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]

• DERI Galway
• Richard @ Freie Universität Berlin (via D2R)
• HP Labs Semantic Web Research
• Sindice Semantic Web search engine/API
• Giovanni Tummarello
• microformats, RDFa
• TagSoup liberal HTML parser
• foaf:knows
• Give yourself a URI, Cool URIs for the Semantic Web
• LinkingOpenData W3C SWEO Community Project
• Chris Bizer
• DBpedia
• Joshua Tauberer
• rdfabout.com (including a billion-triples dataset of U.S. Census statistics)
• RKB Explorer
• Hugh Glaser @ Scientific Commons
• Linking Open Data mailing list, The Linking Open Data dataset cloud
• Linked Data (Tim Berners-Lee Design Issue note)
• RDF/XML, Turtle - Terse RDF Triple Language[see also : Why RDF is more than XML]
• Tabulator Semantic Web browser
• SPARQL
• last.fm
• W3C RDB2RDF Incubator Group
• D2RQ - Treating Non-RDF Databases as Virtual RDF Graphs
• Tim Berners-Lee podcast

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:

• Tom Morris (blog)
• OPML 2.0, RelaxNG
• Google Contacts Data API
• tommorris / rena
• Rake (Ruby make), RSpec (Behaviour Driven Development framework for Ruby)
• Jena, rdflib
• NSFW: Not Safe For Work
• microformats, GRDDL
• Tim Berners-Lee
• git, github
• "Fork (software development)" on Wikipedia
• ID3 (Rhythm and blues/Contemporary R&B on Wikipedia)
• Colorado Benefits Management System
• SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System)
• SHA hash functions
• BlogTalk WebCamp SocialNetworkPortability
• LightBlue (cross-platform Python Bluetooth API)
• BlueFOAF: discover nearby friends with Bluetooth
• Dan Brickley, Dave Beckett, Matt Biddulph
• danbri's MacBook Air
• Growl
• Inverse Functional Property
• SubEthaEdit
• Facebook, MySpace, OpenSocial
• AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy (Wikipedia links)
• Twitter, Dopplr
• Rails, Amazon EC2
• Pownce, Heroku
• Drupal and the opportunity of RDF, video
• EVE Online
• The profile attribute and GRDDL
• Dan Connolly
• URI-Based Extensibility
• Web 3.0 has checked into buzzword hotel...
• Semantic Web Aliases
• SemanticCamp, BarCamp, BarCampParis, BarCampBrighton
• SWIG (Semantic Web Interest Group), mailing list
• N3, DBpedia, Linking Open Data
• #swig on irc.freenode.net