@theatlantic.com Is it possible for authors to look themselves up in the books3 database without giving a credit card number to The Atlantic first?

New blog entry: Let's stop saying "semantic web" — like a startup pivot, the technology turned out to be great for things other than a new kind of "web". www.bobdc.com/blog/stopsem...

New blog entry tomorrow: Let's stop saying "semantic web" — like a startup pivot, the technology turned out to be great for things other than a new kind of "web".

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” - Arthur C. Clarke

Gotta love a comic strip that uses XOR as part of the punch line. www.smbc-comics.com/comic/chew

"Top 10 Query Languages Every Developer Should Know in 2025" including, of course, SPARQL www.analyticsinsight.net/amp/story/pr...

“Journey” is the new “experience” to make the use of your simple product sound like a bigger deal than it actually is.

What are some currently running SPARQL endpoints that people like besides Wikidata and DBpedia?

New blog entry: Correcting some outdated "Learning SPARQL" examples www.bobdc.com/blog/updatin...

New blog entry tomorrow: Correcting some outdated "Learning SPARQL" examples

Speaking as a tech writer, I just love the Performing Directions of Terry Riley’s seminal 1964 music piece “In C”: thirdcoastpercussion.com//downloads/2... (second and third page of the PDF)

From "Model Once, Represent Everywhere: UDA (Unified Data Architecture) at Netflix" netflixtechblog.com/uda-unified-...: "UDA is a Knowledge Graph... We chose RDF and SHACL as the foundation for UDA’s knowledge graph."

With all the new information processing algorithms that are popping up and fading away these days, I love how one of the most popular ones continues to be an algorithm developed over 50 years ago by British computer scientist Karen Spärck Jones en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%8...

The reason that I switched from DOS to MS Windows 3.1 many years ago.

Bitbucket forcing us to upgrade from the free plan to a plan that they say costs $3.30 per month? Not so bad. Oh wait, they were dividing the actual price by 5 to make it look more appealing. They're really charging $16.50 per month.

New blog entry: ChatGPT and Copilot as OWL processors — pretty impressive. www.bobdc.com/blog/chatgpt...

New blog entry tomorrow: ChatGPT and Copilot as OWL processors — pretty impressive.

First Draft Note of RDF 1.2 Primer is now available from the W3C at www.w3.org/TR/2025/DNOT...

I had a great idea for a domain name, but I was 67 days too late.

"On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. [Charles] Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." (from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage...)

New blog entry: Converting RDFS schemas to SHACL constraints — with SPARQL, of course. www.bobdc.com/blog/rdfs2sh...

New blog entry tomorrow: Converting RDFS schemas to SHACL constraints — with SPARQL, of course.

Out of curiosity I let gmail's "AI" rewrite something I wrote and it replaced the word "features" with "functionality." I guess I'll wait a few years before I try that again. www.bobdc.com/blog/writing...

Using ChatGPT every few weeks has changed the way I do regular Google searches. Now I think of them as prompts where my incorporation of more context terms will get better answers, and that actually helps.

Causal AI is a promising field (see upcoming Graphwise webinar at lnkd.in/erXtR726) and a fun side effect of the interest is all the discussions of it out there that include “casual AI” as a typo.

New blog entry: Filtering foreign literals out of SPARQL query results — and only the foreign literals. www.bobdc.com/blog/filterf...

New blog entry tomorrow: Filtering foreign literals out of SPARQL query results — and only the foreign literals.

New blog entry tomorrow: Filtering foreign literals out of SPARQL query results — and only the foreign literals.

I was looking for a Linux command line date math utility and it turns out that the Linux date command already does what I want, e.g. $ date --date "+ 30 days" Thu Feb 13 12:49:45 PM EST 2025

I wish Amazon and Yelp reviews had a checkbox where we could filter out the ones where people talk about themselves too much. It wouldn’t even need AI. It could just count what % of words were "me", "I", "my", or "mine".

New W3C SHACL Working Group: www.w3.org/2024/12/data...

Account creation form: "password must include a special character" Me: "zt34,L9m" Account creation form: “OMG ARE YOU INSANE A COMMA IS BEYOND MY UNIVERSE"

New blog entry: Parsing JSON with Python — my personal quick reference. www.bobdc.com/blog/pythonj...

New blog entry tomorrow: Parsing JSON with Python — my personal quick reference.

What I've learned by switching from Twitter to Mastodon and Bluesky: everyone in my bubble agrees with me about all the big important issues.

New blog entry: Amazon's failed folksonomy and Kevin Federline — what could go wrong? www.bobdc.com/blog/federli...

New blog entry tomorrow: Amazon's failed folksonomy and Kevin Federline — what could go wrong?

@benadavis.bsky.social Nice piece on nature slop! For another horrible fake AI "art" "nature" trend, try a web search for the jellyfish paintings that Monet never did: www.google.com/search?q=mon...

A SPARQL endpoint of… information about Vladimir Nabakov’s mentions of trees in 20 different books aidanhogan.com/docs/nabokov...

SPARQL endpoint of… information about Vladimir Nabakov’s mentions of trees in 20 different books aidanhogan.com/docs/nabokov...

IMDB was recently looking for someone with “Expertise in industry-standard ontology languages and tools (e.g., OWL, RDF, SPARQL, Protégé)” Wouldn’t it be cool to have SPARQL access to all that… www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=f...

New blog entry: RDF serialization formats — starring TriG www.bobdc.com/blog/trig/

New blog entry tomorrow: RDF serialization formats — starring TriG

Another German compound word to love: I recently found out that their word for “musicologist” is “Musikwissenschaftler”, i.e. “music scientist”.

I’m getting tired of web pages that start with “In this article, you’ll learn about the thing that the title of the page says that this page is about”.

New blog entry: Selecting all the triples from all the graphs — but the default graph? www.bobdc.com/blog/selecti...

New blog entry tomorrow: Selecting all the triples from all the graphs — but the default graph?

The best thing I've read on why it's silly to expect AI (i.e., machine learning) to create art: www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

I forgot that John Cage could be so funky: www.youtube.com/watch?v=maIw...

New blog entry: Editing schemas, ontologies, and SKOS taxonomies with VocBench — A free GUI tool. www.bobdc.com/blog/vocbench/