I was sorry to miss the Semantic Web Technologies conference, but I had a very interesting time yesterday giving a talk at the New Horizons in Teaching and Research conference at the University of Virginia (so nice to go to a conference 25 minutes from my house) on Semantic Web technologies, RDF and OWL (and Linked Data). It was an audience of professors and researchers from a wide variety of disciplines who were all very open to hearing about how these standards could let them store metadata…
Calais is the Reuters Clearforest product that, according to their homepage, “automatically annotates your content with rich semantic metadata”. Give it text, and it returns the text marked up with RDF that identifies entities and various semantic information about those entities.
I had my host provider upgrade my weblog to Movable Type 4. At first, it looked like connections to the CSS stylesheets were broken, but it turns out that that the public_html/mt-static/themes directory that had the CSS files was replaced with a new one for MT4. Luckily, I had zipped this directory up before the upgrade and copied the zip file somewhere else, so when I restored the directory of the CSS that I use everything went back to normal.
Lookout engadget, it’s my first consumer electronics scoop: at Digital Book 2008 today, Sony reader business development managers Bob Nell and Daniel Albohn, who were not listed on the online or printed programs, made a surprise presentation: they showed that Sony has worked out how to display ebooks in the standard epub format on the PRS-505. Nell started up the Adobe Digital Editions reader and dragged a DRM-free epub book and a PDF version of Suze Orman’s book “Woman and…
The recent lifehacker article Ten Must-Have Bookmarklets reminded me that I’ve developed a few handy ones myself. A bookmarklet (“bookmark” + “applet”) is a little bit of Javascript embedded in a link. They usually take some information about the page you’re looking at and do something useful with it. For example, if you highlight some text on this page and click this demo it displays the highlighted text in a message box. This particular example is not very…
The idea of single source publishing is at least as old as SGML. You store one version of your content with all the information necessary to create other the versions (typically, a print version plus the electronic formats du jour), and then you develop automated routines to create those other versions from the central, “single” source. The central content gets updated as necessary, and you create new publications by running the appropriate routines to generate the other formats. By…
