Comments for Frankencode

Comment on Swanky Codethink offices by Dmitrijs Ledkovs

Dmitrijs Ledkovs — Sat, 01 May 2010 13:20:13 +0000

Sword Fighting? or Spelling for dummies? =))

Comment on Swanky Codethink offices by Paul

Paul — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 23:10:29 +0000

Selling for Dummies is obviously a red herring, my guess is the SG1 figure.

Comment on Swanky Codethink offices by John Carr

John Carr — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 18:23:57 +0000

I guess he’s most embarassed about the for dummies book, followed by the embedded linux systems book (he don’t need a book on that!)

Comment on Tracker RDF database performance by Richard Dale

Richard Dale — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 22:06:41 +0000

I read the paper you refer to “advantages of RDF over other data models”, and it is certainly interesting, but it seems to leave out some fairly major features of the RDF approach. It doesn’t mention that there are standard ontologies for different subject areas, like the Nepomuk ones that cover the kind of things you find in a personal computer, or FOAF for describing people, or Geonames for geospatial data. These standard ontologies mean that you can easily combine the results of more than one data source, by making ‘federated queries’. You can’t do that with normal relational databases because there is no standard way of representing the same sort of data in the same way with the same tables, and the data isn’t self describing. Hence, the term ‘Open Linked Data’ for RDF stores which is all about turning the web into one big data warehouse.

So to me it is less important that Tracker can support custom ontologies, than it is to be able to make federated queries than combine data in the local Tracker store with databases out on the web, such as DBpedia. SKOS provides a means to describe how one ontology relates to another. Maybe instead of importing data from the web into custom ontologies in a local store, you need something like SKOS definitions to help describe equivalent terms in Nepomuk to ones in web based ontologies to act as a bridge between the local data, and the web based data.

Comment on Tracker RDF database performance by pvanhoof

pvanhoof — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 20:25:18 +0000

Wow, thanks for the benchmark and work you’ve put in it. So we’re even performing better than I hoped for. And this is without the performance enhancements that we are planning to do next week on DBus marshalling. I hope the benchmark run can easily be repeated, then perhaps we can use this work to test performance regressions while we continue to develop the product.

Comment on Tracker RDF database performance by Mark Doffman

Mark Doffman — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 18:34:36 +0000

No, its not wrong. Perhaps a little misleading. The variations in the tracker performance over different queries was much greater than tracker. In the mix of queries performed by the BSBM benchmark, a couple of the queries performed by virtuoso were incredibly slow. Namely Q2 Q7 Q8 and Q10. This greatly dragged down the virtuoso performance across the test. Also not mentioned is the fact that Queries 9 and 12 were left out of the query mixes performed by Tracker. It was not capable, feature-wise, of completing these queries.

Comment on Tracker RDF database performance by Robin

Robin — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 16:22:18 +0000

The graph seems to be wrong. More queries per second is better, isn’t it? In the graph it looks like Virtuoso is faster.

Comment on Funding Gnome a11y by Simon

Simon — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:53:24 +0000

Yes, that page was the kind of thing I was suggesting. I’m not much of a C coder these days, but I’ll have a closer look, see if there’s anything I can help with.

Comment on Funding Gnome a11y by Mark Doffman

Mark Doffman — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:43:16 +0000

Perhaps the best way that the community can contribute is to make sure that the applications and programs that they maintain are fully accessible. For people who want to go further the Gnome accessibility pages are well stocked with ways for people to contribute. There is a somewhat chaotic but very complete Get Involved page. The work I have been concentrating on is documented under Bonobo Deprecation. Aside from that please join us – IRC ‘a11y’ on Gimpnet. Someone will be there to show you round.

Comment on Funding Gnome a11y by Simon

Simon — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:07:05 +0000

In the absence of commercial support, the weight of getting things done falls on the community. Perhaps someone could put some information up on where assistance is particularly needed? Small problems, for example, that someone new to the area could look at (and learn from), while freeing up more experienced contributors for the tough problems?