Code « casual semantics

On the other side of the hill

October 10th, 2010

Since last time I wrote here a lot of things have happened. For one, my licentiate thesis was successfully defended, and I must say that it feels good to have that enormous mountain of labour behind me. The seminar went fine and my opponent gave a constructive opposition – thanks!

So now when I have moved beyond the licentiate it is time to get my act together and collect some empirical data, which certainly is needed as my licentiate thesis lacked that vital part. During the last couple of weeks I have put much of my efforts in shaping up the tool I will be using during my coming efforts – Pinetree. The system was presented already at the ICALT2009 conference, but I have not had the time to incorporate the improvements to the system since then. Mostly thanks to the time consuming process of thesis writing. :S Anyhow, the system has reached a somewhat mature status, and with some bug fixes along the road I hope it will contribute to promote Linked Data.

The plan is to realise the ideas I have presented in my licentiate thesis, where digital content generated by learners can be enriched with RDF and interconnected via distributed Linked Data applications. For the interested reader I have added some documentation about the Pinetree system over here. My aim is to release the system as open source whenever I have enough time and energy to read up on how licenses works..I am a programmer, not a lawyer, so it might take some time. ^^ Alright, that’s it for today. Until next time.

Posted in Code, PhD studies | No Comments »

New design, new content

October 30th, 2009

A new day and a new design to the site, pretty neat huh? I decided to change to an already existing WordPress template as there are people out there who knows how to develop them properly. Besides the new design I have added information about a system we have been developing at CeLeKT called Pinetree, which is a content repository based on Linked Data. While it is not yet available for download we are discussing to either put it up as open source or provide a binary file somewhere on the Web. The system itself still lacks authorisation and authentication mechanisms as we are still thinking about how to realise these things in the best way and still reap the benefits of linked data. So the API and installation instructions are mainly for people here at CeLeKT who have access to the binaries.

A little more useful for people outside the CeLeKT group is the Pinetree core ontology. While it was designed for the Pinetree system, the ontology makes it possible to represent the logical structure of digital content residing in content repositories in general. It has intentionally been kept simple to promote its reuse in other contexts that Pinetree.

A bit annoyingly is that the W3C RDF validator service refuses to validate the ontology when using the “Check by URI” option, but if I paste the ontology into the “Direct Input” textfield it validates perfectly. My initial suspicion is directed towards the FTP server at my web hosting service but I’m out of clues at this point. If anyone have had the same experience I’d be happy to hear from you.

Tags: Linked Data
Posted in Code, Rambling | No Comments »

Poking around with OAuth

June 8th, 2009

Summer has finally arrived which means that there is time over to work with fun stuff at work. During last week and this week I have been poking around with OAuth as authorisation method for Pinetree and other REST based apps under development here, and my initial reaction is that the existing libraries lacks documentation for implementing the 2-legged variant. It seems rather easy but getting the base string right when combining the JavaScript and Java libraries turned out to be less trivial than expected. Besides the wonderful guide at Hueniverse, the implementers’ draft accessible here was really helpful for those 2-legged setups.

*Update* I finally got the signature validation to work after removing all query parameters from the URL (or action) parameter of the message. Quite annoying and frankly I thought that it was taken care of automatically when calling OAuthHelper.getMessage(request), and the invalid_signature feedback was all but verbose when debugging this..