The XSPARQL member submission has been acknowledged by W3C. XSPARQL is a new language that results from the merge of XQuery and SPARQL, and it provides a solution to transform data between RDF and XML.
I discovered XSPARQL while I was working on a related idea that I called XSLT+SPARQL as part of my PhD research. I was immediately captivated XSPARQL because it shares the same aims as XSLT+SPARQL, but it is a much more clever idea. While I was trying to integrate SPARQL in XSLT, Axel Polleres and the rest of the XSPARQL team found a much more elegant approach using XQuery. I humbly confess that it never occurred to me to replace XSLT with XQuery, probably because I'm experienced with the former, but I have little knowledge about the latter. When compared to XSPARQL, my XSLT+SPARQL looks as a ugly hack (well, I never said otherwise). Both approaches were presented during the ESWC2008 at Tenerife. XSPARQL was picked as one of the best papers of the conference, while mine was silently presented in a co-located workshop. I think it's just fair.
When I knew of their intention to make a submission to W3C, I offered my collaboration to the XSPARQL crew. My modest contribution were a couple of novel use cases.
This morning, my colleague Iván Mínguez graduated on Web Engineering after the successful presentation of his research project, TeRRAS. Congratulations, Iván!
This is my fifth service as project advisor (see my blog entries on the previous projects: 1, 2, 3 and 4). I'm very lucky that all the students who have kindly asked me for advise are very talented and dutiful. Their excellent work has always been fairly rewarded by the reviewers. Consequently, it has always been a pleasure and an honour to work with them.
Today I went to the mountains to pay a visit to Puertos de Agüeria, a renowned excursion which I had already attempted. It was three years ago, and I failed because the path was blocked by the meltwater. Today I was luckier, and I enjoyed this magical place. I also experimented with my GPS antenna and Nokia Sports Tracker. This is a very nice piece of software, although my first contact with it -a year ago- was disappointing. However, recent updates have fixed some of the issues (it's still a beta, anyway), and the result is much better. I recorded my activity, and uploaded it to the web (note: I didn't recorded the return trip, so the data only reflects half of the walking). The data is really nice, but it becomes amazing when you open it in Google Earth!
For the third year in a row, I was invited to talk on semantic web applications at the Master on Web Engineering. As I was updating the slides from the previous year, I reassured myself that we are finally witnessing the success of the semantic web, and that the future ahead will be full of exciting developments.
Although I've travelled a lot in the last few years, most of those trips have been for business, with little or none chance to visit the places. However, last weekend I finally did a pleasure trip. I went to a couple of small but monumental cities in the centre of Spain, Segovia and Ávila. I also went to La Granja Royal Palace to enjoy its amazing fountains. It was an exhausting trip, but also very rewarding.
Rafa Nadal is one of the brightest sport stars of this time. His achievements in the last five years are astonishing, and he is the best tennis player at this moment. His matches are usually broadcast on TV. I immensely enjoy watching these matches. Until last year, he used to hold a fascinating pulse with Roger Federer, who is widely considered among the best tennis players ever. The multiple Federer vs. Nadal matches in the last few years were, in my opinion, one of the finest sport events. Their Wimbledon'08 final was one of the most dramatic matches in the history of tennis. The exquisite talent of Federer and the physical and mental strength of Nadal produced a unique mix. Even if the vast majority of Spaniards are supporters of Rafa, we acknowledge and respect the incredible skills of Roger (this is also unique: rivals of Spanish sport figures are naturally the target of our 'negative affect' --consider the case of Alonso/Hamilton). All tennis aficionados are sad while we watch the brightness of Roger's star to fade out. Apparently, he is being replaced by younger players who are challenging Nadal's dominance. So far, it is in vain. No one can win everytime, but right now, Rafa seems to be unbreakable. A couple of hours ago, he beat Novak Djokovic again in a long and dramatic match. Tomorrow, Rafa will play another final. Sooner or later, he'll lose, but anyway, we'll enjoy watching tennis of the highest quality. So, thank you Rafa, and thank you too to Roger and the other rivals, for allowing us to vibrate with the finest professional sport.
Yesterday, we were blessed with the visit of Vint Cerf to CTIC (I don't know if the word 'blessed' is the right one for an evangelist :-). Seriously, we're really proud and grateful for his visit. He was very friendly and showed interest for our activities and research topics, and he happily signed a copy of his paper with R. Khan which settled the foundations of the current Internet decades ago. For a scientist, it must be strange to autograph your own work after so many years.
The newspapers report today that right after his visit to our office, he was interrupted by a phone call from the very Barack Obama. In addition to being the "father of Internet", president of ICANN, vicepresident of Google and so on, Vint is also a personal advisor to the current president of the USA. Of course, this call aroused the interest of the reporters, who immediately asked Vint about the purpose of the phone call. Obviously, he didn't disclose the content of the conversation, but he told Obama that he was having a nice time in Asturias.
By the way, today Vinton went to the Computer Science School of the University of Oviedo, where he held a meeting with the students.
Some months ago, I wrote about my continuous attempt to improve my skills for delivering presentations by learning from the masters. Usually I'm constrained by the fixed style of scientific presentations, but this week I had an opportunity to try something different. I was asked to deliver an introduction on free (libre) software in an University course. This is a topic I've covered many times before, but I decided to innovate. I completely changed the scope, I dropped the old script and slides, and I tried a fresh approach by putting the focus on some relevant people. Inspired by Lessig's style, I prepared a huge number of slides, each one with a very simple idea (sometimes, just a word or an image).
I'm usually very auto critical, but I think this time I managed to do a decent job, and I matched the allocated time by the second. I felt comfortably while delivering my speech, and I copied a few new tricks from the masters. Regrettably, I also committed an act of betrayal and incoherence by using proprietary software to prepare the slides, but I excused myself in front of the audience. It was just an experiment, wasn't it?
After the presentation, I created an account on SlideShare and uploaded my slides. I've been aware of SlideShare for some time, but I never really liked it (one of the reasons being the difficulties to access to the contents without using proprietary software, which apparently no longer exist). The definitive push to join SlideShare was the recent announcement of their support for RDFa. Effectively, it is possible to get the RDF from their HTML pages using the RDFa Distiller. Really great news! I just hope other content-hosting services will start to deploy RDFa soon.
Some events will take place this week to celebrate the first 10 years since AsturLinux was created. A workshop on robotics and free software will be the first activity, and will take place this Wednesday. The main day is scheduled for this Saturday, with a couple of talks, a panel and a espicha (traditional Asturian meal). Don't forget to read the complete program. Additionally, a University course on free software will start tomorrow, with the participation of several members of AsturLinux, as well as a couple of well-known names of the Spanish free software scene. Thanks to all the supporters of these events, and kudos to the organizers!
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