Welcome to the blog of Can Sar, a Stanford CS major. This blog is made up of my thoughts on Computer Science and the computer industry, as well as ever exciting tales from my life.
After delving into FOAF two days ago I spent yesterday reading about on XML, RDF, and related technologies. I have always considered myself to have unsufficient knowledge of many XML based web technologies, and the emerging field of webservices, and want to change this. Before elaborating what I have been looking at, I should not how prevalent this is among CS Students (at least at Stanford), and large groups of academics as well. Much of what is happening in webservices and webtechnologies right now is strongly driven by industry, while often ignored by academics. One of the main reasons for this, is that these topics do not neatly fit into the established areas of CS: Systems, Algorithms & Theory, AI, Graphics, Databases. Because of this professors who work on these issues due so without too many established support structures.
Another problem is that there is so much new development in this fields, that it is hard to decide what exactly to teach students about. While it is often said that it is easy for students to learn about these topics on their own (which is true), the lack of academic emphasis might negatively affect the future development of webtechnolgies and services.
For those of you that want to start now I recommend browsing through old articles on XML.com, and then subscribing to the site's RSS feed. One article that you should definitely look at is this introduction to webservices.