Courtesy: Flickr/jjorogen

September’s getting closer, and for just about everyone, the coming turn of the calendar page brings to mind thoughts of the school year ahead. More specifically, for educators and students, the new school year is just as likely to call up images of iPad tablets and smart-boards as it is to bring forth memories of freshly sharpened pencils and blackboards.

But it’s still probably true that dreams of Linked Data don’t dance through their heads as they contemplate the curricula. But that will change, especially in higher education, where online and remote learning increasingly plays a role — and sooner rather than later.  A paper published earlier this summer, Linked Data for Open and Distance Learning, provides some interesting perspective on the idea. Authored by Mathieu d’Aquin, Research Fellow, Knowledge Media Institute at The Open University, it explores how Linked Data can revolutionize the arena of open and distance learning.

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Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the Web, featured during the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony

As you’ve probably noticed, the 2012 Olympics are underway in London right now. A massive logistical exercise and a global spectacle, the Games have also given the BBC another opportunity to impress with their semantic technology skills. And impress they most certainly do. Only, I can’t help feeling this was a missed opportunity for a bolder and more modern piece of data sharing, more in keeping with both the Olympics spirit and Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s tweet during his appearance at the Opening Ceremony; ‘this is for everyone.’ Read more

On Friday, July 13, 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 with Nick Holzherr, finalist on the BBC One Television Series, “The Apprentice,” and founder of Whisk, a recipe planning idea based on big data and semantic analysis. He was named ‘emerging entrepreneur of the year’ by Insider Magazine in 2010, and Birmingham Young Personality of the Year (Entrepreneurship) in 2011.
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Anthony Myers of CMS Wire recently shared a few highlights from SemTechBiz SF. He writes, “Semantic Web technology is slowly changing the way people use the Internet, and SemTech 2012 is a prime showcase for the best minds in linked data, enterprise solutions and interactive Web experiences. That’s because semantic technology is approaching widestream adoption, and Google’s recent launch of the Knowledge Graph platform is one such manifestation of the technology’s mainstream appeal. At day three of the SemTech 2012 Conference in San Francisco, companies such as Google, Microsoft, NASA, the BBC and the New York Times gathered to present their visions on Web standards of the future. Specifically, many presenters focused on how they are using linked data to better locate, relate and translate content for the best possible Web experience.” Read more

fluid Operations’ Information Workbench is part of the semantic infrastructure supporting the BBC’s revolutionary coverage of the 2012 Olympic Games.  Below is a conversation with fluid Operations Senior Architect for Research & Development Michael Schmidt in advance of his 2012 Semantic Technology and Business Conference presentation. This conversation is a supplement to the series “Dynamic Semantic Publishing for Beginners.”

Q. Is the Information Workbench a response to the need for more robust applications to help process “Big Data”? How is it different than other popular tools?

A. Dealing with Big Data involves a number of different challenges, including increasing volume (amount of data), complexity (of schemas and structures), and variety (range of data types, sources).

However, most Big Data solutions available on the market today focus on volume only, in particular supporting vertical scalability (greater operating capacity, efficiency, and speed.)   This means that such solutions mainly address the analysis of large volumes of similarly structured data sets. Yet the Big Data problem is not fully solved only by technologies that help you process similarly structured data more quickly and efficiently.

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Paul Wilton was Technical and development lead for semantic publishing at BBC News and Sport Online during the 2010 World Cup.  Currently he is the Technical architect at Ontoba.  In this interview, a supplement to “Dynamic Semantic Publishing for Beginners”, Paul describes the current landscape for DSP as it applies to news organizations.

Q. Are you seeing a wide disparity in the way that news organizations have approached the creation and use of semantically-linked (or annotated) content?

A. Actually the pattern and often the (general) technical architecture is surprisingly similar. Where things differ are the applications, models used and instance data. This is undoubtedly bleeding edge technology, and typically the impetus to begin investigating the use of linked data, RDF and semantics in the technology stack has come from within the Information Architecture and R&D teams, not from the offices of the CTO/CIO. Maybe this is starting to change now.

Q. Do many news organizations have the resources (staff and/or Content Management Systems) that are able to publish and use semantic data?

A. Not in our experience, but this shouldn’t be a barrier to integrating semantic technologies and publishing linked data.

The key components to adopting semantic publishing – a semantic repository (triple store); appropriate linked data sets; and the ability to semantically annotate your content – can be built alongside an existing Content Management System. Read more

Semantic technology is scoring more goals in the sports world. The BBC, for example, which created the FIFA World Cup 2010 website that leveraged semantic technology, is at it again as London prepares for the 2012 Summer Olympics. Brazil has gotten into the action, too, with an Internet portal there taking soccer to the semantic web set. At the upcoming SemTech conference in San Francisco, attendees will have an opportunity to hear the latest details about both efforts.

Over at the BBC, for example, the 2012 Olympics site accompanies a completely redesigned BBC Sports site, both based on technology including Fluid Operations’ Information Workbench to support the editorial process for the BBC’s Dynamic Semantic Publishing strategy, from authoring and curation to publishing of ontology and instance data following an editorial workflow. The BBC environment since the World Cup also has been updated to use the MarkLogic document store for managing rapidly changing statistics, navigation and ultimately all content objects, as lead architect Jem Rayfield described it in this blog posting. Today, the triple store that’s been behind the BBC’s past work is extended to cover every team, athlete, venue, discipline, country and so on, Rayfield told The Semantic Web Blog.

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Mo McRoberts of BBC recently shared a few data guides that have emerged as part of the Digital Public Space project, a project “which uses Semantic Web technology as a way to help unlock the value in the archives of the BBC and other publicly-funded institutions.” McRoberts writes, “When we spoke with project partners – and others – about publishing data in a form which makes it possible to have journeys through machine-readable catalogue data similar to the journeys through human-oriented documents that we normally experience on the Web, the reaction was overwhelmingly positive, but organisations weren’t necessarily sure about the nuts and bolts of actually doing it.” Read more

The BBC has been working on automatically tagging their audio archives with DBpedia identifiers. Yves Raimond explains how the broadcast company is handling the project. Raimond writes, “One dataset we are looking at within this project is the World Service archive. This archive is isolated from other programme data sources at the BBC, like BBC Programmes or the Genome Project, and the associated programme data within it is very sparse. It would therefore benefit a lot from being automatically interlinked with further data sources which makes it such a particularly interesting use-case. The archive is also very large: it covers many decades and consists of about two and a half years of high-quality continuous audio content.” Read more

In 2005, I started learning about the so-called Semantic Web. It wasn’t till 2008, the same year I started my PhD, that I finally understood what the Semantic Web was really about. At the time, I made a $1000 bet with 3 college buddies that the Semantic Web would be mainstream by the time I finished my PhD. I know I’m going to win! In this post, I will argue why.

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