Paul Miller

I’m off to California this weekend, heading for Santa Clara and O’Reilly Media‘s inaugural Big Data conference, Strata. There are some great sessions on the Programme, and I look forward to comparing the diverse ways in which Big Data concepts and methods are being put to work across a range of market segments. I also [...]

Image via Wikipedia ‘Big Data‘ is currently capturing the imagination, attracting hype, investment and ambitious startups in almost equal measure. Kim and Eric Norlin’s excellent Defrag and Glue events have gained big-name company, with O’Reilly‘s Strata and GigaOM‘s Structure both set to arrive in the first quarter of 2011. Venture firms like IA Ventures have emerged, specifically [...]

Image via Wikipedia A short report that I was commissioned to write for the European Public Sector Information Platform has just been published. The rise of the App: a PSI opportunity? introduces (smartphone) apps and app stores to those in European governments responsible for meeting their obligations under the 2003 Public Sector Information (PSI) Directive. [...]

Image by Ben Templesmith via Flickr Towards the end of George Orwell’s allegorical take on the Stalinist Revolution, the pigs of Animal Farm take on the trappings of the humans they supplanted, shifting ideologically from ‘Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad’ to declare ‘Four Legs Good, Two Legs Better!’ as they rise to stand on [...]

To be honest, I’ve never fully understood Higher Education’s penchant for building ‘institutional repositories.’ These frequently under-populated aggregations of academic papers produced by ‘research active’ employees of a particular university appear aligned almost exclusively to vaguely expressed institutional imperatives, and seem largely unrelated to either the selfish aspirations of the contributing authors or the tangible [...]