Rdf

The market for books about mashups has become fairly crowded over the past few years but none have really enticed me as from a casual look most seem more interested in following the trend than offering solid information. Thankfully PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects manages to slide in a good number of practical programming tips as it works its way through a variety of services. The book dedicates the majority of each chapter to more general concerns than just interfacing with the system in the chapter’s title. So Chapter 2—“Buy It On Amazon”—spends most of its time exploring XML-RPC and REST approaches and building tools to work with those different styles of interface. Similarly the next chapter spends most of its time introducing WSDL, XML Schema and SOAP before showing how they can be used with Microsoft Live Search. ...

A recent comment reminded me of an old entry proposing yet another project I never had time to follow through with: Using Trac and Subversion with Social Documents. The idea there was to make use of subversion’s utility for version control and trac’s existing frontend for browsing that to present versioned documents. In hindsight, I don’t think trac would actually be a good frontend for this unless the intended audience was entirely techies. Trac works for those of us who use it every day to follow a variety of projects, and its ability to combine a wiki with version control of the ‘official’ versions of documents provides some interesting ideas, but the interface just wouldn’t work. ...

Inspired by Sam Ruby’s work on applying the Universal Feed Parser tests to the Ruby FeedTools, I’ve spent a little time this afternoon working on testing XML_Feed_Parser with that same test suite. There’s a lot of work to do! UFP’s tests consist of a series of feed files, some well-formed, and some illformed, with a description and test condition defined at the top of the file. eg. Example description So far all I’ve done is run a script through all the tests for well-formed feeds, testing whether XML_Feed_Parser throws an exception when I try and interpret them. When run against the current CVS, 1181 of the 1273 feeds parsed successfully and 92 failed. 68 of those failures were due to encoding problems (which I’ll try and work around, but won’t be able to cleanly fix until PHP has full unicode support), and another 17 were a result of not supporting CDF, leaving another seven I need to get fixed asap. ...

Spending a weekend in Chicago last month and looking for a non-starbucks coffee shop in the loop, I was frustrated to find that the otherwise very handy delocator.net didn’t have an option to limit a search to a radius of less than 5 miles or to plot a group of results on a map. We eventually gave up and went to one of the many Starbucks highly visible in our immediate vicinity. ...

I’ve been following the chatter over microformats ( XFN, xFolk, hCalendar, and their kin) for some time, but having been having a hard time formulating a response to all the discussion. In particular, the discussion over at Ryan’s blog and some postings such as this one by Danny Ayers have triggered further thinking. ...

Discussion of ’the Semantic Web’ and ‘Web Services’ rarely dies down, but it seems like there’s been more than usual of late. As analysts yet again predict that this year will the “The Year of Web Services” more people are beginning to agree that such hype isn’t making any real impact on the use of service-based architectures. One of the better comments of late is Danny Ayers’ call to start seeing web applications as “features of the web” rather than standalone entities. The Semantic Web will never evolve if we merely see web services as ways to escape writing certain pieces of code ourselves; we need instead to be trying to grasp at how the whole might work. ...

Looking to the future of the Grand Rapids WiFi site, I hope to see it become part of an integrated set of local websites supporting and promoting community development and local business. Geolocation seems to be the topic du jour, and while the site has for several months featured geodata about all of its locations the time seemed right to develop it further. Today I’ve been adding RDF representations of almost all the data on the site. I’ve extended the RDF descriptions of each location to list all the comments on that location. The vocabulary for that is one I found over at FilmTrust and it means that almost all the useful content of the site can now be represented using RDF. ...

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been trying to get the Redland RDF toolkit installed on my powerbook. I initially tried installing it using the vanilla tools, but kept running into the error: ld: common symbols not allowed with MH_DYLIB output format with the -multi_module option /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.a(my_error.o) definition of common _errbuff (size 512) make[2]: *** [librdf.la] Error 1 I upgraded a few of the standard tools (such as libtool) using the latest sources from the GNU website, and Raptor and Rasqal compiled without a hitch. But Redland still threw that same error and google turned up little in the way of help. ...