What is a scripting language without loops, or a Web language without a template mechanism? Not really usable. Yesterday, I finally added the two missing core features to my SPARQLScript processor, and I'm excited about eventually being able to test the whole thing. This is just the beginning (there is no string concatenation yet, and no WHILE blocks), but with the basic infrastructure (and documentation) in place, it's time to start gathering feedback. I'm going to upgrade SPARQLBot in the next couple of days which should be a fun way to explore the possibilities (also, it were the bot's users who triggered the creation of SPARQLScript in the first place).

A technology that provides ontology analytics (OWL-DL without nominals) over highly expressive ontologies.

This paper introduces application profiles as a type of metadata schema. We use application profiles as a way of making sense of the differing relationship that implementors and namespace managers have towards metadata schema, and the different ways they use and develop schema. The idea of application profiles grew out of UKOLN's work on the DESIRE project (1), and since then has proved so helpful to us in our discussions of schemas and registries that we want to throw it out for wider discussion in the run-up to the DC8 Workshop in Ottawa in October. We define application profiles as schemas which consist of data elements drawn from one or more namespaces, combined together by implementors, and optimised for a particular local application.The experience of implementors is critical to effective metadata management, and this paper tries to look at the way the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (and other metadata standards) are used in the real world. Our involvement within the DESIRE project reinforced what is common knowledge: implementors use standard metadata schemas in a pragmatic way. This is not new, to re-work Diane Hillmann’s maxim ‘there are no metadata police’, implementors will bend and fit metadata schemas for their own purposes. This happened (still happens) in the days of MARC where individual implementations introduce their own ‘local’ fields by using the XX9 convention for tag labelling. But the pace has changed. The rapid evolution of Rich Site Summary (RSS) has shown how quickly a simple schema evolves in the internet metadata schema life cycle.