The room was almost full at the British Library Conference Centre for the Linked Data and Libraries event on 21st July 2010, and many who wanted to attend couldn’t because of distance, other commitments, etc.

We therefore took along our brand new screen grabber device and a video camera to capture as much of the day as we could.  We have completed the editing process so I am ready to share the videos for those that want to view, or remind themselves of, the day.

Like most of the content we produce at Talis, these videos are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License, so share and enjoy.

	Introduction Talis and the world of Linked Data Zach Beavais, Talis Click for presentation video
	The data.bnf.fr Project Romain Wenz, Bibliothèque nationale de France Presentation not yet available
	Linked Data, RDF, and SPARQL Rob Styles, Talis Click for presentation video
	Linked Data in Action Richard Wallis, Talis Click for presentation video
	Lightning Talk Neil Wilson, The British Library Click for presentation video
	Lightning Talk Sally Chambers, The European Library Click for presentation video
	Lightning Talk Felix Ostrowsk, The North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Click for presentation video
	Linked Bibliographic Data Rob Styles, Talis Click for presentation video
	W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Grouop Antoine Isaac, Scientific Coordinator, Europeana Click for presentation video
	An overview of the Talis Platform Richard Wallis, Talis Click for presentation video

The Talis Linked Data in Libraries event, held at the British Library in London on Wednesday 21st July was attended by 50 enthusiastic interested people interested in the topic.

Below you will find presentations from the day.

Introduction Talis and the world of Linked Data – Zach Beavais, Talis 
Click to play

The data.bnf.fr Project – Romain Wenz, Bibliothèque nationale de France
        (Presentation not yet available)

Linked Data, RDF, and SPARQL – Rob Styles, Talis

Click to play

Linked Data in Action – Richard Wallis, Talis

Click to play

Lightning Talks:
                       Neil Wilson, The British Library

                       Sally Chambers, The European Library
                       Felix Ostrowsk, The North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service

Linked Bibliographic Data – Rob Styles, Talis

Click to play

W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group – Antoine Isaac, Europeana
Click to play

An overview of the Talis Platform – Richard Wallis, Talis

Click to play

Watch this space for videos of some of the sessions.

I know what you’re thinking: “He’s going to say Data!”

Well, I might do at some point, but I was going to say “Days”. Last month, Talis flung open its doors to 30 or so folk who were interested in SPARQL, the Semantic Web and Linked … er, Data. The idea was to host an informal event for folks learn about much of what we’ve been talking about for the past few years. We planned some talks on what it means to join up your data, what this Platform is about, and a detailed introduction to SPARQL. With the launch of data.gov.uk and many of the stories covered over in the Magazine, it seemed possible that people were starting to get interested in this whole Linked Data scene.

So, we sent out some invites and tweeted a bit, and soon had to cap the registration numbers. We filled up spaces in the January day not long after New Year, and the February day not long after the January one. March is quickly filling up too (hint). I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting this many people to express an interest so soon. Not only did people sign up, but travelled to Birmingham through adverse weather to come and take part at both ‘Days—and we’ve had a lot of fun.

One thing that seemed to be a good idea was to ask for feedback before the event. It sounds wrong, but the point of an Open Day is to cover things that YOU’re interested in learning or exploring. So, when people registered, they were asked for their expectations and what they’d like to take away with them from such an event—aside from a T-shirt and SPARQL mug, obviously. It made it much easier to work out what we should cover, and I hope it meant that we were able to talk about the things most relevant to the people who came along.

I’d like to do it again, but slightly differently. Instead of hosting an Open Day here at Talis HQ, what if we came to you? Would you be interested in attending a Talis Platform Roadshow? What would you want us to cover? More importantly, where would you like us to go?

Comments below, or email me or tweet me.

The Talis offices, for the past few weeks, have been awash with geeky excitement—that kind of near giddy excitement that comes with eager expectation. We’ve all been waiting for something important.

For some, this was no doubt augmented with the announcement of Steve’s new iPad; but that’s not what’s gotten us all worked up.

For months, we’ve been looking forward to the launch of data.gov.uk; and last week, the wraps finally came off. The official press release put it:

A major new website has been launched to the public which gives anyone who wants to use it unprecedented and free access to government data in one place.

This doesn’t quite capture the coolness of the launch, for me. Yes, it’s a major new website, and it’s point is to publish information. But, the exciting thing is that this information is being published as data: data that can be used, reused, remixed and enriched. Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s perspective was more exciting:

Making public data available for re-use is about increasing accountability and transparency and letting people create new, innovative ways of using it. Government data should be a public resource. By releasing it, we can unlock new ideas for delivering public services, help communities and society work better, and let talented entrepreneurs and engineers create new businesses and services.

The point is that this public resource is finally getting a home on the web, and an infrastructure to make it not just available, but useful.

The exceptional team behind data.gov.uk have striven to adhere to web standards in its production: including Linked Data as a priority, as Professor Nigel Shadbolt explained:

We are also going to increase the use of ‘Linked Data’ standards, which allows people to provide data in a way that is as flexible and easy-to-use as possible.

Back in November, Leigh Dodds wrote a post explaining how we’ve been involved, and there’s an official Talis Platform press release too. Basically, we’ve been working with the data.gov.uk team to help with the Linked Data part of the site—hosting the SPARQL endpoints and providing consultancy and training, for example.

I can confidently say that we’re very proud of data.gov.uk, the team behind it, and our involvement with it. We’re excited by the prospect of this data being used as raw material for clever people to make interesting, useful, even world-changing things with it. We’ve seen the beginnings and proof-of-concept projects already.

Now comes the really exciting stuff. What are you going to build?

Image: “Yay for happy days!” by le vent le cri via flickr (CC: By)

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.

By rob

• 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

Earlier this year Gordon Brown appointed Tim Berners-Lee as an advisor to the Cabinet Office to help the government begin the process of opening up its data. This was one part of the initiation of a project to begin opening up UK government data in a similar style to the US. A key part of Berners-Lee’s vision for putting government data online has been Linked Data which promises to provide a much richer way for citizens to begin accessing, browsing, and using government data.

Several other governments have begun opening up data assets including Australia and New Zealand. These approaches mirror that of the US data.gov site, providing a browsable directory of datasets and links to raw data downloads in a range of different formats. The preview launch of data.gov.uk which was announced at the end of September also includes a directory of datasets which is powered by the software underlying the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network. But the site also aims to fulfill Berners-Lee’s vision and in addition provide access to some datasets as Linked Data through SPARQL endpoints.

We’re very pleased to report that the Talis Platform is currently underpinning the delivery of all of the Linked Data and SPARQL endpoints for the data.gov.uk site.

We’ve been quietly supporting the effort for several months now helping out with data management, modelling discussions, and with training on the core technology. There seems to be a very definite appetite in government to not only open the raw data but to also explore the potential for Linked Data. Its clear from today’s announcement about opening up additional aspects of the Ordnance Survey data that there’s a real focus on delivering on the open data promise. While there are certainly some high-profile datasets like the Ordnance Survey or postcode data that may require legislative changes to become open, one of the biggest implementation challenges facing government is pulling together an overall directory of datasets and spreadsheets that are already scattered across multiple departmental websites.

Creating a dataset directory provides the required basic level of infrastructure to allow reuse, by enabling developers to find what they need; publishing Linked Data, SPARQL endpoints, and potentially extra APIs provides an additional set of options for ways to access the data. By letting datasets be browsable by anyone, not just developers, Linked Data offers the potential for anyone to find, discover and reuse interesting datasets. As I illustrated in a recent talk, these approaches are not mutually exclusive and the goal should be maximum utility.

Over on the Talis Platform developer blog we’ve begun showing some ways that the initial datasets, covering UK schools and traffic measurements can be queried in interesting ways. Its been exciting to see people begin to pick up the technology and creating reporting tools to explore the data, but also fantastic to be able to easily view data using only a browser.

There’s clearly still a great deal of work ahead, but the ground work has now been completed: there’s infrastructure in place to support data publishing; official guidelines on creating public sector URIs; and some agreement on best practices for modelling statistical data. The next challenge is to start ramping up the conversion of currently open data into RDF, in order to begin expanding the coverage of the Linked Data.

This is a very exciting project and here at Talis it’s something in which we’re very proud to be playing a role.

Over on her site, Jeni Tennison has been blogging about publishing data from the Platform. So far, the three-part series has included generic publishing (by converting CSV files to RDF/xml and getting them into a Platform store), using the Platform to back-end Linked Data, and exposing the published data for reuse.

Jeni’s done a great job of making the process understandable, and has included code snippets to illustrate too. You can follow the series on her site’s Talis category.

If you’ve followed Jeni’s series, or you’ve also published data from the Platform, make sure to drop us a line (platform@talis.com) to let us know what and how you’ve done it.

Over the past few weeks, Talis has been working with the BBC to crawl their programmes and music sites and pull in a bunch of usable data into a Platform store. This store now contains information on over 360,000 programmes and more than 34,000 musicians. There is data about albums and reviews, and about programme series and even versions of episodes. This is an interesting dataset.

What’s more, the BBC have made this data available to you to mashup and make use of. They’ve discussed their SPARQL endpoint on their Backstage developers’ blog. We’ve got more details about the store, including information on how you can get a hold of the data over on our n2 developers’ blog.

Leigh, in the n2 post, listed several applications he could see for the data:

Programme Reviews. It’d be easy to build a mashup of the BBC programmes data and something like Revyu (which also has a SPARQL endpoint) to allow someone to review a programme that they watched last night. Note, that as our crawling will be lagging behind the live site until we’ve implemented real-time updates, there will be a lead time between something being aired and in the Platform for reviewing.

PVR Integration. There are a number of open source PVR solutions out there, could some of these be updated to automatically pull in additional data from the endpoint to improve electronic programme guides?

Geographic Overlays. The interconnections between radio programmes, artists and their locations, offers an opportunity to build some mapping mashups, using either Google Maps or Earth. For example it ought to be possible to lay out the geographic spread of artists played by different BBC radio programmes and stations. Interested in music from a particular country or region? (Maybe you’re planning a trip there and what to pick up on the local vibe) Then use a map to home in on radio programmes that are most likely to play those artists.

Fan Widgets. The ability to extract data from the endpoint using SPARQL and JSON means that its really easy to create little widgets to include programme data on external web pages. What could something like the Doctor Who Tardis Index File be enriched by widgets that came straight from the BBC database? Throw in additional annotations from the community and you could make some really interesting embeddable gadgets. Of course there’s also the other direction: if fan communities start using BBC identifiers then the BBC may be able to feed this crowd-sourced data back into their site, just as they’re doing with Wikipedia (via dbpedia)

Under the Talis Connected Commons scheme anyone can have free hosting on the Platform for public domain data, so if a fan community wanted to organize itself around creating additional annotations for BBC programmes (how about character lists? mood assessment? scene breakdowns?) then these can be stored in the Platform for free, and then mashed up with the BBC data on the server-side using features like the Augmentation service, or on the client-side using SPARQL and JSON. Lots of potential there.

Update: all maintenance has been successfully accomplished, and the blogs should all be up and available again. Thanks to the Live Services team for some handy/fast work! The Nodalities blog will be unavailable from around 8pm (GMT) this evening for some scheduled maintenance. This will mean the posts, pages and RSS/Atom feeds will all be unaccessible till around 8am tomorrow morning.

We hope this won’t be too inconvenient for anyone, and that you enjoy the break

Image: “Rex – Gone Fishing” by snuzzy via flickr Creative Commons, “By 2.0″