Planet Semantico

Costolo, su CEO, llama a Twitter el “pulso del planeta”. Se trata de una afirmación algo exagerada  teniendo en cuenta que solamente el 8% del mismo parece que está en la red que muchos/as preferimos. Una investigación reciente de la universidad de Illinois que encuentro en Internet Monitor del Berkman Center for Internet & Society,  a partir del estudio de 1.5 mil millones de tuits enviados por más de 71 billones de usuarios únicos en 39 días, proporciona insights interesantes sobre su apropiación.

El principal hallazgo, en mi opinión: que twitter ayuda  a la gente a trascender los límites geográficos que restringían la comunicación en la época pre-digital, permitiendo compartir intereses más allá de cualquier frontera geográfica. Otros detalles resultan altamente reveladores:

1-Twitter refleja el conocido fenómeno de la long-tail: el 85% de los tuits provienen del 15& de los usuarios, una quinta parte de los tuits provienen del uno por cien de los usuarios. En otras palabras son muchas las cuentas pero pocos los usuarios realmente activos de esta red.

2-Tampoco resulta sorprendente que el mapa de los lugares del mundo desde los que se tuitea corresponda en gran medida al de los lugares con electricidad (según el mapa de la NASA Earth’s City Lights) . Los puntos rojos representan los tuits geolocalizados, los azules el acceso a electricidad, los blancos los lugares en los que coinciden ambas cosas.

3-La mayoría de usuarios se dieron de alta en 2010 (en verde) y 2011 (en azul en el mapa).

4-Retuiteamos y mencionamos con la misma ratio a la gente cercana o lejana, lo cual parece indicar que twitter rompe ciertas normas de conversación y afiliación tradicional y pone por delante los intereses y afinidades profesionales entre sus usuarios más que otro tipo de lazos. En este sentido aparece otro dato que me parece apasionante:  la importancia del lenguaje y de la afinidad cultural entre América Latina y Europa: son más las conexiones entre estas que entre Latam y los EEUU.  En cuanto a  Asia, conecta habitualmente con los EEUU.

En general y en parte sorprendentemente, Europa es el continente que más contenido retuiteado por el resto del mundo produce.

5. El dato es altamente interesante: Una investigación en 2012 mostraba que los usuarios tienden a seguir a gente geográficamente cercana o de lugares  accesibles fácilmente en avión. En cuanto a difusión, sin embargo, el estudio que nos ocupa destaca resultados distintos y reveladores, teniendo en cuenta que los retuits y referencias a otros usuarios son mejores indicadores que los seguidores de la atención.

6-Twiteamos sobre todo acerca de otros espacios en los social media: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, ask.fm y Tumblr son los dominios sobre los que más redistribuimos información. Solamente el 7.8 por cien de los enlaces que se comparten en twitter hacen referencia a portales de noticias escritos en inglés. Cuando les citamos, los más populares son la BBC, el Huffington Post, New York Times y el Guardian.

7-La gente enlaza a artículos cercanos y lejanos casi con la misma ratio, lo cual de nuevo significa que son los intereses intelectuales lo que nos mueven en twitter.

8. El mapa compara las noticias cubiertas por twitter o los medios masivos, de forma que los puntos en blanco significan la misma cobertura.  Creo que se refleja aquí, en parte, la libertad: Twitter cubre en mayor medida la actualidad informativa en Latinoamérica y  Europa del Este, mientras que los medios de comunicación de masas cubren Africa y el sudeste Asiático.

9-Los usuarios más influyentes, teniendo en cuenta el Klout, se concentran en Malasia, Indonesia, Francia, España, Gran Bretaña y Venezuela. Los menos influyentes están en Europa del este, Turquía, India y el Sudeste asiático.

En esta página de Flickr encontraréis más visualizaciones sobre twitter.

0 comment(s)

comunidades, intuición digital, Nuevas Tecnologías-Internet, recursos humanos, Sociedad de la conversacion, Spanish, TRABAJOS DESTACADOS, Ultimas entradas, Vídeos, video-magia, video-publicidad, Web Semántica, web3.0, zeitgeist evolución

OpenCalais community members:
 
I’ll be leaving Thomson Reuters and hence ending my involvement with OpenCalais in the next few weeks. I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone – from users to journalists to convention organizers – for making OpenCalais the success it’s been.
 
The initial years of OpenCalais were among the most amazing in my career. The level of passion, the number of smart people I’ve met and the number of interesting ideas I’ve heard was amazing. While OpenCalais was never a full-time job for me – it was certainly where the majority of my passion lay.
 
Please stay in touch at ttague@gmail.com or via LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/tague/). I have no idea where I’ll be heading next – but I’ll keep LinkedIn up to date. Recently I’ve been running all Product and Engineering for Reuters Media – I’m looking for a similar level of challenge.
 
OpenCalais is being left in good hands. We’ve transferred ownership of the initiative to Philip Kardos – one of my most senior product managers – and I am absolutely confident in the continued stability and growth of the system. And our fantastic and responsive community manager Fran Sansalone’s role remains unchanged.
 
Thanks again. It’s been a wild ride and I’ve loved every minute of it.
 
Tom Tague

English, Official Blog

I am pleased to announce the summer issue of Panlibus is now available online.

The further and higher education landscape is changing. An increase in tuition fees in higher education and changes to further education funding are contributing to an uncertain future. In this issue we focus on the academic library agenda.

Planning for the future in these uncertain times is key to growing the library. Andrew Simpson from the University of Portsmouth  shares his thoughts on what university libraries can do to continue improving.

The ever increasing use of mobile smart devices is prompting yet more change in universities. The University of Northampton realised it needed to proactively embrace these changes and provide students with an native app and adapt their web services. MOOCs are currently a hot topic for universities. Prominent learning technologist Gerry McKiernan gives us an overview of MOOCs and strategies for promoting them in libraries.

The library management system must also adapt, whether for public or academic libraries. Capita’s Paula Keogh provides us with insight into were the LMS will go in the next few years. We also have an extract from Capita’s recent white paper ‘Protecting library services’, focussed on technology in public libraries.

Capita’s Additions Partners provide a wide range of solutions designed to improve the library service. In this issue we feature articles from Bibliotheca, 2CQR and 3M.

I hope you enjoy this issue, and as always, I encourage you to get in touch with your thoughts on any of the articles. If you have any topics you would like to share with the library world, I would be extremely pleased to hear them. Please contact me on mark.travis@capita.co.uk.

Academic, English, Panlibus Magazine, Public

This  is an article from the recent Panlibus Magagine (issue 28) by Gerry McKiernan, Associate Professor and Science and Technology Librarian, Iowa State University Library. This includes all the links that we weren’t able to include in the print version.

As defined by Wikipedia, a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is “… an online course aiming at large-scale participation and open access via the web”.

In late autumn 2012, the New York Times declared 2012 as the “Year of the MOOC”. Earlier, the MIT Review, claimed that they were “the most important education technology in 200 years”, and in a cover story, Time, characterized MOOCs as a major factor that was “reinventing college”. The MOOC phenomenon has also been covered by The Guardian and the Times Educational Supplement, among numerous other educational and news media.

In mid-March 2013, the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, hosted a two-day conference titled “MOOCs and Libraries: Massive Opportunity or Overwhelming Challenge?“. Co-sponsored by OCLC® Research, the event included a session on Copyright, Licensing, Open Access and one on New Opportunities for Librarians: What Happens When You Go Behind the Lines in a MOOC?

Participants in the former session members discussed “the challenges for licensing and clearing copyright for materials” used in MOOCs, and explored the potential “opportunities for advancing the conversation on open access with faculty,” while members of the latter reported and speculated on the roles of libraries and librarians in the MOOC environment. Among those noted were: serving as an advocate for different resource licensing models, identifying and organizing public domain images, as well as encouraging Open Access publishing, and the use of institutional repository content, among other initiatives

Compared to discussion of copyright and licensing negotiations and fair use of proprietary content, however, consideration of Open Educational Resources and their use in MOOCs was not as extensive and implementation strategies were not discussed in detail.

To become more engaged in Massive Open Online Courses and Open Educational Resources, librarians should become more knowledgeable about each.

Open Educational Resources

Professional Development

Librarians can begin to become more knowledgeable about OERs by reading major reviews and white papers such as the Guide on the Use of Open Educational Resources in K-12 and Postsecondary Education, Open Educational Resources as Learning Materials: Prospects and Strategies for University Libraries, and The Roles of Libraries and Information Professionals In Open Educational Resources (OER) Initiatives. Librarians should also become knowledgeable about significant Open Resources projects and sites, as well as other significant work, through such site as the

Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources, “to develop and use open educational resources, open textbooks, and open courseware to expand access to higher education and improve teaching and learning,” Jorum, a collaboratively-created database that provides access to thousands of OERs that can be searched or browsed; MERLOT, “ … a free and open online community of resources designed primarily for faculty, staff and students of higher education from around the world to share their learning materials and pedagogy”; OER Commons that provides access to OER sources, training, and support; the Open Professionals Education Network (OPEN) whose site provides information about OER events, resources; and other services; the OpenCourseWare Consortium, “ … a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials for colleges and universities”; and the OpenOR Hub, a ‘hub for research data and OER excellence in practice.”

Librarians can also become knowledgeable about ORs by attending conferences, seminars, and workshops, either in-person or virtually. Of particular note are the OpenEd Conference held in the United States, the Open Educational Resources conference held in the United Kingdom and the World Open Educational Resources Congress held at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, France.

A most appropriate opportunity to learn about OERs and massive Open Online Courses is to take the Locating, Creating, Licensing and Utilizing OERs (OER-101 MOOC, “an open, self-paced online community course that has been built to demonstrate how to find, adapt, and develop OERs step-by-step”).

Current Awareness

To remain informed about ongoing developments, librarians should read or subscribe to OER blogs, such as the Open Resources: Influence on Learning & Educators (ORIOLE), and the OER blogs of the University of Bath and the University of Leeds.

Librarians should also consider subscribing to appropriate electronic discussion lists, such as the Library 2.0 Open Educational Resources group; the IL-OERS listserv, the electronic discussion list of the Information Literacy Group and Community Services Group; and the OPENED@JISCMAIL.AC.UK mailing list.

Librarians should also consider following relevant ongoing OER developments via Twitter hashtags (e.g., #oer, #opened, #ukoer).

Promotion

To increase an understanding of OERs within their communities, librarians should actively become involved in promoting each.

Librarians can promote awareness of Open Resources in general by preparing appropriate guides as have the Houston Community College, Renton Technical College, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Librarians can further promote OERs among their colleagues by engaging in relevant research and scholarship such as Open Education and Libraries, Reaching the Heart of the University: Libraries and the Future of OER, and What Do Academic Libraries Have To Do With Open Educational Resources?

MOOCs

Professional Development

Librarians can begin to become more knowledgeable about MOOCs by reading major reviews and white papers, such as MOOCs: Massive Open Online Courses, MOOCs and Open Education: Implications for Higher Education, and MOOCs Are On The Move: A Snapshot of the Rapid Growth of MOOCs.

Librarians should explore the offerings of MOOC providers by searching or browsing the contents of a variety of directories, for example Class Central; the MOOC List and OnlineCourses.com.

They should schedule time to take a MOOC individually or as a library group. An ideal MOOC may be the MOOC MOOC (http://www. moocmooc.com/ ), a MOOC intended as an “examination of the MOOC phenomenon.”

Librarians should attend conferences, seminars, and webinars, in person or virtually. Notable recent events include Digital Literacies Conference 2013: The Online Leaner and MOOCs held at the University of Southampton (UK), Leveraging Innovations in Online Education to Improve Cost Effectiveness and Increase Quality, and Understanding the Implications of Open Education: MOOCs and More, the SPARC-ACRL Forum to be held during the 2013 American Library Association Annual Conference,

Librarians should also review available recordings or slides such as Embracing OER & MOOCs to Transform Education…, Massive Open Online Courses as Drivers for Change and MOOCs & Librarians. Of particular note is the 2013 ELI Online Spring Focus Session: Learn and MOOCs a two-day program held in early April 2013 that addressed several major issues relating to MOOCs, notably their accreditation; design and implementation; faculty perspectives; student demographics and motivation; and their potential benefits to a campus.

Current Awareness

To remain informed about MOOC developments, librarians should subscribe or regularly visit websites that offer significant news, such as the Alt Ed, a blog “devoted to documenting significant initiatives relating to Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), digital badges, and similar alternative educational projects,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, EDUCAUSE, and MOOC News and Reviews, “ … an online publication devoted to thoughtful critique of individual MOOC courses and to discussion of the evolving MOOC landscape.”

Librarians should consider subscribing to the EDUCAUSE Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) Constituent Group Listserv, and join the Linkedin MOOC – Massive Open Online Courses group (http://www.linkedin.com/groups/MOOC-Massive-Open-Online-Courses-4652870 ) and the Facebook MOOC group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/216224345082359/).

Librarians should also consider following relevant ongoing MOOC developments via Twitter hashtags (e.g., #moocs, #onlinelearning, #coursera)

Promotion

Librarians can promote MOOCs by compiling library guides about this learning environment, such as Nova Eastern University, University of California, San Diego, Washtenwa Community College.

Librarians can further promote MOOCs among their colleagues by engaging in relevant research and scholarship such as Are You MOOC-ing Yet? A Review for Academic Libraries, Run aMOOC?, Using Information Expertise to Enhance Massive Open Online Courses, and The MOOC and the Library: How Massive Online Only Courses Could Change the Future of Library Instruction.

NEXT STEPS

While Open Educational Resources are among the most well-known of Open Resources, there are others that should also be investigated and considered for integration within the MOOC environment, namely institutional and subject repositories, Open Data sources, Open Access dissertations and theses, Open Access journals and monographs, and Open Textbooks.

Academic, English, Panlibus Magazine

Aunque ando entre viajes y con poco tiempo para escribir, no podía dejar de comentar las noticias  de la semana sobre el binomio Vigilancia vs. Libertad en Internet. Y es que desde que Edward Snowden, ex-trabajador de la Agencia Norteamericana para la Seguridad declaraba que Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. tenían las puertas de sus servidores abiertas de forma permanente a cualquier petición desde el programa Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, (FISA)  sobre sus usuarios, suenan como nunca antes las alarmas de la privacidad en la red.

Hace unos días nadie había sido. Hoy sí “pero poco” y leo que se publica ya el número de peticiones recibidas por cada cual.  19.000 cuentas (el 1%) de Facebook durante los 6 últimos meses, Microsoft, Google a punto de publicar datos similares, parece que la necesidad de transparencia del nuevo ciudadano va dando sus frutos.

Avanza el panóptico pero también las demandas de honestidad, la conciencia crítica acerca de lo que significa el “aumento” de nuestras vidas en cualquiera de los servicios actuales, las demandas de transparencia acerca de la cara más incómoda y necesitada de regulación y valores, de Internet.

Siempre nos quedarán los globos

En fin… que de la mano de Google Evil aparece en escena también Google God de nuevo, sorprendiéndonos con un Project Loon ingenioso que promete el acceso a internet de los dos tercios de la población mundial que hoy no lo tienen.

Lo hemos dicho en ocasiones, si Internet supone un aumento de la Zona de desarrollo próximo sin precedentes, es urgente salvar cualquier obstáculo para su llegada a cualquier lugar del planeta.  En otras palabras si pensamos la red como herramienta de desarrollo resulta imprescindible resolver las brechas: en algunos lugares del hemisferio sur del planeta, nos dice Google, el coste de una conexión a Internet es mayor que el sueldo de un mes.

Denominados Moonshots, los proyectos como este son aquellos importantes, con soluciones radicales a través de tecnologías tremendamente innovadoras. En este caso estamos hablando de Acceso a Internet a través de un anillo de globos estratégicamente liberados y controlados por complejos algoritmos y computadoras, en la estratosfera. Se trata de globos al viento al doble de altura que los aviones comerciales que podrían proveer de un acceso de velocidad similar al 3G actual en áreas rurales, de forma permanente o reforzada en casos de desastres naturales.

El tema, que evidentemente también funciona como distractor ante noticias como la que iniciaba esta entrada, está en marcha ya en Canterbury (Nueva Zelanda). No sabemos cómo y ni siquiera si evolucionará  pero lleva a sacar de los sueños, a imaginar esos nuevos escenarios de igualdad, de libertad no exenta de los riesgos del control, para todos los habitantes del planeta, que tanto ansiamos los que creemos que el potencial de estar juntos supera con creces sus desventajas.

 

Nos leemos de nuevo pronto.

3 comment(s)

2013, Anuncios generales, cibercultura, Ciencia, curiosidades, educación 2.0, educacion, Evolución, Facebook, fundamentos, futurismo, Google, innovación, Planeta educativo, Redes sociales, Sociedad de la conversacion, Spanish, tecno-matices, Ultimas entradas, Vídeos, video-documentales, web 2.0, web3.0, zeitgeist evolución

Disclaimer: the following is my own perspective on the build & design of the Ordnance Survey Linked Data platform. I don’t presume to speak for the OS and don’t have any inside knowledge of their long term plans.

Having said that I wanted to share some of the goals we (Julian Higman, Benjamin Nowack and myself) had when approaching the design of the platform. I will say that we had the full support and encouragement of the Ordnance Survey throughout the project, especially John Goodwin and others in the product management team.

Background & Goals

The original Ordnance Survey Linked Data site launched in April 2010. At the time it was a leading example of adoption of Linked Data by a public sector organisation. But time moves on and both the site and the data were due for a refresh. With Talis’ withdrawal from the data hosting business, the OS decided to bring the data hosting in-house and contracted Julian, Benjamin and myself to carry out the work.

While the migration from Talis was a key driver, the overall goal was to deliver a new Linked Data platform that would make a great showcase for the Ordnance Survey Linked Data. The beta of the new site was launched in April and went properly live at the beginning of June.

We had a number of high-level goals that we set out to achieve in the project:

• Provide value for everyone, not just developers — the original site was very developer-centric, offering a very limited user experience with no easy way to browse the data. We wanted everyone to begin sharing links to the Ordnance Survey pages and that meant that the site needed a clean, user-friendly design. This meant we approached it from the point of building an application, not just a data portal
• Deliver more than Linked Data — we wanted to offer a set of APIs that made the data accessible and useful for people who weren’t familiar with Linked Data or SPARQL. This meant offering some simpler tools to enable people to search and link to the data
• Deliver a good developer user experience –this meant integrating API explorers, plenty of examples, and clear documentation. We wanted to shorten the “time to first JSON” to get developers into the data as fast as possible
• Showcase the OS services and products — the OS offer a number of other web services and location products. The data should provide a way to show that value. Integrating mapping tools was the obvious first step
• Support latest standards and best practices — where possible we wanted to make sure that the site offered standard APIs and formats, and conformed to the latest best practices around open data publishing
• Support multiple datasets — the platform has been designed to support multiple datasets, allowing users to use just the data they need or the whole combined dataset. This provides more options for both publishing and consuming the data
• Build a solid platform to support further innovation — we wanted to leave the OS with an extensible, scalable platform to allow them to further experiment with Linked Data

Best Practices & Standards

From a technical perspective we need to refresh not just the data but the APIs used to access it. This meant replacing the SPARQL 1.0 endpoint and custom search interface offered in the original with more standard APIs.

We also wanted to make the data and APIs discoverable and adopted a “completionist” approach to try and tick all the boxes for publishing and exposing dataset metadata, including basic versioning and licensing information.

As a result we ended up with:

• SPARQL 1.1 query endpoints for every dataset, which expose a basic SPARQL 1.1 Service Description as well as the newer CSV and TSV response formats
• Well populated VoID descriptions for each dataset, including all of the key metadata items including publication dates, licensing, coverage, and some initial dataset statistics
• Autodiscovery support for datasets, APIs, and for underlying data about individual Linked Data resources
• OpenSearch 1.1 compliant search APIs that support keyword and geo search over the data. The Atom and RSS response formats include the relevance and geo extensions
• Licensing metadata is clearly labelled not just on the datasets, but as a Link HTTP header in every Linked Data or API result, so you can probe resources to learn more
• Basic support for the OpenRefine Reconciliation API as a means to offer a simple linking API that can be used in a variety of applications but also, importantly, with people curating and publishing small datasets using OpenRefine
• Support for CORS, allowing cross-browser requests to be made to the Linked Data and all of the APIs
• Caching support through the use of ETags and Last-Modified headers. If you’re using the APIs then you can optimise your requests and cache data by making Conditional GET requests
• Linked Data pages that offer more than just a data dump, the integrated mapping and links to other products and services makes the data more engaging.
• Custom ontology pages that allow you to explore terms and classes within individual ontologies, e.g. see for example the definition of “London Borough“

Clearly there’s more that could be potentially done. Tools can always be improved, but the best way for that to happen is through user feedback. I’d love to know what you think of the platform.

Overall I think we’ve achieved our goal of making a site that, while clearly developer oriented, offers a good user experience for non-developers. I’ll be interested to see what people do with the data over the coming months

English, Open Data, Semantic Web

Disclaimer: the following is my own perspective on the build & design of the Ordnance Survey Linked Data platform. I don’t presume to speak for the OS and don’t have any inside knowledge of their long term plans.

Having said that I wanted to share some of the goals we (Julian Higman, Benjamin Nowack and myself) had when approaching the design of the platform. I will say that we had the full support and encouragement of the Ordnance Survey throughout the project, especially John Goodwin and others in the product management team.

Background & Goals

The original Ordnance Survey Linked Data site launched in April 2010. At the time it was a leading example of adoption of Linked Data by a public sector organisation. But time moves on and both the site and the data were due for a refresh. With Talis’ withdrawal from the data hosting business, the OS decided to bring the data hosting in-house and contracted Julian, Benjamin and myself to carry out the work.

While the migration from Talis was a key driver, the overall goal was to deliver a new Linked Data platform that would make a great showcase for the Ordnance Survey Linked Data. The beta of the new site was launched in April and went properly live at the beginning of June.

We had a number of high-level goals that we set out to achieve in the project:

• Provide value for everyone, not just developers — the original site was very developer-centric, offering a very limited user experience with no easy way to browse the data. We wanted everyone to begin sharing links to the Ordnance Survey pages and that meant that the site needed a clean, user-friendly design. This meant we approached it from the point of building an application, not just a data portal
• Deliver more than Linked Data — we wanted to offer a set of APIs that made the data accessible and useful for people who weren’t familiar with Linked Data or SPARQL. This meant offering some simpler tools to enable people to search and link to the data
• Deliver a good developer user experience –this meant integrating API explorers, plenty of examples, and clear documentation. We wanted to shorten the “time to first JSON” to get developers into the data as fast as possible
• Showcase the OS services and products — the OS offer a number of other web services and location products. The data should provide a way to show that value. Integrating mapping tools was the obvious first step
• Support latest standards and best practices — where possible we wanted to make sure that the site offered standard APIs and formats, and conformed to the latest best practices around open data publishing
• Support multiple datasets — the platform has been designed to support multiple datasets, allowing users to use just the data they need or the whole combined dataset. This provides more options for both publishing and consuming the data
• Build a solid platform to support further innovation — we wanted to leave the OS with an extensible, scalable platform to allow them to further experiment with Linked Data

Best Practices & Standards

From a technical perspective we need to refresh not just the data but the APIs used to access it. This meant replacing the SPARQL 1.0 endpoint and custom search interface offered in the original with more standard APIs.

We also wanted to make the data and APIs discoverable and adopted a “completionist” approach to try and tick all the boxes for publishing and exposing dataset metadata, including basic versioning and licensing information.

As a result we ended up with:

• SPARQL 1.1 query endpoints for every dataset, which expose a basic SPARQL 1.1 Service Description as well as the newer CSV and TSV response formats
• Well populated VoID descriptions for each dataset, including all of the key metadata items including publication dates, licensing, coverage, and some initial dataset statistics
• Autodiscovery support for datasets, APIs, and for underlying data about individual Linked Data resources
• OpenSearch 1.1 compliant search APIs that support keyword and geo search over the data. The Atom and RSS response formats include the relevance and geo extensions
• Licensing metadata is clearly labelled not just on the datasets, but as a Link HTTP header in every Linked Data or API result, so you can probe resources to learn more
• Basic support for the OpenRefine Reconciliation API as a means to offer a simple linking API that can be used in a variety of applications but also, importantly, with people curating and publishing small datasets using OpenRefine
• Support for CORS, allowing cross-browser requests to be made to the Linked Data and all of the APIs
• Caching support through the use of ETags and Last-Modified headers. If you’re using the APIs then you can optimise your requests and cache data by making Conditional GET requests
• Linked Data pages that offer more than just a data dump, the integrated mapping and links to other products and services makes the data more engaging.
• Custom ontology pages that allow you to explore terms and classes within individual ontologies, e.g. see for example the definition of “London Borough“

Clearly there’s more that could be potentially done. Tools can always be improved, but the best way for that to happen is through user feedback. I’d love to know what you think of the platform.

Overall I think we’ve achieved our goal of making a site that, while clearly developer oriented, offers a good user experience for non-developers. I’ll be interested to see what people do with the data over the coming months

English, Open Data, Semantic Web

UMBC's Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research, an NSF Industry & University Cooperative Research Center is holding its Industry Advisory Board meeting at UMBC 12-14 June. Students from UMBC and UCSD will present tutorials on a number of the technologies underlying ongoing CHMPR projects in a session from 1:00-5:00 on Wednesday June 12 in ITE 456. The tutorial session is free and open to the public.

• 3-D Printing – Timothy Blattner (UMBC)
• Semantic Table Information – Varish Mulwad (UMBC)
• Social Media Elastic Search – Oleg Aulov (UMBC)
• Machine Learning for Social Media – Han Dong (UMBC)
• Virtual World Interactions – Erik Hill (UCSD)

Directions and parking information is available here.

English, Multicore Computation Center

UMBC's Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research, an NSF Industry & University Cooperative Research Center is holding its Industry Advisory Board meeting at UMBC 12-14 June. Students from UMBC and UCSD will present tutorials on a number of the technologies underlying ongoing CHMPR projects in a session from 1:00-5:00 on Wednesday June 12 in ITE 456. The tutorial session is free and open to the public.

• 3-D Printing – Timothy Blattner (UMBC)
• Semantic Table Information – Varish Mulwad (UMBC)
• Social Media Elastic Search – Oleg Aulov (UMBC)
• Machine Learning for Social Media – Han Dong (UMBC)
• Virtual World Interactions – Erik Hill (UCSD)

Directions and parking information is available here.

English, Multicore Computation Center

UMBC's Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research, an NSF Industry & University Cooperative Research Center is holding its Industry Advisory Board meeting at UMBC 12-14 June. Students from UMBC and UCSD will present tutorials on a number of the technologies underlying ongoing CHMPR projects in a session from 1:00-5:00 on Wednesday June 12 in ITE 456. The tutorial session is free and open to the public.

• 3-D Printing – Timothy Blattner (UMBC)
• Semantic Table Information – Varish Mulwad (UMBC)
• Social Media Elastic Search – Oleg Aulov (UMBC)
• Machine Learning for Social Media – Han Dong (UMBC)
• Virtual World Interactions – Erik Hill (UCSD)

Directions and parking information is available here.

English, Multicore Computation Center