Kid Rock’s “All Summer Long” looks like the monster summer hit of 2008. In today’s compartmentalized market for pop music, this song is big in a lot of compartments. The lyrics reminisce about a summer when he was young, and the girlfriend he had then, and how they would all sing “Sweet Home Alabama” a lot. Like “Sweet Home Alabama,” the song’s chords are half a bar of D, half a bar of C, and a bar of G, repeated with no variation throughout…

Although he doesn’t describe it in linked data terms, a recent posting from Dean Allemang has some great suggestions for how to dive into a set of SPARQL-accessible data you know nothing about in order to find out what’s there. If there’s cool stuff in the data set, this is a lot of fun. (Also check out the recent Talking with Talis with Dean, where he describes many examples of semantic web technology helping large organizations solve very real problems.)

Last week I discussed the possibility of using the SWOOP ontology editor and the W3C’s SKOS standard to create taxonomies or thesaurii, and I promised to go into a little more detail about how to do so.

In the online course in taxonomy development that I took recently we reviewed several popular taxonomy development tools. I found them to be expensive or to have clunky, dated interfaces, and was disappointed that the formats most of these programs supported for storing saved work was either a binary proprietary format or what they just called “XML”. (I’m open to correction on any of these points.) “OK,” I wondered, “What XML?” Reviewing some samples of…

There are many terms that people can’t agree on. The great thing about standards is that even when everyone doesn’t agree about definitions included in those standards, these definitions provide a common baseline for everyone to work from.