fidzu : xml

… or, the lack of it. A recent discussion at a customer made me having a closer look around support for encryption in the context of XaaS cloud service offerings as well as concerning Hadoop. In general, this can be broken down into over-the-wire (cf. SSL/ TLS ) and back-end encryption. While the former is widely used, the latter is rather seldom to find. Different reasons might exits why one wants to encrypt her data, ranging from preserving a competitive advantage to end-user privacy issues. No matter why someone wants to encrypt the data, the question is do systems support ...

24 Apr 2019 4:06am GMT

There's been a whole lot of discussion around Microdata , a new approach for embedding machine-readable information into forthcoming HTML5. What I find most attractive about Microdata is the fact that it was designed by HTMLers, not RDFers. It's refreshingly pragmatic, free of other RDF spec legacy, but still capable of expressing most of RDF. Unfortunately, RDFa lobbyists on the HTML WG mailing list forced the spec out of HTML5 core for the time being. This manoeuver was understandable (a lot of energy went into RDFa, after all), but in my opinion very short-sighted. How many uphill battles did we ...

24 Apr 2019 2:06am GMT

I had another look at the Named Entity Extraction APIs by Zemanta and OpenCalais for some product launch demos. My first test from last year concentrated more on the Zemanta API. This time I had a closer look at both services, trying to identify the "better one" for "BlogDB", a semi-automatic blog semantifier. My main need is a service that receives a cleaned-up plain text version of a blog post and returns normalized tags and reusable entity identifiers. So, the findings in this post are rather technical and just related to the BlogDB requirements. I ignored features which could well ...

23 Apr 2019 3:06pm 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