Jane Wakefield of the BBC reports that Glasgow has been awarded a £24 million grant by the British government to make it one of the UK’s first smart cities. She writes, “[Glasgow] will use the money on projects to demonstrate how a city of the future might work. They will include better services for Glaswegians, with real-time information about traffic and apps to check that buses and trains are on time. The council will also create an app for reporting issues such as potholes and missing bin collections. Other services promised by the council include linking up the CCTV cameras across the city with its traffic management unit in order to identify traffic incidents faster.” Read more

The University of Leeds is conducting a survey to determine the barriers to realizing the value of open government data. According to the survey website, “The University of Leeds, Socio-technical Centre and Centre for Integrated Energy Research, are conducting a research project on realising the value of open government data. This survey plays a key role in the project and focuses on developing understanding of: the potential barriers to improving the supply of open government data; the potential barriers to increasing the use of open data; and approaches to overcoming these potential barriers. By participating in this survey and providing your viewpoint you will be helping to shape policy, research and the wider dialogue on open data.” Read more

Marie Madden of the Galway Independent reports, “Researchers at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) in NUI Galway are leading a multi-million euro European Union initiative aimed at government transparency and giving citizens a voice in creating policies. The project, entitled ‘Puzzled by Policy’ has now launched a new widget (http://join.puzzledbypolicy.eu) that provides a fun way for users to find out about immigration policy and become actively involved in the immigration policy-making process. This unique widget encourages users to explore their opinions on various immigration topics, as well as enabling them to see how their views compare to those of policy-makers, NGOs, and other immigration stakeholders.” Read more

…and make it machine readable. Jason Miller of Federal News Radio reports, “White House technology leaders are close to issuing a new policy that will change the way agencies release data to the public. Todd Park, the federal chief technology officer, said Friday the new policy is one of several steps to spur the release of more data from agencies. ‘We are going to continue to enlist additional federal agencies in the open data initiatives program as fast track liberators of key existing data sets that could create large scale economics benefit while protecting privacy,’ Park said at the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology meeting in Washington. ‘We also, as per the recently announced Digital Government Strategy just this past summer, with OMB will be releasing policy soon that makes open and computer readable the default status of new data created by the government going forward’.” Read more

Rachel Haot of the Open Gov Partnership reports, “From hackathons to social media, open government is transforming the way that Mayor Bloomberg’s administration and New York City government serve the public. And there has been no greater testament to open government’s potential than the strategy and innovation in action during Hurricane Sandy. Learning from our experience during Hurricane Irene, in the days leading up to Hurricane Sandy’s landfall in New York City, government technologists reached out to the data science community to share recently updated hurricane evacuation zone maps based on up-to-the-minute flooding projections.” Read more

Alex Howard recently shared 14 trends to watch for in 2013. He writes, “The idea of ‘lean government‘ gained some traction in 2012, as cities and agencies experimented with applying the lean startup approach to the public sector. With GOV.UK, the British government both redefined the online government platform and showed how citizen-centric design can be done right. In 2013, the worth of a lean government approach will be put to the test when the work of the White House Innovation Fellows is released.” Similarly, “Gartner analyst Andrea DiMaio is now looking at the intersection of government and technology through the lens of ‘smart government.’ In 2013, I expect to hear much more about that, from smartphones to smarter cities to smart disclosure.” Read more

The team at Nextgov reports, “The team that manages Data.gov is well on its way to making the government data repository open source using a new back-end called the Open Government Platform, officials said during a Web discussion Wednesday. The governments of India and Ghana have already launched beta versions of their data catalogues on the open source platform, said Jeanne Holm who heads the Data.gov team. Government developers from the U.S. and India built the OGPL jointly. They posted it to the code sharing site GitHub where other nations and developers can adopt it as is or amend it to meet their specific needs.” Read more

In December, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Eric Franzon, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about the newly launched Open Data Institute (ODI) in the UK, and “the Linkers” were joined by a special guest: Nigel Shadbolt, Chairman and Co-Founder of the ODI. You can learn more about the ODI here.
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Courtesy: Flickr/LadyDragonflyCC <3

Yesterday we began our look back at the year in semantic technology here. Today we continue with more expert commentary on the year in review:

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead:

I would mention two things (among many, of course).

•  Schema.org had an important effect on semantic technologies. Of course, it is controversial (role of one major vocabulary and its relations to others, the community discussions on the syntax, etc.), but I would rather concentrate on the positive aspects. A few years ago the topic of discussion was whether having ‘structured data’, as it is referred to (I would simply say having RDF in some syntax or other), as part of a Web page makes sense or not. There were fairly passionate discussions about this and many were convinced that doing that would not make any sense, there is no use case for it, authors would not use it and could not deal with it, etc. Well, this discussion is over. Structured data in Web sites is here to stay, it is important, and has become part of the Web landscape. Schema.org’s contribution in this respect is very important; the discussions and disagreements I referred to are minor and transient compared to the success. And 2012 was the year when this issue was finally closed.
•  On a very different aspect (and motivated by my own personal interest) I see exciting moves in the library and the digital publishing world. Many libraries recognize the power of linked data as adopted by libraries, of the value of standard cataloging techniques well adapted to linked data, of the role of metadata, in the form of linked data, adopted by journals and soon by electronic books… All these will have a profound influence bringing a huge amount of very valuable data onto the Web of Data, linking to sources of accumulated human knowledge. I have witnessed different aspects of this evolution coming to the fore in 2012, and I think this will become very important in the years to come.

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Courtesy: Flickr/zoetnet

As we close out 2012, we’ve asked some semantic tech experts to give us their take on the year that was. Was Big Data a boon for the semantic web, or is the opportunity to capitalize on the connection still pending? Is structured data on the web not just the future but the present? What sector is taking a strong lead in the semantic web space?

We begin with Part 1, with our experts listed in alphabetical order:

John Breslin, lecturer at NUI Galway, researcher and unit leader at DERI, creator of SIOC, and co-founder of Technology Voice and StreamGlider:
I think the schema.org initiative really gaining community support and a broader range of terms has been fantastic. It’s been great to see an easily understandable set of terms for describing the objects in web pages, but also leveraging the experience of work like GoodRelations rather than ignoring what has gone before. It’s also been encouraging to see the growth of Drupal 7 (which produces RDFa data) in the government sector: Estimates are that 24 percent of .gov CMS sites are now powered by Drupal.

Martin Böhringer, CEO & Co-Founder Hojoki:

For us it was very important to see Jena, our Semantic Web framework, becoming an Apache top-level project in April 2012. We see a lot of development pace in this project recently and see a chance to build an open source Semantic Web foundation which can handle cutting-edge requirements.

Still disappointing is the missing link between Semantic Web and the “cool” technologies and buzzwords. From what we see Semantic Web gives answers to some of the industry’s most challenging problems, but it still doesn’t seem to really find its place in relation to the cloud or big data (Hadoop).

Christine Connors, Chief Ontologist, Knowledgent:

One trend that I have seen is increased interest in the broader spectrum of semantic technologies in the enterprise. Graph stores, NoSQL, schema-less and more flexible systems, ontologies (& ontologists!) and integration with legacy systems. I believe the Big Data movement has had a positive impact on this field. We are hearing more and more about “Big Data Analytics” from our clients, partners and friends. The analytical power brought to bear by the semantic technology stack is sparking curiosity – what is it really? How can these models help me mitigate risk, more accurately predict outcomes, identify hidden intellectual assets, and streamline business processes? Real questions, tough questions: fun challenges!

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