Internet Alchemy

Nokia has announced it’s new wap server with increased scalability, snmp management and a generic wap email gateway that interfaces to corporate mail systems such as Exchange, Lotus Notes as well as POP3 and IMAP4 mail systems. Also, they have taken a leaf out of Ericsson’s book and included a cookie proxy to help sites implement effective session based applications.

Waptastic has announced a expansion of it’s developer site. Rather than just focussing on WAP they’ll be covering Bluetooth, webclipping and other wireless technologies and will be producing a set of in depth training guides for wireless developers.

Gus writes “CGI::WAP, a subclass of LDS’s CGI.pm for WML output and WAP methods is now available at http://wap.z-y-g-o.com/tools/ Please note that this supercedes Wap.pm at the same location, which should no longer be used. Comments welcome.”



This looks fun - it makes writing WML from Perl a cinch.

This is so different it just has to work: Chrome URL plates, designed to be fixed to the rear of the car.

AnalogX has an amazing array of free applications for network analysis and information gathering including a nifty little whois client.

The hyperlink is the Web’s killer feature - will the news feed be XML’s? reads the strapline of Weaving the Web of News, a new article at Web Reference about using XML for syndicating news content. It covers all the basics including RSS, OCS and ICE (xmlNews is to be covered in a future article). We’re left with a taster of future developments: Watch out for the arrival of RSS at WebReference

James Carlyle writes “I’ve recently come across three semantic networks which might be of interest to XML developers. A semantic network is a series of links between senses of words, with the links being hypernyms, synonyms etc. 1. Signiform’s ThoughtTreasure, which contains 25,000 concepts, 55,000 English and French words and phrases and 50,000 assertions. 2. Princeton University’s WordNet is far more ambitious and older, and contains 173,941 senses. An XML interface to WordNet has been put together using RDF by Dan Brickley, of the W3C, and is available at xmlns.com 3. Cyc is the most famous (or infamous) ontology project, still going after 15 years. Very comprehensive upper-level but very confusing even to so-called “ontologists”. Dan Brickley’s WordNet work is of interest, since he proposes that URIs of specific senses of words could be used to disambiguate meaning, so we could be sure that the <port> element in your document had the same meaning as mine. In addition, if your document used the element <port> and my processing expected the element <harbour>, WordNet could allow the processor to make a lateral interpretation.”


It’s work noting that Cyc is being trialled at HotBot. Search for something like Java and HotBot will suggest different senses of the word Java: Java (island), Java (computer language), coffee (drink). These link straight back into the search engine as better refined search. So clicking on Java (computer language) reformulates the search as Java “computer language” in HotBot. It helps inexperienced search engine users build better queries. Now which enterprising developer is going to create a meta search engine that uses WordNet to create more specific searches for a whole range of search engines?

I posted this as an Ask Slashdot today, but in case it doesn’t get picked here it is: The Open Directory project is an outstanding success, driven by thousands of volunteer editors and used by 120 affiliate sites including Hotbot, AltaVista and Infospace. Netscape/AOL own the copyright on the collection and they choose to license the content under a GPL-like license. So what motivates the editors of the directory? They freely contribute their time and energy to contribute to a collection owned by a commercial entity that could choose to change the license at any time and turn it into a commercial product. Any thoughts?

WebWatch is a project to monitor and analyse various aspects of the web. Some tools have been made available for public use including a robots.txt checker, an HTTP info viewer and a document analyser that returns piles of information about numbers of HTTP connections made, sizes of documents, distribution of HTML tags and even which links are broken.

The Wireless Developer Network is a new site for developers of software for WAP, mobile devices and wireless lans. They already have several interesting articles including: Will WAP Complicate Our Lives? and An Introduction to Bluetooth.