Recent Bookmarks 25-Jun-2009

A College for History Only
Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, 15 June 2009
“The new college will offer only the junior and senior years of instruction, will operate in a no-frills manner to keep costs down, and will offer the single major of history.”
gml: Interesting as another nibbling away at the predominant business models used by higher  education. Pricing is the Achilles heel and for-profit institutions and innovative non-profits see the opportunity clearly.

Mashups 101: Using XQuery for Data Selection
Dan McCreary, 26 March 2009
“Although most web designers don’t think of their HTML web pages as data sources, the use of semantic markup is starting to fuel this new generation of applications that can extract the designers’ data and create new applications from it.”
gml: If you can ignore the horrible web site design and annoying advertisements, this article is a useful overview of how xquery can be used in data mashups.

Introduction to RDFa
Mark Birbeck, A List Apart, 23 June 2009
“RDFa (“Resource Description Framework in attributes”) is having its five minutes of fame: Google is beginning to process RDFa and Microformats as it indexes websites … Yahoo!, meanwhile, has been processing RDFa for about a year. With these two giants of search on the same trajectory, a new kind of web is closer than ever before.”
gml: When it exists, RDFa provides XQuery a means of improving the quality of data integration and mashups.