Found this
caught in my news feeds.
Looks quite big and as useful as searching freshmeat and sourcforge. I also notied they provide the site contents as a topicmap. Which is useful not only for viewing but also for seeing how to write one correctly. I still want to get into topic maps for mapping alot of things.
Category: xml and web 2.0
Output escaping = bad?
I am so pee'd off, People are saying output escaping is evil, dont use it blah blah. I yes I somewhat agree with the points. But what happens when your recieving a xml stream which unfortually you have no control over? Well? Exactly what can you do? Output escaping is very useful in such a situation. But oh no, its evil man.
The feeling is that like html to xhtml there was a transision, and this also needs to happen in this area too. Until we get finer grain controls in xslt 2.0 and xpath 2.0 then I challenge anyone to solve the issue.
GeoURL
Extensible 3D
I'm sorry but I was one of the people in love with vrml. It was amazing to think about for me at that time.
I use to write my 3d scenes in pov ray. And yes it was hard going but I learned so much, and loved watching my old machine do pixel by pixel rendering.
But anyway, I always wish I could make my scenes come alive, you know walk around them, explorer the views from many different directions. Hence when I heard of vrml I was blown away and wanted to use it in the same way I wrote my povray scenes.
Fast-forward past the 1st wave of vrml and at long last vrml is also going to be xml-ised. Could we finally start seeing increase use of vrml? I somewhat douht it, but still feel optimistic that like svg this will grow and become ubiquous.
Anyway heres a article on xml.com titled Extensible 3D: XML Meets VRML, which gives a overview of where the new standard sits at the moment in relation to others such as 3dml, xml, mpeg4, etc.
I'm kinda of glad x3d supports binary, vrml and xml. As everyone is supported then, its in the same way svg supports svgz which is gzip compressed svg for super small sizes, perfect for delivering over gsm connections.
Its also good to see theres java and ecmascript bindings, as I was worried java3d would take off and take people down the wrong path.
I had wished there was more intergration with other xml standards such as smil for animation and svg for texturing (specially with its filter effects, could have been a killer). But all that will come, x3d basicly keeps vrml syntaxes but puts them in the xml world, which isnt a bad thing for the first major release.
I had thought about converting stuff to vrml using xsl in cocoon, but the thought of turning well structured data into a C/C+ text syntax, sounded like too much hard work. Now x3d is available, it would be a trival task to convert other content into x3d. I should do it soon as a proof of concept, just to make sure i can do it cleanly. I would really like to join a aggergator to x3d, so all the elements would be live but exist in 3d space. Which would give new possibilities for navigation and viewing.
At last a update to exist
I was wondering if the open source xml database exist was dead? Well it seems no, there was a 0.92 update a few days ago on the 11th August 2003. Seems the biggest feature is XUpdate
xmldb's xupdate information page. Yeah just as though, xupdate will allow you to modify xml data on the fly though a query, just how you do with sql. I also believe you will be able to change xml structures using xupdate too? Yep the xml schema is gonna be more inportant than ever before if that is the case.
The future plans of exist look interesting too.
XML schemas
An existing XML schema could be used to control the indexing process. Currently, it is only possible to exclude or include selected nodes from the fulltext index.
Stored procedures/Constraints
I would like to enhance the pre- and postprocessing features of eXist, probably by using concepts similar to Cocoon. Each collection could have a collection configuration document, which defines how to process documents.
Free mindmap software
Got this link from Semantic Blogger demostrator, FreeMind is free mind mapping software, written in java.
Going from the screen shots alone, it looks as good if not better than my pocketmind map software on my ipaq. It is also ment to support export to xml? Which schema it uses i dont know, but I'm sure I can knock out a what ever to topic map xsl, if someone hasnt already done so.
HP’s Category Chooser
Another semblogging component, Category Chooser.
Fantastic idea, could be great for those times when your not sure what catergory to put the post in. Sometimes you can spend a good few minutes changing your mind back and forth between two catergories. Would be great to have some systematic advice.
SVG Textorizer Tool
Saw this while searching into topic maps. Found this small but useful site, semantic planet tonight, and off that I found the svg textorizer tool. It looks really good. Would love to try it out, shame its all in C.
Oh well, who cares…Check out the demo files.
SVG Textorizer Tool
Os david demo
David marks has finally sorted out a demo of his beatiful but clever project os david.
Here's the very large quick movie for the project. I expect david will put the project online at some point in the future, if he can find a host which will give him lots of bandwidth and xmldatabse storage.
Semantic blogging, navigation and tree
Semantic navigation
Tree view navigation, with Developer weblog
Almost worked on my new ipaq too!
Seriously these guys at HP, are truly coming up with some very useful applications using simple technologies.
Oh also saw this on my travels,
New updates from the author of Blucene. I have not installed or looked at the docs yet, but it allows you to post and delete using a form i believe?
SVG drafts published
Yep its all happening in the svg arena, I kinda of wish I could have gone to svg open 2003 but Vancouver Canada? Would be the envy of the office. Oh and also would never have got my HP 5550 ipaq with pocketpc 2003, if I had gone.
The SVG Working Group has released an updated Working Draft of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.2 outlining potential areas of new work. SVG delivers accessible, dynamic, and reusable vector graphics, text, and images to the Web in XML.
The Working Group explicitly encourages public feedback on this draft. Visit the SVG home page.
I know I will be getting involved in this one for sure.
And also…
The SVG Working Group has released the first public Working Draft of SVG Print. The document assumes the reader is familiar with SVG 1.2, and is a guideline that explains how to use SVG 1.2 features for printing.
Havent yet read this draft, but could be very useful to graphic designs and the print world. Imagine SVG being the format of choice for graphics, illustrations for printed documents.
And why not? This is a area where flash has not gone, and very much douht will go.
Describing pictures using rdf
Oh my goodness, I dont believe what I am reading. It started off by reading Steve Cayzer's blog. And before I knew it I had 4 tab open looking at different sections in this area.
I truely can not point out how amazing this really is. I've always thought of wrapping images up in xml, not embedding it in. Actually tell a lie, I didnt think it was possible? think of things as if your in the matrix. its just code, so why not?
Anyway heres the w3c rdf photo site outlining the spec. Seriously it brought tears to my eyes.
The goals of the project are partially personal, partially to promote W3C technology. The personal reasons are that we, the authors, have large numbers of photos but always have difficulty finding the exact ones that we want to show to somebody. Digitizing them and describing them in RDF should make it quicker to find the ones we are looking for at any moment.
So what does this all mean? Well in the case of david mark's project os david. (see david if you used xhtml instead of flash, i could link directly to the project, and if xpointer was working fine I could quote directly from your own text).
David has wrapped up his images and videos with xml and wrote a very beautiful interface to navigate around the data. Now if we applied this, we could query the images themselves rather than xml documents.
However one of davids problems was calculation speed, so he used a xml database. Which makes me wonder if there are any databases which support images but wont destory the rdf? Now that would be a good project for someone.
Also on the same tagent, what would photoshop or something like that do to this rich rdf data? I know it kills camera data.
Rdfpic, a real working application written in java, hoping to experiment with it over the weekend
The other side, jpegrdf, getting the data out.
Now if someone wrote a serializer for cocoon which did this, I would be xstatic. And why not? its written in java, sure some one will work it out soon.
There is also talk of intergration into Adobe's Extensible metadata platform which I havent looked at for over 3 years now. Will have to spend more time looking into this later.
All this also bring me back to thinking about Annotea which is a advanced annotation/note tool.br/>
Anyway yes I would like to experiment with this too, specially now they have a client built into Mozilla – Annozilla
Have a look at how powerful this could be Screenshot from current version
Topic maps
Even though I know there not compareable, opml and topic maps. I will use them in simular situations. Or at least write down notes using a outline tool which supports opml then convert them into topic maps.
I'm finding more than ever the need to keep a track of the actual relations between different things. Not just the things themselves.
Good starting points
Topic map.com
Getting started with Topic maps
Xml.com's Introduction to topic maps
Company selling topic map software and a free topic map viewer, they also have some ok papers on topic maps. Including topic maps, rdf and other semantic languages
Another view of office 2003
Found this while browsing around. Thanks MS office 2003 beta notes
Testing the textism plugin
Dont mind me, I'm just testing textism and html input in Blojsom using Chronicle lite.
h2. This is a title
h3. This is a subhead
This is some text of dubious character. Isn't the use of “quotes” just lazy writing — and theft of 'intellectual property' besides? I think the time has come to see a block quote.
bq. This is a block quote. I'll admit it's not the most exciting block quote ever devised.
Well, that went well. How about we insert an old-fashioned hypertext link? Will the quote marks in the tags get messed up? No!
“This is a link (optional title)”:http://www.textism.com
An image:
!/common/textist.gif(optional alt text)!
# Librarians rule
# Yes they do
# But you knew that
Some more text of dubious character. Here is a noisome string of CAPITAL letters. Here is something we want to _emphasize_.
That was a linebreak. And something to indicate *strength*. Of course I could use my own HTML tags if I felt like it.
h3. Coding
This is some code, "isn't it". Watch those quote marks! Now for some preformatted text:
$text = str_replace("%::%
","",$text);
$text = str_replace("%::%","",$text);
$text = str_replace("%::%","",$text);
This isn't code.
So you see, my friends:
* The time is now
* The time is not later
* The time is not yesterday
* We must act
Ah it does work and only requires a small amount configuring. Great stuff…
http://blojsom.sourceforge.net/plugins-textile.html