I’ve been looking for a SPARQL endpoint that provides new data fairly regularly—not just new triples to query, but data that is new to the world, such as from a stock ticker feed. If the RDFa on digg.com pages was accumulated in a database that could be queried as a SPARQL endpoint, that would certainly qualify, and it would be fun to play with.

The open-source program Pellet is described as an OWL reasoner, but I’ve used it mostly as a SPARQL engine that happens to understand OWL. So, for example, if I have RDF that says “Loretta’s spouse is Leroy and spouse is a symmetric property,” but the data makes no mention of Leroy’s spouse, and I ask Pellet “who is Leroy’s spouse,” it can give me the answer.

At last week’s XML in Practice 2008 conference, I joined Micah Dubinko, Evan Lenz, and Frank Miller for the panel on working with authoring tools and schemas. (Lisa Bos of Really Strategies did a fine job hosting the panel; she should consider doing one of those interview podcast shows.) The panel’s full title mentioned both DITA and DocBook, and while Mark Shellenberger predicted a “cage match,” several people later seemed disappointed that there weren’t more…

The first time I went to the annual conference that will be called XML-in-Practice 2008 this year (but which I think of as “XML 2008”), it was called SGML ‘95. It grew from there and morphed into an XML conference, and when the dot com boom supported several XML conferences a year, this was the best and biggest. It’s slimmed down over the years, and I hate to admit that I might not go if it was going to be a conference full of strangers, but I know I’ll see some old…

In the first project I did with SPARQL, D2RQ, and MySQL I used D2RQ to pull all the relational data into a disk file and then queried that after adding some OWL-based metadata. D2RQ does let you execute SPARQL queries against a live relational database, instead of dumping data to a file and querying that, so I wanted to see the effects for myself. This would work better as a live demo, but you could think of it as a script for one.

I’m on my second Canon Powershot right now, having gotten my first one in early 2003. These can take brief movies, but the Powershot is not really a movie camera, so I only took three- or four-second movies of things that I could loop. In November of 2004, once I had a collection of these clips and access to a Mac with iMovie installed, I took a few loopable shots of my daughter Alice playing the drums so I could tie the whole thing together with a regular beat and edited it into a trippy…