To Dublin, in search of evidence
I travelled to Ireland last week, to attend the second meeting of the European Data Forum (EDF). The EDF provided travel support for my trip, and I am grateful to them for that. I was searching for evidence of ways in which smart use of data is having a transformative effect upon European businesses. Although some [...]
Doing the DataBeat
For the past two years, Ben Kepes and I have helped the team at VentureBeat assemble the programme for their annual Cloud Computing event, CloudBeat. It looks as though we may end up doing something similar with them this year, as CloudBeat moves from Redwood City to downtown San Francisco, and from November to September. [...]
Survey: How open is your data?
Back in 2006 as we rolled out the first public draft of the Talis Community Licence, the world of data licensing seemed a simple place. Today, the Open Knowledge Foundation‘s Data Hub contains 3,888 data sets, many of which are explicitly licensed with respect to the Open Definition. But many are still not explicitly licensed. Over at [...]
Thinking about Data Gravity
Dave McCrory introduced his idea of Data Gravity with a blog post back in 2010. The core idea was — and is — interesting, and got some traction from sites like ReadWriteWeb, ZDNet and GigaOM. More recently, Data Gravity featured in this year’s EMC World keynote. But beyond the observation that large or valuable agglomerations of data [...]
A conversation with Richard Wallis, an experiment, and a survey
Richard Wallis left Talis (my former employer) last month, and has set up as a consultant at DataLiberate. In this short podcast, Richard shares some of his thoughts on data, semantics, and ‘the power of the link.’ Our conversation is also an excuse for an experiment. I have been producing audio-only podcasts here and elsewhere [...]
CloudCamp London: the Big Data Special
Image by Kevin Krejci via Flickr The CloudCamp unconference returned to London for the 14th time this evening, regaling a capacity crowd in the Crypt below Clerkenwell’s St James Church with several hours of discussion and debate on the somewhat elusive topic of ‘Big Data’. Rather rough notes of the proceedings follow, after the break. [...]
Top Level Domain for data answers the wrong question
Image of Stephen Wolfram via Wikipedia British-born computer scientist Stephen Wolfram sees ongoing efforts to extend the Internet’s top-level domains (TLDs) beyond the familiar .com, .org, .uk etc as an opportunity to raise the profile of machine-readable data. In a blog post published yesterday, he argues that a new .data domain would increase “exposure of data on [...]
June is San Francisco month
For real-world applications of Linked Data and the Semantic Web, the long-running Semantic Technology Conference is hard to beat. For getting a real handle on the Cloud Computing landscape, GigaOM‘s Structure Conference is also a leading light. Working across both areas as I do, these events tend to figure prominently in my calendar for the [...]
Curating a bit of the Cloud over at GigaOM Pro
Image via CrunchBase I’ve been a fan of Om Malik‘s boutique analyst site, GigaOM Pro, pretty much from the outset, and happily renew my subscription each year. The site covers a wide range of industry topics, and those Quarterly Wrap-ups are worth the fee all by themselves. I’ve written a few reports for them in [...]
The Semantic Link is open
At the end of last month, I wrote about the new Semantic Link podcast that I’m involved with for SemanticWeb.com. We recorded the first episode earlier this week and it’s now online, along with an introduction to the series from myself. Please do have a listen, and let me know what you think whilst I [...]
Is there a disconnect between Big Data and the Web of Data ?
Image via Wikipedia ‘Big Data‘ is currently capturing the imagination, attracting hype, investment and ambitious startups in almost equal measure. Kim and Eric Norlin’s excellent Defrag and Glue events have gained big-name company, with O’Reilly‘s Strata and GigaOM‘s Structure both set to arrive in the first quarter of 2011. Venture firms like IA Ventures have emerged, specifically [...]
Looking forward to The Semantic Link podcast on SemanticWeb.com
Image via Wikipedia Almost exactly two years ago, I announced my intention to leave Talis and strike out on my own. A year ago, the final piece of that transition concluded when we published the last episode of the Semantic Web Gang; a round table podcast that I began inside Talis and subsequently produced with [...]
A tale of two conferences
A somewhat hectic June concluded with my second trip of the month to California. Whilst the first excursion led to Santa Clara and an interesting insight into attempts by Hitachi Data Systems to reinvent its relationship with the wider community, the second journey took me to San Francisco and a pair of events that lie [...]
A podcast conversation about GoodRelations, with Martin Hepp and Jamie Taylor
I recorded my latest Semantic Web-ish podcast last week, talking with Martin Hepp in Germany and Jamie Taylor in California. Our topic was GoodRelations, an ontology/vocabulary designed to enhance the clarity of descriptions of businesses and their products on the Web. As the GoodRelations site describes, “GoodRelations is a language that can be used to describe very [...]
DRAFT report explores Linked Data potential in UK Universities
One of the projects I’ve been working on recently is for the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) here in the UK. Like the BBC, the UK Government and others, they’re interested in the opportunities created by adoption of Linked Data, and will be issuing a call to fund some projects in the space early next [...]
