November 2010
7 posts
4 tags
Demystifying RDF: Part IV
(If you’ve not read them yet, go back and read Part I, Part II and Part III; this will make more sense if you do!)
Back in the first two parts of this series, I explained that lots of RDF is made up of links, often to other RDF documents, and talked about how that’s written in RDF/XML (i.e., the rdf:resource attribute).
This is very powerful. You can link to anything which has a...
4 tags
Demystifying RDF: Part III
(If you’ve not read them yet, go back and read Part I and Part II; this will make more sense if you do!)
So far we’ve covered various parts of RDF, and RDF/XML in particular. Let’s look at literals.
If you run across something like this in the midst of some RDF/XML:
<ex:thing>Hello!</ex:thing>
Then you know that the property ex:thing (whatever that may be) has an...
4 tags
Demystifying RDF: Part II
(If you haven’t read the first part of this series, you’ll probably want to before getting into this one).
In the first part, I compared sets of RDF triples to properties on instances in object-oriented programming, explained the basics of how RDF/XML serialisation works, and gave some small examples.
Let’s look at the properties in the first example:
Rather than express...
4 tags
Demystifying RDF
I must admit, when I came across RDF several years ago, I couldn’t make head nor tail of it. In fact, it was only relatively recently — after being spurred on by sources of RDF which looked like they contained interesting and useful stuff — that I really got to grips with it, and in the end wrote an RDF/XML parser and generator in PHP (though I wouldn’t recommend you do...
3 tags
Neutrality
Okay, let’s open this can of worms.
There are lots of different things at play here, all bundled up under the loose heading of “Net Neutrality”.
Let’s start at the consumer end. Quite a few ISPs employ “traffic management” techniques: that is, because at peak times the concentration points (for example, the links from exchanges) become saturated by the sheer...
4 tags
How to direct Google Groups mail to your Google...
If, like me, you had a Google Apps account and had some Google Groups e-mail landing in your inbox, you will have probably discovered that things went a bit… awry… when your Apps domain was migrated to the “new infrastructure”. The (ordinary) Google Account which you used to sign in to Groups was no longer allowed to have your Google Apps e-mail address as an alias/verified address, and yet Google...
4 tags
Value
I’ve been having some conversations recently about the value of the BBC Archive.
The Archive is a curious beast. To the likes of you and I, the vast majority of it may as well exist in some private collection. We don’t see it, we don’t touch it, and we sometimes hear snippets about it. There are releases of collections, but these really only scratch the surface of what’s...
