Thursday, March 20, 2008

Talking With Talis :: Tim Berners-Lee

Originally posted on Talking With Talis on February 27, 2008.

In our latest podcast interview I talk with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and now Director of the World Wide Web Consortium. We discuss the Semantic Web's readiness for mainstream adoption, and explore a wide range of issues from Linked Data to the writing of new books for developers.

For further discussion of the interview's content, see this post on ZDNet's latest blog, The Semantic Web.

Download MP3 [63 mins, 30Mb]. Read transcript

During the conversation, we refer to numerous resources. These are linked from the transcript, and reproduced below;

Talking With Talis :: Richard Cyganiak

Originally posted on Talking With Talis on March 13, 2008.

Latest recording on technical matters is a chat with Richard Cyganiak, who's currently working on the Sindice Semantic Web search engine, though is probably best known for his leading role in the Linking Open Data project (maintaining the cloud diagram :-)

In the podcast Richard describes various technical details of these projects, and talks about the nature of data on the Web in the wild, as RDF, microformats and increasingly RDFa. He also discusses some of the practical issues in mapping existing databases to the Semantic Web (the kind of techniques Tim Berners-Lee mentioned in his podcast with Paul a few weeks ago).

Richard naturally mentions the principles of Linked Data :

  1. Use URIs as names for things
  2. Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names.
  3. When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information.
  4. Include links to other URIs. so that they can discover more things.
Download MP3 [47 mins, 44Mb]

Friday, March 14, 2008

Talking With Talis :: Tom Morris

Originally posted on Nodalities on March 8, 2008.

Today's verbal delight features Semantic Web hacker (and philosopher) Tom Morris, initially talking about using XML to describe real-world things, mentioning the advantages of RDF. He then describes his experiences with the Ruby programming language, and offers thoughts on practical aspects of working in the distributed environment of the Web. Tom tells of ideas he has around using Bluetooth with RDF, before giving his opinion of platforms like Facebook, and related novel aspects of online gaming. He concludes by talking about his recent experience of organizing SemanticCamp London, and encouraging other people to try the BarCamp approach to conferences.

Download MP3 [52 mins, 48Mb]

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources:

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

The Mark of Zotero: Two-Clicks to Citation Management

Originally presented at OPAL on January 23, 2008.

The Mark of Zotero: Two-Clicks to Citation Management, a presentation made by Chris Strauber, Reference and Web Services Librarian at Wofford College.