Year: 2012

WikiData – Announcing Wikipedia’s Next Big Thing

Posted on by Richard Wallis

One of the more eagerly awaited presentations at the Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Berlin today was a late addition to the program from Denny Vrandecic.  With the prominence of Dbpedia in the Linked Open Data Cloud, anything new from Wikipedia with data in it was bound to attract attention, and we were not disappointed. Denny started by telling us that from March he would be moving to Berlin to work for the Wikimedia Foundation on WikiData. He then went on to explain that the rich Wikipedia resource may have much of the world’s information but does not have …

A Kasabi Day at Semtech Berlin

Posted on by Richard Wallis

I spent yesterday at the first day of excellent Semantic Tech and Business Conference 2012 in Berlin.  It was a good day covering a wide range of topics, a great range of speakers and talks, and most encouragingly some really good conversations in the breaks.  I had the pleasure of presenting the opening session The Simple Power of the Link which seemed to provide a good grounding introduction to what to some is a fairly complex topic.  My slides are available on Slideshare, and I provided a background article on semanticweb.com, if you want to check them out. In my …

A Video Conversation

Posted on by Richard Wallis

Today I share a conversation with my good friend and former colleague Paul Miller of Cloud of Data. Paul is a prolific podcaster, but had yet to venture in to the world of the video conversation.  This conversation was therefore a bit of an experiment.  Take a look below and see what you think.   For those that prefer audio only, Paul has helpfully included an mp3 for you to listen to. At the end of this post you will also find a link to a short survey which has posted to ascertain how successful this format. In the conversation itself …

BBC Sport Site Built on a Solid Linked Data Foundation

Posted on by Richard Wallis

The BBC team have been evolving their approach to delivering agile, effective, websites in an efficient way by building on Linked Data foundations, sector by sector – wildlife, news, music, World Cup 2010, and now in readiness for London 2012 – the whole sport experience. Since the launch a few days ago, the main comment seems to be that it is ‘very yellow’, which it is. Not much reference to the innovative approach under the hood – as it should be. If you can see the technology, you have got it wrong.

More Linked Open Data under a More Open License from German National Library

Posted on by Richard Wallis

The German National Library (DNB) has launched a Linked Data version of the German National Bibliography. The bibliographic data of the DNB’s main collection (apart from the printed music and the collection of the Deutsches Exilarchiv) and the serials (magazines, newspapers and series of the German Union Catalogue of serials (ZDB)) have been converted.  Henceforth the RDF/XML-representation of the records are available at the DNB portal. This is an experimental service that will be continually expanded and improved. This is a welcome extension to their Linked Data Service, previously delivering authority data.  Documentation on their data and modelling is available, …

Ookaboo Release 1,000,000 Free Images For 500,000 Topics + RDF Too

Posted on by Richard Wallis

Ookaboo “free pictures of everything on earth” have released nearly a million public domain and Creative Commons licensed stock images mapped with precision to concepts, instead of just words.

But there is more… They have released an RDF dump of the metadata behind the images, concept mappings and links to concepts in Freebase and Dbpedia

Cloud Computing Back In The Future

Posted on by Richard Wallis

Checking out Cloud Expo Europe. Much, in Linked Data circles, is implied about the mutual benefit of adopting the Cloud and Linked Open Data.
I was interested to see if the cloud vendors were as data [and the value within it] aware as the Linked Data vendors are cloud aware.

Will This Flood of Open Data Wash Past Us?

Posted on by Richard Wallis

 @ePISplatform features fairly prominently in the stream of tweets that waft across my desktop every day – it comes from the European Public Sector Information (PSI) Platform (Europe’s One-stop Shop on PSI re-use) Working to stimulate and promote PSI re-use and open data initiatives. In amongst the useful pointers to news, comment, and documents, I have been recently conscious of an increasing flow of tweets like these: This is good news.  More and more city, local, national governments and public bodies releasing data as open data.  Of course the reference to open here is in relation to the licensing of …

Open Data: Digital Fuel or Raw Material?

Posted on by Richard Wallis

I have been reading with interest ‘Digital Fuel of the 21st Century: Innovation through Open Data and the Network Effect’ by Vivek Kundra. Well worth a read to place the current [Digital] Revolution we are somewhere in the middle of, in relation to preceding revolutions and the ages that they begat.

Create Data Not Records

Posted on by Richard Wallis

One phrase in particular leapt out at me when reading Karen Coyle’s Bibliographic Framework: RDF and Linked Data post a few days ago.

My message here is that we need to be creating data, not records, and that we need to create the data first, then build records with it for those applications where records are needed.