Seth Ladd's Blog

I presented the wonderfully named " Scala: Java, Erlang, and Ruby’s Hot Three Way Love Child " Scala presentation to the Honolulu Coders back in 2007. I went looking for the actual presentation online, and I'm not sure I ever posted it. I had a brief fling with Scala as I was looking for multi-core friendly environments to build data processing frameworks. I came away being very impressed and look forward to deploying Scala in a future project. After Erlang and Scala, I started programming in a functional style back over in my Ruby code. I consider the experiments a win for that fact along. This post is to prove that I knew Scala before it was cool. :P

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...

I will be giving a Programming the Semantic Web talk at University of Hawaii on April 12th, 2006, 6pm HST. The talk will be located in the POST building , room 302, at the University of Hawaii Manoa campus. I will attempt to explore the foundations of the semantic web (RDF, SPARQL, OWL) and what you can do with those technologies right now . I promised not to do any hand waving, and to show working code. Here's the talk's abstract: > The Semantic Web is an effort to enhance the current Web with machine processable information. It is a set of technologies and practices designed to allow machines to combine and reason about Web resources. This talk will explore RDF, the underlying data model for the Semantic Web, SPARQL, the query language for RDF, and OWL, the web ontology language. We will look at deployable solutions with these technologies that you can use today. Problem spaces such as aggregation of multiple disparate information sources, flexible data models, and kno...

Found RDF - Connecting Software and People - Google Video via a post to swig mailing mail . The video is quite compressed, but you can view the original slides and high quality video from the original blog post by the author. The video does a good job of grounding RDF into some real world problem domains with real world tools such as NetBeans (the author works for Sun). To funny bit is, as I started to watch the video, I was impressed by the cool soundtrack it had. I thought, "Wow, this guy went all out and put in a cool trance soundtrack the match with the cutting edge, futuristic feel of the semantic web." Then I realized I had an internet radio station playing in the background. Time for a remix of the RDF presentation video? :)