interface cobalt

Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired magazine, last year had the following prediction for the next 5,000 days of the Web. (Warning: TED intro, although not as bad as it used to be.)

I agree with Kelly’s understanding of the Semantic Web and the future of the Web. My ambition is that the project I’m working on now will be a step in the direction of what he’s talking about.

By the way, isn’t BookCrossing something that already brings specific books into the Internet of Things? I thought of this as I had the pleasure of picking up a BookCrossing-registered book yesterday, and was able to see where the book had been and add my own entry to its journal.

To help keep everyone up-to-date with the work I’m doing on my project, I set up a new wiki for it (a MediaWiki). The idea is that by subscribing to a feed of recent changes, there will usually be no need for emails etc. as notifications of work that has been done.

For now, I don’t want to give everyone either read or write access. That was easily taken care of by adding the following to the LocalSettings.php file:

$wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['read'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount'] = false;

The first two lines (for ‘edit’ and ‘read’) restrict editing and reading to registered users. The last line (for ‘createaccount’) also restricts account creation, to prevent anyone from being able to sign up and get access to the wiki. By default, sysops still have access to account creation: log in as Sysop, go to the Special:Userlogin page, choose to create an account, fill out the details for the user to be given access (except password), and use the by email button. This will send an email to the user containing a URL to the wiki and a temporary password that will allow him or her to log in and set a new password.

Finally, to ensure that feed readers such as Google Reader will still be able to fetch the recent changes feeds, I allow anonymous access to (only) the recent changes page (also in LocalSettings.php):

$wgWhitelistRead = array('Special:Recentchanges');

My thesis work at the Knowledge Management Research Group at KTH is going to involve the Semantic Web, REST and some JavaScript. Because of that, I’ve been reading up on those technologies. These are some of the books that I’ve been reading:

A Semantic Web Primer by Grigoris Antoniou and Frank van Harmelen is a very good introduction to the Semantic Web for those new to the field. While I used it mainly to make sure that I hadn’t missed anything important, I did gain an improved understanding of some areas. Particularly the chapter on mathematical formulations of the Semantic Web was interesting to me, although perhaps not all that useful for my work.

RESTful Web Services by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby offers an architecture for RESTful web services: the Resource-Oriented Architecture (ROA). What is and isn’t REST is a much debated topic.  Richardson and Ruby describe what they believe is RESTful and what isn’t. Thanks to their discussions, I was able to form my own opinions on what I consider to be good RESTful web services and what their advantages and limitations are.

JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford explains which features of JavaScript are good, and which are not that good and should be avoided. Everyone who’s programming in JavaScript ought to listen to Crockford (you can watch his talks at YUI Theater). And perhaps everyone who isn’t should listen to him as well; JavaScript is actually a great language once you get past the bad parts.