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

The W3C has opened a new office in Russia. According to the official release, “The Office is hosted by the National Research University ‘Higher School of Economics’ (HSE), founded in 1992. As one of Moscow’s leading Universities, HSE will work with W3C to strengthen ties to both industry and research in Russia as well as HSE’s many international academic and industry partners.” 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A new Threaded Publications ontology seeks to make unpublished research more easily searchable. The article states, “Unpublished research is a serious problem for evidence-based decision making in healthcare, and this was recently highlighted on BBC Radio 4’sToday programme and in an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to present the totality of the evidence, and a problem for those preparing and maintaining these reviews is how to find unpublished studies and data.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

Boris Villazon-Terrazas reports that the Ontology Engineering Group has announced the launch of datos.bne.es, “an open initiative aimed at enriching the Web of Data with library data from the Spanish National Library. The SPARQL endpoint is available here. The RDF generation from MARC 21 records was done using our tool MARiMbA, which allows non-technical users to work on the mappings from MARC21 metadata to RDF using different RDFS/OWL vocabularies.” Read more

The White House’s Open Government Initiative has published a toolkit of twenty resources for open data innovators. According to the toolkit website, “President Obama emphasizes a ‘bottom-up’ philosophy that taps citizen expertise to make government smarter and more responsive to private sector demands. This philosophy of ‘open innovation’ has already delivered tangible results in public and regulated sectors of the economy – areas like health IT, learning technologies, and smart grid – that are poised to deliver productivity growth and grow the jobs of the future.” Read more

Luc Moreau recently reported on the current status of the W3C‘s Provenance Data Model. He wrote, “The Provenance Working Group began its activities with a charter naming some 17 concepts relevant to provenance, such as resource, process execution, use, derivation, version, etc. For the first 3 months leading to our first face to face meeting, we debated definitions for these concepts. Importantly, for the social cohesion of the group, we developed a common vocabulary shared by members to communicate.” Read more