Sam Danielson

The description of right lines and circles, upon which geometry is founded, belongs to mechanics. Geometry does not teach us to draw these lines, but requires them to be drawn. —Isaac Newton, 1687

There is a pretty neat grease-monkey script many pilots use to browse the company website. It does syntax highlighting on some of the reports and also helps a person find good trips to pick-up or trade based on pay, overnight cities, etc. The same guy who wrote CCSMax is also hosting a logbook app for many pilots that scrapes flight time and other data from the company and puts it in the pilot’s logbook automatically.

The popularity of these and other mashups supports the idea that there is a need for a more semantic web but their implementation suggest that semantics is in the eye of the beholder. Rather than using an authoritative data definition, mashup services use regular expressions and other generally hackish ways to obtain data. Emphasis is placed on data interpretation instead of data definition.

In addition to ad-hoc consumption of data, ad-hoc submission has become widespread using XSS. It will be interesting to watch this evolve since XSS is usually considered a vulnerability.

In closing, an interface should take care to draw only the lines required by the geometry of the data. A simple and correct transformation will ease consumption whether the mapping is XML, CSV, text, or SQL.