8th April 2008, 08:03 pm by Danny Ayers In: Tech Talk

Today’s podcast is an interview with Dave Beckett (blog), Software Architect at Yahoo!

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Dave’s been a contributor to the Semantic Web initiative since before it had that name, originally coming from a background in parallel computing. As well as having worked on many of the key specifications around RDF, he’s responsible for the Redland toolkit, a comprehensive set of open source libraries for RDF. Dave maintains Planet RDF, an aggregation of Semantic Web blogs, as well as various tools in support of Semantic Web Interest Group (SWIG) communications. Until the quantity of material got out of hand, his RDF Resource Guide was the definitive collection. He derived the human-friendly RDF notation Turtle, which recently appeared as a W3C Team Submission, co-authored with Tim Berners-Lee. It was Dave, as a member of the Data Access Working Group (DAWG), that coined the acronym SPARQL - SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (which incidentally solved another a naming problem).

The topics covered include how he got involved in these technologies in the first place, Redland and a couple of Dave’s experiments: the triplr service (“Stuff in, triples out”) and Flickcurl, a C library for the Flickr API. He offers his thoughts around some of the technologies and specifications he’s been involved in, along with other developments around the Web - check the list of links below. While having limits on what he could say in public, he also mentioned the use of RDF inside Yahoo! (more announcements on the way apparently).

There are a couple of quotes I can’t resist pulling out. I asked Dave about how well he thought the Semantic Web was coming along, and he pointed out that, like the Web, there wouldn’t be any specific point in time at which one might say it was a success. But he added:

For me, in the work we’re doing with Yahoo! internally, it’s already a success…we’ve done work better, faster and we’ve done things we couldn’t do before because we were using this style of technology. It’s not always publicly visible because it’s a kind of data technology…but it’s a success for Yahoo! content and metadata problems I’ve been working on.

Dave also talks a little about open data, a nice line being:

The reason I got involved with the Semantic Web was…I wanted control of my data.

If you want to hear more, Dave will be speaking at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose in May, where he plans to go deeper into why Yahoo! is using RDF, the benefits and more detail of their projects.

One final quote: