Filing System Taxonomy Blues

Filing System Taxonomy Blues looks at the problem of paper filing systems from an epistemological/ontological angst perspective and ends up drawing solace from some misheard/re-interpreted Dylan lyrics - Bob not Thomas.

A small step towards combating personal obsolescence

Hello. My name is Sean and I don't have a Flickr account.

That was yesterday. Today I'm cured.

Semantic Steganography

It is Sunday morning and phrases like "Semantic Steganography" sometimes creep into my head unheralded this time of the week. Especially before the kettle boils.

Sometimes I have moments of clarity pre-kettle-boil and I suspect this is one of them. The future of semantic markup is the tunnelling of semantics, unseen, inside harmless looking, presentation-oriented XHTML.

I'm thinking microformats and I'm thinking things like XOXO and HMML and RDDL

Here is the thing: with span and div elements, it is possible to encode any XML instance into a valid XHTML instance. It is a trivial matter to reverse the process to get the explict element-oriented XML back out.

In my mind's eye I see RESTian web services where users dereference URIs as a matter of course and see human-oriented stuff. Yet, hiding underneath as attributes in the XHTML are the semantic parasite attributes. These encode the semantic structure that process-to-process integration software feeds on.

Gee! But what about validation? All our grammer oriented validation technologies are element-type oriented not attribute-value-oriented! No problem. Do a quick XSLT transform prior to validation proper, to make the element structure explicit. Maybe, just maybe, this will be the use case that makes XML pipelining creep into common consciousness.

About time too.

[P.S. for markup geeks] This post has hidden, pre-caffiene semantics. Do "View Source" to see them. At least it had when it left my feed editor. I will be interested to see what happens to the markup when it goes into the big bad world out there.

Anna Livia Blogger Eile

We numbered more than 10 and less than 20 (I reckon). We met in the IFI meeting room on Eustace St. and we talked of many things. First prize in the "best array of quality geek gadgetry" category was Bernie Goldbach.

A rumour is going around that a rather famous personage with very a high visionary and geek quotient might be attending Semantic Web 2005 in Galway in November of this year. If it happens, I'll be there. Even if it doesn't, I might still be there. Its only a rumour though, so it stops here.

Dublin Python Meetup

Last nights Dublin Python meetup was revectored at short notice to a pub we knew Paul Everitt of Zope fame would be in :-)

It was good to put some faces to some names and to finally meet Paul Everitt F2F. The location was, in my opinion, streets ahead of the Dame Lane location and has the added benefit that the famished can get food with their drinks if required.

Lots of interesting tidbits from Michael Twomey about PyCon 2005. I must make a point of getting to one of those.

Dublin Bloggers Meeting

Hot on the heels of last nights Python Meetup in Dublin (of which more anon) comes a meeting of bloggers. There is a non-zero probability that I will be there.

HTTP URIs rather than URNs for identifiers

Dave Orchard questions some of the orthodoxy concerning when to use URNS versus when to use HTTP URIS.

As Dave says, context is the critical thing. Context is king. The notion that a URN is somehow "better" because HTTP URIs tie things to places/versions/whatever is simply not true out there. Just looking around at the way HTTP URIS are really used on the Web shows that it isn't true. Context is king. Identifiers are dereferenced at a time and a place with an abritrary rich resolving context. The act of resolution can - and frequently does - take full advantage of all that contextual information.

Any would-be rigid designator, needs a state of affairs to be dereferenced against. HTTP is a well known resolver of rigid designators given a state of affairs:-)

Most ironic in all the MMTT URN shenanigans is that so many URN resolving schemes end up doing a quick shimmy to convert the URNs into unique HTTP URIs :-)