Talk Digger and Internet Explorer 7.0

Frederick Giasson

Yesterday I installed the new version of Internet Explorer (7.0) and started to test it. I found some user interface bugs in Talk Digger. They were probably caused by all the changes they have made in the way they manipulate DOM documents, JavaScripts, etc.

It is always the same thing when a new version of a browser is released: you have to check if everything always work fine on your Web site, if it is not, you have to fix it and in the worse case, developing custom code that will handle this special case for this specific web browser.

If you find any other problems, errors or glitches, please send a bug report via the Bug Report page.

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First impressions with Internet Explorer 7.0 and FireFox 2.0

Frederick Giasson

I just downloaded and Installed Internet Explorer 7.0 along with FireFox 2.0

First impression: Wow!

I didn’t have the time to have a deep look at them but I am really impressed. I am not impressed by their new interface (even if I find IE’s new interface quite nice), their new features (like embedded RSS reader, etc.) Nah, I am impressed by what make a Web browser a good one: rendering speed and standards complying.

My primary Web browser is Opera. Why? Speed, standards complying, multi-platforms, best tabs handling, the faster DOM manipulation, etc.

The first thing that stroke me when I both used IE and FireFox was their increase in speed. Web sites that were extensively modifying DOM document, on-the-fly, were much more faster (the speed difference between IE 6 and IE 7 with Talk Digger is awesome).

Users have a much better experience using these browsers now. Not for their new goodies or their new user interface features. Users have a much better experience using these browsers because they are much faster, they are much smoother so they are much natural.

Kevin Berton wrote about this dilemma sooner this week: more features or better performance (so better features)? In that case, better performance, so better features was the answer to the question (in my humble opinion).

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Ping the Semantic Web now support N3/Tutle serialization

Frederick Giasson

 

    I am pleased to announce that I finally put online a new version of the crawler (1.2) that crawls RDF documents for Ping the Semantic Web. Now the web service is able to detect and index RDF files serialized in N3/Turtle. It means that much more RDF documents will be visible via Ping the Semantic Web since many RDF documents are serialized using N3 (and I think that more and more RDF documents will be serialized that way in the future).

Also, I entirely re-wrote the crawler. It is now (supposed to be) much more tolerant to the different way people could write their RDF documents. It is also much faster.

I also changed the exporting file format for the version 1.2. I changed the “topic” attribute for a “serialization” attribute. Why did I removed the topic attribute? Because it will be replaced by something else in the next month or so. The new “serialization” attribute can have one of these two values: “xml” or “n3”. It explicit the serialization format the crawler should expect by crawling this document.

In the mean time, if you find any documents that are not processed well by Ping the Semantic Web please leave a message in my mail box with the URL to that document so that I’ll be able to debug what is wrong.

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I’ll give a talk at the Webcom Montreal Conference tomorrow: the Web of tomorrow: the Semantic Web

Frederick Giasson

 

    Tomorrow I’ll answer to the question: “What is the Internet of tomorrow for you?” with 3 other people at the Webcom Montreal Conference.

Guest what is my vision of the Internet of tomorrow? Yeah, you are right, it is the semantic web. Bellow is the layout of my talk where I try to answer to the question in the simplest way, with terms that even my mom could understand. The more technical terms used will be: semantic web, web services, data and search engine. The hardest challenge is to express the vision of the semantic web I have with the simplest terms. In fact, all the “simple” terms I enumerated above have a deep implication and have complexes meaning. However, I hope that I’ll be able to communicate my vision well to all the non technical people that will listen at me tomorrow.

 

Today’s Internet is the one of the men:

  • The structure of the current Web: Tables, paragraphs, headers and footers, citations, bold characters, etc.
  • All these structures exist to help people to understand the meaning of a document.

 

Tomorrow’s Internet is the one of the machine:

  • The structure of tomorrow’s Web: Same documents and same data. A structure that explicit the context and the semantic, the link between the data. Usage of a grammar and a vocabulary to express and communicate the data.

 

How the documents of the semantic web will be used?

  • By web services
  • By applications like:
    • Electronic agend,
    • Calendar
    • Knowledge management systems
    • Etc.
  • By search engines
  • By any application that use Web data

 

What are the advantages of the semantic web?

  • Save time processing data (search time, information management, etc)
  • More pertinent search engine results
  • Better communication between web services
  • Targeted publicity depending on the context
  • Easier and faster web service developments (thanks to standards). The result is the development of more complex systems

 

What are the inconvenient of the semantic web?

  • More work for the software programmer to generate and publish its data for the semantic web.
  • The effects on privacy are unknown

 

What are the advantage of the semantic web vis-à-vis other already existing solutions?

  • The creation of standards assuring the good communication of information between applications that use the data.

 

Is the semantic web already existing?

  • Presentation of the SIOC ontology and its prototype applications.
  • Presentation of Piggy Bank.

 

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Ping the Semantic Web.com service now support RDFs and OWL documents

Frederick Giasson

 

    I didn’t have the time to work on PingtheSemanticWeb.com web service in the last few weeks, so I took a couple of days to fix some issues with the detection of RDF/XML documents (some use cases were not handled well by the detection module).

I also make PTSW recognize and archive RDFs and OWL documents as well. That way, people will be able to track the evolution of ontologies.

What is next? By the end of the next week, PingtheSemanticWeb should not only detect RDF/XML documents, but also N3 and N3/Turtle documents.

I’ll also have to update the export module to let people getting these new RDFs, OWL and N3 documents.

So, if you have any ideas on how to upgrade/enhance this web service, or if you find any bugs (by example if the system doesn’t recognize your RDF documents, etc), please contact me by email.

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