Dilettante's Ball

Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • Metaproxy routes and filters, as I understand them

    Like most Indexdata products, Metaproxy is an incredibly useful, although damn near impenetrable, application.  I have been using it to manage our Z39.50 access in the project I’ve been working for the last year or so (Talis Aspire Digitised Content, if you’re interested).  Its purpose is two-fold: most importantly, it makes the Z39.50 services available…

  • Installing yaz, yazpp and metaproxy on RHEL 6.2

    Here the steps I just took to install metaproxy (which requires yaz and yaz++) on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2.  The reason for this exercise is because Indexdata’s RPMs don’t work for 6.2 (the versions of boost-devel and icu-devel they require seem to only be available in 5.5).  Since I expect Indexdata to eventually release…

  • Don’t impose your worldview onto my graph

    There has been a lot of buzz and general “yeah, what he said!” following Pinboard’s Maciej Ceglowski’s post “The Social Graph is Neither” inspiring posts more directly in my particular field, such as Audrey Watters’ “Is there an ‘Education Graph’?“. “The Social Graph is Neither” is a fantastic read and both raise extremely good points,…

  • Why do we obsess over FRBR entities?

    Ever since the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Resources (FRBR) first came out, there has been plenty of debate and disagreement over how to actually implement them. The boundary between Work and Expression has long been a disputed zone, without even bringing up the murkiness of adaptations, copies, derivatives, translations and their ilk. It’s complicated business…

  • rdf:about=”Linked MARC Codes”

    I have been slowly taking the MARC codes lists and modeling them as linked data. I released a handful of them several months ago (geographic area codes, countries and languages) and have added more as I get inspired or have some free time. Most recently, I’ve added the Form of Item, Target Audience and Instruments…

  • A Proposal to serialize MARC in JSON

    Note: to see the backstory and justification of this proposal, please see the preceding post. MARC-in-JSON is a proposed JSON schema for representing MARC records as JSON. It is the outgrowth of working with MARC data in MongoDB and is intended to be both a faithful representation of MARC as well as a logical and…

  • For your consideration: yet another MARC-in-JSON proposal pt. 1

    Note: this post is broken into two parts. If you are just interested in the MARC-in-JSON technical specification proposal, look here. If you’re interested in the justification and history of it, read on. The easy and obvious reaction to the suggestion of providing new serializations to MARC is to reach for Roy Tennant’s suggestion and…

  • Faceted Search on a Shoestring

    There are any number of reasons that you can attribute to Solr‘s status as the standard bearer of faceted full-text searching:  it’s free, fast, works shockingly well out of the box without any tweaking, has a simple and intuitive HTTP API (making it available in the programming language of your choice) and is, by far, the…

  • What we talk about when we talk about http://dbpedia.org/resource/Love

    I’ve been accused of several things in the Linked Data community this week:  a circular reasoner, a defender of the status quo “just because that’s how we’ve always done it”, and (implicitly) an httpRange-14 apologist.  Quite frankly, none of these are true or quite what I mean (and I’m, of course, over dramatizing the accusations),…

  • Getting the whole story

    A couple of months ago, I hacked up a really simple proof-of-concept Sinatra that took an LCCN, called the Library of Congress’ LCCN Permalink service’s MARCXML output for that particular LCCN and tried to model it into linked data. It was really basic: it only returned RDF/XML and had no persistence layer to it, so…

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