2016

Pulling RDF out of MySQL

With a command line option and a very short stylesheet.

When I wrote the blog posting My SQL quick reference last month, I showed how you can pass an SQL query to MySQL from the operating system command line when starting up MySQL, and also how adding a -B switch requests a tab-separated version of the data. I did not mention that -X requests it in XML, and that this XML is simple enough that a fifteen-line XSLT 1.0 spreadsheet can convert any such output to RDF.

When I presented “intro to the semantic web” slides in TopQuadrant product training classes, I described how people talking about “semantics” in the context of semantic web technology mean something specific, but that other claims for computerized semantics (especially, in many cases, “semantic search”) were often vague attempts to use the word as a marketing term. Since joining CCRi, though, I’ve learned plenty about machine learning applications that…

When I first heard about Albert Meroño-Peñuela and Rinke Hoekstra’s midi2rdf project, which converts back and forth between the venerable Musical Instrument Digital Interface binary format and RDF, at first I thought it seemed like an interesting academic exercise. Thinking about it more, I realized that it makes a great contribution to both the MIDI world and to musical RDF geeks.

Emoji SPARQL😝!

If emojis have Unicode code points, then we can...

I knew that emojis have Unicode code points, but it wasn’t until I saw this goofy picture in a chat room at work that I began to wonder about using emojis in RDF data and SPARQL queries. I have since learned that the relevant specs are fine with it, but as with the simple display of emojis on non-mobile devices, the tools you use to work with these characters (and the tools used to build those tools) aren’t always as cooperative as you’d hope.