2012-04-10

Time to revisit Wilbur, part 2

I am happy to say that after I blogged about a Wilbur "redux", several people have already contacted me about the idea.

Now I have been thinking mostly what existing software I could use in the reimplementation. Last few years, many good quality libraries for Common Lisp have emerged. Here's my current thinking about the most critical bits:

  • HTTP client: Drakma
  • HTTP server: Hunchentoot (the Common Lisp version of OINK, on top of Wilbur, uses Portable Allegroserve, but I think we need to let go of that now)
  • XML parser: several choices are available (CL-XML, S-XML, CXML), I have to figure out which one would make sense; I just need a "SAX-like" API for the RDF parser (which will be recycled from the Wilbur2 implementation)
  • SQL connectivity: CL-SQL
  • HTML generation: possibly CL-WHO, but the functionality I implemented for OINK earlier is actually pretty good and could be reused

Many other libraries also under consideration (URIs/URLs, EXIF metadata extraction, JSON, etc.).

On a slightly different topic, someone suggested I should consider reimplementing Wilbur in Clojure. Certainly then the availability of libraries would not be a problem.

Posted by ora at 20:24 | Comments (2)

2012-04-08

Time to revisit Wilbur

I have been thinking about "revisiting" Wilbur, my Semantic Web toolkit implemented in Common Lisp. Wilbur has not been maintained for several years, and I have been doing most of my prototyping using Piglet, a reimplementation of Wilbur (in Python and C++).

If I were to redesign and reimplement Wilbur (probably as "Wilbur 3" this time), I would like to base it on

  • Piglet database design (including support for aspect-oriented data), and
  • best-of-breed CL libraries for various thing I might need (HTTP client, XML parser, etc.), rather than "rolling my own" as I did for the original Wilbur (because nothing existed at the time).

I also have some ideas about how to take the code written for OINK and use it as some kind of an "object-relational mapper" (or RDF equivalent thereof).

Posted by ora at 11:56 | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

2012-02-08

Another Interview

I was interviewed last week by kimmicblog, mostly about innovation in general and my work on Semantic Web in particular.

Posted by ora at 09:49 | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

2011-12-11

Linked Data Workshop @ W3C

Last week, I attended the W3C workshop on Linked Enterprise Data Patterns. I gave a talk, together with my colleague Ryan McDonough (follow these links: position paper, presentation slides).

The workshop was very interesting, revealing a couple of things of particular interest (to me):

  • I am not the only one frustrated by the fact that there is a lot of confusion between URLs as queries and URIs as identities (of resources/objects). This may seem like a small thing, but actually it is a real obstacle in the adoption of Linked Data.
  • ROI of Linked Data in large organizations still unclear (as a perception).

If everything goes well, we will start some new work on clarifying what Linked Data applications will look like, and how to build them. Another small step towards my real goal, the adoption and deployment of Semantic Web technologies.

Posted by ora at 21:44 | TrackBack (0)

2011-02-22

Interview

Folks at the "Ideas Project" pulled me aside during the last Nokia World event and wanted to know if there was an idea I wanted to talk about. They videotaped this interview of me talking about data sharing between applications, and the "death of applications" (as we know them today). Those familiar with my old ideas about the Semantic Web will understand where this is coming from. Perhaps not a "new" idea per se, but certainly one we haven't seen implemented yet...

Posted by ora at 10:25