I'm amazed now thinking I've been back from Florida three weeks. Amazed at both how long and how short it seems, which usually means some life's been lived, which couldn't be truer for me these last weeks. Someday I'll write about our trials down in Florida with adoption and bureaucrats. I'll write when I've had more reflection and walkaway time. It's an amazing story. I'll also write about little Isabel and I finally driving into Bethlehem during Moravian Vespers, which my wife conducts, and Isabel spending her first hour in town listening to Paula's choir and watching handmade Christmas candles...

Since my last post, I've opened my editor many times, wanting to write, but words just wouldn't arrive, though not for lack of subject matter. When life gets too real to merely chat about, I find it harder and harder to write. In September, on the Autumnal Equinox, Paula and I got a call about a woman from Florida who was pregnant. Two weeks later, we learned she'd picked us to raise her baby. We also learned of another woman who'd picked us, who was pregnant with twin girls. Our counselor gave us a rare and flabbergasting choice: twins or...

After long and stressful projects, I usually allow myself a period of "lateral drift" where I spend time learning nifty things I have no time for. After a sustained period of MUST DO, MUST DO, MUST DO ... I relax with the optional, slowly sneaking up on my responsibilities again. It's my way of combatting burnout, and discovering new directions. My last period of lateral drift was the fall of 2003, wherein I found the Semantic Web and started this blog. This current drifting time lasted two months, wherein I revisited at length the state of Web standards, and spent...

In the early days of this blog, I talked about improving the semweb's "whirlpool rap", stressing that we need a clearer way to talk about it to non-technical types. Since then, I've learned there's an even greater challenge: convincing developers that RDF and the Semantic Web are genuinely worth the training time required before they pigeonhole it and write it off as hype. Choosing tech is critical for software developers and managers. In the last twenty-four years of wading through languages, API's, platforms, and design approaches, I've learned to bet on established winners because there's no more costly mistake than...

I started this blog a year ago today. My original goal was to write once a day about the Semantic Web and its social implications: ...which is why we need Round Two: the annotated, interconnected, Web. This new organic, evolving, maintainable, improvement will do more than simply increase the accuracy of our Google searches. It'll help real people understand and visualize interconnection, which in my opinion will alter our society profoundly for the better. I kept up with the once-a-day pace for two months, writing mostly about semweb topics, before getting distracted by the demands of our in-house Immuexa project,...

Everything needs to work with everything else. Can we at least agree on this? There's nothing worse than using a piece of software only to regret it later because it won't play nice with others. Even with things as simple as contacts and calendars, it's incredible how little we can interoperate. How many of us keep our old contact manager around because it does certain things better than our new one, like printing labels or envelopes? Why can't we use both programs simultaneously without worrying about file formats or import/export? Just how many people start completely over rather than figure...

In the second paragraph of Weaving the Web, Tim Berners-Lee writes of the Web as something that "leaves the entirety of our previous ways of working as just one tool among many." I'm sure most people keep right on reading without a second thought about that sentence, as the line resembles much of the overwrought journalistic hyperbole aimed at the Web. When I read it today though, the line stopped me cold. He means exactly what he wrote, and he can back it up. Outstanding. With the WWW2004 show coming next week, I've been trying to gather my thoughts after...

Today after terrific talks with Dan Brickley and Libby Miller, I read up on the W3C to see just why Immuexa should consider joining. I found their Seven Points page, which I recommend you run off and read right now. Pretty good, yes? This is the kind of language I respond to: simple, direct, inspiring. The friendly drawings help too. I've been visiting the W3C site for years to read up on standards, but it wasn't until I read this page that I really grokked their purpose. If I were them, I'd take it a step further and make something...

Probably the most used RDF schema, besides rdf and rdfs, is Dublin Core, a metadata standard established to describe documents. The first thing you should know about Dublin Core is that it has nothing to do with James Joyce or the city in Ireland. This Dublin is in Ohio, which is where some semweb pioneers met in March 1995 to establish the standard. The next thing you should know about Dubin Core is that it's simple and useful. How so? Well, Dublin Core is a set of fifteen essential things people want to know about a document: its title, its...

The next year will be a big one, no doubt. In 2004, we'll probably hear the first mentions of "Semantic Web" on mainstream media. Somebody's gonna release that category-defining application that people can point to and say, "That's what I'm talking about! That's the Semantic Web!" Blogs will get even more of our mindshare, especially as we get closer to the American presidential election. I fully expect blog rates to soar, both readers and writers. I can't yet tell if something will shake the "power law" fix of the new blogarati class. If anything, it'll be due to mega-corp marketing...

The word "semantic" is one of those words people sort of understand, but not completely. Like "humility," it's a word that's hard to pin down. Most people don't really know what it means, which is ironic because it means meaning: "of or relating to meaning in language." So, are we trying to build a "web of meaning"? Well, here we run into a similiar problem: "meaning" has many meanings. We use it to show intent ("I mean to please") or purpose ("I was meant for this job") or significance ("you mean everything to me"). We also use it when connecting...

My brother said once, "It's our responsibility to make history." Most of us make the kind of history that lives on in families and friends. We consider ourselves lucky if we make a big difference to small groups. Then there's the few who chase the big dreams to completion, who sidestep the naysayers, and remain true to the task: There's a lot I could say about this photo: the brothers, the beach, the stranger who snapped the shot, the ripples this moment would bring... Instead simply: December 17th 1903, 10:35am ET. Twelve seconds....

Today I tried to do something I've been meaning to do for a long time: get my websites to validate as strict XHTML. Till today, I haven't rated it enough of a priority to take the time. Giving myself thirty minutes for the first site, I made it most of the way, but bailed because I couldn't get the layout to work easily in all browsers. Now don't get me wrong. I'm a standards conscious guy, and I believe strongly in refactoring. I'm always taking that extra five minutes (or thirty) to make things more readable, more flexible, and more...

He lives below the senseless stars and writes his meanings in them - Thomas Wolfe In Shelley's starlings post, she talks about the URI debate, and how some think we can sidestep the word "resource", since we've gotten this far without precisely considering it. Usually, while reading debates like this, I begin to feel like a kid with his hands to his ears, yelling, "na na na na na" to block out the sound. Thankfully I was a philosophy minor, which means I've developed a tolerance for this "what's in a name" nonsense. I once wrote a paper on Russell's...

Imagine you're at a party with people you don't know and you walk into the following conversation (a terrific summary by Peter Van Dijck, btw). You listen politely, not wanting to interrupt, all the while wondering "Just what in the hell are you people talking about?" To a newcomer, we must seem like blind men describing an elephant, debating the semweb's essential nature from our differing vantage points, but rarely addressing the most basic questions: what is the Semantic Web and why should anyone care? If you're new, and you're nodding your head, hoping someone will put the pieces together...

I read somewhere that in the early days of telephone, early adopters had a tough time selling the technology to city businesses. Back then, it was standard practice for executives to dictate messages to secretaries, who typed them up to be sent to the mail room, where they would then be rushed by bike messengers across town to the mail rooms of other businesses, which would then deliver them to the executives upstairs. When presented with the idea of a telephone, executives thought, "Why bother? We'd just be saving the bike messenger a trip, and they're cheaper than the telephone...

In Shelley Power's "The Value of Human on a Humanless Web", she talks about the mom scenerio in the Scientific American article: "Mom needs therapy? Oh no! Well, we'll work together and make sure she's taken care of!" In this picture, I search for available plans in the area and then call the hospitals and I talk to the people to see if I can trust them to take care of mother; neither I nor [my sister] is so busy as to begrudge the time taken. " While I agree with most of her article, this part rang false for...

"In the long run [people] hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high." (Thoreau) Mr. Shirky's article The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview is a real piece of work. I don't agree with any of it, but I'm still glad he wrote it. Nothing motivates me more than baseless partisan bluster, and while I know he's just muddying the waters to appear deep, I've decided to use his article, and him, to make a larger point. This is the promise of the Semantic Web -- it will improve all...