Trying Nokogiri XML Parser for Ruby

Bumped into a few blogs talking about how Nokogiri was faster than REXML for Ruby XML parsing. My OMG SysML XMI to ISO STEP AP233 XML converter demonstrations are taking so long that I can't run them live during the demo - up to 8 minutes for a large example SysML diagram. So, I'm modifying the converter to use Nokogiri in the hopes that I'll be able to do the demos live in the future. My first small test showed an 80 percent improvement ... fingers crossed that holds for the real converter.

Update - having problem with XML namespaces. Only xpath method seems to understand them, so after converting from REXML to Nokogiri my converter actually takes longer to run.

IDIOM - An ontology-centric IT Framework

I've been working in an ISO committee for many years and have been trying to convince it to adopt the same IT that the rest of industry uses. It appears that's finally coming to pass (small hurrah heard here).

The committee is called Industrial Data so I came up with the name 'Industrial Data Integrated Ontologies and Models' or IDIOM. Actually, came up with the name 3-4 years ago on one of my many cross-Atlantic flights when my laptop battery died. The core point of the whole exercise is to base a suite of inter-related IT capabilities (process models, SOA, etc) around a core of concepts that are formally specified in logic-based ontologies.

We've done the basic developing on the futurearch wiki (at wikispaces.com, which is a nice free service). Note that although 'Industrial Data' is in the name, there is absolutely nothing limiting how this IT Framework can be used.

More to come ...

VMWare Fusion - Reusing Core Ubuntu Install

When testing out new software, Monodevelop this week, I want to keep my daily Ubuntu VMWare guest clean until I decide if I'll use the new tool or not so I use a separate install. I don't want to keep so many Ubuntu installs around so cloning/disk reuse is interesting. I found a good article explaining how to build a core Ubuntu OS and then extend it. Basically, you create a core OS install guest, then share its disk with other testing guests after taking a snapshot in the other testing guest. Taking a snapshot keeps the core disk unwritable.... nice.

Spotify, Airport and Airfoil - Free Web music on my Stereo

Spotify is free in UK now, with ads every few songs but not too bad, or you can pay a bit. It has a great collection of free music - well worth a look.

Combine it with Airfoil and I can stream Web music, or any other audio, to my stereo from my iMac/Airport Extreme.

Active Scaffold and Inheritance

Had a problem getting two cases of single table inheritance to work in ActiveScaffold so thought I'd document it. Package and Classifier are the ActiveRecord classes.

class ExpressSchema 
  has_many :express_entities, :foreign_key => 'package_id'
end

class ExpressEntity 
  belongs_to :express_schema, :class_name => 'ExpressSchema', 
        :foreign_key => 'package_id'
end

YUML Me for Putting UML on Web

Found a very nice little tool called yUML me for putting UML Use Case and Class figures into your blog or other Web pages.

Semantics For and From Information Models

I gave a presentation at the OMG Semantic Information Day on Thursday of last week. My presentation was actually called Semantics For and From Information Models and was about the use of W3C OWL to add semantics to data exchanges using XML and a follow-on project from NIST with a goal of pushing the STEP community towards semantics/ontologies as a core modeling technology.

The presentations will all be made available online and I'll update this post when they're available.