The European Commission has launched a month-long public consultation to investigate the problem of “incompatible vocabularies used by developers of public administration IT systems. ‘Core vocabularies’ are used to make sharing and reusing data easier, and the EC hopes that if they are defined properly, it will be able to quickly and effectively launch e-Government cross-border services. The EC has divided the consultation into three separate core vocabularies; person, business and location.” Read more

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The Open Knowledge Foundation has announced a new Finnish data journalism app contest. THe contest is being organized by Finland’s leading national newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, in order to find better data visualizations. The post states, “For many journalists today, it’s not a lack of open data that’s the problem, but a lack of the skills and off-the-shelf visualizations needed to make that open data useful to them. A year ago, the Finnish government decided that in principle all data generated with taxpayer money should be free.” Read more

Mark Ballard has commented on the UK’s Department of Business, Innovation and Skills’ recent action to dissolve the Public Data Corporation “while its confused policy Cabinet joint Office initiative team works out how to make open data workable. The Cabinet Office rushed out a revamped Open Data strategy on 29 November, ‘delivering on its commitment to establish a Public Data Corporation’. BIS had already established the Public Data Corporation as a private company on 11 November 2010. But the company had laid dormant for a year while the departments and the Local Public Data Panel worked out how to get an HM data-set free-for-all round the vast bellies of such comfortable institutions as the Ordnance Survey, Land Registry and Met Office.” Read more

A new Threaded Publications ontology seeks to make unpublished research more easily searchable. The article states, “Unpublished research is a serious problem for evidence-based decision making in healthcare, and this was recently highlighted on BBC Radio 4’sToday programme and in an entire issue of the BMJ. Systematic reviews aim to present the totality of the evidence, and a problem for those preparing and maintaining these reviews is how to find unpublished studies and data. But, even when clinical trials are reported in journals and their supplements the formats and descriptions are widely heterogeneous and studies can remain difficult to discover and challenging to compare with similar trials.” Read more

Evan Sandhaus reports for the New York Times that rNews has finally arrived. He explains, “On January 23rd, 2012, The Times made a subtle change to articles published on nytimes.com. We rolled out phase one of our implementation of rNews – a new standard for embedding machine-readable publishing metadata into HTML documents. Many of our users will never see the change but the change will likely impact how they experience the news. Far beneath the surface of nytimes.com lurk the databases — databases of articles, metadata and images, databases that took tremendous effort to develop, databases that the world only glimpses through the dark lens of HTML.” Read more

Manu Sporny writes, “Google is building a gigantic Knowledge Graph that will change search forever. The purpose of the graph is to understand the conceptual “things” on a web page and produce better search results for the world. Clearly, the people and companies that end up in this Knowledge Graph first will have a huge competitive advantage over those that do not. So, what can you do today to increase your organization’s chances of ending up in this Knowledge Graph, and thus ending up higher in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs)?” Read more

James Hendler was recently interviewed regarding the state of the World Wide Web and advances in semantic technology. Asked about the proliferation of the web, Hendler commented, “The Web is changing very fast and it has a very rapid effect on our economy. Consider something like aeroplanes which, as a subject, has been studied all along. On the contrary, the Web has happened so fast and hit so many places that we never really had time to understand it. Many of the periodical works on the Web are being done on the data collected in 1999. In 1999 Facebook didn’t exist. Twitter didn’t exist. A lot of people study Twitter. But again that is just one thing. Wikipedia has been successful, while most ‘wikis’ have failed. Online, we are now discovering the power of the (individual’s) voice and governments do not know how to deal with it.” Read more

Velichka Dimitrova of the Open Knowledge Foundation has called attention to an open data project that is trying to reduce animal testing by improving collaborative scientific research. She writes, “Effectopedia is a project of the International QSAR Foundation. Effectopedia itself is an open knowledge aggregation and collaboration tool that provides a means of describing adverse outcome pathways (AOPs) in an encyclopedic manner. Effectopedia defines internal organizational space which helps scientist with different backgrounds to know exactly where their knowledge belongs and aids them in identifying both the larger context of their research and the individual experts who might be actively interested in it.” Read more

Tracey Mustacchio has written a new article regarding the third wave of network innovation. Mustacchio writes, “Technology has dramatically altered the world we live in. Network technologies in particular have played a central role in shaping the economies and societies of the twenty-first century. One of the most important innovations in networking was, of course, the creation of the Internet—which allowed us to connect physical hosts anywhere and everywhere on the planet to each other… This physical connectivity was soon followed by the creation of the World Wide Web—invented by Tim Berners-Lee.” Read more

On Friday, February 10, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about data; specifically, the recently announced “wikidata” project with special guest, Denny Vrandecic.
At the recent SemTechBiz Berlin conference, Denny presented a talk titled, “Wikidata: The Next Big Thing for Wikipedia.” As evidenced in the “Wow’s” expressed by the panelists in this month’s podcast call, this is indeed a big deal for Wikipedia and for Semantic Web. Read more