Classical vs Chaotic

• Research Interest: ... investigating the value of formal descriptions of chaotic systems like the Web, especially in the consensus-building process.
• Predicting change in the Web is more like predicting the weather or financial markets than predicting the path of a bullet.
• But I want my bank to use classical reasoning, not heuristics, when computing my balance

Statistical Approaches are Great

• PageRank
• tagging a la flickr, del.icio.us
• ...wisdom of crowds

I'm learning that stuff, slowly, but symbolic math is my strength.

HTML 1.x

• 1990: Convex/HP SGML work was an excuse to work on HTML:
  1. draft a DTD
  2. try it on some test cases
  3. discover an issue; repeat

HTML 2.0

• 1994: adding HTML to products at HalSoft
• Asked others to try sgmls parser; not many takers
• Installed sgmls as a CGI service; HTML validator is born
• feedback loop works over the Web

Are DTDs cost-effective?

• To SGML or not to SGML?
  what if we had just used lex/yacc?
• DTD syntax used to be obscure; less so now
• What's wrong with a <form> that spans 3 <tr>s?
  • nothing, really, but it's hard to say in a DTD
• And now XML Schema languages are facilitating a lot of feedback loops...

XSD Schemas put structures in the Web

• Not just <purchase-order>, but
• <ubl:purchase-order>
  where...
  • ubl: is grounded in the web at
    http://docs.oasis-open.org/ubl/cd-UBL-1.0/xsd/common/...

Now I can link to it, not just informally from hypertext, but formally from other XSD documents...

Formal Mix and Match

• Compose <ubl:purchase-order> with <pharma:drug-interactions>
  where...
  • pharma: is (hypothetically) grounded in the web at
    http://pharma.example/drugml/...
• When does it work? The pharma: folks clearly know about XSD; do they have to know about ubl:?

Circles and Arrows on the Whiteboard

Tag had a circles-and-arrows diagram of Language Evolution (extensibility and versioning):

Cirlces and Arrows in Drawing Tools

TimBL captured it in OmniGraffle. See also: xml/graffle source.

UML Diagrams

UML to OWL

Extract RDF from the UML diagram...

ext-vers$ make test-agent-pf.n3
xsltproc ... --output ext-vers-uml.rdf grokVioletUML.xsl ext-vers-uml.violet

See Using RDF and OWL to model language evolution for details.

Colophon, References

These slides: http://www.w3.org/2006/Talks/0301-dc-afm/

• written using nxml-mode; CSS/javascript presentation magic is Slidey
• view source for hCalendar, hCard, GRDDL...

References

• Using RDF and OWL to model language evolution 2006-02-15

See Also

• bnf2turtle -- write a RDF/turtle version of an EBNF grammar, 2006-02-10
• Specifying Web Architecture with Larch given at WWW9 in May 2000 in Amsterdam