Talis Connected Commons launches

Yesterday I attended the OKCon Open Knowledge Conference. The conference -- which was attended by around 70 people (by my rough count) -- brought together a wide variety of people to present on a range of topics from knowledge transfer for sustainable development through to linked data and the semantic web. A really broad range … Continue reading Talis Connected Commons launches →

New SPARQL Working Group Charter

I was really pleased to see that the charter for the SPARQL Working Group is now public. Having made heavy use of SPARQL in a number of personal and commercial projects there have been a number of pain points which, to date, I've only been able to address by resorting to vendor specific extensions. The … Continue reading New SPARQL Working Group Charter →

Interesting Papers from CIDR 2009

CIDR 2009 looks like it was an interesting conference, there were a lot of very interesting papers covering a whole range of data management and retrieval issues. The full list of papers can be browsed online, or downloaded as a zip file. There's plenty of good stuff in there ranging from the energy costs of … Continue reading Interesting Papers from CIDR 2009 →

Enabling the Linked Data Ecosystem

This post was originally published in the Talis "Nodalities" blog and in "Nodalities" magazine issue 5. he Linked Data web might usefully be viewed as an incremental evolution beyond Web 2.0. Instead of disconnected silos of data accessible only through disconnected custom APIs, we have datasets that are deeply connected to one another using simple … Continue reading Enabling the Linked Data Ecosystem →

Next Generation Business Intelligence at ISWC 2008

This post was originally published on the Talis "Nodalities" blog. The second pre-conference session I attended at ISWC 2008 was a tutorial session on “Knowledge Representation and Extraction for Business Intelligence“. I attended the session as I was curious to learn about more applied uses of Semantic Web technology particularly in the financial and business context. In … Continue reading Next Generation Business Intelligence at ISWC 2008 →

Cross Pollination

I binged on TED talks whilst travelling over to the ISWC 2008 conference. One of those that I enjoyed the most was "Design and the elastic mind" by Paola Antonelli. Who doesn't get a kick out of seeing some great design concepts? One item that caught my attention was Antonelli's reference to a regular "salon" … Continue reading Cross Pollination →

Jim Hendler at the INSEMTIVE 2008 Workshop

This post was originally published on the Talis "Nodalities" blog. Along with a number of my colleagues, I’m currently attending the ISWC 2008 conference in Karlsruhe, Germany. Yesterday I attended the INSEMTIVE workshop (“Incentives for the Semantic Web”) which aimed to explore incentives for the creation of semantic web content, i.e. encourage the creation of more structured metadata. The … Continue reading Jim Hendler at the INSEMTIVE 2008 Workshop →

Explaining REST and Hypertext: Spam-E the Spam Cleaning Robot

I'm going to add to Sam Ruby's amusement and throw in my attempt to explicate some of Roy Fielding's recent discussion of what makes an API RESTful. If you've not read the post and all the comments then I encourage you to do so: there's some great tidbits in there that have certainly given me … Continue reading Explaining REST and Hypertext: Spam-E the Spam Cleaning Robot →

Life With Playstation

Earlier today I was playing with the new Life with PlayStation which is available as a free upgrade to the older "Folding @ Home" application that originally shipped with the PS3. The new application looks like it is a step towards generalizing the existing interface, which is a "Google Earth-lite" style zoomable, pannable, 3D globe … Continue reading Life With Playstation →

The Web’s Rich Tapestry

This post was originally published on the Talis "Nodalities" blog. We’ve all read books that linger in our memories. And there are any number of reasons why they might do so; a stirring tale or thought-provoking argument, for example. One book that has stayed with me over the years is The House of Leaves by Mark Danielweski. … Continue reading The Web’s Rich Tapestry →