RDF in 500 Words
Tim Bray was somewhat dismissive of RDF on the TAG list, and the discussion spilled over onto Burningbird's blog, xml-dev and then via Dave Winer onto Slashdot (item below). One of the more uncomfortable lines of attack was the complexity of RDF, especially since 6 non-trivial new docs detailing it have just been released. This was my response to xml-dev.

RDF too simple - Jack William Bell on /. suggesting that emergence might be a problem.

Human Markup Language Primary Base Specification 1.0 just announced.

"HumanML is designed to represent human characteristics through XML. The aim is to enhance the fidelity of human communication. "

Len Bullard comments:
"The Primary Base Schema referred to here is essentially
a loosely coupled ontology of XML Schema abstract types
plus some basic complex types. These would be used
in secondary schemas that could interoperate based on
the primary types. Much of the focus for deriving
these comes from semiotic literature; so a grounding
in the basics of semiotics is helpful in understanding
the intent of the design."

seeAlso: Semiotics for Beginners
(thanks Len!)

Resource Description Framework (RDF) - the latest version of the doc suite has just been announced.

The Weblog MetaData Initiative: Next Step: HTML [meta] Experiment
request for assistance

Sesame 0.7 release. "Sesame is an Open Source RDF Schema-based Repository and Querying facility. It is currently activily being developed by aidministrator and OntoText. "

magazine: Introducing the Microcontent Client - Anil Dash, An interesting write up on approaches to browsers etc. seeAlso: Neil Deakin's XUL/RDF stuff.

Reuters Corpus - "Reuters is making available large quantities of Reuters News stories for use in research and development of natural-language-processing, information-retrieval or machine learning systems."

"The Corpus consists of 806,791 XML files in NewsML format. They are distributed in the form of 365 zip files, one per day, over 2 CDs. Approximately 3.7Gb is required for the storage of the uncompressed XML files. "

Ian Davis has kindly put the region codes and news topic codes into RDF Schema (maybe 50-100 terms in each).

"I do not expect all RDF graphs to be written in RDF/XML", Dave Beckett
RDF/XML syntax is up again on the TAG list, originally in the context of an RDF version of RDDL.
Interesting reading, if you ignore the scratching and hair-pulling.

RDF Vocabulary Description Language 1.0: RDF Schema new version of WD.

RDF/XML Syntax Specification (Revised) - new release.
Key changes :

Section 2 "An XML syntax for RDF" expanded with many more examples.
-- in particular we ask for feedback on this section since it has a
lot of new words and examples.

RDF typed literals added using a new rdf:datatype attribute.
-- so you can mark literals as being of type XSD integer, for example.

rdf:nodeID attribute added to allow referencing of blank nodes.
-- this makes going from RDF graphs to RDF/XML a lot easier

rdf:parseType="Collection" added for collections of nodes.
-- modelled after daml:Collection, generating a lisp-like triple
structure of rdf:first, rdf:rest, rdf:nil.

Some non-namespaced attributes were returned to the grammar:
ID, bagID, about, resource, parseType or type
-- this makes a lot of existing RDF/XML work without warnings.

SnipSnap - "SnipSnap is a free and easy to install Weblog and Wiki Software written in Java."
Looks really good - the weblog/wiki functionlity is integrated, which is a big step in the right direction, but it seems to be a bit light on the old metadata...

PS. I just found the RSS feed, which declares itself rss version="2" but contains stuff using the rss 1.0 modules (and rdf syntax ns) - it looks a little strange, but I do believe it's RSS 2.0 using RSS 1.0 in a legal fashion.

PPS. There is a load of metadata related stuff, see MetaData, Label and MetaFields. RDF & TM representation are planned.

The Past, Present and Future of Web Services, part 2 - Uche Ogbuji.
[Web services and the Intelligent web]
"...At the grassroots there have been efforts to bridge semweb and Web services, I myself being a frequent contributor in articles such as Managing structured Web service metadata and Using RDF with SOAP"
Uche's really getting prolific, and though he's not on a soapbox in his articles he's quietly (!) developing semweb technologies - see 4Suite

Mozilla Weblogs

XForms 1.0 - Candidate Rcommendation now out: "XForms is an XML application that represents the next generation of forms for the Web. By splitting traditional XHTML forms into three parts�XForms model, instance data, and user interface�it separates presentation from content, allows reuse, gives strong typing�reducing the number of round-trips to the server, as well as offering device independence and a reduced need for scripting.

XForms is not a free-standing document type, but is intended to be integrated into other markup languages, such as XHTML or SVG."

KAON Ontology and Semantic Web Infrastructure - OIMODELER STUFF - "The KAON OIModeller is a tool for editing and managing large Ontologies." it uses TouchGraph. Says Alex Shapiro :
"Boris Motik has refactored the TouchGraph GraphLayout library so that it now conforms to the Model-View-Controller paradigm. The new library is well commented and features improved APIs, which should make it easy to build on."

tangle "...is a system for what we call "web page entanglement". tangle creates links between pages automatically based on how users move from one page to another.

By viewing the web through a tangle proxy, you can see the connections and associations left by those who surfed the web before you.

By surfing the web using tangle, you also leave behind connections and associations for others who will surf in the future."
Sourceforge, GPL (looks to be Linux C++).

Cover Pages - Cover covers OWL guide.

Gandalf is an automated theorem proving (ATP) system ... is particularly strong at large problems, decidable classes and model building according to the
CASC competition, probably the best there is for these kinds of tasks.
The person behind it, Tanel Tammet, is looking to get in touch with people doing implementation work for using first order provers for semantic web tasks.

PRIMES is in P though this doesn't mean an efficient way to factorise a composite integer has been found, so it shouldn't affect the security of RSA or PGP.

Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful interesting points from the cusp of HTML 4.01 and XHTML.

VLUM Demo - Visualisation for showing Large User Models. "VlUM takes a user model described in simple RDF, and allows you to explore the model in certain ways."

Ted Nelson "...is a visionary who is credited with coining the term hypertext.". BBC interview from a year ago.
Seems to me that the copyright part is likely to remain an outstanding issue, even if the semweb satisfies the rest of his vision.

e4Graph - "...a C++ library that provides your program with reliable, efficient and portable persistent storage for graph like data". At Sourceforge.

Numerical Recipes in C in PDFs.

0xDECAFBAD: On tilling a plot to plant a Semantic Garden
mentions BlueSky and dogfood in the same sentence!

Notion System found while looking for a good dogfood reference:Conceptually Notion System is close to Topic Maps and RDF but some (major) differences exist.
Some really ugly URLs, but nice TM-like display of list archives

kuro5hin great one-pager on logics, mostly non-classical.

The Waypath Project - Weblog Linking allows 'Related Weblog Navigation' & searching, based on ThinkTank23's commercial tool(s).
I can't find any description of how it works, but then I'm not particularly motived to look hard - there was absolutely nothing relevant in the top 3 results it gave for sites related to this one, although I did try a couple of others which gave possibly acceptable results.