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Month June 2009

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Interesting semantic web stuff

Jun 11, 09 12:23 AM

It’s starting to feel like the world has suddenly woken up to the whole Linked Data thing — and that’s clearly a very, very good thing. Not only are Google (and Yahoo!) now using RDFa but a whole bunch of other things are going on, all rather exciting, below is a round up of some of the best. But if you don’t know what I’m talking about you might like to start off with TimBL’s talk at TED.

"Semantic Web Rubik's Cube" by dullhunk. Some rights reserved.

"Semantic Web Rubik's Cube" by dullhunk. Some rights reserved.

TimBL is working with the UK Cabinet Office (as an advisor) to make our information more open and accessible on the web [cabinetoffice.gov.uk]
The blog states that he’s working on:

  • overseeing the creation of a single online point of access and work with departments to make this part of their routine operations.
  • helping to select and implement common standards for the release of public data
  • developing Crown Copyright and ‘Crown Commons’ licenses and extending these to the wider public sector
  • driving the use of the internet to improve consultation processes.
  • working with the Government to engage with the leading experts internationally working on public data and standards

The Guardian has an article on the appointment.

Closer to home there have been a few interesting developments

Media Meets Semantic Web – How the BBC Uses DBpedia and Linked Data to Make Connections [pdf]
Our paper at this years European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC2009) looking at how the BBC has adopted semantic web technologies, including DBpedia, to help provide a better, more coherent user experience. For which we won best paper of the in-use track – congratulations to Silver and Georgie.

The BBC has announced a couple SPARQL endpoints, hosted by talis and openlink
Both platforms allow you to search and query the BBC data in a number of different ways, including SPARQL — the standard query language for semantic web data. If you’re not familiar with SPARQL, the Talis folk have published a tutorial that uses some NASA data.

A social semantic BBC?
Nice presentation from Simon and Ben on how social discovery of content could work… “show me the radio programmes my friends have listen to, show me the stuff my friends like that I’ve not seen” all built on people’s existing social graph. People meet content via activity.

PriceWaterhouseCooper’s spring technology forecast focuses on Linked Data [pwc.com]
“Linked Data is all about supply and demand. On the demand side, you gain access to the comprehensive data you need to make decisions. On the supply side, you share more of your internal data with partners, suppliers, and—yes—even the public in ways they can take the best advantage of. The Linked Data approach is about confronting your data silos and turning your information management efforts in a different direction for the sake of scalability. It is a component of the information mediation layer enterprises must create to bridge the gap between strategy and operations… The term “Semantic Web” says more about how the technology works than what it is. The goal is a data Web, a Web where not only documents but also individual data elements are linked.”

Including an interview with me!

You should also check out…

sameas.org a service to help link up equivalent URIs
It helps you to find co-references between different data sets. Interestingly it’s also licenced under CC0 which means all copyright and related or neighboring rights are waived.

Comments (7)

URL shortening it’s nasty but it’s also unnecessary

Jun 9, 09 12:04 AM

URL shortening is just wrong and it’s not just me that thinks so Joshua Schachter thinks so too and Simon Willison has a partial solution. The reason various folk are worried about URL shortening and think that it’s largely evil is because it breaks the web.

"The weakest link" by Darwin Bell. Some rights reserved.

"The weakest link" by Darwin Bell. Some rights reserved.

URLs need to be persistent and that’s not so likely when you use these services. But the ever increasing popularity of Twitter, who impose a 140 character limit on tweets, means that more and more URLs are getting shortened. The ridiculous thing is it isn’t even necessary.

In addition to the rev=”canonical” fix that Kellan proposed Michael has also recently come across longurl.org which

…could solve at least some of these problems. It provides a service to expand short urls from many, many providers into long urls

That’s cool because:

it caches the expansion so has a persistent store of short <> long mappings. They plan to expose these mappings on the web which would also solve [reliance on 3rd party – if they go out of business links break]

Of course what would be extra cool would be if, in addition to the source code being open sourced, so was the underlying database. That way if anything happened to longurl.org someone else could resurrect the service.

All good stuff. But the really ironic thing is that none of this should be neccessary. The ‘in 140 characters or less’ thing isn’t true. As Michael points out:

if i write a tweet to the 140 limit that includes a link then <a href=”whatever”>whatever</a> will be added to the message. so whilst the visible part of the message is limited to 140 chars the message source isn’t. There’s no reason twitter couldn’t use the long url in the href whilst keeping the short url as the link text…

All Twitter really needs to do is provide their own shortening service – if you enter anything that starts “http://&#8221; it gets shortened in the visable message. Of course it doesn’t really need to actually provide a unique, hashed URL, it could convert the anchor text to “link” or the first few letters of the title of the target page while retaining the full-fat, canonical URL in the href.

Comments (12)
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