Older blog entries for Uche (starting at number 12)

The latest installment of my column with Mike Olson on Python and Web services, emerged recently. This one covers Rich Salz's ZSI.

I forgot to mention, when announcing part 3 of our 4Suite tutorial series, that there is also part 1 (DOM) and part 2 (XPath/XSLT).

Righted the RDF Inference site, which had fallen over.

Made numerous updates and fixes to the 4Suite site with help from Roxane and Mike Brown.

Yesterday I fired off a rather roguish broadside against the folks who want to turn XML into the next OO wonder. Very interesting and unexpected range of response, much of it private. Sorry about the formatting: the OASIS archiver seems to ignore line breaks from EXMH.

Also found that the link for my 3rd Python/XPCOM article changed, breaking some links. See also part 1 and part 2

IBM dW posted Chime's and my tutorial: Python and XML development using 4Suite, Part 3: 4RDF. Requires free registration, but I think it's worth it :-)

In this third tutorial in a series on 4Suite, learn to use the 4RDF tool set and the various RDF facilities available with Python.

The OMG now links to my XML Europe presentation in their "Presentations and Papers" listing for MDA.

Eric's (vdv) recent article: Format for printing Cataloging XML Vocabularies shows the very interesting method and results of his recent project crawling Web sites to see what sorts of XML he found. He used 4Suite's RDF features and Versa query in it, and gives a small example of a Versa query in the article.

I put a lot of work into 4Suite docs today, partly prompted by my helping Evan Lenz get set up on 4Suite. I reorganized the 4Suite section of my home page to host these updated documents: install guides for CVS users, Windows and UNIX as well as the Quick start guide.

I added full-text search to my Python/XML and 4Suite "Akara" sites (my document collation projects). As I predicted, it took less than an hour.

Dave Carlson pointed me to his article: Modeling XML Applications. I like his thinking in general, though I do have some specific qualms. For one thing, I don't think XML schemata are really solid information modeling bases for the model in the MDA. They're text tree modeling systems, with primitive type inferencing, and we need something more powerful. I, of course, advocate RDF, but even Topic Maps are more suitable. I notice that Dave credits WXS for being the message content model system built into SOAP, but it's actually not WXS but a specialized SOAP serialization, which has some superficial similarity to WXS but is fundamentally quite different.

All business today, pretty much, except for a break to see The Bourne Identity. I highly recommend it, especially for old-school Robert Ludlum fans. That is, for people, like me, who think Tom Clancy basically writes cowboys and injuns books and that John le Carré can't seem to put down the foie gras. The film actually does rather pull it off: I didn't expect even the most virtuoso film making to approach the richness and nuance of the book. While I'm on film, I recently went to see Minority Report. I should have known anything with Tom Cruise in it would be too slick to do justice to Philip K Dick (after all, look what they did to Abre los Ojos).

I contributed Versa examples to RDF Query and Rule languages Use Cases and Examples survey, announced just today, though only the first 3 examples I posted seem to have shown up so far. I think this site could be a good idea with some tweaks (especially giving better definitions of the RDF models being queried).

My Recipe: Merging XBEL Bookmark files has appeared in the Python Cookbook, though the note at the end with sample XBEL files for merging seems to have been corrupted in production. See the comment I added which addresses this.

Craeg Strong pointed me to Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia. It's a good hazing for folks in semantic/intelligent Web communities. Unfortunate that the author chooses the term "straw men" and thus makes it all too easy for detractors to knock him off the log, but I think some of these are points I've been trying to make for a while now. Sometimes an off-hand irreverend statement is worth loads of earnest advocacy. Points 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3 are the motivations of my article The Languages of the Semantic Web. Point 2.4, I think, is a dud: Any Intelligent Web must be a marketplace of ideas. Stupid people will simply lose, just as they do in today's Web. I've put points 2.5 and 2.7 into practice in projects involving ontologies. My motto in these has been: support diversity and disagreement, or fail. I didn't really follow point 2.6.

Speaking of my Sem Web article, looks like it got very kind words in a recent SearchDay issue.

I found my Intel Developer article The XML Menagerie. It discusses a variety of XML technologies, including WXS, RELAX NG and XLink/XPointer.

I also started on an Akara site for 4Suite, focusing on the RDF and respository features.

The Akara stuff is fun to put together, and I hope shaping out to be useful docs. I need to implement sophisticated ordering of some sort in the RDF query to organize the indices a bit more. I also have to add search (should be a snap) and some better style. I'm also contemplating the annotation features of crit as a possible addition. Thanks to vdv for pointing it out.

My document collation system has a name now: "Akara". WikiWiki became MoinMoin in its Python incarnation. Moin Moin is, in a large swathe of West Africa, a meal made from soaked and ground black-eyed peas boiled in water. "Akara" is a similar food, but made from the bean paste fried in groundnut oil. Impeccable nomenclature, right?

Anyway, more importantly, my Akara site for PyXML now has quite a bit more content. For instance, I cover all the relevant entries in the ASPN Python Cookbook. Much more example code to have. Pick it up!

Posted my first Advogato article. Warning: it is not on a technical topic :-)

Yetsrday I resurrected another old article SVG: What comes after XML? from the graveyard of ITWorld. Interesting to see the progress SVG has made these two years later.

A query from someone looking for code for merging XBEL files caused me to dig up an old proposal I made for XBEL merging rules. I think I'll try to build something with this into the BookerT demo that comes with 4Suite. The correspondent also found an old bookmark merging script of mine as well, but this looks too byzantine not to just rewrite from scratch :-).

Eric van der Vlist has announced XVIF, his Python implementation of RELAX NG with extensions for processing pipelines as part of the validation process. Some people have expressed concerns about this combination, but I have long argued that what I call a processing plan should be one of the outputs of XML Schema. I think Eric's design feels just right.

Slow day. I put up this Paper on the use and architecture of 4XSLT (a PDF in Dutch) by Davy Friedrich, Joe Achten, and Wim Deprez.

It seems my brother, Chime, just got an article published in XML.com: Editing XML Data Using XUpdate and HTML Forms. Great stuff, though I'm biased. Micah Dubinko did lament that he didn't cover XForms, but you can't get it all in one article.

I also found my recent column in the Application Development Trends Web page: The many heads of XML modeling.

I also began a document collation instance for 4Suite, though it's not ready for consumption yet.