DailyNotes/2005/06/27 - Raymond Yee's Wiki

Notelets
Clay Shirky on the semantic web
Use URNs?
Peter Brantley's new blog
Today's pictures
Yesterday's pictures
Friday's and Saturday's pictures
Open Threads

Notelets

The Flickr mosaic maker is cool but I'll probably end up writing my own script to make custom-made mosaics.

Jon Udell: How do you design a remixable Web application?:

I think we've known the answer for a long time. A website that wants to be remixable will deliver content as XML and behavior as script. These aspects can be, and will be, combined server-side for Web 1.0 clients, but Web 2.0 clients will increasingly be able to do this processing for themselves. So there will be two ways to remix: by intercepting the server-side combination of XML content and scripted behavior, or by recombining on the client.

What's unclear, at least to me, is whether -- or to what degree -- the content and code will be augmented by external descriptions that can be used by automated tools, and can insulate derivative works from change. Could a lightweight schema for the content, and a lightweight service description for the code, make these remixes more resilient without imposing too much overhead? It's a great experiment for someone to try.

Clay Shirky on the semantic web

a quote from Clay Shirky:

The Semantic Web is peopled by engineers who are offended by ambiguity, and who believe, wrongly, that ambiguous systems are broken systems. The one thing they can't bring themselves to accept is that there might be ambiguity in the world, and that systems that tolerate ambiguity, at the expense of certainty or machine consumability, might actually have better survival characteristics.

Use URNs?

Should I start embedding URNs in my HTML?

In response to What is a definitive URI for books?, BruceDarcus pointed me to using URNs as identifiers. e.g., urn:isbn:0520237048, noting that both ISBNs and ISSNs are registered URNs. I didn't give URNs a serious look because I had actually never seen any "real support" for them. That is, I can write urn:isbn:0520237048, but what would that do?

Still, Bruce's email prompted me to take a closer look, which led to Ben Meadowcroft's URNs, citations in web authoring:

This article covers the techniques authors on the web can use to reference articles and publications in a robust manner. It was written to highlight some of the inadequeces of relying on non persistant URI references for academic and technical papers. It was partially born out of my considerations on holistic hypertext and how this could be integrated into both CMS and KMS.

which I found via URN, some URI scheme - Anne’s Weblog about Markup & Style.

I learned two interesting things:

the cite attribute for blockquote and q in XHTML 1.0
that although there doesn't yet to be widespread support for URNs in browsers, there is an URN Support extension for Mozilla/Firefox, which worked for Ben Meadowcroft.

I installed the extension and clicking on a urn:isbn led to the corresponding amazon.com page.

Here I provide my example:

Introduction to California Plant Life: Nearly one-fourth of the plants found in North America north of Mexico, and more than are found in any other state, grow in California.

Clicking on the name of the book does not lead anywhere in most browsers because there is no native support for URNs, but any bot/search engine reading my wiki can now pick up on the ISBN, stated in a RDF-friendly way.

One might find the default linking of the browser extension to amazon.com rather ironic. There's a lot of jumping through hoops to write URNs, which then gets directed by the browser extension to where people are already linking to in the first place. But note that the decoupling of the identifier from the locator does make the important statement that ISBNs are not synonymous with amazon.com and allows for other explicit aasociations to be made. For instance, the extension could be rewritten to make links to the Library of Congress instead.

I'm still mulling how to make practical use of URNs....

[UriForBook/UseUrn]

Peter Brantley's new blog

I only very recently discovered that Peter Brantley, Director of Technology at the California Digital Library, has started a public blog, shimenawa. Even though I already have semi-regular conversations with Peter, I'm happy to read his latest thoughts about libraries and whatever else he will choose to write about.

I'm envious that Peter will be able to attend Where 2.0 and look forward to seeing how he reacts to the conference. I have been experimenting a lot recently with geospatial services, specifically combining Flickr and GoogleMaps. I've been working on a write-up of my experimentation (e.g., GoogleMapsHacking); you can see some of the pictures that I have georeferenced centered around 2195 Hearst, the location of my office.

Peter is really grooving on the technology. Today is his first podcast!