Linked Data Meetup London
Posted on September 15, 2009
Filed Under Semantic Web | Comments Off
Government data panel - photo by Zac Beauvais
Having just recovered from last week’s London Linked data meet up. I thought it was time to collect together the talks and commentary from the day.
Georgi and I are particularly grateful to everyone for coming, in particular those that spoke. A special thank you also to Talis for picking up the bar tab.
I think Zach Beauvais summarised the day nicely in his post:
‘The day was a storming success, with talks and presentations from all over the Linked Data community: from academia to startups. I think the organisers were slightly overwhelmed, because in the end there were nearly 200 people there, making use of the Talis-sponsored bar well into the evening. Apart from being a good opportunity to catch up with people, this meetup had the feeling of a guild-meet of Linked Data professionals—with lots of different perspectives over similar problems.’
Presentations
Here are links to the presentations so far and I will add the rest as they become avaliable:
Tom Scott / Yves Raimond (BBC)
“Contextualising BBC programmes using the Data Web”
The BBC, following the Linked Data principles, now publishes a URI for every TV and Radio programme it broadcasts this allows people to browser by schedule, genre, format and a-z.
More recently we have published URIs for music artists, animal species and habitats – these pages not only provide useful information in their own right but also allow us to re-contextualise the programme information helping users to discover new content and new patterns.
Leigh Dodds (Talis)
“DataIncubator.org — What Is It & What’s In It?“
This talk will introduce the dataincubator.org project which, supported by the Talis Connected Commons scheme, provides an umbrella project for publishing public domain linked data, with the aim of demonstrating to the original publishers the benefits of Linked Data, as well as a means to build on the community’s efforts. The talk will review the project and some of the datasets that have currently been made available.
Andrew Walkingshaw (Timetric)
“Time to build: storing, sharing and analysing statistics with Timetric, a Web-native service for managing numbers”
Timetric is a Web service which lets users upload, download, visualize and set up calculations on over a hundred thousand different measurements, the values of all of which are tracked over time. But how would you build that, and when you have, who’d want it? In this talk, we’ll discuss the lessons we’ve learned in building a service for sharing open data on the Web and in building a business around that service.
Michael Smethurst, Matthew Wood (BBC)
“Rights, Privacy and Linked Data“
Georgi Kobilarov (Freie Universität Berlin / DBpedia)
“Integrating Linked Data”
Nigel Shadbolt (University of Southampton)
“Hard Research Challenges in the Web Of Linked Data: The EPSRC EnAKTinG Project”
The UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has funded a three year two million pound project at the University of Southampton to investigate the challenges represented by the Web of Linked Data. Nigel Shadbolt and Tim Berners-Lee are two of the Principal Investigators on this project. In this brief presentation the projects aims and ambition will be outlined – together with progress to date.
Libby Miller (BBC / NoTube)
“Beancounter – telling you about you”
Increasing automation means that lots of data is available about what you do, including what you watch and listen to. This means that companies or researchers can mine information about your activities and use them to make predictions about what you might like, and what they might be able to sell you. Beancounter uses attention data from multiple sources, enhanced by linked data, to tell you what you are *really* interested in – rather than what you *think* you are interested in. It puts the control about what sources can be mined in your hands, and limits what companies can do with the outputs. Beancounter is a product of the NoTube EU project.’
Richard Cyganiak (DERI Galway)
“Sig.ma – Live Views on the Web of Data”
Increasing amounts of high-quality data are being published on the web of data, but a lack of applications for searching and browsing it makes access and exploration difficult. Sig.ma is a new user interface that improves upon previous ones by offering fine-grained control over source selection, fuzzy entity matching, and schema and value consolidation. Sig.ma is online at http://sig.ma/… and provides the fastest way yet to get an overview about the data available on a given topic.
Jun Zhao (University Oxford)
“Linked Data for Connecting Medicine Knowledge”
Mischa Tuffield / Steve Harris (Garlik)
“Making FOAF useful: http://foaf.qdos.com/ “
Since the beginning of the Linked Data Movement, a fair chunk of the resolvable RDF found on the web has been FOAF data. This talk will involve a brief overview of what FOAF represents, a list of the services we provide, how we go about saving public and private FOAF data, whilst presenting insight into the technologies used to underpin the services on foaf.qdos.com.
Ian Millard (University of Southampton)
“RKB-Explorer”
The RKBExplorer.com application provides a simple interface over multiple Linked Data sources to assist with the discovery and exploration of related activities with the academic research domain.
This talk will briefly summarise issues and experiences regarding interoperation of multiple sources, and outline some of the services we offer that can be used by all.
Panel: Government Data
Chair: Carol Tullo (Office of Public Sector Information)
Tim Bernes-Lee
Paul Miller (Cloud of Data)
Nigel Shadbolt (University of Southampton)
Mark Birbeck (webBackplane)
John Goodwin (Ordnance Survey)
A good summary of this panel in a blog post by Jane Stevenson and in Zac’s post.
‘It gave a good sense of what is happening at the moment with Linked Data and what the issues are. Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the Web) and Nigel Shadbolt talked about the decision to prioritise UK government data within the Linked Data project – clearly it is of great value for a whole host of reasons, and a critical mass of data can be achieved if the government are on board, and also we should not forget that it is ‘our data’ so it should be opened up to us – public sector data touches all of us, businesses, institutions, individuals, groups, processes, etc.’
Thank you to Carol Tullo for doing such a good job of chairing the session.
Panel: Future of Journalism
Chair: Paul Bradshaw (Online Journalism)
Martin Belham (The Guardian)
John O’ Donovan (BBC)
Dan Brickley
Leigh Dodds (Talis)
A number of posts are avaliable from this session from the wonderful chair Paul Bradshaw and panelist Martin Belham of the Guardian.
Data and the future of journalism panal discussion: Paul Bradshaw
Linked data future of journalsim part 1: Martin Belham
Linked data future of journalsim part 2: Martin Belham
Tom Heath’s “Linked Data – The Story So Far” was a fantastic way to finish the evening and really captured the challenges that lie ahead.
Update: Two further post from Martin Belham: Part 1 and Part 2.
chair: Carol Tullo (Office of Public Sector Information)
Paul Miller (Cloud of Data)
Nigel Shadbolt (University of Southampton)
Mark Birbeck (webBackplane)
John Goodwin (Ordnance Survey)