Dan Brickley

The syntactic web

XQuery is a query language designed to allow queries across the many kinds of information that are represented in XML. Although topic maps and RDF can also be represented in XML, many have held that their many possible syntactic forms make them extremely difficult to query using an XML query language, and that they can only be queried using special-purpose query languages with built-in knowledge of their semantics, including the ability to exploit RDF schema information. This talk shows that XQuery can, in fact, be used to solve the kinds of queries for which RDF and topic map query languages were designed, though with a loss of type safety.The approach taken is to transform instances of RDF and topic maps to a syntactic representation that closely models their underlying logical models, and to use function libraries written in XQuery to directly support operations specific to RDF or topic maps. Schema-level information is also incorporated in this representation and is supported in the library, so queries can exploit type hierarchies and perform joins across predicates.Information from other XML sources can also be queried together with information from topic maps and RDF. For instance, a query on a topic map that searches for Shakespeare plays mentioned in Italian operas can also query the plays themselves - represented in XML - to determine which italian cities are mentioned in them.

Kitemarking the west windWebsite labels are analogous to food labelsNHS Direct Online has important role

# Website labels are analogous to food labels {#article-title-2} EDITOR—We disagree with several of the ideas expressed by Delamothe in his editorial—for example, that we cope without the help of kitemarks and gateways in the real world. 1 2 Book reviews, television programmes, even the BMJ are all counterparts of “infomediaries.” There is also consensus that any gateway, kitemark, or trustmark cannot and does not intend to guarantee the “accuracy” or completeness of information,3 as implied by the editorial. Instead, they should be seen and used as tools to increase transparency. The European Union project MedCERTAIN (MedPICS Certification and Rating of Trustworthy and Assessed Health Information on the Net) will use the concept of a third generation of trustmark, which must be discriminated from traditional kitemarks. The approach can best be explained by drawing an analogy to food labels. In order to direct consumers to a healthy diet we are not telling them which products to eat specifically; instead we educate consumers about healthy constituents of …