Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki, is percolating another project: The Smallest Federated Wiki. This week he gave a presentation entitled, Missing From the Beginning: The Federation of Wikis Abstract, at the University of Advancing Technology (UAT) theatre, which is viewable here, and he’s been hosting Google+ hangouts about the work, too.

So, what is the Smallest Federated Wiki? The idea behind the work-in-progress, launched at IndieWebCamp this past summer and as explained here, is to innovate in three ways: The new Wiki shares through federation, composes by refactoring and wraps data with visualization. As Cunningham said in the March 7 presentation, “We’re making an ecosystem here for sharing data about ideas. I’m taking the conversation about how we’re going to live going forward, to be based on ideas backed up by data that we can understand because it has sensible visualizations.”

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Yes you are right, one of the prime reasons for this post is an excuse to show some stunning pictures from nature.  However, there is also good reason to explore a Linked Data example, provided by Pete DeVries of the Department of Entomology at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, in his recent submission to the W3C public-lod mailing list.

Pete shows a good example of the benefits of Linked Data.  He provides links to information about the Monarch Butterfly (Danaus plexippus) from several Linked Data datasets, each of which provide different, but overlapping views.

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On Friday, February 10, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the latest installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies. This episode includes a discussion about data; specifically, the recently announced “wikidata” project with special guest, Denny Vrandecic.
At the recent SemTechBiz Berlin conference, Denny presented a talk titled, “Wikidata: The Next Big Thing for Wikipedia.” As evidenced in the “Wow’s” expressed by the panelists in this month’s podcast call, this is indeed a big deal for Wikipedia and for Semantic Web. Read more

Richard Wallis is reporting from SemTechBiz in Berlin this week. He recently wrote, “One of the more eagerly awaited presentations at the Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Berlin today was a late addition to the program from Denny Vrandecic.  With the prominence of Dbpedia in the Linked Open Data Cloud, anything new from Wikipedia with data in it was bound to attract attention, and we were not disappointed.” Read more

After a great day yesterday I was eager to to discover what today’s program had to offer.  Unfortunately I had to set off for the airport, where I am now writing this, before the end.  However I caught most of the day and here are my few thoughts and recollections.

Today’s Keynote was in the form of a panel discussing Semantics in the Automotive Industry with Martin [GoodRelations] Hepp, John Kendall Streit of Tribal DDB, William Greenly of AQKA, and François-Paul Servant from Renault.  They discussed their experiences in pioneering the use of Linked Data / Semantic Web technologies and approaches in the automotive domain.
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