Bottom-up semantic web session at ETech- January 24, 2004 I saw that Tantek has proposed an interesting participant session for the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (which happens to share titles with this weblog): Real World Semantics - Today's web developers are using XHTML more and more to express themselves semantically, while leaving the presentation to CSS. Learn how this grass-roots bottom-up lower-case semantic web is quietly and incrementally growing in all sorts of places. Please head over the the ETech Wiki and add your feedback to.http://www.netalive.org/semantics/archives/2004/01/bottomup_semant.html Someone will build the bomb- January 22, 2004 Sebastian comments on my previous post: How am I supposed to act in a self-responsible manner if I want to "safely use a public, globally linked network" under these conditions Unplug my laptop As much as I hate to admit this: If by "safely" you mean anonymously unplugging your PC will be the only option. The data is there, and it is technically possible to have a smart program look at the whole web and find out which parts belong together. Nobody has done that yet, but someone will. Someone..http://www.netalive.org/semantics/archives/2004/01/someone_will_bu.html Full post feeds available at new URL- January 22, 2004 I have changed Real World Semantic's RSS feed to include posts in their full glory. Should this site ever take off I may be forced to revert back to excerpts only, but while I only have a handful regular readers I figure it doesn't matter. The feed also has a new location. If you're news reader has the slightest clue, it should redirect it for you automatically.http://www.netalive.org/semantics/archives/2004/01/full_post_feeds.html Massive Automated Semantic Annotation- January 19, 2004 What about automatically annotating the whole web with semantic tags Sounds fun Here we go. Pick a free ontology that talks about the world we live in. Download the whole Internet to your hard disk. Scan every website for labels of the nodes in your ontology. "For instance, ontology nodes about cats, football, computers and cars all contain the label 'jaguar.'' To disolve ambiguities (and move beyond what Google does), analyze a twenty words wide window around the matched label and figure...http://www.netalive.org/semantics/archives/2004/01/massive_automat.html No anonymity in the first place- January 13, 2004 Sebastian Fiedler worries about localized Google searches: Interesting and slightly worrying... I guess. Google is getting its hands on geographic information retrieval. Though I have very ambivalent feelings if it comes to detailed mappings of personal geographic information on the Web, I can certainly think of a couple of scenarios where such a service would be powerful for group forming, match-making, and social networking. The notion that the Internet is some kind of anonymous space is...http://www.netalive.org/semantics/archives/2004/01/no_anonymity_in.html Data doesn't need self-awareness- January 8, 2004 In an article from 2002, David Weinberger worries that incompatible metadata formats might stop the semantic web in its tracks: So, even if we agree that we want to tag pages with, say, the last name of the people who created them, is the attribute labeled "lastname", "last_name", "name_last", "surname" or "nom_dernier" (...) How much effort would it take to rewire your application so it understands multiple namespaces built for a similiar task It's a triviality to implement. If we ever got..http://www.netalive.org/semantics/archives/2004/01/data_doesnt_nee.html On the legality of annotating HTML class names using XMDP- January 6, 2004 Since XMDP strives to be more than just another nifty format and tries to tie up to ideas already expressed in HTML 4.01, one more thing that Tantek pointed out about annotating class names using XMDP: Strictly spoken, annotating class names in a profile is "barely" legal, because the final version of the HTML spec does not mention the use of profiles for this purpose. However, the HTML spec doesn't really care about what's inside a profile, or how a profile looks like, so practically you...http://www.netalive.org/semantics/archives/2004/01/on_the_legality.html XMDP and Even Simpler Syndication- January 6, 2004 XHTML Meta Data Profiles can be used for much more than distributed social networks. Using XMDP it is actually possible to assign meaning to arbitrary HTML tags by having an XMDP talk about the HTML classes you are using. With these few lines of markup for instance, we could specify a minimalistic format for XHTML syndication that works without the detour over RSS: <dl class="profile"> <dt id="class">class<dt> <dd> <dl> <dt...http://www.netalive.org/semantics/archives/2004/01/xmdp_and_even_s.html |