What makes an on-line community? In the past two weeks I have received announcements of three new “communities” all interested in using open-source software to retrieve, share, and analyze data from or about governments. Most of these announcements say the same thing: “A lot people seem to be working on this, but they aren’t talking…
RDF is seductive. I can’t get away from it. Something about the ability to represent anything and everything in one consistent model just tugs at my engineer’s heartstrings. The problem with RDF, as I’ve discovered through painful experience, is that the ability to represent everything sacrifices the ability to represent anything efficiently. Certainly that is…
I dropped in to hear Rich Hickey talk about Clojure at the New York Semantic Web meetup group. Some highlights: “¢ Some programs, like compilers or theorem provers, are themselves functions. They take input and produce output. Purely functional languages like Haskell are good for these kinds of programs. But other programs, like GUIs or…