Friday, February 10, 2012

W3C co-chair: Apple, Google power causing Open Web crisis

W3C co-chair: Apple, Google power causing Open Web crisis

The dominance of Apple and Google mobile browsers is leading to a situation that's even worse for Web programming than the former dominance of Internet Explorer, a standards group leader warned today.
"WebKit, the rendering engine at the heart of Safari and Chrome, living in iPhones, iPads and Android devices, is now the over-dominant browser on the mobile Web and technically, the mobile Web is full of works-only-in-WebKit Web sites while other browsers and their users are crying."

Thursday, February 2, 2012

LODStats

LODStats looks interesting and is a potentially useful tool if you are working with linked
open data resources.
One of the major obstacles for a wider usage of Web Data is the difficulty to obtain a clear picture of the available datasets. In order to reuse, link, revise or query a dataset published on the Web it is important to know the structure, coverage and coherence of the data.

LODStats is a statement-stream-based approach for gathering comprehensive statistics about datasets adhering to the Resource Description Framework (RDF). LODStats is based on the declarative description of statistical dataset characteristics. Its main advantages over other approaches are a smaller memory footprint and significantly better performance and scalability. We integrated LODStats into the CKAN dataset metadata registry and obtained a comprehensive picture of the current state of the Data Web.

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Piazza for discussion, Q&A and help

This term we will be using Piazza for class discussion and questions on concepts and how to use various software systems and APIs.

Piazza is a Web-based system that describes itself as
"A free platform for instructors and TAs to efficiently manage out-of-class Q&A. On their class dashboard, students can post questions and collaborate Wikipedia-style to edit responses to these questions. Instructors can also answer questions, endorse student answers, and edit or delete any posted content."
I've tried to do this with Blackboard forums, mailing lists, Google groups and blogs with limited success.  I think Piazza as a much better model that will work well for classes where students can benefit from helping each other in an open, collaborative manner.

It looks well done, easy to use and even has custom Android and iPhone apps. They cite as users some well known CS and EE faculty from Stanford, Berkeley and MIT as well. I am looking forward to using it for our special topics source on the Semantic Web.

So, rather than emailing questions to me, I encourage you to post your questions on our Piazza site. If you have any problems or feedback for the developers, email team@piazza.com.