Editor’s Update Jan. 19: DBpedia, Wikipedia and company are all back online, while some lawmakers have taken their support for SOPA and PIPA offline. Republican Senators Roy Blunt and Marco Rubio have withdrawn their support for the Protect IP Act, and Representative Lee Terry (R-Neb.), an original co-sponsor of SOPA, also has asked to have his name removed from the bill.

 

It’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) day. At 8 a.m. EST  OpenLink Software began a 12-hour blackout of the following sites it controls in support of Wikipedia, Reddit and others spearheading the online protest against the legislation:

• http://dbpedia.org
• http://dbpedia-live.openlinksw.com
• http://lod.openlinksw.com
• http://uriburner.com

Founder and CEO of OpenLink Software Kingsley Idehen yesterday directed interested parties to a Linked Data-driven poll for the opportunity to vote on taking this step, and the ayes, so to speak, had it.

Turn to any of the above sites and you’ll see:

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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 !

Enabling Data Independence for Government Transparency

by Ralph Hodgson, CTO, TopQuadrant, Inc.

Open Government has become a popular theme, both in the U.S. and other countries.  With “Transparency” gaining momentum, increasing categories and amounts of government data are becoming available on the web.  In the U.S., an impetus for this was Barrack Obama’s memorandum to the heads of Executive Departments and Agencies. This included the following statement:

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