Tom Simonite of the MIT Technology Review reports, “More than one billion people visit Facebook each month, mostly to see photos and messages posted by friends. Facebook hopes to encourage some of them to do a little work for it while they’re there. By asking people to contribute data—from business locations to book titles—and to check one another’s work, Facebook is building a rich stock of knowledge that could make its software smarter and boost the usefulness of its search engine. ‘We’re trying to map what the real world looks like onto Facebook so you can run really expressive and powerful queries,’ says Mitu Singh, product manager for Facebook’s entities team, a group charged with building a resource called the entity graph.” Read more

Kenny Whitebloom of the Digital Public Library of America reports that the Library is moving forward. He writes, “The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is an ambitious project to build a national digital library platform for the United States that will make the cultural and scientific record available, free to all Americans. Hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, the DPLA is an international community of over1,200 volunteers and participants from public and research libraries, academia, all levels of government, publishing, cultural organizations, the creative community, and private industry devoted to building a free, open, and growing national resource.” Read more

John Biggs of TechCrunch recently discussed an intriguing program at Carnegie Mellon that uses a complex algorithm and Google Street View to identify cities based on their unique traits. The project description states, “Given a large repository of geotagged imagery, we seek to automatically find visual elements, e.g. windows, balconies, and street signs, that are most distinctive for a certain geo-spatial area, for example the city of Paris. This is a tremendously difficult task as the visual features distinguishing architectural elements of different places can be very subtle.” Read more

Pierre-Yves Vandenbussche recently wrote, “We are delighted to announce that Linked Open Vocabularies is now being hosted on Open Knowledge Foundation servers and is now officially an Open Knowledge Foundation project… The LOV project was born in the framework of the Datalift project which aims at providing a platform to lift data from semi-structured formats (csv, xls, etc.) to linked data. Part of this project under Mondeca‘s company responsibility was focused on vocabulary selection and re-use. The LOV project purpose goes now far beyond this original catalogue. The LOV dataset is maintained by Bernard Vatant and Pierre-Yves Vandenbussche.” Read more

Many organizations have attempted to calculate how much data there is in the world, but now an organization is actually trying “to collect all the data in the world and use it to peer into the future. Seriously. What’s more, an organization called the European Commission is even willing to pump 1 billion euros into this dream. The project is called the FutureICT Knowledge Accelerator and Crisis-Relief System, or FuturICT for short. FuturITC is building a Living Earth Platform. In the words of the FuturICT founders, the Living Earth Platform will be ‘a simulation, visualization, and participation platform to support decision making of policymakers, business people, and citizens.’” Read more

The Library of Congress is working on a bibliographic framework for the digital age. According to the article, “The new bibliographic framework project will be focused on the Web environment, Linked Data principles and mechanisms, and the Resource Description Framework (RDF) as a basic data model.  The protocols and ideas behind Linked Data are natural exchange mechanisms for the Web that have found substantial resonance even beyond the cultural heritage sector.  Likewise, it is expected that the use of RDF and other W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) developments will enable the integration of library data and other cultural heritage data on the Web for more expansive user access to information.” Read more

Wikimedia Germany has multiple openings for semantic web professionals in Berlin, Germany. The post states, “Wikimedia Germany is a non-profit organization committed to promoting open knowledge. We support projects for the creation, promotion and distribution of free content. One of the most important projects is Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. Wikimedia Germany has a rapidly growing office in Berlin, with currently 19 employees.” Read more

Jake Berger recently compared the developing Digital Public Space project to an ancient temple called the Metroon. He writes, “Around 500 BC in the Ancient Greek city-state of Athens the state archive was housed in a building called the Metroon, or ‘mother building’. This temple, dedicated to the goddess Demeter, was filled with papers relating to the day-to-day civic, legal, commercial and cultural life of its citizens. The Metroon was open to every citizen, and all were entitled both to read and to make copies of anything held there, giving them a level of access to the building blocks of their society that is unrivalled in the modern age despite our Freedom of Information laws and open data initiatives.” Read more

A new article reports that the British Library has announced “a significant contribution to the development, application, and sharing of bibliographic data using Linked Data techniques and technologies, with a preview of a new approach to publishing the British National Bibliography. Chief Executive Dame Lynne Brindley announced the initiative in her Keynote at Linked Data and Libraries 2011, hosted by Talis at the British Library (BL) in London.” Read more

AKSW has announced the latest release of their project, LIMES, “a link discovery framework for the Web of Data. It implements time-efficient approaches for large-scale link discovery based on the characteristics of metric spaces. It is easily configurable via a web interface. It can also be downloaded as standalone tool for carrying out link discovery locally.” According to the AKSW blog, “We could not resist the pleasure of making the demo of the new release candidate of LIMES (0.5RC1) available for all. LIMES 0.5 comes fitted with a new grammar for complex metric specification and fully novel algorithms.” Read more