Ubiquity fun

And my new Ubiquity command is done!

It's a simple prototype of a semantic search command, using data from semantic data repositories available through SPARQL endpoints to answer user questions like find director of Closer or find author of Parallel Algorithms in dblp and microformats to insert the result in the web page, to preserve the semantic markup of the response when user is editing web document (rich text areas or simple text areas).

Have a look at it on its info.uaic home: http://students.info.uaic.ro/~lucaa/psw/. (Update: the new 'home' is at http://www.infoiasi.ro/~lucaa/psw/ since my infoiasi account changed).

It can be heavily improved in terms of data operation, as well as user interface, but it's quite a nice toy.

(I'd love to show you how nice it finds the license of XWiki on dbpedia but somehow my print screen command does not work when Ubiquity is up, and I also need to find out why it fails to load the results when I add it from an extension and register it programatically, but that's gonna be another night...)

Microformats dinner at Strasbourg

Since microformats are turning 3 today (their day, the american 20th june), and all the fans in the world should celebrate it properly, let's do it:

Microformats dinner @ Strasbourg,
on Saturday, 21 june 2008, 20:00 CET,

at Fondu d'Art, 48 rue du Jeu d'Enfants, 67000, Strasbourg, France

Comment this post or direct message or reply me on twitter if you plan to come.


I should mention that the place I chose is supposed to have WiFi so you can also "register" for a remote dinner!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Yeah!

They had some nice outfits at the microformats dinner.


I should first mention that this is not faked:



Yes, I finally did my microformats t-shirt... And don't you think is that easy: just buy the shirt, get it printed and done!
Noooo, sir!

First, produce the image: svg exported in png with GIMP. Test the position of the text: hmm... vertical left, vertical right, below... hmmm... Well, we'll keep them all and I'll decide later.





Then, buy the shirt. That's no ordinary black shirt, it's a ladies black shirt: stretched and feminine. And you can't find a single ladies simple black shirt in Iasi: all have their own prints, with pink flowers or little flying hearts and stuff. Anyway, good things come to those who... search!

Then, you go to the print shop. The guy is stretching my shirt all directions to test the fabric:
"it's over 90% elastan, man, it's the only I could find, sorry"
"hmm... ok..."
"here's the image!"
"mmmmhhh, it's a little problem here... I want to do it from rubber and I only have one shade of green..."
"That shade of green is important, man! What if you DON'T do it from rubber?"
"Because your shirt is from elastan, it will disappear the first time you wash it. Maybe if I put some yellow...".
"NO! NO yellow! just do it any shade of green you have!".
"Ok, come back in an hour and a half..."

Whaaat? an hour and a half???? Anyway... hang in the Mall for an hour and a half... Sooo boring! I saw some awfully overpriced jeans which I would have bought if I hadn't realized in time how overpriced they were... A lot of girls shopping... you know, the Mall.

Oh, yes, it's time, it's time!

The guy shows me the shirt. The shade of green is not that bad, but:
"Where's the text? There was a piece of text there! You must have missed it because of the transparency!"
"Oh... I remade your image in Corel and I didn't see it... I can print it now if you want...".
Whaaaaaaaaat? I worked so hard for that image for you to 'remake' it now????
"Oh, you can? ok, print it!"
Another 20 minutes waiting and bugging the guy: "No, not there. Pull it a little to the left, please!"

And finally, it's done! Soooo coool!

P.S.: I must apologize to those who read my blog for all the 'false alarms'. In case you didn't notice, I first publish one or two lines and then come back with the rest of the post. That's because I'm used to hit 'Ctrl+S' once in every 2 words (programmer's bad habit) and 'S' is the shortcut for 'publish' in blogger interface. Sorry!

Here we go again...

Yes, I do stare at XML all day long


Just when I thought I saw everything...
Today, Yahoo! Tech!
First of all, there is a special reason for which the guys that designed microformats figured out a method of specifying uids for each of the microformats: when parsing the same page twice, we MUST have a way of testing microformats equality to realize that we already know the precious info one has to offer! So, yahoo tech guys, you might wanna add a rel='self' (or rel='bookmark' or anything that would mean 'id', with its most permissive interpretation) to the 'a' tag in the title of the review!

First-and-a-half of all, the 'description' of the yahoo tech review is its 'item fn' as well. (according to this, the text of the review and the formatted name of the item are semantically equivalent) Now what could that mean? Hmmm... Seemingly, that it's reviewing the "I bought this product 2 days ago and I think is really cool" item. Is this just because 'item' is required and some 'specification compliant' programmer thought he/she should stuff it in somehow?

Second of all (and this is the cool part – I tend to keep good things for the ending), the short review links to a 'longer', 'one-on-the-page' review, through that 'a' tag I mentioned. But guess what: NO hreview markup AT ALL on this new page. Nothing. Empty. Stupid simple html. Pleaaaase, have mercy!

Notice now how I am writing my post in a conversation-like manner: because Neil was so kind to react, I am probably expecting that to happen again (yeah, dream on!).

Now I decided that I REALLY should do something to prevent things like this in the future: and I will start by highlighting some 'tips on how not to screw up semantics' in my presentation on microformats. Even if it won't change anything, at least I will be sure I tried my best.

Microformatted week

First of all I must mention that last week I was pleasantly surprised to see the reactions to my post about Summer <Web /> online.
I must thank Edward and Neil for their immediate responses (changed markup on eventful and added summer web on upcoming). Also, I was surprised (and happy) to notice that the class=url's on upcoming are now attached only to the right elements, yeeeeey!

(I also noticed that Tantek Çelik was wearing an upcoming T-shirt at the microformats dinner at web 2.0 expo. I want one too!)

Second of all, I've just started v0.3 pre-alpha of my Bsc project. I also have a print screen of v2.0 "in action". I was just browsing microformateurs.org (using the dev firefox profile by mistake) and it highlighted the microformats dinner event:



Now don't get enthusiastic, it's just the urlRecommender outlier there... :), no 'smart' predictions yet.

I also thought of some things to mention in my microformats presentation at summer <Web /> to make it cool and attractive for everyone and to tease the developers.

And, I almost forgot to mention, I am now a very happy listener of Queen - Greatest Hits, volumes I, II and III.

So it's a joyfull, microformatted lunch I'm having right now:
<div class="hLunch">
<span class="mainCourse">
<a href="http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/recipe_views/views/230458" rel="vote-for">Yummy potato moussaka</a>
</span>
with
<span class="drink">sparkling water</span></div>.

Summer <Web /> online

Since everybody is blogging and spreading the word about it (well, at least Sabin Buraga and Alina Mierluş) I thought I should contribute too: I started submitting the thing online, to "major" events websites: Eventful and Upcoming.
I had some fun with that tag in the title of the event, but the great discovery was that, as opposed to upcoming's policy on url classes, eventful just does not allow you to add an url (a class="url") for your event. At all. Whatever you do, wherever you add your link, it will not be THE url of the vevent. Their class="url" is for the permalink of the event on eventful. That is, still on their website. I wonder if this is marketing (all events homepages are on eventful) or just plain wrong applied semantics, AGAIN.

The happy end of this story is this.

For the upcoming story there is no happy-end: I couldn't add FCS as a venue on upcoming (I tried like 3-4 times):

and because you cannot add events without venues, summer <Web/> 2007 is not on Upcoming. Yet. I'll try again the next days, maybe this is only because of the changes they're going through now (merging upcoming accounts with yahoo accounts), though I can't see any connection.

Does anyone know if there is a Romanian events website? We should submit it there, too...

Oh, and I shouldn't forget to mention that I will be talking about microformats at Summer <Web/> 2007. See you there!

Far from a better world...

Motto: the optimists say we are living in the best possible world. The pessimists fear so!

Anyone missed my outraged posts on idiot markup and stupid programmers?
I thought so!

Upcoming.org seems to have had a checkbox on their hiring form saying:
"Are you a dumb head that cannot cope with correct semantic markup?"
and hired only the ones that checked it!

My newest discovery regarding the upcoming.org markup (no, I will not go insane from reading XML all day long) is that they just throw URL's (class="url") wherever they feel to! Their event details page is one huuuuge vevent div stuffed with all sorts of things (let's not discuss about this now, they're not the only sinners), among which a list of all users attending to / watching the event. Since those are users, of course they also have user pages on upcoming. Why not put the link to the user page here? Why not add a 'url' class to that link? So, it's enough to write your simple XPath to the url of the event and you'll get yourself a list full of crap (the more people attending the event, the more crap in your event url list!). The author of the event (the one that posted it on their wonderful website) is also a user and the link to him/her is also a url class link. Inside the vevent div as well, why not?

I would really like to know what those guys think "semantic markup / microformats" mean...

Towards a better world...

Why people ignore tagging?

I mean, it's the bloody future of the web, and they just ignore it: either don't tag stuff or they tag it with the slow, non-functional part of their brains.
When I found out about upcoming.org using hCalendars, I thought: oh goodie, gold mine: semantically marked events, free test data for my bsc!!!
BUT (the omnipresent 'but'), when I really started scraping it, I found out that figuring out semantics it's haaaard and misinterpreting standards (or recommendations, not to be so harsh) might be a hobby for some: gorgious abbr-locations, with void titles: I mean title="". Then why the f did you put that location class there in the first place?
And, to get back to the tags (which is the reason of this post)... take a look at the Sun mashup event today... Interesting, is it? BUT how am I suppose to discover it if it isn't tagged at all??? And this is not some mistake of an author, it's a habit (lots of events don't have tags at all).
I wonder, is it because upcoming DOES NOT have a field for tags in the 'add event' form? Hmmm... or because the 'add tag' button is pretty hidden on the event page? (it took me a while to find it. I admit, when I analyzed the tags of the events I was looking at the markup).

So which people are we talking about ignoring tagging? We might be talking as well about the developers: it's them who should realize the importance of tags and make it easier for users to produce tagged content. But since upcoming is 'a Yahoo company', I'm not surprised: it's not their first and personally, I'm expecting more...

If some developers don't realize the importance of semantic markup, maybe users do, and maybe it's us who should start the 'web revolution': your favourite events site does not provide tagging? Report it to the developers, send an email, make a request, state your wish for a better world! The website you upload your pictures to does not tag them? Change it! there are a lot of sites that do! Flood the upcoming mailbox with your requests to a decent tagging process so that next time you would be able to find out about the Sun mashup event...