Off to Santa Clara for O’Reilly’s Strata Conference
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...
Is there a disconnect between Big Data and the Web of Data ?
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...
Apps, App Stores, and Government Data
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....
‘Open’ good, but there’s plenty of room for ‘almost open’ and ‘not open’ too
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...
Repositories in the Cloud? Why on earth not?!
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...
A podcast with Flip Kromer of InfoChimps… and the end of an era
I’ve been following InfoChimps for some time, intrigued by their aspiration to build a marketplace for data that combines the free with the paid. Thanks to the team at Jones-Dilworth (honestly, does Josh have any clients that aren’t interesting?) I managed to get some time with founder Philip (Flip) Kromer and Joseph Kelly whilst over...
‘Why Linked Data?’ presentation at Defrag Conference
The presentation I just delivered here at Defrag is now on slideshare, in case you want a look.
Licensing of Linked Data
As part of a workshop at this year’s International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), former colleague Leigh Dodds prepared an interesting diagram on the ways in which resources comprising the Linked Data Cloud are currently licensed. For various reasons, I was unable to make it to Virginia for the event, but a scan through the presentations...
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...
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...
David Eaves talks about Vancouver’s Open Data initiative
Image via Wikipedia Back in May, ReadWriteWeb reported on a Motion put before legislators in the Canadian city of Vancouver. Duly passed, the Motion commits the city to three closely related ‘open’ agendas; the City of Vancouver will move as quickly as possible to adopt prevailing open standards for data, documents, maps, and other formats...
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