http://iandavis.com/blog 4 8 15 16 23 42 Tue, 12 May 2009 21:36:15 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en It's been an interesting week for embedding metadata in HTML. Yesterday I was exploring html5 microdata and today Google announce support for RDFa. At first this announcement seemed like a big deal - Google supporting the web of data in a big way, a real push into the world of ... http://iandavis.com/blog/2009/05/googles-rdfa-a-damp-squib I read the new HTML5 microdata proposal tonight and thought I'd see what it would take to convert my existing homepage which is currently marked up using eRDF. The result is here and it was surprisingly painless to do the conversion. You can try it out using this demo service. ... http://iandavis.com/blog/2009/05/microdata-experiment A great presentation by Tom Ilube, explaining the Semantic Web at the Davos economic forum this year. Succinct, articulate and pitched at just the right level. http://iandavis.com/blog/2009/03/tom-ilube-explains-the-semantic-web-at-davos Last week I delivered the keynote for the final day of code4lib 2009. This was a particular honour because, unlike many conferences, the keynote speakers are proposed and voted on by the code4lib community. So, rather than keynote speakers being used to draw people to the conference, the community draws ... http://iandavis.com/blog/2009/03/open-data-open-source Tom Heath writes a cracking post on the current attempts by a few people to brand web applications that happen to perform text analysis as "Semantic Web". For me, this nails it: I certainly notice plenty of unjustified attempts at present to co-opt the term Semantic Web, now that it’s no ... http://iandavis.com/blog/2009/03/the-semantic-web-acid-test Since there's a rather nice discussion going on around my weekend post on RMR and MVC I thought I'd dig out the description of MVC from the Gang of Four book to remind us all what we're actually talking about. Often people forget that the GOF book didn't include MVC ... http://iandavis.com/blog/2008/12/what-are-the-benefits-of-mvc Darren Geraghty sent me a wonderful design idea for the OpenVocab logo competition. I've had two great submissions now. http://iandavis.com/blog/2008/12/second-openvocab-logo Stowe Boyd picks up on some very interesting research that suggests that people's happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends' friends, and their friends' friends' friends. Specifically the report includes this: we found that each additional happy friend increases a person's probability of being happy by about ... http://iandavis.com/blog/2008/12/happy-people Via Ryan Tomayko's great article on gateway caches I found this neat webapp that generates UML sequence diagrams. Very handy and a clever implementation. It even has an API for integration into other tools http://iandavis.com/blog/2008/12/web-sequence-diagrams Last year I wrote a short post titled MVC Obscures the Mechanics of the Web that drew together some other peoples writings on why MVC is poorly matched to the web. I didn't give an alternative though, apart from indirectly in the comments. Now Paul James has written a succinct ... http://iandavis.com/blog/2008/12/the-web-is-rmr-not-mvc