After styling some headers in a sample Word document as Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, and so forth, I was pleased to see that when I saved the document as Word 2003 XML, sub-section container elements were wrapped around the appropriate elements, grouping a Heading 3 title and all block elements up to the next Heading 3 (or higher) block together, nested within the group that began with a Heading 2, etc. (Although Open Office 2.0 offers Word 2003 XML as a Save As choice, it does not add these…

I recently heard on short notice that I would have some time to kill in Frankfurt, and just as I was wondering what to do there, Tim Bray posted something about a recent visit, so I asked him. He suggested the Sachsenhausen district, across the Main River. I booked a room in a hotel near there and wandered around a lot. It was great; I’d certainly do it again.

I read Elliot Kimber’s series on XML content management software as it came out, and I’ve been re-reading it lately for work project reasons. We work at the same company, where content management issues come up a lot. Content Management Systems is also one of those software categories where many products claim to do it all, but what exactly constitutes “it all” is very vague. Each vendor makes up their own features and puts their own spin on the au courant buzzwords,…

Last week I mentioned the role that D2RQ played in a project I was working on, and I wanted to write a little more about this RDBMS/RDF interface if it’s any help to people who may use it. D2RQ is free, and it’s easy to use in its default setup, but I’m finding that the further you stray from the default setup, the more you can do with it.

I recently asked about the use of RDF/OWL to integrate databases, especially relational databases. The posting received many good comments, but no pointers to the kind of simple example I was hoping to find, so I’ve managed to create one myself.

A few weeks ago I wrote about free personal data that was really just randomly generated names and contact information created for some tests. Coherent prose by knowledgeable people is something that you can’t generate with a python script, and it’s interesting to see the schemes that some people have made to find such content.

I needed some sample address book data for a project that I’m working on. Because of the number of people who may see it, I didn’t want to use real address book entries, so I wrote some Python scripts to generate some.