Seth Ladd's Blog

I will be presenting a quick 30 minute talk on RDF and Oracle 10g to the Hawaii Oracle Users Group Tuesday May 9th at 11:30am HST. The meeting's agenda is now available, including directions to the location. There's even a drawing for the Effective Oracle by Design book! I plan to give an overview of RDF and then show how Oracle 10g implements it. The word on parking is: > Parking in lot #1 or #2 (enter one block mauka of Dillingham on Kokea Street, is OK. Tell the parking lot attendant they are attending a function in PCATT and put a handwritten note on the dashboard saying that also. Handicap parking should be available on a first-come-first-served basis. Hope to see you there! Pizza will be served, so come on down.

Identity, Reference, and the Web (IRW2006) Workshop > Our immediate goal for this workshop is to explore the nature of identification and reference on the Web, > building on current work in Web architecture, the Semantic Web, and informal community-based tagging > (folksonomy), as well as current practice in XML and theory in philosophy and linguistics. I've been reading the PDFs and papers that will presented at this workshop, and I'm really gaining a greater understanding for the whole httpRange-14 problem. I've always known it's a problem, but I've brushed it off hoping that it won't affect me in Real Life. However, as RDF is moving more and more into knowledge management arena (and I'm not sure it should go there anyway), the issues of identity are extremely important. At this moment, I'm subscribing to the "It's on the web if it has a URI. Who cares if I can't actually retrieve a representation from the URI?" URI ident...

TopBraid Composer is a: > new modeling environment from industry experts for creating and managing Semantic Web ontologies. From the people who brought you Protege OWL editor. Built on Eclipse.

IBM Web Ontology Manager has just been released. > IBM Web Ontology Manager is a lightweight, Web-based tool for managing ontologies expressed in Web Ontology Language (OWL). With this technology, users can browse, search, and submit ontologies to an ontology repository.

I created a new Rails project today, using Rails 1.1 for the first time. There's a little gem inside Controllers created by the scaffolding: # GETs should be safe (see http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/whenToUseGet.html) verify :method => :post, :only => [ :destroy, :create, :update ], :redirect_to => { :action => :list } Not only is that so terse and simple to express in Ruby on Rails, but it's the right thing to do. Any action that may result in modification of the resource should be performed with POST. It's great to see these types of Web Architecture best practices enforced, so that more applications are built with web friendliness.

Pellet , an open source OWL reasoner from Mindswap , is now at version 1.3 . It is a very capable reasoner, and has excellent integration with Jena . Below is a list of changes for 1.3: * ENHANCED: SPARQL query engine PelletQueryExecution tu answer non-SELECT queries * ADDED: Processing class expressions in SPARQL queries * ADDED: Treating bnodes in SPARQL queries as non-distinguished variables * ADDED: Query optimization features (simplification and reordering). Reordering feature is disabled by default and needs to be enabled in the configuration file. * ENHANCED: Datatype reasoning support for user-defined datatypes * ADDED: Support for InverseFunctional datatype properties (a.k.a. keys). (experimental) * ADDED: Support for DL-safe rules (experimental) * ENHANCED: Pellet command line options * ENHANCED: More configuration parameters in pellet.properties

The Semantic Web talk at HJUG went fairly well. About eight people attended, and a few have either used RDF or are currently using RDF and OWL. The questions from the audience were insightful, demonstrating that they were thinking critically about the technologies. Some questions were quite expected: Q) If anyone can say anything about anything, what's to stop someone from saying something wrong? How will I know *not* to use those incorrect assertions for my reasoning? A) Good question! I have two solutions for this. The first is a Google-esque algorithm and hueristics will appear, allowing the top linked RDF documents to bubble to the top. That is, the more people that link to the RDF document, the more likely that the assertions contained within are valid for a majority of the views of the world. The second answer relies on ontologies, for they are able to determine if there are inconsistencies in the world. If someone says that cars and people are disjoint, and you have...