Tom Morris

I was just browsing through my notes and I found some fragments from, well, the Philosophical Fragments and other parts of Kierkegaard's ouvre. As a New Year's gift, I thought I ought to share them.

"[The PF is] without any claim to being part of the scientific-scholarly endeavour in which one acquires legitimacy as a throughfare or transition, as a co-worker or as a volunteer attendant, as a hero or at any rate as a relative hero, or at least as an absolute trumpeter. It is merely a pamplhet and will not be anything more even if I [were] to continue it with seventeen more" (PF 5)

"I can stake my own life, I can in all earnestness trifle with my own life - not with anothers" (PF 8)

On the systematising of objective thought: "[it] translates everything in to results, and helps all mankind to cheat, by copying these off and reciting them by rote". Compared with the subjective: "puts everything in process and omits the result; partly because this belongs to him who has the way, and partly because as an existing individual he is constantly in the process of coming to be" (CUP 68)

"Existence itself, the act of existing, is a striving, and is both pathetic and comic in the same degree" (CUP 84)

"Is a man who hopes to prove that he is sane by uttering a generally accepted and generally respected objective truth, insane?" (CUP 174)

"Just as it once required energy and determination to become a CHristian, so now, though the renunciation be not praiseworthy, it requires courage and energy to renounce the Christian religion, while it needs only thoughtlessness to remain a nominal Christian" (CUP 326)

Tags: kierkegaard

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Want to see something ridiculous? The Mormon Church recently removed Simon Wiesenthal from the list of people to be posthumously baptised by proxy. (Via Bitch Ph.D.)

You can't make this stuff up. The Mormons believe that people only go to heaven if they have been baptised, and so baptise people posthumously, even though they aren't Mormons. So they have Mormons take a "proxy baptism" in the name of another person (rumour has it that John Perry Barlow of "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" fame was once proxy baptised for Napoleon).

Then the Simon Wiesenthal Centre then takes offence because they believe that Simon Wiesenthal is going to heaven without the help of the Mormons.

The executive director of the LDS Church Family and Church History department said back in '95: "It is important to stress that the freedom of choice remains a prevailing concept behind baptism for the dead. No ordinance is administered by compulsion. The freedom of the recipient to accept or reject the ordinance is an overarching principle... The result of a proxy baptism is not binding on the recipient"

Sorry? But, of course a proxy baptism is not binding on the recipient - they're dead, for crying out loud!

Oh, wait, the Mormons say that what happens is that when you are baptised posthumously, you are offered a choice whether to accept it or not. But doesn't that destroy the idea of faith? Once you've died and seen that non-Mormons go to hell, surely you don't need to have faith any more?

This religion stuff sure is confusing! But, then, who am I to say that this is ridiculous? I haven't plumbed the depths of Mormon theology. I just don't get it, you see. This Joseph Smith guy must have been quite something! I really ought to read a library full of Mormon thought before I can say that it's ridiculous.

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I have to disagree with James Corbett's predictions in a number of places.

I think that IPTV is a distration. TV itself is a distraction from what's going on. Television content and the platform which hosts them are going to be disconnected. Like, Lost. You know, Channel 4 showed Lost. How do I know that? Only because a few people I know used to watch it on the television rather than on BitTorrent.

My laptop has a DVD burner built in and connection to the 'net. I have a 21" monitor sitting in my bedroom and some nice stereo speakers. This is the best television setup I've ever used. Do I care about HDTV? No, I care about 'interestingness'. And my MMORPG subscription provides a lot more interestingness per pence spent than my Sky box ever did.

I think that Second Life is only a proprietary fore-runner to what VRML started off back in the day. I'm waiting for the decentralised, semantically marked-up, XMLish way of doing virtual environments.

I haven't tried the Wii, but I can tell you why it's successful. It's trying to be a gaming console and not a "media platform". The Internet is the multimedia platform, so why do I need an Xbox or PS3 to give me multimedia? I kicked that habit long ago. The Wii is successful because Nintendo didn't try and play jack of all trades, it sat down and built a console.

OPML won't be the new RSS, I'm afraid. Much as I enjoy working on OPML projects, OPML is just one tiny component of a much larger play here. OPML will be one entry point for the web as data platform. OPML as an introduction, not an endpoint.

James, you are right about the comments. But they've always been dead. They are a bad way (linear, spam-ridden threads) of serving a good end (conversation). They are begging to be replaced. Unfortunately, TrackBack isn't much better than comments. But still, we persist in keeping them around because nobody has sat down and built something better.

Web 2.0 is a research project. It's cheaper for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft et al. to have the Web 2.0 petri dish set up in Silicon Valley to test ideas out and then either acquire or steal the good bits. It's far cheaper than a research division, and far more competitive than Google's 20% time.

As for the mobile web? Please, spare me. The providers will start innovating when unicorns and faeries breed. The mobile platform is closed and far, far too expensive. It's only because of a special offer that I use GPRS. If that special offer were to disappear tomorrow, my phone would become a useless lump of metal and plastic. At Le Web, there were three levels of folk - the geeks, the business folk and the mobile phone folk. The geeks were all in jeans, the business folk were all in business casual and the phone folk were in suits. That's a pretty good clue as to the level of innovation in the mobile phone business.

Okay, now that I've knocked James about a bit (sorry mate), I've got to make some predictions of my own. It's only fair.

1. MySpace will stagnate. The advertisers will realise that they're not getting good value for money, and the kids will get fed up with the eccentricities in design and function. Bands will find better ways of promoting their music. Kids may realise that online social networking is way bigger than MySpace, just as real-life social networking is way bigger than the school disco.

2. Widget hype will die down. Sorry folks, but I don't think widgets are actually wildly important. They're okay as an introduction to the syndication web, but they are a temporary solution at best. I'm currently subscribed to 284 feeds on my Macintosh newsreader. Information is only going to increase - widgetspace isn't. Widgets will either have to scale up or realise their limitations.

3. Microsoft will realise that the Zune is rubbish, and it'll be for all the sort of reasons I've been waffling about for months on end. Nobody will put out an iPod killer. Shame - Apple needs to be kept on it's toes even if I'm unlikely to switch away from the Pod.

4. MMORPG subscription costs will have to change. Monthly subscriptions don't work for most people. I hope that games will try to reward users for getting their friends to join. Communities in MMORPGs will cross out in to the wider space through web services.

5. At least one of the current social network/ Web 2.0 sites will do something unforgivably evil. Who will it be? My money is on one of the video sites - YouTube, perhaps. Since this is almost a given, I'll narrow it down and say that one of the non-huge brands (ie. not Google, Microsoft or Yahoo) will do something really evil and stupid.

6. TechCrunch will decline in influence. The need for article-length TechCrunch style journalism in the tech business will disappear and be replaced with briefer links. del.icio.us provides for me more Web startups than I need to know about.

7. Conferences will shift towards a BarCamp/unconference model. Those which don't will die out. Bloggers will wield more power at conferences.

8. Nothing significant will happen with regards to the UK media's relationship with the Internet. A few upstarts at the Guardian will still get it, but the rest will continue in their drunken, dead-tree obsessed stupour. Local media really won't get it. The BBC will continue to have debates about whether or not to put the video that the licence payer has paid for online. Duh. It's only one call to Brewster Kahle, dudes, and it's done.

9. People will still put up RealVideo files, and people will get pissed off about it.

10. Nobody in the UK will change their wi-fi charging policies, and the use level will stay about the same - it'll be just folks with expense accounts.

So, I'm extremely cynical. I think that the innovation is going to come from individuals and very small startups. On the negative predictions, I'm hoping that they come out not to be true.

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I've totally fallen in love with Eclipse's PHP mode. It is actually making it possible for me to develop large scale object-oriented applications by doing really pleasant things like keeping track of function names for me in an outline - and doing auto-complete on functions. This includes while working in classes - because you are setting it up to work across a whole project rather than just a file.

Not only does it do functions and member functions in it's 'project outline' mode, it also shows you constants - which is quite useful, because they are supposed to be just that - constant.

Eclipse also saves your state when you shut down. Meaning that if you need to reboot, you can quit Eclipse, save your files and come back to them safe in the knowledge that they'll all be where you expected them to be. This is highly pleasant behaviour, and having spent a year or so using text editors with windows splattered across my screen, that kind of pleasant is extremely welcome.

It also lets you keep track of a to-do list just by putting the word TODO at the start of a one-line comment. This means that if you are hacking away and real-life intervenes, you just jot down what you need to do next by putting in a line like this:

// TODO Load in XML file and read settings

And then Eclipse, upon the next save of your file, will pick it up and add it to your Tasks view. Of course, for it to be useful, you need to actually enter useful information - "TODO Fix all this bolloxed up code so it works" is not quite as useful as something which describes what actually needs to be done.

It also has the language reference built-in, although this would be quite a lot more useful if it were searchable (most of the time I know the function or class I want to call by name, and I just want to see what I need to do. But this certainly is nice - it means that I have to spend less time in my browser (or worse, walking to my bookshelf to retrieve a programming book).

Eclipse is easily extendable. I've got mine set up to work with PHP, OWL, Java, C and C++. There is also some support for Python, Ruby and Perl (among others). Oxygen is also available as a plugin. The thought of being able to do all my projects in one interface is definitely appealing - especially since you can set-up separate TODO lists (I'm hoping to do a MSc in CS next year, and so I'd set up one TODO for my university assignments and one for my Opiumfield code).

Why am I getting ready to go in to development mode? Well, that's for later I'm afraid.

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Incentive Magazine: "Experienced travelers are often creatures of habit who are looking for consistency, ease and simplicity in many aspects of their day-to-day travel activities. This is true whether or not cost is an important aspect of the travel. There is evidence that the Best Western open access policy is resulting in increased room stays from the road-weary Internet-hungry travelers... Proprietors can choose to become frustrated chasing road weary traveling Wi-Fi leeches from their properties or view it as a marketing opportunity. Best Western does not appear to have advertised or publicized their widespread convenient and free Internet access."

Think of wifi as equivalent to lighting or packets of sugar. Neither make you money, but if you went in to a coffee shop that was completely dark and had no sugar, you'd probably not consider returning. Free wi-fi is a really good motivation for me to come and use your services - it creates goodwill and is likely to get people to come back and buy your overpriced coffee.

I'd love to know if there are any establishments near Charing Cross or Cannon Street stations in London that offer free wi-fi. I spend a lot of time in the former and I'd be most happy to come and buy a drink and surf the 'net if I've got 45 minutes to wait for a train. Plus you'd help undercut the Internet cafés, who so badly need to be brought down a peg or two.

If you want to know why subscription doesn't work, go to BT Openzone. Look at their price list. Would you pay that for wi-fi?

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I've finished writing up a script to allow one to perform slightly more standards-compliant SPARQL on PHP. RAP, the RDF API for PHP, supports SPARQL, but doesn't support specifying FROM statements.

There's an easy way of sorting that though - just take your SPARQL query, grep it for "FROM (.*)", and take each of the addresses it returns, load them in to RAP's memory model, and then run SPARQL across the model. My code doesn't yet support FROM NAMED, but it'd be trivially easy to add along the same lines that I have already suggested.

The problem is that you can't easily test against the GRAPH - since it's all just chucked together. The idea of this kind of hacking isn't to make it so that people can build a gigantic, totally compliant system. There are systems like Jena and ARQ (both Java-based) that do this (RAP also has a way of using MySQL to store large RDF datasets and run SPARQL over them).

But if the SemWeb is going to take off, it's not going to be application developers writing huge industry-strength Java servers, it's going to be individuals that are experimenting. Once they realise the benefits that the SemWeb brings, they can then go and evangelise those benefits, and then the big companies can pick up the Jena-type libraries and build industrial-strength services.

If you had to be the size of Google in order to develop web applications, Google would not exist.

I wanted to launch a little semantic product that uses OPML and Grazr as an output format and display mechanism. I've been trying to get it going since Christmas Eve, and I'm still not there. Hopefully, I can finish it off this evening and launch it properly tomorrow.

Just to give you an analogy, imagine if you had a collection of menus from lots of different restaurants and a menu reader, you take all of the menus, extract what they are saying, plonk them on to one giant menu and then ask that giant menu questions like "show me all the restaurants that are open after 5pm that serve vegetarian pizza". You might be able to get Google to give you that information. If you add "the owner must be interested in karate or the Gillmor Gang" to the end of that query (insane though it may be), then you need to use SemWeb technology like SPARQL.

I wrote up yesterday (but didn't publish) that the Semantic Web needs to be simple enough that anyone who can install WordPress can get going with it - not just as a 'producer' of RDF content, but as a consumer of RDF and a producer of services that crunch through RDF content. It's taken me all of about three days of trying out different pieces of software and reading documentation to get to this point. SemWeb needs to get easier if it's going to get widespread adoption.

Compare this to XML. If someone chucks me an XML file, I can crunch through it relatively easily with tools like the DOM and SimpleXML parsers. I can turn it all in to an array and crunch through it. It is reasonably easy to read XML and do things with it. Reading RDF triples and doing things with them needs to be just as easy.

We've got a lot of work to do if this is going to take off. I'm going to record a podcast later with some more reflections on the SemWeb and the process of getting in to it.

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A year ago today, I started blogging every day. 365 days of blogging continuously is something to celebrate. I'll leave all the pontificating stuff for later - but I have to say I'm extremely grateful to everyone who I've interacted with in the last year. The idea that I would have been invited to speak at a conference, been offered employment and worked with some of the smartest minds in the syndication business in the space of a year would have seemed ridiculous on Christmas Day 2005.

I have learned an enormous amount through blogging - through interacting with smart people both in real life and online. The last month or so has helped me in the mental transition from the Syndication Web through to the Semantic Web.

I'm just trying to figure out Friend of a Friend and in the process the method by which one produces RDF Schema and the Web Ontology Language (OWL).

This evening, I thought that it'd be a good idea to try and write an OWL ontology to describe Second Life relationships.

Here is the OWL file. The namespace is http://rdf.opiumfield.com/sl/0.1/

If you know anything about OWL, could you take a look at the file and see whether I've done something really silly. If not, then once all the family formalities are over tomorrow, I'll sit down and put together some example code.

I've included methods by which one can describe social "hang outs" and items for sale (like Kosso's BlogHUD, for instance).

So, tuck in and have a mince pie. And instead of slobbing out to the Queen's Speech, sit down and dream big about 2007, the year when we finally grok the Semantic Web.

Tags: semantic web, semweb, opml, christmas, owl, foaf, second life, secondlife, rdf, rdfs, rdf schema

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As some of you may know, I've been following the Semantic Web stuff quite closely over the last month or so, and I'm in the planning stages of building the Semantic Outlining framework so that you can add RDF triples to outline elements in OPML 2.0.

I’ve been playing around with Protege in order to try and understand RDF Schemas and OWL. It seems simple enough, but it doesn’t really do what I need, which is allow me to assert equivalence.

So, if I come up with some schema or namespace for terms - and start using those as predicates, is there any way of asserting that when I define myschema:title, it’s the same as dc:title?

Nova Spivack has written about this problem:

One of the reasons for this is that each ontology has it’s own naming conventions, philosophical orientation, domain nuances, design biases and tradeoffs, often guided by particular people and needs that drove their creation. Integrating across these different worldviews and underlying constraints is often hard.

The dream of the Semantic Web vision is that someday there will be thousands or millions of ontologies around the web, and millions of instances of them. And these will all somehow be integrated automagically, or at least if they aren’t integrated on the semantic level, then there will be magic software that embodies that integration… Unless mappings are created between [ontologies], instead of a Semantic Web, we’ll just have millions of little semantic silos. Maybe some company will succed in making the biggest silo and that will be “the” semantic web to most people. That might be the best solution in fact, but I’m not sure that is really what Tim Berners-Lee had in mind!

It’s great that we’ve got things like SPARQL, but unless we come up with some kind of way of mapping together distinct ontologies, then I fail to see the point in actually carrying on developing ontologies and churning out RDF.

Can’t we just extend the schema/ontology languages - RDFS, OWL etc. - so as to define equivalence? I mean, if you churn out RDF in one way, I could write a schema (or copyright concerns aside, copy a pre-existing schema) and add some extra assertions to it to express equivalence.

So, we’d have triples that are like this:

http://rdf.opiumfield.com/example/title isEquivalentTo http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/title .

http://rdf.opiumfield.com/example/author isEquivalentTo http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/creator .

As for inferring other schematic ‘stuff’ like the required conditions or disjoints, well, that is a challenge, but surely getting a globally compatible semantic system working comes before defining dis-relationships.

To think that we’re going to get one absolute, set schema is poppy-cock. Or, as Cory Doctorow would say, it’s metacrap. In the OPML space, distributed directories are an example of where competition should happen - if you think that you can run the root node better than the current root node maintainer, fire up your outliner and give it a try. Surely, we need similar competition in the semantic space?

Update: I’m still hoping that someone can give me more information, but I’m presuming that owl:sameAs serves this function. I really need to get my head around OWL properly, but it seems pretty damn confusing.

Surely, on the Semantic Web, the value is the person who builds pipes between the formerly siloed data, no? That’s what I’m looking for - and I’m not sure whether owl:sameAs does that or not.

Tag: rdf, semanticweb, owl, rdfs, protege, schema, semweb, opml, semanticoutlining

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I had an idea today about doing real-world verification of FOAF (and other) online identities.

It is basically to put an SHA-1 sum of the passport number on to one’s FOAF profile.

I’m currently fiddling around with the security of it.

Initally, I thought that putting the 9 digit passport number would be secure. I’m wrong about that. I’ve been brute forcing my own SHA1 checksummed passport number (not very efficiently, I may add). Everything up to six digits took less than a second to compute. I’m currently brute forcing seven digits, and it’s taking a bit of time to crunch.

Once I’ve figured out how long it takes to brute force my 9 digit passport number, then I’ll probably be able to work out how much more data I should add in order to make it secure.

One thing I’ve thought of is using the lower row of the mechanical readable section of the passport - which contains passport number, offset number, country code (eg. GBR, FRA, USA), date of birth, gender and date of passport expiry (I think that covers it). On my passport, that’s 28 alphanumeric digits. That should be more than enough to be secure from all but the most lunatic of crackers.

If that’s not enough, we can add some other information, such as putting the date of last stamped entry - finally, the Department of Homeland Security makes something more secure

Anybody got any better ideas to improve the security of this?

Tags: security, passport, sha1, foaf

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I don’t usually do memes, but since both Kosso and Amyloo have asked, let’s see what I can do. (I actually wrote this yesterday only for my system to crash - yes, Macs never crash - and I lost the data).

1. I am an art school dropout. As one person puts it, “it’s like kindergarden all over again” (juliemalady). Only, being a miserable bastard, that’s not the sort of experience I wanted to spend large chunks of my future income on (thank you, student loans). So I dropped out. I booked myself a train ticket on the Monday, stopped attending class and on Friday, packed up, got a taxi to the station and went home.

This was perhaps the best decision I have ever made - my life has got significantly better since leaving art school. The college I was at was a trumped-up “post-1992” University In Name Only in the Midlands. It cost me all of about £4k to do so, but, hey, better that than living life with an art degree on my CV.

2. I’m an unashamed Americaphile. I’ve visited twice now and enjoyed it enormously. I’m a future American in waiting. If you are from the State Department and reading this, please drop me an email - I really want a Green Card, I really don’t want to live in Britain for much longer - this place is driving me completely crazy. (Note: My love for America has nothing to do with that ridiculous arse known as the President - my love for America has more to do with Thomas Jefferson and the First Amendment than it does for any president in the last 50 years or so…)

3. I love jazz, soul, funk and gospel music. I despise almost all the indie crap that is touted as the “NEXT BEST THING” by the blasted NME. Seriously, pick up a copy of the NME from 5 years ago. How many of the NEXT BEST THING indie bands still exist? Don’t worry though, it’ll still be in the hidden recesses of some hipsters iPod snuggled up in the pocket of his “pre-worn” jeans.

4. I’ve been to confession once in my life. I have only prayed properly once in my life - but I spent a lot of time pretending to pray in order to satisfy teachers - repeating words that have no meaning to me. Gee whiz, and now I’m an atheist. Who would have thunk it, eh? When I was in the Scouts, I recited the phrase “I promise to do my best, To do my duty to my God, To the Queen and my Country”. Let’s see how I’ve ranked. I’m an atheist republican who wants to get a Green Card. I’d say I’ve done my duty - but I’m not sure that my duty extends to God, Queen or Country. I dislike the latter two, and think the former doesn’t exist. I have done my duty to intellectual honesty though.

5. I speak no languages except English (okay, I speak some programming languages, but they don’t count - when I get lost in Paris or Copenhagen, no amount of JavaScript, C++ or Perl will help). I am quite ashamed of the fact. I’d really like to be able to speak, read and write French and/or German. The former primarily so I can tell the world how shit Le Web 3 was in both English and French, and the latter so I can read Nietzsche in the original. I am also a subscriber to some extent to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determinism. The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

I must say I also agree with Alex Barnett’s fifth fact.

Who shall I tag? Suw Charman, Mike Kowalchik, Adam Tinworth, Ivan Pope and Rachel Clarke.

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Today I’ve been writing schema. In fact, I’m trying to write a simple RELAX NG schema for OPML 2.0. I’ve found the specification pretty clear to work from, and the schema is coming together nicely.

I’ve still got a few things to fix. It’s strange - I’ve validated my schema against the RNG schema and it’s fine, but oXygen doesn’t want to validate OPML against my schema. Perhaps I’ll try it in PHP5’s DOM validator in the morning.

What’s next? Once I’ve got a working RELAX NG schema for OPML 2.0, I can add Semantic Outliner extensions to the schema so we can validate Semantic Outlines. Then it’s time to write the parser. Then I release the whole bloody lot. First as a service and then as code. The parser will be using RAP - the RDF API for PHP (and PHP5).

I took an hour or so out to go and buy the standard lens for my camera. When I bought the camera body (Pentax K100D) a while back, they didn’t have the standard lens in stock (not a problem since I already have old manual focus SMC Pentax ‘M’ lenses for my camera). I got it today, and it’s a great piece of glass.

So, not much done in terms of feeds read - but we are getting there with the code.

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Niall Kennedy has some early information about del.icio.us’ new API function to get a list of the tags which people are using for their bookmarks.

Basically, you can now quite easily get hold of del.icio.us top tags for a URL in JSON format.

I’m not a big JSON fan. I prefer XML or PHP arrays. Good thing I’ve got PHP 5.2.0 installed on my web server. json_decode handles it without me even having to think about it.

(Also, eBay hosts this excellent XML to JSON XSLT)

So chuck anything you like at me. XML, HTML, PHP arrays, JSON. I can read it and turn it in to something useful.

I’m basically writing a tag parser at the moment - which is easy enough. You just look through and find the rel attribute and then chunk through the URL in a really ugly way to get the tag.

Only a number of popular web services don’t actually follow the rel=tag microformat. Yes, that means you, Flickr, Zooomr and YouTube. I’m ignoring YouTube because the tag quality on there tends to be so low (people just tend to type in a sentence in to the tag box and so we get “i” “really” “like” “this” “video” or some equally rubbishy set of tags).

Why is it that these services aren’t speaking microformats like everyone else is? They are standards for a reason…

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I tried to write this up yesterday and got kind of didn’t get very far (I was trying to do it in the Apple Store in London which is crazy, mad busy and where coherent thought is made almost impossible by the constant din of people trying out iPod speakers).

I want to introduce an idea I’ve been working on which is a simple namespace extension to OPML which I am calling so - short for semantic outlining.

What semantic outlining does is allows one to add attributes or elements to an OPML file that describe semantic relationships. It’s intentionally a hacky language because OPML is kind of an odd format when you look at it from the perspective of semantics.

I am going to write a parser in PHP to turn OPML with semantic additions in to a set of RDF triples or XML-serialised RDF.

There are some native rules that I am writing to make semantic inferences from OPML.

First of all, so:xmlUrl. This may be familiar if one has looked at OPML code. It’s the same as OPMLs xmlUrl - but it serves a different function. so:xmlUrl is a simple inference that the parser makes on outline elements with the type attribute set to “rss”. It basically asserts “this HTML URL has an XML version at this URL”.

How will writing OPML change in order to make it semantic?

Well, first of all, one will be able to set various parser rules in the head of the OPML file. The element will be of the sort so:parserRules and contain sub-elements that define what the parser should do. For instance, I am thinking that if there is an outline element containing the attribute type set to rss or link, then the parser ought to declare a new triple to state that the text attribute of the outline node ought to be set as the dc:title.

Where am I going with this? Well, the first thing is to make the explication part work. This means basically defining a new element that allows one to add explicit semantic markup to existing elements. This is done by making a subnode of the outline element called so:resource. Various simple inferential rules then figure out what the resource is - basically, it looks at the parent node, figures out whether there is a URL there (looking at url, htmlUrl and xmlUrl attributes in that order) and uses that (the RDF library will give it a “genid” type resource name on the graph when it parses if it doesn’t have a URL).

The second step is to do semi-explicit markup. This is a way of simply adding extra namespace attributes to an outline element. For instance, if one was linking to a website using a type="link", one could add a dc:language="en" on the end to declare the language of the resource one is linking to. You then declare in the head an element called so:parseNSatts with the namespace prefix in there (eg. ‘dc’) and the parser will then pull those attributes out of the document and apply them.

The third step is to come up with a way of doing implied description from OPML. Once I get to this stage, I am going to set up a group to discuss the best ways of doing this. Looking at the OPML 2.0 specification, I think that there is a lot of value in pulling in the created attribute, and the little-used category attribute.

I’ve written up some sample markup, but I’m not very happy with it. I’m hoping to eventually write up a schema in RELAX NG.

The important question is whether or not what I’m doing meets the OPML 2.0 specification. As far as I can see, it does. Here is what the OPML 2.0 specification says about extending the standard:

An OPML file may contain elements and attributes not described on this page, only if those elements are defined in a namespace, as specified by the W3C.

Do I expect software like Grazr to read the Semantic Outlining extensions? No. You guys can rest easy. If you are already parsing OPML, and you haven’t got time to parse it, just ignore all the namespace extensions that I am adding. I’ve built a few test files and found that this is basically the behaviour that Grazr exhibits. I need to test a few more test files and test them with a few more OPML readers.

As for OPML writers - I’d really love to work with the folks who make them to implement Semantic Outlining functions in to your systems. Once I’ve got my JavaScript skills going, I’m hoping to make an outline editor in the browser to help add semantic markup to OPML. This is something I am trying to avoid though.

Last month, Danny Ayers produced a script to go from SPARQL to OPML. With a bit of work, it will be possible soon to have OPML and all the RDF/SemWeb technology integrated in to one another.

It is a profound fallacy to think that “SynWeb” and “SemWeb” are contradictory. With a bit of work, they can be partners.

Perhaps I’m doing this all the wrong way. My basic design goals are simple: add a highly flexible and extensible ability to turn OPML in to RDF triples without breaking anything that OPML is already doing or going against the OPML 2.0 specification. Certain people don’t like the OPML specification, but that is not the issue. We’ve already got an ecosystem of tools that read and write OPML, and, more importantly, we’ve got users who enjoy using them.

I’m hoping to have a functioning prototype of the parser ready in a few weeks, and at least some sample documents (for me the design process is simple: get something working, get some examples, then write a schema - it may be messy, but it’s far better than doing it the other way around - writing the schema should be the last thing to do, not the first thing).

Tags: rdf, opml, semanticweb, semweb, outlining

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Last night, Rod Liddle’s documentary on atheism was broadcast on Channel 4. RichardDawkins.net has links to the YouTube videos of it.

The trouble with journalists (or broadcasters, in this case) is fairly obvious - they are often given the chance to pontificate on topics for hours on television without having down even the most cursory research, and allowed to make thoroughly outrageous statements with a straight face (and unlike us bloggers, they don’t do corrections quite so willingly).

I was actually filmed a while back for this programme - I was on a panel discussion about the secularist movement in the UK - but the film was not used (I would like to believe it’s because I was coherent and rational and the suchlike, but it was probably due to the fact that the venue was badly lit and I said some fairly incendiary things about our friends, the “community leaders”).

If you are looking for a way to while away just under an hour of your life, watching the clips linked to above will do it just fine.

Liddle has made the classic mistake of doing the “atheism == Stalinism/Hitler/nasty people” tactic, which means you can at the very least get some clips out of the old boys.

There’s more discussion of this programme over at IIDB along with a listing of some of the fairly fundamental errors.

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Yesterday, I couldn’t be bothered to respond properly to Loïc’s post. Today I will.

“I always want to listen, learn and improve”

The first step is admitting it.

“That said, I must now admit that the reactions in the blogosphere convinces me blogging conferences are dead. The tools we developed have entered the mainstream and we must embrace that.”

When Loïc writes “the end of blogger conferences”, I have to agree to some degree - but also strongly disagree. BloggerCon was one of the most interesting conferences I’ve ever listened to. That happened late last year and was extremely enjoyable to listen to.

Blogging conferences is dead if you take the conference model - but blogging conferences are certainly not dead in the unconference model. BarCamp, PodCamp, BloggerCon and similar events are still well-suited for bloggers and other independent media producers like podcasters and videobloggers.

“Artists, academics, politicians and so many others have joined the ranks of bloggers and web entrepreneurs in recognizing the power of social software. We must bring them into our conversation”

Again, this is not exactly the point. I didn’t want politicians excluded. I wanted politicians to be subject to scrutiny through having a lot of questions. The only way to do that is to have three or four panels with a lot more time given to Q&A. If you want bloggers to attend, you’ve got to let them ask the questions. This did not happen at Le Web 3, and it was extremely disappointing that it did not.

“People don’t clap their hands if they don’t want to”

Take a course in social psychology - if you have enough people doing something and people don’t have a strong reason not to, they’ll do just about anything.

“As for other aspects we have had almost all positive feedback for the top-level networking, food and physical set up for more than 1,000 people”

Ah, but food and networking do not justify a bad conference experience any more than the chance to chat to interesting people on the train is a justification for the trains breaking down. If networking is the object, then we can do it a lot cheaper - events like BarCamp and other evening events that go on in places like London let you meet people in the industry without a 300-500 Euro admissions price.

“Next year - for those who want join an open conference that brings blogging beyond technology”

An open conference? What, like this year’s unconference? I’ll believe it when I see it Loïc. But as I’ve said elsewhere, I’m not going to Le Web 4 unless I don’t pay a penny for the privilege. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

“Bloggers have power”

I’m glad that has finally sunk in. One would think that working for Six Apart might teach you that, but I expect being at the center of a user-generated shitstorm helps too.

The point is that so many people got up on stage talking about that disgusting phrase “user-generated content” that, in reacting as we did, we had to say “actually, we’re not just content generators - we’re people, talk to us”.

If bloggers have power, then the answer has to be simple - make sure they aren’t there next year.

“My two reference conferences are the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos and TED both by invitation only”

That would explain a few things. If only that information were made clear right at the beginning of the cycle of promotion for Le Web, I would have stayed away.

“I want to say I made a big mistake by not asking the room for feedback before doing it. I got caught by my enthusiam and just did it without asking. Not listening to bloggers and your “audience” is a big mistake I have been warning dozens of brands, speakers and politicians for years and I did it.”

“audience”, huh? Why was it a “60 million people audience” when you were speaking to Sarkozy et al. but it’s a scare quotes audience now that they have turned?

Later on in the post in the “I hope I responded to these criticisms above” section, Loïc links to me quite a lot (specifically in six and seven).

I do not think that Loïc has provided enough response to criticism 6 - that no or not enough conversation happened (with either the politicians or more generally). The fact is that there is a huge ironical distance between the claims of the blog pushers (“Blogs start conversations”!) and what went on at Le Web 3. This has not been addressed.

The seventh criticism on Loïc’s list is something I still have to affirm - it has not been answered. Why is it that I have to show respect to Shimon Peres or Nicolas Sarkozy by closing my laptop and not blogging, but it’s not disrespectful to danah boyd or David Weinberger to keep my laptop open and blog about it? Sorry, but it’s a universal thing. I do not consider it disrespectful to blog or to use my laptop at a conference. In fact, I believe the absolute opposite. It is highly disrespectful to have a public conversation and not to report it. Not blogging someone at a conference is a way of saying “you’re not important enough for my readers to read about”.

Tags: leweb3, loiclemeur, loic le meur, criticism, conferences

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Okay, I tried to write this entry earlier only to find my laptop freeze up on me. I was out on Thursday night and was chatting with Gareth Rodger about Twitter. The subject of APIs and XML came up, and Gareth had a problem with the fact that XML languages and dialects seem to be springing up willy nilly, and that API vendors seem incapable of sticking to one XML schema - or they define their own when a simpler dialect like Atom or RSS would do the job.

Gareth had a big dream - basically, an XML parser with artificial intelligence. It would be able to detect implicit schema and data types and crunch them in to a usable format with ease. We’ve been dreaming about this kind of thing too, but it’s not gonna happen.

This kind of thing is what leads people to the opinion that XML is like regular expressions - “when you say that you’ve got a problem and you use XML to solve that problem, all you’ve got now is two problems”.

That may be so, but we can do a few things to make the situation better with a bit of hackery.

We can make some pretty good decisions about content automatically by reading schemas automatically and then producing data out of it. If we look at a schema - say an RNG schema - for documents that contain a ‘oneOrMore’ or ‘zeroOrMore’ element declaration with multiple sub-elements, we can easily match things within it to elements that we already know.

I think that what we need is some kind of central directory where we can submit XSLTs along with API documentation. Then we nominate one person to basically keep an eye on returns from APIs - this would mean just visually looking over the changes each week and making sure that nothing unexpected happens.

If a change happened that broke the stylesheet, then they could drop a bug notification in to a Bugzilla type system and then someone who is capable of changing the XSLTs could change them.

I think we’d need to think about some way of putting an incentive in place so that people would be willing to help write these stylesheets. I’m thinking some kind of semi-voluntary commercial licence to support development. Again, this is a deep alpha idea.

We already do this - the guy who maintains the Apple Dashboard widget for Tube status is a great example. I use the file he produces in order to power some little applets. He makes sure that his XML file is working - that the scraper is pulling the data from London Transport and so on. I’d love it if there were a more official way of doing this (the guy hasn’t licenced it - I just opened up the JavaScript file that powers the Dashboard widget and looked for the link to his XML file).

So, who’s up for this kind of thing? Remember, this is just a ‘brain fart’ - an idea I had this morning that I had to scribble down on my Palm Pilot that I’ve finally gotten around to writing it up.

Tags: xml, xslt, api, tagsoup, mashup

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If the last week has taught me anything, it has been the importance of telling the truth about the world around me. Sometimes you have to shout the truth in order for anyone to pay any attention, but it sometimes works.

On the same basis, I think it is time to link to some other truth-tellers.

This story over at ODAN is pretty damn heart-wrenching. It is of the life of a former Numerary Assistant to Opus Dei:

My life was controlled and suppressed and I had little access to the outside world. Our newspapers were censored and our television was often switched off if it was deemed unsuitable by one of the fanatic numeraries… I lived a life of conformity and indoctrination. I began to ask questions about some of the contradictions that I saw, but was quickly quieted by being told I would go to hell for even thinking such things.

At the other end of the spectrum, John Roche writes of his time in Opus Dei:

The supervision of our lives was almost total. To leave the house one had to get permission from the director. Members were not permitted to go to the cinema, theatre or public sports, or to sleep in their parents’ house. One even had to get permission to read any book. Innumerable other rules from the Father concerned deportment, dress, relations with other members, how to write letters, how to make the best use of soap and how to close doors.

They maintain control by disabling the judgment of many members and their ability to assess objectively or criticise Opus Dei… This is mainly achieved by undermining the semantics of ordinary language in a remarkably Orwellian manner. So extraordinarily successful are these techniques that lay members will claim to be completely free. It’s thought-control raised to a fine art.

Whenever I hear a claim that someone ha