Julia Wetherfell of Tech President reports, “Last summer, the Japanese government announced a new open data strategy, with the intention of connecting the country’s governmental, industrial, and academic sectors. Now Japan is set to have a record year for open data projects, with open government advocates leading the way. Global Voices reported yesterday on a cluster of civic hacking events occurring this winter. An Open Data Day was held in Yokohama last weekend, where participating developers worked to make public services and cultural resources more accessible to citizens and visitors to the city. Japan’s branch of the Open Knowledge Foundation, founded last summer, is partnering with Hack for Japan, established following the 2011 earthquake, to run events in Tokyo and elsewhere for International Open Data Day on February 23.” Read more

Siri’s coming to Japan, but not to Apple TV. And, in a limited way, it may have made its way into the iPad, too.

Previous to the Apple event today, there had been speculation that an Apple iTV would be unveiled that reportedly would integrate Siri semantic-enabled voice technology into TV sets for viewers to use to speech-select their program choices. But the Apple TV accessory that was unveiled was, as noted here, an upgrade, not an overhaul, including support for video in 1080p.

Among the new iPad’s big features are its support for next-generation 4G LTE, HSPA+ and dual-channel HSDPA networks, and its retina display: 31 million pixels with resolution of 2048 by 1536 pixels. During the press conference Marketing chief Phil Schiller called it the best mobile display that ever shipped.

Less was made in the online coverage of the event of its inclusion of voice dictation, with a new built-in mike on the virtual keyboard. However, that may be coming courtesy of Siri. Over at 9to5Mac, a January story discussed the finding of an “About Dictation and Privacy” link in the keyboard menu for a beta of iOS 5.1 running on an iPad. When opened it provided the user with the standard legal literature and feature information for Siri Dictation, the report said, and considered that this might indicate that this will be an iPad 3 feature.

What iOS 5.1, which is available for download today, does for sure include is Siri in Japanese for iPhone 4S users. The big question is now, will it have to deal with the Siri brand issue for Japanese speakers that was first raised with the initial roll-out of the intelligent personal assistant? If you don’t recall, the talk then was that Siri in Japanese means buttocks.

According to a recent article, “A new lightweight web service interface for accessing massive amounts of life science research data across multiple public and private domains has been developed by researchers at RIKEN, Japan’s flagship research institute. Through the powerful RIKEN Scientists’ Networking System (SciNetS), the service provides a secure, flexible and light weight interface to millions of data records and their network of semantic relationships, ushering in a new era of collaboration, analysis and information-sharing for life science research and applied innovation.” Read more

A new article from the New York Times discusses the multitude of improvements that transparent data can have on our everyday lives: “Governments have learned a cheap new way to improve people’s lives. Here is the basic recipe: Take data that you and I have already paid a government agency to collect, and post it online in a way that computer programmers can easily use. Then wait a few months. Voilà! The private sector gets busy, creating Web sites and smartphone apps that reformat the information in ways that are helpful to consumers, workers and companies.” Read more

KISTI (Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information) and MOJ (Ministry of Justice of Korea) have provided a W3C Semantic Web Case Study on an intelligent Legislation Support System (iLaw). The system integrates legislation texts and academic articles from the USA, Japan, the European Union Countries, and Korea using Semantic Web technologies. Using locally developed ontologies, iLaw provides further relationships, shows trends and related hierarchical information connected with a legal term to local government departments; in doing so, iLaw helps legislators to review bills or legal cases in a wider, more comprehensive and international legal framework.

I was a bit … weird … as a teenager. As part of an Air Force family we moved frequently, and like most teenagers trying to distinguish themselves from their peers, I tried to use my strengths – an active intellect and an ease at working with abstractions – as a way of establishing myself in the new schools I constantly found myself in. I was the "smart kid", the one who took to carrying around large books with titles such as "Principia Mathematica" by Bertrand Russell and Whitehead Alfred North in order to impress people with my intelligence (okay, so perhaps my social intelligence was not quite as well developed at that stage).

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