I’ve written before about W.C. McGee’s 1981 article in IBM’s Journal of Research and Development covering the history of database systems from 1955 to 1980, and I left off saying that I’d devote a separate entry to his history of report generation. The creation of reports may sound mundane, but throughout the history of computers the pulling of data meeting specific criteria is the most important thing we do with computers. (Why put data in or calculate new data in the…

My first book was a crash course in basic end user tasks for using the MVS, VM/CMS, OS/400, VMS, and Unix operating systems: logging in, navigating the file system, using e-mail, using the text editor, listing, creating, and deleting files, and so forth. I wanted to call it “Fake Your Way Through Minis and Mainframes” but the McGraw-Hill Professional Book Division decided that “The Operating Systems Handbook” sounded more, well, professional, especially for a $49.50…

University of Maryland semantic web researcher Jim Hendler (XML 2005 attendees will remember his keynote speech in Atlanta) closed a recent mindswap weblog entry by writing this:

After following Dave Beckett’s pointer to Stefano Mazzocchi essay On the Quality of Metadata last week, I remembered that while we have people like Stefano and Bruce D’Arcus among us with stronger backgrounds in more classical approaches to metadata, most geeks think that technology from ten years ago is ancient history. I’d like to recommend two books I’ve read recently for the historical background they provide on the creation, organization, and use of metadata to…

I haven’t looked too hard at dojo, an open source Javascript toolkit, but on robotwisdom I found out about the Data Model Comparison Table on dojo’s website. The page’s multiple tables compare various dojo data model and metadata concepts with comparable concepts in RDF, XML, SQL, spreadsheets, CSV files, Google Base, Ning, and more. If you don’t care about dojo and take its columns out of the table, the comparison of the remaining columns is still very interesting.…