Potlach Feast

Misha pretty much summed it all up in his post

The RDF Model and Syntax Specification became a W3C Recommendation nine years ago today!

Resource Description Framework (RDF)
Model and Syntax Specification
W3C Recommendation 22 February 1999
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-rdf-syntax-19990222/

Best wishes to all members of the original W3C RDF Model and Syntax Working Group and to all those who have built on top of the foundations we created.

Seems like only yesterday

Stu Weibel’s post on ‘List Making Meets Redirection’ prompted me to comment on some of the Active PURL work (PURLs with associated services) we at Zepheira has been developing. Example ‘Active PURLs’ might be notification to publishers of problems with target URLs (basically a link-checker for PURLs), notification to readers of updates to target PURLs (a “what’s new” feed for PURLs), etc. More specifically the architecture allows for an open marketplace to grow around such associations with PURLs (or PURL patterns) and services.

While I only touched briefly on this work in my comment, David Wood has expanded on this in his blog and given additional context on the potential business applicability of this approach.

Perhaps the most interesting use of Active PURLs to enterprises might be the ability to provide standardized RDF metadata about SOA Web Services as well as relational databases. UDDI is so broken, we might as well fix it with existing SemWeb standards. That is not a new idea, but the application of Active PURLs to the problem is.

Applying the lessons and standards of the web back inside the enterprise makes sense for managing evolution, supporting collaboration and more effectively delivering products and services. More and more businesses are starting to realize the true benefit of being *in* the Web, not just on it.

Following a web of circuitous links in the process of explaining to my son what a computer *not* connected to the Web might be, I stumbled upon some of our early working group notes discussing the finer points of initial HTML specification. Scanning the minutes I found it interesting to note the original cast of characters:

HTML-WG Meeting
Monday, Oct 17, 1994, Chicago World Wide Web conference.

Attendees

Eric Sink            (Spyglass)
Stuart Weibel        (OCLC)
Eric Miller          (OCLC)
Yuri Rubinski        (SoftQuad)
TimBL                (W3O, CERN)
Tom Magliere         (NCSA)
Ron Daniel           (Los Alamos)
Dave Raggett         (HP, UK)
Roy Fielding         (UC Irvine)
Phillip Hallam-Baker (W3O, CERN)
Liam Quin            (SoftQuad)
Corp Reed            (Cold Spring Harbor Lab)
Mitra                (Mitra Internet Consulting)
Murray Maloney       (SCO)
Bill Perry           (Spry)
Terry Allen          (O'Reilly Associates)
Thomas Churchill     (EIT)
David Land           (Verity)
Jeff Sutor           (UCLA)
Jon Bosak            (Novell)
Chris Wilson         (Spry)
John Punin           (RPI)
Dave Hollander       (HP)
Jim Seidman          (Spyglass)
Larry Jackson        (NCSA)

- My son’s response to this particular page was simply: “Hey! Two Erics!” (here is the other one and he’s not a legend)

For those that have been asking about where to send financial support to help Chimezie and Roschelle Ogbuji, The Ogbuji Family Fund has been established.

Thanks in advance to anyone providing whatever they can.

So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and Demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, Beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and Its purpose in the service of your people.

Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, Even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and Bow to none. When you arise in the morning, give thanks for the food and For the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, The fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and nothing, For abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision.

When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts Are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes They weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again In a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.

– tecumseh

After a minor gauntlet of cleaning, rebuilding, head-scratching and more rebuilding, we finally have a working 1948 Martin motor. The rewind spring could use some works, along with knobs, a paint job, etc. but overall she’s up, running and purring like a kitten (albeit an angry one).

Special thanks to the folks over at the AOMCI who fielded a few novice questions; these folks are just a fountain of knowledge when dealing with old outboards. I don’t know what her top speed is, but she moves ‘high treason’ much faster than I expected.

My son and I couldn’t be happier

damn… err, i repeat. damn…

I’ve just finished assembling a pair of modified Decware Radial 1 speakers. Cutting to the chase these sound absolutely stunning and come close to trumping my Infinity P-FR’s in almost every way.

As these original Radials came unassembled with upgraded speakers, Jensen capacitors, Audioquest Indigo internal wire, etc, I took the liberty of continuing the upgrade to 1.5’s by adding new bases, cones, passives etc. (thank you Zygi!). After fixing various issues with the veneer, I decided to turn my attention to seal the inside of the speakers with black hole pads that I obtained from speakercity a while back for a different project.

(If anyone is curious, you can do both speakers, top and bottom gaskets, etc. in 6 sheets. - highly recommended).

I sit here slack-jawed as I can’t believe the detail and range I’m hearing from these speakers. When I hear folks talk like this, I usually role my eyes and move on, but the imaging, depth and bass (yes, i said it… bass!) that is coming out of these speakers is absolutely astounding. I need to experiment a bit more with different resistors and weighting the passives, but I’m absolutely floored by what I’m hearing.

I have a crummy room for audio, but these speakers seem incredibly forgiving of this sin. And when I open my eyes I absolutely amazed at how such small speakers can produce such a large, accurate soundstage.

ok… enough of the rants, back to the music…

For a long time I’ve been thinking how useful it would be to give PURLS to people as a key part for managing evolving social networks. And now that the new purl work we’re doing at Zepheira (which is downright scary-good due to in part a rock solid engineering team and the use of NetKernel as a key underlying technology) will include support for identification of non-document resources, this will soon be possible.

Recently, Brian has been reflecting on his building of some very cool FOAF tools. And now whats even cooler is that it looks like Brian is on the case …

This exercise has also inspired me to make some progress on my goal to create some good tools to lower the bar to FOAF usage. I am going to leverage the PURLS work that we are doing for the OCLC. This will allow us to create permanent, resolvable names for ourselves that transcend where we currently hang our hats*. This will allow the networks to be more resilient. As many links as I am finding, there have been a ton of broken links (presumably people who have moved on) that would have enriched the result set even further!

I suspect he’ll have a production ready system in place by sometime tomorrow

15 years ago, I was involved in series of discussions at the IETF regarding technical standards related to identifying resources in decentralized environments. Acronyms such as “URI”, “URN”, “URL”, “URC” (and occasionally the phrase “you are kidding?!”) where constantly thrown around with much heated debate regarding requirements, protocols, semantics and capabilities for each of these technologies. URLs (Uniform Resource Locators … the global identifiers that start with ‘http:’, ‘mailto:’, ‘ftp:’, etc) were increasingly becoming prevalent as people found the immediate feedback of merging “clickability” and global “addressability” an attractive one. The others standards, however, were not so lucky.

At that time, the library community was starting to focus on issues related to cataloging and managing Web resources. Relaxing link integrity (404 file not found) and making it easier for people to create these URLs was one of the reasons the Web had succeeded where other hyperlinking systems had failed. This relaxation, however, caused problems for effective cataloging, managing and relating of resources. Spending time, effort and money to do this only to find the resource is no longer available because it had been moved, etc. was a serious issue to individuals in the library community focused on describing and providing effective access to relevant digital resources.

A solution to this problem was developed by OCLC; PURLs - Persistent URLs. PURLs provided a level of indirection that allows the underlying Web addresses of resources to change over time without negatively affecting systems that depend on them. Persistence is not an technological issue as much as one of social and organizational commitment. The PURL software provided the simple technological solution, and made it available for others to use, but it was OCLC running the purl.org service that provided the organizational commitment that helped make it possible for others to create and share persistent identifiers.

OCLC has been running the purl.org services for more than 12 years; there are very few services I can think of that can make such a claim. The Library community has in many ways been ahead of the general curve for managing data. A barrier for weaving these ideas, however, into various other non-library applications is that the code behind this service has largely been the same for the past 12 years as well. I’m quite pleased to note, however, that this is in the process of changing. More specifically, the following press release explains whats going on.

DUBLIN, Ohio, July 11, 2007—OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. and Zepheira, LLC announced today that they will work together to rearchitect OCLC’s Persistent URL (PURL) service to more effectively support the management of a “Web of data.”

This re-architecture will not only make it easier for folks to embed PURLs within existing applications, it will also be updated to reflect the current understanding of Web architecture as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This new software will provide the ability to permanently identify networked information resources, such as Web documents, as well as non-networked resources such as people, organizations, concepts and scientific data. This capability will represent an important step forward in the adoption of a machine-processable “Web of data” enabled by the Semantic Web.

One of the most important principles for Zepheira is that developments towards a Semantic Web can be carefully tuned and scaled to meet the immediate needs of businesses, while valuable experience from solving enterprise needs can bring focus to Semantic Web efforts. I’m pleased to see this work underway and very much look forward to what capabilities the new PURL work will help enable in the next 12 years (and beyond).

Over the past several years, I’ve occasionally used the phrase “recombinant data” when talking about the Semantic Web. Recently at the Semantic Technologies 2007 conference I attempted to give this term a definition during one of my talks:

the ability to rapidly recombine, reform, re-factor and reuse data from different applications to address a particular task, need or objective

- Eric Miller, President Zepheira “The Business of Recombinant Data”

It’s not quite right, but close…

Passing this definition though a syllabic minimization filter yields: “when it comes to data - write once, use often”.

The talk went on to demonstrate the benefit of recombinant data by using various practical tools the Simile folks have been developing to solve specific use-cases. And from there connecting these examples back to real-world problems that enterprises are grappling with in terms of more efficient, flexible means of supporting data integration and ultimately effective business intelligence. And while I’m admitedly bias in my assessment, it seemed to go over extremely well. Re-echoing the point once again that showing rather than telling helps people understand the power of recombinant data.