The view from 900 feet

We have an environmentally insensitive hot tub outside in the backyard that’s surrounded on 3 sides by a ‘privacy’ fence. We also live about 4 miles from a small airport, and it’s not unusual at all to have a plane fly by at a fairly low altitude. So I didn’t pay any attention to our airspace today as I stepped out of my robe and into the hot tub, until the plane flying overhead cut his (her?) engine and circled, slowly, with my hot tub at the center of the circle. Of course I could just have been imagining that I was briefly the center of someone’s attention, but still, I looked up and waved. Then went back to watching the far more interesting barn swallows chasing each other around the yard. After completing the circle, the pilot resumed the plane’s original heading and things got quiet again.  

Sometimes there’s a lot less privacy out here in the country than there would ever be in the city.

Linux … Hell

Alistair Miles has written a brief account of the fun he experienced installing Trac for a project. This is nicely describes my experience installing/updating packages on RHE Linux and explains in part why we don’t do it very often at the Registry.

Big projects, little time

This is just an observation and I certainly don’t mean to whine, but it can be pretty tough to make continuous progress on a very large project like the Registry when working half-time and half of that time is taken up with academic administrivia — writing/reading papers, conferences, grant proposals, meetings, trying to keep up with new ideas and technology.

I have nothing but admiration for anyone who manages to get something real accomplished under those circumstances. I live in somewhat constant fear that I won‘t be one of that august group.

Back to blogging

It’s been busy, so I haven’t been blogging. I also had some essays kicking around in my head that I just didn’t have time to write up, and so I wrote nothing. Well, the essays are still there but it’s a tad less busy so I’m going to try some small posts and see if I can get back into it.

Some of what I write will be more personal and thinking-out-loud than in the past too. So you should expect even more crap than usual.

What a great error message

The bad news is that Google Docs & Spreadsheets has just encountered an error.

The good news is that you’ve helped us find a bug, which we are now looking into.

We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you

Sorry, and thanks for your help!
- The Google Docs & Spreadsheets Team
(report #Pf5rH3BMhXllRx0H)

I almost don’t mind not being able to get into my document.

QOTD

“Looking for an idiot at [pick any store/location] is like looking for a needle in a needle-stack”

That just makes me smile every time I read it..

SKOS Concept History Management – Metadata-Registry

Several weeks ago, right after I got back from the Dublin Core 2006 meeting, I wrote up a brief outline of how I thought we could handle skos:concept change management in the context of the MetadataRegistry. It builds on the versioning discussion presented by Stuart Sutton and Joe Tennis at the DC2006 registries working group, and a gardening discussion with Alistair Miles.

In it I suggest that for each registered skos:concept we would maintain a single generic, scheme-independent ConceptClass, one or more scheme-specific ConceptInstances, and one or more ConceptInstanceHistories. I put off posting anything about this before because I was going to clean up the text a bit, and add some fancy UML diagrams and some real RDF, but heck I’m just too busy at the moment. 

I’d be very interested in some feedback.

This outlines proposed requirements for maintaining change history for Concepts.

SKOS Concept History Management – Metadata-Registry.

Joe Busch on “Benchmarking Taxonomies”

Joe Busch of Taxonomy Strategies keynote presentation "Benchmarking Taxonomies" (powerpoint) at Online Information 2006, November 30, 2006, London, UK.

 

Google vs. The Semantic Web

Incompetents revolt!

From Danny Ayers
“…proof and trust are key considerations for Semantic Web systems. The foundations are built into the theory, logic provides one route to addressing the issues. Even if that formalism is ignored and statistical approaches taken, the
use of common languages makes data more amenable to analysis.
Probabilities and uncertainties can be expressed as logical statements
on top of the base languages. However you approach it, the answer is
mo’ better data, not less.”

Danny Ayers has some cherce comments regarding the recent debate between Tim Berners-Lee and Peter Norvig of Google. The aggregation of data using common methodologies, protocols (like OAI), and frameworks (like RDF) and the application of AI and statistical analysis results in “mo’ better data”. Lovely gold spun from tons of lead.

The 7 (f)laws of the Semantic Web – O’Reilly XML Blog

I find myself agreeing with quite a bit of this article by Dan Zambonini (which should come as no surprise). Among other thoughtful observations, he points out that…

…The Semantic Web needs to prove what problem(s) it’s going to solve, and not just show that it can create pictures showing you that you know your friends.

…the Semantic Web would be a lot easier if we did have a central ontology … My clients don’t want to create ontologies. They don’t want to map one set of data to another. They want to use something that’s out there and ready for them to use … maybe we should try it, rather than thinking that we don’t need it because it’s hard to achieve?

Worth a read.

The 7 (f)laws of the Semantic Web – O’Reilly XML Blog.