Posted in General, Semantic Web, workfriendly on Mar 7th, 2006 Comments
When designing large information systems to hold data from a wide range of sources (e.g. a large company inventory or knowledge base), a common approach is to employ a global identifier scheme so that entities can be referenced unambiguously across the system. A really large scale example of this approach is the W3C Semantic Web […]
Posted in General, Semantic Web on Mar 2nd, 2006 Comments
Here’s an attempt at a working definition:
The ‘meaning’ of an identifier = the complete set of assertions that can be made about it.
(for the purpose of discussion of identity in information systems).
E.g. if an assertion is true for one identifier but not another, then they don’t mean (or denote) the same thing.
Does that sound […]
Posted in General, Semantic Web on Feb 22nd, 2006 Comments
I noticed that the podcast mp3s from the future of web apps conference a couple of weeks ago are up on the site.
I really enjoyed and would especially recommend Tom Coates ‘Native to a web of data’ presentation for those that are interested in web 2.0 and semantic webby stuff. His slides (to go with […]
Posted in Semantic Web, workfriendly on Feb 20th, 2006 Comments
I was having a discussion with somebody at a conference recently about merging data on a large scale, and how the differing ‘contexts’ under which the data is created make global merging difficult. He asked me to define what I meant by the ‘context’ of the data. It’s a wooly term I’d been using for […]
Posted in General, Semantic Web, microformats on Nov 22nd, 2005 Comments
My recent look at microformats has lead me to think more about the levels of grey between being able to fully interpret (understand) data, and not being able to interpret it at all. Microformats are currently very binary in this regard - either the software knows the microformat and is able to interpret it, or […]
Posted in Semantic Web, microformats on Nov 21st, 2005 Comments
Have spent some spare time looking at microformats recently (and more importantly, writing a microformats parser).
The main thing that troubles me is that microformats have no explicit way of conveying the structure of the data. This scuppers the idea of a general microformats importer (which I would obviously like for JAM*VAT, amongst other things).
There are […]
Posted in General, Semantic Web, Veudas, tagtriples on Nov 16th, 2005 Comments
I couldn’t find a way to comment on Benjamins post, so I’ve stuck it here:
What indexing are you using? My tagtriples store schema is basically a table with 4 ids which joins to an (ID,String) table. When it used to be an RDF store this held both literals and URIs.
I found the key to getting […]
Posted in General, Semantic Web on Nov 16th, 2005 Comments
Two ways to enable the disambiguation of data:
ensure that each identifier is namespaced so that it can’t collide with any other
or
allow identifier names to collide, but also capture context to enable the consumer to disambiguate
RDF relies on the former approach, English the latter.
N.B. An advantage of the latter approach is that it allows the […]
Posted in General, Semantic Web, tagtriples on Oct 29th, 2005 Comments
I’ve recently been experimenting with ways to provide simpler structured searching/querying to ‘normal’ web users (i.e. not techies). Sparql/SQL querying doesn’t cut it here - we need something simpler.
One approach I’ve been trying is allowing simple query constraints in with the text search facility. Using the proximity searching capability JAM*VAT then finds a collection of […]
Posted in Semantic Web, tagtriples on Oct 27th, 2005 Comments
Using a relational database as a triplestore backend has a number of advantages - one of which is leveraging features of the backend SQL support with very little effort.
I’ve recently added a whole bunch of functionality to ttql (the experimental query language that JAM*VAT uses for querying). These include:
SQL (mysql) numeric and string functions […]
Posted in Semantic Web, tagtriples, microformats on Oct 24th, 2005 Comments
Danny! Here’s another
Posted in General, Semantic Web, tagtriples on Oct 18th, 2005 Comments
It’s just occurred to me that I never posted about the proximity search capability that I built into JAM*VAT about 3 months ago.
It works by looking for symbols in close proximity. E.g. searching for ‘Danny Ayers Blog‘ yields an answer ‘raw’, even though the word isn’t in the search string. This is because the ‘raw’ […]
Posted in General, Semantic Web, tagtriples on Oct 7th, 2005 Comments
JAM*VAT is now mature enough that it handles relational operations over large amounts of aggregated structured data quickly and scalably, and also provides very fast regex text search operations (due to its inbuilt suffix array implementation).
However one area where it doesn’t perform very well is in handling dates and numbers. E.g if you aggregated 10000 […]
Posted in General, Semantic Web, tagtriples on Sep 24th, 2005 Comments
I’m quite excited about this release - it includes new POST functionality that accepts HTTP-POSTed content interpreted via mimetype. The upshot of which is that people can cut-n-paste xml chunks into JAM*VAT (which is a compelling way to demonstrate the technology).
You can try it via the online demo - click on the ‘Post Data’ link […]
Posted in General, Semantic Web on Sep 22nd, 2005 Comments
Here’s a barrier to successfully using RDF URIs for identifying things collaboratively: you need to know the URI before you can use it.
If two parties create URIs for the same thing in seperation, the chances of them minting the same URI are pretty much nil. This is especially true with temporal seperation - you […]
Posted in General, Semantic Web, tagtriples on Sep 20th, 2005 Comments
With all the buzz around the possibility of an ‘RDF-Lite’, I feel compelled to list a few barriers that I think URIs raise for a new user trying to get to grips with RDF metadata creation.
Here they are, in no particular order:
(1) URIs don’t allow you to use existing identity schemes.
Apart from existing web […]
Posted in General, Semantic Web, tagtriples on Sep 16th, 2005 Comments
In the last post I mentioned importing XML into the JAM*VAT tagtriples store. One of JAM*VATs main features is that it can translate *any* XML into a tagtriples representation using some simple heuristics. I thought I’d better elaborate on this, especially as I haven’t documented the heuristics anywhere.
Before starting, I ought to point out that […]
Posted in General, Semantic Web, tagtriples on Sep 15th, 2005 Comments
Ian Davies has been discussing the complexity of RDF and considering the possibility of an RDF Lite. Danny Ayers also picked it up here.
Readers of this blog will already know that I struggled with teaching RDF’s complexity when attempting to promote and deploy it at work. This prompted my research and creation of a simpler […]
Posted in General, Semantic Web, tagtriples on Aug 23rd, 2005 Comments
I’ve just put up v0.7.5 of JAM*VAT. This improves the RDF uri-to-symbol heuristics and adds some stuff that we needed at work - mainly arithmetic comparisons in structured queries. Have also put the new release on the demo site.
Posted in General, Semantic Web, tagtriples on Aug 22nd, 2005 Comments
I hardly got any response to the launch of my JAM*VAT structured aggregator tool. Either that means that nobody’s got a use for it, or they just don’t understand what does. I’m hoping it’s the latter, so I thought I’d post some things to try with the demo installation. Here’s a first stab:
Getting a […]
