Don’t call me DOM

The past two days, I’ve been participating in the SWAD Europe workshop on metadata in a multi-lingual world, mainly because of my work on the W3C Glossary project.

The workshop raised several issues about making the Semantic Web works in a multi-cultural context, most of it has been logged in the #rdfig IRC channel (day two).

Regarding the W3C glossary project itself, the main issues I raised regarded the difficulties we stumbled upon when designing our data model for it; basically, using SKOS as a basis, you end up considering terms as a particular instanciation of a concept (the Ideas in Platon’s world) in a given language; but using this modelling, while it has definitive advantages, doesn’t allow to model very well some other aspects:  Read more... (355 words, estimated 1:25 mins reading time)

When developing a CGI script and before putting on the production server, you need to test it; to catch runtime errors, but more generally, to check if you get the expected result depending on the parameters.

To emulate a GET request without setting up a Web server, the easiest method is probably to set the QUERY_STRING and REQUEST_METHOD environment variables and run the script through its interpreter, e.g. REQUEST_METHOD="GET" QUERY_STRING="foo=bar" php4 filename.php.

Well, this used to work till recently – I assumed it broke with PHP 4.3 release; nowadays, the php4 executable comes in two flavours: the CLI and the CGI SAPI; the former is designed to be use out of Web context, so isn’t much relevant to this case.  Read more... (271 words, estimated 1:05 mins reading time)

Today, I finally found the time and the motivation to update the W3C Glossary system to make it use the SKOS schema that was developed as part of the W3C SWAD Europe Thesaurus activity; as I said in the related announcemen, this was mostly changing a few namespaces declarations and element names, since the custom RDF Schema that we had developed for the project was so close to SKOS’ one.

Well, of course, it wasn’t as easy as it should have been, since there was always something I had forgot to check in my regexp, but really, it didn’t take more than a couple of hours.  Read more... (193 words, estimated 46 secs reading time)