data on which we are slowly building the Semantic Web. Through the use of RDF, we know that all of the vocabularies are compatible.

Beyond these good and practical uses of RDF I’ve described earlier in the article, and unlike XML or HTML or XHTML, the RDF model, and its associated syntax, brings with it the ability to define statements about data, rather than to just record pieces of data. Add to this the use of OWL, and we begin to have the ability to mine for knowledge, not just words.

Consider poetry. My favorite poem is Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road”, with its friendly and positive imagery of life as an adventure, a road to follow with glee. In fact, the use of “road” as a metaphor for life and life’s journey is quite common in poetry. (See an excellent article, “Poetry of the Open Road.”) However, it’s the very use of imagery and metaphor in poetry that defeats traditional web discovery techniques.

Currently we have the ability to use keyword searches within search engines such as Google, and with this we can find poems that mention the word “road”. This is all well and good, but in the future, as the use of RDF and RDF/XML expands, we’ll be able to do searches that not only provide links to poems that have used “road”, but also know which poems use the word as a metaphor for life, which have used it metaphorically to describe freedom, and which are just talking about roads as roads.

Eventually as RDF insinuates itself throughout the web, as it has already started, you’ll be able to search on “road” and “poem” and “metaphor for life” and not get this article back as a result. As much as I like the thought of people reading this article, that search result will be a good thing because this article is not about poems, metaphors, and life. It’s about RDF and how it is now more than ready for prime time.

Categories
Weblogging

Sweet tunes and Weblogging runes

Being off-weblog this weekend, I missed the Blogathon, and in particular, the joint effort on the part of Scott Andrew LePera and Shannon Campbell to co-write a song in 24 hours. All online.

They made their goal, plus one: two songs, Southdown and Nothing New. (Mirrored on Burningbird Net)

Their effort was extraordinary. The music is wonderous. How they did this is amazing. I hope that Scott and Shannon combine their talent more often, because they make lovely music together. Though this note is late for the Blogathon, hopefully you can still contribute to Mr. Holland’s Opus in their name.

In additional news, Elaine aka Kalilily was featured in a new Chicago Tribute article on women and weblogging.

(Note, registration required for article.)

All in all, the article was one of the better ones, with a few caveats. I winced when I read Rebecca Blood’s comment categorizing weblogs into “filter-style blogs or short-form journals”, as well as the article’s references towards gender-based weblogging:

Men tend to use the filter format for their often political Weblogs, whereas women lean toward journals about “day-to-day stuff,” or traditionally female topics such as cooking, knitting or motherhood, Blood said.

Ouch – gender stereotypes are alive and well and living in blogdom. For being such an open minded person, Rebecca can be suprisingly conservative in weblogging classification, ethics, and normative behavior. I like the point that she made on clustering, though:

However, blogging can have a downside Blood calls a “clustering effect,” where people only link to like-minded sites, creating “an echo chamber.”

“That’s not a good thing,” she said. “We need to talk to each other and understand each other in a democracy.”

Spot on.

I also liked what Elaine had to say:

“From politics to partying, from men to menopause, from feminism to family–women Webloggers seem more comfortable in viewing their personal lives in a larger, cultural context and also in looking at global issues from a very personal point of view,” she wrote in an e-mail.

In fact, there was much about this article that was refreshing, not the least of which was hearing from more ‘just plain blogging folks’. Who just happen to be women.