A pungent mix of programming, philosophy, pedanticism, procrastination, perplexity, peripheral political polemic, and platters of preposterousness.
PZ has a post from Evan Olcott describing a highly educational talk by creationist Eric Hovind in Shakopee, Minnesota. That would be son of convicted tax-evader Kent Hovind.
Danny Ayers has a great blog post describing how to do GRDDL with non-XSLT algorithms. Quite simple actually. You just wrap the RDF/XML in XSLT elements. What does this mean? Well, if you aren’t an XSLT programmer, you can still use GRDDL. You could use server-side JavaScript or you could use something like Java or Python. Similarly, you could write some quite simple bridge code that would pull data from APIs and transform it.
For instance, I could quite simply write some code to just wrap the output of my RDF Twitter API in some XSLT elements, and just create what amounts to a service endpoint. For those of you who don’t grok RDF, imagine this: you are on Flickr, you find a page, you send the URI of the page to a service, which then goes to the API, pulls all the data about it and returns you a document containing pure data. Pretty cool.
What else? Well, what about the HTML5 situation? The profile attribute still isn’t there, despite being useful. It’s down to some form of deluded neo-pragmatism that is no doubt making the maggot-infested bones of Dewey and Pierce et al. bounce around inside their respective graves. But once the HTML WG get an idea in their head, the fact that GRDDL depends on it is no reason to not chuck it away. Apparently. Completely barmy, but, you know, that’s that.
One of the solutions we have thought about is using a new link element with @rel = ‘profile’ instead of head/@profile. But there’s another way.
So, this guy Mark Nottingham has been putting an interesting idea out there recently - a LINK header in HTTP. Danny thought of FOAF headers back in 2005. This is another solution if the HTML WG pig-headedly decides that it doesn’t want to catch RDFitis. Seems like a good solution, as it’ll allow us to use GRDDL for XML and XML-like languages (like tag soup) that don’t allow any profile URIs. HTTP transcending HTML? Nice.
Either way will require GRDDL clients (which are HTML and HTTP User Agents, even though some people try not to think about them) to be rewritten to support HTML5 (pragmatism - not politics - strikes again!).
Two Semantic Web posts from danbri which I have had sitting in my Starred: Missing Isn’t Broken (a design principle that comes from the additive data model) and a SELECT query for Facebook. SPARQL away!
Another SemWeb post I meant to link to a while back - Keith Alexander has tips on creating RDF vocabularies or ontologies.
