Author: Richard Wallis

Get Yourself a Linked Data Piece of WorldCat to Play With

Posted on by Richard Wallis

You may remember my frustration a couple of months ago, at being in the air when OCLC announced the addition of Schema.org marked up Linked Data to all resources in WorldCat.org.   Those of you who attended the OCLC Linked Data Round Table at IFLA 2012 in Helsinki yesterday, will know that I got my own back on the folks who publish the press releases at OCLC, by announcing the next WorldCat step along the Linked Data road whilst they were still in bed. The Round Table was an excellent very interactive session with Neil Wilson from the British Library, Emmanuelle Bermes from Centre …

OCLC WorldCat Linked Data Release – Significant In Many Ways

Posted on by Richard Wallis

Typical!  Since joining OCLC as Technology Evangelist, I have been preparing myself to be one of the first to blog about the release of linked data describing the hundreds of millions of bibliographic items in WorldCat.org. So where am I when the press release hits the net?  35,000 feet above the North Atlantic heading for LAX, that’s where – life just isn’t fair. By the time I am checked in to my Anahiem hotel, ready for the ALA Conference, this will be old news.  Nevertheless it is significant news, significant in many ways. OCLC have been at the leading edge …

Schema.org Consensus at SemTechBiz

Posted on by Richard Wallis

Day three of the Semantic Tech & Business Conference in San Francisco brought us a panel to discuss Schema.org, populated by an impressive array of names and organisations: Ivan Herman, World Wide Web Consortium Alexander Shubin, Yandex Dan Brickley, Schema.org at Google Evan Sandhaus, New York Times Company Jeffrey W. Preston, Disney Interactive Media Group Peter Mika, Yahoo! R.V. Guha, Google Steve Macbeth, Microsoft This well attended panel started with a bit of a crisis – the stage in the room was not large enough to seat all of the participants causing a quick call out for bar seats and …

Surfacing at Semtech San Francisco

Posted on by Richard Wallis

So where have I been?   I announce that I am now working as a Technology Evangelist for the the library behemoth OCLC, and then promptly disappear.  The only excuse I have for deserting my followers is that I have been kind of busy getting my feet under the OCLC table, getting to know my new colleagues, the initiatives and projects they are engaged with, the longer term ambitions of the organisation, and of course the more mundane issues of getting my head around the IT, video conferencing, and expense claim procedures. It was therefore great to find myself in San …

Richard Wallis Joins OCLC

Posted on by Richard Wallis

You may have noticed this press release Richard Wallis joins OCLC staff as Technology Evangelist today from OCLC. I have already had some feedback on this move from several people, who almost without exception, have told me that they think it is good move for both OCLC and myself. Which is good, as I agree with them 😉 I have also had several questions about it, mostly beginning with the words why or what.  My answers I thought I would share here to give some background. Why a library organisation? – I thought you were trying to move away from …

Who Will Be Mostly Right – Wikidata, Schema.org?

Posted on by Richard Wallis

Two, on the surface, totally unconnected posts – yet the the same message. Well that’s how they seem to me anyway.

Post 1 – The Problem With Wikidata from Mark Graham writing in the Atlantic. Post 2 – Danbri has moved on – should we follow? by a former colleague Phil Archer.

Semantic Search, Discovery, and Serendipity

Posted on by Richard Wallis

An ambition for the web is to reflect and assist what we humans do in the real world. Search has only brought us part of the way. By identifying key words in web page text, and links between those pages, it makes a reasonable stab at identifying things that might be related to the keywords we enter.

As I commented recently, Semantic Search messages coming from Google indicate that they are taking significant steps towards the ambition. By harvesting Schema.org described metadata embedded in html

Google SEO RDFa and Semantic Search

Posted on by Richard Wallis

Today’s Wall Street Journal gives us an insight in to the makeover underway in the Google search department. Over the next few months, Google’s search engine will begin spitting out more than a list of blue Web links. It will also present more facts and direct answers to queries at the top of the search-results page. They are going about this by developing the search engine [that] will better match search queries with a database containing hundreds of millions of “entities”—people, places and things—which the company has quietly amassed in the past two years. The ‘amassing’ got a kick start …

Linked Data a Recipe for Food?

Posted on by Richard Wallis

What relevance does Linked Data have for a City’s food supply you may ask. “We live in a world where the agri-food supply chain, from producer all the way through to final consumer, is extremely inefficient in the flow of knowledge.. ..with the application of Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies along the food supply chain, it will make it easier for all actors along there to know more about where their food comes from and where their food goes.”