The Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School is about making law accessible and understandable, for free. It’s been engaged in that mission since the early ’90s, and semantic web technology today plays a role in furthering that goal.

The organization this month published a new electronic edition of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), which contains a bevy of rules across 50 titles that impact nearly all areas of American business. Work underway at LII, dubbed the Linked Legal Data project, seeks to apply Linked Open Data principles enhances access to the CFR, with capabilities such as  being able to search its Title 21 Food and Drugs database using brand names for drugs (such as Tylenol), and receiving the generic name for the drug (acetaminophen) as a suggested term. “You cannot look for regulatory information on Tylenol in the CFR because Tylenol will never be there,” says Dr. Núria Casellas, who is a visiting scholar at the LII spearheading work on the project. “That is a brand name. What you actually want to look for are components, such as acetaminophen.”

While the general citizenry might find reasons to leverage the fruits of this effort, businesses that must comply with these requirements are a more likely target – not just the lawyers and paralegals, but those responsible for tasks, for example, such as storing and caring for products their company exports or imports, including understanding the safety regulations that apply to it. The Tylenol-acetaminophen example, she says, is very interesting because it showcases how using the wrong word or the incorrect approach can hamper a company from being able to find the relevant regulatory or safety information it needs to take into consideration.

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SemTechBiz is Less Than 2 Weeks Away

The Semantic Tech & Business Conference (SemTechBiz) is coming to San Francisco on June 3-7! Join us for case studies, innovative panels, tutorials, and keynotes that will provide you with practical advice, hands-on guidance, and breakthrough approaches to solving business problems with semantic technology. Passes go up $200 at the door. Sign up now and save !

Structured Dynamics has published a list of frequently asked questions about Linked Data. The list is prefaced by a definition of Linked Data: “Linked data is the first practical expression of the semantic Web, useful and doable today, and applicable to all forms of data. Sources such as the four principles of linked data in Tim Berners-Lee’s Design Issues: Linked Data and the introductory statements on the linked data Wikipedia entry approximate — but do not completely express — an accepted or formal or official definition of linked data per se.” Read more

Philip Fennell of O’Reilly recently commented on Tom Koulopoulos’s keynote speech at the recent MarkLogic World conference. Fennell writes, “Although he did not mention Linked Data explicitly, Tom Koulopoulos’ presentation drew attention to the importance of ‘connections’ – links between data and the value that has both within an organisation’s data and outside to externally held data and he chose to underline this by likening it to the neural connections within the brain.” Read more

Mike Bergman recently gave a talk in which he discussed how “the pragmatic contributions of semantic technologies reside more in mindsets, information models and architectures than in ‘linked data’ as currently practiced.” He writes, “No matter how expressed, the idea behind all of these various [Semantic Web related] terms has in essence been to make meaningful connections, to provide the frameworks for interoperability. Interoperability means getting disparate sources of data to relate to each other, as a means of moving from data to information. Interoperability requires that source and receiver share a vocabulary about what things mean, as well as shared understandings about the associations or degree of relationship between the items being linked.” Read more

Remember the days before Wikipedia had all the answers? We looked things up in libraries, referring to shelf-filling encyclopaedias. We bought CD-ROMs (remember them?) full of facts and pictures and video clips. We asked people. Sometimes, school home work actually required some work more strenuous than a cut and paste. We went about our business without remembering that New Coke briefly entered our lives on this day in 1985.

Wikipedia is far from perfect, and some of the concern around its role in a wider dumbing down of thought and argument may be justified. But, despite that, it’s a remarkable achievement and a wonderful resource. Those who argued that it would never work have clearly been proven wrong. Carefully maintained processes and the core principle of the neutral point of view mostly serve contributors well.

With Wikimedia Deutschland‘s recent announcement of Wikidata, many of the early concerns about Wikipedia itself have resurfaced once again. Read more

George Thomas of Data.gov recently called out a number of technologies and products employed by Data.gov projects. Thomas writes, “When the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) decided to publish their Clinical Quality Linked Data on Healthdata.gov, we made extensive use of DERI’s RDF extension for Google Refine, helping to design the RDF Schemas we used to define the metadata to capture a controlled vocabulary for Hospital Compare.” Read more

Simon Rogers reports that the National Audit Office has released its report on the United Kingdom’s open government data project. Rogers writes, “This should be a good week for open government data in the UK. The British government is one of the key drivers in the Open Government Partnership, presently meeting in Brasilia, where it is being lauded for the way it has released a ‘tsunami of data’. And yet, according to the National Audit Office, all is not entirely rosy. Read between the lines of its report out today, Implementing Transparency, and you will see a government which has been chucking out tonnes of data, that no-one looks at and without a complete strategy. Oh and it’s cost an awful lot of money.” Read more

Linked data is becoming even more interesting to the OCLC, a non-profit, membership, computer library service and research organization of 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories around the world. It’s named Richard Wallis — formerly of the U.K.’s Talis Linked Data and Semantic Web Technology company and one of our frequent Semantic Web Blog guest authors — to the position of Technology Evangelist.

The OCLC has as a major asset Worldcat, a global catalog comprising the collections of more than 10,000 libraries and adding up to more than 258 million records and 1.8 billion-plus holdings, in traditional library metadata format. WorldCat.org is the publicly searchable view of their core data in library format based upon library records (Marc records). More semantic web-oriented is other work the OCLC been doing over the last couple of years, Wallis explains, including experiments with using RDF/Linked Data at viaf.org, where the Virtual International Authority File publishes authoritative descriptions of names or organizations, and something similar for the Dewey Decimal Classification system at dewey.info.

In his new role, Wallis will collaborate with members and facilitate projects with OCLC teams as libraries and the cooperative drive efforts to expose WorldCat data as linked data, and will represent OCLC and WorldCat to the global library and web/IT leader communities. The VIAF and Dewey projects certainly provided an opportunity for OCLC to see the benefit of linking things together. On top of that, “the climate for Linked Data and libraries has changed dramatically over the last 12 months,” Wallis says.

Interest was evident at the Linked Data in Libraries event he ran for Talis this past summer, for example, and efforts like the W3C’s Linked Data in Libraries interest group, the Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives & Museums work, the British Library’s work on the British National Bibliography as Linked Open Data, and the Library of Congress’s   Bibliographic Framework Initiative General Plan all are adding fuel to the fire.

The opportunity is there for the OCLC to take the lead on Linked Data in the somewhat fragmented library world as those organizations start to hear more and more about the concept. “Linked Data is starting to be something talked about in the library world, but like any other world, it’s still a bit of an enthusiast environment,” Wallis says. As he evangelizes to the library community what Linked Data is about – and to the web community about what the OCLC is doing with its chunk of data that is relevant to the wider Linked Data and Web of Data world – he hopes “to be in at the beginning of a process where those two communities come together to help come up with the best way of applying Linked Data principles to library data.”

In a statement announcing the appointment, Robin Murray, OCLC Vice President, Global Product Management, said, “Richard Wallis is a leader in Semantic Web and Linked Data technology, and we believe he will help the OCLC cooperative extend our efforts to help libraries move to Webscale.”

Data Liberate, the consultancy Wallis began upon leaving Talis, will continue as a personal blogging site. “I still have interest wider than the library community and I believe that those interests can keep me up to date with the wide world and advise my advice into the OCLC,” he says.

Ivan Herman recently offered a recap of some of the most intriguing presentations at the recent Linked Data on the Web Workshop in Lyon. Herman writes, “Giuseppe Rizzo made a presentation related to all the tools we know have to tag texts and thereby being able to use these resources in linked data (“NERD meets NIF: Lifting NLP Extraction Results to the Linked Data Cloud”), i.e., the Zemanta or Open Calais services of this World. As these services become more and more important, having a clear view of what they can do, how one can use them individually or together, etc., is essential. Their project, called NERD, will become an important source for this community, bookmark that page.” Read more

Semantic tech startup Ontodia took the grand prize at New York City’s BigApps 3.0 contest on Tuesday. As covered in this article, Ontodia’s NYCFacets is a Smart Open Data Exchange for the developer community that catalogs all the NYC-related data sources already present in the New York City Open Data Catalogue.

“Now that we’ve gotten this validation, we’ll charge full-steam ahead with our bigger vision for pragmatic Linked Big Open Data in NYC,” says Ontodia co-founder Joel Natividad.

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