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Tuesday, July 29, 2003
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The linked article is about a recent talk by Tim Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web.
I have mixed feeling about the Semantic Web. On one hand, the idea of the Semantic Web excites my interests in AI, natural language processing, automatic information extraction, etc. On the other hand, many people argue that the world wide web consortium should stick to web standards.
I linked to the Sesame RDF repository and query system earlier today. If you are not familiar with RDF, go over to France (a short walk in cyberspace :-), and look at
this good RDF tutorial.
One problem is that almost no one ever adds RDF markup to their web sites. A few months ago, I wrote a polite web spider (i.e., a spider that never tries to access content on any given web server more often than once every 10 seconds) to look for RDF markup. I was really disappointed by how little RDF markup I found.
During a period of under-employment last year, I experimented (using Smalltalk, Java, and Common Lisp) with some rough ideas for automatically generating RDF - fun to do, but not so sucessful. Probably not such a good idea either.
How to motivate companies (and individuals) to provide RDF markup on their web sites? It is really a chicken and the egg type of problem: if there were good agent tools that used RDF markup, then more people would use RDF - but why write the tools when almost no one makes the effort to support RDF?
3:34:57 PM 
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I find it difficult to even imagine what it must be like to not be able to travel even a few miles from home. Getting to a market to buy food? - no.
Get to work? - no.
Your child is ill and you want to get to a doctor? - no.
The U.S. is, I believe, the only country in the world that has a majority of its citizens who support Israel over the Palestinians. I believe that this is largely because of news blackouts in the U.S. I read that the U.S. aid to Israel is to be increased to $10 billion a year. As Americans, we are partially responsible for the actions of Israel
because we help fund their actions.
Israel continues to try to deport international observers
My hopes and prayers are with both the Israeli and Palestinian people - but the leaders of both groups suck -at least we are not responsible for the Palestinian leadership, but I believe that we do have at least some responsibility for the Israeli leadership.
By the way, it may sound like I am picking on Israel here, but I am not: if instead we massively funded the Palestinian leadership, then you better believe I would be complaining more about their actions.
A bit of a tangent: our public school systems here in Arizona are facing financial crisis. I would rather spend our massive foreign aid to Israel right here at home.
11:38:57 AM
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I think that Scheme (a modern LISP language) is a good bet for teaching programming. The link is for a complete GUI based Scheme development environment DrScheme that has teaching modes that are good for students.
If you want to learn Common LISP (great for large projects, commercial software development, etc.), I wrote a free web book Loving Lisp, or the savvy programmer's secret weapon that you can download from my web site. This web book attempts to be a gentle introduction to Lisp using the free CLisp tools.
While I usually architect and build systems using Java, I also like to use dynamic languages like Common LISP and Smalltalk. I have always believed that using multiple programming languages opens the mind up to new possibilities for solving problems.
9:57:02 AM
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I periodically download, install, and play with new versions of Sesame.
Sesame is an open source RDF Schema based data repository
that supports a query language. Sesame is servlet based and
supports PostgreSQL - a fairly easy install in Tomcat.
9:27:15 AM
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This is a problem. On one hand I would hope that people are smart enough to do what is best for themselves: save money, avoiding unnecessary purchases. On the other hand, our economy might really tank if we all do what is best for us individually.
The best advice for people is to avoid debt. Recent laws will make it very difficult for individuals to declare bankrupcy (although easier for corporations). If the economy does tank, people with lots of consumer debt will be in big trouble.
9:22:26 AM
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© Copyright 2003 Mark Watson.
Last update: 9/14/03; 9:52:12 AM.
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