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.

(continued from Part II)

One thing Formula 3 (F3) was designed to help with is the quantitative transformation of time series. If you had to compute the mean values over an 1-hour interval of, say, the ticket sales then the following TSP operator takes care of it:

(continued from Part I)

Last time I implicitly proposed to think some parts of a (geosemantic) application in terms of time series. This is not so farfetched, consider for instance a semantically enabled tourism application for, say, Vienna.

Sure, there are a number of very static things you would store into the semantic network:

• the sites, churches, cathedral, churches, and even more churches,

• the museums, galleries, museums and even more museums,

• the tourism ontology, containing buildings, museums, and yes, the churches.

But even if this is Vienna, not everything is static: There are (insane) traffic conditions, (predominantly italian and spanish) tourists roaming through the city, concert tickets sold at the weirdest places. All these are perfect candidates to be packed into time series.

When people design semantic systems, then a typical architecture looks something like this:

• An RDF tuple (or Topic Maps) store for the odd and irregular data, and

• some relational DB, either imported into the semantic store, or wrapped, or linked via a message bus (MQ, events, ...).

• Some more or less sophisticated integration, and

• the user interface on top of it.

Now this is all well and good for your middle-of-the-road semantic portal, but the class of applications I have in mind have one thing in common:

Data dynamics, with temporal and geospatial aspects. And that with physical units.

Well, it took me long enough. But here is another overdose.

Category Religion

CatBert was in a very aggressive mood. He had interviewed me all day on subject identification and how it worked for the Topic Maps and the RDF stack.

But the longer he investigated, the more poignant his remarks became. This evening he even meant:

Robert, I am getting tired of the lack of imagination in the semantic web community.

This weekend I delivered on my threat to post RDF::SKOS onto CPAN.

It is a developer version, as I still have to fathom out a proper API to deal with this.

Recently the Perl TM package has started to experience some problems with smoke testing together with some Perl releases.

As I do not have the time to track this down properly, I simply take this opportunity to remove the complete TMQL support, just to factor this into my private implementation.

Version 1.46 is on its way into CPAN.