I have been pub­lish­ing my fam­ily tree along with the all the branches to other rel­a­tives and sur­names, using the Semantic MediaWiki Bundle.  The Website for the Whealton Genealogy is here. 

The web­site uses Semantic Forms which make it easy for users to enter infor­ma­tion just using the form. Persons can edit the wiki and con­tribute to the growth of the Genealogy by first reg­is­ter­ing at the site, which just takes 2 min­utes and it lim­its van­dal­ism on the site which can hap­pen when any­one can edit a live page. With MediaWiki the new site con­tent is imme­di­ately avail­able when a per­son saves a page on while editing.

There is a link at the top for Creating or Adding a Person to the web­site  You can also click on the link next to any name while brows­ing the web­site and you will be taken to a page where you can cre­ate the page if it doesn’t already exist or edit the page if it does exist.  If it is about a Person you will be given a form for enter­ing infor­ma­tion.  Enter what­ever infor­ma­tion you know.  We use a nam­ing for­mat for page where we list the person’s name fol­lowed by the years they lived.  For exam­ple my grandfather’s page is Stephen Redden Whealton(1914–1995).

Each of these form fields, behind the scenes will apply Semantic prop­er­ties or classes to the data so that we can take advan­tage of the new tech­nol­ogy that is part of the Semantic Web.  This is infor­ma­tion that com­put­ers and soft­ware pro­grams (agents) can use to process the data or crawl web pages.  When a search engine crawls a web page with Semantic Data the search engine is given more pre­cise infor­ma­tion about the con­tent of what is on the page.  This is called meta data because it is data about the data.  Without this, the web­site is just mean­ing­less text to the com­put­ers or soft­ware that is vis­it­ing the page. 

One of the most pop­u­lar appli­ca­tions on the Semantic Web is the cre­ation of FOAF files that describe one­self using RDF (tech­ni­cally, this isn’t an appli­ca­tion but for this dis­cus­sion, I’m using this phras­ing to describe this tech­nol­ogy.  FOAF stands for Friend of a Friend and it is a “vocab­u­lary” also known as an “ontol­ogy.”  On the seman­tic web, as we start describ­ing things on the web, infor­ma­tion about real world things, events, peo­ple, ideas, and rela­tion­ships, we need to spec­ify a com­mon set of vocab­u­lar­ies so that peo­ple and com­put­ers can under­stand what you mean when you use cer­tain terms. 

In real life, we all had to learn the mean­ing of words.  We learned that words, in English, as in most lan­guages, have dif­fer­ent mean­ings.  When devel­op­ers all across the world are cre­at­ing appli­ca­tions, and sav­ing infor­ma­tion in open data­bases, we need to come up with dif­fer­ent vocab­u­lar­ies to describe these dif­fer­ent domains of knowl­edge or aspects of our world.  These vocab­u­lar­ies or “ontolo­gies” describe the mean­ing of terms, whether the terms are used as sub­jects, pred­i­cates or objects – sim­i­lar to how we write sen­tences in English using sub­ject verb and object.  That is only one way to write a sen­tence in one lan­guage.  However, this form is the basis for all data­bases that make up the Global Database, the Global Graph.  This global graph defines a stan­dard way of cre­at­ing open data­base struc­tures that can be accessed by any soft­ware any­where, with­out hav­ing to know any­thing at all about the nature of what is in the data­base or what is described by the infor­ma­tion in the data­base.  This, as I stated in the pre­vi­ous arti­cle, is a rad­i­cal depar­ture from the way most data­bases on the web work. 

Web Design and Web Development

This blog is a affil­i­ated with or a fea­ture of Future Wave Designs, go there now.

This is an impor­tant advance­ment in tech­nol­ogy.  It means that devices will be faster and smaller.  One can also expect to see more tran­sis­tors in the same area because of this new tech­nol­ogy.  The video is very interesting.

In accor­dance with Moore’s Law, com­put­ers or com­puter com­po­nents , such as the tran­sis­tors that make up com­put­ers com­po­nents and devices, have been get­ting smaller, faster and more effi­cient.  This has allowed for com­put­ing devices like smart­phones, flash thumb dri­ves and microSD mem­ory mod­ules for a vari­ety of devices.  Today’s tran­sis­tors are described here as being mea­sured at 22 nanome­ters (bil­lionths of a meter).  These tran­sis­tors also switch states 100 bil­lion times per second.

Transistors make up mem­ory and CPUs.