Irregular Observations

All right then; Opaque URI's it is

2008-08-01T08:14:00.000-07:00

At first it would appear maybe not:

http://knol.google.com/k/jon-awbrey/semeiotic/3fkwvf69kridz/4#

However, the reduced form:

http://knol.google.com/k/-/-/3fkwvf69kridz/4#

is also being supported.

This of course makes sense if your intention is to become a global authority; automated translation anyone?

Now that issue has been put to rest (pun intended, the implications should be obvious) the next bogeyman is how to model the resultant mess. One could argue that this is a beast all onto itself, but if you ask me approaching this from the intersection of database modeling, code modeling, and semantic structuring (the web schema world) will prove the most useful in the long run. I have my own biases but that's a topic for another day. In the mean time one can only wonder if this marks the point in history that will eventually be looked on as the dawn of the first machine intelligence? Bwahahahaha......

Would a:rose by any other URN smell as sweet?

2005-11-17T14:12:00.000-08:00

Here I continue with the questions raised in the previous post. My answer to this question is basically summed up in this xml-dev post Reading between the lines, the answer to the subject line is “maybe”. If it’s a different URN it’s a different rose; they may not smell the same at all.

Naming things distinctly is crucial to the REST camps vision of the world. If you can’t name something you can’t identify it and retrieve it. However, this means we need a lot of URN’s. Not only do we need a lot of URN’s we need to have some way of understanding the URN’s. An identifier might be opaque (what does id=1234567687 mean?), but once you start naming things you really want to know the semantics of the names. If you don’t know the semantics you need some way of discovering them. If I’m looking for roses I need to know that Rosa and Rose may mean the same thing.

Alternatively, you don’t name everything. You serve up bigger blobs that people can do discovery inside of. When looking for roses you’ve got to know to look for florists first. Either way, discovery is part of the future of the semantic web. That seems to mean that pure REST isn’t possible in the broadest sense, but I wonder if anyone ever thought it would solve all the worlds problems?

More thoughts on discovery and
naming from xml-dev.

Separated at birth

2005-04-20T11:53:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I've posted, but then again, I did promise that posting would be irregular... Anyway, the topic for today is identity:

So what do you think, is this just coincidence? The implications of it being one and the same person are "interesting". Maybe there's truth to the idea that Microsoft is "evil"? Even worse, is there perhaps an "evil" penguin trying to penetrate the Linux world?

For the most part humans aren't going to have trouble deciding these are really two different people. However, computers don't have it so easy. Part of the solution may lie in ontologies. Ontologies tell us how everything is related to each other. Once you know something is related to something you have a clue if two things are the same thing: are they related to the same things? If not, they can't be the same thing. If they are related to the same things, well we still may not know for sure. Conversely, we can't build ontologies if we don't agree on identities. Ontologies are work, people have to build them and agree to them. Identifying things for ontologies seems even harder.

Don't look for WWW URIs for help on this issue. In particular, don't ever assume that you really even know what lies at the end of a URI. It's a resource, but there really isn't a concrete definition of a "resource". That's mostly by design, the WWW doesn't think URIs in themselves hand out guarantees. I can by into this, but if we can't know that two resources are the same then building ontologies becomes even more complex.

So is there a solution on the horizon? Not that I can see (pun intended...)

This is my brother Bubba, and this is my other brother Bubba

2004-11-05T09:32:00.000-08:00

One lazy summer morning several years after I moved to Memphis I was out mowing the lawn when a beat up red station wagon sputtered to a stop in front of my house. A young woman wearing blue jean shorts and a tube top emerged followed by a very large fellow wearing overalls with no shirt underneath. A moment later another even larger fellow exited the back seat, I can't recall what he was wearing. As I wandered over to the car the young lady dispatched the first fellow with the statement "Bubba, go check that we're really out of gas". I volunteered that I had gas for the lawn mower across they yard. This time the lady fixed her eye on the other fellow and told him "Bubba, go help him carry the gas over here". When I questioned whether both fellows where in fact named Bubba I was told that neither was really named Bubba but both her brothers where called Bubba. I don't know about you, but that that certainly cleared up any confusion I might have had...

Having done data modeling for many years I can't help but wonder whether the family tree in this particular case was in fact acyclic. I suspect neither Bubba would have known what I meant by such a query, but both of them would have been able to tell me how they "was related to each other".

The reason for my rambling on about this here is to point at an ongoing discussion about relationships known as xml-dev. This mailing list is obstensibly about XML related issues. Turns out you can't really get very far in talking about XML before you get to talking about how things are related to each other. To me, it is this underlying theme to xml-dev that is the most important reason to read the list. Ultimately, what we do with information systems is to attempt to relate pieces of data together so that we can get some better understanding of the data. Relational databases, Resource Description Framework (RDF), Ontologies, the semantic web, triples, tuples. All different ways of getting at the same issue.

As posts turn up on xml-dev that help to illuminate this central issue I will on occasion point to them here:

The first of these is on the issue of dynamically generated schema. The conclusion I arrived at as I worked through this discussion is that currently there is no good way to model all the different ways that things are related to each other.

The second thread is even longer and more dispersed. It started as a discussion on what standards needed attention after XQuery but much of the discussion ended up centered on the theme of how do we relate things to each other. My conclusion this time is that the ultimate goal of the semantic web is admirable, but a long way from fruition.

Nice design, shame about the execution

2004-09-03T11:09:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago it seemed that just about every graphics designer who could pronounce “WWW” while maintaining the appropriate degree of graphics designer aloofness was rebranding themselves as a Web designer. This lead a whole slew of web sites that, while they perhaps looked nice, where built to look like print pages and completely ignored basic Web design principles.

I had hoped that eventually this phenomenon would disappear but I continue to run into it. In most cases it usually takes the form of sites that are built to a fixed resolution. Even if you happen to be surfing on a monitor that supports 1920 x 1600 resolution that’s too bad, we’re going to fix everything to 800 (maybe 1024) pixels wide. If you have bad eye site and need to use larger fonts, that’s too bad, because you’re still stuck with 800 pixels to display them in. Do the designers realize that for some people this means that they end up with one or two words per line? The most egregious of these sites fix the font size, effectively making them off limits for people with bad eye site.

People, this is not good! The Web is not the same as print media. It supports new modalities of interaction and display. It provides new levels of adaptability for the differently able.

I’d almost go as far as suggesting a boycott of sites that fail at such basics. Unfortunately, that would mean I couldn’t use blogger.com anymore. Everyone, take a look at your web site. If you have any references to fixed width elements (most likely “px” for pixels) get rid of them. The only time you need fixed widths is if you need to match up graphics elements with other floating elements. Use such design elements only as ornamentation.

If you are really dogmatic about having the size of your graphics in sync with the size of your text then look at technologies such as SVG. Learn to use percentage based widths and character size based widths and heights. Learn to build resizable sites, and if you can’t or won’t learn to do such things, then please, please, don’t pass yourself off as a Web designer.

Evidence of brain tampering by space aliens

2004-08-31T08:57:00.000-07:00

Friday I had LASIK. I really hadn’t had all that much time to contemplate the implications of the process before I did it. We have two children 19 months and 5 years and between home and work time for reflection is rare. Saturday we attended a dinner party and after a couple of conversations where I described the procedure I got to thinking about the whole process. Some guy, who I’ve previously met for all of 2 minutes took tiny little diamond coated knives and cut open my eyeballs and then proceeded to burn off parts of the insides of them with a high powered laser. Not only did I volunteer for this process, but I paid good money for it. Perhaps even stranger, I’m happy with the results.