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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →