The Web Semantic

Dion Hinchcliffe details 17 principles in his recent blog post entitled “A Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA) Un-Manifesto“.  It’s nice to see somebody attempt to steer (if ever so slightly) away from the “manifesto” cliché… » Read the rest of this entry «

Try and find the disco ball.

My daughter made this for me today. Notice the invitation to user generated content…free-for-all flowers!

I was having a conversation with a respected colleague yesterday and and we began discussing publications. His comment was that he stopped reading Dr. Dobb’s because it was full of complicated algorithms he’d never use.  That struck a nerve within me.  Although a side of me respects the drive towards simplicity, some things are necessarily complex.  It seems that the computing field is becoming less tolerant of thinking hard about difficult problems. » Read the rest of this entry «

I attended The Big (D)esign Conference yesterday.  I was impressed with how well it was organized and the implications for furture technology conferences.  It was organized by a team of volunteers as a joint venture by the Dallas/Fort Worth Usability Professionals’ Association, Refresh Dallas, and the Dallas/Fort Worth Interaction Design Association.  During the conference I was able to see some top notch speakers, and the venue was small enough to ensure you were able to get a chance to speak face to face with nearly any one of them.  It cost $50 and a short trip to SMU.  Constrast that to the 1,000+ and flight it normaly requires to get a line of similar caliber.

It was held at the student center at SMU.  I liked the venue because it was small, and yet still had plenty of conference rooms to allow 4 simultaneous tracks.  The sponsors setup booths at the center…so there was no partitioned off exhibit floor, they were front and center.

The JDK is full of gems.  My latest discovery began with a need for a simple in memory “least recently used” (LRU) cache.  I wanted a hash map with limited size.  When the cache is full, it should remove the least recently used item, keeping the more popular items in memory.  I figured there was probably an existing implementation in java.util, but nothing fit, until I ran across some posts that mentioned “LinkedHashMap” as a possible solution…Bingo.  The java doc even mentions this type of application and provides an abstraction ready for implementation when you extend LinkedHashMap,

 removeEldestEntry()

Today I found a good example with documentation, for anyone who is curious, or would like an off the shelf ready to use example of LRU cache for java, see

http://www.source-code.biz/snippets/java/6.htm

The googlecode wiki system allows you to insert google gadgets into your pages, as well as the front page of your open source project.  Do this by using using the wiki:gadget tag:

<wiki:gadget width="450" height="365" border="0" url="http://link/to/mygadget.xml" title="title of your gadget" />

That’s the easy part…the xml file describes the content you’d like google to “iframe” into you wiki page.

<Module>
<ModulePrefs title="Developer Forum" />
<Content type="html">
<![CDATA[
your stuff here
]]>
</Content>
</Module>

The simplest thing to do is host this file within your SVN repo. To see and example here’s my xml file that includes and embed for a related screen toaster demo.  I merely took the HTML code suggested on screentoaster and placed it in the gadget module descriptor.

Just saw Ian Davis’s open vocab tool mentioned on his blog.  It’s a novel idea and provides some of what has been missing in the semantic web space in terms of community involvement.  What it provides is the ability for nearly anyone to propose an RDF term, describe it, and even give it a range and domain.

RDF/OWL tempts us to compare it’s type system with Java, however, the two are different in substantial ways.  OWL allows RDF resources to inherit from more that one class.  Furthermore, there is no such thing as an RDF “interface”.  Perhaps the most striking difference are properties.  RDF properties aren’t owned by any particular class.  They can be in the domain of many classes, and can inherit from other properties.  Furthermore, classification (typing) can be inferred from the properties given to a RDF resource.  If something has a foaf:mbox, it’s a foaf:Agent.  Note how that’s the complete opposite of how we nomaly think in OOP…”If the object is an instance of Agent, by definition it must have an mbox property.”.  This is the motivation for “jenathing”, my moniker for what is essentialy a very simple utility class…thewebsemantic.Thing. » Read the rest of this entry «