I take my eye off the ball and all sorts of stuff happens at the W3C!
The biggest news is that SPARQL is now a Recommendation! The Data Access Work Group has done a stunning job - SPARQL is well-specified, has a comprehensive test suite and is tremendously useful. For all those people who are cynical about the W3C, I suggest they take a look at SPARQL. We also have a MIME type for SPARQL queries - application/sparql-query. Nice.
Also, Notation3 has been published as a Team Submission (a little known part of W3C folklore where members of the W3C Team formally ask timbl to publish a document on w3.org, which he then does if he wants to), as has Turtle. The N3 Team Submission is by timbl and DanC while the Turtle one is by timbl and dajobe. This is a good thing. N3 has made a baby step towards standardization - the spec is filling out, and it's a degree of formality higher than being part of Design Issues. I don't see any reason not to standardize Turtle and N3 - both are already widely implemented in a lot of different tools and languages. Interestingly, before Monday, the last Team Submission was GRDDL, and that's now a Recommendation also.
I'm currently working on a data portability 'thing' - namely, getting my data out from the clutches of my bank and making it more useful. I discovered today that NatWest allow one to get CSV data out, and to cancel printed monthly bank statements. This is great news. I don't need bits of paper cluttering up my life when I've got a computer that's a lot more secure. I now have a CSV file with the last 45 transactions on my current account and the last 48 on my credit card - including interest payments, direct debits, BACS payments, purchases, paid-in cheques and currency conversions. The data isn't great, but it's a start. I've already started writing a parser for it in Python. I'm going to basically try and turn it into something a little more useful and natural than CSV (possibly XML or even RDF - I can see a use for running Rules on the data with regular expressions), and figure out a de-duping process (quite important with financial transactions) - then I can start storing this in a data store and start running queries over it. It's difficult designing the data in a useful way - I wish NatWest (and, presumably, the whole financial sector) would provide better quality data.
For instance, it would be interesting to see spending graphs and so on in order to try and save money and stay on budget, look for recurring patterns (bills) and generally manage money better. I've also been playing around with Cha-Ching, a nice financial app for OS X. Call me cynical, but this is the kind of thing I'm not trusting to a 'beta' web app, however shiny the buttons are.
