Seth Ladd's Blog

Why do I have a great eBay feedback rating, but no way of moving that trust rating over to Amazon? I worked hard to get all the feedback, but when I want to sell something on Amazon, it's like I'm a brand new person. This sounds like a job for FOAF . A specialization of the Trust Ontology can be applied to trust in auction settings. Then, using some OWL magic, I could quite easily map myself on eBay to myself on Amazon. Then, ta da, my Amazon avatar doesn't look so bad anymore. I wonder if this is doable with eBay's API and Amazon's APIs (SOAP and RESTful)? Sounds like an interesting application of those APIs plus FOAF. Is this a good proof of concept for the Semantic Web? What would stop it from being deployed?

I put food on the table by developing Java web services (for both humans and machines). I work primarily with Open Source tools, and contribute many bug reports and an occasional patch or two. In the open source world, there are typically more than one programmer with commit access to the project. Usually, the existing developers will vote on the new developer. The voting criteria differ between projects, but usually it comes down to an issue of trust . Is the new developer trusted to have write access? I believe that a correctly tripled Semantic Web could help with that question. The data for determining trust, in this case, is ample throughout the web. For instance, as a developer, I leave breadcrumbs everywhere: bugzilla posts, JIRA posts, mailing list posts, CVS commits (on the web via ViewCVS). Let's pretend in some magical world all those actions and events had triples to describe them. It's conceivable to write a Rule against the Semantic Web that would say "...

As a first step, using DMOZ categories for dc:subject is very simple. In Movable Type , just place the dmoz URI (eg, http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/On_the_Web/Weblogs/ for blogging) as a category in your blog configuration. dc:subject wants a Literal as a value, so the URI from dmoz will show up as a Literal. I believe the Semantic Blog Demonstrator has a more full schema for blogging. Once it starts to work again, I'll see how best to indicate a blog entry's subject in a more RDF friendly way (ie, make the DMOZ URI a Resource and not a Literal). Just adding more semantic web friendly triples.

phil ringnalda dot com: TypeKey from a different angle Phil Ringnalda writes: Now, I'm not so sure that's the right angle to take. If instead of seeing TypeKey as a slightly more tolerable (because you only have to lie about your email address once instead of many times) way to implement registration, you look at it as way to implement comment moderation, it begins to look a tad bit better. He's right about this. TypeKey alone won't stop any problems. We need authorization controls, which are above authentication. TypeKey is only a first step. I am investigating using Semantic Web technologies to help with the authorization problem. There's a concept of building a trust web that can likely help here. Use a authenitcation service (TypeKey or PGP signatures) to prove Seth is Seth. Give Seth a URI. A foaf:mbox_sha1 might be good here. Put blog comment triples into RSS feeds. The aggregators can pick these up and start to collect where Seth has posted, when, etc. ...

RSS 1.0 and 2.0 Blog Comments Module The current blog comments module does not render as RDF. The current usage: <blogcomments:comments> need to become <blogcomments:comments rdf:parseType="Collection"> I have made this change, and along with the MTEntryIfComments plugin, I now have validated RSS 1.0 as RDF! Just doing my part to add more triples to the world. Of course, now question remains, how best to promote these (and other) triples to other blog authors?

MT Extensions: MTEntryIfComments 2.0 MovableType has conditional tags that are true when entries and pings are enabled. The following tags allow you to test whether comments or pings exist. MTEntryIfComments : A conditional tag that is true if the current entry has one or more (or a specific number of) comments. Useful if you want to add content before/after a list of comments only if the list is not empty, or if you want to display different text based on the number of comments. This is useful for rendering comment triples if they exist for a particular blog entry.

SemErgence: Comment on Subject metadata to Blog Posts CaptSolo writes: Regarding the hard part to make the UI for selecting categories - I think that most blog engines already have UI for entering the blog post categories. Therefore, instead of adding semantic category to each post and having to create a new UI for that, we may add the semantic meta-information to the existing categories. This is the route I initially travelled. I have a post that shows how to use OWL to map a blog post that has a particular dc:subject Literal to a OWL Class . For instance, declaring that posts that have a dc:subject of "blogging" are members of the :PostAboutBlogging class. This leaves each blog owner the freedom to declare any dc:subject they want (literal or Resource) and to use an external OWL ontology to bring some order.