Benlog

A few days ago, I wrote about privacy advocacy theater and lamented how some folks, including EPIC and Kim Cameron, are attacking Google in a needlessly harsh way for what was an accidental collection of data. Kim Cameron responded, and he is right to point out that my argument, in the Google case, missed an [...]

A few years ago, a small group of folks (Mark Birbeck, Steven Pemberton, Ralph Swick, Shane McCarron, me, and more recently Ivan Herman, Manu Sporny, and a lot of great new folks) started with the simple idea that, if web pages contained a bit of structured data in addition to their haphazard content, we could [...]

The worst part of my job is dealing with the mess of document formats and coding systems in healthcare. The acronym soup is insane: HL7, CCD, CCR, CDA, Green CDA (which I just heard about from John Halamka’s blog but… no link!), and that’s just the document formats. Then there are coding systems like LOINC, [...]

On many issues, I’m an Apple fanboy. On the issue of the iPhone, less and less. Here’s the short version of the story: Apple produces iTunes, which manages all of your music and videos, and syncs them to your iPod/iPhone. Very cool software, magnificently built, great experience overall. I’ve been using this setup for 6+ [...]

Stefano Mazzocchi is awesome and his thinking on Web-based data is incredibly nuanced and pragmatic, so it’s not often that I want to publicly disagree with him. But in his latest post, I think he’s off the mark. Stefano argues: The difference between RDFa and Microdata (syntactic differences aside) is basically the fact that the [...]

Facebook is an impressive company, they’ve done and continue to do some very amazing things. And I admit I certainly didn’t see them coming 4 years ago. But okay, come on: “No one wants to live in a surveillance society,” Zuckerberg adds, “which, if you take that to its extreme, could be where Google is [...]

John Halamka, renowned CIO of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), is a blogger, and he just added a Creative Commons license after making the following remarks: I want my blog to be used for education, training, and research. I hope that its contents appear in derivative works such as other blogs, websites, and [...]

I learned web programming in 1995, when a SQL database for storing your data was the obvious choice, but the options were still few, expensive, and slow. Since then, the SQL database has become ubiquitous, and the options are many, including at least two very solid free/open-source solutions. But when it comes to large datasets, [...]

I just finished my presentation on “RDFa: Life after W3C Recommendation” at the Creative Commons Tech Summit held at MIT (photographic evidence). Fun to chat about RDFa, as always, and a good crowd with some good questions.

EndNote is a tool used commonly by a number of academics for adding endnote references to their papers. You keep an EndNote library of references, and you can easily add them to your Word document as you type your paper. So, this is a classic example of a file format that becomes vastly more useful [...]