Semantic Blogging Demonstrator is pointing to Alistair Miles' and Brian Matthews' Thesaurus Interchange Format RDF schema, which is designed to link thesauri.

Here's a fairly standard user-centered design process - not particularly different than most: Uncovery, Wireframing, Storyboarding, Prototyping, Development and Optimization.

It's a familiar story to anyone experienced with iterative, user-centered processes. Its name: the Minerva Architectural Process ™ for Persuasion Architecture ™, with the obligatory consulting firm trademarks. The difference: there's a patent pending on it. "M.A.P & Persuasion Architecture are Patent Pending proprietary business processes belonging to Future Now, Inc. Contact us about licensing for your organization."

Now maybe I'm misreading, and Future Now is only trying to patent some very specfic part of an iterative design process for persuasion. (though maybe B.J. Fogg or Andrew Chak might object). Given the USPTO's track record, it may well be granted, despite prior art.

Don't get me wrong, I think Persuasion Architecture is a valuable approach. I just think that patents on process are pathetic. How about you?

Updated: Some Future Now clarification added to comments.

The W3C have made the user agents accesability guidelines into a reccomendation. What this means in practice is that most browsers and other programs designed to access web content will be required to meet the reccomendations in order to conform with local accesability laws. This will almost certainly apply in the EU and US. Hopefully this will force more use of WAI standards, allowing content providers to use newer standards with confidence.

The W3C has published a working draft for a new XHTML standard here. Following on from XHTML 1.1 expect it to be a strict standard with no formatting tags at all.

Web Ontology Language (OWL) Guide Version 1.0, W3C Working Draft 4 November 2002.

The W3C has just released draft version 2.0 of their Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Thanks, Column Two: KM/CM blog

I posted this link about Thesaurus::RDF, The RDF Thesaurus descriptor standard under the OPML thread so thought I'd surface it here in case it gets missed.

This document describes an RDF implementation of a representation of terms of a thesaurus. The definition of a thesaurus follows that of the NISO specification z39.19. This specification is intended as a method for thesaurus servers to transfer all or part of a thesaurus to an application.