February 8, 2010
We recently found an article by Karen Coyle (whom David interviewed for chapter 6 of his book, Pull) explaining many semantic web terms for lay people. It’s an excellent introduction to many of the concepts of the semantic web by a champion of 21st century library science. Read the LibraryJournal.com article and then explore her personal page for more of her work trying to change the world of book metadata.
February 5, 2010
Keywords: RDFa, W3C
We are excited to learn that the W3C organization has launched a RDFa working group, a giant leap into the initiatives towards the adoption of the Semantic Web. The group’s mission will be to promote technologies including HTML, XHTML, RDFa along with helping others adopt these into applications. Read the announcement and the group details at w3.org.
February 5, 2010
New York City wanted to promote the use of its open online data sets, so they had a competition called NYC Big Apps, asking application developers to do something interesting with the data. Last night, they unveiled the winners. It may not quite be the semantic web, but it’s a structured step in the right direction. We salute New York City government and all the app developers who participated, working to make public data more accessible to all. Browse their iPhone and Android apps and start downloading New York City!
February 4, 2010
Data360, a site started by Tom Paper to provide a source of factual data in tables, graphs, charts, and (we hope some day) RDF and other fully semantic formats. At the moment, he’s hoping to attract more people to his data community and host as much data as possible. As his site matures, we’re sure there will be more linked data that interacts with the rest of the open web. Please support Data360, give him your data, and become part of the community.
February 4, 2010
Keywords: SIOC, Social Web, RDF, Ontology
The Health Care and Life Sciences research community today has several online communities in the form of blogs and wikis containing vital information necessary for researchers. There is a need to connect these individual silos to facilitate interoperability and reuse of rich knowledge base and content these networks possess. Meet the SIOC initiative (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities), which provides a semantic web ontology to facilitate a standard way of representing the information in RDF format. SIOC provides a platform for new usage scenarios of online community data and establishes a model to connect the silos together. Learn more about this initiative at sioc-project.org and find a detailed document at w3.org.
February 2, 2010
We found a great new site helping disseminate structured data to help researchers discover information about Alzheimer’s and other diseases. From their web site:
SWAN (Semantic Web Applications in Neuromedicine) is a Web-based collaborative program that aims to organize and annotate scientific knowledge about Alzheimer disease (AD) and other neurodegenerative disorders. The SWAN project is designed to allow the community of AD researchers to author, curate and connect a diversity of data and ideas about AD via secure personal and public SWAN workspaces, using the emerging Semantic Web paradigm for deep interconnection of data, information and knowledge.
February 1, 2010
We found a good article explaining the difference between today’s databases and tomorrow’s pull-based linked data online. It’s written by Eric Neumann and it’s only two pages. Take five minutes and read about linked data for drug discovery.
February 1, 2010
Keywords: Semantic Web Meetup
Do you want to meet other people who share interests in topics related to the Semantic Web? We found a comprehensive list of the Semantic Web Meetups around the world. If you’re a technologist, you may already know about them but don’t participate. If you’re a business person and you enjoyed reading Pull, we encourage you to go learn at these meetups – you’ll probably learn quite a bit and get to know some of the people in your community working on the semantic web. Distribute the list to your friends, participate in the discussions and spread the news.
January 29, 2010
Keywords: Attensity, Inxight, Business Objects
Attensity Government Systems (AGS) has launched itself as a wholly owned subsidiary of Attensity Group. AGS enables agencies to uncover intelligent information such as citizen feedback and events embedded inside unstructured documents owned by the federal government, through its suite of semantic technology applications. Read more about this announcement at prnewswire.com and Attensity’s technology at attensity.com.
January 29, 2010
January 29, 2010
In addition to LinkedData.org, we now have Uberblic, which promises to help index and integrate linked open datasets online. It’s based on the Uberblic data reconciliation platform that helps make semi-structured data more structured. For example, it gives WikiPedia authors the ability to add the tags to their WikiPedia entries that will make DBPedia more effective as an RDF graph. Read their press release and compare Uberblic with Linkeddata.org.
January 28, 2010
Keywords: Genetic research, open linked data, life sciences, biology, Open Access Platform
Sage Bionetworks, a non-profit dedicated to making disease-related genetic data available in linked formats to enable large-scale computing and collaboration, announced their first data set open to the public. Their goal is to provide a framework for researchers to construct disease models from human and mouse genetic data. These working models are incredibly complex, so as researchers collaborate they will learn much more in less time than working independently and publishing papers. Merck has generously contributed some of the first data sets, but there will be many more. It’s an exciting project that promises to bring us better disease and therefor better cure models in the near future. Since they are gathering huge data sets and making them into open linked data, they are extending the semantic web of knowledge for life sciences. These open, royalty-free datasets pass the semantic web acid test with flying colors – we hope they inspire others to do the same. Please give them your attention and send your friends to their site. The more people who know that this can work, the better. Learn about the Sage case studies and the Sage Commons and spread the word. Bravo!
January 27, 2010
Keywords: Arrayent, Internet of Things, Cisco, CES 2010.
ReadWriteWeb reports that Arrayent wants to connect everything you own to the Internet. The company debuted at CES this year, showing Mattel toys and Monster Cable products connected to the web via their web app and server products. The company plans to help make home automation and medical reporting (as discussed in chapter 14 of Pull) easy and inexpensive. Read more at ReadWriteWeb and Arrayent.com.
January 26, 2010
The New York Times has published a vocabulary of approximately 10,000 terms as linked open data. This vocabulary helps define and reference people, places, and companies. It lives online, where anyone can use it under a creative commons license. This is an exciting project, one we applaud and hope other news organizations will start to build such things collaboratively. We hope it proves more useful than some of the existing vocabularies published by other news organizations. Pull readers note: there is NO REASON for all the news organizations to do this on their own! Please let us know if you hear of any collaborations – we want to showcase them. See the New York Times vocabulary at Data.Nytimes.com.
January 26, 2010
Come to http://ThePowerOfPull.com for an easy guide to the Seesmic Look product announcement video that makes Twitter easier to use for the masses. If you don’t want to watch an entire 1:40-minute video, David’s guide will save time and provide valuable insight.
January 25, 2010
Keywords: Boxee, Premium Content, Cable TV
Boxee recently announced it would start charging for content. The Hulu competitor and company that wants to be your gateway to professionally made video content, recently announced on their blog that they would begin offering premium paid content sometime later this year. They haven’t unveiled their micropayment partner yet, but they have said they want it to be easy to pay for content using your traditional cable remote. As David says in Pull, this WILL replace cable TV eventually. It’s just a matter of time. Learn more on Boxee.tv’s blog.
January 22, 2010
Keywords: Bombardier Transportation, McMaster RFID Applications Lab, Ontario Centres of Excellence
Semantic technology has found its way into the transportation sector with Bombardier Transportation, McMaster RFID Applications Lab (MRAL) and Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) collaborating towards the development of a location aware technology. The location aware technology uses RFID systems, sensors, networks and new antenna technologies to transmit RFID signals to the subway operators notifying them of approaching track workers. Currently the notification is done manually using colored lights and broadcast messages. David talks about the RFID technology in his book Pull. Read more about this new initiative which is the first of its kind in the world aiming towards better communication and imrpoved safety at physorg.com.
January 21, 2010
Keywords: Transparency Governance, UK Government, RDF, SPARQL
In a major step towards transparent governance, the UK government yesterday officially opened data.gov.uk. The site will publish government-held, non-personal data in RDF, and there are already 3000 datasets available. Apart from raw data, the provides a SPARQL end-point and is inviting public participation for applications, ideas and virtualizations. With busting of this big silo of data, we should see many PULL-based applications. In fact, there are some interesting ones already at data.gov.uk.
January 21, 2010
Keywords: Online Computer Library Center, Open Library, Google, Metadata
As David talks about in chapter 6 of Pull, the OCLC (Open Computer Library Center) and Google have been at odds on metadata issues for years. Recently, the two sides met at the American Library Association’s Midwinter Meeting, where Google “opened the kimono” to explain how they process book metadata from libraries and publishers. The discussion also revolved around Open Library’s architecture which uses standards in line with W3C recommendations and the Semantic Web. Read more about this discussion, questions asked, and recommendations on the standards at go-to-hellman.blogspot.com.
January 20, 2010
Keywords: Legal Systems, Semantic Framework, JIEM, NIEM
Law enforcement agencies always find it difficult to round up all the information about a given case. Wouldn’t it be better if they could PULL all the relevant judicial information about the criminal case from different fragmented SILOs present across different locations and sources? Metatomix offers an integrated semantic framework showing a 360 degree view of a criminal case. Read more about the different standards for the legal domain at semanticuniverse.com and specifically about Metatomix at metatomix.com.
January 18, 2010
January 18, 2010
Keywords: QR Codes, LinkedIn, Squarepush, PingTag.
Squarepush, a company developing innovative applications for the mobile and marketing space has come out with a new mobile enterprise application called PingTag. The technology allows you to connect your business card directly to your LinkedIn profile. PingTag generates a QRCode for your LinkedIn profile and will enable people to PULL your LinkedIn details by just scanning the QRCode attached to your business card, using a 2-d code reader. You don’t need to worry about updating people holding your business cards about your job changes. With PingTag, generate your LinkedIn profile QR Code, attach it to your business card and forget it. Read more about this new capability at 2d-code.co.uk.
January 18, 2010
Keywords: Garlik, Cybercrime
Garlik has released their 2009 Cybercrime report, showing that identity theft and financial fraud are on the rise. Some people have the impression that the principles David talks about in Pull are going to make us less safe, but reports like this show how unsafe we are today and blogs like The Burton Group’s talk about how much safer we will all be once we adopt the principles of pull.
January 16, 2010
Keywords: RFID, NFC, Internet of Things, SPIME
In his book, David demonstrates the Power of PULL of RFID tags with the use case of Retail. One company expanding the choices in this space is Touchatag, an RFID service for consumers, application developers and enterprise created by Alcatel-Lucent. Touchatag lets you create your own infrastructure of contactless RFID cards and NFC (Near Field Communication,a short-range high frequency wireless communication technology which enables the exchange of data between devices over about a 10 centimetre distance) mobile devices — for wallet 2.0 services such as mobile payment, fidelity and interactive advertising. Even more Interesting, it opens its services as a platform with a dedicated Developer Network. See Touchatag.com for more.
January 15, 2010
Keywords: Drupal, Linked Data,Semantic Web
Now you don’t need to be a Semantic Web Expert to expose your Site’s data as Linked Open Data. Drupal 7 does out of the box RDFa annotations and RDF mappings enabling networked RDF Drupal sites that reuse and enrich Linked Data.With the growth of Web of data, we will be experiencing Power of PULL even greater. The paper on the work titled “Produce and Consume Linked Data with Drupal” won best Semantic web in Use paper at International Semantic Web Conference,2009. Drupal 7 is releasing in alpha on 15th Jan 2010. See here for review.
