Don’t call me DOM

A recent mail from Bjoern to our QA Interest Group mailing list reminded me the importance of the work on normative references in specifications; while I hope the Working Group will be able to address this topic in more details, especially given how recent history has shown how important this question is, I’ve decided first to work on a pragmatic approach, that had been on my todo list for quite some time (and others’ too, apparently): a tool to detect outdated references to our W3C Technical Reports; see for instance its results on the list of references of DOM Level 2.  Read more... (293 words, estimated 1:10 mins reading time)

For quite some time, Mozilla’s bug about not recognizing the application/*+xml MIME Type as an XML Mime Type has made my life harder than it should be; that’s especially true for RDF files served as application/rdf+xml (see the proposed registration of this MIME Type). Enough being enough, I’ve set up a work around this bug in my Gnome 2.6 + Galeon 1.3 set up; it’s not clear how much of this can be re-used in other environments, although I think it’s likely it should work with other Gnome+Mozilla derivatives set up.  Read more... (494 words, estimated 1:59 mins reading time)

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)