Category Programming

(continued from Part I)

One of the questions you might rightfully ask, is how much impact the semantic network information within the topic map has on producing visualisations like those below:

Or how much they should have, as this is a parameter which I must control.

This is my first stab at a realistic data set (see the attachments for the original resolution):

It shows the landscape around the theme MapReduce, a cloud computing technology about which semantic web people may or may not have heard.

Hi! CatBert here.

Gosh. Robert is soooo easy to play: I only had to show him how a web application can be expressed with my TM based language TempleScript. As expected, he first appeared to be all negative about it, but I just know him too well. Now he is hooked and off doing the conceptual footwork for me.

Which allows me to sleep more and dream up more ambitious things:

A Topic Maps based mashup infrastructure.

Category Technology

Obviously I managed to send CatBert back into deep depression (he saw that coming, trust me).
While he sleeps in his favourite armchair, I can steal back my ideas and tuck them safely away into an academic paper. So maybe another RDFascist can entertain me with a negative review. As if a man with a vision would care.

Locator Patterns

Among the things I want to add to TempleScript are subject locator patterns. Here is the use case:

Life is full of coincidences: First I followed with interest the Ontopia web dev tutorial, then I had my more-or-less regular "TM brain storming pizza lunch appointment" with Robert (Cerny), keeping my head spinning with ideas for days. And just earlier I was passing by CatBert's office.

He was lazily typing on his CatBook:

Look what I have done with my language TempleScript!

Actually TempleScript was our idea, but CatBert had started to take ownership.

Eating Your Own CatFood

His screen showed:

This is a complete web application written in TempleScript!

A look into the January 2010 CACM issue tells me that Amir Pnueli has died end of last year.

He - or more precisely his work on Temporal Logic - had an huge influence on me, in particular when I wrote my Ph.D. thesis back in the early 90ies.

How would you react when you learn that your name appears on a Microsoft filed US patent (7627600)?

No, not as inventor, but under "Other References" which cites an ancient journal paper (Syndication with JML) I had written in 1999 together with a friend.

The patent was filed 2006 and only end of last year (12/01/2009) it has been issued to Microsoft.

The dirty little man was nervously hopping from one leg to the other:

"If you touch me, I will kill you."

I tried to look right through him and smiled coldly.

• "It is not ... a matter ... of violence. It ... never is."

It was the 1st of January, the day right after New Years' Eve. Sylvester itself, and the days before that were marked by constant explosions of fire crackers. Annoying and nerve-wrecking, especially when at 3:00 in the night.

This time around, an animal special. All about cats and dogs and ...

Category Animals

Today I have deinstalled my old TM server

It has served me well as private bookmark server, especially while I ran the ESW course.

I own my MacBook now for a year, having been convinced by a friend. He - like me - had become tired of fiddling around with kismet and iwconfig just to make networking work at this conference, or at that meeting.

[Beware: Topic Maps ahead.]

Once you reach a certain age, you seriously ask yourself whether this has been be all: wealth, fame and many beautiful women.

It is the time when you look for a more integrated meaning in the universe. A meaning which transcends all levels of abstraction. And a processing model which gets rid of the silly separation between programming language and semantic data store with its static knowledge.

Start of December I attended the ESTC 2009 (European Semantic Technologies Conference) here in Vienna.

It was my first attendence, and it was interesting to see how the non-academic faction of the semantic web crowd looked like. I had seen the academic portion at the ESWC 2009 where I presented a paper on semantic time series in one of the workshops.

And while I wore my Topic Maps T-shirt publicly in Heraklion, at the ESTC it was kept well hidden under my pullover all the time.