The registry database was updated last week, in both the sandbox and the registry, to support history tracking. This is in preparation for finally enabling timeslice retrieval and versioning.We also made some significant changes to the site layout and css, so if things still look a little funky, try refreshing your browser — most browsers seem to be caching our css and not detecting the changed files.In the process, we broke search (you may not have even noticed), but it’s fixed now.
Since the beginning of the project, we’ve been running our own web server. After a significant number of local service outages on the part of Time Warner this year, particularly in July, we finally decided that had to change.
As of today, we’re running on Dreamhost. Dreamhost isn’t perfect, but they offer a nice package of services, reasonably good support and, with the right promo code, the price was right. So we’re going to give it a try for a while.
Moving from a host where we had complete control of the Apache and MySql servers to a shared host where we don’t has required some minor configuration changes to the blog and the wiki, and some significant changes to trac and subversion, but no changes to the Registry. As a side effect of the wiki tweak, we can have prettier URLs — http://metadataregistry.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page becomes http://metadataregistry.org/wiki/Main_Page. Links will default to the new style, although the older form will still work in order to keep older bookmarks working too.
We updated trac and subversion to the latest stable releases, moved trac from a lighttpd server to Apache and moved subversion from a subversion server to Apache as well. This has changed the user authentication process for both services, hopefully for the better.
We made some major/minor changes to the Registry software last week. If you’ve used it lately you may have noticed the fairly ugly tabs that replaced the links at the top of the browse pages. They still need some work, but it’s generally a lower priority than some other things.
The major change was reworking a significant amount of the Registry code to bring it up to the Symfony 1.0 release. We’d been working with a fairly ancient version of Symfony while waiting for the final and as a result there were significant structural changes required. We also wrote a bunch of automated functional tests so that we can be a bit more confident that future releases will have fewer bugs. You shouldn’t notice any of this when using the Registry, but please let us know if we broke anything.
We cleared up a few small existing bugs, one of which was that the Registry was a little too aggressive in checking to see if a prefLabel was unique, so the check is now local to the Vocabulary instead of the entire Registry. Another was that under some circumstances the URIs generated by the Registry Sandbox had a hard-to-see double slash after the base domain, causing the URIs to fail to resolve properly. In addition to fixing the bug we also fixed all of the bad existing URIs.
More updates are imminent.
The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative is looking for someone to build them a wiki. At least I think that’s what they want.
From the Call for Tender page:
“DCMI Call for Tender 2007-03: Wiki format for application profiles convertible into XML”
From the DCMI home page:
“Call for tender for a machine-processable application profile format”
I don’t think that these two descriptions are describing the same thing at all. Of course, that just reflects my sense that “machine-processable application profile” doesn’t mean “application profile that can be scraped from a wiki page and expressed as XML”.
I’m more inclined to think that a “machine-processable application profile” means a DCAP that can be directly used to validate data that has been created with the intention of conforming to a specified DCAP (or is it DSP? — I wish that they wouldn’t suddenly change the terminology just to fit the model).
Increasingly, I’m viewing ”machine-processable application profile” as meaning machine-processable-DCAP-derived data-entry forms (XFORMS) used to generate DCAP-conformant XML data that can be validated using a machine-processable-DCAP-derived RELAX NG schema, W3C XML Schema, or Schematron ruleset. RDF triples would then have to be derived from the validated XML.
The intermediate XML validation is necessary because a sensibly efficient way to validate RDF against a DCAP currently doesn’t exist. Although Alistair’s notion of rules-based RDF validation based on SPARQL query assertions looks like it might work in a Schematron-like way. This would then imply the ability to derive SPARQL queries from a machine-processable DCAP.
While the idea of a wiki-based DCAP editor is conceptually interesting, it would seem to me that a tender to produce exemplars of the above based on the current DCAP XML expression would be far more useful in actually providing useful test cases for determining the validity and utility of that expression.
Danny Ayers points to a screencast by David Huynh of MIT demonstrating a new data viewing tool.It’s indeed awesome — one of those things where about halfway through I said “holy mackerel!” or words to that effect. It’s definitely must-see TV.
David Huynh of MIT, responsible for wonders such as Timeline and Exhibit has made a short screencast demoing his latest marvel, Potluck. It’s currently a research prototype though appears very close to being web-ready. When you’ve seen the screencast I think you’ll agree with me - it’s awesome .
If you tried to request your password and nothing happened, it’s because mail was broken on the server. Actually I had closed the port in the firewall a very long time ago and since a password request is the only thing that normally uses mail on the Registry, I hadn’t noticed.
Today I needed to register as a new user with this here blog (same server) and I didn’t get a password emailed to me! Oh, the sorrow.
It’s fixed now. Oh, the joy.
A few belated entries about registry activities at the DC2006 conference in Manzanillo, Colima, Mexico…
“So now we’ll just see how long it takes Jon to get his oar in”
The evidence is irrefutable — it took me almost exactly two months…
I stumbled across an email this morning from the Semantic Web Best Practices list that made me more aware of one of the main things that’s making me hesitate before diving into the Registry project… I’m certain that I don’t know enough about what I’m doing. So I spent a little bit of time browsing the SWBP list…
Building any kind of functioning service requires an initial assemblage of assumptions. Who’s the user? What do they expect in the way of service and interaction? Where do we start to engage them in the enterprise? I’ve always been a strong believer in diverse work teams, with a variety of backgrounds and experience brought to the table. Of course the messy part of diversity comes when there’s a need to come to some consensus about priorities and approaches.
