Out of the way

So far this year has been about reading books. But for the second time in a year I received a package recently that had a book in it where I had written something. This one was "Knitting the Semantic Web" - a collection of papers edited by Jane Greenberg and Miel^H^H^H^H^ Eva Méndez, and Eva and I wrote one of them called "Library Cards for the 21st century".

It's a nice book - reasonable size for carrying around, hardback for hitting things, white and orange on the spine for simple recognition (and upsetting Moose's sense of æsthetics). You should all rush out and buy it - I am sure your bookshop has been stacking up advance copies in anticipation... (if you really want to buy it, drop me a message - I have some order forms).

The basic idea of our paper is that unlike normal XML, which is pretty much what library catalogues were since they started getting on computers, RDF gives you the ability to scribble more useful stuff on them or add a second or fifth card under a different category in the same way you could with an actual card catalogue. (When I started my university studies we atually had one of those - duplicated at different parts of the library. Sometimes cards from the 19th century are better than the computer records of the 21st). And the added bonus is being able to search it all electronicaly still, rather than fighting over the "PROM - PROT" box with the big guy with a bad reputation who doesn't much like you ...

Since my FileVault enryption failed and swallowed all my data, and sine it was non-critical, the book is probably the only copy I have handy of the paper, actually. Anyway, it is nice to see my name in a book even if it is only on the inside. And it was a fun artile to write - it was something I had been thinking for a while.