A good source of links for the general subject of AI, including 2 links for 'Qualitative Physics' !

Updated Aug 17 2009:

The main link is to business rules subjects on the home site. The articles are generic than the actual implementations business rules with rule engines discussed on this site.

Business rules tutorial.

Updated Sept 8 2008: added BizTalk links ( after much agonized debate with myself )

Generally identical to "enterprise" business rule engines, usually implemented in Java or C++. This category excludes many pattern or search engines geared toward business intelligence and data mining.

From the site:

DBpedia is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. DBpedia allows you to ask sophisticated queries against Wikipedia and to link other datasets on the Web to Wikipedia data.

Their demo page for the subject Semantic Web, using DBpedia's Linked Data Interface format.

Mike Bergman's site has an interesting article on ESW, titled "Enterprise Semantic Webs (ESW) Demand New Database Paradigms", at http://www.mkbergman.com/?p=185. In fact, it's one of the few defintions of ESW availible.

Nice documentation front end, Good use of AJAX. Dual licensing.

• Demo of documentation for Ext version 1.1, powered by Ext 1.1.
• Demo of documentation for Ext version 2.0-dev, powered by Ext 2.0.

A very big, enterprise level Java RE environment ...

From the site:

FDSE is an easy-to-install search engine for local and remote sites. It returns fast, accurate results from a template-driven architecture.

Gubed is a cross platform program to debug PHP scripts.

Link to BB.COM SOA Subject

Cook up Web sites fast with CakePHP

Adding related information and services

Bake bigger and better with CakePHP

Use Sanitize for your protection

Use CakePHP's Session and Request Handler components

Three-part "Learning PHP" series, teaching you how to use PHP through building a simple workflow application

Also see Using PHPEclipse : Installation : Installing the DBG Debugger.

Updated Oct 3 2008:

Libraries and a toolkit for developing semantic web applications using MicroSoft .NET technology. Not open source of course, but their developer documentation in interesting.

The Learning Agent Center at George Mason University.

Excellent text book on reasoning and agents from Gheorghe Tecuci et al, Building Intelligent Agents. ( Academic Press, 1998 ).

... building business rule applications or rule-based systems using the Java programming language.

* Promote rule-based programming in Java in general.

* Provide a vendor neutral portal for finding and sharing information.

* Inform and educate implementors and users of the "Java Rule Engine API" (JSR-94).

* Discuss future evolutions of the Java Rule Engine API.

From the jQuery site: "jQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages".

jQuery is also the base Javascript library in Drupal.

Also see the Weblink to PQuery.

Feb 27 2009: updates
May 22 2009: update on Kubuntu 9.04 with KDE 4.2

In addition to the plethora of great Linux applications running on Windows via GTK, QT and Java, there is now a fairly stable version of KDE4 for Windows. It's still not entirely stable and requires some effort to get going, but at this rate my old Windows 2000 system may make it to the year 3000 !!!

Excellent discussion of CakePHP core classes, particularly the Dispatcher class.

Mike Bergman has written numerous insightful articles about the Semantic Web.

During a speech to a Linux audience on the necessity of "standardizing" Linux, Novell President and CEO Ron Hovsepian continues the thought expressed above by saying, 

"We need the software vendors to have their footprints on Linux. On Windows, application availability is their biggest advantage."

He seems to be talking about the Microsoft model of standardization, that is by being the one and only application.

From the W3.Org site

The Open Data Movement aims at making data freely available to everyone. There are already various interesting open data sources availiable on the Web.

From the OpenSource Java site:

Java, Eclipse plugins, server supporting WSDL.

Excel + Java + Eclipse

A combination of Excel, Eclipse, and Open Source Tools, backed by OpenRules support, forms a practical framework for full-scale Business Rules Management and rules-based Web Application Development. OpenRules embodies an ingenious software architecture that maximizes customizability and is open to any integration solution. Extensive reuse of proven, commonly available software results in a framework that matches or exceeds similar commercial systems in speed, compactness, and ease of use.

http://openrules.com/overview.htm

PEAR PHP_Debug, Project description:

PHP_Debug : A simple and fast way to debug PHP code This PHP debug library offers you the ability to debug your PHP code and generate a trace of your program. - Process time - Database and query process time - Functional debug - Check performance

A simple fast tool that seems to provide most of what a PHP programmer needs ( minus having to recompile the PHP sources ). Requires Javascript.

From the PQuery site:

PQuery is a set of helper classes for JQuery JavaScript library.This library allows you to easily integrate AJAX , Effects and other JQuery functionality into your PHP scripts.IT has a small foot print and is compatible with PHP4 and PHP5.

Updated Sept 24 2008: added features and SWCL link

REWERSE is short for "Reasoning on the Web with Rules and Semantics".

From the site: REWERSE is a research "Network of Excellence" (NoE) on "Reasoning on the Web" that is funded by the EU Commission and Switzerland within the "6th Framework Programme" (FP6), Information Society Technologies (IST), Priority 2 under the project reference number 506779. REWERSE addresses the IST strategic action line "Semantic-based knowledge systems".

 My old Rule Based Systems tutorial, some of it outdated.

It is easier to get a feeling for the site by clicking the 'random article' item on the menu.  The site is still sparse in parts.

From the site: 

Link to the LSDIS (Large Scale Distributed Information Systems) Lab

From the site:

The Semantic Web Client Library represents the complete Semantic Web as a single RDF graph. The library enables applications to query this global graph using SPARQL- and find(SPO) queries. To answer queries, the library dynamically retrieves information from the Semantic Web by dereferencing HTTP URIs and by following rdfs:seeAlso links. The library is written in Java and is based on the Jena framework.

SemSol seems to be connected to the Semantic Web Community Portal, http://www.semanticweb.org/, which has been on the verge of being relauched for many months ....

From the SemSol site, "SemSol is a forthcoming Web development framework that uses Semantic Web technology to significantly increase productivity and flexibility for everyday Web programming".

Also see http://bnode.org/, Benjamin Nowack's personal website.

Updated Sept 25 2008: new link This page describes the taxonomy of semantic web topics adopted by the European projects Knowledge Web and REWERSE

Semantic web tutorial ( Static HTML ).

Update 3/26/2008 - ARC completely reimplemented and released as ARC2.

Update 7/25/2008 - added Triplify 0.3 section.

From the ARC site:

ARC is a lightweight, SPARQL-enabled RDF system for mainstream Web projects. It is written in PHP and has been optimized for shared (or otherwise performance- or privilege-limited) Web environments.

ARC facilitates the integration of RDF and SPARQL functionality in PHP/MySQL-driven frameworks.

From the site:

SemWebCentral is an Open Source development web site for the Semantic Web. It was established in January, 2004 to support the Semantic Web community by providing a free, centralized place for Open Source developers to manage Semantic Web software and content development. Another purpose is to provide resources for developers or other interested parties to learn about the Semantic Web and how to begin developing Semantic Web content and software.

The purpose of the mod.smalltalk project is to integrate Smalltalk with the Apache Web Server via Fast CGI.

On the page describing Fast CGI, they say:

FastCGI is a fast, open, and secure Web server interface that solves the performance problems inherent in CGI, without introducing the overhead and complexity of proprietary APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).

The Inference Web is a Semantic Web based knowledge provenance infrastructure that supports interoperable explanations of sources, assumptions, learned information, and answers as an enabler for trust.

Tools for Semantic Web Rules and Ontologies, including Translation, Inferencing, Analysis, and Authoring.

From the site:

The Semantic Web Education and Outreach (SWEO) Interest Group has been established to develop strategies and materials to increase awareness among the Web community of the need and benefit for the Semantic Web, and educate the Web community regarding related solutions and technologies. 

The old top page for the 3 tutorials.

VisualWorks Smalltalk has drifted and evolved across the years eventually winding up with CINCOM. While not Open Source, it is a mature product and CINCOM has a liberal download policy for non-commercial use. They encourage you to register before downloading, but do not absolutely require you to do so, which shows the right spirit.

Excellent tutorials and references.

An interesting collection of papers accepted.

From the site: "xajax is an open source PHP class library that allows you to easily create powerful, web-based, Ajax applications using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP".

There is also a fairly inactive Xajax module project at Drupal, although it may be lurking to life again, because some one did the Xajax upgrade for Drupal 5.1 recently.

A very concise and straightforward introduction to XML, RDF and the Semantic Web.

Updated: Sept 24 2007

It is a browser plugin, which introduces browser dependencies, but the project is Open Source and seems to be active and well-supported.

From the site:

Mozilla RDF was originally used to support the Aurora/Sidebar user interface and SmartBrowsing metadata services. It's main use in Mozilla now is as a common data model and API for use in XUL-based applications.

From the site: "This prolog is enhanced with the JavaScript callout capability though a rudimentary external/3 call; see the arithmetic functions for examples".

A link to History.

Updated Sept 7 2008: added seaBreeze link

Seaside

To get a good feel for Seaside development environment, read the excellent technical introduction by Shaffer Consulting.

Note that the article was written in 2005 and may be obsolete in parts. For example, Seaside now supports several object-oriented databases, including Gemstone.

Revised Nov 1 2008: Draft of OWL2 specs.

The recent drafts of the OWL2 specification describe some important changes from OWL1. In a nutshell,

The structural specification of OWL 2 provides the foundation for the implementation of OWL 2 tools such as APIs and reasoners. ... This document also defines the functional-style syntax, which closely follows the structural specification and allows OWL 2 ontologies to be written in a compact form.

Surveying open-source AJAX toolkits

Mozilla's Category:AJAX

Updated Sept 12 2008: moved page to Home site ( it's a standard, not a project or product ).

See "Links - Business Process Execution Language on the Home site".

Updated Sept 28 2008: fixups and links

From the CakePHP project site at ohloh.net:

Cake is a rapid development framework for PHP which uses commonly known design patterns like ActiveRecord, Association Data Mapping, Front Controller and MVC. Our primary goal is to provide a structured framework that enables PHP users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications, without any loss to flexibility.

Update Jan 24 2009: The new PageBakery repository is showing some activity !
Update Dec 4 2008: Mambo 5 movements
Update Sept 19 2008: Wildflower impressions and links

Doing the Mambo

The latest movements in the Mambo 5 project ( Nov 25th 2008 ) -

Updated Oct 29 2008: added 68KB, now BSD

I am not sure why it took me this long to get around to CodeIgniter ... it's a worthy and mature PHP framework but I gravitated to CakePHP for some reason. Maybe it's the CodeIgniter licensing of EllisLab, Inc..

The main link is to Oracle - Semantic Technologies Center. so far .... From the site:

Semantic Technologies are designed to extend the capabilities of information on the Web and enterprise systems to be networked in meaningful ways. ... Oracle Spatial 11g introduces the industry's first open, scalable, secure and reliable RDF management platform. Based on a graph data model, RDF triples are persisted, indexed and queried, similar to other object-relational data types.

Big, non-open, usually implemented in Java or C++.

From the About CSAIL page:

The primary mission of CSAIL ( Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory ) is research in both computation and artificial intelligence, broadly construed. It is organized into four broad research areas:

Systems covers all aspects of the building of both hardware and software computational systems

Perception and Learning includes work on the sorts of things that all people manage to do effortlessly, both emulating those abilities, and simulating their appearance.

Drools is probably the leading Open Source Java rule engine and rule management environment. It is the community version of commercial JBoss Rules. The whole operation os very solid - the Drools/JBoss Rules User Guide is among the best of any business rules product, either open source or commercial.

The following is a heavily paraphrased version of the three main points on Drools site:

Drupal has been good to me, no question about it.

I had planned to roll up my sleeves and do some PHP coding to make it work the way I wanted. But, between the Drupal core, Links and a few other modules, it pretty much does what I need already ( with maybe some more meta-data for the links ). So instead of coding PHP, I devote my time to creating content, which was the point of the exercise in the first place. It's worked very well for my purposes.

According to the Drupal web site,

Potential RDF use cases for Drupal - an excellent article about RDF in Drupal 6 - 7.

The Drupal RDF module uses the recently-rewritten ARC2 RDF Library if available but apparently does not require it.

From the drupal.org post, Semantic Search - Faceted Search and Semantic Web:

It's getting serious. Things are moving resolutely forward toward Drupal 6 and 7.

The seems to be some confusion about the difference between 'rule engines' and 'semantic web' applications.  See related link to "Semantic Web Inferencing versus Rule Engines"

Also a link to CCK-related modules.

From the project page:

Node linking and Metadata

The Relationship Manager module is intended to allow free-form links between nodes, recording not just that one page relates to another, but HOW it relates. ... The core module is made available to be extended by other modules that wish to make use of the generalized relationship management functions. Several examples of simple modules that leverage this power are provided as optional plugins.

The major plugins are:

A sorely needed module for Drupal ... some functions exist but others do not.

The game's a foot.

From the Workflow-NG project page, a list of Drupal 5 modules that integrate with Workflow-NG ( other than Workflow ):

March 29 2009: created

I just noticed that I didn't have a proper links page for Java ... hmmmm.

I think I need to readjust my attitude toward the Enterprise-Level Big Java applications encountered in the yesteryear of flaming youth and get up to date with the open-sourced/open-licensed small java applications of today. One must try to keep up with the times after all ... I like to think of it as being chronologically enhanced. :-)

Feb 3 2009: reflections on the power of modern marketing in selecting rule engines.

Sun appears to be serious about open sourcing the Java Development Kit and Virtual Machine, so it is time to consider Java as an environment for implementing Open Source rule and inference engines.

As an interpreted language, the performance and resource consumption of client and server-side solutions will probably be a critical design factor, particularly as Java-based rule engines tend to aspire to enterprise-level applications.

March 28 2009: added links, few edits. revisiting subject in general

There are some Javascript oldies but goodies to be found on the Web.

There was an active Javascript inference engine at CNLP ( Syracuse Univeristy ) at some point, but it may be moribund. From the site:

Some interesting possibilities that may lead to a better RETE algoritm. There are some good article suggesting directions for investigation but references on the web are still a bit thin.

Updated Sept 24 2008:

The Lanius website ( formerly known as the Drake CMS ) is up and running [ wild cheers and celebration !!! ]

They have make some of their first production releases of the small, quick and generally admirable CMS.

I'll install it and see ... stay tuned.

Updated Sept 19 2008:

From the article "Using Prolog as the fundament for applications on the semantic web":

Oct 26 2009: there may be some activity for running Glade XML with XUL, new link for the Webglade Javascript library.
March 29 2009: moved server-side Javascipt, and added yet more links.
March 27 2009: added Jelix and Jaxer, more links.

See related content about Firefox and server-side Javascript.

OntoGrid provides a technical infrastructure for the rapid prototyping and development of knowledge-intensive services for the Semantic Grid.

Updated Oct 3 2008:

C++ engines are often neglected for web-based inferencing applications, but compilation is possible on non-shared hosting ...

More pattern matching and structural parsing than symbolic processing in a classical sense of an inference engine.

A nascent category for "associative" engines, neural networks and various statistical and connectionist approaches to inferencing.

March 19 2009: Pharo will be going beta with version 1.0 !!! I thought they said it would take three years ... glad it didn't :-).

Feb 11 2009: an important looking update for Eclipse PDT 2.0

A new version of the Eclipse PDT 2.0 environment.

Oct 14 2009: What's going on ! Yet another good small CMS emerges from the pack. Added phpSQLiteCMS.
Oct 10 2009: added Zikula CMS framework.
Oct 9 2009: added XMLNuke, XML CMS framework.
Oct 4 2009: discovered gpEasy CMS.

Browse PHP Debug package

PHP Debug - PEAR

Oct 8 2009: Are MVC frameworks worth the performance hit and hassle ? See Damn Small PHP Frameworks. Because size does matter. Make sure to read comments too.

Feb 10 2009: added PHPulse

Good list of PHP frameworks. Are they all MVC ?

Updated: Sept 24 2008: more links, RAP

A very thin category at the moment, but the new Drupal Rules project may help to fill it out.

The RAP project has a simple forward and backward chaining inference engine using networks of relationships rather than condition/action statements like a true rule engine.

Updated Oct 2 2008: The Mission

There is a decided dearth of good PHP open source search engine solutions, but Sphider seems to be the leading candidate these days - "a lightweight web spider and search engine written in PHP, using MySQL as its back end database".

Nov 4 2009: Added Semantic MediaWiki, demo on server.

Oct 4 2009: Add Wikyblog. Updated WikkaWiki with info about burgeoning project for phpMyEdit package

Updated Jan 25 2009: added Kisimi and DokuWiki

There are several small, fast and powerful open source wikis that can be used as a full-featured CMS to for building small web sites and are fairly easy to extend and customize.

Updated: June 20 2008

Galaxia is an activity-based workflow application, where the processes and the workflows are made of dynamic activities that must be completed to finish a task. Contrast this with a procedural system where each step in the process must be completed in order, and the power of this application becomes clear.

Feb 20 2009: link for building a KDE .sfs
Feb 10 2009: devxx.sfs. for hard disk install

A full collection of Puppy links. They can be hard to track down individually.

Notes: Hard-Puppy page about updating o disk installation with devxx,sfs:

Jan 27 2009: more links,particularly Zwiki
Revised Oct 3 2008: it's still Plone as the premier Python CMS so far ... still looking.

Python is an admirable language in almost every way ( but don't get me going about 'self' in method calls - if Smalltalk programmers see 'self' all over the code, they add $10 to their hourly rate, usually well deserved ).

Jan 31 2009, added EasyEclipse for Python IDE
Dec 13 20008: A few preliminary links ... and two new links on the Great Self Debate !

A Minor Harangue

I remember a time not so very long ago when I was required to spend an afternoon adding "^yourself " to the end of several hundred Smalltalk methods because "that's the right way to do it". I predict that the use of self in Python method arguments will persist for much the same reason.

Revised Oct 27 2008:

Maybe I should use a pseudonym for this posting ....

Feb 17 2009: cheap servlet hosting ?
Feb 5 2009: more links to applet demos

A few ill-formed thoughts so far ...

Java is The Enterprise Language. Most Java applications are not applications so much as pieces in the jigsaw puzzle of the enterprise integration architecture. In short, they are big, complex and expensive.

Updated Sept 19 2008: added Ruby/EventMachine links
Updated Sept 19 2008: more links for Ruleby

Not a major category among the many rule engines implemented in Java and other languages. In this case, I've pushed the definition of 'engine' to the limits so I can include some of the more solid and interesting implementations.

Jan 20 2009: created

There is a good collection of simple CMS and wiki gems available for Ruby webapps, most prominently the Ruby on Rails framework. In addition, there are several interface and integration frameworks either based on Rails or presented as alternatives to Rails which provide a solid foundation customized Ruby web applications.

Updated: Dec 5 2008, more links, RuleLab.Net

Note that there is some overlap in the use of the term "rule engine" with pattern matching, text transformation, rendering and other filtering or search engines that have some level of rule capabilities.

RuleLab.Net is closed source, closed license and closed almost everything else, but it has good documentation of its facilities. Also on the plus side of the ledger, it has a hosted solution and is not terribly expensive as these things go.

Note: my understanding of these services is evolving and may be incorrect at this point. Updates coming soon probably ...

Of course, the best example of a Seaside-powered site may be the Seaside site itself. But there are several interesting ( and either cheap or free ) hosting sites for Seaside web applications.

Jan 26 2009. derived from PHP Wikis and Knowledge Wikis.

Often referred to as "knowledge wikis", they are capable of providing some level of knowledge representation and management functions as well as the usual features available in traditional wikis. They may be the closest existing solution to some of the requirements for a Semantic Web ( however it gets defined ).

Nov 4 2009: Getting active, or maybe reactivating.

This page is just a collection of links so far. The link above for the 'Miscellaneous' subject is to my own modest effort with Semantic Mediawiki.  It's nascent but coming along.

The entire Semantic Web subject area will be getting a makeover soon.

Weaving Meaning: An Overview of the Semantic Web

Good W3 Powerpoint presentation by Eric Miller.

The Semantic Web held pride of place at the AAAI 2008 Spring Symposium Series.

June 30 2009: AppJet ends its free hosting and shelves AppJet. Adios, amigo !
April 6 2009: server side Javascript content makes its second and final move to its own page.

Tales from the Server Side

See a recent article What Server Side JavaScript Needs.

Updated: Sept 10 2007

There is a small but persistent Smalltalk/OWL project. From their project information page:

The Smalltalk OWL Project was launched 1 Jan 06, the overview of the effort is:

A strong candidate for a Smalltalk RDF/OWL inference engine is the Smalltalk Open Unification Language (SOUL).

March 19 2009: Squeakland-EToys updated, see the EToys download page.
Updated July 10 2008: Pharo - new, leaner fork of Squeak. See related link.

From Wikipedia on Squeak Smalltalk:

This is a new topic ... it is more abstract than most content on this site and may be moved to the Home site.

Update: Jan 16 2009 - Current development release ( rules-6.x-1.x-dev ).
Update: Sept 29 2008 - Current production release ( 6.x-1.0-beta3 )

Wolfgang Ziegler ( a.k.a. fago ) has started a project derived from the workflow-ng module to create a Drupal rules nodule implementing inference engine functionality, tightly coupled to the Workflow-NG module. One presumes that the rules engine will implement forward/backward chaining and be pluggable into the workflow engine.

GNU's Alife site.

Feb 16 2009: new authoritative upgrade guide from Drupal.

There are a good series of articles on the subject from becircle.com. This could be the start of something big ... if I'm not careful.

I must say that preliminary results have been a mixed bag. It's probably something I'm doing, but in any case, upgrading a medium-sized site with half-a-dozen modules to Drupal 6 is far from a trivial undertaking at this point of time. That may change in the coming months - I hope so.

Not much yet.

The Java marketing machine has worked assiduously to associate the concept of a portal with the Java language, but there is no real dependency between the function of a portal and its implementation language. See the section for CakePHP CMS.

Some interesting questions and comments about portals.

Updated Sept 22 2008:

A few AI links won't hurt my prospects for future employment ... will they ?

People ask the way to Cold Mountain.
Cold Mountain ? There's no road that goes through.

Han-Shan - "Cold Mountain"

Updated: Sept 10 2007

Smalltalk.org is the main link - it's a good kick-off point for Smalltalk adventures. The whysmalltalk.com site is also a good resource, even if some of the event announcements are several years old.

A great list of free Smalltalk books on the web.

March 27 2009: added XML Markup Languages for User Interface. This category neglected ...

Some Cetus links about XML, so far. Most of the Microsoft links are broken.

Updated Sept 16 2008: Note that this is not a complete list of Java workflow applications, just the ones that I have found and interest me.

Of the 702 Semantic Web tools listed in Mike Bergman's masterlist, 332 are implmented in Java .... and Java now being a fully open source and open licence language ...

Stray link I'll find a home for: http://www.daml.org/tools/

SWCL - Semantic Web Client Library:

March 29 2009: added sections about Mozilla, server-side Javascript, AppJets, links, etc.
March 22 2009: added WYMeditor

The only ubiquitous thing in the web universe ... also see ECMAScript.

Also see Server Side Javascript.

The preeminent tool for RDF parsing in Javascript must be the Tabulator project at CSAIL. The Tabulator 0.7 demo is fairly impressive and gives one a good sense of what RDF is about, but don't expect it to run quick. The new version 0.8 is over 200KBytes ( tgz-ippped ! ).

A MIT student did some work with a stripped-down version of the RDF parser to good effect.

Oct 5 2009: PyKE 1.0.2 download, seems to be fairly active
Updated Jan 26 2009: new SimPy 2.0 release, Twisted framework, more links
Updated Oct 29 2008: added Narval

An important and growing segment of the rule engine world ... Python runs fast, a necessary requirement for all large rule-based applications.

Jan 31 2009: ruby-lang.org has released the first production version of Ruby 1.9, some bugs and problems with gems, also see Ruby 1.9.1 Released - Fastest Ruby Ever.
Updated Dec 14 2008: link for Ruby Shootout.

Some useful links.

Updated Sept 16 2008

Semantic web search engines ? Social bookmarking run mad ? We shall see. The new search technology is still early in the S-curve and more useful for pop culture subjects than for rule based systems.

From the WikiaSearch project page:

Wikia's search engine concept is that of trusted user feedback from a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way.

Stray Linux links of interest ...

March 1 2009: added Postgres Rules, and a few edits.
Revised Oct 20 2008: This is a new "hybrid rule engine" category for the development site, more nut-and-bolts-oriented than most rule engine discussions.

A Rule Engine By Any Other Name?

What should one call rule engines without true inferencing capabilities. How can they be called rule engines if the don't do rule inferencing ? Maybe the best term is "un-rule engines", as if we were talking about the "un-Cola" of soft drink marketing fame.