One of the things I've always liked about the Semantic Web vision is the idea that "Anyone can say Anything, Anywhere" (hereafter: The AAA Principle). That I can publish data about anything; and which links to and annotates data that other people are publishing elsewhere. I've been thinking recently whether we've spent a lot of … Continue reading Annotated Data →

Last Friday I spoke at the Open Knowledge Foundation Open Data & The Semantic Web event. I was giving the opening talk of the day and thought that I'd take the opportunity to lay out a view that I've been meaning to articulate for some time: that integrating data with the web maximises its utility. … Continue reading Web Integrated Data →

One of the things that has interested me for some time now is how RDF and Linked Data enables communities to enrich information published by organizations, e.g. by annotating it with additional properties and relationships (links). This is after all, one of the intended goals of the technology: to make it easier for people to … Continue reading Linked Data Liminal Zones →

At the end of my recent post on Surveying and Classifying SPARQL Extensions I noted that I wanted to help encourage implementors to publish useful documentation about their SPARQL Extensions. If you're interested in the current state of that survey then you can check out my current spreadsheet listing known extension functions. There are more … Continue reading Describing SPARQL Extension Functions →

In this post I want to put down some thoughts around using named graphs to manage and query RDF datasets. This thinking is prompted is in large part by thinking how best to use Named Graphs to support publishing of Linked Data, but also most recently by the first Working Drafts drafts of SPARQL 1.1. … Continue reading Managing RDF Using Named Graphs →

I realised recently that, while a lot of work has been done on creating and exploring interesting extensions to the SPARQL query language, there has yet to be a systematic survey of the range of different extensions that are currently implemented in various RDF triplestores. Or if there has been a survey, then I've clearly … Continue reading Surveying and Classifying SPARQL Extensions →

On Thursday and Friday I was luckily enough to be able to take some time out to attend VocampBristol2009. This was the third Vocamp event I've attended, the previous two being the very first (Oxford) and a recent event hosted by Yahoo in Sunnyvale. There seems to be a common theme emerging around the topics … Continue reading A Spectrum of Schema Related Questions →

Yesterday Jeni Tennison published a blog post outlining some frustrations with RDF datatyping. In particular, the lack of an appropriate datatype on RDF literals, and difficulties it adds when processing the data, e.g. for visualisation. I left a comment on Jeni's blog, partly because I was responsible for generating some of the data she was … Continue reading RDF Data Typing →

This post was originally published in the Talis "Nodalities" blog. Whilst attending the recent NewsInnovation event I gave a lightning talk about Linked Data. The talk was proceeded by an introduction to the Guardian Open Platform which reviewed their content and data publishing system, and some of their plans for future development. This set the scene really well as … Continue reading Linked Data and News Innovation →