Semantic Web
I’m happy to announce that version 0.8 of sparta, a simple API for RDF, is now available. As always, feedback and suggestions are appreciated.
When I worked in the financial industry, I quickly noticed that Excel spreadsheets contain the bulk of the data in the enterprise. It may make IT execs tear their hair out, but having the data nearby and ready for analysis is sloppy, but oh-so-effective. The challenge is to make the data reusable elsewhere.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has announced that as of today, their online publications and tables are now free to download, instead of requiring an account and a per-download charge, as before.
Today’s release of Tiger includes a new but little-discussed framework for developers, CoreData. What’s most interesting to me is its similarities — and differences — to SDO, IBM and BEA’s* effort to abstract away the specifics of how data is stored.
RDF has a simple, usable, universal model; everything’s nodes and arcs, so it avoids the problems of the Infoset, which IMO are brought by its complexity and special cases. Years of disquiet about attributes by portions of the XML cognoscenti support this view unintentionally, I think.
I’m happy to announce that version 0.7 of sparta.py, a simple API for RDF, is now available. As always, feedback and suggestions are appreciated.
Version 0.6 of sparta.py is now available. Changes include:
Version 0.5 of sparta.py is now available; with this release, I think it’s roughly feature-complete.
I’ve been talking with a few people about my previous assertion that the Infoset is a bad abstraction for data modelling, and my subsequent post about the informational properties of the Infoset.
After a short pause (OK, nearly three years), I’ve released version 0.4 of sparta.py.
This is why heuristics aren’t such a hot idea.
Browse through the W3C Semantic Web pages and you’ll see this notice in a few different forms:
I spent a little time on the plane the other day reading the latest WD of the RDF Primer. I didn’t attempt to review the entire document set, as reading a 71 page primer is quite enough!
Jo Walsh has created a Semantic Web system that appeals quite strongly - a means of using RDF to map to the real world in “gonzo geographical data collection”.
Before, I was wondering about the intersection of Wikis and the Semantic Web. I’ve since done some noodling and prototyping, and the idea came together on the train home tonight.
Anybody else notice how you can use a Wiki like a Semantic Web engine?
Jack William Bell makes a precise, short and readable effort at explaining why RDF is simple and important.
