The Sun BabelFish Blog

Splitting the Atom in Bern

The best way to discover a place is by having a friend show you around. Here in Bern I met up with Reto Bachmann-Gmür, a fellow Semantic Webber whom I met on the BlogEd mailing list. Reto works for the Swiss Refugee Council where he developed the very original and interesting open source Knobot Content Management System powered by a Semantic Web database and sporting a cool AJAX front end. (It even has some P2P functionality!) This is the Server side equivalent of the work I have been doing on BlogEd. So we spent a few days here working on an ontology for the final atom syntax draft (11). This will help us in more ways that we can think of. For one it should make seamless data exchange between BlogEd and Knobot or any other agregator, very easy. By helping us understand the deep structure of Atom, I believe we could end up releasing a lot of energy :-)

So we have been doing what amounts to semantic pair programming, me writing down the ontology in N3, and Reto coming up with all kinds of surprising corner cases. What would a blog for analphabets look like? How can one publish entries in multiple languages simultaneously? I often wondered if he was kidding me, but this last problem is in fact a very important one. In Switzerland all laws have to be published simultaneously in French, German and Italian. Simultaneously: not one second, millisecond, or nanosecond later, as that would be showing some kind of preference for one language community. This problem is not just one to be found in Switzerland, but is certainly going to be found in the European Union institutions, the United Nations or any other large international or multinational organisation.

Interspersed through some very long lasting in depth discussions on the structure of Atom, we did find a little time to relax by visiting the town. Bern has a huge park through which we cycled to one of the many very bohemian cafés. Behind some badly lit elegant facades sometimes there do lie some amazingly beautiful interiors, as Stephanie, a good friend of Reto's helped us discover yesterday, when she took us around her preferred spots, helping us shift the conversation to other topics such as the sociology of the architecture of financial districts, on which she is doing her PhD. Another intriguing knowledge space I had never known even existed...

Posted at 11:45PM Sep 29, 2005 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in travel  |  Comments[1]