Tawny-OWL (n.d.a) enables a rich programmatic interface to OWL and ontology building. To an extent, I wrote Tawny because I wanted to get away from the use of Protege (n.d.b/) as an ontology editor. I compare the experience of Protege to Tawny as similar to a comparison between Excel and R; if the former does what you need, then it’s fine, but it’s hard to extend. So, it is with Tawny — it is simple to add patterns, new syntaxes, new capabilities. And I have access to all the standard tools that I expect with any programmatic environment; I can use versioning, build tools and test harnesses.

I was lucky enough to catch (er) the premier of Catch-22 at the Northern Stage on Saturday. I’ve been to quite a few shows there now, and they are generally good; an adaption of what I consider to be best book that I’ve ever read, I was optimistic. We had good seats as well, middle, fifth row (far enough away not to get a stiff neck, close enough to hear clearly).

Literate programming comes in many forms and disguises but is essentially the notion that the documentation and programmatic code should be written together, so that the documentation supports the code and vice versa. In this post, I discuss some of the problems with literate programming, my early attempts to circumvent these with respect to ontology development. Finally, I finish up with a description of some new technology which, I think, offers a solution.

This year I have been on a bit of a mission. I decided that having being here for 8 years, I would actually use the library. So I have started off by requesting books and reading them. It’s been a while since I have regularly read books and it’s been quite an interesting experience. I’ve remembered that reading tech books is quite a reflective process, away from the computer. It’s a less stressful, although perhaps more time consuming experience than hunting through the web, reading documentation or code until you understand what ever it is you are reading about.

My inaugural (n.d.) book-review is for Clojure High Performance Programming, by Shantanu Kumar.