Semantically speaking
Updates have been far and few in between here due to the same old reasons: life being mostly all work and very little play. There are a couple of pretty interesting developments that has been in the works, I will write more about them if and when they work out. Meanwhile, in the technology sphere, other than the recent and continuing dalliance with Lucene, Nutch and crawling the tubes, there is one bit of technology – RDF and the semantic web – that’s been taking more and more of my thought cycles.
Firstly, I will readily admit to not yet understanding the core concepts – triples and the subject, object and predicate soup — to the required level of finesse, but I am trying hard to implement a subset of it in regular and existing applications, so that data can describe itself and generate multiple views that would otherwise be pretty much impossible to. This is also necessary because most of the tools in the RDF space – including application frameworks and data browsers — are far from being scaleable or stable enough at this point. Besides, paradigm shifts are best left out when it is based on currently evolving technology.
Over the past week I’ve been putting the finishing touches on version one of an internal API and remodeled it to be REST-compliant than to use XML-RPC as the earlier one used to do. It took me a while to wrap my head around URIs being used as unique identifiers and other concepts, but you can call me a convert now, after having seen the positives, thought I will admit that getting the URIs right is one hell of a bitch.
