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)
Media meets the Semantic Web
Posted on July 2, 2009
Filed Under Semantic Web, journalism | Comments Off
Georgi and I presented a jointly written (BBC, DBpedia and Rattle) paper at the European Semantic Web Conference a couple of weeks ago. My half of the presentation is avalible on slideshare.
One point that I thought was particularly interesting was the potential role of Linked Data for SEO.
Consuming Open Linked Data (LOD) can help you publish more url’s for things (for example a music artist or country). These nodes act as topical points of aggregation for resources on your site but also increase the surface area ( the number of useful points of access) for search engines to get at. In addition Linked Data can also help in scaling cross-linking between nodes and resources. Which is really the subject of the paper.
Web-scalable narratives
Posted on November 23, 2008
Filed Under Semantic Web, information architecture | 4 Comments
As we build larger and larger websites it becomes increasingly difficult to scale meaningful user journeys. Success is dependent on indentifying your key user journeys (narrative structures) and ensuring these can be dynamically populated as the site grows.
Some of the largest and most successful websites have taken simple narrative structures and made them scale successfully. In the mold of the fairytale “once upon a time” and “they all lived happily ever after” these sites have come to own their simple narrative structures and this has played a significant part in their success. Some familiar examples:
- Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought – noun (book) verb (also bought) noun (book)
- Buy it now – noun (user) verb (buy) noun (item)
- Such and such wrote on your Wall – noun (friend) verb (wrote on) noun (wall)
These simple noun-verb-noun narratives should be familiar and are very much part of the brand of these sites. This is a result of them getting these narratives to scale and ensuring there is the quality of data to back them up.
Now in order to make sure these narratives are applied consistently as the site accumilates content these structures need to be understood by your application. This means the noun-verb-noun structures must be encoded into your domain model ( and so your database) from the outset. Designing the site in this way means that as new content, pages and data are added to the site these narrative structures will be automatically created. This guarantees new pages are incorporated into the site and automatically become a scene in the sites larger story.
Weak and strong narrative structures
As we move from flat published pages to large dynamically created sites we need to think more and more about the primary narrative structures. These user journeys will be encoded into the very core of the site and you will want to be confident you have selected the right ones and that there is the data to back them up.
One of the strengths of the BBC News site is its contextual navigation with strong narrative. For example a BBC News story about Kosovo will carry an explicit user journey to the background story of the independence of Kosovo. This is in contrast to tags. Tags help to open up new user journeys but are weak in narrative, taking the form ‘this content is about this tag’. Related links also often fall into this category of weak narrative. One of the problems with rich narrative structure is that they are difficult to scale, this poses a significant challenge.
Web-scale narratives
When George Lucas was looking for a narrative structure for the beginning of his Star Wars films he used a well understood simple narrative structure, ‘once upon a time’.
He knew that this would be something that his audience would immediately understand.
The dream of the Semantic Web project follows a similar logic. Take the simple narrative structures that have been so successful in creating user journeys within large scalable websites and apply them to the web at large. This means narratives (in the form of domain models and ontologies) that are not limited to a single site. Not just ‘people who bought this on Amazon also bought this’ rather ‘people who bought this on the web also bought this’ web-scale narrative structures. This will not only help create more coherent user journeys across the web but also provides more structure to help machine understanding.
Who killed the networked fridge?
Posted on November 8, 2008
Filed Under Semantic Web | 1 Comment
One of most memorable parts of the Euro IA conference was Adam Greenfield’s comment during his keynote regarding the networked fridge.
“Unless anyone here works for Philips, I’m fairly certain that nobody in this room wants or will ever buy a networked fridge.”
http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2008/09/euroia2008_part1.php
Fair point but I wanted to revisit the concept with regard to the big challenge of this century; climate change and energy conservation. Thomas Friedman’s book Hot, Flat and Crowded is a nice summary of some of the issues and possible solutions.
The problem:
If we continue on our current path CO2 levels will double (to 560ppm) around the mid-century and will triple by 2075. A situation we have not been in for 650,000 years. We don’t know what it will be like to live in a 560ppm CO2 world let alone an 800ppm one.
“So now we have a target: We want to avoid the doubling of CO2 by mid-century, to do it we need to avoid emission of 200 billion tons of carbon as we grow between now and then.”
Thomas Friedman
Solutions:
Freidman identifies a number of targets that need to be met. One of them is to cut electricity use in homes, offices, and stores by 25%. A way that this might be achieved according to Friedman is to become more intelligent about energy use and the development of an Energy Internet. Energy distribution and consumption is currently stuck in the 50’s and has failed to embrace the IT revolution.
The concept of an Energy Internet was originally conceived in an Economist article:
“Energy visionaries imagine a “self-healing” grid with real-time sensors and “plug and play” software that can allow scattered generators or energy-storage devices to attach to it. In other words, an energy internet.”
http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_NQSGJRR
Amongst other things this would mean more intelligent appliances in the home that can negotiate their energy needs with the grid as well as communicating to the homeowner the worst offenders in growing energy bills. Friedman imagines what it might be like to live with a smart grid.
“..an Energy Internet in which every device – from light switches to air conditioners, to basement boilers, to car batteries and power lines and power stations – incoporate microchips that could inform your utility of the energy level at which it was operating, take instructions from you or your utility as to when it should operate and at what level of power, and tell your utility when it wanted to purchase or sell electricity. You and your utility now have two-way communications.”
Thomas Freidman
So the smart fridge is not dead but it just won’t be doing the weekly shop for us, it will be helping save the planet (or at least your energy bill).
Clearly ubiquitous computing is closely tied to the Semantic Web. Until machines can parse the web on our behalf we are stuck with large screens so that we can parse the data for them. The smart fridge will need Semantic Web technologies and so link into a larger body of data about our energy use; where it comes from (clean or dirty), how it is being used in the home and the damage it is doing. Targeted advertising will illustrate how new, more efficient, appliances will impact our energy use and so on into the graph…
Currently we have little context to understand our energy use and context is king when it comes to education and driving real changes in behaviour. Perhaps the Energy Internet and the tackling of one of the big problems will be the making of the Semantic Web project.
Update: The Talis people have written a nice post about semweb and the home: http://blogs.talis.com/nodalities/2008/12/smart-stuff.php
URL’s for Information Architects
Posted on November 8, 2008
Filed Under information architecture | Comments Off
Deanna Marbeck and I presented recently at the EuroIA conference in Amsterdam. The research has come on since then building on the anecdotal evidence we presented it. We hope to publish a white paper later in the year with the full research findings.
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