Friday, May 3, 2002

If ontology, then knowledge: Catching up with WebOnt (XML.com) A web portal, for example, could use a formal ontology covering the knowledge domain the portal focuses on; for example, medical research about the origin of AIDS. In order to collect, analyze, share, and structure information, it would be helpful if the portal had a public ontology available for its own use and the use of its information-sharing partners, including medical publishers, university researchers, health organizations, and the like. [IBM DeveloperWorks: XML News] 2:44:54 PM     SJ Merc: "A federal magistrate in Los Angeles has ordered SonicBlue to spy on thousands of digital video recorder users, monitoring every show they record, every commercial they skip and every program they send electronically to a friend." I have an admission to make. For the first few weeks as a TiVO owner, I didn't skip over the commercials because it felt wrong to do so. Now I do skip them. If everyone does this (I'm sure they do) does this mean the end of TV as we know it? Yes, of course. Should the courts interfere? No, of course. Should the entertainment industry adjust? They have no choice, imho. I talked on the phone with Adam Curry yesterday and told him this story. Adam said when he watches TV he skips over the shows and only watches the commercials. Heh. I'm sure he's not joking.   [Scripting News] 2:38:27 PM     Bryan Field-Elliot: "It's completely absurd to call 'theft' the skipping of commercials using a PVR. By their logic, I suppose it's also theft if I go to the bathroom or fetch a snack during commercials. If so, I wonder how many billions of dollars in advertising have already been lost to such malevolent biological needs."  [Scripting News] 2:36:33 PM     Wrapping Web Service APIs. O’Reilly: “There are many approaches to writing XML based web services: SOAP, XML-RPC, REST. If all you want to do is use a service, and there is a Python wrapper for it, you might not care what it was written in. Mark Pilgrim has wrapped the Google SOAP API. Load up his PyGoogle module and google away. The wrapper takes care of the SOAP for you.” [ranchero.com] 2:34:29 PM

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