“One of the things the Web teaches us is that everything is connected (hyperlinks) and we all should work together (standards). Too often school teaches us that everything is separate (many different ‘subjects’) and that we should all work alone.” –Aaron Swartz, April 2001. So Aaron is gone. We were friends a decade ago, and [...]
A talk from London SemWeb meetup hosted by the BBC Academy in London, Mar 30 2012…. Slides and video are already in the Web, but I wanted to post this as an excuse to plug the new Web History Community Group that Max and I have just started at W3C. The talk was part of [...]
Ben Fry in ‘Visualizing Data‘: Graphs can be a powerful way to represent relationships between data, but they are also a very abstract concept, which means that they run the danger of meaning something only to the creator of the graph. Often, simply showing the structure of the data says very little about what it actually [...]
I wanted to learn more about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service (wikipedia), and perhaps also figure out how I feel about it. Named after a historical faked chess-playing machine, it uses the Web to allow people around the world to work on short low-pay ‘micro-tasks’. It’s a disturbing capitalist fantasy come true, echoing Frederick Taylor’s ‘Scientific [...]
As ever, I write one post that perhaps should’ve been two. This is about the use and linking of datasets that aid ‘second screen’ (smartphone, tablet) TV remotes, and it takes as a quick example a navigation widget and underlying dataset that show us how we might expect to navigate TV archives, in some future [...]
Lonclass is one of the BBC’s in-house classification systems – the “London classification”. I’ve had the privilege of investigating lonclass within the NoTube project. It’s not currently public, but much of what I say here is also applicable to the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) system upon which it was based. UDC is also not fully [...]
RDF is defined as an abstract data model, plus a collection of practical notations for exchanging RDF descriptions (eg. RDF/XML, RDFa, Turtle/N3). In theory, your data modelling activities are conducted in splendid isolation from the sleazy details of each syntax. RDF vocabularies define classes of thing, and various types of property/relationship that link those things. [...]
In the NoTube project, we are exploring the use of Semantic Web technology in Television and Web-TV scenarios. By making use of richer and linked descriptions of content and users, we hope to help users better find (and annotate, tag, cross-link etc.) content that is interesting to them. The growing amount of linked RDF data [...]
Every wondered who the mother(s) of Adam and Eve’s grand-children were? Me too. But don’t expect SPARQL or the Semantic Web to answer that one! Meanwhile, … You might nevetheless care to try the Gedcom::FOAF CPAN module from Brian Cassidy. It can read Gedcom, a popular ‘family history’ file format, and turn it into RDF [...]