Error: I'm afraid this is the first I've heard of a "rss10" flavoured Blosxom. Try dropping the "/+rss10" bit from the end of the URL.
On picasa web’s storage…
Strange coincidence… a few days ago I was complaining about the fact that Picasa Web Album did not give non-US audience the possibility to buy extra storage space if needed. I have just received a mail from Picasa Support (I also complained to them by email) that they have just this possibility is also open now for everybody. So I have to rectify my remark, and I am happy to do so…
I will have to look at my photos on Picasa Web again now. This facility has some nice features, it may very well be a nice alternative to my current, mostly manual way of generating albums on the Web. I do not know yet.
#A simple template for Picasa
I have been using Picasa for a while to organize my photos on my machine, run a local slideshow, etc. It is a good software for that. I generate my photo albums with the HTML export facility of Picasa which also has a simple template system that lets you adapt the output.
I have recently updated my templates to include some javascript to navigate among the
pictures with arrow keys; while I was at it, I also made the output proper and valid XHTML.
I have put the template files to this site,
in the somebody wants to use them: just download the zip file, deflate it in the web\templates
directory of your Picasa installation, and that is it. Picasa will pick up the template automatically from this directory.
Not all my albums use the cleaned up version yet, but you can look at, say, my photos of Amsterdam as an example (I have commented out the copyright statement and the extra calligraphy image from the distribution, you might want to adapt it to your taste…).
By the way, I have also tried out the Picasa Web Album, to see if I could directly use that instead of generating (and uploading) the XHTML myself. I do not think I will use this, though… Although the album feature looks quite nice (see mine, for example), it has a relatively limited amount of space available and one has to pay a yearly fee for some extra space. That, by itself, would be acceptable, but… payment is accepted from US bank account and credit card only! Isn’t that ridiculous? What a parochialism…
#Music Ontologies
Frederick Giasson just posted a blog on the renewed Music Ontology Specification, trying to make it as close to the MusicBrainz project as possible. It will also be possible to query the MusicBrainz database via SPARQL endpoints. Really great stuff!
While we are at it, however… Personally, I listen mostly to classical music, and I’m always frustrated that most of these ontologies, databases, etc, are not really prepared for that at all. I own an iPod, it is all right as a device, but the terminology it uses is really not prepared for that (think of the terms “song” or “album”, for example). But yesterday, on #swig, Frederick also gave me the reference for a classical music ontology: the “Music Vocabulary” defined by Kanzaki Masahide. For that minority of us caring about classical music, this is a good resource to have…
#SADIe
Read through the paper of Bechhofer & al[1] from ISWC. Interesting stuff. Use Semantic Web to help accessibility problems. Per se, this is not new, but the approach of Bechhofer & al. seems promising. What they do is (1) extract CSS class names from an HTML page (not necessarily XHTML…) and (2) use ontologies to categorize the role of each element (as referred to by CSS). Using the knowledge gained from the ontology a tool can rearrange the page, remove unnecessary elements, etc. The ontologies consist of two parts: on the one hand a general ontology describing the possible roles of various elements in general ( e.g., menus) and, on the other hand, specific ontologies for a specific classes of pages. Eg, ontologies are available for all the CNN.com pages, or for the blogger.com blogs. (There is a much better description on the project’s home page.)
Having some contacts with the Web accessibility community (eg, via my contact with the Accessibilty.nl group here in the Netherlands) I know how really difficult these things are. Also, the fact that the Web designers’ community has not really adopted XHTML over HTML makes the development of various tools even more difficult. The advantage of SADIe seems to be that it annotates the (now ubiquitous) CSS tags rather than relying on the content of the (X)HTML page; also, the ontology can be defined for a specific Web site (or family of sites) independently so that no extra information has to be added to the site itself.
Although the project is still in research, I was curious, so I tried the on-line facility for some sites. I was not very lucky with the CNN home page; there was hardly any difference. But, when I randomly chose a blog on blogger.com, the difference with the site generated by the tool is noticable (e.g., the menus are rearranged):
I did not compare this with the output of other tools (like Opera’s small screen rendering which does similar things based on very different techniques). But it is certainly promising.
It is interesting that Danny Ayers just published a blog on turning CSS sructures into RDF. The current tool of SADIe is a javascript goody analysing the DOM tree of the page, and using the CSS ontology knowledge to massage the DOM tree. However, if the CSS structure can be turned into RDF, this can then be mashed up with the Ontology defined by SADIe; ie, other tools can do nice things with those data, too (for example, specialized queries could extract the meaningful information from the page, stuff like that). Could become even more interesting…
Hivatalos gyásznap
Óriási tehetség volt. Fiatal korában már minden hozzáértő felfigyelt rá, és óriási jövőt jósolt neki. Mind otthoni mind nemzetközi porondon öregbítette Magyarország jó hírét. Aztán, az otthoni politikai körülmények, saját biztonsága és jövője miatt, elhagyta az országot és “nyugaton” telepedett le. Külföldön folytatta karrierjét, óriási népszerűségre tett szert. Elérte mindazt amit az adott területen el lehetett érni: nemzetközi elismertséget, tekintélyt, befolyást, kitüntetéseket, tiszteletet. Soha nem tagadta meg magyarságát, mindenki úgy ismerte, hogy a “magyar”; többet tett a magyar név ismertségéért mint megannyi nagybeszéd vagy hivatalos esemény. Hosszú élet után nemrégiben elhunyt. A szakma sokáig fog még rá emlékezni.
Állami gyásznapot azonban Magyarországon nem hirdettek, a TV-ben vagy a rádióban éppen hogy megemlítették. Az illető nem focista volt, nem jelentett populista népszerűséget a körülötte lévő gyásznap meghirdetése és az azon való résztvétel. Solti Györgynek hívták (pontosabban: Sir Soltinak); elhunyt 1997-ben mint a huszadik század egyik legnagyobb karmesteregyénisége. Teller Edének hívták; elhunyt 2003-ben, mint atomfizikus, az Egyesült Államokbeli tudományos élet egyik legnagyobb befolyású egyénisége. Cziffra Györgynek hívták, elhunyt 1994-ben, mint Liszt Ferenc zongoraműveinek utolérhetetlen előadója, és megannyi fiatal zongoraművész támogatója.
A sort folytathatnám, és csak olyanokat emlegetek itt akiknek halála arra az időre esett, amikor ez az állami gyásznap, mint jogi fogalom, már létezett. Egyedül vagyok-e abban a meggyőződésemben, hogy valami itt nem egészen stimmel?
#Book mashup, SW book list…
I regularly follow the updates on the “Books on Semantic Web” wiki page. I just found out that for most of the books a new entry has been added: a reference to the book mashup service of Chris Bizer & friends. It is really a great service, thanks Chris!
The only disadvantage is that the various RDF references are spread over the wiki page, so it is not easy to make, for example, SPARQL queries over the whole list of books. To make this easier I made a small python program that simply collects all mashup data for the books on the wiki, merges them into one, and puts the result back on the Web as one RDF resource. The script is ran once a day, so there might be a bit of delay when updating the book list. (I could have added it as a CGI script, and I may do it at some point; the problem is that collecting all the data takes quite a long time, so it is not ideal as a service…)
#Literals as subject in RDF and internationalization
I had one of those “aha” moments today. I am at the AC meeting of W3C and listened to a presentation on the Internationalization Tag Set work done at W3C. Essentially, the group tries to define a set of generic (XML) attributes and elements relevant and important for internationalization. One of the possible examples is the proper handling of right-to-left scripts in left-to-right one (like Arabic or Hebrew put in an English text): how should one ensure that the text: “פעילות הבינאום, W3C” is properly displayed (i.e., with the ‘W3C’ at the left of the hebrew characters). It so happens that this requires an extra attribute (called ‘dir’ in HTML). HTML happens to have this attribute, but what the ITS group is working on is to define a generic set that could be used in other XML dialects, too. Another example is an attribute to denote whether a specific text should be translated or not.
The question is: what about RDF literals? How can one ensure that the right set of information are set on literals? At the moment we have only the language attribute, which is necessary, but may not be enough. And my “aha” moment was: if we did not have the restriction in the RDF model which says that literals cannot be subjects of triplets then this would be way easier. The current terminologies used in ITS could have a variant in the form of an RDF vocabulary and be used to characterize literals. This may not cover all internationalization issues (like Ruby markup, for example), but may be o.k. for most.
Of course, one has to be very, very cautious in changing the RDF model and semantics, i.e., there might be some hidden mines here. But the internationalization issue may certainly be a good use case for looking at this restriction again…
(There is a really nice overview on the bidirectional issue above on the I18N site of W3C, if you are interested.)
#Tabulate bookmarklet
As a typical example of programming by example, I have copied and changed the foaf explorer bookmarklet to make a tabulator bookmarklet. It looks for a link header element referring to application/rdf+xml, and sends the corresponding URI to the (latest version) of the tabulator. The tabulator will automatically load that RDF file, instead of starting up with its default values. Nothing fancy, but maybe useful. (Caveat: if there are several such link entries, the bookmarklet finds the first one only…)
(I wanted to put the bookmarklet itself, ie, the javascript: URI into this
blog directly, but blosxom had problems displaying it. Oh well…)