Category Archives: Blogging

Copenhagen Dinner

Blogging

There was a blogger dinner tonight in Copenhagen. While I should have stayed at home for the FOAF IRC meeting regarding the FOAFCommunityProcess document, I decided it’d be better to go local for once and spend an evening in the company of Dan Gillmor, Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, Christian Dalager, Lisbeth Klastrup, and the rest of the Danish bloggers at the Laundromat Café.

Also, I knew there’d be beer:

Knut Nägele, Joachim Oschlag, Jesper Balslev, Lisbeth Klastrup, Dan Gillmor, Guan Yang

It turned out to be quite a good idea, as there indeed was plenty of beer, and plenty of nice people. Discussed semweb and blogging with Henrik Føhns (of harddisken fame), cameras with Lisbeth (of royal fame), FOAF with Thomas (of reboot fame) and technology in general with everyone. A good time was had.

SKOS Output from WordPress

FOAF, RDF, Travelling, WordPress

Waiting for the bus to the medieval banquet at Dunguaire Castle for the FOAF Galway Workshop (photos), I remembered I had tweaked the FOAF Output Plugin to also output SKOS concepts — and possibly mappings to others’ categories.

Get it before your neighbour, the FOAF Output Plugin, version 1.11 — the Galway Release…

See also the SKOS development toolshed.

In passing, being here in Galway/Ireland is great, not only do I get to meet a lot of smart and interesting people, very much like at FOAF Camp, I also get to add another country to my list of visits…

WordPress Plugin: seeAlso’s

FOAF, RDF, Release, WordPress

What is now several weeks ago, Christoph Görn hacked a bit on my FOAF Output plugin, and asked for seeAlso links to be included. Short of the mythical WordPress triple store (factory?) I couldn’t see a better way to do it than building on the concept from the Semantic Visits add-on: Using the link manager.

I challenged Danny Ayers to write the plugin/add-on, but he’s been busy lately, with the RSS book and all, so here it is, the seeAlso’s Plugin (view source). While I was at it, I also fixed a few buglets in the FOAF Output Plugin and added trust ratings for friends and bio:olb.

The current version is 1.0 (this blog entry will serve as a changelog).

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Visit Revisited

OWL, Vocabularies, WordPress

A few days ago, Norman Walsh was kind enough to let me know that there was something wrong with the way I had put together the visit vocabulary.

It turned out that I had mixed together some URIs while surfing around the DAML vocabularies, and the URIs I used to identify each of the states were wrong — the right ontology is http://www.daml.ri.cmu.edu/ont/USRegionState.daml.

The visit vocabulary has been updated to reflect this, and the WordPress plugin Semantic Visits has been fixed, you should upgrade if at all possible.

In addition to the fixes, it has been clarified that the right ISO 3166 country code for the United Kingdom is “GB”. This warranted a fix (or more precisely an addition) in the image generation code at MyWorld66, and Douwe Osinga was quick to respond — it now accepts “GB” as well as “UK” (for backwards compatibility reasons only, use “GB” from now on), thanks!

While I was twiddling, I added support for Canadian provinces — also supported by MyWorld66’s Visited Canadian Provinces and a DAML ontology for Canadian States and Teritories, for those that have had the privilege of visiting those parts of the world.

This last part turned out to be a little harder than expected, as the Canadian regions are divided into states and territories, and that required some investigations into OWL — I think I got it right, but if not you’ll likely see yet another correction soon…

Also, it turned out that there was an issue with the terms used to indicate the code, name, and other state properties — the terms are defined in the general DAML State Ontology as e.g. http://www.daml.ri.cmu.edu/ont/State.daml#code, but in the DAML US Region and State Ontology and the DAML ontology for Canadian States and Teritories they are used as e.g. http://www.daml.ri.cmu.edu/ont/CanadianState.daml#code.

I’m still not sure whether the error is because of a typo with regards to the default namespace declaration, or if it’s a misunderstanding of the semantics of owl:imports (actually daml:imports). In any case, I have decided not to propagate the error, so the WordPress Plugin and the vocabulary documentation uses the properties that are defined — but not used until now.

WordPress Plugin: Semantic Visits

FOAF Explorer, Release, Travelling, Vocabularies, WordPress

When I came back from Madrid, after the Image Decription workshop, a few days in the city, and a hefty party in Getafe, I realised I could add another country to my list of visits.

The nice folks at World66 have created a nice interface for generating an image with visited countries highlighted, but while it would be easy to check a few boxes and copy the code to somewhere on my blog pages, that wouldn’t make it possible for the semantic web to figure out where I’ve been. For that reason, I decided to mint a set of vocabulary terms for visits according to Norm Walsh’s country counting rules, collected in the visit vocabulary, and have WordPress output the information in my FOAF profile – thanks to the extensibility of my FOAF Output Plugin. Of course, the FOAF Explorer now also understands these terms, displaying maps of the world, Canada and USA when appropriate — see for yourself!

Thus, here is a new plugin, the Semantic Visits Plugin (view source).

The current version is 1.1.

Changes since 1.0:
  • Added visits to Canadian regions.
  • Fixed “wrong” code/name/etc. properties.
  • The URIs for US states are now correct, pointing at the http://www.daml.ri.cmu.edu/ont/USRegionState.daml ontology containing state definitions instead of http://www.daml.ri.cmu.edu/ont/State.daml which only contains classes and properties.

Continue reading WordPress Plugin: Semantic Visits →