Recent posts in my Linked data & semantic web Category

An Oregon judge has inadvertently sparked a wider debate about the nature of journalism, as Cleland Thom reported for the Press Gazette. I think a public set of principles is one key way for publishers to set themselves aside from the general hubbub of the internet.

This is the essay version of the talk I gave yesterday at the EuroIA Summit in Prague.

This week at the Guardian we launched something like 3 million album pages, allowing users to rate, review and buy just about anything that has ever been released. Well, provided it has a MusicBrainz ID anyway.

This week, in the run-up to Glastonbury, at The Guardian we have begun publishing the latest incarnation of our artist tag pages. These gives us an automated page for every artist playing at the festival, which mixes together our own content with content drawn from the rest of the web. It is an extension of the work that we did earlier in the year based upon the SxSW festival, and on some even longer-standing prototypes that our development team built in the middle of 2010 as a proof of concept. And this blog post is about why I am so pleased with them.

Last night I was at the Hacks/Hackers meet-up to hear Andreas Gebhart, Stuart Myles and Evan Sandhaus talk about the proposed new IPTC semantic metadata standard rNews.

I’ just come back from Poland, where I was giving the opening keynote session at the Polish IA Summit, and this week I’m posting my notes from the rest of the sessions I saw in Warsaw. Today I’d like to focus on the talks by Krzysztof Trzewiczek and Tomasz Kopacz, about opening up state data and the future of IT respectively.

Last Wednesday was the second anniversary of me joining the Guardian on a full-time basis, and it turned out to be one of the best days I’ve had since I arrived. As well as seeing tech demos of three products that will shortly be going live which I am very excited about, we also launched our guide to the bands playing at the SXSW festival in Austin next month, which uses the linked open data of MusicBrainz IDs to aggregate content from elsewhere onto the guardian.co.uk site.

The BBC College of Journalism were filming all of news:rewired last week, and they've now put up all the clips from the linked data and semantic web session.

A few more links to things mentioned in yesterday's news:rewired session about linked data and the semantic web.

Today I've been at news:rewired in London, talking about linked data and the semantic web in a panel session with my Guardian colleague Simon Rogers, Martin Moore from the Media Standards Trust, and Silver Oliver of the BBC. Here is a linklog special of all the things I mentioned in my talk...

Last week I was at the Online Information conference, and here is the second part of my notes from a session featuring Richard Wallis, Chris Taggart and Noel Hatch, looking at linked data in the context of local government in the UK.

Last week I was at the Online Information conference, and here are my notes from a session featuring Richard Wallis, Chris Taggart and Noel Hatch, looking at linked data in the context of local government in the UK.

Last week I was at the Online Information conference in London. Here are my notes from a session given by John Sheridan, looking at how they have turned nearly 800 years of UK legislation into digital linked data online.

In early November 2010 I gave a presentation at the London UKUPA meeting for 'World Usability Day'. In it, I took the day's theme of 'communication', and examined how twenty years of digital technology had smashed the boundaries between media organisations and their audiences. In this five part series, I've written that talk up as an essay, covering how the media now have to deal with users on a much more personal level, involve them in product design, and build tools to enable story-telling. This is part four.

The release of Government spending data gives us a wealth of information about companies earning their living from the state. However, the ability to cross-reference it with data on the companies themselves is limited by the fact that Companies House keeps that state data behind a paywall.

Tyler Bell has written a piece for O'Reilly Radar entitled "Where the semantic web stumbled, linked data will succeed". He seems to comes out strongly in favour of the Lego-building kit approach of interoperable data from many sources, rather than the rigid approach of defining a perfect ontology to map everything to.

Some bits and piece from around the web about a couple of things I've been involved with at The Guardian this week - the inclusion of MusicBrainz IDs and ISBN numbers in our content API, and the "Search at The Guardian" event I helped run on Monday.

Today we have announced that we have added 'Linked Data' to the Guardian's API. You can now query it using MusicBrainz IDs and ISBN numbers.

There has been plenty of reaction my "Let a million data structures blooom" post last week, which was sparked by Tom Coates and his "Death to the semantic web" slide at dConstruct the other week.

At dConstruct last week Tom Coates stood in front of a slide saying "The semantic web must die". I couldn't help but respond...by saying that I agree with 99% of what he said in Brighton.

I've spotted a few blog reactions to last week's datajournalism meetup in Berlin, and thought I'd gather a couple of them here, which focus on the importance of linked data being free from commercial restraint, on the German attitude to privacy on the web. And David Essex.

The first of what will no doubt be a flurry of blog posts about my trip to a datajournalism meetup in Berlin looks at one of the questions asked during the final panel session: Why do the UK and US seem to be so more advanced with linked data and the semantic web than Germany?

My post about the deletion of the band First Aid Kit's Wikipedia page got a rapid response from an admin, who saw my blog and restored it to the encyclopedia. However, it has done nothing to allay my primary concern, that in relying on dbpedia as a near-central hub in the #linkeddata world, we are relying on the good intentions of WIkipedia editors, some of whom are keen to reduce the scope of pages on the site.

I've been keeping a close eye on the new media elements of this campaign, and thought I'd stick my neck out and predict three digital trends we will see a lot more of next time around.

In the last of several posts around the web about the 2nd London Linked Data meet-up, here are my notes on issues of privacy, distribution, software licences and setting usable standards for open linked data.

My blog post yesterday about human readable linked data URIs sparked a lot of discussion in the comments and on Twitter. In this follow up post, I argue that just because it wouldn't make sense for the BBC to do it with their /programmes URI schema, doesn't mean it should be ditched as a worthwhile aspiration for those who can manage it.

One of the topics that came up in last week's London Linked Data meet-up was whether URIs needed to be human readable, or whether computer generated random mixes of characters were acceptable. For me, human readable is the way to go every time.

I've recently started a blog post series on Inside Guardian about my role as information architect at guardian.co.uk, and also been interviewed for the Nodalities podcast about 'Linked Data' and news.

Linked data and the future of journalism
I recently appeared on a panel debating linked data and journalism. Here is a transcript of what I said.