Hack Day London

On By RachelIn conferenceLeave a comment

So, Hack Day was pretty amazing. The event was organized by Yahoo! and the BBC, with several other sponsors providing interesting thought capital, demonstrations, inspiration and prizes.

The event was meant to start out with 4 sessions of 1-hour presentations by various people at BBC, Flickr, Yahoo, and other places. They demonstrated APIs, available data, and other services available for all the attendees to hack up and play with. I think there’s too much for me to cover in one post, so I’m going to break it up a little and talk about each of the interesting things that I saw, heard, learned about, and hacked.

I missed the first session, because it took me a lot longer to get from Heathrow to Alexandra Palace than I expected. But while I was signing in, my friend and one-time coworker, Chris Sizemore, popped over and said hello. He works for the BBC, so he was partly there in the capacity of helping to make the event run smoothly.

By the way, Alexandra Palace is gorgeous, with an amazing view of London. This high vantage point would turn out to be a bit of a problem later in the day, but in the early morning, it was pretty impressive.

For more about the event, see my posts on:

Web 3.0 hits the mainstream

On By RachelIn semantic webLeave a comment

This is kind of old news, but I wanted to include a link to the New York Times article that made me realize that Semantic Technology is on the verge of breaking through.  I especially like this bit:

“In its current state, the Web is often described as being in the Lego phase, with all of its different parts capable of connecting to one another. Those who envision the next phase, Web 3.0, see it as an era when machines will start to do seemingly intelligent things.”

Representing Taxonomy

On By RachelIn conference, taxonomyLeave a comment

I’ve been meaning to write about my presentation at the Semantic Technology Conference last month. It was called Representing Taxonomy: What Am I Looking At Here? The idea I was trying to convey is that, as semantic technologies become more widely adopted, we’re (sometimes) going to have to come up with data to drive our semantic applications. We’re also going to need processes for documenting that data and communicating about it to our clients and stakeholders.

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More Resources

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I added a few things to the Resources page.

A few new tools, like Piggy Bank – an open source tool for gathering data. I haven’t tried it, but I heard a couple people mention it at the Semantic Technology Conference. Sounds like a good way to gather data for prototypes and proof-of-concept projects. 

A couple Semantic Wikis (Visual Knowledge and Knoodl.com). I’m very interested in this approach because it seems like a manageable entry into the world of building semantic content. People are already kind of familiar with the way to interact with a wiki, and this overlays a powerful layer of functionality. People will be building semantic content and applications without even realizing it. Unfortunately I think that both of these products have a little way to go before they are fully presenatble, but it’s great to be able to go in and play around with them. Alice in MetaLand is a budding semantic community built on the Visual Knowledge platform.

 I also stumbled across this Semantic Web FAQ, which seems to be a work in progress, but has some potential. Check it out and add some things, if you feel so inclined.

Re-naming the Semantic Web

On By RachelIn article, semantic web3 Comments

One of the things I heard a lot of people buzzing about at the Semantic Technology Conference last week was whether or not the Semantic Web would be more accessible to people (as a concept) if it were called something else. Apparently people don’t like the word “semantic.” I sometimes forget that, and then I read something like this (admittedly fairly old) article about Tim Berners-Lee in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The framing metaphor – Berners-Lee as Tolkien – is nonsensical. You could swap out any author who invented a culture with its own language and the metaphor would work just as well (or just as poorly). And, it’s ridiculous to imply that the significant factor of the WWW is that it’s based on an invented language; computer programming languages and markup languages have a long history that predates the WWW. In the end, this metaphor does nothing to illuminate the social, economic, and cultural impact of the Web. (It does have a handy subtext, though – apparently people who are interested in the underlying workings of the Web are nerds, just like people who are passionate about Lord of the Rings.)

With frequent references to “futuristc” and “magic” and “special codes,” the Chronicle article starts out by oversimplifying the concepts of Semantic Web and quickly shifts to steeping them in acronyms and dense technical jargon. If this really is the view of the Semantic Web that’s out there, then perhaps it does need a more consumer-friendly name.

Continue reading “Re-naming the Semantic Web” →

Folksonomy versus Taxonomy

On By RachelIn folksonomy, taxonomyLeave a comment

My colleague Seth Earley wrote an interesting post on a topic I’ve been thinking about lately, the relative merits of Folksonomy versus Taxonomy. I agree with the points he’s making, though I think there’s room to go a little deeper into the appropriate uses of each. I’ve seen some great applications of user-generated tagging, and I’ve also seen some poor applications that were clearly designed to save time and resources, with no real thought as to why people would be motivated to contribute meaningful information (I’m looking at you, Amazon.com!).

Coming Soon: More SemTech

On By RachelIn conference, semantic webLeave a comment

I’m not going to try to liveblog the rest of the Semantic Technology Conference. There’s a lot here to absorb and report on, and I’ll be adding more details once I’ve had some time to process a bit and sort through the materials. I’ve seen a lot of interesting tools and communities, which I’ll be writing about later and adding to the Resources page.

For now I’ll just say that I made it through my own presentation and I’m very pleased with how it went. More about that later, as well.

SemTech – Tutorials

On By RachelIn conference, semantic webLeave a comment

In the morning I went to a tutorial on Semantic Wikis. It was great, despite some technical difficulties that kind of messed up the flow of the presentation for the first hour or so. The speaker was Conor Shankey, the founder of Visual Knowledge. They created a wiki platform, built on a semantic framework. It’s a collaborative tool, like any wiki, but the semantic aspect means there’s a structure that gives the system more knowledge about the content that people contribute. For example, if you have a record about a person, you indicate that it’s a person, and then there will automatically be certain assumptions made, and certain properties available to be filled out. You suddenly have fields where you can say the person’s birthday, surname, projects, etc.

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Introduction to Semantic Technology

On By RachelIn conference, semantic web2 Comments

I’ve been at the Semantic Technology Conference for a day and a half. The first half day was an introductory talk by Dave McComb. I was hoping this presentation would arm me with some good information and inspiration to become an evangelist for semantic technologies in my organization. I think it did the trick. 

At the beginning of his talk, McComb was saying that the Semantic Web has hit the mainstream, and he knows this because more and more people are calling and asking to interview him about it. One of his recent interviews was with Business 2.0, and he admitted that some of the things he said in that interview were better than the things he had in his presentation, and it made him rethink the things he was going to say today. Then Barbara, my friend who works at Time Inc Interactive, leaned over to me and whispered that she told the editor of Business 2.0 to call Dave McComb!

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