RDFa Drupal Open Graph

 I have added a page to collect RDFa links over at http://aule-browser.com/rdf/index.html.

There will be a separate parsing section for PEG's, Icon 9.5, ObjectIcon 2.3, Rebol 3, Logtalk and PROLOG (and SNOBOL in C ?)

The number of essential links is now near twenty - and this is in English only.

It is still not clear to me how searchmonkey will fare as Yahoo! moves to using Bing for search.

SearchMonkey for documents was already infuriating for me due to SearchMonkey being restricted to Flash documents ( given my work in Curl markup for literary documents as http://aule-browser.com/poets/ and http://aule-browser.com/phil/ .)

I still have to get a post together on RDF with Curl documents.  RDF is largely associated with the one XML syntax - but there is nothing about RDF triples that requires XML.  Curl documents which are embedded in HTML pose no problem in general since the RDF can be expressed in the embedding object element.  Curl documents which are themselves .curl applet files offer unrestricted tagging in the initial {applet } expression so the Curl runtime itself could be adapted to export RDF.  The matter is less obvious for the {include } of documents which are .scurl text files at the top-level within applet files.

The root Curl document, when unspecified, is a TextFlowBox, but with Curl 7.0 there are now ParagraphVisual and TextVisual classes. To quote from the documentation for the parent class,

This class provides a public API for accessing the contents of text-containing objects to be rendered by text containers such as TextFlowBox.

At the moment there is no option available for a popup action such as "Print" which would offer RDF triples rather than the content - and these for the Visual container "hit" as opposed to the entire "page". A Visual would need an option such as exports-rdf? and possibly a tie to a triples validator.

The whole matter ties back to whether Curl is suited for CMS - if a suitable server-side partner emerges as IT continues its slouch towards HTML5.  Or Flash 12.1 or ...

I had thought that Drupal could be a candidate, but after some exploratory efforts I lean towards a Gemstone + Seaside 3.0 option ( pul-ease do not mention Scala Lift ... )  I still keep an eye on Wicket (Hippo?), Zope/Plone and Ruby candidates such as Nesta.

Visual Prolog 7.3

Prolog Development Center has just released version 7.3 of Visual Prolog.

VIP was once known as Borland Turbo Prolog and was one of my favorite tools alongside Borland C++ for OS/2.

PDC Prolog has its counterpart in the Mercury project: a typed Prolog.

So what is new in 7.3? Well, Visual Prolog is getting ready to go 64-bit.  That and more are detailed at the 7.3 page.

For a while I thought the Prolog would go behind the scenes at PDC as it did when Air Liquide acquired Prologia in France (the home of Prolog IV as CLP.)   Happily PDC now is back to showcasing at least AI and not just smart software applications.

But what will the fate of this Prolog prove to be?  In a decade or two, projects such as Oz and Mercury may be in other hands - but a small commercial venture?

In my experience the strength of Visual Prolog was not the IDE or the GUI-building tools but the debugging.  And that has been further strengthened in the 7.3 release.

There is a "personal version" available for download and extensive examples come with it.

Prolog is part of the Adobe world in the ILOG arena (an IBM acquisition) and in an age of multi-processor 64-bit hardware, Prolog should come into its own in the RDF processing needs of the semantic web (in which regard, see Logtalk and the XSB project as well as http://www.swi-prolog.org/ for alternatives to PDC.)

A typed-Prolog should present no problem to ActionScript Flex developers at home with a typed ECMAScript variant - and "declarative" MXML UI layout.

Other languages superbly suited to processing text: ObjectIcon, Icon 9.5, Rebol, Oz.

Other Prolog implementations of merit: Eclipse-housed AMZI! Prolog.

For OOP for almost any other Prolog than PDC, see http://www.logtalk.org/

When the ICON language was named, Ralph Griswold could not have suspected that computing would come to have an "iconic" interface.  Curl has suffered a similar fate due to haxx.se and cURL.  Sadly, XML has a "prolog" and not a "prologue" so without RDF, searching for news on Prolog and XML is vexing.  So far, Rebol fares best and Oz much better.  As for Mercury and Alice, what's in a name?

http://www.logiquewerks.com/index.html

Semantic Web group at developers.curl.com

There is now a Semantic Web group at developers.curl.com

The Curl programming language is a web content language with macros which can load code packages dynamically so there are lots of good things for keeping semantic markup orthogonal to presentation markup. Curl has multiple inheritance so we may have a mix-in class for those containers which carry semantic tags. Strings in Curl are treated as Visual objects for purposes of presentation but they are often held in wrappers such as {text some string content} and {paragraph some-variety-of-objects}. All that is required is that curly braces are balanced - note the lack of closing tags.

Now to see if we lean towards RDF or Topic Maps or can get our arms around both ... it's time to triple-down on all bets!

Tagging content with Curl macros (Part 2)

Today I added a page on Curl markup at semanticweb.org

It seems long-overdue that some attention be paid to Curl's natural fit for SemWeb - if only in the enterprise.

Tagging content with Curl macros

Curl was thought of as a web content language before getting some attention as an RIA platform, but Curl macros are of interest for markup because Curl files are Curl data and macros are expanded based on the package reading that file. So in different contexts, the same markup can be used to obtain different results with no conversion.
Here is an example from an outline of mine on microformats:

{topic "microformats",

{wp "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microformats", Lang.en},

{home "http://microformats.org/"},

{intro "http://www.digital-web.com/articles/microformats_primer/"},

{blog "http://garrettdimon.com/", BlogType.personal },

{cf "http://microformatique.com/optimus/"}
}

The commas are an option that I chose for the {topic} macro, but the Curl macro format is very open and the punctuation is wholly arbitrary on my part.
Curl also offers a more extensive {define-syntax} option which is even more suited to treating Curl as data than the friendly {define-macro} with its many template or pattern options.
In the elements {wp} and {blog} the final attributes are themselves optional and in some contexts might be ignored altogether. Here they are simply my enums Lang and BlogType.

Curl and string-scanning

Over at the Curl Developer Center I added a comment to a post on string-scanning. I keep meaning to post on my efforts with RDF in REBOL and in Curl. But I have a few other TODO's on my GTD paths blocking my way ... now off to the first wedding of one of my own children's school friends ... tempus fugit.

The Future of Curl

Over at Curl I have added some comments to an invitation by Richard Monson-Haefel to weigh-in on improving Curl.

Divining the future of Curl means thinking outside the box. Here's a few attempts.

Pair up Curl as a client-side to Gemstone as has been done by Seaside.

Beef-up Curl on the client-side by getting serious about the future of expression-based languages: if there is not room in the marketplace for ICON, UNICON, REBOL and Curl then look to partner with the remnant of the ICON team at U. of Arizona.

If the Curl team cannot partner-up, then look to go beyond one of those languages by having more effective goal-oriented programming than UNICON or more user-friendly parsing than REBOL.

The option of viewing Curl as a platform and not a language seems to close off many avenues unless Curl, the platform, is able to embrace languages such as ICON which appear to be in need of a new home.

Or is there a niche for Curl in the future of Perl with Parrot, or Ruby with an industrial-quality VM, or distributed OZ?

One interesting place to look is GROK and what they are looking to do with Python ZOPE. That project alone might ensure the future of ZOPE.

Then there is RDF. Somehow RDF has become tied to clunky XML implementations or worse. Even now that W3C has embraced "sparkle" for RDF Data Access, we need not ignore the prospects for Curl as a potentially RDF-friendly language. Prima facie, ICON back-tracking and REBOL paths make either look more promising as a language. But Curl, the platform, could be a powerful starting point for a more language-neutral approach to RDF triples. Mozilla XUL has moved away from RDF (blame XML there, where the 'X' is for 'Xtra-heavy' rather than eXtensible.) The real-issue is how to effectively provide metadata. As more people look to HTML and XHTML itself as the answer, Curl appears to be a natural: Curl has always been metadata-friendly.

Curl CSPD could even be used to help ensure that meta-data that would disclose too much would be suppressed where privacy is an issue (think blogging in China and i-journalism most anywhere.)

Rebol

My Rebol notes are going to be at what is somewhat marred at the moment by rant about what the trial version of Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 did to my licensed instal of OneNote 2003 ...
Only this morning I enter my office to edit this post to find my computer stone-cold dead. When Microsoft Windows XP comes back to life, a little message tells me that a security update required a restart.
I do not have the time or energy for a rant this morning: on to Curl, curlr and rCurl

But I am back. About 30 minutes later. And with no Blog POST for LcurlR.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, IE7, perhaps just to remind me of last night's fiasco, simply froze. I knew that blog post was history. I had not hit Save-As-Draft. Daft. I do not have time or energy for a rant.

So why was I not in Firefox ? Firefox will recover. It will reopen my 12 or more sessions with their multiple tabs. My machine will start to crawl (some have the Adobe plugin running.) Said I, you just want to post a blog on LcurlR. Firefox can wait. Wrong.