Internet Alchemy

A bunch of pointers for learning more about
WSDL
:

• Microsoft’s WSDL Specification
• IBM alphaWorks WSDL Toolkit
• IBM developerWorks Web Services
• XML Cover Pages - WSDL
• SOAP + UDDI + WSDL = Web Services, by Ken Sall
• WSDL processing with XSLT, by Uche Ogbuji
• Supercharging WSDL with RDF, by Uche Ogbuji

Via ResearchBuzz, the Google Custom Logo Archive. I
wonder how long Google can keep the corporate lawyers from destroying their culture?

I have a once in a lifetime opportunity this April Fool’s day to spring something on both my in-laws and my
mother who are all visiting this weekend. But, I’m stumped for something to do. If anyone has any suggestions
for something funny but not too disturbing please mail me. I’ll
post any outstanding ones here.

ICEPick, another alternative to HailStorm

Flash demo of Nokia’s new XHTML browser.

A WSDL search engine has been announced. How
useful is this? Are people going to be searching for SOAP services like the do web pages
or are their applications going to be smart enough to find the appropriate services transparently?

Does anyone apart from me think that SOAP is dead in the water?
Dave has written a DaveNet on
the challenges facing SOAP. Specifically, Dave’s gripe is that he wants to be
sure that his SOAP implementation is going to be interoperable with the implementations coming
from Microsoft and IBM. Unfortunately, from where they’re
sitting, interoperability is right at the bottom of the agenda. This could have been predicted
from the track records of both these companies. How many ’standards’ has Microsoft implemented without
adding additional complexities of their own?

OK, I know this is starting to look like the
Rael Dornfest
appreciation society, but here’s another
of his articles, this time an Overview of Hailstorm.

I thought that I was the only person having problems with Microsoft Media Player until I found
Jeffrey J Kujath’s rant on Media Player.
He’s quite right - why do Microsoft promote the hell out of Media Player and its ability to
handle all your multimedia needs when it doesn’t ship with the latest codecs? Indeed, checking
Microsoft’s site this afternoon I noticed that they have dropped
support for the RealPlayer protocols as well.

I’m researching Japanese text anaysis techniques. There appear to be two approaches: morphological/n-gram analysis
and dictionary based which is more accurate but requires more up-front and ongoing work. Most of the dictionary
based systems are commercial which is unsurprising considering the amount of effort that needs to be
put into them. Some relevant links:

• Jim Breen’s Japanese Page - a massive
  gateway to all kinds of Japanese computing and parsing information.
• Freely available Japanese Morphological Analysers & Dictionaries - a good
  listing of the currently available software.
• A Stochastic Morphological Analysis for Japanese employing Character n-Gram and k-NN method - research paper
• Japanese Text Initiative - corpus of Japanese texts
• Bibliography of n-gram research
• Japanese Language and Linguistics-related links - mostly
  general linguistic information
• Japanese Natural Language Processing Websites - links
  to the NLP home pages of Japanese academic institutions.
• Namazu - a Japanese full-text search engine
• Natural Language Processing & Text Analysis at the Hitachi Advanced Research Laboratory - some interesting
  research papers.