blog

After I posted Reification is a red herring (and you don’t need property graphs to assign data to individual relationships) last month, I had an amusingly difficult time explaining to my wife how that would generate so much Twitter activity. This month I wanted to make it clear that I’m not opposed to reification in and of itself, and I wanted to describe the fun I’ve been having playing with Olaf Hartig and Bryan Thompson’s RDF* and and SPARQL* extensions to these…

I recently tweeted that the ZDNet article Back to the future: Does graph database success hang on query language? was the best overview of the graph database world(s) that I’d seen so far, and I also warned that many such “overviews” were often just Neo4j employees plugging their own product. (The Neo4j company is actually called Neo Technology.) The most extreme example of this is the free O’Reilly book Graph Databases, which is free because it’s being given away…

I enjoy writing short tutorials to get people started on something that may have seemed intimidating to them before, and I thought it might be fun to write up something that isn’t related to software but that I have thought a lot about in the last 15 years: jazz bass playing.

I finally had a chance to play with rdfstore-js by Antonio Garrote and it was all pretty straightforward. I already had node.js installed, so a simple npm install js installed his library. Then, I was ready to include the library in a JavaScript script that would read some RDF and query it with SPARQL. I just ran my script from the command line, but node.js fans know that they can take advantage of this library’s features in much more interesting application architectures. (Before I go on,…

Amazon recently announced Neptune as an AWS service. As its home page describes it,

While listening to the song Dear Life on the new Beck album, I wondered who played the piano on the Beatles’ Martha My Dear. A web search found the website Beatles Bible, where the Martha My Dear page showed that it was Paul.

On the computers that I use the most, the browser home page is an HTML file with links to my favorite pages and a “single” form that lets me search the sites that I search the most. I can enter a search term in the field for any of the sites, press Enter, and then that site gets searched. The two tricks that I use to create these fields have been handy enough that I thought I’d share them in case they’re useful to others.