essive: indicating a temporary state of being - from The Phrontistery: Obscure Words and Vocabulary Resources
Agents - Semantics and Meaning
The internet is changing. Today, web documents provide static information interspersed with images objects and forms. It is fairly easy to find information on the web, however, it is not easy to establish or determine the meaning of the content delivered. How do you determine the relationship between things and information found on one site vs. another? How do you represent knowledge in a meaningful way? Enter the Semantic Web.
I founded Essive Innovations in 1999 as an internet consulting company specializing in web design,
construction, and optimization. Over time I started to discover that the intricacies of the web were changing from a
static model to something much larger and more dynamic. Today the trends are moving to a synthesis of design, style,
substance, semantics, autonomy, social networking and technology. Many have shared their own experiences of how
information and meaning are not only revolutionary as part of the web 1.0
but also life changing for those who are now finding financial independence through social and semantic links. How this will
change in the future is anyone's guess. Time to think outside the box - enjoy!
Google’s new Digg-like search page
Google is experimenting a new search interface that is very similar to which of Digg. Users can vote and comment on search results — watch this video. I like the idea that users can customize and influence how results are displayed, but also I’m very worried about privacy issues that arise from this new feature.
Allowing [...]
Eye-Fi: the ultimate SD memory card
I dreamed of designing a new digital camera that knows my location when I take pictures. Since then, few products have showed up in the market. But, none of them is as sexy as this new product called Eye-Fi.
It’s an SD memory card with built-in Wi-Fi capability and does geotagging. It requires no special hardware [...]
Search engine paradigm shift
Search engines are essential to the success of the Web. Without search engines, our Internet experience would be crippled. Recently Ian Hendry wrote a blog post that speculates the usefulness of the search engines in the near future. He thinks that search engines are facing extinction.
Paradigm Shift
Ian’s premise is an interesting one — the emergence [...]
Geohash for spatial index and search
Geohash is a new algorithm for encoding latitude and longitude coordinates. Given a pair of lat/long coordinates (e.g., 42.6 -5.6) as the input, the algorithm produces a string output that is the Geohash encoding of the coordinates (e.g., ezs42).
Why is this interesting? In many Web applications, we often need to create unique identifiers for locations. [...]
Using Wii Fit to cruise around Google Earth
Mattieu Deru and Simon Bergweiler at DFKI demonstrate the use of Wii Balance Board as an input device to Google Earth. The application they developed is written in C#.
It’s pretty amazing what one can do with Wii controllers.
Structured data representation of financial data
The U.S. Security and Exchange Commission recently proposed a timetable requiring 500 of the largest public companies to begin filling their financial data using XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language).
Why XBRL? Instead of publishing financial data in tables and charts, an XBRL representation will allow financial data be described in a more structured representation that is [...]
MySpace plans to support the Semantic Web
According to the Web User News, MySpace plans to support Semantic Web technologies. From the article, it’s unclear exactly how the world’s largest social networking site plans to support RDF, RDFa or microformats. It may be still too early to celebrate.
At the SocialDevCamp East, we talked about the importance of Semantic Web technologies in context [...]
Reflecting on the news Digg embraces RDFa
Digg, one of the popular social news web sites, announced that it will begin to support RDFa, a standard for embedding RDF statements in XML documents. Here is a screenshot of digg RDFa in action.
Although it’s unclear at the moment how this new feature will help digg to expand to its market share, but the [...]
Semantic Web 2.0 and Semantic HTML
Continue with the previous Semantic Web discussion, I gave two more lectures on the subject. The first lecture was on thinking about the Semantic Web in the context of Web 2.0 and the Social Web. The second lecture was an introduction to RDFa and Microformats.
Students were very excited about these topics. Some continued her thinking [...]
Optimus: Microformats data transformer
Microformats is data format standards for embedding semantic information in XHTML documents. Dmitry Baranovskiy created a tranformer application that can output Microformatted semantic information into formats that are suitable for mashup (JSON and XML).
The application is open source, and is hosted on Google Code.
Here is the XML and JSON outputs of my Biosketch page.
The implementation [...]