devlog

we lurked on the beer track mostly at foafcamp, but i visited the quick presentation sessions and did a braindump on geopolitical foaf, some of the socio-political networking projects that we’ve come across in california, some using foaf overtly, others with cotangent aims.

Most enjoyed, i think, graham klyne’s presentation on description logics in literate haskell, presentation notes and literate program and truly a “description of a process which unfolds into the process”.

At foo camp i had several enlightening conversations on the subject of literate programming, and was inspired to call a session. The living narrative of maintenance, literacy as edited historiography, appeals as as ideal.

I enjoyed stef’s presentation of they work for you. XML feeds of MPs’ speeches, attendance, affiliations, indexable and searchable by location - i dream of seeing this for the european parliament.

And Schuyler ran a session themed “maps tell stories”, which turned into a bit more of a lecture, but allowed us to get across some interesting points, i hope. I think back to the eurodata rant, and have a sense of both hope and hopelessness about a project like that.

Our next stop was more philosophical in tone, at a seminar type event at the Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam. Researching “mapping imaginary places” on the web, i ran across cartogrammatic maps of a mud faithfully based on terry pratchett’s “discworld”. This unfolds into many philosophic themes, and the illustration of bus routes as a nominal cartogram in line with my bus plan.

We spent several days at a workshop on the fortress island of Suomenlinna, outside helsinki. We did a nice piece of work on SVG photomapping from RDF annotations, positioning photographs from timestamps and so on.

iIn Utrecht now, procrastinating over a half-written book.