A Milestone Week of Innovation

This Past Week’s Theme is Lightweight, and Cool!

Danny Ayers has recently instituted a semantic Web links re-cap each week (hey folks, set up a specific category!, though the del.icio.us tag “semweb weekly” is a nice touch), which is a fantastic service by Talis and one that most of us in the community look forward to. This post is not meant to be competitive with it. But, with the stuff happening last week, I could not resist a bit of a re-cap of my own.

While I have a pending post on Zitgist’s zLinks tool for WordPress (stay tuned!), there were some other announcements of the past week I thought were unique and noteworthy:

• CouchDB — this is a very lightweight, scalable and flexible database approach that involves simple declarations on Web pages and a simple Erlang server component to render them. What is exciting about the approach is the ease for non-developers or users to create structured and transferrable data from unstructured and semi-structured bases; the technical overview is a good place to start
• RDF/JSON — the Javascript community and many of us desirous of seeing a broadening of semWeb efforts to mainstream developers welcomed Keith Alexander’s announcement and request for input on RDF/JSON; Keith has been a pragmatic innovator of the first rank and I suspect this initiative will be widely embraced
• CoScripter — a simple, natural language system for automating repeated tasks within a Web browser, based on the Koala initiative (see, for example, the CHI 2007 paper) from IBM that many of us have been keeping our ears to the railroad tracks, and
• zLinks — see my next post.