In the pursuit of collaborative intelligence...

RSS data web!? Doh!

In Feb 2004, The World Wide Web Consortium released the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the OWL Web Ontology Language (OWL) as W3C Recommendations. RDF is used to represent information and to exchange knowledge in the Web. OWL is used to publish and share sets of terms called ontologies, supporting advanced Web search, software agents and knowledge management.

<rant>What on earth are people doing creating their own names for existing thinking?  Or is something else going on?  Jon Udell recently interviewed Bill Gates after his keynote to the Microsoft Professional Developers' Conference in LA this September (podcast).  During the interview Jon decides to discuss with Bill how Microsoft is including RSS capabilities in Vista (Longhorn loves RSS) and Office 12.  During this line of questioning some unexpected terminology creeps in courtesy of Jon and and to quote from him - "What I call the RSS data web".

Well that doesn't really help does it?  For those who don't know Jon is referring to a derivative of the 'data web', not the whole - the whole happens to be what the W3C call the semantic web.  This is a collection of technologies and standards such as OWL, RDF and RSS - an RDF vocabulary.  Perhaps in the hope of adhering to open standards both interviewer and interviewee might care to use the correct industry accepted terminology rather than 'shock and awe' listeners with mis-appropriated jargon.

So here's the irony of all of this and perhaps why Jon speaks RSS and not fluent RDF - Jon Udell was previously a member of the board of the RSS 2.0 initiative and if you check out the history you'll see they dropped the RDF headers in RSS 0.91 - so while it's nice Harvard is championing RSS one wonders if it will eventually die as the rest of us embrace the W3C's more eloquent RDF</rant>

I might add this rant has been done before... and you might care to note Dave resigned from the RSS 2.0 board and is now working at Microsoft, c'est la vie.

Adobe advancing the vision of tomorrow's developer

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/12/adobe_livecycle/

This illustrates the changing role of the developer, for it makes it possible for business managers, particularly if they fall into the `power user’ category, to create and / or adapt workflow practices of their own using the Q-PACs. The upside of this is that it can create a business capable of reacting more quickly to change. It also means that the role of the developer is taking one more step along the road from code-cutting `applications development’ to business process development.

Fry was at pains to point out that LiveCycle is not aimed at cutting developers out of creating workflow processes, but more towards up-skilling them. “We have a Professional Services organisation that is specifically aimed at pushing up the skills of our customers,” he said.

A while ago I met with Adobe to learn about 'Adam & Eve' and other interesting work they're doing that related to work a startup called Orangery was offering with mobile interface generation loosely coupled with BPEL spun from their custom IDE (coincidentally known as Eden) - our interest (SalePlane) was embedding the logic and ease of Decisionality into this mix.

Where Decisionality has differed over Adobe and others is that it has leap-frogged certain areas traditionally dependent on developers and empowers the business user who we prefer to call the subject matter expert (SME) to be in control of authoring and knowledge management.  Now it looks like Adobe has finally joined the party!

I recently commented at Patrick Kerpan's blog on whether Borland would evolve to develop tools for the business user as part of the rejuvenation of the software house's go-to-market strategy, not surprisingly it was perhaps an ambitious question :-)

So, fellow coders & developers - the future be in the middleware me thinks ;-)

MONO meetup during PDC '05

• iFolder file sharing and synchronization,
• the Banshee media player,
• our new photo management software,
• the desktop search, 
• the MonoDevelop IDE and
• the GTK# GUI toolkit which is the API we use to create all of these applications.

• Ruby.NET and PHP.NET compilers.
• The DIVA Movie editor.
• The new ASP.NET editor.
• The .NET bug finder.
• The Cecil libraries for reading and writing CIL images.
• Mono's XAML compiler.
  

eBay to buy Skype

http://investor.ebay.com/index.cfm

One wonders, as have others, how this fits in with the existing eBay roadmap and strategy - I wonder if Amazon will bring out their own tool soon, lol :-)

Of course the reality might well be that NewsCorp does something all together much more interesting down the line considering their recent and obvious foray into the internet business landscape. 

The problem with the Skype model is that anyone can enter this market with enough financial backing.  The question may now be what do users want or care?

Credit: thanks to Lee for alerting me to this!

UPDATE courtesy of Neville/Darren:

• On eBay, sellers go where the buyers are, and vice-versa.
• With PayPal, more sellers (and not only eBay sellers) offer payment options by that means, and more buyers use that option.
• Integrating Skype into the eBay/PayPal mix gives buyers and sellers the means to quickly and easily get in touch with each other if they want to, and for free if they make their calls entirely via the internet no matter where each of them is. Talk about facilitating global commerce!
• Each part of the mix feeds the other, enhancing the richness of each element and helping to bolster and grow the whole eBay offering.