In open data news, the United Nations Human Rights Council has rallied behind the right to internet freedom of expression. William New reports, “With tension seeming to brim just beneath the surface, human rights officials from around the world came together [on February 29] at the United Nations in Geneva to talk about ways to keep the internet open and nationally regulated at the same time. There were no decisions, and wide differences in views, but the first-of-its-kind panel might have laid the ground for future work on internet freedom and human rights. Intellectual property rights were mentioned several times.” 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 !

Publishing Technology’s digital publishing platform pub2web has been selected to build the United Nations eCollection. COO Louise Tutton stated, “With 40 new agreements so far this year, we are continuing to build on the success of our state-of-the-art solutions to the unique challenges of digital publishing. The new United Nations eCollection will take full advantage of the powerful combination of semantic web technologies and sophisticated information commerce capabilities available within the pub2web platform as standard. This combination allows for ease of breaking down content silos and moving away from the traditional containers of journals, books and reference works while allowing publishers to experiment with new business models (such as Patron-Driven Acquisition) and to deliver an enriched user experience.” Read more

Has there ever been a better time to think about renewable energy, what with the uprisings in the Middle East and Northern Africa and the nuclear reactor meltdown fears in Japan?

For those financiers and government decision-makers whose thoughts are turning more in that direction – as well as for project developers and international organizations on the ground in developing countries working on such efforts – there’s a Linked Open Data resource that can help. Semantic clean energy search portal reegle, launched by non-profit REEEP (Renewable Energy & Energy Efficiency Partnership)  in cooperation with the Semantic Web Company, provides data on stakeholders in the clean energy area as well as country’s energy profiles. All its data and services are free for reuse.

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Umovement: A Wikipedia for Social Good Mashable … part of the world that help [the] UN MDGs to achieve their goals, to be introduced on this site and to use web 2.0, web 3.0 technlogies to get promoted. …

The 2009 Semantic Technology Conference (SemTech) took place June 14-18, 2009 in San Jose, California. SemTech is produced by Semantic Universe and brings together the entire marketplace of semantic technology vendors, developers, researchers, start-ups, investors and customers. Here is a small sample of the hundreds of companies who signed up to attend:

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Controlled vocabularies, taxonomies and thesauri have been in use in a wide variety of organizations for decades. With the information explosion fueled by the internet, the importance of these organization structures has become more and more apparent. The problem isn’t where to find vocabularies or how to build them; on the contrary, enterprises typically find that they have several mini-vocabularies, each tuned to a special purpose or business need, just as so-called "folksonomies" have appeared in popular websites. The problem enterprises are facing today is how to manage all these vocabularies in a coherent way and eventually to integrate them so that they can make cross-references from one to another.

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World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee declared the Semantic Web ‘open for business’ in 2008, celebrating the ratification of the SPARQL query specification by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C); the organisation of which he is Director. “I think we’ve got all the pieces to be able to go ahead and do pretty much everything,” he stated in an interview. “You should be able to implement a huge amount of the dream, we should be able to get huge benefits from interoperability using what we’ve got. So, people are realising it’s time to just go do it.”

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— SOONHO KIM, MARTA IGLESIAS SUCASAS, CATERINA CARACCIOLO, JOHANNES KEIZER

Executive Summary

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) launched an ontology and associated services to manage, exchange and integrate geopolitical information at corporate level and with international partners. The geopolitical ontology is showcased in the FAO Country Profiles and Mapping Information System (FCPMIS) www.fao.org/countryprofiles, where it is used to enhance the system functionality and to integrate geopolitical information, such as, statistics, maps, feeds or documents.

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