Following the Online Information Conference 2009, at which I demonstrated live examples of Linked Data in action, I have been asked several times if my presentation had been videoed.

Unfortunately it had not. So I have tried to recreate the presentation, if not the atmosphere, by recording this screencast.   In an attempt to find a quite uninterrupted environment, I recorded this early on a Sunday morning.  I hope therefore you will forgive the odd clink of the first coffee cup of the day.

A slides version of the presentation is also available on SlideShare.

Today I had the pleasure of delivering a presentation in the Semantic Web track at Online Information in London.  Sharing the stage with David Pullinger, Head of Digital Policy, COI,UK Government, John Sheridan, Head of e-Services and Strategy, Office of Public Sector Information and Eero Hyvonen, Professor, Semantic Media Technology, Helsinki University of Technology, Finland, in a session that followed on from a keynote Talis CTO, Ian Davis, it was my challenge to ‘demonstrate’ Linked Data in action.

After a few opening scene setting slides I took my life in my hands, opened up a selection of web browsers to embark on a tour of live examples of Linked Data in action, many of which being underpinned by data in Talis Platform stores.  Fortunately my 3G connection held up for the duration, and I got to the end without any long waits watching spinning web browser icons.

For those that asked, here is a SlideShare version of my presentation, including screenshots of what I showed, and links to some of the sites I visited.

• Data.gov.uk
• Edubase
• Search Interface for Education RDF data in [Talis Platform] store.
• SPARQL Query Interface for Education RDF data in [Talis Platform] store. (Results of SPARQL query)
• Litchfield District Council ‘My Area’ page, demonstrating schools information pulled in vas SPARQL query from above store. (See Nodalities video with Stuart Harrison who developed this)
• KML File Generator for Schools data – courtesy of Stewart Harrison.
• John Goodwin’s Meshup of OS, DBpeadia, BBC, and geniality data.
• BBC Programmes Subject Relationships – courtesy Leigh Dodds, Talis.
• Crime statistics visualisation – courtesy Jeni Tennison
• Crime offences visualisation – courtesy Jeni Tennison

Update: The FanHubz application merging Twitter and BBC programmes data, shown in Ian Davis’ keynote earlier in the day, can be found here: fanhu.bz

For this final podcast in the Online Information Conference 2009 series, I caught up with Dame Wendy Hall in a very echoey room at the Royal Society in London.

Wendy is sharing the opening keynote session on the first day of the conference with Nigel Shadbolt.  Their session has the title The Semantic Web Revolution – Unleashing the world’s most valuable information.  This promises to be a great session to catch with a combination of slide-backed presentation, conversation, and Q&A.

In this conversation with Wendy, we explore the approaching step-change evolution that Semantic Web technologies, specifically Linked Data, will  bring to the online world over the next few years.  An evolution to the web that is already in place, not the totally disruptive revolution that the web itself was.  Wendy makes it clear that, as with the document web of the mid nineties prior to the emergence of Google for instance, it is difficult to predict how the data web will turn out and what tools, services, and business models will emerge.  Nevertheless, the opportunities for innovation, building on the unleashing of distributed yet interlinked data, will be massive.

An interesting insight in to the thinking that will underpin what promises to be a great opening session to an equally good conference.

Antonio has been working in the area of Web search for eleven years.  He has recently joined Microsoft as principle developer manager based in London.

Presenting in the The realtime web: Discovery vs. Search session on the 1st day of the Online Information 2009 conference, Antonio brings an insight in to the challenges of realtime search.  Traditional search systems utilise pointers between pages to ascertain relevance and importance.  In a realtime environment, those references will have not been created.  News items from the BBC are obviously of high reputation, but are they as important as the local paper when you are in Iowa.

How do you calculate the relevance images, or videos, or a stream of information from an event such as an earthquake.  How do you calculate the importance of various social services such as FaceBook and Twitter.  Without giving away the secret recipe behind the way Bing approaches this, his explanations set the scene for these very real challenges.

The twelve months that have elapsed since the previous Online Information Conference has seen an explosion in technologies that influence the information world and life in general.  What was being talked about as up coming trends last year, are now core to the agenda of this years conference.

Conference Chair, Adrian Dale, joins me in conversation to discuss these trends an to explore his hopes for the highlights of this years conference.

The Opening Keynote slot on day three of Online Information 2009 will be filled by Charlene Li, formerly of Forrester Research and now founder of Altimer Group.  Named "One of the Most Influential Women in Technology" by Fast Company magazine, Charlene, co-author of Groundswell, is well know for her opinions on how social technologies are influencing all business.

In this Talking with Talis conversation we explore her thoughts on how many commercial organisations are having to wake up to the new way that there customers and employees are interacting.  Realising that they can not control or buy their way in to this space, is an important step. 

We move on to explore how things will evolve further, how and for what the massive amounts of data amassed by social services.  With a history in newspapers, Charlene has some thoughts on what the future may look like for that industry if the do, or do not, adapt.

An interesting heads up for day three of the conference.