A few months ago I saw a call for contributions of recordings of original holiday songs for a CD to be called “A Charlottesville Songwriters Christmas” to benefit a local charity. Around here there seems to be a law that when you name a business you have to name it either Jefferson (whatever), Piedmont (whatever), or Blue Ridge (whatever), so I decided to write a song whose name is a variation on “Blue Christmas” called “Blue Ridge Christmas.” I thought about…

Jo Rabin’s “Mobile is not The Future (It’s Now)” presentation in the Trends and Transients portion of this year’s XML Summer School (and the reading he suggested, such as this Tomi Ahonen blog post) got me thinking much harder about mobile delivery. One of my first ideas was how easy the jQuery Mobile Javascript library could make it to deliver SPARQL query results, and in less than 30 minutes I wrote an XSLT stylesheet that can take the SPARQL Query Results XML Format…

I got so tired of hearing people complain about how confusing RDFa is that while I was on hold during a recent phone call I threw together a demo of just how simple it can be. The document has the two basic kinds of triples: one with a literal for an object, with data typing thrown in for good measure, and one with a resource URI as its object. A View Source of that document will show this in its head element (namespaces are declared earlier):

At a recent W3C Government Linked Data Working Group working group meeting, I started thinking more about the role in linked data of laws that are published online. To summarize, you don’t want to publish the laws themselves as triples, because they’re a bad fit for the triples data model, but as online resources relevant to a lot of issues out there, they make an excellent set of resources to point to, although you may not always get the granularity you want.