Tag Archives: web

digging ourselves back from the Semantic Web mire

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Discussions on the Talis Platform Advisory Group prompted me to look at some of the APIs of new Semantic-Web-like services such as Freebase1.

Freebase is interesting as its underlying representation is graph/relationship based like RDF, but its Metaweb Query Language (MQL) uses JSON which is a more programming-like whole and parts representation with arrays and slots. Facebook’s new Data Store API also has objects and associations, but does not use RDF or other obvious web technologies.

So the question is – if the closest things to Semantic Web apps on the internet don’t use SemWeb techology like RDF, SPARQL etc. … are these SemWeb techologies fit for purpose or indeed useful at all?

I think the answer is that (i) partly they are not fit for purpose – caught in a backwater by their history, but (ii) that is like all things and they are what we have got, and (iii) we can use some of the tools of computing to make them work …

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  1. listen to Talis’ pod cast interview with Jamie Taylor Freebase’s ‘Minister of Information’ (sic).[back]

tagging … I am not alone … or am I?

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I’ve noticed that I reuse very few tags … and thought I was just a poor tag-user. However, I read the other day a reference to a paper at the CSCW confernce last year; it reported that the average number of re-uses of a tag was just 1.311 . I thought this meant that most tags are never reused … I am not alone 🙂

Having downloaded and read the paper it turns out that this is the average number of users who use a tag – that is most tags are used by only one person, in fact individuals reuse their own tags a lot more … so I am no-good tagger after all 🙁

Incidentally, I use ultimate tag warrior plugin for wordpress and it seems OK. Only drawback is that if you want tags displayed with your post, they really get inserted into the post itself. This is not a problem for tags at the end, but would mess up an RSS feed if you like your tags above the post. I guess this is because wordpress does not have a handle for plugins to add things to display loops, so the only way to ensure the tags are displayed are to make them part of the post.

Also Nad sent me a link to a neat tag visualisation by Moritz Stefaner.

  1. Sen, S., Lam, S. K., Rashid, A., Cosley, D., Frankowski, D., Osterhouse, J., Harper, F. M., and Riedl, J. 2006. tagging, communities, vocabulary, evolution. In Proceedings of the 2006 20th Anniversary Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work {Banff, Alberta, Canada, November 04 – 08, 2006}. CSCW ’06. ACM Press, New York, NY, 181-190. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1180875.1180904[back]

omnignorance, the future of the web

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The dream of the web seems a form of omniscience, unlmited and universal knowledge available at the vlick ofof a button or least at the click of a Google ‘Seach’ button. However, last night I was on a site that empitomised the problems of the web.

I was pointed to a blog entry about a presentation that the blog said was “Simply the best presentation I’VE EVER SEEN!“. I was intrigued and and followed this to the Identity2.0 site and in particular a page about a keynote at OSCON 2005.

The entry about the talk mentioned ‘Identity2.0’ and ‘digital identity’ so guessed this was something to do with single logins (like MS passport) or open authentication, which has long been an open issue (with many ‘solutions’ but so far little success). However, was this person and this site talking about one of these such as plain open authentication, or something deeper.

Well it is fine for the page about the talk not to say clearly, it is written within the context of the Indetity2.0 site, so I looked for an ‘about’ link or something like that … nothing I stripped the url back to plain identity2.0.com and of course simply got to a stabdard blog front page (I guess rather like this one), with the latest news, but nothing to gove over context or background.

In fact by chasing yet more links to other sites, by half guessing from various abstracts, blog entries, etc. I managed to pick out half a story about what this was about … but why so hard?

This reminds me of the problem I recorded a month or so back when trying to find last week’s (as opposed to yesterday’s) news. Really easy to find the latest item or even the hotest item, but really bad at getting to the background that gives context and turns buzz words into meaning.

At the risk of sounding like a codger at a cafe table, the same is true of much software documentation. If you have seen the software grow and develop over the years it makes sense, but to students trying to make sense of Java packages, AJAX, Mac/Windows APIs, it is like fumbling in the dark. Good signpoosting at every street corner, but no roadmaps.

In all these cases there are real questions we want to ask, this is not like meandering around Flickr or YouTube, travelling just for the journey. However definitive statements (I’ll not say answers) give way to half-overheard conversations in a coffee shop.

It is often said that experts know more and more about less and less untul eventually they know everything about nothing. It seems we are turning into a generation who know less and less about more and more until we know nothing about everthing – omingnorance rules.

paying the tax

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tax collectors get a bad press, but we have just got to the end of filling in our annual tax returns online and is an amazingly trouble free process … I can still remember when it was paper forms and 2 days before the final deadline we’d discover we needed extra green pages for this thing or other. Now-a-days you just fill in the boxes on the web form, if you haven’t got the figures it just remembers it all for later, then at the end you press the button and it works out everything. And even better, they said they owed me £80 🙂

If only every online service was as good. A short while ago we tried to open a savings account with the Northern Rock and gave up as the applet-based system they use is not compatable with Apple Macs … other banks seem to be able to use SSL for security and browser-independent HTML, so why not them! Suffice to say we went elsewhere.

Even worse was an experience early last year. I’d given a seminar at another university and submitted an expense claim. The university sent me payment advice as an email, but it displayed oddly when I viewed it and got a high spamassassin rating. A bit of digging and I found that the high spam rating was due to the fact that there was not a closing body tag in the HTML. I was going to mail the university IT support and then saw that the company who supplied the software, Albany Software, was named in the email and decided to mail them directly to avoid embarassing them to their client.

So I went to their web site … but it didn’t display properly in Firefox, I tried Safari … even worse! Eventually I got their ‘support’ contact email by using view source and mailed them, mentioning both the broken HTML in the email and the broken website.

The reply from their ‘support’ email:

“Try using Microsoft Internet Explorer. Though Firefox is vastely superior, most websites/applications are only compatible with Internet Explorer.”

Who said the days of the old sys admins had gone!

The happy end to the last story is that I just revisited their site, they have at last got it working cross browser … well I guess better late than never.

Anyway thumbs up for Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs, even if others need to catch up a little.