Planet Semantico

A new month, shorter than others in length but no in news intensity, at least referred to semantics. Related to Knowledge Management, we find several pieces of news about Companies that work with semantic technologies. For instance, Empolis an Attensity group company and leading provider in business user applications that generate value from unstructured data has [...]

English, Spanish, Uncategorized, monthly review, semantic technologies

Author: José Manuel Cantera Fonseca, Telefónica I+D HTML4, the language of the Web, is intended to define the content of a web page from an structural and presentational point of view but not from a semantic point of view. For instance, in HTML4 a <table> element can be used to present information about different entities such [...]

English, Spanish, Uncategorized

In the latest posts we have reviewed the present situation of Semantic Technologies for enterprises from several points of view: providers, technologies, demand. Undoubtedly we can claim that these technologies are mature enough to go to market, there is a big number of providers with interesting solutions, and there is demand for these technologies in lots [...]

English, Spanish, Uncategorized

Value-it “Demand Driven Report”  is very rich in data, conclusions, results, undoubtedly a reference document for people who want to know about Semantic Technologies possibilities. But a one hundred pages document is perhaps too much document for people who only want to have a high level picture. For this reason it is worth to highlight the [...]

English, Spanish, Uncategorized, demand, semantic technologies

This document, that you all can download here,  tries to bring us nearer the STE supply vision. To achieve this, TechnoVision Report provides a vision of the STE products, services, technologies, and expertise that play and will play a key role in configuring and further consolidating the Supply of STE products and services from the [...]

English, Spanish, Uncategorized, Value-it project, semantic technologies, supply side, technovision

Found this survey on an O’Reilly blogpost. Some questions are quite trivial but PEW also asks about the impact of the Semantic Web in 2020.

Take your chance: If you’d like to take the survey, you can currently visit http://www.facebook.com/l/c6596;survey.confirmit.com/wix2/p1075078513.aspx and enter PIN 2000.

English, Uncategorized

There have been a number of discussions about “Enterprise Linked Data” recently, and I took part on a panel on precisely that topic at ESTC 2009. Unfortunately the panel was cut short due to time pressures so I didn’t get chance to say everything I’d hoped. In lieu of that debate here’s a blog post containing a few thoughts on the subject.

When we refer to enterprise use of Linked Data, there are a number of different facets to that discussion which are worth highlighting. In my opinion the issues and justifications relating to each of them are quite different. So different in fact that we’re in danger of having a confused debate unless we tease out this different aspects.

Aspects of the Debate

In my view there are three facets to the discussion:

• Publishing Linked Data, the key question here being: What does an Enterprise have to benefit by publishing Linked Data?
• Consuming Linked Data: What does an Enterprise have to benefit from consuming Linked Data?
• Adopting Linked Data: What benefits can an Enterprise gain by deploying Linked Data technologies internally?

I think these facets whilst obviously closely related are largely orthogonal. For example I could see a scenario in which an organization consumed Linked Data but didn’t store or use it as RDF, but just fed it into existing applications. Similarly businesses could clearly adopt Linked Data as a technology without publishing or using any data to the web at all.

These issues are also largely orthogonal to the Open Data discussion: an enterprise might use, consume and publish Linked Data but this might not be completely open for others to reuse. The data may only be available behind the firewall, amongst authorised business partners, or only available to licensed third-parties. So, while the issue as to whether to publish open data is a very important aspect of the discussion, its not a defining one.

Here’s a few thoughts on each of these different facets.

Publishing Linked Data

So why might an enterprise publish Linked Data? And if that is a worthwhile goal, then is it clear how to achieve it? Lets tackle the second question first as its the simplest.

There is an increasingly large amount of good advice available online, as well as tools and applications, to support the publishing of Linked Data. We’re making good strides towards making the important transition from moving Linked Data out of the research area and into the hands of actual practitioners. The How to Publish Linked Data on the Web tutorial is an great resource but to my mind Jeni Tennison’s recent series on publishing Linked Data is an excellent end-to-end guide full of great practical advice.

We can declare victory when someone writes the O’Reilly book on the subject and do for Linked Data what RESTful Web Services did for REST. (And the two would make great companion pieces).

But technology issues aside, what are the benefits to an organization in publishing Linked Data? There are several ways to approach answering that question but I think in most discussions Linked Data tends to get compared with Web APIs. The value of creating an API is now reasonably well understood, and many of the benefits that come from opening data through an API also apply to Linked Data.

However the argument that Linked Data married with a SPARQL endpoint is as easy for developers to use as a Web API is still a little weak at this stage. SPARQL can be off-putting for developers used to simpler more tightly defined APIs. As a community we ought to consider it as a power tool and look for ways to make it easier to get started with. It’s also worth recognising that a search API is also a useful addition to a SPARQL endpoint as part of Linked Data deployment.

But publishing Linked Data can’t be directly compared to just creating an API, because its also largely a pattern for web publishing in general. Its increasingly easier to instrument existing content management systems to expose RDF(a) and Linked Data. So rather than create a custom API, which will involve expensive development costs, particularly if its going to scale, its possible to simply expose Linked Data as part of an existing website.

By following the Linked Data pattern for web publishing, in particular the use of strong identifiers, an enterprise can end up with a single point of presence on the web for publishing all of its human and machine-readable data, resulting in a website that is strongly Search Engine Optimised. Search engines can better crawl and index well structured websites and are increasingly ingesting embedded RDFa to improve search results and rankings. That’s a strong incentive to publish Linked Data by itself.

Adopting Linked Data, particularly as part of a reorganization of an existing web presence, could deliver improved search engine rankings and exposure of content whilst saving on the costs of developing and running a custom API. The longer term benefits of being part of the growing web of data can be the icing on the cake.

Consuming Linked Data

Next we can consider why an enterprise might want to consume Linked Data.

To my knowledge organizations are currently only publishing Linked Open Data (albeit with some wide variations in licensing terms), so we’ll skip for the present whether enterprises have an option of consuming non-open Linked Data, e.g. as part of a privately licensed dataset.

The LOD Cloud is still growing and provides a great resource of highly interlinked data. The main issues that face an organization consuming this data are ones of quantity (there’s still a lot more data that could be available); quality (how good is the data, and how well is it modelled); and trust (picking and choosing reliable sources).

To some extent these issues face any organization that begins relying on a third-party API or dataset. However at present a lot of the data in the LOD cloud is still from secondary sources. The same can’t be said for the majority of web APIs, which tend to be published by the original curators of the data.

These issues should resolve themselves over time as more primary sources join the LOD cloud. Because Linked Data is all based on the same data model bulk loading and merging data from external sources is very simple. This gives enterprises the option of creating their own mirrors of LOD data sources which will provide some additional reassurances around stability and longevity.

Linked Data, with its reliance on strong identifiers, is much easier to navigate and process than other sources, even if you’re not storing the results of that processing as RDF. There’s also a much greater chance of serendipity, resulting in the discovery of new data sources and new data items. Whereas there is virtually no serendipity in a Web API as each API needs to be explicitly integrated.

But this benefit is only going to become evident if we continue to put effort into helping (enterprise) developers understand how to consume Linked Data. E.g. as part of existing frameworks or using new data integration patterns is another area that needs more attention. The Consuming Linked Data tutorial at ISWC 2009 was a good step in that direction, although the message needs to be circulated wider, outside of the core semantic web community.

In my opinion it will be easier for enterprises to consume Linked Data if they first begin to publish it. By publishing data they are putting their identifiers out into the wild. These identifiers become points for annotation and reuse by the community, creating liminal zones from which the enterprise can harvest and filter useful data. This is a benefit that I think is unique to Linked Data as with an Web API the end results are typically mashups or widgets displaying in a third-party application; these are just new silos one step removed from the data publisher.

Adopting Linked Data

Finally, what value could be gained if an organization adopts Linked Data internally as a means to manage and integrate data behind the firewall?

The issues and potential benefits here are largely a mixture of the above, except that there are little or no issues with trust as all of the data comes from known sources. In a typical enterprise environment Linked Data as an integration technology will be compared to a wider range of systems ranging from integrated developer tools through to middleware systems. There’s a reason why SOAP based systems are still well used in enterprise IT as most organizations aren’t (yet?) internally organized as if they were true microcosms of the web.

Its interesting to see that Linked Data can potentially provide a means for solving many of the issues that Master Data Management is trying to address. Linked Data encourages strong identifiers; clean modelling; and linking to, rather than replicating data. These are core issues for data consolidation within the enterprise. Coupled with the ability to link out to data that is part of the LOD Cloud, or published by business partners, Linked Data has the potential to provide a unifying infrastructure for managing both internal and external data sources.

Its worth noting however that semantic technologies in general, e.g. document analysis, entity extraction, reasoning and ontologies seem to be much more widely deployed in enterprise systems than Linked Data. This is no doubt in large part because the advantages of those technologies may currently be much more easily articulated as they’re more easily packaged into a product.

Summary

In this post I wanted to tease out some of the questions that underpin the discussions about enterprise adoption of Linked Data. I’ve presented a few thoughts on those questions and I’d love to hear your opinions.

Along the way I’ve attempted to highlight some areas where we need to focus to help transition from a researcher-led to a practioner-led community. More data, more documentation, and more tools are the key themes.

#linkeddata, English, Semantic Web, Uncategorized

Lots of mention of Semantic Web in Data.gov ConOps.  I'll read it in detail on the plane . . .

Uncategorized

I was a newbie to the library mashup scene, and took in a lot of information yesterday at Middlemash, hosted by Damyanti Patel and her colleagues at Birmingham City University. It was every bit the friendly and stimulating event that I’d expected to be, but by the time I, along with an impressive number of co-malingerers, got to the Barton Arms at the end of the day, I was able to pinpoint what had made me mildly uncomfortable at intermittent points of the day.

The discomfort had nothing to do with either the organisers or the participants, or indeed with the concept of mashing itself. The problem is that the same forward-thinking librarians who celebrate the advent of electronic resources and innovative technologies for discovering them, are the same people who, in a mashing context, are forced back into the world of print. And this has to be about ownership of data. Bibliographic data is much more “ours” than electronic resource metadata, that has traditionally been proprietary, locked away in abstract and index databases, available only in academic institutions and certainly not mashable by a bunch of librarians with a strange predilection for creating more exciting experiences of scholarly information.

Mashing the reading list

Like many people at the event, Edith Speller from Trinity College of Music was concerned about her institution’s reading lists. She felt that they were getting too static, and out of date, and, like many Talis Aspire customers, wanted to raise awareness of all those expensive subscriptions to e-resources among academics who would then be more likely to include them on resource lists. However, the solutions arrived at seem to be very book-specific, involving the following:

• Using the ISBN of a book on a resource list to look up recommendations (along the lines of “people who bought that also bought this”) using Amazon Web Services.
• Using the Mosaic API to:

• Perform an ISBN look-up to find the courses associated with the people who have borrowed that book.
• Use course codes to look up what other books were borrowed by people on those courses.

Paul Stainthorp at University of Lincoln is using RefWorks to create embeddable lists of new titles and communicate them to users, by sharing folders within RefWorks publicy and creating RSS fees on that folder. He’s also used Yahoo! Pipes (the mashup panacea du jour) to pull in the book cover image and description from Amazon. Because their academics prefer notifications by email, as opposed to running their own RSS feed, an email now comes in when a new book arrives in their subject area.

No doubt academics are availing themselves of current awareness services provided by publishers to find out about new e-journal articles, but it comes back to the disintermediation of the library from e-resource metadata. Owen Stephens from Open University reflected in the pub afterwards on the decisive break that occurred with the electronic journal, when the library no longer owned the item, but merely licensed it. Tony Hirst concurred that the library world had never challenged the proprietary nature of abstracts and indexes.

Mashing the library floor plan

Owen ran a workshop in the afternoon to develop his idea for mashing library floor plans with Google Maps. We used the University of Sheffield library floorplan as a working example, and it was fascinating to hear about how Open Layer (an Open Source mapping tool) works. Apparently maps are divided into tiles of 256 by 256 pixels, and then some javascript asks for each tile as needed as the user navigates around the map. And as the user zooms in, the map simply moves to a more detailed set of tiles. The exercise of converting a floorplan into a zoomable map forces the library to consider how granular and practicable their floorplans – is there enough detail to establish on which shelf a book is located? Maintenance is also an issue and Owen suggested augmenting the shelving workflow, so at the end of shelving, the librarian records the start and end classmark of the shelf. We also considered separate scenarios where the user wants a particular book, on the one hand, or books on a subject area on the other.

University of Sheffield plans to use heat maps to analyse how users are navigating the library. With the Ranganathan maxim in mind (positioning the stock to minimise the need for users to move around the library) they would then be able to optimise the library layout.

Sure it’s funky, but I just want to renew my books

Earlier in the day, Mark Van Harmelen from Hedtek Ltd. based at the University of Manchester, urged us all to listen more to the student voice, through focus groups and other mechanisms. I know that Owen Stephens and many other Middlemash attendees are making every effort to engage with students in the idea and design stage right now. It will be interesting to see whether we’re expending too much energy on over-sophisticated solutions for the dying format of print. As Chris Keene from University of Sussex stated, the response of students to tag clouds and other features at the discovery layer is, “Sure it’s funky, but I just want to renew my books.”

Personally, I’d love to see more focus on work-level data. The published works of an author or indeed a subject area plotted against an appropriate timeline could be tremendously useful – the works of Dickens plotted against key social legislation of the 19th century springs to mind. But the approach would come into its own with non-fiction, where there is a more direct relationship between published literature and real world events. That would really add scholarly value to bibliographic data, and would enable us to break out of transactions such as reservations that are rooted in the past not the future of scholarly life.

English, Libraries, Mashups, Metadata, Uncategorized

When recording my previous Talking with Talis podcast with OCLC’s Karen Calhoun, in a hotel lobby over the road from the British Library in London, we suffered a technology failure loosing the last third of our conversation.

Karen kindly agreed to spend some time in a follow up conversation so that listeners could get to hear her thoughts on a couple of further questions I asked, including one about the future for library metadata formats. 

In addition I also gained the opportunity to ask her reflect upon the presentation she gave on that day.  The slides for which are available to view from the OCLC site.  The other benefit being that we were not competing with the music, staff, and hotel guests during the recording.

English, Uncategorized

Yesterday I was reading El caparazón, one of the most relevant blogs about semantic applications in Spanish language, when I found this post about “Education and Web 2.0”. Undoubtedly this is an area where semantic technologies will have an important say in the future.

Some experts state that most of the knowledge that an elementary school student will need to perform his job when he will grow up, don’t exist yet. How can we focus the education in so a rapidly changing environment?. Certainly knowledge is advancing so quickly that it is an almost impossible task trying to keep the pace. This raises a fundamental change in the education approach, as its key task will be to transmit information to the students, to help them to manage all this information, to help them to distinguish useful one from useless, to help them to extract knowledge from all this information… This is, learning how to learn.
No doubt Internet will change education approach at all levels. No longer students will go to university to pick up some notes, or to listen a one way explanation in which the teacher talks and students listen. Because to access to information we have Google, and to hear lectures, we can easily access to those of the outstanding experts in each subject.
Any country that wants to maintain a high level in the knowledge society must be capable of integrating technologies within education systems at all levels. We’re going to be bombarded along all our lives with millions and millions of information bytes, this is a real fact we must live with. In this situation it will be paramount to extract useful knowledge from this information, indeed this will mark the difference among efficient and no efficient people. In this environment semantic technologies will play an important role, because they will help us to navigate through information and to adapt it to our needs, that is to contextualize it. Nowadays, semantic technologies have got an important level of madurity and standards as RDF, or OWL will help us to give the jump form a “textual” management of information to a “concept” treatment of this information. This is a first step and a very important achievement. However, some years will be required to settle these concepts, and to develop technologies allowing us to extract knowledge from all the information around us: this means tools to show us to learn.

Education, English, Spanish, Uncategorized, Web 3.0, semantic technologies, virtual education

Having read some documentation recently around the plans of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France (BNF) for what they call a “pivot” – a mechanism based on semantic technologies for optimising the value of the BNF’s entire web presence, including Gallica, its digital library, it was great to have the opportunity to hear Dominique Stutzmann from the BNF speak at the recent Eurolis Seminar in London.

The future of the library (Doom or Bloom?) was what the day event was all about, and according to Stutzmann, we’ve already invented it. We’ve got the nice buildings, and so ostensibly the library of the future will be the same as that of today. If the library space vanishes, he argued, it will only be the result of a self-fulfilling prophecy because librarians aren’t confident about what they’re doing. I think he’s really onto something – there is indeed an element of subjective crisis in the problem of the future of libraries. He admitted, though, that Web 2.0 re-presents the user-librarian relationship in quite a fundamental way; the user becomes both publisher and librarian. But users don’t want librarians to disappear. He seems to be saying that our library spaces continue to be successful, so leave them alone but engage with some interesting technological stuff as well, because libraries are well-positioned to do so. He added that users trust libraries with everything including long-term preservation of data, and BNF is clearly poised to exploit that trust, but not for its own ends, but for everyone, in the great universal tradition of libraries.

Stutzmann perceives the potential of semantic technologies very clearly in terms of the user experience – giving everyone improved and accurate access to the information available, and had an impressive array of exemplars to reel off, citing Google Book Search’s use of data mining tools taking city name from search results and pinpointing them on a map, and Bibliosurf’s map of novels as examples. Along similar lines, he demonstrated an interactive map with mashed up data from last-fm to produce a map of composers, where proximity indicates artistic commonality rather than geographical proximity – for example Beethoven is situated alongside Vaughan Williams.

As a Modern Languages graduate, I loved hearing about semantic search developments at the European Library and specifically in their TELplus project, where multilingual search (i.e. a search query with terms from more than one language) has been achieved. Stutzmann was clear that authority data is indivisible from semantic web developments, and that is where the librarian tradition really comes into its own; he demonstrated search results with LCSH headings as a facet on the side-panel. He pleaded with librarians to use metadata to give more accurate access to data.

The only downbeat element to his presentation was a survey carried out at BNF in 2008 to get a clearer picture of their users. A key finding was that the average user of the digital library 48, although there is an overall age range of 14-94. Europeana suffers from the same problem. Funnily enough, when I was out on Saturday night, a friend was saying how almost all the people who queued up recently in Birmingham to see the Anglo-Saxon treasures recently discovered in the West Midlands were white people aged 50+. Stutzmann pondered whether there was anything that could be done about it – does it come down to lifestyle fundamentals?

In the same survey, there was a fascinating finding about Library 2.0. Many users questioned felt that library sites should not be spoilt by the comments of user. They are happier to share their information and collaborate with the librarian than with other users. Obviously this goes against received Library 2.0 thinking, and left me wondering, is that a specifically “French thing”, or do UK users have more in common with their European counterparts than we think?

English, Libraries, Semantic Web, Uncategorized, eurolis

Aiming high is rarely the wrong thing to do, in my opinion, and Jonathan Purday’s presentation, at the Eurolis Seminar Doom or Boom of Europeana, a digital library offering a single, direct and multilingual interface to cross-domain European cultural artefacts certainly wasn’t short of lofty aims. Europeana isn’t just about making library resources available, it’s about breaking down the cultural institution-based silos right across the European cultural sector, and in the process it has created an exciting online resource for the public, researchers and teachers and learners in education.

It’s easy for British people to forget the risk that the Google Book Project will overshadow non-English artefacts in Europe, and this has been an important concern since at least 2005, when the European Commission launched its Digital Libraries initiative. Initiatives such as Europeana are, in Purday’s words “making available the intellectual record of other languages”. And it will also “harmonise digitisation practices across Europe”. All good stuff.

It was also great that Purday acknowledged that every search now begins with Google, and that if you don’t find material, you think it hasn’t been digitised or it doesn’t exist. I and a number of delegates were left wondering at the end of the session, though, whether the full text of content in Europeana will be exposed to Google, and if Purday could come back on that point, that would be useful.

It’s worth mentioning that every single speaker at the Eurolis seminar mentioned the need to consider copyright harmonisation and Purday was no exception, but he probably deployed the most powerful arguments to support this. We can’t digitise at the scale now technologically possible, he argued, unless we reconsider and harmonise copyright, he said, and that the risk was of creating a “20th century black hole”, whereby we will be unable to represent the published output of “the most documented century” and we will end up with a distorted picture of the past as a result.

I would urge people to take a look at Europeana. The search interface is available in 26 languages, and in the next 2 years they plan to be able to translate search terms on the fly (currently only the interface is translated). Purday demonstrated a search on Don Quixote, which not only came up with an impressive range of book editions, but also images inspired by the work, plus videos, including a 1956 news broadcast in which Salvador Dali recreates a vision of Don Quixote at Moulin de la Galette. Europeana holds metadata in the central index and takes the user back to the original site to look at the full artefact, so decentralised and collaborative in a sustainable way.

Europeana is currently attracting 15,000 users a day. Purday is concerned, though, that most people interested in the site are over the age of 45. He plans to address this by creating an API so users can put Europeana into their own web space, although in discussions afterwards, people wondered whether such a measure would succeed in engaging younger people.

English, Google Book Settlement, Uncategorized, digitisation, eurolis

Lots of news related to semantic technologies have appeared in the media during this month.

• As is usual some of them are related to search engines for example perfect search , or bing
• There are some mentions to some application of semantic technologies to concrete areas for example the patent research. In this area LexiNexis announces the introduction of  transparent semantic technologies in the search of patents. Or for example related to advertising, or to smarter aggregators
• In the area of the press, the NYTimes announces their contribution to the linked data cloud with first 5,000 Tags Released to the Linked Data Cloud
• In the field of social networks, Adaptive Blue’s Glue is a Firefox add-on that uses semantic technology to understand the subject of the page you are on and then shows you via a bar at the bottom of your browser whether your friends have commented or liked the item anywhere on the Web. During this month Glue’s destination site, GetGlue.com, has been launched. This  is a recommendation network for people with the same interests in books, music, movies and other products.
• The good moment for these technologies is demonstrated by the fact that new projects are getting funds, for example Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), in collaboration with an industry consortium facilitated by Fuji Xerox Australia have got a grant of 1,4 million $ from Australian Research Council (ARC). And by the fact that there are awards for the most innovative companies, for example 2009 Promise and Reality award tries to promote innovative technology solutions for implementing and integrating knowledge management practices into their business processes. Among the list of finalists some companies related to semantic area are included
• Semantic Technologies are still in the first phase of implementation but there is place for celebrations Thomson Reuters Celebrates Ten Innovative Sites And Services Using OpenCalais.
•  Semantic technologies applications are very diverse, among them we find very curious tools, one of them is the application of semantic technologies to the book of odds, a tool of a Boston company that is set to answer questions as these: What are the odds of being struck by lightning? Bitten by a rabid dog? Run down by a bus? Audited by the IRS?

English, Spanish, Technologies, Uncategorized, monthly review, semantic technologies

At the end of my recent post on Surveying and Classifying SPARQL Extensions I noted that I wanted to help encourage implementors to publish useful documentation about their SPARQL Extensions. If you’re interested in the current state of that survey then you can check out my current spreadsheet listing known extension functions. There are more to add there, but its a good summary of the current state of play.

At VoCamp DC last week I did some work on designing a small vocabulary for describing SPARQL Extensions. The first draft of this is online here: SPARQL Extension Descriptions. There’s a little bit of background on the Vocamp wiki too, if you want to see my working .

Here’s an example of the vocabulary in use, describing some extensions to the ARQ SPARQL Engine:

<http://jena.hpl.hp.com/ARQ/function> a sed:FunctionLibrary;
  dc:title "ARQ Function Library";
  dc:description "A collection of SPARQL extension functions
      implemented by the ARQ engine";
  foaf:homepage <http://jena.sourceforge.net/ARQ/library-function.html>;
  sed:includes <http://jena.hpl.hp.com/ARQ/function#sha1sum>.

<http://jena.hpl.hp.com/ARQ/function#sha1sum>
  a ssd:ScalarFunction;
  rdfs:label "sha1sum";
  dc:description "Calculate the SHA1 checksum
       of a literal or URI.";
  sed:includedIn <http://jena.hpl.hp.com/ARQ/function#>.

<http://jena.hpl.hp.com/ARQ#self> a sed:SparqlProcessor;
  foaf:homepage <http://jena.hpl.hp.com/ARQ>;
  rdfs:label "ARQ";
  sed:implementsLibrary <http://jena.hpl.hp.com/ARQ/function>;

Ideally what should happen is that every URI associated with a filter function and property function should be dereferencable, and that terms from this vocabulary be used to describe those functions. There’s a lot more detail that could be included, but I suspect this is sufficient to cover the primary use cases, i.e. documentation and validation.

The draft SPARQL 1.1. Service Description specification does cover some of this ground, but falls short in a few places, and I think some of what I’ve described here could usefully be folded into that specification without greatly extending its scope. But thats a matter for the Working Group to decide.

One specific issue is that the specification doesn’t currently recognise “functional predicates” (to use Lee Feigenbaum’s preferred term; others include “property functions” and “magic properties”) as a distinct class of extensions. They clearly exist, so I think we should have a means to describe them. In fact arguably they are the most important class of SPARQL extensions that need describing.

Filter functions are relatively well understood and can clearly be identified based on where they appear in a query. Language extensions will generate a parser error if an endpoint doesn’t support them, so will easily be caught. But functional predicates use existing turtle triple pattern syntax, but typically involve triggering custom logic in the SPARQL processor, rather than actually appearing as triples within the dataset. Without the ability to dereference their URIs and identify them as a functional predicate, a SPARQL engine will simply treat them as a triple pattern and fail silently, rather than complaining that the extension is not supported.

The following example query illustrates this:

PREFIX list: <http://jena.hpl.hp.com/ARQ/list#>
PREFIX func: <http://jena.hpl.hp.com/ARQ/function#>
PREFIX dc: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/>
PREFIX ex: <http://example.org/vocab/>

SELECT ?doc ?contributor WHERE {
   ?s dc:modified ?created.
   ?s ex:authors ?authorList.
   ?authorList list:member ?author.
   LET ( ?contributor := ?author )
   FILTER ( ?created < func:now() )
}

The above query contains 3 extensions: a language extension (LET); a filter function (func:now()); and a functional predicate (list:member). Without prior knowledge of that predicate, or the ability to dereference its URI, there’s no way to know that the functional predicate is not really a triple that the query author is attempting to match against, rather than an extension.

I’d like to urge all implementors to consider making their extension URIs dereferencable. The schema I’ve drafted is very light-weight so shouldn’t be difficult to support. I’m also very happy to take comments on its design. I’m intending it as a starting point for others to help build upon.

English, Uncategorized

FOAF was one of the first Semantic Web projects, and is still trotted out as an example on a regular basis.  The FOAF model itself has been criticized a number of times (I don't feel like googling all the examples), but there are some things about FOAF that are very interesting in today's world.

One could criticize FOAF for having invented social networking in the late nineties, then having missed the whole Web 2.0 boat, to have the limelight taken by myspace, linkedin, livejournal, and nowadays by facebook.  Indeed in terms of bringing social networking awareness to the masses, this criticism would be true.  But if you have a look at some of the founding assumptions behind FOAF, you'll find that the project was eerily prescient - forseeing problems with social networking that took years to come to light once social networks became commonplace.

A simple example is a bit of drama that happened on the social networking site LiveJournal a couple of years ago.  Livejournal was sold to a Russian firm, with the risk that all the servers, with all those back journals, would migrate outside the United States.  Many American users (who for the most part had been ignoing the vast number of Russian speaking users) suddenly became aware of the fact that their precious journal data might drop out of control of copywrite laws that they understood.  A panic ensued, and LiveJournal dump programs became quite the "meme".

A more recent example was the change of the terms of use for Facebook.  Suddenly, Facebook reserved the right to use your photos in its advertising.  Okay, they probably don't want that photo of the time you passed out in Vegas and your 'friends' stripped you to your underwear and drew faces on your chest with shaving cream, but you never know.  The outcry amongst FB users cause them to rescind this policy.  But the same issue came up again - who owns the data that you put on social networking servers?

FOAF understood this issue over a decade ago, when they envisioned a distributed social network, where servers owned/operated by different agents could participate in the same social network.  A sort of decentralized, distributed version of facebook.  Where you kept your own ownership, access control, backups, etc.  Or you could hire someone to do it for you, if you preferred.  But you had the option.

This is a key idea behind the Social Web - not just social networking on the web, but making the network part of the web itself.  How can this work?  The Semantic Web plays a big role in the solution - or so many of us believe.  Come to the Social Web Camp in Santa Clara on November 2 and  find out what the W3C and others are doing to make this come true. 

Uncategorized

At the PLA 2009 conference last week, Bob McKee, Chief Executive of CILIP, proudly presented a new set of guidelines as to what makes a good library service. In comparison to the traditional bulky, text heavy and complex use of language presented in traditional library guidelines, this A5 pamphlet could easily be overlooked as an advert or flyer rather than library guidelines. However, this is not to be perceived as a bad thing. The concise manner in which it is presented leaves no room for hot air and leaves it do exactly what it says on the tin: guide.

The guidelines urge the library service to be:

“Continually refreshed and improved to respond to the adapting needs of local communities”

And

“Library buildings, equipment and ICT facilities should be well-designed and kept up-to-date.”

The ten questions to ‘test’ whether your library service is up to standard, highlight many benchmarks which could only ensure a good service is being achieved. The one which caught my eye in particular, was point four.

“Does your library service provide what local people expect in terms of location, accessibility, materials, resources, staffing and activities?”

There is not a ‘one size fits all’ solution to turning around the current perception of the library service; each should not be a clone of another. Whilst sharing best practise has a valuable role to play, we must engage with those around us ensure the local library service is engaging, and as odd as it may seem, local.

Download the guidelines here.

CILIP, English, Libraries, Library, Talis, Uncategorized

Last week, the All-Party Parliamentary Group launched their new report: an inquiry into the governance and leadership of the public library service in England. On the basis of the progression we have seen with the DCMS modernisation review, I had little expectation of this report providing any real insight or vision. As I worked my way through the report, I found myself scribbling and highlighting away, only to find the very thought I had just noted to be clarified in the upcoming paragraph. So I was pleasantly surprised to say the least, as I found the report to consider more perspectives than I anticipated.

It would have been too easy for the scope of the report to be wide and vague, which no doubt would have provided a foggy vision if any. So it was good to see that the focus of this report is specifically on the effectiveness of arrangements for the governance and leadership of public library services. The six lines of enquiry were very appropriate in light of the current situation. They were:

1)      What are the strengths and weaknesses of the present system for the governance and leadership of the public library service in England?

2)      Should local communities have a greater say in decisions about the public library service?

3)      Should central government do more to superintend the public library service?

4)      Are local authorities the best agency to provide library services?

5)      What are the governance and leadership roles of the Advisory Council on Libraries (ACL), the Museums, Libraries and Archives (MLA) and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS)?

6)      What changes (if any) are required to improve and strengthen governance and leadership?

Perhaps a closer look into the role of technology and innovation may have been a potential area for inquiry, though this may be something which stems from point six. As the report began to take a closer look at the strengths and weaknesses of the public library service, they acknowledged that:

“The submissions presented a bleak national picture with more weaknesses than strengths being identified.”

Amongst some of the more legitimate and agreeable points raised, there were a few points which led me to frown as I read. For example, the group believes the library service is diverse and innovative, listing it as one of its strengths. But is this really the case? Would this report really be necessary if they were? A couple of contradictions arose too, for example, listing staff to be helpful and experts at one point and then ill equipped and unhelpful at another.

In summary, the key recommendations were to develop one lead voice for libraries through the establishment of a single Library Development Agency for England (LDAE). A reassuring recognition, as a vision leading the library service could not be any more crucial than it is today. The current role and purpose of the many national agencies has brought confusion to the service, lacking a prominent player leading the way. The report rightly recognises the library sector has lost its way, and is sadly regarded to be of low value by decision makers.

Whist the LDAE is in the making (I assume answers around who, when and how are yet to come) we can expect a mid-term communications strategy and training and development programmes for public library personnel to improve management and leadership skills, from the MLA. Interesting, as the report recognised the MLA’s poor record with libraries in the past, and some contributors felt regret around the recent changes to its regional structures. The formation of LDAE would result in revision to the role, function and allocated funding of the MLA, making them a surprising/uncertain candidate to lead the way on the mid-term plans.

Overall, I was pleased to see the group recognise dramatic action is required and quickly. Yet it could be argued that recognising the problem is the easy part, finding and implementing the solution is the real challenge.

Image copyright of APPG. Publisher, CILIP.

Full report available to download from CILIP.

APPG, DCMS, DCMS Review, English, Libraries, MLA, Public Libraries, Talis, Uncategorized

Day 3 and it’s the final day of the Public Library Association conference 2009. I had low expectations for the day, as I misread the conference programme to believe the day would be dwindling to an end. Yet as the first session began, I was quickly proven wrong.

I assumed the ‘Libraries opening doors to health’ session would be bland and irrelevant, so was attending a little half heartedly. But as Bob Gann, Head of Strategy and Engagement for NHS Choices programme began the session, he had me engaged straight away. The NHS Choices web site allows patients to review their own health services, and has been (informally) described as the “NHS Trip Advisor”. Aside from the direct work the programme does with libraries such as bibliotherapy and community information centres, it was clear the programme and the strategies used to execute it could be mirrored in libraries. For example, he crucially recognised the importance of syndication. Though the site gets lots of hits (attracting over 7 million visits a month), he acknowledged early on that people are less likely to visit a government website out of all the websites they could choose from, so by syndicating NHS information to over 100 different channels, such as YouTube to showcase videos and Boots to support their existing health information etc. they were able to reach a wider range audiences. An enjoyable presentation which I dare to describe as insightful, and hopefully something which librarians recognised as something they could emulate to achieve such similar successes.

The second presentation was from Senior Library Managers at the Nelson Mandela Bay Library Service and Nelson Mandela Bay Metropolitan University and it began with a 15 minute thank you to the conference organisers. This is all very well, but I would’ve much rather preferred that that time was spent talking us through the projects. Just as I began losing my patience, some interesting aims began appearing on the screen. The NMBM aims to meet the information needs of those less privileged social groups, recognising that university and public libraries are building blocks of local information and knowledge infrastructure. Key projects were showcased during the session, including a reading project working with the youth of South Africa and New Zealand. The project encouraged participants to become avid readers – a unique fact in itself, as resources are not easily accessible in South Africa. Another project to develop partnerships to improve service delivery, increase the flow of information was adopted as it was believed to be the way forward. By the end of the session I was left thinking, if a library in South Africa can achieve so much with so little and really make a difference to their community, why can’t we?

Following a well deserved break, John Fisher, CEO of Citizens online began his session. He believes the focus should not be about getting everyone a computer, but ensuring everyone benefits from the use of a one. Conscious of his semi-graveyard slot, John began some quick interactive surveys to demonstrate the scale of the population who don’t use technology. Apparently, 15-16 million people (one quarter of the of the UK’s population) doesn’t use technology. And a further third of those are totally disconnected, and see no benefit in using it at all. He went on to explain the Everybody Online project, where a digital champion has been recruited, Martha Lane Fox, the Co-founder of Lastminute.com to launch a strategy to improve these statistics. The project aims to optimise social media tools to engage with communities by allowing them to choose their own information, and encouraging them to share and build online communities. It was a nice change to see a speaker actually speak and not read from a card or slides; in fact John’s entire presentation had no slides, resulting in a highly engaged audience.

Following the last few sessions, I began concluding my thoughts of the three days and of my first PLA conference. Though officially the themes were centred on community engagement, in hindsight, I felt it was something quite different. Reading between the lines, I felt the main focus of the delegates wasn’t around engaging with their communities at all, but more about justifying their existence. Cases like Wirral and more recently, the proposals of library closures in Aberdeenshire, has left librarians constantly thinking about how they can build their portfolio of ammunition, should their service come under the firing line some time soon. And if recent goings on are anything to go by, it’s almost certain that they will have to in the coming years. Each speaker seemed aware of this too. Though not literally, each was providing ideas and models to do so, with the term ‘outcome based accountability’ sneaking in quite frequently.

Throughout the conference I was keen to speak to as many people as possible and gauge their opinion on the sessions as they happened. It was interesting to see the two distinct interpretations of the presentations that emerged. Throughout the conference, many librarians felt many of the speakers weren’t as insightful as they’d hoped, lacking an understanding of the real issues. Whereas particular Councillors and Senior Executives were nodding enthusiastically when informally discussing over lunch that the declining library usage would rightly justify library closures. There appears to be a distinct difference in vision for the future of libraries between librarians and those elsewhere, begging the question, do we need to engage internally before externally? Should my assumption be correct, librarians have no option but to fail if half of the team has already given up…

English, Libraries, PLA 2009, Talis, Uncategorized, books

Today, my day didn’t begin in the most ideal way. As I’m staying in a hotel a few minutes away from the conference, a complementary shuttle bus has kindly been provided to escort delegates back and forth. This morning, a combination of a late dash for breakfast and the shuttle bus being reliably late, led me to be a little more flustered than usual, only just managing to make the start of the conference. However, I didn’t let this dampen my outlook for the day as, of course, today was the day the DCMS publish their long awaited Modernisation Review; at least it was supposed to be. But more on that later.

Andrew Cozens, Strategic Advisor at the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) kicked off the day with his interactive workshop, introducing the approach – outcomes based accountability. He explains that currently there are too many terms defining performance measures, and not enough discipline in using them. By using three key particular definitions, ‘outcomes’, ‘indicators’ and ‘performance measures’, a real outcomes based accountability approach can be achieved. The term outcome would be used only to describe the high level goal, for example, ‘improve the well being of children and adults’. The term indicator would then go a step further, by highlighting the measure which helps to quantify the achievement of an outcome, and finally performance measure would then measure how well the programme is performing. Overall, this was an interesting session which challenged delegates to re-think their current thought processes, as all too often, it’s easy to focus on the measuring performance elements and lose sight of whether the outcome is improving.

Then the session many were waiting for began, as the Rt. Hon Margaret Hodge, Minister for Culture and Tourism took to the stage. She began by acknowledging that public libraries are very precious, but from time-to-time, we must question whether things could be done differently to ensure a comprehensive and efficient service fit for purpose in the 21^st century is being delivered. She then went to on to provide some ‘interesting’ statistics which appeared to paint a sad and downward spiralling trend in library usage. However, these statistics were later questioned, to which Margaret was only able to respond “I don’t know where they [the statistics] came from, they are just given to me”.

She believes engaging with young people requires radical innovation, as they require something new and something stimulating. Her acknowledgment of the technological revolution being at the heart of future of libraries hinted at what the (once again delayed) Modernisation Review would focus on, looking to models such as LoveFilm and Amazon. Some ‘innovate’ suggestions for libraries included a loyalty card that rewards every ten book loans with a free DVD hire and a library card for every new born baby, bringing frustration to many delegates sitting at my table, as they squealed “We’ve done that for years”. They felt such suggestions demonstrated Margaret’s lack of understanding of the library profession and felt patronised. However other ideas to provide an internet lending service to have books delivered to your home; selling books as well as lending in conjunction with companies like Amazon, led to more positive reactions.

The Modernisation Review itself is to be published in a much faster paced climate than previously published reports, she explained, and therefore, the DCMS do not intend for it to be the last word in the conversation. Margaret would like the time to input her thoughts on the paper before release, and publish as a consultation document. The cynic may read this as a lack of ideas or direction on the DCMS’ part, yet others may believe wider consultation is a genuine attempt to engage with those experienced in the field. In her closing statements, she encouraged librarians to get in touch, as she would like to produce a comprehensive and controversial report. She promised that the Government remains committed to strong and modern public library services and will continue to value and champion them.

The third session was lead by Liz Forgan, the Chair of the Arts Council, highlighting the importance of reading. From the conference programme, I got the impression that this would be a bad case of preaching to the converted, however, I was proved wrong. She explained, for a library to support reading is instinctive, but today, everything must be evidence based, therefore the difference that reading makes must be highlighted. “Libraries are central to reading, and reading is your jewel” she explained.  Miranda McKearney, Director of the Reading Agency explained how they can work closer with libraries to do this. Firstly, national reading programmes can be worked harder. Secondly, stronger partnerships can be established with publishers, broadcasters and media to publicise reading further. By setting up a digital taskforce to take up reading developments online can help showcase achievements as well as build stronger networks. Thirdly, a 21^st century library workforce created via strategic training could also contribute significantly to wider reading. And finally new thinking would be essential to develop clear messages and creative new projects. The session finished on thoughts of cross authority reading strategies, where a show of hands indicated a mere two local authorities were actively adopting them. A second show of hands highlighted how many would like to adopt such strategies in their libraries and this time there were significantly more than just two.

For the afternoon session, we were given the opportunity to visit local libraries providing unique and innovative services. I chose to visit the Hartcliffe Library and the Knowle West Media Centre in the South of Bristol. The Hartcliffe Library was built in 1974 in what was once a vibrant part of the area. Following the closure of a nearby factories and banks, the library began to suffer. It wasn’t until the adjacent Morrisons supermarket was built that the area became revitalised and the close nit community was reformed. In 2003 the refurbishment of the library began, in which the local community remained faithful to the service, bringing flasks of hot drinks through times of power cuts. With strong support from youth in what is described to be a ‘challenging area’ the library acts as a social environment engaging with all, simply by opening up.

The Knowle West Media Centre is a stunning building; the walls of which are made of straw bales and a rubber roof which harvests rain water. As we were shown around the building, we were told about the activities that take place within the centre including photography, music and film maker projects. But what was really interesting was how the local youth had been engaged in the development of the building. And we’re not just talking minor consultation. Real decisions such as choosing designers, architects and creating the design brief were all done in close conjunction with the local youth. This way, not only is the passion ignited within the youth straight away, but they are presented with a building that they are a part of and something which is made to their requirements. The Media Centre staff believe they learn just as much from those who use the centre as they do from them. They believe the jobs of the future require a solid understanding of digital skills and therefore the centre has a massive role to play.

Today I have enjoyed speaking to delegates from all sorts of backgrounds and the coach trip around Bristol. Though my highlight has to be Margaret Hodge’s presentation, simply because of the debate she stimulated. Tomorrow promises more interesting sessions as the conference draws to an end. Watch out for PLA Day 3 tomorrow…

Images published by _satunine and ourcreativetalent on Flickr

DCMS, DCMS Review, English, Libraries, Library, Margaret Hodge, PLA 2009, Talis, Uncategorized, books

I confess: I am a PLA virgin. My expectations for the next three days had been built up of a combination of colleagues’ experiences, event reviews and a bit of imagination. However, on my journey into Bristol this morning, I decided I would put those expectations aside and approach PLA 2009 with an open mind.

It became clear quite early in the conference that the themes for this year were three fold: community engagement, governance of the library service and public library buildings – all quite timely with the imminent release of the DCMS review, the announcement of the public library buildings awards and the Wirral Libraries u-turn.

After being warmly welcomed by those who were “truly delighted” with this year’s conference programme, the first session was kicked off by Jayne Hathaway, the Director of 2QAB Community Interest Company around engaging with local people. Jayne began her presentation stating she knew very little about libraries, which became evident with the declaration “I no longer use libraries as I am now fortunate enough to purchase books” which needless to say, sparked stunned looks around me. Is Jayne suggesting (in her opening few words) that libraries are only for those who can’t afford books/computers/access to the Internet? Her attempt to get the audience on side went down as noticeably patronising.

But fortunately, Jayne did raise some interesting thoughts: local people have the right to be engaged in local service planning and the delivery of it. But do they always know what is going on to be able to get involved? She went on to explain how excluding the local community in such planning could risk wasting the resources of an already under-funded service, and how local people are barely aware of their own rights and responsibilities. This is something that must change, Jayne explains, people must be more active in the community, aware of their power and be confident enough to use it and ultimately, become economically, socially and politically fulfilled. But how? Jayne believes the answer lies in allowing the community to choose what they want, and empower (a word Jayne was reluctant to use) communities. She then introduced a local person who thoroughly entertained us with his powerful story of how he overcame his alcohol addiction and then sang African chants (although great entertainment, I wasn’t entirely clear how it related to 2QAB’s work, or in fact public libraries at all).

The second session introduced us to the Public Library Building Awards, the winner of which will be announced at tonight’s dinner. Norma McDermott, co-Chair of the awards took us through the trends they were seeing throughout the nominated libraries, as it became clear the ‘feel’ of libraries was changing. In summary, a large majority were incorporating minimal designs, vibrant yet airy colour schemes and more interactive spaces. User experience was a higher priority, as well as working with other local services such as health centres and gyms. Later in the day, the shortlisted libraries were showcased via video.  Newcastle City Library certainly is the most impressive, and the most likely to win on wow factor alone. However, my vote went to Ramsgate Library (Kent County Council) largely because of its traditional exterior appearance and contemporary, yet welcoming feel inside. I felt many of the libraries adopted the ‘clean’ and ‘minimal’ look to the extreme where (on video) they appeared to be cold and uncomfortable, but overall some great libraries achieving some impressive transformations.

The presentation from Julie Finch of the Museum of Bristol was extremely rushed, and presented in an incredibly monotone manner, with very little engagement with the audience. Disappointing, as so much could have been explored. For instance, Julie could have explored how the library could mirror the success experienced by museums in their transformation of their public perception or how museums can look to the library community to influence their stock selections and strategies to engage with communities. Overall, it came across as a presentation which had been previously delivered elsewhere and no attempt to cater the content to this audience had been made.

Following conversations with other delegates, the next session from John Hicks of Kentwood Associates got mixed reviews. Whilst many thought this was the best session of the morning, others thought it required more substance and avoided real practical issues that appeared to have been completely over looked. John proposed four types of alternative governance for libraries. Firstly, community governance. Local people running their local services would bring benefits of knowledge and dedication; however it would compromise direction, focus and deciding who exactly runs the library would be tricky as personal agendas may interfere. Secondly, partnerships. Working with wider council services bring obvious cost advantages and bring in wider experiences, however control is compromised and contractual relationships are introduced. In the next year or two, John envisages one or two additional shared services appearing (as a minimum). Thirdly, trusts. Wigan is the longest surviving trust; established in 2003, and Glasgow is the largest, who may well provide the model for others to follow in the future. Trusts bring tax advantages, but can be expensive to set up. Finally, the private sector. We are starting to see private sector organisations such as JLIS, Tribal and LSSI making more of an appearance in private sector governance of libraries. In the future, John believes libraries will need to get used to writing service specifications to measure performance effectively, managing libraries through contractual agreements, strategic commissioning and more partnership working.

For the first afternoon session, I decided to attend the presentation by Elizabeth Elford, the Public Libraries Advocacy Manager at the British Library, which focused on marketing the public library. She explained by maintaining a good relationship with council communications teams, using one message/voice and presenting materials professionally (amongst other things) is key to achieving a positive lasting impression. Social media is a tool which must be embraced more in public libraries as a higher percentage of the target audience is highly responsive to such channels. However, as the session went on, it became clear that it isn’t as easy as “OK, let’s set up a Facebook page” as local authorities often face challenges internally, whether they are with IT departments or the senior management. Manchester City Library, a shining example in adopting such social medias, proposed an interesting ideology “Seek forgiveness, don’t ask permission” which may well be the way forward for libraries battling with departments internally. After all, the library would increase its reach and accessibility, improve its reputation and influence and promote transparency through doing so. This session was very well received by those who attended, with approx 90% of the attendees either asking questions or engaging via commentary, demonstrating the high interest in the topic and the desire for librarians to do more in this area.

My final session for the day was the public library partnership work with the BBC, presented by Elizabeth Waite, Library Partnership Manager at the BBC. After a clumsy and frankly unimpressive start fumbling around with technology, Elizabeth explained how the BBC sees itself to be very similar to libraries, with similar aims. As two publicly funded organisations, both want to promote education and learning so there were firm foundations for a partnership. So far, four successful projects have now been rolled out, including: BBC Raw, BBC Breathing Places, BBC Headroom, BBC Off By Heart. Staffordshire County Council has been a keen advocate of the projects, working with its different segments of library users to promote each. Janine Cox of Staffordshire explained working with the BBC enabled them to identify the contribution they made to education and learning and develop sustainable relationships. As some of the projects draw to an end, the BBC is looking to introduce new projects around digital literacy and history working closely with more libraries across the UK.

Day 1 has been an eventful day, packed with activity and conversation in a way I didn’t quite expect. I look forward to tomorrow as the DCMS take centre stage. Watch this space for PLA Day 2 tommorrow.

Image from @MichaelStead on twitpic.

CILIP, English, Libraries, PLA 2009, Public Libraries, Talis, Uncategorized, books

Yesterday, the Society of Chief Librarians made national news with their new initiative attempting to make libraries accessible to all. The collections of more than 4,000 libraries across England, Wales and Northern Ireland will be open to any member of the public by showing their existing library card, or proof of address, to join or access any library they are visiting.

Tony Durcan, formerly president of the Society of Chief Librarians explains:

“If you’ve joined one library service, why do you have to go through the bureaucratic process of filling in forms to join another?”

The Society’s Chief, Fiona Williams supports this further by saying:

“Libraries are a public service for everybody. We want people to know that all libraries are open to them, not only the libraries where they live. This is an important step towards making libraries even more accessible to all.”

Though items borrowed must be returned to the library from where they came, so far the initiative has generated positive feedback and appears to be welcomed across the board. However, questions are now emerging including those raised by Mick Fortune of Library RFID Ltd.:

“Should I now be lobbying Oxfordshire to cancel their subscription to online information services because I, and everyone else in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, can now access them by joining say, Manchester online? How will the companies providing these services stay in business if only one authority pays a sub? Will Manchester council tax payers be prepared to pick up the tab for the whole country?”

This begs the question whether this initiative really is the significant move forwards that it has been painted to be? Have the consequences highlighted by Mick Fortune been taken into serious consideration? Watch this space as the debate continues.

Image published by framework_zend on Flickr

Book lending, English, Libraries, Library, Society of Chief Librarians, Talis, Uncategorized, books

In the last years we have passed from a situation characterized by the shortage of information in which “information is power”, to a situation in which the abundance of information starts to be a problem. Since Internet has been settled as the most important way of communication, and the Web 2.0 is a successful phenomenon, we have in our hand much more information than we can process. We are a click away of the news (newspapers, blogs), report analysts on all the topics, pages of patents, commercial information of the companies, opinions of the consumers, and hear live conversations in diverse degrees of formalism.

 

It is possible to state that we are drowning in information. Providing this situation, Internet will evolve to facilitate the life to the users, and no longer will be considered as a repository where all information is stored and accessed more or less easily by means of the search engines. The growth of the information has been so huge during the last years, and all seems to indicate that it will continue in this way in the future, that Internet will have to adapt itself and to be converted into a tool orientated to help the user in his daily activities.

 

This will need an evolution in the Internet approach, passing from a model based on storage of text to a model of storage of concepts. At present, the semantic technologies allow to store concepts in databases, and trends as “linked data”, will allow us to consider the information as data related to other data. These two concepts have fixed the bases of a new paradigm of information treatment with the main characteristic that the information stops being considered as flat text, to include a meaning. This fact, will allow the information systems to have the possibility of contextualizing the information, which means that they could offer it to the user in a suitable way at the right time.

 

Though these technologies have a high level of development, still it will be necessary y in the next years a maturing process to find the most suitable way to move them into the market. In a decade they could set up the base for a new concept in Internet: your personal assistant. This supposes that Internet must host tools with a more active character, capable of analyzing the present information in the Web and show it to the user adapted according to his context. The applications of this concept will be amazing: to organize the time, to plan meetings, to prepare the work… In fact, all the activities specific of a personal assistant that thanks to semantic technologies can be available to everyone. 

In the following video, some of the scenes show how the technology can play the role of a personal assistant in the future.

English, Spanish, Uncategorized

After the vacation period, Semantic Technologies come back to the arena with force in different areas:

• Application of semantic technologies to search activity is always a hot point, with news appearing continuously.  Primal Fusion has announced advances in their search engine to infer meaning from the words used to conduct an online search. This company was Founded in 2004, and joins to others that are working with the same goal. Robin Li, the CEO of Baidu, the most important search engine in China with more of 3 hundred million users in this country (more that all the population of the USA), gave a conference about the business model of Baidu and about his vision of search in the future, giving big importance to the semantic technologies for the companies that want to compete on this area.

 

• Application of semantic technologies to concrete industries continue its growth, for example in the area of pharmaceutical companies, BioFharma that has announced that they will use Cambridge Semantics’ Anzo suite “because of its ability to deliver tools that are not only powerful, but also practical, usable, flexible, and scalable,”. In the field of health the announcement of Netbase Solutions of the tool  “Health base semantic search” has been reported by several media

 

 

• The possibilities of Semantic technologies to make innovation easier has been raised by the company Invention Machine, a leading provider of innovation software that has announced the availability of Invention Machine Goldfire 5.5, a platform to enhance product innovation

 

• From the technological point of view we can highlight the utilization of Open Calais by Oracle to integrate semantic data into workflows.

 

• Among the curious news, I recommend this article from MIT News about how to improve eGoverment and how Semantic Technologies will play a role in this evolution.

English, Spanish, Uncategorized

After the vacation period, Semantic Technologies come back to the arena with force in different areas:

• Application of semantic technologies to search activity is always a hot point, with news appearing continuously.  Primal Fusion has announced advances in their search engine to infer meaning from the words used to conduct an online search. This company was Founded in 2004, and joins to others that are working with the same goal. Robin Li, the CEO of Baidu, the most important search engine in China with more of 3 hundred million users in this country (more that all the population of the USA), gave a conference about the business model of Baidu and about his vision of search in the future, giving big importance to the semantic technologies for the companies that want to compete on this area.

 

• Application of semantic technologies to concrete industries continue its growth, for example in the area of pharmaceutical companies, BioFharma that has announced that they will use Cambridge Semantics’ Anzo suite “because of its ability to deliver tools that are not only powerful, but also practical, usable, flexible, and scalable,”. In the field of health the announcement of Netbase Solutions of the tool  “Health base semantic search” has been reported by several media

 

 

• The possibilities of Semantic technologies to make innovation easier has been raised by the company Invention Machine, a leading provider of innovation software that has announced the availability of Invention Machine Goldfire 5.5, a platform to enhance product innovation

 

• From the technological point of view we can highlight the utilization of Open Calais by Oracle to integrate semantic data into workflows.

 

• Among the curious news, I recommend this article from MIT News about how to improve eGoverment and how Semantic Technologies will play a role in this evolution.

English, Spanish, Uncategorized

In this podcast I talk with David Parkes, Associate Director for Learning Technology and Information Services at Staffordshire University. On the day that the library at Staffordshire University launched its 24 hour service, meaning that the library will now be open continuously until next July, David and I discuss how his team has adopted more agile working practices in order to meet the challenges of the 21st century information landscape and all that entails in terms of technological change, student expectation, budgetary pressures and shifts in the publishing supply chain.

English, Libraries, Library 2.0, Podcast, Podcasting, UK Library Podcast, Uncategorized

Written yesterday at the EA Conference held in Washington, DC.

This morning's session on data.gov was really nothing short of inspiring.  There has been a sea change in how government data is made public.  As little as a year ago, even government RSS feeds were presented in such a way as to be barely re-usable, as if their agencies were providing open data under protest, and doing as much as possible to keep their data secret.

Contrast that to the accomplishments of data.gov today, with their tens of thousands of data sources, RSS feeds that really expose data, application contests to do interesting things with public data. 

I asked the data.gov panel at the Government EA conference this week in the Ronald Reagan building what had changed.  This seems like a difference of work culture in the agencies.  What was the cause of that?

I got insightful answers from all the panelists.  I don't want to put words into their mouths, so I won't attribute any particular answer to any of them, but the panelists were Sonny Bhagowalia (DOI), Jerry Johnston (EPA), Marion Royal (GSA) and Martha Dorris (GSA).

There are a few forces that are coming together to cause this change.  First, there are people in the agencies who have always believed in open data, and wanted to share it, but have not had a charter to do so.  They have effectively done it in their spare time, just waiting for a chance.

The efforts that they have managed to make have been oriented toward very specific tasks; they made data available in a way that they thought some particular consumer wanted it.  This would allow them to justify the effort of publishing the data.  But data presented for a single consumer doesn't feel like 'open' data to the rest of us; it can even feel as if the data is being kept intentionally secret.  Early feedback (early?  As recently as June the whole effort was called a "significant failure" on this point alone) to data.gov told the providers that there is an audience for 'raw' open data.  So they have started to do both.

Another force is hard times.  This country is in the midst of a number of crises,  and the government is involved to a great extent in the problems and any solutions.  Government data is more important than ever.  And the agencies need to harness the ingenuity of the masses to work through it, adding another incentive.

This situation is like a powder keg ready to go off.  We have people in the agencies who want to share data, who want to stimulate the clever folks at MIT or Stanford or in their garages to solve problems using government data, and who want to get around requirements for particular audiences for their published data.  To this mix, you add a spark: in February, President Obama signed the memorandum about Transparency and Open Government.

Critics might cry that this is too little, too late.  But the gains that data.gov has made in the past few months show a real change in attitude; a far cry from what we had before.

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Holding the printed version of our new book in hand – that’s quite a sense of achievement: Pascal Hitzler, Markus Krötzsch, Sebastian Rudolph, Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies, Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2009. And I think we made a difference with this book, since it not only provides intuitive introductions to RDF(S), OWL 1+2, RIF, SPARQL, but also an in-depth treatment of the formal semantics (including tableau algorithms) – plus applications, tools, a bit on ontology engineering, OWL+Rules, conjunctive queries, and exercises+solutions. Ready-to-use for self-study or teaching. We will also collect slides on the book webpage.

Since our German book has become a widely used textbook for university courses in the German speaking countries, we expect no less from the new book: The didactic rationale is basically unchanged, but we cover much more material, and have obviously brought the contents up to date.

And we’ve already found a first typo: The heading to Section 1.4 reads: “Semanic Web Technologies.” Is that a Freudian Slip?

Pascal Hitzler

English, Uncategorized

For those of us who have been doing Knowledge Representation for decades, we judge a modeling tool on its power: How many whiz-bang shortcuts for complex OWL restrictions or mass editing of similar items or refactoring does it have? But when we try to get Modeling to the Masses, or at least Modeling in the Enterprise, we find that it isn't the power tools that they are interested in. Enterprise knowledge workers will prefer pretty simple model editing tools. But they insist that they have strict control over version governance.

What exactly is version governance? Often the people who want it aren't quite sure, but they know it when it isn't there. Someone makes a change to a part of a model on someone else's turf. Someone wants to try out a long-transaction 'better idea' to see how it works - but we want to be able to toss it later on if we don't like it. Or we find something wrong in a category - who changed it? When? What was the model like when they changed it?

Some of this stuff comes for free when you use a version control system like SVN or CVS. But these solutions, which are great for managing versions of java code, aren't intuitive to a team that is organizing, say, a vocabulary project. They want something a bit finer grained (who changed this term?) and with a bit of process ("I can propose a change, but only John can approve it").

That's why the biggest part of TopQuadrant's Enterprise Vocabulary Management System (EVMS) is a system for collaborating on model changes. You don't just use the EVMS to change a vocabulary; you use it to build a sandbox in which you make your changes. The changes then enter a (configurable) workflow, where, if they get approved, they are committed to the shared version. If not, well, then they aren't.

Now, that's pretty cool. After all, it lets teams collaborate on their vocabulary management, lets them manage territory on a term-by-term basis, and even provides a process for moving the changes along. But the thing that I find most cool about this is that it was all built using the TopBraid Ensemble assembly platform.

You see, I never got the hang of coding Java, and I'm not really a programmer. But I like making systems do what I want them to do, so I am a big scripter. The entire EVMS collaboration control system is written as a TopBraid Ensemble application.

What does this mean? It means a lot of things, but for this project it means that when I was talking to a colleague about how to display the changes that had been made to a vocabulary. He said, "to my mind, I want to be able to click on a term, and see all the people who have changed it, and why!" Well, all that information is modeled in the system - it is just a matter of querying it out with SPARQL.

In the figure, we see the final step of this. We are looking at a fragment of the NCI Thesaurus regarding Organisms. The change log shows a rather silly argument over what we should call lab mice by two of the taxonomists. Every change was made through the EVMS, so we can track back the whole story about each term. Adding this to the system was as easy as writing a SPARQL query and wiring it up to the display components (a grid in the upper-right and a form in the lower-right) so that the changes relevant to a chosen term would be shown.

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When the iPhone OS 3.0 came out with new Mobile Me features allowing you to remotely discover the location of your iPhone and send it a message and an alarm, I hoped that there’d be an API. While there’s no official way to access it, the enterprising Tyler Hall and Sam Pullara dug out their HTTP sniffers and figured out how the javascript on me.com talks to its backend service.

Their code is written in PHP and Java respectively, two languages I’m not particularly comfortable in. Translating from their source code, I’ve produced a ruby version and packaged it as a very simple gem. It lacks real documentation or elegant error handling, but it’s easy to figure out.

Use it like this to locate your phone:

$ sudo gem install mattb-findmyiphone --source http://gems.github.com

>> require 'rubygems' ; require 'findmyiphone'
>> i = FindMyIphone.new(username,password)
>> i.locateMe
=> {"status"=>1, "latitude"=>51.546544, "time"=>"8:06 AM", "date"=>"July 23, 2009", "accuracy"=>162.957953, "isLocationAvailable"=>true, "isRecent"=>true, "isLocateFinished"=>true, "statusString"=>"locate status available", "isAccurate"=>false, "isOldLocationResult"=>true, "longitude"=>-0.05744}

And to send a message:

>> i.sendMessage("Unimportant message")
=> {"status"=>1, "time"=>"8:17 AM", "date"=>"July 23, 2009", "unacknowledgedMessagePending"=>true, "statusString"=>"message sent"}

Finally, if you look in the examples directory you’ll find a short script that uses the location data to update Fire Eagle via its API. Fill in the example YAML files with the appropriate credentials and it’ll do the rest.

Of course the code’s all open source and contributions via Github are very welcome.

English, Uncategorized