The Linked Data and Libraries 2011 event to be held at the British Library in London on July 14th is to be opened with a Keynote from Dame Lynne Brindley, British Library Chief Executive.

With reports from the LOD-LAM Summit, W3C Libraries Linked Data Working Group, plus an insight in to bibliographic linked data modelling intriguingly called The Record is Dead, this is looking like a not to miss event.

For full agenda and to register early to guarantee your place, check out the event site.

Lightening Talk slots available I am still taking submissions for the available lightening talks.  Drop me a line before June 17th if you would like to propose a talk.

Image from a photo on Flickr by Fuzzyyol

Whenever we publicise one of our Linked Data events we regularly hold in the UK, I always get a handful of responses wishing that we would run such an event on the American side of the planet.

So guess where our next Open Day is going to be held – the photo might give you a clue.

Check if you are right, and find more details from our Consulting blog. 

Photo Creative Commons licensed from Rob Styles Flickr Photostream

We are proud to be a Lead Sponsor for the Open Data Challenge being coordinated by Jonathan Gray from the Open Knowledge Foundation and Paul Meller from the Open Forum Academy, under the auspices of the Share PSI initiative.

This is a significant competition, with significant prizes totalling €20,000 for ideas, applications, visualisations and datasets – up to €5,000! 

As you would expect from a Talis Sponsored competition, Linked Data features in the line up of attributes that entrants should be considering.   Following the 5 Star Data principles espoused by Sir Tim Bereners-lee, the more machine readable, non-proprietary formatted, and linked that Open Data can be, the lower is the barrier to its innovative use.   This is especially true in the area of Public Sector Information, with similar or associated data is being published by several organisations or governments.  In recognition of this we are, as part of our sponsorship, backing the Talis Award for Linked Data – €1,000 presented for the best use of Linked Data in any of the competition categories.

The competition will run for 60 days, so get your ideas flowing, and developers fingers rattling over those keys.

Watch out for a later post, when I will  identify some Linked Open Data that is already available that you could use to build an entry.

3 March 2011, Birmingham, UK

Talis Information Limited, the library division of Talis Group Ltd, has been acquired by the UK’s leading outsourcing firm, Capita Group plc. The transaction is valued at £18.5m with an additional £2.5m due, based on performance over the next 12 months. Talis Information Ltd has a range of around 100 academic and public library clients based in the UK and employs 42 staff, all of whom are based in Birmingham, UK.

Talis Group’s other portfolio companies including Talis Education Ltd, Talis Systems Ltd and Talis Inc are unaffected by the acquisition of Talis Information Ltd.  Talis Group’s other divisions provide a SaaS-based semantic web platform and related applications including Talis Aspire, a resource list management solution for higher education customers.

A short while ago, my colleague Zach Beauvais podcasted with the Vice President of Engineering at Talis Inc., David Wood. In this conversation, David discusses his background, Linked Data and SPARQL. He also talks about Talis Inc.s’ first US customer: the US Government Printing Office (GPO) and its Persistent URL infrastructure, which provides persistent Web addresses for critical government documents and is primarily used by the more than 1,200 Federal Depository Libraries. The PURL server uses the PURLz open source software, the development of which was led by David while at Zepheira, and complements the data hosting and search capabilities of the Talis Platform with identifier management functionality.

For more information, you can follow David on Twitter on read his blog.

On the eve of the American Thanksgiving holiday, millions of people travel to spend time with friends and family.  Before I share a meal with relatives, I contemplate the connection between the first thanksgiving and the emerging Open Government movement.

The “First Thanksgiving” celebration in the US was a feast shared by 53 starving pilgrims who survived a brutal winter in New England, and 90 Native Americans.  The Native Americans knew how to manage their land and waters to provide sufficient fish, meat, vegetables and fruit.

The connection between the first American Thanksgiving and Open Government has to do with adapting to a new world by sharing information.  Four hundred years ago,  the Native Americans shared information on seeds, crops and planting conditions, helping the pilgrims survive.  Today, sharing information via the Web is helping us to better understand climate conditions, our health care options and issues impacting our local community.

Last week I joined about 250 people at the first International Open Government Conference, hosted by the US Department of Commerce in Washington DC.  Approximately half the conference delegates were from government, the balance from academia and the private sector.  The speakers discussed Open Government projects underway in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Brazil. Speakers shared success stories and areas for future development.  The common theme: democratizing public sector data and driving innovation.  Jonas Rabinovitch from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs highlighted several eGov strategies in developing nations.  Mr. Rabinovitch noted that all but three UN member nations have a basic Web presence, many offer online forms and some provide the ability to perform transactions via the Web.

Given the conference was hosted in the US Department of Commerce, data.gov featured prominently.  “The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government.”  Seven countries have stood up Open Government sites in the last 18 months, including UK, US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Finland.  Government administrators are seeking to restore public trust and establish an environment of transparency, participation and collaboration with the public.

The US Administration launched its Open Government Initiative in April 2009.  In the last two years, I’ve watched the US Executive Branch begin to move from  a “need to know” to a “need to share” culture.  This cultural transition and thus this Open Government Conference, was truly historic.  The conference underscored to me that we all, regardless of our political views and affiliation, live in a highly  interconnected global economy, underpinned by the World Wide Web.

Respected advisors on Open Government initiatives including Professor Jim Hendler of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, agreed that public participation and collaboration will be key to the success of Open Government initiatives.  I believe that more conferences like this one and the Open Government Data Camp 2010 held in London last week, drawing delegates from a variety of disciplines, from several countries, will do a great deal to reinvigorate civic engagement and economic growth from the ground up.

Government employees are responding to mandates to publish content to Open Government websites.  Data.gov was launched in April 2009 with 47 data sets.  Vivek Kundra, U.S Chief Information Officer stated that data.gov has in excess of 300,000 data sets as of November 2010.  A large portion of the data.gov data sets are geospatial information which is an opportunity for scientists and entrepreneurs to build tools for analysis and visualization of this valuable data.  The UK Government as published over 4,600 data sets, including many from Great Britain’s national mapping agency, Ordnance Survey, providing the most accurate and up-to-date geographic data for the UK.

“The stakes are high for our interlinked global economy.”  Dr. Robert Schaefer, Deputy Project Scientist from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab gave a compelling presentation on the need for mechanisms to make sense of published data as Linked Open Data. Publishing the content as in RDF is not sufficient, rather, providing context on what the data implies is necessary.  Better tools for analysts and scientists to extract meaning from Linked Open Data will allow critical information on climate change and space weather, for example, to be more readily understood by policy makers.  Professor Schaefer stated the implications for climate change are serious, wide ranging & urgent.  Current CO2 emissions are higher than the International Panel of Climate Change “worst case” scenario.  Billions of people may experience serious consequences from climate change.  Professor Schaefer reiterated the need to get started as soon as possible.  “When the water from the sea rises, millions of people will have to move.”  This international conference will hopefully stimulate cooperation between the public and private sectors.  It is a critical step in making data accessible and providing decision support tools for space weather and climate change.

Mr. Kundra acknowledged we have much more to do to improve the quality of published data sets.  He said, “when I’m able to perform analytics on the fly, grounded on quality data, we will have achieved success.”  Delegates were encouraged by Mr. Kundra and  other speakers to build out communities of interest, lead by individuals, rather than government agencies. The US Government is regularly launching challenges, see http://www.challenge.gov, with modest cash prizes targeting citizens to gain insights on how we, the people, not government, can solve problems ranging from education on childhood obesity to sustainable urban housing that respects the environment.

Beth Simone Noveck, United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government, leads President Obama’s Open Government Initiative.  Based at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, she is an expert on technology and institutional innovation. Ms. Noveck stated that “the Open Government Initiative is not transparency for transparency’s sake.  It is through participation and collaboration with academia and the public sector that there is value.”  Creating partnerships to use Open Government Data for important and unforeseen uses is empowering individuals with the ability to make better decisions and affect our quality of life.

We are in the very early stages of making Open Government available as Linked Data. Today, we are in the very early phases, however,  there are many good reasons to support Open Government initiatives including accountability in spending, improved health care provision, and addressing climate change and space weather which affects the world’s population.   The international data exchange standards are in now in place.  While experts will continue to refine the technical underpinnings and best practices will evolve, the citizen lead movement, assisted by government, is truly underway.

Bright young geeks are increasingly involved in American civic life through non-profit organizations like Code for America.  Passionate entrepreneurs like Dan Melton show that being being super bright and engaged at a grassroots level in government is both hip and necessary.  Code for America recruited twenty “fellows” from 362 applicants to get involved in city projects in 2011.  One example discussed was the Boston Project whose idea is to bring info on students together & create interesting applications leveraging federal census content, student data, transit info, city and state data.

Each month new mobile applications and social networking solutions are made available.  These are not expensive, government top down initiatives, rather, they are coming from the ground up by military personnel, students, local government officials, publishers, scientists and citizens who value transparent government.  An interesting mobile app for Android, iPhone and the iPad was unveiled for the New York Senate.  It is a real-time constituent mobile dashboard to the legislative process allowing citizens to connect with Senators, find and comment on bills, review votes and transcripts.

Academics are doing innovative research.  Grad students and post-docs are rapidly prototyping what the new world of open data will look like.   An increasingly number of software companies, including my employer Talis, are producing light weight platforms and cloud computing solutions.  Thousands of smart people have been creating the foundation of the Linked Data “ecosystem” in the form of International Data Standards and best practices over the last fifteen years, largely through the important work of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

The availability of improved development tools is seen as a requirement for widespread proliferation of Semantically enabled applications, however,  people are leveraging international standards such as RDF for Linked Data, content sharing models, well-documented licensing models, and existing best practices.  Fully 25% of the applications shipped on a new Apple iPhone use government produced content.

I believe there are significant opportunities for commercial software firms to produce services and products to visualize data sets, find related data sets and most importantly, provide mechanisms as easy to use as the early Web to publish machine and human readable data as Linked Data.  There is burgeoning information economy rapidly forming around provision of public and private data mixed together in novel ways.  I believe that in 2011, truly useful tools for Web developers to create compelling Linked Data applications will be available for use with Open Government data.

We should all acknowledge that data will never be 100% perfect.  Real data is dirty, face it.  Yes, concerns will linger about misinterpretation and inappropriate mashups until people gain experience in making informed decisions based the data presented.  Be patient and don’t expect it to be perfect on day one or even year one.  Allow best practices to emerge from the ground up, by communities of interest.  Issues of data quality, provenance, context and important elements such as units of measure will all be addressed as Linked Data becomes more mainstream.  Harvard Business School published a blue print for use of open government data.  The W3C provides lots of useful guidance on eGovernment and Linked Data activities.

Just as the early American pilgrims experienced miscalculations in weather and agriculture, they eventually they figured out how to plant seeds correctly and increase their potential for a bountiful harvest.  Through information sharing and discussion by informed citizens, the US evolved a free and democratic form of government that is admired by millions of people around the world.

I’m optimistic that the citizens of the world will leverage Open Government initiatives for positive outcomes.  The more our governments support openness and transparency through Open Government initiatives, the more we, the people, can solve issues that matter at the community-level or on a global level.  The stakes are high and we should be grateful and cooperate to harness the power of Open Government data and the Web.  We are defining our history, as well as our future, today.

We’ve seen and reported on the rise of Linked Data from concept to practice, and our Open Days have been a great opportunity to explore and explain Linked Data very broadly. The broad discussions have allowed many people to imagine using semantics with their own data, as publishers, developers, information architects etc. across many different industries and applications. But one area in which we are particularly interested is health.

Biomedical science is full of structured and semi-structured information, much of which crosses the organising boundaries we’ve created for it. Every aspect of medical practice, research and policy makes use of (and in most cases creates supplementary) information, and it’s become plain that much of this data is stored, hidden and often unaccessible.

I attended some sessions on biomedical semantics at SemTech last month, and was hugely intrigued by the state of health data world-wide. There are many usable ontologies for medical science, for example, which show the relationships among biological knowledge and clinical use; but much of the data used on the front line is not part of this structure. There seems to be much that could be gained from taking a Linked approach to these data!

Mark Birbeck and Dr Michael Wilkinson, in last month’s Nodalities Magazine introduced the idea of “A Linked Data Platform for Innovation,” a project of the National Innovation Centre for joining clinicians to linked visualisations through a widget-like, Linked Data platform:

The NIC is committed to using Semantic Web technologies as a way to significantly improve the speed and quality of decision- making in the area of health technology innovations.

So, we’ve decided to join forces with some of these minds and host an event to explain and explore biomedical data. We’ll be at No 76 Portland Place on 19th August from 10AM to 4PM. We’ve invited Dr Nigam Shah from Stanford University to talk to us about the state of global health data, and to suggest several ways in which linking can be done in the very near future. We will also cover the topic of Linked Data (what it is, and how it works), as well as taking a quick look at how it’s being used across the web already. The people behind the NIC’s clinical widget platform will also be there to introduce their project.

Places are free of charge, but limited so make sure to sign up to reserve your place.

We’d very much like to keep the spirit of an Open Day. This event is open for discussion, examination and exploration of using the Semantic Web in life sciences, so come armed with ideas, questions and problems!

Talis will be putting on lunch, and we will also have a ready supply of coffee on hand to help the discussions.

Image: “Science is Knowledge” by Zach Beauvais, is a mashup of “3D Stone Cells” by BlueRidgeKitties, and “Glass Bottles I” by Tim O’Brien via flickr. They are used under CC: BY, NC, SA licenses.

JISC calls for Linked Data projects…

Back in December, I met up with the Semantic Technologies Working Group at JISC to talk a bit about the rise of Linked Data and have a high-level look at who’s been doing what. It was a great talk, from my perspective, because I was speaking to a room full of folk who knew EXACTLY what I meant. Instead of stumbling over explaining basic principles, we were all able to have a pretty healthy discussion about the big picture—looking at companies and organisations who’ve told their stories in Nodalities Magazine, for example. I left with the impression that JISC certainly has its eye on the Linked Data ball, as it were.

My impression has been strengthened recently, as I read their commissioned Linked Data “horizon scan” paper published by Paul Miller over on Cloud of Data. The Horizon Scan makes several recommendations for further investigation into Linked Data for Higher Education, the gist of which is to keep their eyes out for good use cases and to engage the Linked Data community where it can to learn more.

Then, as a couple hundred folk gathered at the second Linked Data Meetup in London, JISC announced that it’s putting £750,000 up: “…for projects to make content available on the Web working using linked data approaches.” JISC is calling for Higher Education projects to build Linked Data!

Talis can help

So, it looks like there is some alignment with our purpose here at Talis, then. We often talk about building the web of Linked Data, and we’ve been pushing projects and building stuff to make that happen. Now, it’s your turn…

The deadline for receipt of proposals in response to this call is 12 noon UK time on Tuesday 20 April 2010.

So, there isn’t much time to get proposals in. One way we can help is to host any Linked Data needed for a project on the Platform through the Connected Commons initiative. As we’ve reviewed here before, Talis will host any public data as Linked Data in the Platform. By public, we simply mean rights-waived (using PDDL or CC0) so it can be reused. The Platform hosts data online, and will also give you a SPARQL endpoint and RESTful API for rapid development on top of your new Linked Data.

The other thing we can do is to provide free developer licenses for working with the Platform and the API. There is also an extensive archive of documentation over on the developers’ wiki. Let us know what you’d like to build, and we’ll see if we can help. We’re keen to see more projects surfacing Linked Data, and it’s exciting to see what you will be building!

Finally, I’d love to hear about your projects. I can tell your Linked Data story in Nodalities Magazine, or perhaps as a podcast—whether you’re using the Platform or not. It’s great to share success stories with the wider community, and this should provide many good stories!

JISC funds Higher Education projects in the UK, and their full eligibility criteria are up on their call post.

To quote Prime Minister Gordon Brown in his opening speech today at the Global Investment Conference 2010 “from today you will be identify centres of excellence at the click of a button”.  Obviously in a general global stage speech, a Prime Minister cannot go in to detail, but he was referring to a project  delivered in super quick time to the UK Government which is launched today – The Research Funding Explorer.

It was less than a month ago when the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) asked us at Talis if we could use the Linked Data Principles and practice demonstrated in our work with data.gov.uk to produce an application to help them with their mission.  Specifically they wanted a way to demonstrate to those looking to invest in the UK, where the centres of excellence are located.

You can’t beat the focus of a fixed delivery date to stimulate innovation.  So when we were asked to not only come up with the the pilot for a real application but also have it ready in two weeks, in time for the preparation of the Prime Minister’s Conference, the team behind it were filled with challenge and trepidation in equal measure – especially as at this time we hadn’t had a close look at the data.

They wanted something that could join the list of applications on the data.gov.uk Apps List and show how Linked Data from several sources could be brought together to deliver real benefit in a way that each source alone could not.   The data originated from organisations such as the the Technology Strategy Board, the Medical Research Council, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, and the Intellectual Property Office mostly in the form of large spreadsheets.  The data was extracted from these, transformed in to RDF and loaded in to the Talis Platform utilising URIs for concept which will be compatible with rest of the RDF to be found on data.gov.uk.  With great input from visualisation developers at  Iconomical, the Research Funding Explorer was born.

In the limited time available it was not possible to ingest and display data for all research topics, so for that demonstrate the UK’s investment in leading technologies were chosen: RFID, Advanced Composites, Regenerative Medicine, and Plastic Electronics.  Running the animation on the home page of the site clearly shows the funding hot spots for these topics of UK research.   Zooming in to the map shows the location of the organisations involved. The graph on the visualisation tracking the national cumulative investment in these subjects, overlaid with an indication of the number of patents granted for each.

The obvious wow of this application is the visualisation, but the real power of storing this data in RDF, and using SPARQL to query it,  becomes apparent when you start navigating it via the subjects, regions, and organisations, seamlessly following the associations between them.  For a quick whiz through what the application is capable of, checkout this short screencast:

At the moment the data is all stored within a single Talis Platform store (if you are at home with SPARQL, check it out here), over the next couple of weeks this data will be made available via stores available via data.gov.uk so that it can be used to drive other innovative applications.

This is only a start, but already this project has demonstrated that publishing data as Linked Data in a queryable store can stimulate innovation beyond the ubiquitous demo mashup towards real full-blown applications that can deliver commercial benefit.

Leigh Dodds, Platform Programme Manager, gives the following screencasts to demonstrate using the Talis Platform to use rich RDF features on the BBC’s /programmes and /music sites.