March 11
Lots of people can’t seem to understand the relationship of the
Web to the Internet. So I’ve come up with a simple analogy:
The Web is to the Internet as Beer is to Alcohol.
For some people, sometimes, they are essentially synonymous,
because they are often encountered together. But of course they are
fundamentally different things
In this analogy, Email is like Wine: it’s the other universally
popular use of the Internet/Alcohol.
But there are lots of other uses, too, somewhat more obscure. We
could say the various chat protocols are the various Whiskeys. IRC
is Scotch; XMPP is Bourbon.
gopher is obscure and obsolete, …. maybe melomel.
ssh is potato vodka.
I leave the rest to your imagination.
Note that the non-technician never encounters raw Internet, just
like they never encounter pure alcohol. They wouldn’t know what it
was if it stepped on their foot. Of course, chemists are quite
familiar with pure alcohol, and network technicians and programmers
are familiar with TCP, UDP, and IP.
The familiar smell of alcohol, that you can detect to some
degree in nearly everything containing alcohol — that’s DNS.
Posted at 13:28
March 08
In which a spoonful of syntactic sugar makes the string
querying go down a bit easier.
Posted at 15:09
March 05
The Linked Data Cloud diagram is back; bigger, better, and
powered by the CKAN registry tool.
Posted at 18:06
becomes the Virtual Personal Assistant?
Apple buys Siri, and brings real semantic smarts to
Cupertino.
Posted at 18:06
This podcast conversation with David Siegel discusses his
latest book, Pull, and explores the many ways in which Siegel
believes a semantic web can power business today and into the
future.
Posted at 18:06
Martin Hepp and Jamie Taylor answer questions about the
GoodRelations vocabulary in a podcast conversation, exploring
opportunities to enrich the way in which we compare goods and
services.
Posted at 18:06
Semantic Technology startup, Siri, releases a Virtual Personal
Assistant for the iPhone and simplifies a wide range of tasks for
US consumers on the move. Just by speaking to their phone, users
can make dinner reservations, check the weather, find movies,
flights and more.
Posted at 18:06
Thomson Reuters and Oracle today announced support for the
media giant's OpenCalais metadata generation service within release
2 of Oracle Spatial 11g. The integration gives Oracle users and
developers direct access to OpenCalais' natural language processing
(NLP) capabilities.
Posted at 18:06
Government transparency in all its forms would appear to be
very much in vogue at present, spanning everything from the Obama
administration's Data.gov portal and Prime Ministerial
pronouncements in the UK Parliament to municipal proclamations of
openness in Vancouver and compelling grass-roots demonstrations by
activists and even newspapers.
Posted at 18:06
An oft-repeated concern in discussing large-scale deployment
of Semantic Web ideas is that of 'scale.' With many of the better
known data stores upon which the Semantic Web depends capable of
storing only tens or at best a few hundreds of millions of RDF
triples, it can be difficult to argue that the technology is fit
for real-world deployment at scale.
Posted at 18:06
June's episode of the regular Semantic Web Gang podcast was
recorded on stage at the Semantic Technology Conference in San
Jose.Audio and video of the session is now available, with Gang
members and conference organiser Tony Shaw engaging in a discussion
of the event's highlights and the underlying trends at work.
Posted at 18:06
The keynote on this final day of the Semantic Technology
Conference saw Robert Larson and Evan Sandhaus of the New York
Times talk about the paper's innovative adoption of semantic
technologies; "The first semantic search system for The New Times
was released in 1913 and was available bound in either paper ($6)
or cloth ($8).
Posted at 18:06
Radar Networks attracted a fair degree of attention with their
roll-out of Twine, and the company's CEO has built a reputation as
one of the more thoughtful thinkers in the space. Nova took to the
stage at the Semantic Technology Conference today, not to talk
about his own company or ideas, but to lead a conversation with
Russell Foltz-Smith from Wolfram Research.
Posted at 18:06
Wednesday's opening Keynote here in San Jose sees Guidewire's
Carla Thompson joined on stage by senior representatives from many
of the more interesting players in the Semantic Search space;
Tomasz Imielinski from Ask, Peter Norvig from Google, Riza Berkan
of Hakia, Scott Provost from Microsoft, William Tunstall-Pedoe of
the UK's True Knowledge, and Andrew Tomkins of Yahoo.
Posted at 18:06
This year's Semantic Technology Conference got fully underway
this morning, with Keynote presentations from Tom Tague of Thomson
Reuters' Open Calais Initiative and Tom Gruber from Siri.Despite
the wider economic situation, attendance for this fifth year of the
event feels a little up on last year, and there's clearly real
enthusiasm in the buzzing Halls.
Posted at 18:06
Microsoft's Bing is attracting plenty of interest today, and
perhaps deservedly so as it brings some interesting fresh ideas to
the world of generic search engines. Whether it is sufficiently
compelling to break our deeply ingrained association of 'search'
with 'Google' remains to be seen.
Posted at 18:06
This month has seen Google announce 'Rich Snippets' and
Wolfram Research release Alpha to a flurry of mainstream media
coverage; both are of interest to those working on the Semantic
Web.This month's episode of the Semantic Web Gang takes a look at
both stories, and Gang members share their impressions on the news
and what it might mean moving forward.
Posted at 18:06
In my latest podcast interview with those shaping our evolving
engagement with Semantic Technologies, I speak with Eric
Hillerbrand.Drawing upon years of experience in the development and
deployment of Semantic Web solutions, Eric has spent the past few
years considering the ways in which semantic technologies could
bring structure and value to the increasingly visible online
conversations around products and brands.
Posted at 18:06
Back in October I wrote about the first Vocabulary Camp, or
VoCamp. These informal gatherings have gone from strength to
strength, and the fourth is currently underway on the Spanish
island of Ibiza.
Posted at 18:06
I wrote about Talis' Connected Commons last month, and today
spent some time talking with the company's Platform Programme
Manager, Leigh Dodds.The conversation has just been released as a
podcast which looks at the rationale behind the company's offer and
the specific licensing choices that beneficiaries are asked to
make.
Posted at 18:06
Semantically powered question answering start-up True
Knowledge today made its Semantic Search API available for public
consumption, taking the next step on the company's journey out of
beta and providing a clear steer as to the way in which they intend
to generate revenue.As the company's press release notes,"True
Knowledge offers two distinct API services for developers: the
'Direct Answer API' and the 'Query API.
Posted at 18:06
Ivan Herman is Semantic Web Activity Lead at the World Wide
Web Consortium (W3C), and in this podcast he talks about a range of
current activities across the Semantic Web community.
Posted at 18:06
Go ahead, file, change. I've got my eyes on you!
Posted at 13:41
Who art thou? Thou art the sum of all thy posts.
Posted at 03:09
March 03
February 28
2014-02-28, A DCMI
Regional Meeting
will be held in London jointly with partners
ISKO-UK and
BCS/IRSG (aka the UK Chapter of the
International Society for Knowledge Organization and the
Information Retrieval Special Interest Group of the Chartered
Institute for IT, respectively) on Monday 23 June 2014. A workshop
in the morning will address Vocabularies and the potential for
linkage, including follow-up on some of the topics discussed in the
Vocabulary
Day at
DC-2013. In
parallel there will be a tutorial on Metadata Management in
Sharepoint. The afternoon program will provide a showcase for
metadata developments, such as exploitation of semantic media;
metadata to enhance research workflow; applications of metadata in
text search, image search and Linked Data; and the opportunities to
enhance access to audio collections. To find out more, see full
details and booking form at
http://www.iskouk.org/events/metadata_June_2014.htm.
Posted at 23:59
since 2005.
