The Library of Unwritten Books

I just saw a piece about The Library of Unwritten Books in the Book Show on BBC 4. Couldn't resist digging up more information. This BBC News story "The art of not writing books" is a good introduction, with some more details here. Such a cool idea. Hope the books get collected into a published … Continue reading The Library of Unwritten Books →

Google Scholar

You can't go far these days without tripping over commentary on Google's strategy. I've not really paid this much attention, but it's been interesting watching the launch of Google Scholar and reactions from the library communities because it directly intersects with my day job: managing the team that has built and is enhancing IngentaConnect my … Continue reading Google Scholar →

foaf-beans 0.1

I'm pleased to announce the first iteration of a Java API for FOAF based around the Jena semantic web toolkit. The API, which I've dubbed "foaf-beans", is an attempt to provide a number of convenience classes that will allow Java developers to quickly get to grips with reading and writing FOAF data. With this in … Continue reading foaf-beans 0.1 →

Chaals on Schema Documentation

This is an interesting posting from Charles McCathieNevile to the rdf-interest group discussing how to correctly document an RDF Schema. Basically: Ensure that the terms are annotated with labels and comments Flag annotations with their language code, and seek translations into other languages Use SKOS or custom properties to embed actual examples in the schema … Continue reading Chaals on Schema Documentation →

del.icio.us and foaf:interest

Using the foaf:interest property it's possible for me to describe my interests (musical, technical, etc) in my FOAF profile. The term has been specified so that it has a range of foaf:Document, with the implication that the foaf:topic of that foaf:Document is what I'm interested in. Seem a bit convoluted? Maybe, but there are benefits... … Continue reading del.icio.us and foaf:interest →

Public Collections of RDF

Bob DuCharme is looking for public collections of RDF. He's compiled an initial list and is looking for further examples of, ideally large, data sets.

Bad Fall

Yesterday my father-in-law fell 20ft from the Severn Bridge. If you're in the South West you may have seen it reported on the news, there's some coverage and even a photo story of the three hour rescue on the BBC website. The good news is that he's basically OK, although he had to have surgery … Continue reading Bad Fall →

Bayesian Agents

Classifier4J is a Java text classification library that includes a text summariser and a Bayesian classifier. It was my interest in the latter that lead me to play with the API recently, as I wanted to demonstrate to some colleagues the ease with which one can use Bayesian classification to create a content filter/recommender. Well, … Continue reading Bayesian Agents →

URLinfo

I've been doing some playing with a neat tool called URLinfo. It's a simple form and customizable bookmarklet that allows you to reflect on a given URL to discover all sorts of interesting information, which ranges from related links, validators, del.icio.us bookmarks, and blog backlinks. You can even carry out some basic textual analysis on … Continue reading URLinfo →

Working In A Small World

Stumbled over these musings on how small world theory applies to company organization. They've been languishing in my personal wiki for many months, thought I might as well post them as is. Whilst reading the first few chapters of "Small World" by Mark Buchanan, I was fascinated by the work of Granovetter (see "The Strength … Continue reading Working In A Small World →