2008

I’ve been looking for a SPARQL endpoint that provides new data fairly regularly—not just new triples to query, but data that is new to the world, such as from a stock ticker feed. If the RDFa on digg.com pages was accumulated in a database that could be queried as a SPARQL endpoint, that would certainly qualify, and it would be fun to play with.

Adding metadata value with Pellet

A nice new feature of Pellet 2.0.

The open-source program Pellet is described as an OWL reasoner, but I’ve used it mostly as a SPARQL engine that happens to understand OWL. So, for example, if I have RDF that says “Loretta’s spouse is Leroy and spouse is a symmetric property,” but the data makes no mention of Leroy’s spouse, and I ask Pellet “who is Leroy’s spouse,” it can give me the answer.

Picking XML schemas and tools?

Then first think about your content and users.

At last week’s XML in Practice 2008 conference, I joined Micah Dubinko, Evan Lenz, and Frank Miller for the panel on working with authoring tools and schemas. (Lisa Bos of Really Strategies did a fine job hosting the panel; she should consider doing one of those interview podcast shows.) The panel’s full title mentioned both DITA and DocBook, and while Mark Shellenberger predicted a “cage match,” several people later seemed disappointed that there weren’t more…

Looking forward to XML 2008

And seeing some friends and learning about new developments.

The first time I went to the annual conference that will be called XML-in-Practice 2008 this year (but which I think of as “XML 2008”), it was called SGML ‘95. It grew from there and morphed into an XML conference, and when the dot com boom supported several XML conferences a year, this was the best and biggest. It’s slimmed down over the years, and I hate to admit that I might not go if it was going to be a conference full of strangers, but I know I’ll see some old…

In the first project I did with SPARQL, D2RQ, and MySQL I used D2RQ to pull all the relational data into a disk file and then queried that after adding some OWL-based metadata. D2RQ does let you execute SPARQL queries against a live relational database, instead of dumping data to a file and querying that, so I wanted to see the effects for myself. This would work better as a live demo, but you could think of it as a script for one.

A video from a still camera

With various strange noises and images.

I’m on my second Canon Powershot right now, having gotten my first one in early 2003. These can take brief movies, but the Powershot is not really a movie camera, so I only took three- or four-second movies of things that I could loop. In November of 2004, once I had a collection of these clips and access to a Mac with iMovie installed, I took a few loopable shots of my daughter Alice playing the drums so I could tie the whole thing together with a regular beat and edited it into a trippy…