Today in the morning, I had a sudden "insight" about one of the problems of RDF and Semantic Web: it misses some of the value that XML offers. This is what my daily commuting bike ride is for, thinking...

The adoption of Semantic Web rises and falls with the adoption of it in standardization bodies. For example the Oil&Gas industry of Norway is thinking about Semantic Web, and I have recently been talking with people from the automotive supplier industry about Semantic Web. To interchange data in a business-to-business environment you would expect that RDF has more features than XML, but in fact, it doesnt.

• RDF is less expressive than XML. One example: you can't define pattern in RDF. Look in the XML spec, there is much more of it missing in RDF.
• RDF is not validated. Although in theory, it is possible to validate a file for semantic correctness, nobody does that because of the open world assumption. Hence, there is no validation of the XML in mainstream applications.

So, if you are an industry, you already havean XML based standard, moving to RDF without the expressiveness of XML and without the notion of validation is tricky. RDF should have more features, not less.

Also the stack of XML technologies must be embraced better, for example a XSLT-friendly RDF/XML serialization. Please, dear reader, solve these problems and make a company around it.

<https://www.example.com> rdf:type "muahahaha".

On Friday we received our author copies of Springers new masterpiece of Semantic Web books. Springer's "Social Semantic Web" - Web 2.0 - was nun"



From left to right: M, Kinga Schumacher, Ansgar Bernardi, Leo Sauermann. We all were authors on the chapter on "Semantic Desktop", Malte additionally contributed to the chapter on Semantic Wikis. As you see we are very happy about our complimentary author's copy. Besides that - das buch ist gut.

Read it - in deutsch :-) . The authors (besides our small contribution) are the who-is-who of the German-speaking Semantic Web. Chris Bizer, Sören Auer, Sebastian Schaffert, Krötsch&Vrandecic, etc ...

edited by Andreas Blumauer and Tassilo Pellegrini, it brings together many authors from the practical side.

As said on reddit, the other was coined "The Great Depression." We start referring to the coming one as "The Bush Depression." It'll be one for the history books.

Listening to the radio news this morning, I heard that the US gov did not find 700billion in their piggybank to give away to scrupulous banks who screwed up their economy. Uhoh. Well, we are all in one boat, and if the US goes down, it will affect global economy. In the radio they mentioned the national banks of Belgium and Germany having to react (something like "have to print more money" but I didn't get it...)

If the bank bubble affects the web2.0 bubble, I may lose my flickr pics and del.icio.us bookmarks, but Knallgrau, the european company hosting this blog is living on company contracts and will probably survice (I hope). Looking forward to the economy next year with mixed feelings - it will probably sort out itself.

If not, look for health packs and ammo on elevated places within the mayhem on the streets.

A quick and fun tool to make nice calligraphically-good-looking tag clouds out of your own tags (works with delicious)

see mine
https://wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/216762/leobards_delicious



via my pal Barbara Geyer-Hayden's howknow blog, I would guess also reviewed on infosthetics.com

I attended the ESTC2008 conference.



micro-summary:

• I met Ivan Herman and shook his hand (I think for the first time, after working together with him a year on cool uris for the semantic web)
• I met many old friends, made new aquaintances and got intesting chances to continue working on the Semantic Desktop. To point out two, it was again a good location to talk about aperture, smila, aduna, and empolis, who cooperate with DFKI here
• I made some pictures

Heise also reported about the conference.