Cait O’Riordan recently explained the many changes to the BBC Sport Website. O’Riordan writes, “This redesign is the first major launch of many this year as we get ready to cover the Olympic Games this summer. We are working on some really exciting developments, which will be showcased on the new BBC Sport website. This redesign has concentrated on doing four main things: (1) Creating a fresh website that better showcases the range of content we offer. (2) Prominent promotion of our fantastic live coverage from across the BBC. (3) Making it easier for our users to talk about our sport coverage. (4) Making it faster for our users to find our great content. We have tried to do this in a way that makes the site easier to use for the millions of people from across the UK and around the world who use the site every week and are confident it will. But we know that, initially at least, the site will take a bit of getting used to.” Read more

Semantic Tech & Business Conference Returns to San Francisco

Semantic Tech & Business Conference returns to San Francisco in June! Join us from June 3-7 for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. We're offering a special early rate when you register by February 17. Sign up now!

The Open Knowledge Foundation’s CKAN software has been chosen to power the European Commission’s new open data portal. The article reports, “The European Commission (EC) has awarded a contract to create an open data portal website, where data produced by European Commission services will be freely available. Belgian company TenForce will lead the project to deliver the portal, supported by Leipzig University’s Institute for Applied Computer Science (InfAI), and UK-based non-profit the Open Knowledge Foundation. Users will be able to search for information in a flexible range of ways, for example by subject area, country, and region, and to visualise the data or download it for re-use in research, campaigns or commercial applications. The EC and the contracted partners will run workshops and other outreach activities, to raise awareness of and interest in the data among companies, researchers, journalists and policy groups.” Read more

Andrew Phelps reports, “Data nerds from government and academia gathered Friday at Northeastern University to show off the latest version of Weave, an open-source, web-based platform designed to visualize ‘any available data by anyone for any purpose.’ The software has a lot of potential for journalists. Weave is supported by the Open Indicators Consortium, an unusual partnership of planning agencies and universities who wanted better tools to inform public policy and community decision-making. The groups organized and agreed to share data and code in 2008, well before Gov 2.0 was hot.” Read more

I often read blogs and watch conference presentations extolling the virtues and benefits of adopting Semantic Web and Linked Data techniques & technologies. It makes me wonder how those new to the field ever get through the blizzard of acronyms and techno-speak, to understand what is being promoted and how it might be relevant to them and their business.  In this post I will attempt to demystify and identify the core benefits of Linked Data without burying you in LD-speak!

Let me start with the web itself.  Imagine if you will that you have just returned from desert island exile for the last decade and a half. You are introduced to the web and start using Google searching to find out what this web thing is all about. You are assailed with an overwhelming array of acronyms terms and concepts – Ajax, Javascript, HTML, CSS, HTTP, XML, DOM, URL, Flash, RDFa, JSON, Microformats, SEO – argh! where do you begin?  However after some digging it becomes clear that there is a blindingly simple concept at the core that only uses three of them: HTML – a simple markup language to describe how a web page should be laid out, URL – a globally unique way to address a page on the Internet, HTTP – a simple way to request and receive a page across the Internet. Read more

Adrian Pohl reports that the German National Library has decided to go Linked Open Data and publish the national bibliography. Pohl writes, “Good news from Germany. The German National Library (1) changed its licensing regime for Linked Data to CC0 which makes the data open according to the open definition, (2) has begun to publish the German national bibliography as Linked Open Data.” Pohl translates an email announcing this development thus: “In 2010 the German National Library (DNB) started publishing authority data as Linked Data. The existing Linked Data service of the DNB is now extended with title data. In this context the licence for linked data is shifted to Creative Commons Zero.” Read more

Paul A. Houle, founder of Ontology2 recently reported that his company has announced “the beta release of the Ookaboo RDF Dump, which contains metadata for nearly 1,000,000 public domain and Creative Commons images of more than 500,000 specific topics from Dbpedia and Freebase. The Ookaboo RDF dump is released under a CC-BY-SA license that is friendly to both academic and commericial use. With precision in excess of 0.98, Ookaboo enables entirely new applications for image search and classification.” Read more

Over the last two years Wikipedia has benefited from a number of Wikipedians in Residence, people who make data from the cultural institutions they work at available to Wikipedia. The article states, “It was just under two years ago when Liam Wyatt proposed a concept that seemed so bold, it required the British Museum to run a risk assessment before they’d agree to it. Liam suggested that he serve as the ‘Wikipedian in Residence,’ a role that would allow him to put into practice the idea that cultural institutions should share their knowledge with Wikipedia.” Read more

The Open Knowledge Foundation is currently accepting submissions for the Panton Fellowship. According to the fellowship website, “The Panton Fellowships, funded by Open Society Foundations and coordinated by the Open Knowledge Foundation, will be awarded to scientists who actively promote open data in science. We believe that ‘open data means better science’. Panton Fellows will explore and support this concept. They will endorse the Panton Principles for making scientific data open, and will promote the value of open data in all areas of science.” Read more

Steve Hamby proclaims that 2012 is the year of the Semantic Web. He starts by quoting Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the semantic web back in 1996: “If the interaction between person and hypertext could be so intuitive that the machine-readable information space gave an accurate representation of the state of people’s thoughts, interactions, and work patterns, then machine analysis could become a very powerful management tool, seeing patterns in our work and facilitating our working together through the typical problems which beset the management of large organizations.” Read more