July 24, 2004

Digestible Information

Today, I spotted two approaches to serving a large helping of information:

Pot Roast

Responding to perceived failures on the part of mass media, Change This intends to distribute large, PDF "manifestos" through the blogosphere. They must have forgotten that the medium is the message.

Clay Shirky has a lot to say about this:

In the middle of announcing their plans to rescue intellectual discourse, they suddenly point to a specific document format; it?s like listing the brand of knife the chef uses on a menu. What do PDFs have to do with Change This?s larger goals?

And the answer, of course, is ?Everything.? PDF is the ultimate no-backtalk format. It is designed for the page, not the screen, can?t be annotated, has no provision for comments and nor can it host any trackbacks ? in short, it is almost useless as a site for subsequent reference to the very conversations Change This says they want to stir up. Source.

Cheese and Crackers

Vivisimo is hosting a "clustered" version of the 9/11 Commission's Final Report. Their approach is obvious and simple, and it works very well.

It is too bad that deconstructed documents such as this one are walled off from one another, and walled off from those who would annotate them. Statements in documents should be as easily referenced and retrieved as verses in religious texts.

July 9, 2004

Oracle's Network Data Model

Susie Stephens' post to public-semweb-lifesci is part of a discussion about using Oracle 10g's network data model in lifesciences. The pdf she pointed to is also worth looking at:

Subject Re: Chemistry and the Semantic Web

I've attached a document that gives a high level technical overview of
the Network Data Model (NDM) feature that is available as part of Oracle
Database 10g. I'd be happy to have individual discussions with people
who would like to learn more about our RDF plans. Source.

By way of Andrew Newman (check out his original post).

Perhaps this is not the most cost-effective approach, but I can see all sorts of uses for Oracle's NDM in online games. :)

July 5, 2004

Slashdot covers "Metadata", Apple Computer's Take

On Saturday, the Slashdot community had a very colorful discussion about Edd Dumhill's excellent Metadata for the desktop article.

On a related note, the Mac OS X Tiger's Spotlight file search utility will be harvesting metadata from each file's metadata.

These are all great developments. Within the next year, I hope to clear up some of my own mental metadata about my computer's file system. What will I do with all of the extra space?