It's triples all the way down
Posted at 11:11
Posted at 23:48
En este �ltimo art�culo sobre Hakia se profundiza en las ventajas de red de Google frente a Hakia y se trata la innovadora herramienta de Hakia para la publicidad web (CONTEXTA). Tambi�n se expone la utilidad de Hakia, y en general de cualquier buscador sem�ntico, para evitar el tr�fico oportunista que muchas p�ginas web consiguen usando palabras equ�vocas.
Desde un punto de vista t�cnico, los expertos distinguen entre ventajas de red directas e indirectas. Sin entrar en detalles, dir� que las primeras corresponden a situaciones en que el valor de un bien o servicio se incrementa inmediatamente cuando crece el n�mero de nodos con los que puede comunicarse, como sucede con el caso del correo electr�nico o del est�ndar XML (elimina los problemas de interoperabilidad sint�ctica en el intercambio de documentos). Otro ejemplo de ventaja de red directa est� asociada al servicio de anuncios contextuales AdSense de Google, que emplea la tecnolog�a del buscador para saber qu� anuncios son relevantes para un sitio web de peque�o tama�o y publicarlos. A medida que AdSense ha ido atrayendo anunciantes, se ha vuelto m�s valioso para m�s sitios web, que se han suscrito al servicio, y ha atra�do m�s anunciantes. Y as� sucesivamente�
Las ventajas indirectas de red son efectos secundarios positivos de que muchas personas empleen un mismo bien o servicio; pueden corresponder a efectos en los que interviene el mercado o la existencia de bienes o servicios complementarios.
Algunos ejemplos de estas �ltimas ventajas son las econom�as de escala (a medida que se incrementa el n�mero de usuarios de una red se reduce el precio del producto o servicio), el aprendizaje de los usuarios (si los usuarios expertos de una red comparten su conocimiento con los nuevos usuarios la red se expandir� r�pidamente) o su reticencia a cambiar por otros los bienes o servicios con los que se han familiarizado. En el caso del software, las ventajas indirectas de red hacen que el n�mero de usuarios de un sistema operativo determine que los fabricantes de hardware saquen o no al mercado dispositivos compatibles con �l (servicios complementarios); del mismo modo, las empresas de programaci�n desarrollan aplicaciones que funcionan en los sistemas operativos m�s populares. En el caso de las consolas de videojuegos, los ventajas indirectas de red ocasionan que las m�s populares tengan disponible un mayor n�mero de juegos (servicios complementarios), as� como un mayor n�mero de revistas y sitios web dedicados a ellos (aprendizaje de los usuarios)
El buscador Google tiene como principales ventajas de red el gran n�mero de usuarios (que hace, por ejemplo, que muchas empresas se anuncien en �l y, por tanto, que atraiga a m�s usuarios), la capacidad de aprendizaje de �stos (unida a su inercia, que hace dif�cil que cambien a otros buscadores) y el valor de una marca muy conocida y bien valorada, tanto en el c�rculo de los usuarios como en los mercados financieros. En los �ltimos a�os, el valor de la marca de Google ha superado al de empresas como General Electric, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, IBM o Marlboro (las quiebras y los rescates estatales no son buenos para las marcas: por eso el valor de las marcas de los bancos estadounidenses y brit�nicos ha ca�do en picado y no las considero). Este valor percibido de la marca Google acarrea que los medios de comunicaci�n informen de sus novedades, que sus usuarios sean leales a la marca y que muchos de ellos adopten cualquier herramienta que saque al mercado (Gmail, Google Maps, tel�fonos m�viles, etc.). De hecho, esas herramientas han sido posibles por las ventajas de red indirectas del buscador.
Con todo, Hakia s� puede competir con Google en cuanto a calidad de los resultados, y dicha calidad resulta muy importante para los usuarios: cuando Google comenz� apenas proporcionaba m�s de unos cientos de resultados para b�squedas que hoy devolver�an millones o cientos de miles y Yahoo! era pr�cticamente sin�nimo de buscador. �qu�l gan� la batalla a �ste dando resultados m�s precisos y r�pidos en las b�squedas; es decir, siendo el mejor en lo que quer�an los usuarios: �de qu� sirve tener una interfaz gr�fica muy conseguida o un maravilloso servicio de atenci�n al cliente, si lo que quieren los consumidores del servicio es velocidad en las b�squedas? Google emplea un enfoque horizontal; intenta estar en todos los sectores, como si mediante el sabelotodo rect�ngulo blanco horizontal bajo seis letras de colores llamativos pudiera accederse a toda la informaci�n del mundo. Este enfoque puede coexistir perfectamente con buscadores especializados en sectores concretos y que proporcionen respuestas precisas y fiables, como hace Hakia en el campo de la salud (http://health.hakia.com/).La clave para que un buscador sea rentable a largo plazo es la publicidad. La inclusi�n de enlaces patrocionados en los resultados de Google, ha hecho que la compa��a gane miles de millones de d�lares. Un buscador sem�ntico como Hakia puede hacer que la publicidad mostrada al usuario se adecue m�s a la que puede interesarle. La empresa Hakia ya est� cambiando la publicidad web con herramientas comerciales como CONTEXTA, que permite analizar p�ginas web y obtener palabras claves que representan el significado de la p�gina con sus correspondientes puntuaciones.
Si CONTEXTA conquista un nicho significativo del mercado publicitario, basar el posicionamiento web en buscadores que usan palabras clave como Google o Yahoo! estar� en poco tiempo tan obsoleto como medir audiencias de televisores en blanco y negro. Por el momento, el popular blog ReadWriteWeb utiliza CONTEXTA configurado de manera que compara sobre la marcha el contenido sem�ntico de cada post con los criterios establecidos por los patrocinadores, con el objetivo de mostrar anuncios relevantes para los lectores. Los patrocinadores de ReadWriteWeb han proporcionado previamente algunas frases que definen sus productos o servicios.
Adem�s, Hakia puede reducir el tr�fico oportunista que muchas p�ginas consiguen insertando textos que en realidad no tienen nada que ver con el contenido de las p�ginas, y muchos usuarios y organizaciones estar�an dispuestos a pagar por un buscador que les evite perder su tiempo y que garantice que sus resultados son fiables. Por ejemplo, en http://www.pauklein.com/experimento-captar-trafico-oportunista/ se puede ver un interesante ejemplo, debidamente cuantificado, sobre el tr�fico oportunista a trav�s de Google que se genera al incluir en un blog de marketing la letra y el nombre de una canci�n de Billie The Vision And The Dancers tan pegadiza como ef�meramente popular en Espa�a.
Este tr�fico existe solamente porque Google es un buscador convencional basado en palabras clave, no un buscador sem�ntico, y cualquiera puede enga�arlo incluyendo en su p�gina web palabras que est�n de moda o sean populares. Si Hakia estuviera ya disponible en espa�ol, detectar�a que las palabras como "Estrella", "Damm", "Formentera" o "Mediterr�neamente" no guardan ninguna relaci�n de semejanza con los conceptos designados por t�rminos como "marketing online" o "posicionamiento en internet", y por lo tanto no mostar�a el post "Anuncio Estrella Damm Formentera 2009 Mediterr�neamente" cuando alguien buscara informaci�n sobre marketing (considerar�a que el sitio web donde se encuentra es de poca fiabilidad) o le asignar�a una posici�n muy baja en la lista de resultados.
A los usuarios nos interesa que buscadores como Hakia o Bing compitan con Google. Cuando una compa��a domina un mercado, la necesidad de inversi�n en mejorar sus productos disminuye o desaparece, y los usuarios se encuentran con productos fosilizados o con pr�cticas comerciales leoninas. Algunas empresas parecen pensar "�Para qu� tratar bien al cliente, si estamos solos en el mercado y nadie puede ni siquiera ara�ar nuestra cuota de mercado?" o, m�s crudamente, "Pague y calle: no hay nadie m�s que pueda ayudarle".
En mi opini�n, nos hemos acostumbrado a tratar los buscadores como si fueran m�quinas de refrescos: se introducen unas palabras clave, se pulsa un bot�n y se recogen los resultados (con la salvedad de que a veces uno pide una lata de Coca-Cola y obtiene una botella de Don Perignon; y otras veces, un vaso de agua f�tida y aherrumbrada). En realidad, deber�amos considerarlos bibliotecarios especializados a los que convendr�a formular preguntas detalladas y precisas. Un ejemplo: si uno introduce las frases "En este mundo vil, nada es gratuito. Todo se exp�a: el bien, como el mal, se paga tarde o temprano. El bien mucho m�s caro, l�gicamente" en un buscador, deber�a obtener resultados que informaran sobre la biograf�a de su autor, sobre su obra, sobre el estilo renqueante de su prosa, sobre su influencia en otros escritores, etc. Actualmente, lo que uno obtiene en Google son unos 5.400 resultados, de los cuales solamente unos 10 guardan relaci�n con el autor, y s�lo 3 informan sobre �ste, de manera muy incompleta y sin dar fuentes reconocidas o de prestigio.
Hakia es por ahora un escaparate de lo que el futuro nos deparar� en cuanto a b�squedas sem�nticas. Un precioso escaparate, dicho sea de paso.
Posted at 16:01
Back in December, I met up with the Semantic Technologies Working Group at JISC to talk a bit about the rise of Linked Data and have a high-level look at who’s been doing what. It was a great talk, from my perspective, because I was speaking to a room full of folk who knew EXACTLY what I meant. Instead of stumbling over explaining basic principles, we were all able to have a pretty healthy discussion about the big picture—looking at companies and organisations who’ve told their stories in Nodalities Magazine, for example. I left with the impression that JISC certainly has its eye on the Linked Data ball, as it were.
My impression has been strengthened recently, as I read their commissioned Linked Data “horizon scan” paper published by Paul Miller over on Cloud of Data. The Horizon Scan makes several recommendations for further investigation into Linked Data for Higher Education, the gist of which is to keep their eyes out for good use cases and to engage the Linked Data community where it can to learn more.
Then, as a couple hundred folk gathered at the second Linked Data Meetup in London, JISC announced that it’s putting £750,000 up: “…for projects to make content available on the Web working using linked data approaches.” JISC is calling for Higher Education projects to build Linked Data!
So, it looks like there is some alignment with our purpose here at Talis, then. We often talk about building the web of Linked Data, and we’ve been pushing projects and building stuff to make that happen. Now, it’s your turn…
The deadline for receipt of proposals in response to this call is 12 noon UK time on Tuesday 20 April 2010.
So, there isn’t much time to get proposals in. One way we can help is to host any Linked Data needed for a project on the Platform through the Connected Commons initiative. As we’ve reviewed here before, Talis will host any public data as Linked Data in the Platform. By public, we simply mean rights-waived (using PDDL or CC0) so it can be reused. The Platform hosts data online, and will also give you a SPARQL endpoint and RESTful API for rapid development on top of your new Linked Data.
The other thing we can do is to provide free developer licenses for working with the Platform and the API. There is also an extensive archive of documentation over on the developers’ wiki. Let us know what you’d like to build, and we’ll see if we can help. We’re keen to see more projects surfacing Linked Data, and it’s exciting to see what you will be building!
Finally, I’d love to hear about your projects. I can tell your Linked Data story in Nodalities Magazine, or perhaps as a podcast—whether you’re using the Platform or not. It’s great to share success stories with the wider community, and this should provide many good stories!
JISC funds Higher Education projects in the UK, and their full eligibility criteria are up on their call post.
Posted at 14:40
As I announced a few weeks ago, the RDF Next Steps Workshop will take place at NCBO, in Standford, US. A separate page has now been published on the details of the location, especially on hotels.
Let me also use this blog entry as a gentle reminder that the deadline for the position paper submissions is on April the 4th. There is still time, but not that much…
Posted at 09:32
On Thursday, I have 20 minutes to address 200 people (plus a video audience) at NoSQL Live … from Boston. My self-appointed mission is to start building bridges between the
Posted at 05:08
In the last few days I released Version 1.17 of my Flickcurl C library interface to the Flickr API. It has new complete support for three new recent sets of new APIs.
Added 15 new functions for the new Stats API calls
announced
2010-03-03:
flickr.stats.getCollectionDomains,
flickr.stats.getCollectionReferrers,
flickr.stats.getCollectionStats,
flickr.stats.getPhotoDomains,
flickr.stats.getPhotoReferrers,
flickr.stats.getPhotosetDomains,
flickr.stats.getPhotosetReferrers,
flickr.stats.getPhotosetStats,
flickr.stats.getPhotoStats,
flickr.stats.getPhotostreamDomains,
flickr.stats.getPhotostreamReferrers,
flickr.stats.getPhotostreamStats,
flickr.stats.getPopularPhotos and
flickr.stats.getTotalViews.
Added 8 new functions for the new People and “photos of”
people API calls
announced 2010-01-21:
flickr.photos.people.add,
flickr.photos.people.delete,
flickr.photos.people.deleteCoords,
flickr.photos.people.editCoords and
flickr.photos.people.getList,
flickr.people.getPhotosOf.
Added 3 new functions for the new, unannounced (and seems
incomplete) Gallery API calls:
flickr.galleries.addPhoto, flickr.galleries.getList
and
flickr.galleries.getListForPhoto .
Updated the flickcurl(1) to support the new
gallery, people photos and stats API calls.
See the Release Notes for full details.
Get it at: http://download.dajobe.org/flickcurl/flickcurl-1.17.tar.gz (GPL2 / LGPL2 / Apache2.)
This is what I do for fun between releasing Redland RDF libraries more of which soon…
Posted at 02:36
Posted at 21:25
sameAs.org is a great service on a number of different levels. It provides a much needed piece of Semantic Web infrastructure and it achieves that through a simple clean interface and API. You don’t even need to know anything about RDF to get value from the service. In short it’s one of those nice web services that do one thing and do it really well.
I use the service as a frequent example in my talks and training sessions on Linked Data. For example, while it’s useful to review techniques for linking together datasets, in practice you can achieve a lot by simply doing a series of look-ups against sameAs.org. I’ve had some happy experiences of discovering connections between datasets without having to do any manual linking.
More than a few times recently I’ve been thinking that it would be useful to repeat what Hugh Glaser and Ian Millard achieved with sameAs.org, but for a number of other common RDF predicates.
In my opinion there are a small number of general predicates
that will act as the backbone for the web of data. At the head of
the predicate long tail we’ll find properties like:
owl:sameAs, but also useful properties like
dc:subject, foaf:knows and
foaf:primaryTopic.
The topic based predicates (dc:subject,
foaf:primaryTopic, foaf:topic, et al) are
particularly useful for discovering documents and material that
relate to a specific resource. An index of these would be extremely
useful for inter-linking between content from different news and
media organisations for example. I’d envisage that “topicOf.org”
might index a range of different topic related predicates and
expose some useful discovery tools, relations and equivalencies.
Dan Brickley has a nice diagram
that shows how these different predicates inter-relate.
“topicOf” is currently top of my list of these predicate based
services. But the same approach would work in other contexts. For
example a service that indexed foaf:knows would be
useful for social networking applications. But I think that this
area is already well-served by existing services already. But what
about:
foaf:depiction), e.g. person, place or thing (and
reliably, not like the Flickr Wrapper)dc:creator,
foaf:maker)I can think of all sorts of useful purposes for these services. I also think that they could offer additional ways of engaging with the broader developer community and getting them to buy into the Linked Data vision.
Anyone want to have a crack at implementing some of these?
Posted at 19:58
Deceptively simple demonstrations of how Virtuoso's SPARQL-GEO extensions to SPARQL lay critical foundation for Geo Spatial solutions that seek to leverage the burgeoning Web of Linked Data.
SPARQL Endpoint: Linked Open Data Cache (8.5 Billion+ Quad Store which includes data from Geonames and the Linked GeoData Project Data Sets) .
Posted at 22:43
Posted at 21:57
Posted at 08:48
Motivation for this post arose from a series of Twitter exchanges between Tony Hirst and I, in relation to his blog post titled: So What Is It About Linked Data that Makes it Linked Data™ ?
At the end of the marathon session, it was clear to me that a blog post was required for future reference, at the very least :-)
"Data Access by Reference" mechanism for Data Objects (or Entities) on HTTP networks. It enables you to Identify a Data Object and Access its structured Data Representation via a single Generic HTTP scheme based Identifier (HTTP URI). Data Object representation formats may vary; but in all cases, they are hypermedia oriented, fully structured, and negotiable within the context of a client-server message exchange.
Information makes the world tick!
Information doesn't exist without data to contextualize.
Information is inaccessible without a projection (presentation) medium.
All information (without exception, when produced by humans) is subjective. Thus, to truly maximize the innate heterogeneity of collective human intelligence, loose coupling of our information and associated data sources is imperative.
Linked Data is exposed to HTTP networks (e.g. World Wide Web) via hypermedia resources bearing structured representations of data object descriptions. Remember, you have a single Identifier abstraction (generic HTTP URI) that embodies: Data Object Name and Data Representation Location (aka URL).
A structured representation of data exists when an Entity (Datum), its Attributes, and its Attribute Values are clearly discernible. In the case of a Linked Data Object, structured descriptions take the form of a hypermedia based Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) graph pictorial -- where each Entity, its Attributes, and its Attribute Values (optionally) are identified using Generic HTTP URIs.
Examples of structured data representation formats (content types) associated with Linked Data Objects include:
You markup resources by expressing distinct entity-attribute-value statements (basically these a 3-tuple records) using a variety of notations:
You can achieve this task using any of the following approaches:
Our data access middleware heritage (which spans 16+ years) has enabled us to assemble a rich portfolio of coherently integrated products that enable cost-effective evaluation and utilization of Linked Data, without writing a single line of code, or exposing you to the hidden, but extensive admin and configuration costs. Post installation, the benefits of Linked Data simply materialize (along the lines described above).
Our main Linked Data oriented products include:
Posted at 15:16
Yesterday,
Posted at 10:23
At this year's 19th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2010 - Raleigh, NC, USA), W3C will organize two "camps": the "HTML 5 camp" and the "Linked Open Data (LOD) camp" (29 and 30 April 2010). The "camp" format of the W3C Track, first adopted in Madrid in 2009, received positive feedback and so we are continuing, and improving, that format.
Each camp is one day. The morning sessions will feature talks from experts and surprise guests. In the afternoon of each session, the participants themselves will choose the topics they wish to discuss during the breakouts.
Wikis are available to submit topics of discussion in advance. There is one wiki per camp: LODCampW3CTrack and HTML5campW3CTrack. Apart from technical topics, we are also looking for lightning talks (very short presentations) proposals: anything from announcements, forward thinking ideas, controversial statements, observations, short demos, etc. Note too that the breakout session outcomes will be recorded in the same wikis.
So, if you're planning to attend the WWW conference, please register through the WWW2010 online registration system and let's W3Ccamp there!
Posted at 18:24
Socially enhanced enterprise and invididual collaboration is becoming a focal point for a variety of solutions that offer erswhile distinct content managment features across the realms of Blogging, Wikis, Shared Bookmarks, Discussion Forums etc.. as part of an integrated platform suite. Recently, Socialtext has caught my attention courtesy of its nice features and benefits page . In addition, I've also found the Mike 2.0 portal immensely interesting and valuable, for those with an enterprise collaboration bent.
Anyway, Socialtext and Mike 2.0 (they aren't identical and juxtaposition isn't seeking to imply this) provide nice demonstrations of socially enhanced collaboration for individuals and/or enterprises is all about:
As is typically the case in this emerging realm, the critical issue of discrete "identifiers" (record keys in sense) for data items, data containers, and data creators (individuals and groups) is overlooked albeit unintentionally.
Rather than using platform constrained identifiers such as:
It enables you to leverage the platform independence of HTTP scheme Identifiers (Generic URIs) such that Identifiers for:
simply become conduits into a mesh of HTTP -- referencable and accessible -- Linked Data Objects endowed with High SDQ (Serendipitious Discovery Quotient). For example my Personal WebID is all anyone needs to know if they want to explore:
Even when you reach a point of equilibrium where: your daily activities trigger orchestratestration of CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations against Linked Data Objects within your socially enhanced collaboration network, you still have to deal with the thorny issues of security, that includes the following:
FOAF+SSL, an application of HTTP based Linked Data, enables you to enhance your Personal HTTP scheme based Identifer (or WebID) via the following steps (peformed by a FOAF+SSL compliant platform):
Contrary to conventional experiences with all things PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) related, FOAF+SSL compliant platforms typically handle the PKI issues as part of the protocol implementation; thereby protecting you from any administrative tedium without compromising security.
Understanding how new technology innovations address long standing problems, or understanding how new solutions inadvertently fail to address old problems, provides time tested mechanisms for product selection and value proposition comprehension that ultimately save scarce resources such as time and money.
If you want to understand real world problem solution #1 with regards to HTTP based Linked Data look no further than the issues of secure, socially aware, and platform independent identifiers for data objects, that build bridges across erstwhile data silos.
If you want to cost-effectively experience what I've outlined in this post, take a look at OpenLink Data Spaces (ODS) which is a distributed collaboration engine (enterprise of individual) built around the Virtuoso database engines. It simply enhances existing collaboration tools via the following capabilities:
Addition of Social Dimensions via HTTP based Data Object Identifiers for all Data Items (if missing)
Posted at 20:47
Together with my co-organizers Haofen Wang, Thanh Tranh and Marko Grobelnik, we have been again given the fantastic opportunity to organize the next edition of our
Posted at 14:49
Posted at 23:56
Posted at 20:39
We’re happy to announce the second Pellet maintenance release of the 2.0 series, Pellet 2.0.2. This release fixes several issues and includes the updates to support the latest reasoner interfaces in OWLAPI version 3.0.0. Complete set of tickets closed for this release are listed at the Trac page for this release. Pellet 2.0.2 is available for download.
We’ve also release an updated Pellet Reasoner Plug-in for Protégé 4 to work with Pellet 2.0.2.
Posted at 18:59
Posted at 13:05
Since the beginning of the modern IT era, each period of innovation has inadvertently introduced its fair share of Data Silos. The driving force behind this anomaly remains an overemphasis on the role of applications when selecting problem solutions. Unfortunately, most solution selecting decision makers remain oblivious to the fact that most applications are architecturally monolithic; i.e., they fail to separate the following five layers that are critical to all solutions:
The rise of the Internet, and its exponentially-growing user-friendly enclave known as the World Wide Web, is bringing the intrinsic costs of the monolithic application architecture anomaly to bear -- in manners unanticipated by many. For example, the emergence of network-oriented solutions across the realms of Enterprise 2.0-based Collaboration and Web 2.0-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), combined with the overarching influence of Social Media, are producing more heterogeneously-structured and disparately-located data sources than people can effectively process.
As is often the case, a variety of problem and product monikers have emerged for the data access and integration challenges outlined above. Contemporary examples include Enterprise Information Integration, Master Data Management, and Data Virtualization. Labeling aside, the fundamental issues of the unresolved Data Integration challenge boil down to the following:
Effectively solving today's data integration challenges requires a move away from monolithic application architecture to loosely-coupled, network-centric application architectures. Basically, we need a ubiquitous network-centric application protocol that lends itself to loosely-coupled across-the-wire orchestration of data interactions. In short, this will be what revitalizes the art of application development and deployment.
The World Wide Web is built around a network application protocol called HTTP. This protocol intrinsically separates the five layers listed earlier, thereby enabling:
A uniquely designed to address today's escalating Data Access and Integration challenges without compromising performance, security, or platform independence. At its core lies an unrivaled commitment to industry standards combined with unique technology innovation that transcends erstwhile distinct realms such as:
When Virtuoso is installed and running, HTTP-based Data Objects are automatically created as a by-product of its powerful data virtualization, transcending data sources and data representation formats. The benefits of such power extend across profiles such as:
Bottom line, Virtuoso delivers unrivaled flexibility and scalability, without compromising performance or security.
Posted at 19:12
Sporting the title of Head of
Making Public Data Public and data.gov.uk, Richard Stirling leads the
central team behind those two initiatives, based out of the Cabinet
Office of the UK Government.
In our conversation we discuss data.gov.uk which emerged from a conversation between Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the Prime Minister, less than a year ago, and how Richard found himself involved.
The setting up and launch of data.gov.uk, with external advisors Sir Tim Berners-Lee & Nigel Shadbolt, exceedingly short development period, and involvement of the wider community, has been very different to the popular conception of a government IT project. Richard gives us some insight as to what it has been like on the inside. He also explains the focus on taking data in to RDF and Linked Data in addition to publishing it in the form provided by the originating departments.
With a look in to what might be next, Richard gives us a great view of what is behind the web site.
Picture published on Flickr by Thayer18
Posted at 21:57
Posted at 20:13
Posted at 10:52
To quote Prime Minister Gordon Brown in his opening speech today at the Global Investment Conference 2010 “from today you will be identify centres of excellence at the click of a button”. Obviously in a general global stage speech, a Prime Minister cannot go in to detail, but he was referring to a project delivered in super quick time to the UK Government which is launched today – The Research Funding Explorer.
It was less than a month ago when the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) asked us at Talis if we could use the Linked Data Principles and practice demonstrated in our work with data.gov.uk to produce an application to help them with their mission. Specifically they wanted a way to demonstrate to those looking to invest in the UK, where the centres of excellence are located.
You can’t beat the focus of a fixed delivery date to stimulate innovation. So when we were asked to not only come up with the the pilot for a real application but also have it ready in two weeks, in time for the preparation of the Prime Minister’s Conference, the team behind it were filled with challenge and trepidation in equal measure – especially as at this time we hadn’t had a close look at the data.
They wanted something that could join the list of applications on the data.gov.uk Apps List and show how Linked Data from several sources could be brought together to deliver real benefit in a way that each source alone could not. The data originated from organisations such as the the Technology Strategy Board, the Medical Research Council, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, and the Intellectual Property Office mostly in the form of large spreadsheets. The data was extracted from these, transformed in to RDF and loaded in to the Talis Platform utilising URIs for concept which will be compatible with rest of the RDF to be found on data.gov.uk. With great input from visualisation developers at Iconomical, the Research Funding Explorer was born.
In the limited time available it was
not possible to ingest and display data for all research topics, so
for that demonstrate the UK’s investment in leading technologies
were chosen: RFID,
Advanced
Composites, Regenerative
Medicine, and Plastic
Electronics. Running the animation on the home page of
the site clearly shows the funding hot spots for these topics of UK
research. Zooming in to the map shows the location of
the organisations involved. The graph on the visualisation tracking
the national cumulative investment in these subjects, overlaid with
an indication of the number of patents granted for each.
The obvious wow of this application is the visualisation, but the real power of storing this data in RDF, and using SPARQL to query it, becomes apparent when you start navigating it via the subjects, regions, and organisations, seamlessly following the associations between them. For a quick whiz through what the application is capable of, checkout this short screencast:
At the moment the data is all stored within a single Talis Platform store (if you are at home with SPARQL, check it out here), over the next couple of weeks this data will be made available via stores available via data.gov.uk so that it can be used to drive other innovative applications.
This is only a start, but already this project has demonstrated that publishing data as Linked Data in a queryable store can stimulate innovation beyond the ubiquitous demo mashup towards real full-blown applications that can deliver commercial benefit.
Posted at 10:01
Posted at 23:20
During the implementation phase of the Rule Interchange Format (RIF), the Working Group discovered a problem with the design of the Production Rules Dialect. This problem is addressed with a new Last Call Working Draft that changes the way actions are handled to more closely match existing production rule engines. Please send comments and RIF implementation reports to public-rif-comments@w3.org.
Posted at 08:43
I
know what you’re thinking: “He’s going to say Data!”
Well, I might do at some point, but I was going to say “Days”. Last month, Talis flung open its doors to 30 or so folk who were interested in SPARQL, the Semantic Web and Linked … er, Data. The idea was to host an informal event for folks learn about much of what we’ve been talking about for the past few years. We planned some talks on what it means to join up your data, what this Platform is about, and a detailed introduction to SPARQL. With the launch of data.gov.uk and many of the stories covered over in the Magazine, it seemed possible that people were starting to get interested in this whole Linked Data scene.
So, we sent out some invites and tweeted a bit, and soon had to cap the registration numbers. We filled up spaces in the January day not long after New Year, and the February day not long after the January one. March is quickly filling up too (hint). I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting this many people to express an interest so soon. Not only did people sign up, but travelled to Birmingham through adverse weather to come and take part at both ‘Days—and we’ve had a lot of fun.
One thing that seemed to be a good idea was to ask for feedback before the event. It sounds wrong, but the point of an Open Day is to cover things that YOU’re interested in learning or exploring. So, when people registered, they were asked for their expectations and what they’d like to take away with them from such an event—aside from a T-shirt and SPARQL mug, obviously. It made it much easier to work out what we should cover, and I hope it meant that we were able to talk about the things most relevant to the people who came along.
I’d like to do it again, but slightly differently. Instead of hosting an Open Day here at Talis HQ, what if we came to you? Would you be interested in attending a Talis Platform Roadshow? What would you want us to cover? More importantly, where would you like us to go?
Posted at 11:12
This post has been triggered by a Twitter thread, where I
Posted at 11:08