cloudsoup

RDF is part of the W3C’s Semantic Web project, an effort to add meaning to the content of web-pages. It’is a metadata specification so before we go further you might like to read Cory Doctorow’s Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia.

RDF is very often implemented in XML (see below). Don’t imagine for a moment, though, that RDF is XML – XML is only one common way of representing RDF: XML can express a serialisation of RDF. Got that? RDF is not XML but RDF can be written as XML. Mark Pilgrim implausibly claims his partner had an XML serialisation of her shoe collection and pointed out that her shoes were not based on XML.

Anywhere you read about RDF you’ll hear that it’s based on triples of the form : subject-predicate-object. When you look at some XML/RDF, though, it sometimes isn’t clear where the triples are supposed to be. More often it looks like gibberish. To take a real example, the weblogging tool WordPress automatically inserts RDF for trackback into your weblog scribblings. For example, the RDF for this item reads:

<!--
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#\"
   xmlns:dc=\"http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/\"
   xmlns:trackback=\"http://madskills.com/public/
   xml/rss/module/trackback/\">
<rdf:Description rdf:about=\"http://www.cloudsoup.com
                             /weblog/archives/2004/05
                             /24/rdf-for-beginners\"
 dc:identifier=\"http://www.cloudsoup.com
                /weblog/archives/2004/05
                /24/rdf-for-beginners\"
dc:title=\"RDF for beginners\"
trackback:ping=\"http://www.cloudsoup.com
                /weblog/archives/2004/05/24
                /rdf-for-beginners/trackback/\" />
</rdf:RDF>
-->

Hunt the triple : subject-predicate-object

The bit we’re interested in is this:

<rdf:Description
   rdf:about=\"http://www.cloudsoup.com
              /weblog/archives/2004/05
              /24/rdf-for-beginners\"
   dc:identifier=\"http://www.cloudsoup.com
                /weblog/archives/2004/05
                /24/rdf-for-beginners\"
   dc:title=\"RDF for beginners\"
   trackback:ping=\"http://www.cloudsoup.com
                /weblog/archives/2004/05/24
                /rdf-for-beginners/trackback/\" />

This snippet of XML/RDF contains three triples:

They’re all talking about this document, it’s the meaning of the rdf:about tag- hence the repeated URL in the subject column. The first says the document has an identifer, the second that it has a title and the third, that it has a trackback URL.

If you’re ever at a loss to understand this stuff, or can’t spot the triples, or need to validate your own RDF, try the W3C’s RDF validator.

WordPress 1.2 is out and the upgrde on cloudsoup took a little over 20mins because, for some reason, the first FTP didn’t work properly. Everything sorted now.

Some features of WordPress 1.2

1. Sub-categories: Categories can be arranged hierarchically and infinitely deep. Multiple categories combined with sub-categories gives WordPress the most comprehensive taxonomy system of any blogging software available.
2. OPML Export and Import: You can import and export OPML to systems like Bloglines or desktop aggregators like NetNewsWire and FeedDemon.
3. Automatic Thumbnail Creation System: WordPress has a refined upload feature that automatically creates thumbnails any size you want.
4. Encrypted passwords and cookies: All passwords in the database and password cookies are encrypted, ensuring maximal security.
5. New plugin architecture: The new plugin architecture simplifies modifying or extending WordPress features. Plugins can now hook into nearly every action WordPress does.
6. Localization of WordPress and Unicode support: The efforts put into internationalizing WordPress have borne fruit, and now you can adapt WordPRess to work in your native language. Several translations are already available.
7. Advanced comment moderation: You can now fine-tune your moderation filters in a manner very similar to blacklists for other weblog tools. There is also mass-editing of comments, which makes it a snap to delete hundreds of comments with the click of a button, if necessary.
8. Post preview: Near-instant previews while writing or editing articles help you proofread and make improvements before finally presenting your work of art to the world.
9. RSS and LiveJournal Importers: The new RSS import script is the closest thing to an universal importer. It allows you to import entries from Radio weblogs even other blogging tools that we may not support specifically. The LiveJournal importer finally lets you have a full blooded self-hosted weblog without losing all your old LiveJournal posts.
10. Unlimited update services: Now you can define multiple weblog change monitoring services to be pinged when you post.
11. Directory flexbility: Now you can have all the WordPress files in one directory and the weblog in a higher level directory.

One of the websites I’ve worked on recently has a backend database of over 20,000 images with accompanying metadata in English and Welsh. Every image has been categorised with subject terms culled from five standard thesauruses, and each has been put into a three-tiered subject tree using terms that are deliberately more colloquial than the controlled vocabulary of the thesauruses. The subject tree is expressed bilingually, too.

Deriving relationships

This got me thinking I could use the subject tree and subject categories to create a bilingual subject ontology and to offer subject mappings and subject searches to other websites and organisations associated with this one.

It should be possible automatically to derive nested classes of our controlled vocabulary subject terms. The subject terms themselves are entered in a flat, comma-delimited list against each item, with no significance in their order. A careful trawl through the database, though, should be able to spot common occurrences of terms for items at the same point in the subject tree from which we will be able to derive a bilingual controlled, subject-term hierarchy. Once we have that we will be able to offer advanced searching possibilities like ‘broadening’ or ‘narrowing’ the search —- esentially, moving up and down the subject tree.

The biggest problem in getting this done, though, is describing to people who control project funds what it is I’m proposing. I don’t expect professional administrators or accounts to understand technical jargon like ontology but I’m at a bit of a loss to know how to talk about it without using jargon. In the past I&#817′ve resorted to doing stuff anyway, under the guise of producing a pilot, because it’s the only common language: we can all then see what it does.

Assembly Online was setup without using blogging software, unlike our bigger cousin, Downing Street Says, because we didn’t see much use for most of the baggage of, say, Moveable Type.

We missed out on the automatic production of RSS and Atom — and trackback, by the way — and had to manage the RSS ourselves (Mark and Sam’s Feed Validator was invaluable), and the trackback, and we still have to implement the Atom feeds.

Now Bill Gates is waking up to RSS:

Websites were a problem too, he added, because they demand that people visit them regularly to find out if anything has changed and require regular updating to avoid going stale.

These problems could be solved, said Mr Gates, by using blogs and Real Simple Syndication (RSS), that lets people know when a favourite journal is updated.

And it looks as though Microsoft is going to make a move into the weblogging software market sometime soon.

Every year Helen holds the Freud Beanie Competition for her final-year psychology students as part of her Campaign to Rubbish Freud.
The competition comprises a questionnaire and a short essay.
Previous questions have included:

• How many phallic symbols can you identify on the school grounds?
• Give five good reasons why a woman might want a penis?

And the short essay question has often been an invitation to provide a Freudian critique of Eeyore’s Birthday, the story that ends with Eeyore dipping a deflated balloon in and out of an empty honeypot.

The winner gets a lovely Freud Beanie (from the Freud Museum) that plays Memories.

This weblog was moved from MoveableType to WordPress just a few days ago and we’ve already created our first hack.

The hack sits in the my-hacks.php file and implements a function to return a list of the {n} most recently posted items. Here it is:

function get_recent_posts($limit = 10) {
   global  $wpdb, $tableposts;
   $list = \"<ul>n\";
   $rows = $wpdb->get_results(\"
         SELECT ID, post_title, post_date,
         post_name FROM $tableposts
         WHERE post_status = 'publish'
         ORDER BY post_date DESC
         LIMIT 1, \".$limit);
   foreach($rows as $row){
      $list .= \"<li><a href=\"\".get_permalink($row->ID) .
            \"\">\" . $row->post_title . \"</a></li>n\";
   }
   $list .= \"</ul>n\";
   echo($list);
}
	

Feel free to use it yourselves.

The news about Abu Ghraib isn’t too suprising if you remember a few key experiments in Social Psychology.

Milgram and Obedience to Authority

Stanley Milgram conducted a famous experiment on obedience to authority shortly after WWII which seemed to show that two-thirds of the public are willing to administer 450V electric shocks to people taking part in an experiment. Milgram’s study was a careful setup; the true experimental subjects were the people administering the electric shocks and the supposed victims were actors colluding with Milgram.

Milgram’s study was repeated by others before ethics committees began to consider the experiment unethical. The figures for those willing to deliver lethal electric shocks vary but Milgram’s original 66% stands up well.

Zimbardo and the Stanford Prison Experiment

Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment randomly allocated student volunteers to the roles of ‘prisoner’ and ‘guard’ in a mocked-up prison in the basement of a lab at Stanford University. The experiment had to be ended prematurely after 6 days (it was planned to last 2 weeks) because of the violent and abusive behaviour of the guards.

Zimbardo’s experiment would not now get past the ethics committees; not so long ago Zimbardo said he thought there might to room to conduct similar experiments in reality tv shows and he has advised on at least two shown in the UK.

Both Zimbardo’s and Milgram’s experiments – and the work of Asch on conformity – show that people conform, are obedient to authority and will do nasty things if asked. It’s been known for a long time now. In the words of Milgram:

…stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.