fidzu : xml

A brief crash course.

25 Feb 2018 5:15pm GMT

This is the second part of a two part post looking at the building blocks of data infrastructure. In part one we looked at definitions of data infrastructure, and the first set of building blocks: identifiers, standards and registers . You should read part one first and then jump back in here. We're using the example of weather data to help us think through the different elements of a data infrastructure. In our fictional system we have a network of weather stations installed around the world. The stations are feeding weather observations into a common database. We've looked at why its ...

23 Feb 2018 8:30am GMT

Data is a vital form of infrastructure for our societies and our economies . When we think about infrastructure we usually think of physical things like roads and railways. But there are broader definitions of infrastructure that include less tangible things. Like ideas or the internet. It is important to recognise that there is more to "infrastructure" than just roads and railways. Otherwise there is a risk that we, as a society, won't invest the necessary time or effort in building, maintaining and governing that infrastructure. The decisions we make about Infrastructure are important because infrastructure helps to shape our ...

23 Feb 2018 8:30am GMT

This is the last entry in this blog… A few days ago W3C started a new activity, called Data Activity, that also subsumes the (by now old) Semantic Web Activity. In order to have a fresh start, and to avoid … Continue reading →

16 Dec 2013 9:22am GMT

The RDF Working Group has published a Group Note of RDF 1.1 JSON Alternate Serialization (RDF/JSON). The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a framework for representing information in the Web. This document defines a textual syntax for RDF called RDF/JSON that allows an … Continue reading →

08 Nov 2013 9:28pm GMT

The RDF Working Group has published two Proposed Recommendations today: JSON-LD 1.0. JSON is a useful data serialization and messaging format. This specification defines JSON-LD, a JSON-based format to serialize Linked Data. The syntax is designed to easily integrate into deployed systems … Continue reading →

06 Nov 2013 10:02pm GMT

En attendant la publication des photos et vidéos sur le site du Retour à la Terre , voici le texte que j’avais préparé pour mon intervention lors de l’inauguration officielle du magasin de la Rive Gauche le 18 janvier. Catherine est inquiète parce qu’elle ne sait pas ce que je veux vous dire ce soir… Elle me connaît pourtant bien puisque cela fait plus de trente ans que nous vivons ensemble ! Nous avons la chance d’avoir étudié dans une grande école (l’École Centrale) où nous nous sommes rencontrés mais avons toujours eu du mal à nous intégrer au monde des ...

19 Jan 2012 12:59pm GMT

If your brain works the way mine does, you often find yourself doing a variety of related but not necessary tasks along the way to fulfilling a larger goal. For some reason, the history of which I’m not entirely sure, this is called “yak shaving.” Some of my finest work has been done that way, so I’m happy to embrace it, even if I do add hours to the job at hand. This week’s yak shaving has neared epic proportions, but proved eminently satisfying. I’ve been working on collecting together an overview of big data products. It’s early days yet ...

19 Jan 2012 12:13am GMT

If you’re programming in the Java language and want to talk to a Web server, there are several libraries you can choose from. HttpURLConnection is one popular choice, and for Android programming, the engineering team has now officially suggested that you use it where possible. Since there are irritating orthographical and Web-Architecture issues with the name “HttpURLConnection”, let’s just say HUC. HUC is reasonably well documented, if by “reasonably well” you mean “omits any discussion of the relationship between method calls and underlying HTTP traffic”. Let me fill that in. Who knows, maybe some JavaDocs maintainer somewhere will feel inspired ...

18 Jan 2012 11:17pm GMT