My standard joke about not being able to program VCRs, my phone, etc. is that without a QWERTY keyboard I don’t know where to start. Finally, I can program my breakfast!

I was tempted to call this “Semantic Web project idea number 4a”, because it’s not a big leap from my last one. Perhaps if I generalize the idea more it will sound separate enough, but as you’ll see, my example builds on the last example.

I stopped reading BoingBoing some time ago, but my co-worker Eliot Kimber just pointed me to a BoingBoing item that makes fun of obsessive ontological design. It’s not every day that you see a Protégé screenshot or references to monotonicity constraints in a BoingBoing humor piece. Ironically, the idea of classifying cute cats could get my younger daughter interested in using Protégé, but she’d probably be better off with SWOOP.

Usually, when a tech friend starts a weblog, I try to say “hey, check it out” here, but I was a little behind on my news when I found out about Jeni Tennison’s blog, and plenty of other people pointed to it, and it was already included in the Planet XML feed, so I thought that everyone who should know about it already would. But she just keeps delivering solid, useful, XSLT advice, so a few weeks late, I’ll say it: if you write many XSLT stylesheets, you owe it to…

Can a taxonomy help you buy a lightbulb? I didn’t think so, but when Ron Daniel of Taxonomy Strategies told me how they helped a big box hardware store with the product taxonomy that drove their online store’s menus, I realized that taxonomies aren’t just for classifying content, as my publishing technology bias had led me to believe.

For part 3 of my series on semantic web project ideas, I was tempted to take part 2 and do a global replace of “ERP” for “CRM”. I’ll briefly recap what a semantic web add-on to an open source Enterprise Resource Planning package would have in common with a similar add-on to an open source Customer Relationship Management package:

While in Dallas on business recently, I heard the sports news mention a “tech” basketball game, and I thought “What do they care about Virginia Tech?” Of course, they meant Texas Tech, but where I live, it means Virginia Tech.

I wanted to use Emacs+nxml to create some XHTML 2 documents, so I went looking for an XHTML 2 schema. The latest Working Draft says that it “includes an early implementation of XHTML 2.0 in RELAX NG, but does not include the implementations in DTD or XML Schema form. Those will be included in subsequent versions, once the content of this language stabilizes.” This schema’s location is not obvious, but a few web searches turned up a pointer to the ZIP archive version of the…