If Government is a Platform, what are people building?
I’ve written and spoken before about a recent upsurge in enthusiasm for exposing data from Government in ways that facilitate use and re-use, and will doubtless be returning to this topic in the ‘Government Data’ panel session at the Linked Data Meetup in London on Wednesday. Tim Berners-Lee has been amongst those rallying to the...
Talking about Government Data with David James of Sunlight Labs
Image by kimberlyfaye via Flickr Continuing my ongoing series of conversations about the increasing availability of Government data, I recently spoke with David James of Sunlight Labs. Sunlight Labs is part of the non-partisan Sunlight Foundation in Washington, DC, and undertakes a range of projects to shine a light on the dealings of the US...
Linked Data Meetup in London
I tweeted about this when it was first announced, but it’s certainly worth flagging here too. There will be an informal Linked Data Meetup at London’s Hammersmith Club on the afternoon and evening of Wednesday 9 September. The list of attendees is already looking good, and it should be a useful opportunity to explore some...
Talking with Jim Hendler and Li Ding about Data.gov
My latest podcast is with Jim Hendler and Li Ding of the Tetherless World Constellation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York state. They’re part of a team converting some of the Federal Government data on the new Data.gov portal to RDF, and we talk about both how the work is going, and what it...
Examining the Linked Data opportunity; the case of Higher Education
Image via Wikipedia Regardless of where you stand on some of the questions of detail with respect to the Linked Data meme, it’s clear that significant enthusiasm is being marshalled behind both the concept and the opportunities that it promises. Dion Hinchcliffe looks at some of the means by which enterprise data can be more...
John Sheridan talks about the drive to get Government data online
John Sheridan’s role as Head of e-Services at the UK Government‘s Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) places him at the heart of this country’s enthusiastic drive toward increasing visibility of Government data online. As we discuss in this podcast, the programme is ambitious but eminently achievable, and builds upon a tradition that has actually...
More Linked Data and RDF
Image via Wikipedia Thank you to everyone who took the time to share a wide range of views in response to yesterday’s post in its comments, on Twitter, and out on your own blogs. Although reduced to silence throughout the day because of other commitments, I have been reading and learning from all of you....
Does Linked Data need RDF ?
Image by PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE via Flickr Before going any further, let’s get a few things crystal clear; The recent success of the Linked Data meme is long overdue, very welcome, and entirely capable of carrying the Web of Data far beyond its current niche adherents. A lot of my current work involves arguing that more organisations...
Talking with Mark Birbeck about RDFa and its use in Government
The ease with which RDFa can be embedded into existing HTML web pages makes it compelling as a means of easing traditional organisations and their workflows toward the Semantic Web. If we’re to realise Gordon Brown’s ambitions for making Government information more visible, tweaks to content management systems to inject a little RDFa onto their...
How Open is ‘Open’ ?
Image by Getty Images via Daylife There has been a recent burst of enthusiasm for making raw data produced by and for Government more ‘open,’ and this must surely be welcomed. Long-running grass-roots efforts such as Tom Steinberg’s mySociety and The Guardian‘s Free Our Data campaign continue to innovate, but in an environment that is...
Looking back at the Semantic Technology Conference, and the rest of my week in the Valley
Image by official_powerset via Flickr Today’s my first day back at home, following a tour of Silicon Valley and a couple of days in London to present at the ISKO UK Conference. The main event was this year’s Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose, which I’ve already partially covered via various blog posts over on...
Thomson Reuters turns to FedEx and DHL to boot-strap their Cloud of Data
Image by perspikace via Flickr Thomson Reuters‘ Open Calais team have clearly been busy, with several announcements at the Semantic Technology Conference here in San Jose. On 15 June the company rolled out version 4.1 of Open Calais, embracing Spanish language content and the notion of ‘social tags;’ “OpenCalais is a great semantic data extraction...
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