According to a new article, “Louis Pouzin, Robert Kahn, Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, [and] Marc Andreessen are the joint winners of the first Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. They have been awarded the prize for the ground-breaking work, starting in the 1970s, which led to the internet and worldwide web. The internet and worldwide web initiated a communications revolution which has changed the world.” Read more

In a recent interview with the BBC, Sir Tim Berners-Lee described what he believes will be the dynamic future of the web. The article states, “Sir Tim Berners Lee, the man credited with inventing the world wide web, has said that he sees the internet becoming more dynamic with web pages able to do “more amazing things” as technology advances. He spoke to the BBC’s Jon Sopel from Davos, Switzerland, where political and business leaders have gathered for the World Economic Forum.” Read more

Big Graph Data Panelists (L to R): Mike Stonebraker, John Giannandrea, Bryan Thompson, Tim Berners- Lee, Frank van Harmelen

Last week, the 11th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2012) took place in Boston. It was an exciting week to learn about the advances of the Semantic Web and current applications.

The first two days, Sunday November 11 and Monday November 12, consisted of 18 workshops and 8 tutorials. The following three days (Tuesday November 13 – Thursday November 15) consisted of keynotes, presentation of academic and in-use papers, the Big Graph Data Panel and industry presentations. It is basically impossible to attend all the interesting presentations. Therefore, I am going to try my best to summarize and offer links to everything that I can.

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The Open Data Institute has announced that Jeni Tennison will take the role of Technical Director at the Institute and Gavin Starks will take the role of CEO. The announcement states, “Created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, the ODI will open its doors this autumn and is a world-first, dedicated to incubating and nurturing new and existing businesses that want to use open data to create economic growth… The new hires will be based at the ODI’s Shoreditch HQ, which will open its doors later this year and will become a focal point for entrepreneurs and developers, start-ups and established corporates, technologists and creatives to meet, share ideas and drive growth.” Shadbolt will give a keynote address at next week’s SemTechBiz UK Conference in London. Read more

On this day, way back on August 6, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee posted a short summary of the “WorldWideWeb Project” while working at CERN. In it, Berners-Lee wrote, ”To follow a link, a reader clicks with a mouse (or types in a number if he or she has no mouse). To search and index, a reader gives keywords (or other search criteria). These are the only operations necessary to access the entire world of data.”

Looking at the summary twenty-one years later, I was struck by two things: how far the Web has come and how well that initial, elegant vision holds up.

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Rising Media and WebMediaBrands, producers of the Semantic Technology and Business Conference – UK (#SemTechBiz), have announced details of this year’s event, the foremost conference series on semantic technologies.

This year’s line-up of speakers includes Professor Nigel Shadbolt, Co-Director, Open Data Institute. A former President of the British Computer Society, Professor Shadbolt has been involved in a wide range of entrepreneurial activities.  In 2009, together with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, he was appointed as information advisor by the Prime Minister to help transform public access to Government information. Professor Shadbolt will be delivering a keynote presentation on day 1 of the conference.

The 2012 Semantic Technology and Business Conference – UK will be held on 19-20 September at The Millennium Gloucester Hotel, 4-18 Harrington Gardens, London SW7 4HL.

Semantic Technology and Business Conference – UK brings together today’s industry thought leaders and practitioners to explore the challenges and opportunities impacting both corporate business leaders and technologists. The two day conference is packed with case studies and real-world perspectives, with insight and learning from global experts in technology, financial services, insurance, healthcare, publishing, government, automotive and enterprise data.

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Sir Tim Berners-Lee recently spoke out against UK government plans to monitor citizen’s internet use, Ian Katz reports. Katz writes, “The government’s controversial plans to allow intelligence agencies to monitor the internet use and digital communications of every person in the UK suffered a fresh blow on Tuesday when the inventor of the world wide web warned that the measures were dangerous and should be dropped. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who serves as an adviser to the government on how to make public data more accessible, says the extension of the state’s surveillance powers would be a ‘destruction of human rights’ and would make a huge amount of highly intimate information vulnerable to theft or release by corrupt officials.” Read more

This year was the 5th version of the Linked Data on the Web Workshop co-located at the World Wide Web Conference going on in Lyon, France.

At this workshop, seven issues caught my attention:

1) Media: Yunja Li presented on Synote: Weaving Media Fragments and Linked Data. This is interesting for those who not only want to link to an entire video, but want to link to a part of a video at a specific interval of time, and also add metadata information about that.

2) NLP to Linked Data: How can we relate the results of different named entity extraction tools to Linked Data. Giuseppe Rizzo introduced their project, NERD, which is working on this area.

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Earlier this month 16 out of 42 papers were accepted for the upcoming Linked Data on the Web (LDOW) 2012 Workshop in Lyon, France in April.

What might be discerned from the tenor of the submissions is something of a shift in focus in the Linked Data space, according to workshop chair Dr. Michael Hausenblas, Linked Data Research Centre, DERI, NUI Galway, Ireland. Other organizing committee members include Tim Berners-Lee, Christian Bizer and Tom Heath. “In 2008 to 2010 it was more like we were establishing the field, getting people to talk about what they do in terms of publishing and best practice around Linked Data, Open Linked Data and Linked Enterprise Data,” says Hausenblas. Now, with the web of Linked Data having grown to about 32 billion RDF triples last year, “we’re moving more towards the consumption – publishing is a necessary precondition but not an end in itself.”

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A recent interview by Kim Chandler McDonald with Ora Lassila takes a look at the current state and future prospects of the semantic web. The article notes, “A large part of Ora’s career has been focused on the Semantic Web as it applies to mobile and ubiquitous computing at the Nokia Research Center (NRC), where he, among many things, authored ‘Wilbur’, the NRC’s Semantic Web toolkit… Ora is one of the originators of the Semantic Web, having been working within the domain since 1996.  He is the co-author (with Tim Berners-Lee and James Hendler) of the most cited paper in the field, The Semantic Web.” Read more