Permaculture Database

[jedd <jedd@progsoc.org>]

On Wednesday 17 February 2010 00:27:26 Paul d'Aoust wrote:
> Hi, Jedd. My secret feeling is that, although RDF triples are quite a
> thrilling and versatile concept, I just can't get my head around them,
> and they may be very hard to abstract into something extremely simple
> for the average permie to use. I'm trying to keep my mind open; that's
> why I'm attempting to understand this RDF thing.

 Agreed.  I feel that I'm missing something very important about 
 the subject, and yet I can't work out why (let alone what).  It's
 not a hugely complex construct, after all.

 A fortnight ago I went over to FOSDEM [1] and by one of those
 weird coincidences, on the Friday night before it kicked off, I was
 in a pub having a yak with one of the guys who was there to do
 a doing a presentation [2] on SPARQL, RDF and tying in with things
 like Nepomuk.

 It might have been the 11% beer, but I started to 'get it' .. though
 I really can't work out how it could be applied to the types of
 problems that we('re going to) have.

 Maybe Matt has some ideas on this subject?

 Matt - do you have access to the archives?  There's not exactly
 a *wealth* of background info from this list - a fairly torpid
 and uninspiring sequence of ponderings, I'd imagine, were I
 being totally candid.  ;) 

 We've read your message to Keith from 2010-02-15T20:45:33 -0500
 but we're obviously in a different realm here than a CMS.  I think
 few of us really understand the complexities involved - though
 Paul Cereghino's message (and link to one of his PDF's) from 
 2009-03-28T10:16:27 -0700 is an excellent, if ultimately quite
 depressing, example of an exception.

 The 2 minute summary of my intent is to create a system that will
 let me record activity / productivity of different elements within an
 environment - and I thought I may as well add the extra dimension
 up front to allow others to contribute data about their own
 experiences.  At the moment it's a plan in my head and a few pages
 scrawled into various notebooks.

 Obviously other people have substantively different end-games.

 J.


 [1]  http://fosdem.org/2010/
 [2]  http://fosdem.org/2010/schedule/events/xd_nepomuk_sparql