Category: World Wide Web

Google can be used to search XML files by using their filetype operator. And this can be used to search RDF's, RSS's as well.

But it has 2 problems:

• It works on file extensions. So if I have a link like http://www.livejournal.com/users/gauthampai/data/rss and that link is actually to a RSS file, that file will not be listed (as it does not have the extension rss).
• It does not understand the difference between an element (what is inside angular brackets) and its value.

In an earlier blog entry, I had written that I had used XML/XSLT approach to my website. Now it is not listed in Google! 🙁

Remember the “Critique of the OSI Model” that Tanenbaum talks about in “Computer Networks”.

This is just a thought, but is there a possibility that RSS will evolve into a standard that Semantic Web is trying to attain, in a way that Semantic Web didn't even think of?

The job is simple. I need to download the RSS feed of my blog from LJ and then transform it using XSLT on the client side and then display it in a IFRAME.

Internet Explorer provides a very simple way to do this. Script can be found here. But I didn't find an easy way to do it in Mozilla (supposedly my favorite browser 🙁 ) Any way out?

This reminds me of Tanenbaum's comments:

The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.

The Creative Commons seems to be an interesting move towards the Semantic Web. What is so special about Creative Commons, you might ask? Just adding that label to your page makes the difference? No, surely not.

If you look at any page that has a Creative Commons license, just go to the source. Now provided the license is valid, you should see some RDF data in it. What is so special about this RDF data is that it can be understood by machines (in this case crawlers). So crawlers are able to go through your page and understand how your work can be used.

Creative Commons licenses can be used to license not just text, but also audio, images, video etc.

So add this license to your blog and call it a licensed work in future. 🙂

To get started you may visit CC and then create a license by following the steps.

And ya, not to forget, Yahoo has started a Creative Commons search engine. So if you need flash movies for free or songs that you can download, just search for CC licensed works.

I updated my website today. I used the “Drifting” template from OSWD.

Initially I had used Sinorca. But I found that it is very difficult to update the pages since we need to search for the tags where we need to update the information.

I thought it would be good to have a design based on XML/XSLT so that it is easy to make changes in the XML and the changes are rendered (without any user intervention) using the style-sheet. But no such template was available. So I had to make the modification from XHTML to XML/XSLT myself. (But it is well-worth the effort.)

So here it is, my website based on XML/XSLT.

I'll soon be uploading the new template so that anyone can use the “Drifting” template based on XML/XSLT.

Combine the power of the “Semantic Web” and “Wikipedia” and you get Semantic Wiki. What would this mean for normal users? Well, probably in the near future you could see a revived search in Wikipedia that is able to search for very specific information.

That is not all, the potential of semantic web is limited only by our imagination. (And right now I don't know what potential semantic wiki has, but it is a thing to watch out for).

Semantic web would do to the WWW, what WWW did to the Internet.

Since the idea was mine, I should take some credits for its success. Most of them (or should I say all) liked the event.

The idea:
We present a system (software system) to the contestants and ask them to come up with special features that can be implemented in that system. This time, the system was an “on-line auction site”.

We then check the best features that we have received, club all the features and ask the best contestants to present the features/possible problems in implementation and the solutions to these problem.

I have uploaded the prelims and the final papers. Please have a look at them.

I had earlier written about the feature that I was missing in LJ. It is about categorizing the blogs into different categories. I tried suggesting LJ about this through a moderated suggestions community.

Guess what happened? My suggestion was rejected! Know why?

It was already suggested by others.

Here is the list:
http://www.livejournal.com/community/suggestions/281625.html
http://www.livejournal.com/community/suggestions/227856.html
http://www.livejournal.com/community/suggestions/45987.html

Now what are they waiting for?! Some person says it hasn't been implemented for 2 years now!

I somehow feel that search engines still suck (sorry for that word, but no better word to describe what I feel).

Consider this:

I am new to a domain say, “Autonomic computing” and I need more information about it. How do I go about it in present day search engines? I need to write any one of these:

“Autonomic computing” tutorial
“Autonomic computing” introduction
“What is Autonomic computing”

or something similar.

Now consider a web-site that deals with newbies and it has a list of definitions for all the upcoming words. The title of this page could be,

“Technical words simplified”

and could contain the definition and a list of resources to know about “Autonomic computing”. Note that the words introduction or tutorial or “What is…” doesn't appear in this page. So, it is not listed by our search engine.

The problem is that search engines are based on keywords. And keywords are not the best way to describe data. Keywords don't help in defining relationships. Nor are they complete.

It is perhaps because of this reason that search engines are trying to provide information in ways other than keywords. For example, Y!Q, Brainboost etc are trying out something different.

Until now, I somehow felt Semantic web could be a really good solution. I still feel so, but it all depends on how it is accepted by the community. I read an article today Whither the Semantic Web. This is what he says initially:

I have been and continue to be a supporter of the Semantic Web. It is, however, an idea that I believe has drifted and with each passing day is becoming more irrelevant. I have enormous respect for the creativity and innovation of those working on it. But I wonder whether they haven't been led astray..

And at the end he has yet another interesting input:

Now, again, all this may exist. But where? Buried somewhere under the morass that is the W3C's website? Paragraph 47.3.45 in the Resource Description Format technical manual? If any of this exists (which I personally doubt) it should be up front on the W3C site: here's how to get started – describe yourself, describe your resource, link them together. *This* is what we mean by the Seamntic Web. *Here* is some script *you* can run using your limited resources that makes it work.

So what's the solution? I hit upon a PG course in IIT Kharagpur that deals with Semantic web as part of it. The course is called “Intelligent systems”.

Well, I think I should wind up now.

Whew, what a success we have had!

Technologix was organized by us on April 1 and 2 this year. I being the chairman of CSI-SJCE had moments of tension, excitement and relief. 🙂

As usual, we tried to do something special and I should say we succeeded.

As a first thing, BUGSY was made open book. The finals followed some sort of Topcoder pattern. We also had a new event this year by the name IMAGINE.

We had 5 talks:
* Mr. Atul Chitnis (Exocore consulting and Open Source evangelist)
* Mr. Hariprasad Nelliteertha (IBM Linux Technology Center)
* Prof. K. Doraswamy (Author of several fun-in-maths books)
* Mr. Kothapalli (Honeywell TSL, Aerospace division)
* Mr. M. L. Ravi (CSI India president)

We had 6 contests and HUB (display of tech clips) to go with it.

Students from colleges across Karnataka participated in this event.

There were some blunders that we committed (which is usual in events like this), but none worth mentioning.

So let me sigh again, a sigh of relief. 🙂

P.S. We had asked Bharat to come up with the website, but somehow didn't find time to host it. This is how it would have looked. Sorry Bharat, your efforts went waste.