SemWebDev Weblog

Web Development with Triples

HTML5 and the future of @profile

Thu May 17 2007 at 10:26

Tom Morris has written a post decrying the HTML5 working group's decision to drop the @profile attribute . I thoroughly agree. The point that @profile has remained relatively obscure all these years is worth noting, but (as Tom says) does not mean that it should be thoughtlessly dropped from future specifications. It’s not that @profile is useless , it’s that its use ...

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TheyWorkForYou.com - Low hanging fruit for the Semantic Web?

Wed May 16 2007 at 23:41

Update: Graham Higgins set up a kforge project for the further development of the parlparse rdf mapping . Anybody interested in figuring out an RDF mapping for TheyWorkForYou ? I think this is a dataset that would really benefit from being availble as RDF - it's of wide public interest, it can usefully be related to lots of other data of lots of different types, from lots of ...

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HAML - a markup abstraction language - and triples notation?

Wed May 16 2007 at 08:59

I thought I didn’t like markup abstraction for templating; abstracting away from HTML leaves you with less control of your markup, and source code that looks quite different to what you get when you press View Source, so can be harder to debug – that was my thinking. But HAML has caught my interest (for now at least). It gives you tersity for the common cases, ...

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Why use eRDF?

Thu May 10 2007 at 00:42

Make your HTML a Data Source. The idea of using semantic xhtml to let your web page be your API has been around for quite a while now, and there have been various blog posts and presentations on the subject by Tantek Çelik , Drew McLellan , Glen Jones , and MoreThanSeven . While that argument has largely been centred around Microformats supplemented by custom semantic ...

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POSH: Plain Old Semantic HTML

Wed May 2 2007 at 12:40

It seems that a while ago, I coined a new acronym: POSH . Surprisingly (I think the acronym sounds quite unappealing [1] ) it’s gained some currency, but already there seems to be some slippage in meaning. The meaning that I intended was this: (x)HTML used as a data format ; writing HTML so that the data in the document can be parsed or transformed into another ...

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Musings on my ideal syntax for RDF-in-HTML

Tue May 1 2007 at 11:15

Looking again at the bnode comparison of µf, eRDF and RDFa I’ve been thinking about the relative advantages and disadvantages of eRDF and RDFa a bit. The great thing about GRDDL of course, is that if I come up with a syntax of my own that I prefer, I can just write a stylesheet and get on with it. I don’t need to evangelise it, or even document it. Whether or not ...

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eRDF at a glance: a beginners' introduction

Sun Apr 22 2007 at 09:50

This is intended as an easy demonstration of the basics of eRDF. eRDF FOAF Classes: Agent Document Group Image OnlineAccount OnlineChatAccount OnlineEcommerceAccount OnlineGamingAccount Organization Person PersonalProfileDocument Project Make a Thing FOAF properties: accountName ...

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Good Tagging, Bad Tagging, and the Semantic Web's Image problem

Thu Apr 12 2007 at 16:35

A major part of the negative press and misunderstanding surrounding the Semantic Web , the reason people think it won’t work, is that they assume that RDF is something that you publish for other people [1] . The reason that (according to Tim from LibraryThing ) Amazon.com’s tagging doesn’t work , is that on Amazon.com, tagging is something you do for other ...

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Microformats: How Many Is Enough?

Fri Mar 30 2007 at 02:21

You know the scene: XML guru scratches beard and says, Microformats, eh? No namespacing? Won’t scale. Ah , says a Microformateer, but they aren’t designed to! and scoots off to write an hReview about the new hBIB proposal. The point of course, is that the Microformats movement aims to develop only a limited number of standards for the most commonly published ...

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getSemantic.com

Wed Mar 28 2007 at 18:06

Thought I'd put out a plug here to getSemantic , which is a community wiki and irc channel (freenode.net #getSemantic ) that seems to be all about semantic data formats (mainly html formats that can be serialised into RDF). There's a list of general aims on the wiki, the most general and mission-statementy of which is probably: [GetSemantic will] be a bridge not only between ...

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Why RDF Ought to make Web Apps easier to build

Fri Mar 23 2007 at 00:00

Some too-hasty thoughts on why it ought to be fundamentally easier to build web apps based on RDF, instead of relational databases: RDF is the Web Unlike the relational database, RDF is designed to be part of the Web, to be the Web. Its standard method of unique identifier is the same as the Web’s. A GET request of a URI to your web app is a request for a representation ...

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Roundtripleting

Wed Mar 28 2007 at 18:06

Roundtripleting is the process of dynamically generating documents whereby the dynamic contents are retrieved with queries derived from the document template's own semantics. Or that's what I'm calling it for now anyway :) . The name is supposed to evoke the ideas of Roundtripping , Templating , and Semantics . It's a bit of a weird concept, so I'm inclined to think that it needs a ...

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Exhibit your RDF databases!

Wed Mar 28 2007 at 18:06

I've written a short script that reads in an Exhibit JSON template file , and turns it into SPARQL queries, queries a local ARC RDF store, and injects the results back into the items array of the JSON template, which it then outputs. The script will generate a new query for every item it finds in the items array. The format of the template is the same as a normal Exhibit ...

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eRDF-T with Tonic and Smarty

Wed Mar 28 2007 at 18:06

I’ve hammered together some classes that lets you use eRDF templating within the Tonic framework. The dependencies are: ARC appmosphere RDF classes for PHP MySQL Tonic RESTful Framework Smarty The code I’ve written is: lib/erdft_parser.php : a class that reads in an erdf template, generates and executes sparql queries, and returns ...

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RDFa(dict) : An RDFa parser in Python

Wed Mar 7 2007 at 02:35

RDFadict is a python library that extracts triples from RDFa, and provides a pretty nice looking API for accessing them. It looks like it would be fairly easy, if anyone were inclined, to implement a simple RDFa to SPARQL and back templating system (as I have done with eRDF) with it. Should anyone care to try, the basic steps of the system (as I implemented it at least) are: ...

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Processing HTML Form Values to RDF

Wed Mar 28 2007 at 18:06

Generic Form Processing In an earlier post, I explained briefly how I imagined a generic form processor could work . And this is basically how it works in the code I have written. I did consider having the semantics of the form names derived from eRDF class names (instead of a structured @name on the input element), but decided that it was better to separate input and output at the ...

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eRDF-T and Nested Arrays

Tue Mar 6 2007 at 23:48

In my previous post on an idea I had for eRDF-T - deriving SPARQL queries from an eRDF template, retrieving the data, and injecting them back into the template - , I mentioned that deriving multiple queries from a page would be necessary if you wanted to do thing like nested associative arrays and aggregate functions. I spent a while puzzling over how to separate out the triples and ...

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eRDF as Query and Report language

Tue Mar 6 2007 at 22:58

I was doing some Smarty templating, marking up the html with eRDF so that I could easily pull the data into the database as triples later. And then I thought about having to write SPARQL queries afterwards, and populate and assign variables, and embed those variables in the template. It struck me that there would be a great duplication of effort here - I would specify some variables ...

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