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Speaking of RDF ..

Paul Ford discusses his design of a new Harpers site, crucially using RDF. He also has articles in more or less the same place about his own site, not to mention the source code. Neat!

As an aside, I kind of dug Harpers since I read David Foster Wallace's articles written for it; not so much the writing (not that &c. ..), more the fact that they'd publish it.

Zowie and RDF

TonyG talking about RDF made me remember about a note I made regarding categorisation:

Index things by their connection of ideas

I think this refers to "Quicksilver", in which Daniel Waterhouse is trying to reduce all things to their component attributes. In "The Confusion" (ibid), Leibniz assigns prime numbers to ideas, and plans to use the product of these ideas to catalogue books.

Another note from the magical red book:

Correspondence with - items in Zowie (shapes, text) - rooms in a MUD - pages in a wiki

This sounds like a clue of what basic relations there are: derived spatial relations (positions on a canvas); asserted spatial relations ("there is an exit to the north"); referrals (wikiwords). Each view on Zowie specializes in expressing certain relations; you might be able to squeeze more and common relations in, like using containment on the canvas and in the wiki.