The EFF has published "Dear Hollywood: An Open Letter to the Hardworking Men and Women in the Entertainment Industries", which is well written and worth reading, especially if you're in the entertainment industry (not that I'd expect to have readers from the entertainment industry, but that's all right on the internet). This matters, and I care about the issue.
The W3C has acknowledged WSMO-Lite, a lightweight set of terms for describing the semantics of Web services that builds on the standard SAWSDL. According to the W3C's own Team comment, WSMO-Lite "is a useful addition to SAWSDL for annotations of existing services and the combination of both techniques can certainly be applied to a large number of semantic Web services use cases."
So now, if you were interested in what SAWSDL could be useful for, here's an answer. We are using WSMO-Lite for semantic Web services automation in the project SOA4All, and especially in the SWS registry iServe.
We also apply WSMO-Lite to RESTful Web services - through the microformat hRESTS we structure the HTML documentation that every RESTful API has, and then it's easy to add SAWSDL/WSMO-Lite annotations.
So that's what's been keeping me busy.
If you've ever wondered about what virtual worlds (like Second Life) are good for, beside games, Greg Pfister describes a better way to do presentations:
Living in a presentation. It cannot be done in two dimensions. You cannot even do it in real life. It's something virtual worlds are, uniquely, good for.
Apparently, Erik Naggum died. I never knew him, but words of his death reached me and I've learned a lot. Two excerpts from his entry on wikiquote (these are his signatures, not necessarily quotes):
Rest in peace, Erik Naggum.
This month, the Web reaches 20 years since its conception and there will be celebrations! Boy, am I happy not to be too much older than the Web.
Happy birthday, Web. Thanks, Sir Tim.
David Booth of HP has an article online called RDF and SOA. Summary quoted (emphasis mine):
The following seem to be key principles for leveraging RDF-enabled services in an SOA.
- Define interface contracts as though message content is RDF
- Permit custom XML/other serializations as needed
- Provide machine-processable mappings to RDF
- Treat the RDF version as authoritative
- Each data producer supplies a validator for data it creates
- Each data consumer supplies a validator for data it expects
- Choose RDF granularity that makes sense
Apart from suggesting that RDF can be a good internal view on the data exchanged by Web services, with benefits especially in versioning, David suggests that validation has two faces - the producer should say how to validate that the data makes sense, and the consumer should say how to validate that the data is fit for the use by this particular consumer.
Further, David wonders about the mapping between XML and RDF - XSLT seems good enough for lifting from XML to RDF, and SPARQL seems to be a good start for transforming from RDF to XML. I can heartily suggest XSPARQL, a fusion of XQuery and SPARQL, for both mapping directions, but especially for lowering. (I'm a minor coauthor of XSPARQL.)
Going through the AtomPub protocol, I discovered that it introduces an HTTP header called Slug (see Section 9.7). I find the name quite funny, and it is an unexpected (though not surprising) part of AtomPub. And it should be applicable outside of AtomPub, so why not spread the word of its existence. 8-)
The header is used by the client creating a new entry to suggest to the server what the server should put as part of the URI of the new entry. Typically, an entry like the one you're reading could be located at http://jacek.cz/blog/2008/02/04/slug-header — but I don't have my blogging engine set up to do that, I like my numbers. Anyway, when creating the entry using an AtomPub client, it would say "Slug: Slug header?" and that's how it'd get into the URI.
Oh, and while the AtomPub RFC says Slug's an entity header, I'd have thought that it's more of a request header — it applies more to the POST than to the new entry, and it won't get transferred back with the entry content (response entity) when you go GET it later. Minor detail, not that anybody really cares about the differences between request/response and entity headers.
Tiny things like the Slug header make the Web infrastructure fun.
Just came over a photo by a friend of mine from the general area where I used to live. The picture shows a common kind of view. Sure glad I'm out of there. 8-)
From Ina: a bloody anthropologist talking to us about computers (and it's "about time", as Ina said):
Through Chris: type "failure" to google, see the first result. I wonder, is this a failure of Web search, or is it perhaps public opinion showing? 8-)
(Just adding the 2c of my opinion.)
Years late, but Apple finally makes the switch, and with style! See Apple - Mighty Mouse. One less reason against buying a mac. 8-)
Jonathan has a piece, Schlaft gut, where he says:
Instead of top and bottom sheets, covered with blankets and bedspreads and tucked in, the German bed is dressed in a bottom sheet and a duvet cover that is entirely enclosed in a sheet. This is a superior design in my mind [...]
Same style is widespread in Poland, Czech Republic and Austria (from my own extensive experience), and I also find it superior, therefore I'm glad to hear an American agree with me. Does anybody have any points in favor of the other approach? 8-)
In his entry A380 Fear and Loathing, Tim Bray says: ergo, this turkey will carry 800-plus suffering souls packed in like sardines
. Hey, if this means more people flying around, power to them! People getting to know (at least the tourist areas of) the foreign countries and cultures means more tolerance, right? Making the Earth smaller is, IMHO, a good thing. We may lose much of the global variety, but we gain a lot of local variety (Mexican food in Prague? Are you joking? Who'd be interested?) ultimately maybe even making humanity one nation.
Via a comment on Slashdot, I was directed to The ZoomQuilt and I can heartily recommend this.
Imagine the potential - a patchwork (can be zooming, panning, anything) of segments stitched together, and a recurring motive (like the reddish ribbons in the ZoomQuilt) is a nice touch, too. I can just imagine a growing image of this form, extended continuously with segments contributed by the web's artists and amateurs - wouldn't it be fascinating? It would probably require making it non-circular, but that wouldn't be much of a loss.
If something like this already exists, please point me to it. 8-)
Found via Tim Bray's ongoing, Google blog speaks about stopping comment spam. The solution is basically as follows (quote):
From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results.
I'm going to implement this, how about you? 8-)
[update] Just copied the MT plugin from MovableType page on nofollow plugin and it's done. 8-)
Here's a funny link to a somewhat rude post-election write-up, apparently by a disgruntled Wisconsin citizen (according to whois on the domain): Fuck the South.
I'm currently in Belmont, California in the W3C Workshop on Constraints and Capabilities for Web Services. We're basically talking about policies (not just WS-Policy, but these folks are here as well). Read on for my thoughts on this and for links to other participants.
I hope the outcome is a future W3C working group on Web Services Policy language that would be chartered to come up with a framework for capturing non-functional capabilities, constraints and preferences (cc&p's) for web resources and web services, including semantic web resources and semantic web services. I mention SWS explicitly because this policy language might in fact become a significant part of semantic web services description language.
I would discourage the use of the policy language for expressing the functional cc&p's just for practical purposes (to keep the purpose simple and clear), including choreographical constraints and the constraints on the content of the message bodies.
We (DERI) have an accepted position paper here, where you can read in section 3 what we see as non-functional capabilities, constraints and preferences.
Finally, I'm very glad for this opportunity to see again many cool folks, including co-chair Mark Nottingham, alphabetically Glen Daniels, Paul Downey, Dave Orchard, and Jeffrey Schlimmer, mentioning only those whose blogs I can readily link to, and many others, especially the W3C folks. If you feel left out, send me a link to your blog. 8-)
I'm reading about yesterday's new Apple - iMac G5. I like to say that a Mac will be my mid-life crisis machine - I've always admired Macs but never really had the guts for the OS change. But man, is it gorgeous!
An interesting topic for the hot and slow August - the site of the current olympic games in Athens has a linking policy that is unnecessarily restrictive, against the principles of the web and also (hopefully) unenforcable. I recommend a provocative HackCraft page that is, like this blog entry, in violation of said policy.
Today Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne has successfully and safely gone to the space (cca 100km altitude) and back, marking the first commercial manned space flight. See the Scaled Composites - Tier One / SpaceShipOne Home Page.
This is important because now it's clear private enterprises can go to space without the help from governments (except for the huge body of experience and some approvals). Basically, space flight has just gotten much cheaper and I have a renewed hope for space vacations or even actual colonies.
Perhaps the new "land of the free" could be established on the Moon, now that the USA seems to have some problems on the freedoms front. Imagine starting a country with no history whatsoever in a place where no native civilization would have to be destroyed in the process. I'd grab the first opportunity.
Joel Spolsky writes about how Microsoft Lost the API War. It's a long and very insightful article that I enjoyed reading, but now I'm wondering - what's it mean to me?
Personally, I'd just like somebody to rid me of the necessity to use the unpredictable MS Word, but since this will stay in the "rich client" area in the predictable future and nobody seems to be rushing towards HTML as the document format (even though email clients already have pretty good HTML editors), we'll stay stuck with Word as well. Unless, of course, somebody (EU?) forces a standard document format on Microsoft, creating space for interoperable competing products.