Because the open source Subversion version control system lets you assign fairly arbitrary keywords to resources, I had some ideas a few months ago about combining Subversion with an RDF triple store to track resource metadata. I never learned Subversion properly, though, and recently decided to keep my to-do lists, address book, and notes files in Subversion to get better accustomed to its important commands. Many introductions to Subversion are available, but none were quite what I wanted, so…

While reading the W3C Recommendation OWL Use Cases and Requirements, I was surprised at how many nice, succinct explanations of basic OWL and ontology-related concepts it had, so I thought I’d reproduce some highlights here. For example, take its definition of an ontology:

The eighth meeting of the XML Summer School sponsored by The CSW Group at Oxford University was another great one, with Norm Walsh and Dan Connolly being excellent additions to the list of XML luminaries presenting. Norm started a flickr group for the summer school, and I just added a few pictures.

Eamonn Neylon has kindly moved the monthly meeting of the Oxfordshire Semantic Web Interest Group to later in the month than usual so that people who are in Oxford for the XML Summer School can attend. To make it even easier for them, the meeting will be at Wadham College, where the rest of the summer school takes place.

I’ve only written up about half of my list of semantic web project ideas first described here, and the 2007 Semantic Web Challenge has just been announced, so I wanted to get another one of the ideas out there.

I wrote last year about how much I was looking forward to going to the XML Summer School at Oxford University, and I’m looking forward to it even more this year, because my wife and daughters will come with me. (Not to the classes, but certainly to several of the social events, and there are plenty of those.) It will be held at Wadham College again; the picture shows Wadham’s beautiful chapel, which adjoins the room where they usually hold the opening reception.

A recent devchix blog post has inspired a lot of discussion about the low percentage of women software engineers out there. There’s been plenty of discussion in the XML community, as Tim Bray, Lauren Wood, Shelley Powers, Jeni Tennison, Edd Dumbill and David Megginson have contributed thoughtful comments. Everyone says that there are a lot fewer women than men writing code, especially in the US, the UK, and western Europe. OK, to be honest, I haven’t seen anyone include this…