Hatrack River Forum: And the seventh angel poured out his vial into the air . . .

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Posted by Jon Boy (Member # 4284) on :

and there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, It is done.

I have finished the book I have been editing for most of the last six months. It's gone. I no longer have to deal with the rambling, the bad grammar, the bizarre usage, the problems galore that plagued the manuscript from end to end. And I just wanted to let Hatrack know of my newfound joy.

Posted by Dan_raven (Member # 3383) on :

[The Wave]

Posted by gwan (Member # 6194) on :

good for you!!! Thats really exciting. [Party]

Posted by Vána (Member # 3262) on :

Whoo-hoo!

Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :

So, Jon Boy . . . interested in expanding the Semantic Web?

Posted by Jon Boy (Member # 4284) on :

Semantic Web? What's that?

Posted by Anthro (Member # 6087) on :

Whose book were you editing?

Posted by Jon Boy (Member # 4284) on :

It was a history of the BYU Department of Communications, written by an incompetent professor and former journalist.

Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :

*cackles maniacally*

The Semantic Web is an effort (by one of the original creators of the Web) to encode meaning (metadata, if you will) about resources (on the web and elsewhere) in a program-'understandable' format. Or rather, to get people to include such encoded meaning in their web pages, much as they include titles and such in it today.

The Semantic Web is largely based upon the Resource Description Framework (RDF) concept, which encodes meaning in 'triples' having a subject, a predicate, and an object. The subject and predicate are both resource specifiers, while the object is either a resource specifier or raw data (if one had one's name stored somewhere, one could use either then name itself or the resource specifier referring to where it is store when using it as an object, for instance).

You may or may not be familiar with another technology being used in the Semantic Web (its quite popular among librarians, for instance), the Dublin Core Metadata specification, which can be expressed in RDF.

The importance of the Semantic Web is that it makes it possible for programs to decipher meaning in resources such as web pages, documents, maps, et cetera. For instance, if the relevant documents are marked up using Semantic Web technologies, one could search for the restaurants mentioned in a particular book which are in a certain city and serve fettucine alfredo. Not only would such queries be possible, they would be easy.

That is the promise of the Semantic Web, and (though I'm a bit busy to talk about it right now), I would like to talk to you about it for a bit at some point.

Posted by Jon Boy (Member # 4284) on :

I'm not sure I'd be able to work on a project like that right now, but I'd certainly like to hear more about it.

Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :

Congrats, Jon Boy! May it be the worst project you ever have to deal with. [Smile]

Posted by Brinestone (Member # 5755) on :

This is a great occasion!

[ March 18, 2004, 05:17 PM: Message edited by: Brinestone ]

Posted by Trisha the Severe Hottie (Member # 6000) on :

Congrats, Jon Boy.

That Semantic web thing for some reason reminds me of the story of how the Jet Stream discovery was buried for years because the Japanese scientist who discovered it thought the best way to publicize it would be to translate it into esperanto.

Posted by Jon Boy (Member # 4284) on :

Esperanto? No wonder they lost the war.