My daughters have always thought that the “black box” that I use so much (the command prompt shell) was hilarious. I type my cryptic little abbreviations, press Enter, and then more text goes scrolling up the window and off the top. I tell them how in the early days of PCs, and even pre-PC computers, the whole computer screen was just one big version of that window, and how before that people did the same thing with a keyboard and a printer, and the girls roll their eyes and…

The Semantic Web Strategies conference is just a few weeks away, although there are still a few days before September 12th to get the early registration rate.

While I’ve sworn that I would never write about my new favorite album in this weblog—if I think that the White Stripes’ latest album is even better than Get Behind Me Satan, what do you care?—but at the recent XML Summer School in Oxford Norm Walsh convinced me that more coverage of non-technical topics is a good thing. A few recent Tim Bray postings convinced me that it’s worthwhile to point at great musical performances on YouTube that people don’t know about. While…

I recently asked if anyone knew of applications that pull meta[@name and @content] metadata out of HTML head elements, and I got a few interesting answers. To extract such data, writing a short XSLT stylesheet that reads the output of John Cowan’s TagSoup would be easy, but lately I’ve been thinking: with a slight change to those meta elements, they’d be RDFa, which can store more versatile metadata that is easier to get out (see Getting Those Triples).

A view source on a lot of web pages out there shows something like this, which is from a web page created by the DITA Open Toolkit from a DITA XML file:

I’ve had problems getting OWL’s import mechanism to work before, and once I got a simple demo of it to work I wanted to make it available. owl:imports is great because it helps make your ontologies more modular, even letting you separate your ontology from the data it describes, sort of like—dare I say it—a schema.

I’m very happy to announce that the program for the Semantic Web Strategies conference in San Jose September 30 - October 2nd is finished and available. For keynote speakers, we’ve got some well-known names who all bring a combination of experience and creativity to their semantic web work: Eric Miller, Nova Spivack, and Kingsley Idehen. We also have presentations on many interesting projects from large and small organizations and well-known semantic web companies such as…

I assume that people reading my weblog are pretty tech-savvy. Otherwise, they’d find most of what I write pretty boring. (That’s why no one in my family reads it.) The following advice will look like common sense to most of you, but after getting an email with a subject header of “Fw: FW: Fw: I M P O R T A N T W A R N I NG ! ! ! ! ! !” from a family member today, I thought I’d write this out in case it’s useful to anyone. You can send the URL to anyone who…