Here's a tool I want...

... a graphical FOAF (or general OWL, even better...) editor that will allow me to quickly and easily make a knowledge base for myself. Picture this, if you will - a window in which I can drag a contact to make a FOAF:Person, a song from iTunes to make a set of song and album instances, complete with links to cover art, pictures to elements to make links, etc.

I want context-sensitive linking options - if I Ctrl-drag from a FOAF:Person to an image, I want an option for 'features in' - similarly for a song ('performs' or 'wrote').

The ideal conclusion would be a big KB where I can retrieve pictures, songs, emails, information - everything - based on anything else. Not just a better way of finding songs (because it knows that Astrid was a member of Goya Dress, and that a song by Simon & Garfunkel features both "Paul Simon" and "Art Garfunkel", for example), or pictures (all pictures featuring me and wine...), but a better way of managing all sorts of information.

Semantic Web heaven. Now we just need an easy-to-use tool that does it - automagic understanding of common drag-n-drop items is a good start (e.g. links, iTunes songs, photos, quotations (text), Address Book contacts, etc.).

Of course, there's no market at all - who would pay to make metadata with no use? Chicken and egg.

*sigh*

RDFAuthor is a good start, but I need usability, dammit.

No disrespect to the author of RDFAuthor, of course

Posted at 2004-01-26 10:56:29 by Richard • Link to Here's a tool I wa…
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Sweet Jesus

I know this is old, but I never bothered looking into it. However, it's bloody amazing (and a stroke of genius), so:

Wes "Kernel Hacker" Felter describes Cooperative Linux as, a scary hack that loads the Linux kernel into the NT kernel as a driver so that they can both run in ring 0 at the same time, allowing Linux apps to run full speed on Windows without porting.

Posted at 2004-01-26 06:58:49 by Richard • Link to Sweet Jesus
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Disconnected Urbanism

Metropolis Magazine is running a good piece on the disconnection we suffer from the places in which we exist, caused by mobile phones:

The great offense of the cell phone in public is not the intrusion of its ring, although that can be infuriating when it interrupts a tranquil moment. It is the fact that even when the phone does not ring at all, and is being used quietly and discreetly, it renders a public place less public. It turns the boulevardier into a sequestered individual, the flaneur into a figure of privacy. And suddenly the meaning of the street as a public place has been hugely diminished.

...

Every place is exactly the same as every other place. They are all just nodes on a network--and so, increasingly, are we.

Local cache

Posted at 2004-01-26 01:51:51 by Richard • Link to Disconnected Urban…
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