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Decentralized Information Group (DIG) Breadcrumbs -

The paradox of information flow in transitionNovember 11

The original appearance of this entry was in Danny Weitzner - Open Internet Policy

A wonderfully perceptive and funny characterization from outgoing US Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean (Health care contenders - Chris Frates - Politico.com):

Dean said: “I’m not going to say anything about anything to do with transition. Generally, those who talk don’t know, and those who know don’t talk. And I don’t know what he’s [President-elect] going to do, but I ain’t talking.”

First legal shot across the Semantic Web’s bow - Thomson suing ZoteroOctober 6

The original appearance of this entry was in Danny Weitzner - Open Internet Policy

Last week Thomson Reuters (the owner of EndNote Software, a widely used proprietary tool for collecting and managing scholarly bibliographic information) filed a lawsuit against Zotero, the most popular open source, Semantic Web-enabled bibliographic tool. Zotero, packaged as a Firefox extension, is a handy tool for collecting bibliographic metadata to assist scholars in managing information necessary for their research (news story, complaint). Zotero can import and export a variety of different bibliographic formats and does so in a web-friendly, RDF-enabled way. Exchanging and linking bibliographic information (ie., the title, author, publication venue) of scholarly communication is an important means to discover new links amongst individual pieces of research that are published around the world. This has been a high priority, for example, in the life sciences where new knowledge can be uncovered by linking individual pieces of research together.

The latest beta release of Zo

Justice Brandeis and privacy protection through usage restrictionSeptember 17

The original appearance of this entry was in Danny Weitzner - Open Internet Policy

For a couple of years, colleagues of mine and I have been writing about the need to protect privacy through rules and laws restricting how information is used, not just who can access the personal information. So, I was very happy to discover that a famous early exposition of privacy rights in United States law (Olmstead v. United States (1928)), by the most famous judicial advocate of privacy rights, Justice Louis Brandeis, expressed a clear sentiment in favor of protecting privacy based on how information is used, not just whether one is entitled to have access to it or not. In the course of explaining why earlier Supreme Court legal precedents should be understood to make wiretapping illegal, Brandeis wrote

Unjustified search and seizure violates the Fourth Amendment, whatever the character of the paper; [n4] whether the paper when taken by the federal officers was in the home, [n5] in an office, [n6] or elsewhere; [n7] whether the taking was effected by force, [n8] by [p478] fraud, [n9] or in the orderly process of a court’s procedure. [n10] From these decisions, it follows necess

Will John McCain help the NEXT Blackberry creator?September 16

The original appearance of this entry was in Danny Weitzner - Open Internet Policy

Today a senior McCain advisor, Doug Holtz-Eakin, proudly held up Blackberry and declared:

“You’re looking at the miracle that John McCain helped create.”
AP, 16 September 2008

Bloggers on all sides of the partisan divide are having a field day with this, suggest that the McCain campaign is out of touch, desperate, or trying to top the trouble VP Al Gore got into when he was falsely accused of claiming to have invented the Internet. At best, it suggests that Eakin-Holtz was just careless. At worst, it suggests that the campaign and the candidate has deeply irrational ideas about how to promote innovation. It’s also been pointed out that there’s some irony in McCain claiming credit for the success of a Canadian company.

The real question is: what would a McCain presidency do to help enable the NEXT innovative device, service or revolutionary use of the Web? (**Full disclosure here: I’m an active supporter of Senator Obama, though this post is entirely my own and not in any way made on behalf of the Obama campaign.**)

McCain’s record in promoting innovation on the Internet and in the large

The details of data in documents; GRDDL, profiles, and HTML5August 22

GRDDL, a mechanism for putting RDF data in XML/XHTML documents, is specified mostly at the XPath data model level. Some GRDDL software goes beyond XML and supports HTML as she are spoke, aka tag soup. HTML 5 is intended to standardize the connection between tag soup and XPath. The tidy use case for GRDDL anticipates that using HTML 5 concrete syntax rather than XHTML 1.x concrete syntax involves no changes at the XPath level

But in GRDDL and HTML5, Ian Hickson, editor of HTML 5, advocates dropping the profile attribute of the HTML head element in favor of rel="profile" or some such. I dropped by the #microformats channel to think out loud about this stuff, and Tantek said similarly, "we may solve this with rel="profile" anyway." The rel-profile topic in the microformats wiki shows the idea goes pretty far back.

Possibilities I see include:

• GRDDL implementors add support for rel="profile" along with HTML 5 concrete syntax
• GRDDL implementors don't change their code, so people who want to use GRDDL with HTML 5 features such as <video> stick to XML-wf-happy HTML 5 syntax and they use the head/@profile attribute anyw