Dara Karr of Cnet.com reports that the Wikimedia Foundation is set to launch a new ad-free travel website, Wikivoyage. Karr writes, “Want to know more about the German spa city called Baden Baden, or ‘Bathing Bathing?’ Or how to get to Khajuraho — an Indian town known for its ancient erotic rock carvings? All this and more will be in the Wikimedia Foundation’s new travel site, called Wikivoyage. A bare-bones version of the site has already been up and running since September, but the official launch of the filled-out site is tentatively scheduled for January 15, according to Skift.” Read more

Karen Coyle recently analyzed a new release of OCLC metadata records. She writes, “OCLC recently released a file of 1.2 million metadata records for the most widely held items in its catalog. These are all items with 250 library holdings or more. I created a list on WorldCat of the top 50, mostly out of curiosity. I was quite surprised at the results, however. Here’s how it breaks down: 16 periodicals, with Time and Newsweek being numbers 1 and 2, respectively; 29 kid and YA books, four of which (and very high even in this small list) from the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series; 5 adult books.”

Coyle goes on, “The five adult books are: (1) McCullough, D. G. (1992). Truman. New York: Simon & Schuster. (2) Brown, D. (2003). The Da Vinci code: A novel. New York: Doubleday. (3) Johnson, S. (1998). Who moved my cheese?: An a-mazing way to deal with change in your work and in your life. New York: Putnam.  (4) Haley, A. (1976). Roots. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday.  (5) Peters, T. J., & Waterman, R. H. (1982). In search of excellence: Lessons from America’s best-run companies. New York: Harper & Row. This small set gives me many ideas of things to investigate in the full set.”

Read more here.

Image: Courtesy OCLC

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

The Conductrics blog has shared a list of data science and machine learning resources. The introduction states, “Every now and then I get asked for some help or for some pointers on a machine learning/data science topic.  I tend respond with links to resources by folks that I consider to be experts in the topic area.   Over time my list has gotten a little larger so I decided to put it all together in a blog post. Since it is based mostly on the questions I have received, it is by no means complete, or even close to a complete list, but hopefully it will be of some use.  Perhaps I will keep it updated, or even better yet, feel free to comment with anything you think might be of help. Also, when I think of data science, I tend to focus on Machine Learning rather than the hardware or coding aspects. If you are looking for stuff on Hadoop, or R, or Python, sorry, there really isn’t anything here.” 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

Richard Wallis of DataLiberate recently wrote, “Back in September I formed a W3C Group – Schema Bib Extend.  To quote an old friend of mine ‘Why did you go and do that then?‘  Well, as I have mentioned before Schema.org has become a bit of a success story for structured data on the web.  I would have no hesitation in recommending it as a starting point for anyone, in any sector, wanting to share structured data on the web.  This is what OCLC did in the initial exercise to publish the 270+ million resources in WorldCat.org as Linked Data. At the same time, I believe that summer 2012 was a bit of a watershed for Linked Data in the library world.  Over the preceding few years we have had various national libraries publishing linked data (British Library, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Deutsche National Bibliothek, National Library of Sweden, to name just a few).  Read more

SEMIC, the Semantic Interoperability Community recently published 10 Rules for Persistent URIs. The article states, “The attached report documents a survey performed by ISA Action 1.1 on Semantic Interoperability in order to explore good practices on the publication of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI), both in terms of format and of their design rules and management. Read more

Carl Reynolds of the Open Knowledge Foundation reports, “Last week saw the launch of prescribinganalytics.com (covered in the Economist and elsewhere). At present it’s ‘just’ a nice data visualisation of some interesting open data that show the NHS could potentially save millions from its drug budget. I say ‘just’ because we’re in discussions with several NHS organizations about providing a richer, tailored, prescribing analytics service to support the best use of NHS drug budgets. Working on the project was a lot of fun, and to my mind the work nicely shows the spectacular value of open data when combined with people and internet.” Read more

Miguel Paz of the Idea Lab recently announced that Poderopedia, a data journalism project that we have reported on recently, went into public beta last week. Paz writes, “We are pleased to invite you to Poderopedia, a project backed by Knight Foundation through its News Challenge 2011. We believe that Poderopedia will save reporters time in their reporting and will help citizens understand the relationships between people, companies and organizations that influence our daily lives. We know our 3,000 pre-registered users have been waiting several months, and therefore we want to thank them and you for your patience and support through this invitation to browse our site and review the profiles of individuals, businesses and most influential organizations in our country.” Read more

Dave Mccomb of Semantic Arts recently discussed how inspiration plays a part in designing ontologies. He writes, “It seems that there are three ways that ontologies are or can be related to applications. They are: (1) Inspiration. (2) Transformation. (3) Extension. To put this conversation in context, let’s go back to the ‘tic tac toe’ board [above]. What it is attempting to convey is that there are levels of abstraction and differences in perspective that we should consider when we are modeling. An application is in the lower middle cell. Data models are in the middle square. Ontologies could be anywhere. An ontology is a formal way of representing a model. And so we could have an ontology that describes an application, an ontology of a logical model, even ontologies of data or meta meta data.” Read more