I just finished updating my FOAF file. Thanks Jim for the help. – Eric Thauvin

We shouldn’t have to do this by hand. We need GUI tools. FOAF-a-matic mk 2 is good but incomplete. As of ten minutes ago it now imports friends from vCard files and you can open your existing FOAF file and have the GUI updated with the info it contains.

TODO:

  • provide GUI components for all base FOAF properties
  • look into providing dynamic a GUI for properties from other namespaces (I doubt this is possible in Thinlet)

Issues:

  • App now inclues Jena libraries, and is massively bigger as a result
  • I don’t know if Leigh Dodds (the original author) has already done this work, or more, or anything. I emailed him a few days ago, but no response as yet. Does anyone know anything?

RSS Bandit. Found it

I had a dream last night. It was about RDF and the semantic web. It was all about automated agents talking, relating; RDF documents find out stuff about other RDF document and becoming cleverer. They link together and become a gestalt entity, greater than the sum of their parts.

There were plain old documents in it too. They were like farmyard animals, chewing the cud.

Incidentally, I didn’t find RSS Bandit via Google. I found it because its author posted a link on a weblog I read.

Searching for “RSS Bandit” on Google produces hundreds of links to pages mentioning it, but none to either its homepage, or its gotdotnet workspace (there’s a link to an old MSDN article about it). The link to the workspace may be on any number of those returned pages, or all of them (it’s not linked to on the first page returned). This is normal Google usage. And it doesn’t work any more.

All our new projects at work are being done in Tapestry.

It makes my brain bleed.

RDF is supposed to be hard, but it’s a walk in the park compared to this.

Ian Davis writes that Dan Brickley’s proposed FoafNews is just RDFNews.

I think he’s right. Why use the FOAF name in this? This is the point where I’d like to use, for the first time ever, the phrase ….. (fanfare please) … FUD.

A summary:

Zeldman has redesigned his website, and it looks absolutely beautiful. Is this finally an end to the proliferation of white-only websites (I have an excuse – I have no design talent)?

A few days behind, but still, XHTML 2.0 considered hopeful. It’ll be so nice to see many of the broken facets of XHTML 2.0 fixed.

It’s also (vaguely) interesting to see the CSS debate continue on and on and on.

FOAF and co-depiction gets a mention on a completely unrelated website, which I think is a good sign of its growing popularity (or at least mindshare).

Dare‘s RSSBandit is actually looking really good now, and as soon as I find out where to download it from, I’ll be trying it out.

Oh. It’ looks like it’s not out yet.

Slightly more interestingly, Jena includes a tool called “schemagen” which takes in an RDF schema and produces an appropriate vocabulary class in Java. Excellent! I was really expecting Jena to be much much harder to use, but it appears to be fairly simple.

p.s. I’ve just spotted a design suggested for Dave Hyatt’s website. I think I’ll convert to CSS and steal it (using -moz-border-radius to do the corners for gecko-browsers).

They say the Net expands as necessary to fill your free time, and this has been true for me for years, and with the advent of RSS aggregators there’s no excuse for anyone to have a moment’s free time; I’m subscribed to thirty feeds, but there are people who subscribe to three hundred, or more.

But recently I’ve found this not being the case, in fact, the opposite; now, I don’t even have enough time for the computer at all, let alone keeping up with the virtual joneses. More quality time with ‘er indoors means that (through no fault of my own) I’m kept up to date on the dalliance of Kat Slater and Alfie Moon in Eastenders. Some people would say this is healthy, I say “where’s my personal coding time?”. I need a laptop.

BIO: A vocabulary for biographical information and Friend of a friend.

The GEDCOM Standard and any of one, or a mixture, of Simple API for GEDCOM, GedML, GEDCOM to DAML.

Does anyone see where I’m going here?

Possibly converting GEDCOM to DAML to use Jena instead of the Stanford RDF API, and then using XSLT on the resultant XML to produce good FOAF using the BIO vocab.

And voila, your family in your FOAF file. Why you’d want to do so is a different matter.

Incidentally, I’ve seen a lot of talk (esp. on rdfweb-dev and rdf-interest) about GEDCOM -> RDF but no concrete code, hence why I thought I’d have a go.