oreilly network rss moves forward
oreilly network writing rss 1.0
oreilly network rss delivers the xml promise
davenet what to do about rss?

This note describes a project for describing & retrieving (digitized) photos with (RDF) metadata. It describes the RDF schemas, a data-entry program for quickly entering metadata for large numbers of photos, a way to serve the photos and the metadata over HTTP, and some suggestions for search methods to retrieve photos based on their descriptions.

The data-entry program has been implemented in Java, a specific Jigsaw frame has been done to retrieve the RDF from the image through HTTP. The RDF schema uses the Dublin Core schema as well as additional schemas for technical data.

“The blogger, by virtue of simply writing down whatever is on his mind, will be confronted with his own thoughts and opinions. Blogging every day, he will become a more confident writer. A community of 100 or 20 or 3 people may spring up around the public record of his thoughts. Being met with friendly voices, he may gain more confidence in his view of the world; he may begin to experiment with longer forms of writing, to play with haiku, or to begin a creative project–one that he would have dismissed as being inconsequential or doubted he could complete only a few months before.

As he enunciates his opinions daily, this new awareness of his inner life may develop into a trust in his own perspective. His own reactions–to a poem, to other people, and, yes, to the media–will carry more weight with him. Accustomed to expressing his thoughts on his website, he will be able to more fully articulate his opinions to himself and others. He will become impatient with waiting to see what others think before he decides, and will begin to act in accordance with his inner voice instead. Ideally, he will become less reflexive and more reflective, and find his own opinions and ideas worthy of serious consideration.”

“In sum, SOAP provides a web-aware alternative to current object protocols like CORBA. It has a low cost of deployment and is supported by software right now. It still has issues to face in terms of interoperability, security, and description/discovery infrastructure.

RDF implements a computer-readable alternative to current web knowledge representation applications (i.e., HTML). It faces some immediate challenges in terms of intelligibility and immediate business uses are less than certain. In the long run, though, it presents the opportunity to transform the way the web is used.

Looking at the big picture, one can envisage SOAP and RDF operating in a complementary manner in the Web of the future. RDF-based technology can provide directory information to describe and locate SOAP services. SOAP could carry RDF graphs in between RDF aggregation services, or provide a “virtual graph” service from a provider like Amazon.com.

Both SOAP and RDF have a part to play in my dream of a totally integrated future. However, they also point to the need for some very significant work, only just getting started, on agreeing upon XML vocabularies and semantics. That is a hard problem, one which I expect will never be totally solved, and may cause us to develop the best “nearly-there” solutions we can, to continue getting the most out of the Web.”

“There are many other data models which RDF’s Directed Labelled Graph (DLG) model compares closely with, and maps onto. This page is written with the intention of enumerating the similarity and diferences between the models, to indicate how the mapping might be done and what extra information muast be added in the process. Where the other models are related to previous unmet promises of computer science, now passed into folk law as unsolvable problems, they suggest a fear that the goal of a Semantic Web is inappropriate.

One consistent difference between the Semantic Web and many data models for programming langauges is the “closed world assumption”.”

“In fact, being first seldom proves to be a sustainable advantage and usually proves to be a liability. VisiCalc, for example, was the first major personal-computer spreadsheet. Where is VisiCalc today? Do you know anyone who uses it? And what of the company that pioneered it? Gone; it doesn’t even exist. VisiCalc eventually lost out to Lotus 1-2-3, which itself lost out to Excel. Lotus then went into a tailspin and was saved only by selling out to IBM. Similarly, the first portable computers came from now-dead companies like Osborne Computer. Today we use portables primarily from such companies as Dell and IBM. Or consider the ubiquitous Palm-Pilot. It was hardly the first to market, lagging years behind early leaders Sharp and — in particular — Apple, with its high-profile Newton MessagePad.”

“The pattern of the second (or third or fourth) market entrant’s prevailing over the early trailblazers shows up throughout the entire history of technological and economic change.”