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;

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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]

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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:

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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.

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Tuesday, February 19, 2008

EDUCAUSE 2007 :: Bruce Schneier on Information Security: Ten Trends [Keynote]

Originally posted on EDUCAUSE Connect on October 31, 2007.

In this 43 minute podcast, we feature a keynote speech by Bruce Schneier, author and Chief Technology Officer for BT Counterpane, Inc. This speech was delivered at the EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference in Seattle, Washington on October 26th, 2007. It is entitled "Bruce Schneier on Information Security: Ten Trends".

Surveying current trends in information security, it’s clear that a myriad of forces are at work. But fundamentally, security is all about economics: both attacker and defender are trying to maximize the return on their investments. Economics can both explain why security fails so often and offer new solutions for its success. For example, often the people who could protect a system are not those who suffer the costs of failure. Changing these economic incentives will do more to improve security than will more technology.

Bruce Schneier notes on his blog: "I spoke at the Educause conference this year in Seattle. There's a podcast and video of my talk available ("Ten Trends of Information Security"; I've given the talk before) as well as a podcast of an interview with me."

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Talking with Talis :: Daniel Lewis on the Social and Semantic Webs

Originally posted on Talking with Talis on November 24, 2007.

In our latest Talking with Talis podcast, I talk with Daniel Lewis. We discuss some of his ideas about the 'Social Web', and the relationship between this and the ideas and technologies of the Semantic Web.

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

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Thursday, November 8, 2007

Media Berkman :: Aaron Swartz on the Open Library Project

Aaron Swartz, co-founder of Reddit.com and Tech Lead for the Open Library project, spoke at this week’s installment of the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Listen to the MP3 or view the MOV (time: 1:03:39)

Aaron spoke about how, thanks to new technology, the grand vision of a library containing every book in the world is now within our grasp. He discussed how the Open Library Project, a loose collection of technologists, publishers, librarians, and book-lovers, has taken up this challenge by trying to create a website collecting everything we know about books — including library records, publishers’ blurbs, full-text and scans, reviews, and more

Aaron was previously a co-founder of Reddit.com, which was purchased by Condé Nast in late 2006. He was worked on Internet specifications for RSS and RDF and was one of the early team members of the Creative Commons project. He is the author of a number of free software packages and a co-founder of Jottit.com.

+ Open Library vision
+ Aaron Swartz’s website

Berkman Fellow David Weinberger live-blogged the lunch, and you can check out his comments and summary here.

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Jon Udell's Interviews With Innovators :: Beth Jefferson on BiblioCommons

Originally posted on Jon Udell's Interviews With Innovators on November 30, 2007.

This week’s ITConversations show features Beth Jefferson, founder of BiblioCommons Inc., a company that aims to reinvent and federate the online catalogs of public libraries. She’s thinking very creatively about the social forces that such a federation could marshall. The idea is not to create yet another social network. Instead, she wants to promote the social discovery — and social cataloging — of books, CDs, videos, and other kinds of library resources. Social networks pivot on interpersonal relationships. A BiblioCommons-enabled network would, in a complementary way, pivot on those resources.

How would such a network achieve meaningful scale? Beth has found some data which suggests that if you federated lots of public library catalogs, the combined user population would rival some of the web’s largest sites. Enabling those folks to connect with one another, in the context of resource collections that share common metadata, would be a big deal.

The BiblioCommons software is only now entering its first trial phase. But you can see some of what it does in Beth’s presentation at code4lib, a conference for library technologists.

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Sunday, October 7, 2007

Talking with Talis :: Danny Ayers on the Semantic Web

Originally posted on Talking with Talis on 14 March 2007.

In our latest Talking with Talis podcast, I talk with Semantic Web developer and evangelist, Danny Ayers. We discuss the Semantic Web and the notion of Linked Data, before touching briefly upon Metaweb's Freebase, which had just been released at the time.

Download MP3 [52 mins, 36 Mb]

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources

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Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators :: Barbara Aronson

Originally posted on Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators on August 30, 2007.

In this edition of Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators, host Jon dell speaks with Barbara Aronson, program manager for the World Health Organization's Health InterNetwork Access Initiative (HINARI). Thanks to this program, qualifying hospitals, universities, and other organizations in 70 of the poorest countries receive free access to many of the best biomedical journals. Another 43 somewhat less poor countries pay token fees to access the journals, an arrangement that has drawn criticism from some open access advocates. Barbara Aronson argues that the developed world's notion of open access is too narrow, that HINARI is an important form of open access, and that it has also become a laboratory in which publishers can explore a tiered pricing model that may ultimately apply to developed countries too.

The economics of scientific publishing notwithstanding, HINARI represents a revolution in poor countries' access to current medical research. And researchers in those countries aren't just consuming the information. They're also processing it to produce new research that reflects their own very different circumstances.

Download MP3 35:41, 16.3 mb

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