People who listen to Jersey City freeform radio station WFMU tend to be a bit fanatical about it. The Wikipedia page on the station quotes the New York Times referring to them as “a station whose name has become like a secret handshake among a certain tastemaking cognoscenti.” It’s not only because of the range of their musical eclecticism, which is an easy game for college and other non-profit radio stations to play; the depth of their commitment and their role in the music…

At a recent W3C Government Linked Data Working Group working group meeting, I started thinking more about the role in linked data of laws that are published online. To summarize, you don’t want to publish the laws themselves as triples, because they’re a bad fit for the triples data model, but as online resources relevant to a lot of issues out there, they make an excellent set of resources to point to, although you may not always get the granularity you want.

A recent @TopQuadrant tweet about legal knowledge and RDF/XML led me to Dr. Adam Wyner’s piece Legal Ontologies Spin a Semantic Web on law.com. After reading it, I wanted to leave a comment, but this required registering on law.com and telling them lots of details about the law firm I work for. I don’t work for a law firm, so I’m just putting my comments here and expanding on them a bit.

Many have wondered about what the semantic web and publishing can offer each other. (By “publishing” here, I mean “making content available in one media or another, ideally to make money”.) After following a lot of writing and discussions in these two worlds—and they are surprisingly separate worlds—I have a few ideas and wanted to write them up where people could comment on them.

My old friend Dale Waldt (I remember, immediately after the announcement of the existence of XML at SGML 1996, going up to my then-coworker Dale and asking “So what do we think?”) recently posted an entry on the Gilbane XML blog titled Why Adding Semantics to Web Data is Difficult. A few days ago I posted a comment saying that the things that he saw as missing from semantic technologies are actually already there and working well, but my reply hasn’t shown up yet, so after a…