my.life: the wacky story of aaron swartz

Code

Blogspace

Blogspace is a simple website management system. It includes aspects of community systems, content management and knowledge bases, while keeping a simple, easy-to-use interface. It will be provided both as an free software product and as a service free of charge on the Internet. A demo version is expected to be available soon. [More...]

check.theinfo.org

This site allows you to validate Web files against Internet standards. It has validators for XML and HTML, and ot will also help clean up your web pages. [Go...]

Semantic Web Hacking

I'm writing various scripts to demonstrate and take advantage of the power of the Semantic Web. There's the SWAG: Notation3 <-> RDF Converter which converts RDF/XML into something a little easier to read and the SWAG Dictionary to keep track of Semantic Web terms. I'm also working on ArchiverProxy, an HTTP proxy to archive the web pages you visit for offline viewing.

MOTO

MOTO (Master Of The Obvious) makes it easy to put an HTML interface on top of an RDF database. Using simple RDF queries and an HTML-based templating system, you can build webpages rapidly while having them update dynamically based on multiple data sources. The MOTO crawler retrieves RDF-based information form these web-based data sources. MOTO will eventually be combined with Blogspace to allow anyone to generate and store their own customized RDF information thru a web-based interface.

MOTO can also be given a series of custom inference rules to make it work better for your application and make application-specific inferences. If that's not enough you can write custom Python code to give your application other features.

MOTO is in vaporware phase. Assistance with the project is appreciated.

get.info

The goal of the get.info project (which will hopefully use MOTO) is to build an InfoBase of information collected from the Web. Eventually, you'll be able to enter in any InfoBase keyword (a name, a site, a magazine, a person, an idea, etc.) and get a listing of all the information on the web that pertains to it.

get.info 3.0 collects and imports files from all across the Web and combines them into one searchable database. It imports RDF and XML (like RSS) collecting and categorizing the information. You'll also be able to build your own compatible knowledge base (using Blogspace, for example) which can be included in the overall InfoBase. [More...]

my.info

The my.info Project is an attempt to take charge of the information overload facing us today. By subscribing to various information sources, and ranking their usefulness and importance, you'll be able to have your own continously-update information inbox, with the latest news that you're interested in, and with the most important information at the top.

The first step is to have websites provide their information in a semantically-enhanced format, rather than simple web pages. This is done using RSS. The second part is to use the changedPage system to provide a simple way for websites to notify each other when a page has updated. The third step is to build a Universal Login format to allow people to easily log in to any site without registering again. [Coming soon...]

ArsDigita Prize

I was a second-place winner of the 2000 ArsDigita Prize for my entry the Info Network.

However, since Philip Greenspun was forced out of ArsDigita I can no longer recommend their services. They disconnected my websites from the Internet without notifying me, and refused to put them back up. Instead, patronize a nice company, like Musea Technologies who helped me bring my servers back online.

Sites I Host

• ChicagoForce.org - A science-fiction fanclub for Chicago, IL, USA.
• SwartzFam.com - The Swartz Family Server.