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

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 !

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

It cannot be denied that Stephen Wolfram knows data. As the person behind Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, he has been working with data — and the computation of that data — for a long time. As he said in his blog yesterday, “In building Wolfram|Alpha, we’ve absorbed an immense amount of data, across a huge number of domains.  But—perhaps surprisingly—almost none of it has come in any direct way from the visible internet. Instead, it’s mostly from a complicated patchwork of data files and feeds and database dumps.”

The main topic of Wolfram’s post is a proposal about the form and placement of raw data on the internet. In the post, he proposes that .data be created as a new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) to hold data in a “parallel construct.”

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Katy Cowan recently reported that a new Open Data Institute is going to be established in London in order to “drive innovation and exploit the growth opportunities for the UK created by the government’s Open Data policy.” Cowan writes, “The government is to commit up to £10 million over five years to support the Open Data Institute (ODI), which will be co-directed by Professor Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt. The ODI will be developed by the Technology Strategy Board and the implementation plan for the Institute will be published by the Technology Strategy Board by April 2012.” Read more

Ten years (and change) since the publication of The Semantic Web article in Scientific American, co-author Jim Hendler says he is “very, very happy and optimistic about the state of semantic technologies and the Semantic Web.”

And, he notes, government has been an exciting partner in its progress.

Hendler, professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, home of the Tetherless World Constellation, will provide evidence of that in his presentation at the upcoming Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Washington D.C. this month. TWC works on opening and linking government data using Semantic Web technologies, and Hendler also freely provides his expertise to the U.S. data.gov project, through which he’s in contact with many other governments’ open data projects. Those attending Hendler’s keynote at the conference will get a look at TWC’s new International Open Government Dataset Search (IOGDS) app based on metadata extracted from some 400,000 government datasets on catalog websites. These were converted to RDF Linked Data and then republished via TWC’s LOGD SPARQL endpoint. “That proves we can use metadata to help people find the right data when there is so much available,” Hender says, and yield better visualizations of it, too.

Some 25 countries currently are represented, inclusive of datasets from the U.S., U.K., Singapore, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Kenya, and China. “What’s exciting to me is we see this happening all around the world,” Hendler says. “The extent to which the ecosystem is forming around this area is really surprising.” TWC features a few dozen demos here, which provide some insight into how much of a game-changer it is for government to couple open and Linked Data, providingthe ability to do things more quickly and in a more web-friendly way, and at lower costs. Hendler points to TWC’s creating infographic visualizations from several government datasets in hours, not months, and at a cost of pennies, not tens of thousands of dollars.

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Vuk Miličić, the author of Faviki, has written an article regarding the challenge of building a truly semantic web. Miličić writes, “The Semantic Web is often described as an extension of the current Web. The idea of what extending the Web should look like can be seen in Linked Data. In order to better understand the importance of Linked Data, one has to understand the context in which it emerged, i.e. the problem it has been trying to solve.” Read more

Underway at the W3C are some major Semantic Web efforts that can have a big impact on the enterprise.

One of these is about mapping relational databases to RDF. The RDB2RDF Working Group late last month issued a last call regarding the publication of its Direct Mapping and R2RML documents. As has been noted by Tim Berners-Lee, a big driving force for the Semantic Web has been the expression on the Web of the vast amounts of relational database information in a way that can be processed by machines. “We know that something like 80 or 90 percent of data published on the web comes from relational databases,” says Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web activity lead. “So it is important to make smooth the bridge between those two worlds, and this is what the working group was set up to do.”

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The recent MIT $100,000 Entrepreneurship Competition included a new category this year: The Linked Data Prize. That $10,000 award was shared by three entrants, Convexic, whose algorithm matches job applicants with positions; Link Cycle, which has a collaborative online tool for improving environmental life-cycle analyses; and Upkast, which has created a virtual file sharing system.

Upkast, which was founded by MIT student David Jia, also took the lead in the category track for web/IT. The online platform, which is used by MIT’s own Media Lab, was inspired by Jia’s own experiences having to upload and download the same data across various services – Facebook, Google Docs, and so on. “That didn’t seem to make sense,” Jia says. Upkast takes care of that by making any sort of file system or data service into a standardized virtual file system, aggregating all users’ different web services and points of data under one roof.

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