There's a short article in Nature (subscribers only I'm afraid) this week about Google Base and its potential impacts on the science community. In particular whether it might galvanise greater data sharing between scientists. I've been corresponding with Declan Butler, the author of the piece, on this and some related topics recently, and he ended … Continue reading Nature Quote
Author: Leigh Dodds
CTO at EnergySparks (https://energysparks.uk), previously Director of Delivery at the Open Data Institute. Proud Dad.
Open Mapping System?
I've been playing with Google Maps a bit for a talk I'm giving on Monday. It's addictive stuff. But I'd like to be able to use alternate kinds of maps. E.g. plotting Samuel Pepys's diaries on a historical map of London, or points on a sonar map of the sea, or views of MMPORG maps. … Continue reading Open Mapping System?
WebCite
Alf Eaton posts today to point to the new WebCite service. This is going to be very useful. Don't think so? Well there's plenty of research to show that link atrophy is a big problem in scientific literature: Persistence of Web References in Scientific Research See also: A study of missing Web-cites in scholarly articles: … Continue reading WebCite
SPARQLing
I've been enjoying a bit of SPARQLing recently and you can now begin to see some of the results: XML.com has published the first part of my SPARQL tutorial. The tutorial is backed with a SPARQL query service that I whipped up using Jena. As the documentation explains there are several output options supported by … Continue reading SPARQLing
Writing an ARQ Extension Function
The core SPARQL specification provides some hooks for extension in the form of Extensible Value Testing. This allows an application to provide custom functions for testing variables in a SPARQL query, where the built-in tests don't cover a particular need. The specification notes that: SPARQL queries using extension functions are likely to have limited interoperability, … Continue reading Writing an ARQ Extension Function
Parameterised Queries with SPARQL and ARQ
When writing queries for an application, whether for an SQL or an RDF data source, its common to end up with a core set of queries that are used time and again. Typically these queries vary only in the values of a few variables. For example, you might have a query to lookup details of … Continue reading Parameterised Queries with SPARQL and ARQ
First Jena User Conference
HP Labs have announced the first Jena User Conference to be held at the labs in Bristol on 10th-11th May 2006. As the website notes, the conference will include presentations on: applications and tools developed by Jena usersdemosin-depth explorations of Jena featurestutorialsdiscussions about the future development of Jena See the call for submissions for details … Continue reading First Jena User Conference
Florescu: Re-evaluating the Big Picture
Ken North just posted this email to XML-DEV drawing attention to a presentation by Daniela Florescu titled Declarative XML Processing with XQuery -- Re-evaluating the Big Picture (Warning: PDF). It makes for interesting reading. In the presentation, Florescu argues that XML is in a growth crisis and that there's a need for more architectural work … Continue reading Florescu: Re-evaluating the Big Picture
It’s Like the Ultimate Lazy Web
So you're sitting in a coffee shopping talking over an idea with a friend: how to get people to contribute quality metadata on all manner of topics. Kind of a semantic wikipedia but where the goal is data entry rather than essay writing. The basic concept is straight-forward: start from a basic fact such as … Continue reading It’s Like the Ultimate Lazy Web
QOTD: Fielding on Form(s)
Roy Fielding on why HTML4 forms only support GET and POST: The only reason the HTML4 spec has only two options available in that field is *because* of the browser bugs. W3C specs have no spine. In an earlier message in the thread he urged folk to help fix the browsers. Never occured to me … Continue reading QOTD: Fielding on Form(s)
Lost Boy 