The Second International Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives, and Museums Summit has announced the finalists of the LODLAM Challenge. The finalists were broken into two heats. In the first heat, the finalists are Free Your Metadata, ReLOAD, and Linked Jazz. In the second heat, the finalists are Pundit and Mismuseos.net. The LODLAM team commented, “This rounds out the slate of 5 challenge finalists that will be competing head-to-head at the LODLAM Summit June 19-20, 2013 in Montreal. All finalists have earned travel grants for the trip to Montreal and the chance to win a $2000USD cash prize. A big thank-you to all the teams who submitted entries. It was great to see such creativity and wide range of ideas. The LODLAM community rose to the challenge and amazed us.” Read more

Todd Park

Justin Kern of Information Management reports, “The U.S. government is outlining its new program for an open source repository to foster collaboration on getting more information to citizens in a faster manner. Federal CTO Todd Park formally introduced Project Open Data on Thursday in a blog post, and gave an update on its first days of activity. In the first 24 hours after Project Open Data was published, more than two dozen contributors submitted to its GitHub platform, including fixes to broken Web links and policy input. Other, meatier contributions, or ‘pull requests,’ included a tool that converts spreadsheets and databases into APIs for ease of use by developers, and code that translates geographic data from locked formats into open, available formats, according to Park.” Read more

Prachi Patel of IEEE Spectrum reports, “Farmers today produce three times as much food as they did 50 years ago using just 12 percent more land, thanks to new technologies and better farming practices. But the global playing field isn’t level. In Africa, farmers produce a fraction of what they could, according to the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa, and most barely get by, struggling against infertile soil, drought, and diseases. Helping farmers—in Africa and elsewhere—produce more will be key to lifting millions out of poverty and sustainably feeding a world population of 9 billion in 2050. Food-policy experts believe that a crucial step toward that goal is to give farmers, scientists, and entrepreneurs unhindered access to agricultural data which is generated at research centers worldwide.” Read more

Danny Palmer of Computing.co.uk reports, “US President Barack Obama has signed an executive order that requires government agencies to make publicly accessible data open and machine readable. ‘Government information shall be managed as an asset throughout its life cycle to promote interoperability and openness, and, wherever possible and legally permissible, to ensure that data are released to the public in ways that make the data easy to find, accessible, and usable,’ reads the Open Data Policy order. In 2009, Obama pledged to make his administration the most open in the history of US government. The administration hopes that innovators, including researchers and entrepreneurs, will be able to examine and use the data to benefit the country.” Read more

BOSTON, May 8, 2013 /PRNewswire-iReach/ — karmadata officially introduced its freemium website (www.karmadata.com) and API (www.karmadata.com/API) to the global data community at the Data 2.0 Summit held April 30th in San Francisco.  karmadata’s website enables users to find, visualize, and share data of interest to them and their social networks.  The karmadata API provides standardized linked data from the world’s data sources, allowing developers to design and build their own applications. Read more

Alex Howard of O’Reilly Radar reports, “After years of steady growth, open data is now entering into public discourse, particularly in the public sector. If President Barack Obama decides to put the White House’s long-awaited new open data mandate before the nation this spring, it will finally enter the mainstream. As more governments, businesses, media organizations and institutions adopt open data initiatives, interest in the evidence behind  release and the outcomes from it is similarly increasing. High hopes abound in many sectors, from development to energy to health to safety to transportation. ‘Today, the digital revolution fueled by open data is starting to do for the modern world of agriculture what the industrial revolution did for agricultural productivity over the past century,’ said Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, speaking at the G-8 Open Data for Agriculture Conference.” Read more

Jean-Claude Bradley of Chemistry World recently wrote, “Almost a decade ago, the term ‘podcasting’ grabbed society’s imagination. Although sharing audio and video files over the internet had been possible for some time, the technology for creating, disseminating and following media reached a critical mass for the average internet user. Predictably, this situation represented different opportunities for different factions of the ideological spectrum. At one end, some saw new means to monetise their skill sets and products. At the other end, another group recognised a means for the radical sharing of knowledge. For the majority, the opportunities lay somewhere in the middle – for example, freely sharing some content with the hope of selling another portion, or freely sharing content but with restrictions on its use.” Read more

Jonathan Gray of the OKF reports, “On Tuesday President Obama unveiled a new $100 million research initiative to map the human brain. The BRAIN (Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) initiative will ‘accelerate the development and application of new technologies that will enable researchers to produce dynamic pictures of the brain that show how individual brain cells and complex neural circuits interact at the speed of thought.’ As well as trying to vastly improve scientific understanding of ‘the three pounds of matter that sits between our ears’, it is hoped that this research will enable new forms of prevention and treatment for conditions like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, autism and epilepsy.” Read more

The Research Data Alliance (RDA) was recently formed with the goal of accelerating international data-driven innovation and discovery. It aims to get there by facilitating the sharing and exchange of research data, its use and re-use, standards harmonization, and discoverability.

Funded by The Australian Commonwealth Government through the Australian National Data Service, the European Commission through the iCordi project under the 7th Framework Program, and the U.S. through the RDA/US activity supported by the National Science Foundation, it began its work last August when it established an international steering group with these funds. In March, it held its first plenary meeting and had its official launch.

Dr. Francine Berman, Professor of Computer Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is Chair of the Research Data Alliance/U.S. The Semantic Web Blog recently conducted a  Q&A with her to learn more about RDA plans:

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John Kennedy of Silicon Republic reports, “Ireland’s State broadcaster RTÉ, as part of its strategy to preserve the memories of a nation in digital form, is to collaborate with SFI’s recently announced mega CSET the Insight Centre to employ big data and the semantic web to make hundreds of thousands of hours of audio and video content available at the touch of a button. In a collaboration announced at the European Data Forum in Dublin this morning, RTÉ will work with the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) in Galway and the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) to make sure that content going back over 60 years can be accessed digitally.” Read more