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

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

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

Jonathan Gray of the OKF reports, “On Tuesday President Obama unveiled a new $100 million research initiative to map the human brain. The BRAIN (Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) initiative will ‘accelerate the development and application of new technologies that will enable researchers to produce dynamic pictures of the brain that show how individual brain cells and complex neural circuits interact at the speed of thought.’ As well as trying to vastly improve scientific understanding of ‘the three pounds of matter that sits between our ears’, it is hoped that this research will enable new forms of prevention and treatment for conditions like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, autism and epilepsy.” Read more

Derrick Harris of GigaOM recently expressed the need for a data democracy, not a data dictatorship. He writes, “The democratization of data is a real phenomenon, but building a sustainable data democracy means truly giving power to the people. The alternative is just a shift of power from traditional data analysts within IT departments to a new generation of data scientists and app developers. And this seems a lot more like a dictatorship than a democracy — a benevolent dictatorship, but a dictatorship nonetheless. These individuals and companies aren’t entirely bad, of course, and they’re actually necessary. Apps that help predict what we want to read, where we’ll want to go next or what songs we’ll like are certainly cool and even beneficial in their ability to automate and optimize certain aspects of our lives and jobs.” Read more

Tom Slee of The Guardian recently raised some of his concerns regarding who profits most from open data. He states, “In the technology world, ‘openness!’ has long been a battle cry of the underprivileged. It’s the language of bottom up freedom against top-downcontrol; of Linux against Microsoft and Wikipedia against Britannica. And now, open government data is the demand of those who would drag government data out from behind locked doors. But the world has changed since Linus Torvalds started his hobby operating system, and now openness is heard from the top as much as the bottom.” Read more

The Semantic Web Blog reported last year about a relationship formed between the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) and Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. in Japan, focused on a project to build a large-scale RDF store in the cloud capable of processing hundreds of billions of triples. At the time, Dr. Michael Hausenblas, who was then a DERI research fellow, discussed Fujitsu Lab’s research efforts related to the cloud, its huge cloud infrastructure, and its identification of Big Data as an important trend, noting that “Linked Data is involved with answering at least two of the three Big Data questions” – that is, how to deal with volume and variety (velocity is the third).

This week, the DERI and Fujitsu Lab partners have announced a new data storage technology that stores and queries interconnected Linked Open Data, to be available this year, free of charge, on a cloud-based platform. According to a press release about the announcement, the data store technology collects and stores Linked Open Data that is published across the globe, and facilitates search processing through the development of a caching structure that is specifically adapted to LOD.

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Ivan Herman recently discussed the possibilities of multilingual linked open data. He writes, “Experts developing Web sites for various cultures and languages know that it is way better to include such features into Web pages at the start, i.e., at the time of the core design, rather than to ‘add’ them once the site is done. What is valid for Web sites is also valid for data deployed on the Web, and that is especially true for Linked Data whose mantra is to combine data and datasets from all over the place.” Read more

Martin Kaltenbock of the Semantic Web Company reports, “The brand new web based GBPN Knowledge Platform has been launched on 21 February 2013. It helps the building sector effectively reduce its impact on climate change! It has been designed as a participative knowledge hub and data hub harvesting, sharing and curating best practice policies in building energy performance globally. Available in English and soon in Mandarin, this new web-based tool of the Global Buildings Performance Network (GBPN) aims to stimulate collective research and analysis from experts worldwide to promote better decision-making and help the building sector effectively reduce its impact on climate change. Read more

If you’re a small or medium-size enterprise that has a business case around patent mining and landscaping, offer-tender matching, or customer feedback, as well as access to some relevant data and developer talent to help realize the ambition, then opportunity awaits at Fusepool. Next month the project, which is partly funded by the European Framework Program for Innovation, will be putting out a call to SMEs to participate as end users in its effort to refine and enrich raw data as Linked Data and provides tools for analyzing and visualizing it.

“We want to provide a common data platform to make links between data that was usually in separate corners. Even if it’s open it still can be hard to find and interlink because it’s not the same format, or the quality is not reliable,” says Dr. Michael Kaschesky, Head of Research Group / FP7 Fusepool Coordinator, Bern University of Applied Sciences. Fusepool will provide that data pool for specific use cases and areas, letting others bring relevant data into the pool and making it easier to integrate the data into other apps, and develop apps on top of the data.

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