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31 December 2007

This Week's Semantic Web

[provisional]

Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2007-12-31, all weeks. Also available in RDF as linked data or via GRDDL.

In the Media

Docs

Software News

Miscellany

Quote of the Week

The true idiocy of the RIAA is that they've made DRM simple enough for everybody to understand why they don't want it.

- Marc Hedlund

~

Sources include Planet RDF, various other blogs, Semantic Web Interest Group IRC Chatlogs & Scratchpad, ESW Wiki, SemWebCentral, Sweet Tools, W3C Semantic Web Activity, mailing lists, personal emails etc etc. If you see anything suitable this coming week, please mail meor use the del.icio.us tags "semweb weekly" - thanks!

Posted by Danny Ayers at 06:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

24 December 2007

This Week's Semantic Web

Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2007-12-24, all weeks. Also available in RDF as linked data or via GRDDL. Includes some overlooked older items recommended via del.icio.us.

foaflet-pressy.gif

In the Media

Docs

Software News

Events

Calls for Papers

Jobs

Miscellany

Quote of the Week

If you stay within RDF world, though, things seem fine.

- Tim Berners-Lee on XML namespaces and RDF

~

Sources include Planet RDF, various other blogs, Semantic Web Interest Group IRC Chatlogs & Scratchpad, ESW Wiki, SemWebCentral, Sweet Tools, W3C Semantic Web Activity, mailing lists, personal emails etc etc. If you see anything suitable this coming week, please mail meor use the del.icio.us tags "semweb weekly" - thanks!

Posted by Danny Ayers at 10:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

17 December 2007

This Week's Semantic Web

Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2007-12-17 (plus some material from the previous week). All weeks. Also available in RDF as linked data or via GRDDL.

In the Media

Docs

Software News

Events etc.

Miscellany

Quote of the Week

Every triple is sacred.

Every triple is great.

If a triple is wasted,

Tim gets quite irate.

-Peter F. Patel-Schneider, A Song for the Semantic Web

~

Sources include Planet RDF, various other blogs, Semantic Web Interest Group IRC Chatlogs & Scratchpad, ESW Wiki, SemWebCentral, Sweet Tools, W3C Semantic Web Activity, mailing lists, personal emails etc etc. If you see anything suitable this coming week, please mail meor use the del.icio.us tags "semweb weekly" - thanks!

Posted by Danny Ayers at 06:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Licensing Open Data - Creative Commons and Talis have something to say

Well that's a relief.

As you may have noticed, we announced the birth of the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence this morning, following up on Lawrence Lessig's unveiling at Creative Commons' fifth birthday party in San Francisco in the wee hours of our Sunday morning. Happy Birthday, Creative Commons, and we look forward to building upon this relationship for many birthday parties to come!

Regular watchers of Talis will be aware that we've had an interest in data for a long time, and that we've been active in the licensing issues behind Open Data for a couple of years now. Today's announcement is an important milestone in that journey, but we're not finished yet.

Back in 2006, we released our first public attempt at an open data licence, the Talis Community Licence, and began to use it for some early submissions to the Talis Platform. In building a Platform, we recognised from the outset the importance of recognising - and celebrating - the rights of those contributing their data to the shared pool. The Talis Community Licence allowed us to do that.

Not long after, Tim O'Reilly wrote;

“One day soon, tomorrow's Richard Stallman will wake up and realize that all the software distributed in the world is free and open source, but that he still has no control to improve or change the computer tools that he relies on every day. They are services backed by collective databases too large (and controlled by their service providers) to be easily modified. Even data portability initiatives such as those starting today merely scratch the surface, because taking your own data out of the pool may let you move it somewhere else, but much of its value depends on its original context, now lost.”

We certainly share those sentiments, and I've used the quote in several presentations since Tim wrote it.

During 2007, our interest continued to grow. In public, we convened a workshop on Open Data at the World Wide Web conference in Banff in the Spring, and reached out to Jordan Hatcher and Charlotte Waelde over the Summer, to help us extend the principles of the Talis Community Licence to the global stage. That they did, and over the past couple of months we've all been beavering away to align their initial offering with a parallel activity incubated within Creative Commons.

It's been fascinating to work closely with Science Commons during this process, and I've also welcomed the opportunity to work with Jordan and Charlotte again in dotting legal 'i's and crossing initially incomprehensible 't's. Together, they have produced a vitally important component in the toolkit that will encourage and facilitate real sharing of data. There is more to come, but the steps announced today mean that we can all move forward in lowering the walls of our silos, releasing data to play its part in the Data Web. All of us invest heavily in collecting and curating data, which is traditionally locked away and left to atrophy, failing to achieve anything like its true potential. Appropriately released and sensibly licensed, data held by every one of us can contribute hugely to the promise of the Semantic Web. Here, the whole really is far greater than the sum of its parts.

I'm really pleased to be able to share this latest piece of work today, and invite everyone to take a look, think about how it would work for them, and join in both freeing your own data and carrying the conversation to those still unaware that there is an issue to be addressed here.

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Posted by Paul Miller at 11:20 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Talis and Creative Commons launch new open data licence – a milestone for sharing data on the Internet

Sc-Launch-Logo
Talis and Creative Commons are delighted to announce the release of the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence, the first output of a successful partnership with the Science Commons project of Creative Commons. Creative Commons is well known for its advocacy and licensing work in the arena of 'creative works' such as songs, images, and copyrightable text.

In developing the Public Domain Dedication and Licence, Talis secured the efforts of Jordan Hatcher and Dr. Charlotte Waelde, asking them to build upon the principles of the earlier Talis Community Licence in ways that ensured its fitness for international purpose whilst aligning it more closely to the phrasing of Creative Commons' overarching protocol.

Talis’ Technology Evangelist Dr. Paul Miller commented,

“At Talis we've been arguing for a more permissive culture around use and reuse of data for a very long time. Working with our partners at Creative Commons and elsewhere we now have a clear framework upon which to build, and in our Public Domain Dedication and Licence we have the very first licence to conform to that new Science Commons Open Access Data Protocol. With this announcement we provide a tool to those who already understand the value of unlocking their data. We can also use discussion of this first tool to carry a wider set of messages to those who remain unaware of the importance of data licensing to their own activities.”

The legal environment within which data exist is radically different to that for creative works, and although there have been attempts to apply existing Creative Commons licenses to data, the legal validity of those efforts is questionable. In Europe we have Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament, and its various expressions in the laws of member states to define the so-called Database Right. These protections do not apply in jurisdictions such as the United States. A different approach is therefore required if we are to facilitate the widespread availability of data upon which the emerging Semantic Web will depend.

John Wilbanks, Creative Commons' Vice President responsible for the Science Commons project, commented,

“For a commercial organisation such as Talis, with a heritage in the business of creating and managing data, to recognise the importance of the 'freedom to integrate' says much about changing attitudes to the ownership and use of data. That they went beyond this recognition and did something about it with their licensing and advocacy work says much about them and the team with which they collaborated. The Open Data Commons Licence is the fruit of that collaboration. Both CC0 and the ODCL offer a sound legal basis upon which creators can follow Talis' example and recognise that there is far more to be gained by enabling access to data than by continuing to lock it away. Uniquely built for data, the Open Data Commons Licence approach furthermore implements the norms of data sharing for scientific data, providing the guidance for scientists to act as good citizens without exposing them to lawsuits and lawyers.”

Jordan Hatcher, who completed the redrafting effort, commented,

“Building an open data licence for the community is very much a collaborative process and we need everyone's input to make the licence be the best it can be -- including meeting everyone's needs for open data. The project's goal is to produce an easy to understand licence and that means having it user tested just like software. In the end, the Open Data Commons licence will provide a workable and easy to use solution for data integration that will take care of the relevant rights over data and databases.”

The Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence is available for use from today. We are working with the Cambridge-based Open Knowledge Foundation in the expectation that they can take on the support and development of this and related licenses in the future, ensuring true community ownership of the licensing cornerstone upon which so much data will come to rely.

The Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence is available for download from www.opendatacommons.org, along with the first set of documented Community Norms.

The full press release is available here.

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Posted by Paul Miller at 10:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

14 December 2007

Amazon releases a database as their latest Web Service

Amazon Web Services Evangelist Jeff Barr has been at it again, using Twitter to announce the release of his employer's latest offering.

Amazon has come a long way since its days as a big book shop, and is increasingly making a name for itself as an exemplar of commodity computation.

First we had the Simple Storage Service, S3. Little more than a big disk in the Cloud, it offered an affordable means by which anyone could make large amounts of data available for download by large numbers of people. Second Life client downloads come from S3, as do Talis podcasts. Several of my colleagues use S3 for backing up their laptops (I use Mozy myself, but that's another story).

Then we got the Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2. This commoditised availability of virtual computers, making it relatively straightforward for those experiencing rapid growth - or needing short-term access to additional computing power for some other reason - to call upon additional computers as required, configure them as needed, use them for as long as necessary, and then throw them back into the pool when done.

Unsurprisingly, given Amazon's e-Commerce heritage, a payment service came next. This essentially opened Amazon's own e-Commerce capabilities to third party developers, and allowed them to build it into their own applications. Although we knew that this would come, I should admit here that the pundits at Talis (including myself) were sure that Amazon's third web service would be the one they actually only announced today. Given our interest in data and their interest in e-Commerce, it's perhaps not surprising that we prioritised them differently.

Next in the path, a Service Level Agreement. Essential, if Amazon are to move beyond the early adopters and actually see mass market numbers of mainstream enterprises rely upon their web services.

Which brings us to today, and the unveiling of Amazon SimpleDB. It had to come, and now it has, offering;

“a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud.”

It's great to see, and in some ways the conceptual use of Cloud-based 'content' and 'metadata' is similar to our own ideas around the Talis Platform... although with very different emphasis and realisation.

And yes, I know I missed SQS and Mechanical Turk, and various other Amazon web services from my story...

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Posted by Paul Miller at 09:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

13 December 2007

Scoble has an interview with Radar Networks CEO, Nova Spivack

Robert Scoble has a video interview with Talis Platform Advisory Group member (and Radar Networks CEO) Nova Spivack. Nova builds on ideas in his podcast with me earlier this year, and provides a good look at Radar's first product, Twine. Twine was announced at the Web 2.0 Summit in October, the day before Nova's participation in the Semantic Edge discussion Tim O'Reilly moderated.

Take a look, and sign up for the beta.

Here's hoping that Scoble keeps up the great content if he leaves PodTech in the New Year as rumoured. And as he's clearly got a thing for the Semantic Web now, he knows where we are... :-)

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Posted by Paul Miller at 10:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

12 December 2007

Latest issue of Talis Platform News now online

The latest issue of our monthly Platform Newsletter is now online. Take a look, and remember to subscribe if you haven't already...

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Posted by Paul Miller at 05:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

11 December 2007

Issue 3 of the SemanticReport

December's issue of the SemanticReport is now available online, including a new look and an article by yours truly.

It's good to see this effort grow and evolve, and it's attracting some good content (and no, I wasn't meaning me).

Check it out, and if you've got something to say I know that Scott would love to hear from you.

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Posted by Paul Miller at 08:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

3 December 2007

This Week's Semantic Web

Selected links related to Semantic Web technologies for the week ending 2007-12-03, all weeks. Also available in RDF as linked data or via GRDDL.

In the Media

Docs

Software News

Events etc.

Calls for Papers

Miscellany

Quote of the Week

My document can point at your document on the Web, but my database can't point at something in your database without writing special purpose code. The SW aims at fixing that.

-hendler's executive elevator pitch

~

Sources include Planet RDF, various other blogs, Semantic Web Interest Group IRC Chatlogs & Scratchpad, ESW Wiki, SemWebCentral, Sweet Tools, W3C Semantic Web Activity, mailing lists, personal emails etc etc. If you see anything suitable this coming week, please mail meor use the del.icio.us tags "semweb weekly" - thanks!

Posted by Danny Ayers at 06:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack