Open government and Linked Data; now it’s time to draft…

Published on 24/6/2009 in DERI, FOAF, Internet, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Software, US, Web and Web 2.0. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

For the past few months, there have been a variety of calls for feedback and suggestions on how the US Government can move towards becoming more open and transparent, especially in terms of their dealings with citizens and also for disseminating information about their recent financial stimulus package.

As part of this, the National Dialogue forum was set up to solicit solutions for ways of monitoring the “expenditure and use of recovery funds”. Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal on how linked open data could provide semantically-rich, linkable and reusable data from Recovery.gov. I also blogged about this recently, detailing some ideas for how discussions by citizens on the various uses of expenditure (represented using SIOC and FOAF) could be linked together with financial grant information (in custom vocabularies).

More recently, the Open Government Initiative solicited ideas for a government that is “more transparent, participatory, and collaborative”, and the brainstorming and discussion phases have just ended. This process is now in its third phase, where the ideas proposed to solve various challenges are to be more formally drafted in a collaborative manner.

What is surprising about this is how few submissions and contributions have been put into this third and final phase (see graph below), especially considering that there is only one week for this to be completed. Some topics have zero submissions, e.g. “Data Transparency via Data.gov: Putting More Data Online”.

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This doesn’t mean that people aren’t still thinking about this. On Monday, Tim Berners-Lee published a personal draft document entitled “Putting Government Data Online“. But we need more contributions from the Linked Data community to the drafts during phase three of the Open Government Directive if we truly believe that this solution can make a difference.

For those who want to learn more about Linked Data, click on the image below to go to Tim Berners-Lee’s TED talk on Linked Data.

(I watched it again today, and added a little speech bubble to the image below to express my delight at seeing SIOC profiles on the Linked Open Data cloud slide.)

We also have a recently-established Linked Data Research Centre at DERI in NUI Galway.

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BlogTalk 2009 (6th International Social Software Conference) - Call for Proposals - September 1st and 2nd - Jeju, Korea

Published on 29/5/2009 in BlogTalk, Blogs, Boards, China, Data Portability, Education, FOAF, Internet, Japan, Korea, Microblogs, Mobiles, Podcasts, RSS, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Software, Web, Web 2.0 and Wikis. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

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BlogTalk 2009
The 6th International Conf. on Social Software
September 1st and 2nd, 2009
Jeju Island, Korea

Overview

Following the international success of the last five BlogTalk events, the next BlogTalk - to be held in Jeju Island, Korea on September 1st and 2nd, 2009 - is continuing with its focus on social software, while remaining committed to the diverse cultures, practices and tools of our emerging networked society. The conference (which this year will be co-located with Lift Asia 09) is designed to maintain a sustainable dialog between developers, innovative academics and scholars who study social software and social media, practitioners and administrators in corporate and educational settings, and other general members of the social software and social media communities.

We invite you to submit a proposal for presentation at the BlogTalk 2009 conference. Possible areas include, but are not limited to:

  • Forms and consequences of emerging social software practices
  • Social software in enterprise and educational environments
  • The political impact of social software and social media
  • Applications, prototypes, concepts and standards

Participants and proposal categories

Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the conference, audiences will come from different fields of practice and will have different professional backgrounds. We strongly encourage proposals to bridge these cultural differences and to be understandable for all groups alike. Along those lines, we will offer three different submission categories:

  • Academic
  • Developer
  • Practitioner

For academics, BlogTalk is an ideal conference for presenting and exchanging research work from current and future social software projects at an international level. For developers, the conference is a great opportunity to fly ideas, visions and prototypes in front of a distinguished audience of peers, to discuss, to link-up and to learn (developers may choose to give a practical demonstration rather than a formal presentation if they so wish). For practitioners, this is a venue to discuss use cases for social software and social media, and to report on any results you may have with like-minded individuals.

Submitting your proposals

You must submit a one-page abstract of the work you intend to present for review purposes (not to exceed 600 words). Please upload your submission along with some personal information using the EasyChair conference area for BlogTalk 2009. You will receive a confirmation of the arrival of your submission immediately. The submission deadline is June 27th, 2009.

Following notification of acceptance, you will be invited to submit a short or long paper (four or eight pages respectively) for the conference proceedings. BlogTalk is a peer-reviewed conference.

Timeline and important dates

  • One-page abstract submission deadline: June 27th, 2009
  • Notification of acceptance or rejection: July 13th, 2009
  • Full paper submission deadline: August 27th, 2009

(Due to the tight schedule we expect that there will be no deadline extension. As with previous BlogTalk conferences, we will work hard to endow a fund for supporting travel costs. As soon as we review all of the papers we will be able to announce more details.)

Topics

Application Portability
Bookmarking
Business
Categorisation
Collaboration
Content Sharing
Data Acquisition
Data Mining
Data Portability
Digital Rights
Education
Enterprise
Ethnography
Folksonomies and Tagging
Human Computer Interaction
Identity
Microblogging
Mobile
Multimedia 		Podcasting
Politics
Portals
Psychology
Recommender Systems
RSS and Syndication
Search
Semantic Web
Social Media
Social Networks
Social Software
Transparency and Openness
Trend Analysis
Trust and Reputation
Virtual Worlds
Web 2.0
Weblogs
Wikis
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My Twitter Wordle

Published on 27/5/2009 in Microblogs. 0 Comments

Here’s a Twitter “Wordle” via my TweetStats tag cloud page:

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Also, my usage stats show a nice growth over the past two years:

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Growth of boards.ie users / posts / threads continues

Published on 18/5/2009 in Boards and Ireland. 2 Comments

I’ve re-run our statistics gathering queries, and produced three new graphs showing boards.ie’s growth in terms of users, posts and threads during the period February 1998 to April 2009 (here are the previous set of graphs from August 2007).

User growth

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Post growth

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Thread growth

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Idea for Linked Open Data from the US recovery effort

Published on 2/5/2009 in SIOC and Semantic Web. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Tim Berners-Lee recently posted an important request for the provision of Linked Open Data from the US recovery effort website Recovery.gov.

The National Dialogue website (set up to solicit ideas for data collection, storage, warehousing, analysis and visualisation; website design; waste, fraud and abuse detection; and other solutions for transparency and accountability) says that for Recovery.gov to be a useful portal for citizens, it “requires finding innovative ways to integrate, track, and display data from thousands of federal, state, and local entities”.

If you support the idea of Linked Open Data from Recovery.gov, you can have a read and provide some justifications on this thread.

(I’ve recently given some initial ideas about how grant feed data could be linked with user contributions in the form of associated threaded discussions on different topics, see picture below, all to be exposed as Linked Open Data using custom schemas plus SIOC and FOAF across a number of agencies / funding programs / websites.)

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New BE/MEngSc in Engineering Innovation - Electronic from NUI Galway

Published on 24/4/2009 in Education, Electronics, Galway, Innovation and NUI Galway. 0 Comments

NUI Galway’s College of Engineering & Informatics is now offering a new course titled “Engineering Innovation - Electronic“. This course will provide graduates with specialised multi-disciplinary skills to start their own business, centered on the development of innovative, niche, market-led, electronic products. The programme is composed of three multi-disciplinary strands, with the formation of an Electronic Engineer at its core. The three strands are:

  • Electronic Engineering
  • Business & Finance
  • Design & Innovation

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You can view our brand new brochure for GY412, and find out more about the course from the NUI Galway course page for GY412. The course is being run by the Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering in collaboration with the Department of Industrial Engineering and the Cairnes School of Business & Economics.

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Mum, Mary Breslin (1950-2009)

Published on 23/4/2009 in General. 13 Comments

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My mother, Mary Breslin, died two weeks ago today. It was a terrible shock to all of our family, but I wanted to say a few words about her so that you would have an idea about what an influence she was on my life and the lives of many others.

Firstly, Mary was a loving and caring wife and mother, who amongst other things made sure I always had the best of everything, protected me from any perceived harm or injustice, and nurtured and encouraged my love for learning. She was a formidable woman, and always strived for perfection for both herself and her family. She was the kind of customer that you would either love or hate to have in your establishment, as any flaw or deficiency would be exposed!

She had a huge network of friends that she helped through both actions and words. She was one of those people that you could always call on if you were in trouble and needed help, advice or information.

Mary was an extremely intelligent and organised woman, and showed throughout her life how she was able to adapt herself to new situations and take on a variety of challenges. Having being forced to give up her civil service job in the tax office when she married (a regulation at that time), her jobs included homemaker, senior administrator in a car rentals agency, and part-time book keeper for local businesses.

She was also very modern and took to technology very easily. I remember when I was in Virginia in 1996, we used to communicate via a precursor to internet chat (VMS Phone) as international phone call prices were exhorbitant at that time. She used the Web for buying books, paying bills and internet banking, but also mastered services like boards, blogs, Skype, PayPal and eBay with ease (she racked up more positive feedback in a few months on her eBay account than I managed for many years!).

Mary loved many things, including: her family, her two grandchildren, her home and village, being beside the sea, Elvis, the comedian Dave Allen, holidays in San Francisco, Cyprus and Rome, Pope John Paul II, Hummel figurines, “The Past is Myself” by Christabel Bielenberg, Bjorn Borg, repeating baby stories about John, the Royals, TV soaps, the Thorn Birds, QVC, style and fashion, making greeting cards, the odd sherry, Italian food, the burned bit at the end of a roast, dolphins, gardening, the colour turquoise, and much more. We loved her too, and we always will.

Ar dheis D? go raibh a h-anam.

Though we need to weep your loss,
You dwell in that safe place in our hearts,
Where no storm or might or pain can reach you.
May this dark grief flower with hope
In every heart that loves you.
May you continue to inspire us:
To enter each day with a generous heart.
To serve the call of courage and love
Until we see your beautiful face again
In that land where there is no more separation,
Where all tears will be wiped from our mind,
And where we will never lose you again.

- John O’Donohue

“The Social Semantic Web”: now available to pre-order from Springer and Amazon

Published on 23/3/2009 in Blogs, Boards, DERI, Data Portability, FOAF, Internet, Ireland, Podcasts, RSS, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Software, Web, Web 2.0 and Wikis. 3 Comments

Our forthcoming book entitled “The Social Semantic Web”, to be published by Springer in Autumn 2009, is now available to pre-order from both Springer and Amazon.

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An accompanying website for the book will be at socialsemanticweb.net.

Tales from the SIOC-o-sphere part #9

Published on 19/3/2009 in Blogs, DERI, FOAF, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Software, Web 2.0 and Wikis. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , .

It’s been another exciting six months in terms of SIOC-related developments. Here’s a summary:

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Nice video shows how hidden structured data from the Drupal content management system can lead to semantic search

Published on 18/3/2009 in Blogs, DERI, FOAF, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Software, Web and Web 2.0. 1 Comment

(Cross-posted at socialmedia.net.)

Via Drupal creator Dries Buytaert’s post entitled RDFa and Drupal and St?phane Corlosquet’s post about RDFa and Drupal examples and use cases, there is a really cool video that demonstrates how the structured data that is available in many Drupal deployments (but is difficult to leverage due to HTML representations) can be exposed and leveraged using RDFa semantic data. The video shows deep searches of Drupal data using Yahoo! SearchMonkey and also some visual navigations of this linked data. The possibilities are very exciting, as Dries says:

Google and Yahoo! are getting increasingly hungry for structured data. It is no surprise, because if they could built a global, vertical search engine that, say, searches all products online, or one that searches all job applications online, they could disintermediate many existing companies. [...] Hundreds of thousands of Drupal sites contain vast amounts of structured data, covering an enormous range of topics [and these structures] can be associated with rich, semantic meta-data that Drupal could output in its XHTML as RDFa. For example, say we have an HTML textfield that captures a number, and that we assign it an RDF property of ‘price’. Semantic search engines then recognize it as a ‘price’ field. Add fields for ’shipping cost’, ‘weight’, ‘color’ (and/or any number of others) and the possibilities become very exciting.

The video is below:

This effort has been growing over the past year, since it was championed by Rasmus Lerdorf (the creator of PHP) and proposed by Dries himself at DrupalCon 2008. Based on St?phane’s roadmap for RDFa in Drupal 7, the video shows some modules that have been developed for Drupal 6 to demonstrate the power of having embedded RDFa representations of Drupal structures. RDFa is currently being integrated into the core of Drupal 7.

There’s a nice line in the video about this embedded data:

It’s machine readable and now we have access to all of the machine-readable fields available to us before. Very quick, very simple, just what RDFa is supposed to be: human readable data [text], formatting data [HTML] and machine-readable data [RDFa] all in the same document, all inline, all describing the same thing.

(See also this great video and deck of slides about the “Practical Semantic Web and Why You Should Care” by Boris Mann from DrupalCon 2009.)