The weekend just gone was the Northern Rock cyclone weekend. With three events: the Leazes Criterium, Cyclone and Beaumont Trophy it’s a bit a of feast for a cycling nutter like myself. The criterium is a short race just down from my work, the latter is a long, elite rider race. The cyclone is a fun run; on a bike. It’s a bit of an embarrasement of riches, to be honest. Both this year and last, I’ve not seen all of the Criterium and totally missed the Beaumont because I wanted to sleep early or been knackered from the cyclone.

Well, after a reasonable degree of struggle, I managed to get the first version of my literate OWL system working. As well as learning python, I’ve had a go with git; my repo is hosted on github at git://github.com/phillord/literate_omn.git. There are three components.

Learning a new language is always a bit stressful. I thought that I would learn python; I need a new, rapid development, build some scripts, but don’t look as awful as perl type language. I’ve recently learnt lua which was fun, but then it’s meant as a very small, quick langauge. It’s nice, but not really the perl-u-like that I wanted.

My next blog post was going to be about function, as I have just had a paper about it accepted. But, I got slightly side-tracked along the way, thinking about Literature Programming as it applies to OWL. While an ontology is (or, to my mind, should be) a computational artifact, it’s a bit different from a program; the main thing is that it doesn’t run; it doesn’t have that functional test that a program does. This is not to say that an ontology is not an application-dependent entity. It can be, but even then it needs to have a program built on it.