One area of W3C activity with which we’re involved at Talis is the Semantic Web Education and Outreach (SWEO) Interest Group.

As reported on one of the SWEO pages,

“The W3C Semantic Web Education and Outreach (SWEO) Interest Group wishes to encourage a community of developers to come together to work on some Semantic Web projects. This rally has the goal of using our collective input to generating real running code, that can help us to demonstrate the value of the Semantic Web to a wide user base. We want to encourage developers to work together to create something that will make a real difference to people’s lives today. This is not a competition like the Semantic Web Challenge, rather an effort to bring together people to share ideas, with the added possibility of being able to realise the ideas by working with like minded programmers.”

The call has now closed, and we received ten expressions of interest which the group is now discussing.

Given our other interests within Talis, I was particularly taken by the POWDER browser extension (see my recent podcasts with Paul Walsh and Phil Archer for more on the possibilities there) and by the two Open Data projects. Of the two, Bizer and Cyganiak’s proposal would appear to be garnering more public support than Chen’s and it’s perhaps unfortunate that two such similar sets of ideas are in competition. I’ve been impressed by the speed with which the former has gathered attention to itself, with burgeoning wiki pages and an active mailing list, and very much look forward to seeing how a group of like-minded individuals can build upon components such as flexible licensing, changing attitudes, and increasingly powerful infrastructure to expose, maintain and leverage the wealth of data that we currently do such a good job of locking away behind supposedly ‘public’ web interfaces.

Open Data is becoming ever more important in underpinning a new generation of applications and services. Open Data doesn’t ‘need’ the Semantic Web… but maybe the Semantic Web needs Open Data.

Technorati Tags: Semantic Web, SWEO, Talis, Talis Community Licence, Talis Community License, Talis Platform, Talking with Talis, W3C

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