Bob DuCharme

New blog entry: Gin(ger) and Tonic. Special bonus: bourbon and actual ginger. www.bobdc.com/blog/ginger-...

New blog entry tomorrow: Gin(ger) and Tonic. Special bonus: bourbon and actual ginger.

From yesterday's mail: let's see Excel import *this* data.

I take back what I said about "Don't say AI so much" www.axios.com/2026/10/08/t... www.bobdc.com/blog/stopsay...

"We needed Walter Benjamin in order to understand art and technology in the twentieth century; to make sense of generative AI, we need to forget him." www.artforum.com/features/mar...

Nice quote from this week's Benedict Evans newsletter about anthropomorphizing AI: "When Word ate your essay and undo didn’t work, you didn’t claim that Word ‘decided’ to destroy your work and then ‘lied’ about it. "

New blog entry tomorrow: Making an LLM turn a flat vocabulary list into a hierarchical taxonomy — automating the increase of metadata value.

What an excellent pun on "markdown" dhq.digitalhumanities.org/vol/20/2/000...

New blog entry: What to do with old computer books? Send them to prisons. www.bobdc.com/blog/booksto...

New blog entry tomorrow — What to do with old computer books? Send them to prisons.

Recent slide deck "Is the Semantic Web Vision Still Relevant?" from @jahendler.bsky.social and Ora Lassila is really good. www.slideshare.net/slideshow/is...

Every product I use is pushing some sort of AI features on me, and my first reaction to Jira doing this was an eye roll. I have since learned that, because their search has always been so awful, the "Ask AI" version of their search is soooo much better.

New blog entry — The best way to talk about AI: don't say 'AI' so much; say what you really mean www.bobdc.com/blog/stopsay...

New blog entry tomorrow — The best way to talk about AI: don't say 'AI' so much; say what you really mean.

Nice presentations on what's new in RDF 1.2 and SPARQL 1.2: www.w3.org/Talks/2025/i...

New blog entry: My GraphRAG Curator interview — discussing RDF graphs, RAG, GraphRAG, music... www.bobdc.com/blog/graphra...

What does it mean to claim that a SPARQL benchmark proves that one engine is faster than another? A passionate debate about one case is going on at www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

The published lyrics of the 1967 Rolling Stones song “2000 Man” (later covered by KISS) include the line “I am having an affair with a random computer”. Wouldn’t “RAND computer” have made more sense in 1967?

New blog entry: Let's stop saying "semantic web" — like a startup pivot, the technology turned out to be great for things other than a new kind of "web". www.bobdc.com/blog/stopsem...

New blog entry tomorrow: Let's stop saying "semantic web" — like a startup pivot, the technology turned out to be great for things other than a new kind of "web".

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” - Arthur C. Clarke

Gotta love a comic strip that uses XOR as part of the punch line. www.smbc-comics.com/comic/chew

"Top 10 Query Languages Every Developer Should Know in 2025" including, of course, SPARQL www.analyticsinsight.net/amp/story/pr...

“Journey” is the new “experience” to make the use of your simple product sound like a bigger deal than it actually is.

What are some currently running SPARQL endpoints that people like besides Wikidata and DBpedia?

New blog entry: Correcting some outdated "Learning SPARQL" examples www.bobdc.com/blog/updatin...

New blog entry tomorrow: Correcting some outdated "Learning SPARQL" examples

Speaking as a tech writer, I just love the Performing Directions of Terry Riley’s seminal 1964 music piece “In C”: thirdcoastpercussion.com//downloads/2... (second and third page of the PDF)

From "Model Once, Represent Everywhere: UDA (Unified Data Architecture) at Netflix" netflixtechblog.com/uda-unified-...: "UDA is a Knowledge Graph... We chose RDF and SHACL as the foundation for UDA’s knowledge graph."

With all the new information processing algorithms that are popping up and fading away these days, I love how one of the most popular ones continues to be an algorithm developed over 50 years ago by British computer scientist Karen Spärck Jones en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%8...

The reason that I switched from DOS to MS Windows 3.1 many years ago.

Bitbucket forcing us to upgrade from the free plan to a plan that they say costs $3.30 per month? Not so bad. Oh wait, they were dividing the actual price by 5 to make it look more appealing. They're really charging $16.50 per month.

New blog entry: ChatGPT and Copilot as OWL processors — pretty impressive. www.bobdc.com/blog/chatgpt...

New blog entry tomorrow: ChatGPT and Copilot as OWL processors — pretty impressive.

First Draft Note of RDF 1.2 Primer is now available from the W3C at www.w3.org/TR/2025/DNOT...

I had a great idea for a domain name, but I was 67 days too late.

"On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. [Charles] Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." (from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage...)

New blog entry: Converting RDFS schemas to SHACL constraints — with SPARQL, of course. www.bobdc.com/blog/rdfs2sh...

New blog entry tomorrow: Converting RDFS schemas to SHACL constraints — with SPARQL, of course.

Out of curiosity I let gmail's "AI" rewrite something I wrote and it replaced the word "features" with "functionality." I guess I'll wait a few years before I try that again. www.bobdc.com/blog/writing...

Using ChatGPT every few weeks has changed the way I do regular Google searches. Now I think of them as prompts where my incorporation of more context terms will get better answers, and that actually helps.

Causal AI is a promising field (see upcoming Graphwise webinar at lnkd.in/erXtR726) and a fun side effect of the interest is all the discussions of it out there that include “casual AI” as a typo.

New blog entry: Filtering foreign literals out of SPARQL query results — and only the foreign literals. www.bobdc.com/blog/filterf...

New blog entry tomorrow: Filtering foreign literals out of SPARQL query results — and only the foreign literals.

New blog entry tomorrow: Filtering foreign literals out of SPARQL query results — and only the foreign literals.

I was looking for a Linux command line date math utility and it turns out that the Linux date command already does what I want, e.g. $ date --date "+ 30 days" Thu Feb 13 12:49:45 PM EST 2025