Structured Data Website Launch

Structured Data Website Launch (via Gregg Kellogg) A number of Web developers from the RDFa, Microdata and Microformats communities announce the launch of the Structured Data website and community. There are a number of syntaxes for expressing structured data in HTML today: RDFa, Microdata and Microformats. While each syntax has its own parsing rules and data model, the underlying concept among all of them is the same - to express Structured Data in HTML. The Structured Data website (http://structured-data.org/) provides resources to learn about, markup and debug structured data in HTML, including RDFa, Microdata and Microformats. One of the new features, not available anywhere else, is a unified Structured Data Linting Service (http://linter.structured-data.org/), complete with Google Rich Snippets and schema.org examples (http://linter.structured-data.org/examples/) in both Microdata and RDFa format. The Structured Data Linter provides a unified service for verifying and visualizing the structured data contained in web pages, and supports the RDFa and Microdata syntaxes, with Microformats support on the way. At the time of this announcement, the Google and Microsoft testing tools do not support schema.org markup in RDFa or Microdata. The need for such linting service has been expressed many times on the schema.org mailing list and we are happy to announce that the service is now available. Gregg Kellogg has been instrumental in creating the linting service with support from Stéphane Corlosquet. Web developers may now use the linter service to ensure that their schema.org Microdata or RDFa markup is valid. The Structured Data Linting Service is a beta launch and thus contains a number of bugs. That said, we felt that it would be best to get this tool into the hands of the Web developer community. We invite the Web developer community to try it out, report bugs (https://github.com/structured-data/linter/issues), suggest new features (http://groups.google.com/group/structured-data-dev) and contribute new ideas and code. All of the source code is released under a public domain dedication and is available on github (https://github.com/structured-data/).

Structured Data on the Web Structured Data on the Web. More and more of the world's data is moving onto the Web. We want to share, re-mix and use this data to build more awesome Web applications. Using structured data techn...

Via Health Intersections: Resources For Healthcare

Resources For Healthcare (RFH): Grahame Grieve's proposed response to the HL7 Fresh Look Taskforce, using 37 Signals' uberREST Highrise API as a jumping off point.

RFH defines a RIM-based ontological framework for Resources For Healthcare, based around an exchange, data dictionary and workflow management.


Letter to RFH readers

Letter to RFH Readers. Grahame Grieve 13-Aug 2011. This specification arose from the remit of the HL7 Fresh Look Taskforce: if HL7 started again from scratch with a new specification, what would a goo...

So, what's important about this? This proposal draws on the HL7 v3 RIM, the Reference Information Model that underlies the HL7 specification. The RIM is a pictorial object model which defines the life cycle of the different messages that comprise the HL7 clinical domains. Because health information is very much workflow based, the RIM-based part is important. moving away from a service architecture towards a REST architecture is indicative of a general shift towards simplicity in the IT industry as a whole.

The timing of this proposal is very much driven by the questions raised by the HL7 Fresh Look taskforce. I recently joked that HL7 v3 is still at a turning point, like one of my son's Choose You Own Adventure books. This screen capture from Graham Grieve's Health Intersections blog recently is perhaps an indication of the signposts facing HL7 v3:

I'm crossposting this to my personal weblog...

I'm crossposting this to my personal weblog for further ingestion. This is partially an experiment in google+... when the article (which I shared to blogspot by email) receives the message, it will post as a draft, since google+ sends blogger (along with the original post here), the credentials I am using to transmit the post... Question: How to store a CDA document in a relational database « Health Intersections Pty Ltd Question: How to store a CDA document in a relational database. Posted on August 16, 2011 by Grahame Grieve. 2 commentsLeave a comment. A question (by the ask me a question link above): I am trying to...

Can't argue with that...

On Pitchfork, via @camera_obscura_ on Twitter

Pitchfork: Watch Neko Case and My Morning Jacket Cover Kenny and Dolly's "Islands in the Stream" With their specific combination of beardedness and hotness, My Morning Jacket's Jim James and Neko Case are kind of ...

Cross posting from google+ to blogger

Well that's kind of cool... thanks to Rick Klau for the know-how.

Paul Di Filippo reviews a book on identity...

Piers Hollott shared Piers Hollott's post with you.

Piers Hollott Paul Di Filippo reviews a book on identity by Gary Younge (Barnes & Noble) Second New Review at B&NR I survey a non-fiction item about identity politics: http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/I n-the-Margin/Who-Are-We-And-Should-It-Ma tter-in-the-21st-Century/ba-p/5445 Posted by Paul DiFi. View or comment on Piers Hollott's post » Join Google+

Context+

Here are a couple initial thoughts about Google Plus:

1) I would really like to be able to create some content (like a photo album), and publish this to my circles, using different contexts for different circles. Fine grained, but I think this would be really cool. When you post on your blog, you post photos and then you write a story, and you think the story is the content. But when the post comes up as a result of a google search, it's the pictures - the real content - which you see. With short posts (Twitter, Posterous, Facebook, Google+), it becomes more obvious that what is readily shareable is videos and pictures (my content), not words (my context).

2) Because I can't access Twitter during the work day due to a firewall restriction, I appreciate how several techies I follow collect a week's worth of tweets into "Short Form Fragments" - why couldn't Google+ automatically do this for me, collecting a weeks "stream" into an automatic blogger post? Again, this would be very cool.

Canonical Context

The word canon has a literary meaning - in this context, a canon is a set of writing felt by someone to embody and exemplify the norms of those works which are non-canonical. An anti-canon is just a canon appointed by someone else to oppose a hegemonic canon.

In mathematics or informatics, a canonical form is a normative way of expressing or describing an object, so again, a norm created by a group to facilitate sharing of concepts.

In Superman comics, Star Wars books and so forth, "The Canon" refers to the fictional history which is considered (ostensibly by the publishers) as normative by the audience. Other histories may have taken place in alternate realities, parallel storylines and the like, but the canonical events are the ones which "actually" took place, and the chronology within which they are taken to have occurred. Fan fiction, for instance, is non-canonical.

Deepening Context and Content (cont)

For instance, here is an application I've talked about before, which one day I would like to build, what I have called a Content Engagement System, though I don't know if I really like this terminology. As with a standard CMS platform, a logged in user would be able to create a textual context, with associated images, video, documents... Within this textual context (which I will start referring to simply as 'context' since this translates roughly as 'with text', right?), another user can identify a phrase, and rather than linking out, the way a standard hyperlink works, link in. Sounds kind of odd, but this is essentially like adding a comment, except the comment is associated back to a phrase within the original context. In HTML terms, this is similar to a link to an anchor within the same page, and in a textbook we would identify this as a footnote.

Okay so far. A blogger posts something, which is then considered canonical, after which anyone else can add footnotes, and these offer an alternative view. A use case then: say I am writing a novel, which is serialized in weekly installments. The math is something like, 1000 words/week = 52,000 words/year, which then gets bundled up into EPUB or PDF and flogged off on Kindle, Smashwords or whatever. The idea is to create demand through serialization, then capitalize on the demand with the actual content.

But, and here's the thing. I want to engage my audience. And but, I want to entertain my audience. And but, a vocal minority within this audience typically demands something edgier; or racier; or, well, smuttier. Which, for the purposes of illustration, let's assume is not really my style. So what I want to provide is the canonical safe version of my novel, and a mechanism, a backstage, which allows the audience created by the canonical story to add (share) their own non-canonical additions to the story, which can then be linked to from within the canonical context as an alternative or supplement. This is similar to a literary parallax (events viewed from multiple vantage points).

More on this at some point. This is an idea I really want to pursue... but it is hard to articulate, so bear with me.

Deeper Context and Content

I've posted several times now about what I consider the differences between context and content, and why the word "content" kind of annoys me. It's okay, I don't mind being annoyed, and in the right context, content is fine. What I find annoying is that the two terms augment each other, but, so often, one is used when the other is more appropriate. For instance, if I have a web page that you can use to download a PDF of an article I have written, and this web page contains an excerpt of the article - the PDF is the content. Everything on the page, as far as I am concerned, is the context for your act of downloading. Of course, this is important if I am concerned about monetizing, since I have no problem with requiring a specific digital signature or some sort of payment; and I feel that everything else, the context, is like a smile. Why not give this away?

It's quite simple really. People require, create, digest and absorb context. But people like stuff. They like content, because it is something they can grasp onto, whether it's a PDF, an MP3, JPEG, AVI. Something "file-ish." The reason I bring this up, I suppose, is because, well, these things are easy. You can set up a microphone, you can use Prince, DocBook or FOP to turn your words into something more portable in a document format... then you can shade down your context a bit, broaden it, focus attention on the page content. Everything else is really just part of the transmission wrapper. The rest is just part of the vector.

I mean really, is a platform like Blogger or Wordpress actually a Content Management System? No, at best, these are discontent platforms. They separate us from content by masquerading context as content. It's not a bad thing, but I feel it's something we need to move past. You take good pictures, make a commodity out of your pictures. You tell good stories, make a commodity out of your stories. Allow people to focus through the context.

On The Jungle Planet

This is a picture my 3-yr old drew of Amberwood Entertainment's Rob the Robot, on the Jungle Planet. At left, you can see a tiger. The planet, apparently, has frightening red eyes!

Ontology of Dream Landscape

A couple things I have been thinking about recently, which come together in this: even dreams typically have a location, but it is a unique quality of dreams, at least the ones I have been having lately, to feature a location in isolation, that is separated from character or context; and: in matters of taxonomy, more than three levels is seldom viable in practical terms, but two is seldom sufficient.

In the work I am currently involved in developing a financial application, I see a three-level vocabulary emerging which I have witnessed in other domains, typified as category, type and subtype.

If I was attempting to describe an ontology of dreams, therefore, I imagine I would use a category of "location", a type of location name or "realm", and a subtype describing each specific "locale" within the realm. So, for instance:

/location/a_forest/one_of_many_paths

What I would like to do is build an API, attached to a cloud storage, to allow people to describe their own dream landscapes in these terms. More on this as it develops. Please comment as you see fit.

Context, content and getting over ourselves...

I am a huge fan of Lucas Gonze's weblog, where he wrote something recently which strikes me as quite profound.

Keep music from the web in the web. Don't go to a music blog, download a track, and then listen in iTunes.

Instead, he advocates bookmarking and playing music in the page that contains it, once again returning to fundamental link between URI and resource, between index and content.

What, for that matter, is a Content Management System? The term is a necessary evil; it's not like it is meaningless. But when you use this term to refer to WordPress or Blogger, I get an uneasy feeling, and reading Gonze's comment really cemented for me the reason why. The text on the page in front of you? It's not content. It's context. The page may provide content, but it is itself a context for whatever content it provides.

More on this later, just passing around the lightbulb moment, as it were.

Abie and Rondo Redux

Sorry, broke the link in the last post. A better title would be "The Adventures of Abie and Rondo..." And this link should work.

Abie and Rondo

Abie and Rondo is a serialization of children's adventures I am writing for Web Serial Writing Month this year. The premise is simple: brother and sister team Abie and Rondo travel to remote locations to right the world's wrongs. Irony abounds, and good times are had. I have recently added truly awful vector art courtesy of yours truly, along with pithy captions.

More than anything else, this is an experiment to see how much I can accomplish with very little effort, using the tools at hand (Blogger) without a great deal of modification (JavaScript hijacking the page layout). When WeSeWriMo is over, I will summarize my experience in some sort of "lessons learned" post.

Enjoy.

Because it's a while since I've 'blogged about Identi.ca...

Here's an idea: SourceForge is connected with a great community of open source developers; Twitter is connected with a great community of individuals, some of whom are open source developers. One of the great value propositions for me for Twitter is that rather than following an open source project, I can follow the projects creators, and receive timely information about updates, patches and the like... as long as I am actually logged into a Twitter client when the update in question is pushed out. There is a lot of noise.

Yammer is great for organizational transparency, or so I've heard from people who are using it, but it's a walled garden - I wonder what would happen if a similar approach were taken with an open source repository like SourceForge? What if an open source status network like laconi.ca were hosted and synchronized with the group of individuals with SourceForge projects? Then you could follow this entire list or a segment of this list, and get updates in a timely fashion without the background noise, or aggregate this stream into the broader stream that you might normally follow.

Might inject a bit of life into the open source community as well.

The other side of transparency

Really quick, I just wanted to jump in and say, with regards to Facebook privacy, there is another situation that I have yet to see adequately described. The situation I am seeing described is when you publish a piece of yourself, and it goes further afield than you anticipated, ie you share photos with someone with whom you had no intention of sharing.

But consider the obverse situation, when you publish a piece of yourself to your social circle, and it is withheld for some reason from a portion of this circle because of a change in privacy setting, or confusion about the impact of the privacy settings you have selected.

In many ways, this may create more distrust in the platform, when someone in your social circle feels slighted because they did not receive the expected update. Of course, this happens with email spam filters as well as social network privacy settings. In either case, it creates an atmosphere of distrust in the platform.

Tab Sweep - 2010 05 14

Dare Obasanjo on Facebook:

Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol from a Web Developer’s Perspective

danah boyd on Facebook:

Facebook and "radical transparency" (a rant)

Not surprising that Facebook is facing criticism; I appreciate danah's demonization of transparency, and the distinction she draws between being exposed and exposing oneself. One of the things I appreciate about Twitter is that the level of exposure of any conversation I have there is dictated directly by the object graph of those involved in the conversation. If I want to curse and swear, I can engage someone in a conversation with whom this is appropriate. But there is always a risk of exposure.

Dare's point is also well taken on many levels, but particularly from my viewpoint, ontologically speaking, that Facebook is leveraging RDFa and not microformats, and that RDFa is an exponentially more robust technology specifically due to the use of namespaces. And what better way to identify arbitrary URIs as social objects than by using namespaces? In issues of transparency and privacy, it seems that disambiguation, ie clarification of social context will become increasingly important.

Reread danah's rant, especially the Zuckerburg quotes referring to the artificiality of sustaining a multiple identity. My own reaction to this is equally violent, and I call BS - all relationships in a social graph are virtualizations or supplementation of something that they are not, actual relationships. They are by definition artificial and demand disambiguation.

My travels in Flex-land keep coming back to the importance of namespaces outside the strict context of XML. Their time is coming; more widespread use of RDFa and the need for disambiguated rather than radical transparency are definitely indicative of this.

Seminal Granularity: I <3 the </>

It's no secret, I love me some XML, whether as an exchange format like XBRL, a messaging standard like HL7 or NIEM, or a document framework like DITA or DocBook. I am not sure what appeals to me so much about data-enrichment using tags, but it has something to do with reducing entropy by adding structure and meaning. In addition, I would rather model something using the sort of extension and restriction available in NIEM than the classical inheritance strategies presented by OOP. I have heard from several sources recently that the seachange from an object-oriented to declarative paradigm is underway, and I am pleased.

But more than this, I just love the angle brackets in a way I could never feel about dot-notation, and I am not alone in this.

I am attempting to develop a notion I am calling "Seminal Granularity." This notion appeals to my background in structuralist literary theory - "seminal" and "granular" are both agricultural references, both seeds, but whereas "seminal" has patriarchal overtones, granular is more mercurial. Between the two axes there lies a tension, bringing to mind a transclusive dilemma.

Simply stated, the transclusive dilemma is this: when faced with modifying an object, do you create a reference to the object for modification, a seminal approach which binds the new object to the original; or do you create a clone of the object, a granular approach which results in modification to the new object becoming estranged from the original, releasing the object through mimesis.

A viral licensed open-source project, for instance, is by design both seminal and granular. The project itself exists as a single seed, and it allows granular modification with the caveat that modifications are returned to the original seed.

Edit: there is also an odd kind of tie in with this short story, The Ice Box.

The transclusive dilemma is a real phenomenon; you cannot do both. Seminal granularity should be about finding ways to negotiate this problem. A wave can't be a particle either, right?

Talking Points: Collaboration and Documentation

A few years ago I wrote about a project I developed for my then employers, which I open sourced under the name CaseBook. The intent was to single-source end-user documentation which could be be transformed into internal and client acceptance test scripts. As I developed it, the project involved XML, Schematron, XSL and XQuery, hosted in an eXist database and accessed using webDAV.

At the time, I had barely heard of DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, but the approach I took shared some ideas with what I later came to learn about DITA, using concept maps, separation of topics into tasks and steps and so forth. In the mean time, DITA has gained a lot of traction, and my SourceForge page has been hit maybe 500 times.

I have been giving a lot of thought lately to collaborative writing. As Anne Gentle has pointed out on her JustWriteClick 'blog, DITA shines in environments which have a strong collaborative or Agile approach, since both of these emphasize timely repurposing and multipurposing. One of the problems I was addressing with CaseBook was collaboration between development, documentation and testing resources. Now, in part, this was because I was working in a small team, and had responsibilities in each of these areas.

I still think there is a lot of value in facilitating collaboration between these groups, and were I to develop this project today, I would start with the DITA Open Toolkit from day one.

In addition, for the last four months, I've been working with Flex, mxml and ActionScript. One thing that intrigues me about mxml is that it is XML. For instance, what if you could generate end user, acceptance or client walkthrough documentation automatically from the mxml source? Transforming mxml to DITA seems like a useful technique.

Any thoughts?