triple|scape

Time once again for another fabulously informative edition of The Week in Linked Data. Let’s get to it…

Miscellaneous

• First, a personal note. I’m looking for some consulting work. Generally I’ve been working from home, but I’m willing to travel pretty much anywhere where I won’t be killed for being an American. If you have some SemWeb/LOD development or professional services work you need done, please ping me!
• Richard Hancock (no link to him in the article?) has an article over at DevX called “Why Migrate to the Semantic Web“. In it, he briefly describes some of the benefits that semantic technology brings to ordinary applications. For example; social networking, domain modeling, concept clarification, data augmentation, collaboration and reasoning.
• Paul Miller of Talis and ZDNet fame has a new blog called “Cloud of Data” in which he’s exploring the integration of Cloud Computing and the Semantic Web. Could Cloud Computing be the peanut-butter to the Semantic Web’s chocolate? It would seem that they would be very complimentary (vital?) technologies in turning the web into a giant distributed database. I’m looking forward to what Paul has to say on this.
• Dapper announced MashupAds this week. MashupAds is an add engine that produces ads based on contextual information in page on which it’s displayed. In short, it takes some snippet of your web page (that you define, I believe), and generates a widget containing ads that are contextual relevant to the snippet you defined. Looks interesting I suppose.

  (Warning: Rant ahead) But I wonder about these kinds of things. I mean, just because I’m on your site doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m interested in what you’re talking about. I might just be there in passing, or to look something up for my wife. If you want to make a killing on advertising, ask me what I’m interested in. Then have ads related to my interests follow me around wherever I go on the web. Danny Ayers and I talked about this some a few years ago; putting my FOAF URL in a HTTP header and letting the website fetch my FOAF, find my interests and return advertising that is relevant to me, not to the site that I just happen to be on.

• Jeen Broekstra has an update on his Sesame 2 Windows client. It’s now supporting a SKOS hierarchy browser.
  
• Alexandre Passant over at DERI has a new iPhone based Linked Data browser out call iLOD. Actually, it’s not a native iPhone application, but a web site that is optimized for the iPhone. Regardless, it works really well! Here are some screenshots of me exploring dbpedia’s Linked_Data resource:
  

  iLOD iPhone Linked Data Browser

  No iPhone? No problem. Just open the site in Safari and it works great.

• Clark and Parsia’s Pellet v2.0 RC3 is now available. You can get the list of changes/fixes here.
• Kevin Kelly has a good, forward looking video on TED where he discusses the web’s next 5000 days. In a nutshell, a) today’s web will be re-engineered into smaller chunks of data and re-cast into the web of data and b) any device or thing with even the most modest computing power will web enabled . Additionally, he points that that the things that we thought would be impossible back when the web was just a baby have now come true. And the things people think are impossible today (like the semantic web, web of data, whatever), are most certainly going to be achieved. And I agree!
• Benjamin “Another Day, Another Cool Thing” Nowack annouced poshRDF. It’s a parser that converts the most popular (and apparently ad-hoc?) microformats to RDF.
• I know some of you are involved with library related information retrieval work, so I thought I’d mention the Reference Extract project. Being developed by the Online Computer Library Center, it’s a search engine, but it’s Librarian powered. You enter some search term and the results are returned and weighted towards the sites that are most often referred to by librarians at major institutions such as the Library of Congress. They are looking for help getting the system up and running. So if you’re a Librarian or interested in Library Science, you might want to head on over and see how you might contribute.
• Hank Williams has a problem. Specifically, the lack of UI/UX work being done in the semantic web space. I couldn’t agree more! If Tabulator continues to be held up as the de-facto tool for browsing linked data, we’re screwed. Now, there are a few gems out there I admit. But generally speaking, I think we can probably all agree that the linked data movement has focused almost exclusively on the hard science while ignoring the soft. How can we fix this? How can we engage the UX community to get involved? I want my Minority Report-style LOD browser, damnit!:)

Specifications

• Nothing? Didn’t come across one darn thing this week. Ping me if you know of something and I’ll update the post.

Conferences

• VoCamp Galway 2008. VoCamp is a series of informal events where people can spend some dedicated time creating lightweight vocabularies/ontologies for the Semantic Web/Web of Data. I suspect some drinking will also occur.
• OIC 2008: ONTOLOGY FOR THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY - Toward Effective Exploitation and Integration of Intelligence Resources. George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia. December 3-4, 2008. Sounds very cloak-and-dagger!
• ESWC 2009 CALL FOR TUTORIAL PROPOSALS . 6th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2009) 31 May - 4 June 2009, Heraklion, Greece.