Tom Morris: 2008-03-28

David Peterson at SitePoint has a great blog post about Microsoft Research work into the Semantic Web - using Silverlight to visualise data from a new database that's a half-way house between a triplestore and a RDBMS. It's not RDF (see the comments), but it's not far off. The intended use case for this project is that of helping researchers keep track of 'stuff'. They certainly could do with that... 2008-03-28T15:16:35Z

Cultivating the garden 2008-03-28T14:50:59Z

Back in March 2006, I wrote a blog post called The Conversation Garden, asking whether or not anyone is going to do anything interesting with the humble message board. Hil over at Spirits Dancing points out that Twitter is the conversational marketplace that I described. Despite Facebook's looming presence, I still think the Web has a lot going for it.

Despite Twitter and despite blogging reaching an apex (perhaps?), I still participate in a fair few message boards, and a curse-inducing number of mailing lists. There's still a significant signal:noise problem, and it's not going away. People still aren't thinking boldly enough about this kind of thing. While in the nineties, it was "just install a message board", now it's become "just install a blog". Big deal.

POWDER Grouping gets Working Draft 2008-03-28T15:08:31Z

POWDER Grouping has been released as a W3C Working Draft. What does it do then? It specifies a framework for describing patterns of IRIs (that's URI+UTF-8 for those of you who can't keep track of what the current verbiage is for them funny things you put in the bar in yer browser). Why would you want to do that? Well, you might want to say in a machine readable way things to the effect of:

All the pages on www.example.org/porn/ are pornographic.

All the pages on www.porn.com are pornographic, except those in the /notporn directory.

All the pages on www.twitter.com/tommorris/ are written by a person named Tom Morris who also has a homepage at tommorris.org.

POWDER Grouping describes the formal semantics of a group of resources. Membership in that group is done through a variety of means. It can be through providing an explicit listing of URIs or by providing a list of patterns which they all meet - for example, a regular expression or a simple string match (of the sort "/notporn").

Once you describe a set of resources, you can then make declarations about that set - for instance, that they all contain a certain class of content, or that they are all made by one person - or whatever else it is you want to say about them.

Like a lot of the current work going on in the W3C's Semantic Web workgroups, it seems at first glance well specified. Keep it up!

Movable Type fails 2008-03-28T15:27:37Z

I tried to post the following comment on the BBC Internet blog attached to this entry by Ashley Highfield about Internet speeds:

Broadband 'speed' is not the only issue. The actual usable monthly download limit is also important. It matters very little to me if I can get 24 Mbps, if I can still only download 20Gb a month over it. If we are talking television, the difference between it taking fifteen minutes to download EastEnders and five is not important. But if you can only download (or - sorry - stream, since this is bbc.co.uk/blogs and we have to be politically correct for the rights holders) half the programmes you want to watch because you hit a monthly cap, that's the limiting factor, not the speed. Everything else that I might do - checking e-mail, browsing the web, SSHing into my servers, a few online games - are quite fine on 2Mb.
We need to demand from our ISPs that they provide not only high-speed connections but high-quality connections, which includes the ability to use them without download limits.

The Perl script (it's the BBC - what else?) that Movable Type uses to accept comments seems to not respond or something.

Su	Mo	Tu	We	Th	Fr	Sa
						1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30	31

Tom Morris

2008.03.28