As Linked Data matures across the web – courtesy of efforts such as that underway by the Linked Data Platform Working Group to mandate publishing data in RDF and to use the HTTP protocol, (see our story here) – anyone running a website is going to need to know how to manage it. That, says Geoffrey Bock, principal at strategic marketing and insight services firm  Bock & Company, is going to make the popular Drupal platform for managing web content even more important.

Drupal 7 brought to the platform the ability to manage semantic metadata by incorporating RDF as a core capability, in a module that outputs RDFa. From the end user’s point of view the task of managing the metadata is made very easy through the familiar editing environment, says Bock. He will be co-hosting the session, How Drupal 7 Manages Linked Data for Smart Web Experiences, at the SemTechBiz conference in San Francisco in June. He’ll be joined by Stéphane Corlosquet, software enginner at Acquia Inc., the company co-founded by Drupal creator Dries Buytaert, which provides cloud, SaaS, and other services to organizations building websites on Drupal. Corlosquet was a critical force in bringing semantic web capabilities to Drupal’s core, with roles including being the maintainer of the RDF module in Drupal 7 a member of the Drupal security team.

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Mary O’Leary of the New Haven Register recently wrote, “As a state, Connecticut has plenty of data on firearm violence from medical and law enforcement sources. But it’s never had a central repository where it can be linked and made available for fundamental research on which to base policy. Ready with a solution to aggregate and integrate this information in a new program is the Institute for the Study of Violent Groups at the University of New Haven in conjunction with the Lee College Center for Analytics and a professor from Yale University’s Department of Emergency Medicine.” Read more

Silk, a company we have highlighted in the past, recently unveiled two new tools, the new CSV importer and the Silk bookmarklet. According to the company, “When you start a Silk site you can begin from scratch, but you might already have some data lying around. If this is the case, Silk makes your life a bit easier by offering the CSV Importer. This tool can automatically create a page for every row in a spreadsheet. You can use this for your own spreadsheets or for publicly available datasets. The only caveat is that your spreadsheet must be exported as a CSV file. CSV stands for Comma-Separated Values. It is the most common and easy way to format rows of data. Every well known spreadsheet program can export to this file format.” Read more

Alex Howard of O’Reilly Radar reports, “After years of steady growth, open data is now entering into public discourse, particularly in the public sector. If President Barack Obama decides to put the White House’s long-awaited new open data mandate before the nation this spring, it will finally enter the mainstream. As more governments, businesses, media organizations and institutions adopt open data initiatives, interest in the evidence behind  release and the outcomes from it is similarly increasing. High hopes abound in many sectors, from development to energy to health to safety to transportation. ‘Today, the digital revolution fueled by open data is starting to do for the modern world of agriculture what the industrial revolution did for agricultural productivity over the past century,’ said Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, speaking at the G-8 Open Data for Agriculture Conference.” Read more

It’s time to get real with Linked Data. The World Wide Web Consortium’s Linked Data Platform Working Group, convened almost a year ago, is on the case, with expectations by June to publish a last call working draft of the specification, and to have a final recommendation, the last stage of the W3C’s standards process, by early next year.

“The Linked Data Platform is expanding on the concept [originally] put forward by Tim Berners-Lee on his web site, to turn it into a specification,” says Arnaud J. Le Hors, co-chair of the working group and IBM’s Linked Data Standards Lead. He will address the work at this session during next month’s SemTechBiz conference in San Francisco.

Why the need to formalize Linked Data?  While there is a fairly significant list of W3C standards around the Semantic Web, the more loosely-defined Linked Data has led to an environment where interoperability suffers. That’s because people are left to solve the same problems, such as those around publishing and retrieving data, over and over again, and they take different paths to get there, Le Hors says. The guides that are out there are just that, guides, with people free to use or ignore them, if they can even find them – which in itself isn’t easy to do for those who aren’t well-informed members of the community, he says.

The Linked Data Platform extends the model to provide the industry with a formal definition for read-write access to Linked Data; it mandates publishing data in a standard format, RDF, and using a standard protocol, HTTP, “which is completely symmetrical with the way the web works today, with HTML and HTTP,” Le Hors says.

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Shahid Qadri has written an article for Med City News about how to use WebID to create single sign-on access for health care systems. He writes, “The Simple Sign-on challenge sponsored by the ONC through the Health 2.0 challenge was an exciting opportunity for us to learn about a sophisticated technology protocol and then being able to hack several open source system to implement a single sign on solution based on the protocol. This was a challenge that was truly a ‘challenge’ for me, but an exciting and rewarding one (our solution was the second place winner!).” Read more

The Financial reports, “Unlocking the future—that was the theme Rick Rashid, Microsoft chief research officer, used to close his opening remarks April 23 during the first day of the Microsoft Research Machine Learning Summit 2013… ‘This topic of machine learning has become incredibly exciting over the last 10 years,’ [Rashid] said. ‘The pace of change has been really dramatic, so it’s exciting to get so many people from so many different areas to be here today to talk about it.’ Rashid recalled a time in the not-so-recent past when machine learning was in its nascent stage, using rules and pattern recognition to produce results many found less than stellar. But today, he stated, a combination of data, devices, and services has led to newfound respect for the discipline, which is having an increasingly dramatic impact on business and society.” Read more

LOS ANGELES–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Geni.com, the leader in collaborative family history, today announced the release of two major new features, Record Matching and Smart Matching™, which enrich family trees with relevant historical records and help users discover unknown relatives and ancestors, respectively. This will add significant new detail and color to the World Family Tree, a global initiative by Geni.com that shows how everyone in the world is related, and will help members learn more about their shared ancestries. Read more

Jean-Claude Bradley of Chemistry World recently wrote, “Almost a decade ago, the term ‘podcasting’ grabbed society’s imagination. Although sharing audio and video files over the internet had been possible for some time, the technology for creating, disseminating and following media reached a critical mass for the average internet user. Predictably, this situation represented different opportunities for different factions of the ideological spectrum. At one end, some saw new means to monetise their skill sets and products. At the other end, another group recognised a means for the radical sharing of knowledge. For the majority, the opportunities lay somewhere in the middle – for example, freely sharing some content with the hope of selling another portion, or freely sharing content but with restrictions on its use.” Read more

Carmel Doyle of Silicon Republic recently covered some exciting developments that have arisen from the recent collaboration between Fujitsu Labs and DERI: “This week, Fujitsu is presenting the first results from its research collaboration with DERI at the XBRL26 conference taking place in Dublin. Speaking this afternoon, Fujitsu Ireland’s head of research Anthony McCauley said the team has been pioneering an interface that sits on linked data. ’We’ve been looking at that not just from a research perspective but also in terms of the real commercial opportunities that linked data can provide,’ he said.”

Doyle continues, “The big challenge at the moment for data miners is that data sets are dispersed in different locations. Read more