Recently, I was contacted by a Kcite (n.d.a) user who had found an interesting problem. They had cut-and-paste a DOI from the American Society of Microbiology article [webcite], and then used this in a blog post. But it was not working. The user actually did identify the problem, which was a strange character in the DOI.

Adding metadata to article could be done by many people. This could be the author, and in the ideal world, this would be the author. They know most about the content and are best placed to put the most knowledge into it. But, we have to answer the question, why would they do this? We have previously argued that semantic metadata must be useful to the people who producing it (n.d.a) For this, we need tools that extract and consume this metadata.

The Mercurial repository for KnowledgeBlog (n.d.) has been starting to show the strain for a while now. Firstly, when it was created we were all new to mercurial; for instance it contains the trunk directory which is really a Subversion metaphor. The second problem is that it is a single large repository, which maps to the development directory on my hard drive; there is now a lot of experimental software on my hard drive which I don’t want in a public enviroment, so I am now faced with either an enormous .hgignore or more “untracked” files than tracked. Not ideal.

Today, I recieved an email from a journal, asking me if I would review a paper. The paper in question is by, amoung others, Iddo Friedberg, and can be read on arXiv (n.d.a) I’ve known Iddo Friedberg for a while; he was an earlier user of my semantic similarity work (n.d.b) for protein function prediction (n.d.c) and was also the editor for our paper on realism in ontology development (n.d.d) I would have liked to review this paper, and I feel a little bad because I know these things are important for the careers of the scientists.

Tawny OWL, my library for building ontologies (n.d.a) is now reaching a nice stage of maturity; it is possible to build ontologies, reason over them and so forth. We have already started to use the programmable nature of Tawny, trivially with disjoints (n.d.b) as well as allowing the ontology developer to choose the identifiers that they use to interact with the concepts (n.d.c) However, I wanted to explore further the usefulness of a programmatic environment.