The presence of presence as part of unified communications deployments increasingly is being felt by enterprise users. It’s paying off in better productivity, but it’s when presence gets semantic that the real magic can start to happen.

That’s something that DERI and Cisco, as part of the multi-party Lion2: Enabling Networked Knowledge project funded by Science Foundation Ireland, are exploring. The idea is to “bring more granularity and more meaning to presence than state,” says Cisco lead architect Keith Griffin – that is, an indication that you are available or away. After all, just because you’re sitting at your desk doesn’t necessarily mean you are fully or even partially available, and just because you are on the phone doesn’t necessarily mean you aren’t free to respond to instant messages. “The Semantic Web provides more intelligence to that.”

Read more

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Recently, we reported on the creation of a semantic data wrapper for the GoogleArt project. At the time, the wrapper only offered data for individual paintings and there was no good way to access the full data set. In this deeply technical guest post by the wrapper's creator, Christophe Guéret, he outlines how to grab the full data set.

If you do something interesting with this data, we would love to hear about it! Leave a comment below.]

Some weeks ago, a first version of a wrapper for the GoogleArt project from Google was put online (see also this blog post).
This wrapper, initially offering semantic data only for individual paintings, has now been extended to museums. The front page of GoogleArt is also available as RDF, providing a machine-readible list of museums. This index page makes it possible, and easy, to download an entire snapshot of the data set so let’s see how to do that.

Read more

On Tuesday in London, the Google Art Project was announced. The project includes artworks from 17 of the world’s leading institutions including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Frick Collection; the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art in Washington DC; London’s Tate Museum, and museums in Madrid, Moscow, Amsterdam and Florence, among others. The paintings are presented in High Definition, and the site has a wonderful User Interface for exploring the artworks.

Christophe Guéret noticed that there was something missing: machine-readable, semantic data. Read more

Here are two words that don’t necessarily spring first to mind when you think of implementing cutting-edge semantic web technology: Video and non-profit.

 Yet that’s exactly the direction taken by ViewChange.org , a project of Link Media’s LinkTV nationwide news, events and culture television channel and website. With funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, ViewChange.org uses video to tell stories about progress in global development, with an eye to influencing action on the part of everyone from average citizens to the media to policymakers to NGO staffers. Non-profit organizations, film distributors and individual filmmakers contribute to its own videos their documentaries, news reports, and other films to the site, and as users click through video links in featured topics, from water and sanitation to governance and transparency to environment, the site uses semantic web technologies to dynamically generate links from the video being viewed to related video media, news stories, topics and actions – links that change based on where you are in the video.   

Read more

While doing preparation for some upcoming talks, I noticed that the FOAF specification had been updated to version 0.97 in January. It had been quite some time since there had been activity on this vocabulary so it is good to see some love shown to it. According to the specification, some of the new changes include:

Read more

O’Reilly Media (http://oreilly.com/), the current name for the geek publishing giant founded by Tim O’Reilly, has finally joined the Semantic Web.  O’Reilly’s coining of the term "Web 2.0" and early misunderstandings of the Semantic Web stack lead some to think that he didn’t see much value in machine readable information.  That seems to have changed, at least in within <a href="http://labs.oreilly.com/">O’Reilly Labs</a>.

Read more