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)