Jeni's Musings

Registration has just opened for this year’s XML Summer School, held in Oxford on 20-25th September. I’m teaching a couple of sessions and helping with a workshop on the “XSLT, XSL-FO and XQuery” track along with Bob DuCharme, Michael Kay and Priscilla Walmsley. It’s one of my favourite events, for three reasons:

• I get to listen to experts talk about particular technologies in depth. The sessions are particularly good because they’re provided by people who don’t just spend all their time training, but actually practice what they’re talking about, and therefore positively relish the kinds of discussions that normal trainers might shy away from.
• I get to meet a whole bunch of people who are using XML in different areas: publishing, healthcare, government, you name it. In that way it’s like a conference: many of the most useful conversations happen during the breaks or at the bar.
• I get to go punting, visit Oxford’s best pubs and dress up for a formal dinner — more social engagements in a single week than I usually have in a year!

I know a lot of beginners go to the XML Summer School for the introduction course, but to me the real value is for people who are actually using XML on a day to day basis and want to keep on top of the latest tools and technologies that will actually help them do their jobs. I learn something new every year.

Anyway, I wanted to blog about it because there’s a discount on registration up until 30th June. Grab ‘em while you can!

If you’re anywhere near Oxford on the weekend of the 11-12th July, and are interested in parsing, querying and manipulating RDF(a) in a browser, come along to the rdfQuery Dazzle (hack days). The official page lists some of the things we might work on:

• Applications: widgets, adding to existing RDFa sites
• Core development: documentation, packaging, microformats, named graphs, and ontologies
• Interfaces: Talis change markup, N3 and Turtle, and SPARQL

It’s free to attend, you can come for either or both days, and refreshments, entertainment and wifi will be provided, so register now!

For the last several months, I’ve been working on a project at TSO for publishing UK legislation using a native XML database (eg eXist or MarkLogic Server) with some middleware (eg Orbeon or Cocoon). It’s a powerful and flexible approach that’s built on declarative languages like XQuery, XSLT, and XML pipelines; you can see it in action with the Command and House Papers demo.

But the killer platform isn’t quite here yet, partly because the specs aren’t quite done. Both Orbeon and Cocoon use XML pipelines, but they use different languages to define them; XProc is just around the corner. XML databases are all over the place in their conformance to XQuery, its optional features and the not-quite-finalised specs for free-text searching and updating.

People talk about how productive you can be using Ruby on Rails or Django, and they work great for publishing data you can store in a relational database. What we need is a similarly easy-to-use platform for document-oriented, XML-based content. This is my wish-list.

I can’t reply to Henri Sivonen

@JeniT What’s wrong with http://rdf.data-vocabulary.org/rdf.xml ?

in 140 characters.

http://rdf.data-vocabulary.org/rdf.xml is the the RDF schema that describes the classes and properties recognised by Google’s rich snippets, which promises to provide richer information about search results than is available currently, in the manner of SearchMonkey.

So what’s so bad about this RDF schema?

Update: Fixed a couple of errors in the microdata code.

The HTML5 microdata proposal has hit the web, just days before Google announced its support for RDFa (or at least one vocabulary encoded using RDFa attributes). These are, indeed, “interesting times” for the semantic web.

Now, if you’re one of those weirdos who want to embed RDF triples within your web pages, what you’re going to care about is whether you can use microdata to do it. Those of us who have been using RDFa in anger, rather than in toy examples, know that it can be hard to map a particular set of RDF statements onto HTML content. I thought I’d take a look to see just what it would be like to create particular RDF with the HTML5 microdata proposal.