Yet Another Sexy Use Case for the Semantic Web

Stumbled on a great semantic web use case from mod-pubsub titled Imagine eBay Without The eBay.


Commerce over the web should be as decentralized as the web itself. In such a world, search engines become more important, and pubsub becomes more important (as buyers and sellers regularly want to publish and subscribe to messages saying "I want to buy this" or "I want to sell this"). There's a very exciting future out there, waiting to be invented...


Take it one step further: one of eBay's nice features is that of trust. You can see the user feedback and trust ratings for a buyer or seller from past transactions. Why does that data have to live only in eBay? Isn't my Amazon Marketplace identity and trust rating equally as important? I should be able to combine the two identities into one identity, and thus build twice as much trust. (btw, I've posted about this scenario before, but I never took it so far as to decentralize the actual buying and selling)

Good use case, thanks mod-pubsub.

Popular posts from this blog

Lists and arrays in Dart

(This is Part 3 in a series about Dart. Check out Part 2, Function in Dart .) Warning : We expect the Dart libraries to undergo potentially sweeping changes before Dart goes to alpha. This document is relevant as of 2011-12-22. Intro Dart is a "batteries included" effort to help app developers build modern web apps. An important "battery" is the bundled core Dart libraries, providing common and rich functionality. Dart is building a solution for large, complex web apps, and providing well tested, integrated, and common libraries is key to helping a web app developer be more productive out of the box. The Collection libraries are a crucial set of APIs that Dart developers get for free. Much more than simple arrays and maps, the Collection library includes standard ways to filter, iterate, inspect, compose, and sort your data. This post specifically looks at List<E> , Dart's ordered, indexable collection of objects. Aside: The Dart project is lucky
Read more

Converting Array to List in Scala

Now, this has to have a built-in somewhere in Scala , because it just seems too common. So, how to convert an Array to a List in Scala? Why do I need this? I needed to drop to Java for some functionality, which in this case returns an Array. I wanted to get that Array into a List to practice my functional programming skillz. **Update**: I figured out how to convert Arrays to Lists the Scala way. Turns out it's a piece of cake. val myList = List.fromArray(Array("one", "two", "three")) or val myList = Array("one","two","three").elements.toList The call to elements returns an Iterator , and from there you can convert to a List via toList . Nice. Because my first version wasn't actually tail recursive, what follows is a true tail recursive solution, if I were to implement this by hand. The above, built in mechanism is much better, though. object ArrayUtil { def toList[a](array: Array[a]): List[a] = { d
Read more

Null-aware operators in Dart

Image
Three new language features just landed in the latest dev channel build of the Dart ! Collectively known as null-aware operators , these new features will help you reduce the code required to work with potentially null objects. I'm excited for these new abilities, because typing less is always a good thing. Read on to learn more, and be sure to try these new features on Dart Pad . ?? Use ?? when you want to evaluate and return an expression IFF another expression resolves to null. exp ?? otherExp is similar to ((x) => x == null ? otherExp : x)(exp) ??= Use ??= when you want to assign a value to an object IFF that object is null. Otherwise, return the object. obj ??= value is similar to ((x) => x == null ? obj = value : x)(obj) ?. Use ?. when you want to call a method/getter on an object IFF that object is not null (otherwise, return null). obj?.method() is similar to ((x) => x == null ? null : x.method())(obj) Yo
Read more