Linked Open Data: The Essentials provides answers to the following key questions:

• What do the terms Open Data, Open Government Data and Linked Open Data actually mean, and what are the differences between them?
• What do I need to take into account in developing a LOD strategy?
• What does my organisation need to do technically in order to open up and publish its datasets?
• How can I make sure the data is accessible and digestible for others?
• How can I add value to my own data sets by consuming LOD from others?
• What can be learned existing best practices?
• What are the key potentials of sharing and consuming open datasets?

Read more about this publication and find out how to obtain a copy.

Digital Identity on the Semantic Web
Thursday, April 7, 2011

While recent developments in ICT make it easier for companies and consumers to reach each other, they can also scatter your personal information more widely, making life easier for criminals. On the other hand public institutions and government agencies are collecting personal data too. So personal data is processed without the consensus (or even the knowledge) of the respective citizen. As we know, leaks in this field may unleash sensible personal data as well. The misuse of personal data can be restricted – this is a challenge to both, the technological and the juridical domain. This meetup takes a look on how Semantic Web Technologies can take over its responsibility in this emerging field.

• Christof Tschohl (BIM)
  Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Human Rights
• Mischa Tuffield (Garlik)
  A Standards-based, Open and Privacy-aware Social Web (W3C)

>> read more, and register for free



Portals, Apps and Visualizations for Open Government Data
Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Picking up Keith Andrews suggestion, this is a MeetUp focusing on tools, services and projects dealing with Visualization, Apps-creation and Portals/Catalogs for Open [Government] Data. As this MeetUp is on the eve of Austrians first Open Government Data – Conference (OGD2011) we expect to meet experts ans enthusiasts from Austria and abroad.

• Keith Andrews (IICM)
  Institute for Information Processing and Computer Supported New Media at Graz University of Technology
• Andreas Blumauer (SWC)
  Storing, searching, serving Open Government Data – getting an overview on the growing market for open data solutions

>> read more, and register for free





Open Data, Open Government, Open Source, Open Innovation – “Open” everywhere. Today I want to talk about another “Open something”: The “Open Intranet”. This might sound a bit radical but it will also help to reflect a little bit on the term “open” in general.

“Open Intranet” – isn´t this a contradiction by definition? What is understood by “Intranet”? It means a network of computers and users “within” some organisational boundaries. But boundaries don´t necessarily have to be closed as nature teaches us: Organisms aren´t closed systems. A watch would be an example for a closed system but living organisms tend to be open – to survive. Of course they aren´t totally open, in systems theory we are talking about systems which are structurally coupled with their medium when we refer to this special kind of openness. As an example, an immune system, having learned to recognise a class of virus it will remain sensitive to that and similar viruses in future. In contrast to this, imagine a fly walking over a painting of Rembrandt: Since the fly isn´t structurally coupled to the cultural space of human aesthetics it is not “open” to the beauty of Rembrandt´s work.

When we think of today´s intranets, we can see that they tend to be isolated from the world wide web, they don´t seem to perceive the internet as their medium. From a user perspective, those two systems aren´t connected to each other. Typically, when working on the intranet we jump from time to time to be in the “internet mode” and start to Google something, we copy it, jump back and paste it into the intranet. It´s the user who is the only part of the whole system connecting the internet with the intranet. Isn´t this exhausting for us?

And now I start with the good news: Intranets all over the world start to open up, slowly – but they do. It seems like the “pressure” from “the outside” just became too huge. In the first instance it seems that it´s not the data and the information which will “break” in, it´s rather the “cool functions” which web apps offer and which we (as digital natives) would like to have in our intranets too. We want:

• better search,
• more possibilities to interact with information,
• integrated views instead of jumping around,
• and we want more possibilities to self-serve our extensive hunger for more and well structured information.

On the information level intranets are still rather conservative: Typical pieces of information already “injected” from the web into an average intranet would be:

• weather forecasts,
• stock exchange rates,
• time zones and
• jokes.

How could companies use the web to inspire their employees (without opening up totally), how could the web “inject” the right amount of information into an intranet to make an enterprise portal as vivid as the web is being perceived by today´s typical end-user. How could this tremendous amount of data and knowledge on the web be “structurally” coupled with intranet repositories and workflows? What are the advantages a company could gain from publishing (at least some) data on the web?

Let me give you a few examples for intranet apps which have started to consume other information than jokes from the web:

• Enterprise Mashups: Combine CRM systems with social networks like LinkedIn
• Open innovation: Let´s bring the knowledge of consumers and producers together and improve certain products and services. As an example, just recently after BP´s oil spill more than 40.000 people came up with ideas on how to clean up  the oil, more than two dozen were deployed to help clean up the oil
• Content Augmentation: Enrich content which is being edited, let´s say in an enterprise wiki, automatically with some background knowledge from Wikipedia or with news from a news company

Finally I will also give you two examples for use cases where companies expose and publish internal data on the web (without violating privacy) and benefit from it.

• Wisdom of the crowd: The Canadian gold mining group Goldcorp made 400 megabytes of geological survey data available to the public over the Internet. They offered over $500,000 to anyone who could analyze the data and suggest places where gold could be found. The company claims that the contest produced 110 targets, 8 million ounces of gold, worth more than $3 billion.
• Prize economics: Netflix, a movie rental service in the US has published data for a contest to improve their recommender engine. One team out of 50.000 contestants after nearly 3 years has improved the existing recommender engine by more than 10% and won 1 Million dollar

To end with a conclusion: What Tim Berners-Lee has demanded in one of his famous TED talks was “raw data now!”. It has started to become reality. Just think of all the “Open Government Data Initiatives” around the globe which were initiated since then. Now companies with a “Web DNA” have started to understand the value of open data and to contribute their “5 cents” to the global “open data cloud”. I think this will not only be of value for many companies but also will increase tremendously the chances to resolve some global problems in the near future.

The answer to me is that database and data are different.  They’re different legally and different practically in what consumers and producers of open data want to do with it.  They’re also different in what the future looks like in terms of things like linked data.

Read the details in the full interview.

We kicked off with Eddy Vanderlinden elaborating on the lessons he learned from 30 years of work in the financial sector. He outlined how improvements could be achieved by using data models relying on semantic web standards. You can read about his ideas in this essay.

TQ’s chief scientist Dean Allemang then continued with his talk “Enabling Creativity at the Edge”. “The edge” refers to the boundary between an information system and the real world, where the end users of a system work. As business needs change faster and faster, the people working at the edge need to be able to adapt the company’s applications on their own and shape them to their everyday needs.

Dean Allemang

Nowadays end user often achieve this kind of creativity on the edge by using self-made spreadsheets. The problem with that is their lack of interoperability. These data from different spreadsheets, databases, reports, etc. are often connected through business processes that rely on repetitive and error prone human processing, like copying things from a spreadsheet to a database, creating a report and pasting its result into another system, and so on.

The result is a complex system with many heterogenous parts and an organisation that cannot possibly know what it knows.

As a solution Dean proposed to “think outside the table” and go beyond the relational database way of orgranising data. This of course can be achieved by integrating the data using semantic technologies. TopQuadrant’s software offers possibilities to do just that, and makes it possible to create highly customizable dashboards and applications that all rely on the same data.

During the following days we learned about the ins and out of using semantic standards and languages and tried out TopBraid tools in several hands-on excercises. The TopBraid Suite is a very powerful, commercial toolkit. It includes TopBraid Composer, Live and Ensemble. Composer is a semantic web modeling and application developement tool, that uses the Eclipse framework. TopBraid Live is a server for semantic applications built with TopBraid Ensemble. Ensemble is a graphical application assembly toolkit, that enables end users to create custom apps that run in a browser and use RDF data and data models – thereby allowing for the above mentioned “creativity at the edge”.

I am very impressed with the capabilities of these tools, they enable the user to realize manifold possibilities that come with using semantic web standards – and that without programming. You can see some of these tools in action and learn about applying semantic standards in a series of webcasts from Semantic Universe. For the latter topic you might also attend one of our webinars.

On the last day Dean coverd several case studies, like connecting ontologies to legacy data sources (using e.g. D2RQ inside Composer), applying semantic technologies to the customer service management of a larger retailer or using ontologies in Federal Enterprise Architecture.

All in all I am very happy to have attended TopQuadrant’s training and hope they will establish a successful series of trainings in Europe just as they did in the US.

The current gigantic network of web documents could be realized by enabling any user to publish any document and link to other documents. If we want to see the network of Linked Open Data explode on a similar scale, we need to enable general users to publish “data” directly on the web and link to other “data”. We need to move the paradigm of web page publishing and hyperlinking towards data publishing and data linking. We should enable people to post structured data about anything rather than just unstructured text. We need the active participation and contribution of the billions of worldwide internet users. Recently, the web has seen enormous user participation with the rise of easy-to-use social software. We should exploit this trend of social web applications, however, for enabling people to create, share and link “data” on the global Linked Data Web.

With this vision, I am working on a social Semantic Web application called StYLiD (an acronym for Structure Your own Linked Data), now available at www.stylid.org. A basic demo video is also available at www.stylid.org/quickstart.php#video

It enables people to share a wide variety of structured data with the freedom to define their own structured concepts on the fly. Concepts with attributes can be used to model any data. We can also consolidate such multiple small schemas defined by many people to have emerging and evolving concepts. Any user would be able to share structured data simply by filling up system generated forms for such concepts. The system supports creating linked data right from the time of data entry. While submitting new data instances, we can directly input other data instances, as attribute values. It supports the users to simply pick up data from a suggested range of concepts. We may also input any resource URI as the attribute value directly. It enables the user to link to existing vast resources like Wikipedia too. Transparently, the Wikipedia URLs get converted into URIs in the DBpedia linked data repository. Wikipedia is better known and understood by general people. So they would be motivated to link to Wikipedia to make their data more informative and interesting. Thus, while people would still be using simple web interfaces, they would be creating a web of data which machines can crawl and process.

We have already witnessed how the current web of documents has transformed our lives. The Giant Global Graph of open Linked Data will be the next big thing. Linking data will shrink the exploding information space into a small world where any data can be easily reached from anywhere. This will open up a new range of possibilities. Businesses will foster in healthy competition by tapping in this common wealth. The open linked data will truly reflect global interests and drive world politics towards the welfare of everyone. Machines will feed upon the linked data and do useful things for people. This will transform our lives once again. We cannot predict all outcomes of such enormous power. However, we need not be afraid when the entire world is watching and working for the benefit of mankind.

Aman Shakya,
National Institute of Informatics,
Tokyo, Japan

Here is what you need to do to enter the competition:

Send us a brief description of your vision of the impact that linking Open Data will have on business, politics and culture. Share with us your ideas how linking open data will change the world – with all the pros and cons involved.

We welcome ideas in the following categories:

• mashups
• search applications
• ontologies & schemas
• scenarios for lifestyles
• policies for the practice of linking Open Data

Submissions will be assessed based on the following criteria:

• Feasibility: Can it be achieved or carried out easily?
• Innovation potential: Does it introduce new perspectives or facets?
• Sustainability: Does it open up further uses and exploitations?
• Practicality: What are its practical uses and impact?
• Legibility: Is it concise and easy to read?

You can use text, images and video to express your ideas. Please submit your text as a comment in response to this blog entry and provide links to images and videos you would like to include.*) To qualify for the competition, your vision must be posted by May 20, 2008, 12 p.m. (noon, Central European time).

In addition to your vision, please leave your name, a valid email address and information about your affiliation. If identical (or very similar) submissions are made, the submission that was entered first will be given a higher ranking. The author of the top-rated submission in our LinkedData Vision Competition will receive a full LinkedData Planet conference pass, to be collected on site.

Conference Venue:
Roosevelt Hotel
45 E 45th St
New York, New York 10017
Co-chairs: Bob DuCharme, Ken North

Conference producer: Jupitermedia Corporation

*) By submitting your texts and and providing links to related content in support of your vision, you are granting us the right to use and distribute both text and related content. You are also confirming that you are either the copyright holder or that you have the copyright owner’s permission to grant us the rights to distribute and use the content in question. This blog entry – and automatically all comments posted at this entry – are published under a Creative Commons Licence: by attribution – no commercial uses – share alike. Travel and accomodation expenses are not included in the prize.

The competition is closed.

In creating the modern generation of enterprise and web applications, we typically integrate information from multiple sources. Relating data from disparate sources presents a challenge of deriving information. However, semantic tools and technologies are evolving that enable us to understand information derived by linking data from different sources, including data from applications, databases, ontologies and content management systems. Semantic technologies and tools support techniques such as tagging online information to make it more readily accessible for data integration. This makes it easier to understand data in relation to other data, even if some of this data is inside your firewall, some is in a business partner’s system, and some is part of the growing collection of useful publicly available data on the web.

LinkedData Planet provides insights into those technologies that enableus to:

• connect data contained in silos within organizations in a meaningful way
• extract and correlate data from web sites and databases for purposes such as analyzing trends and decision support, customer and vendor relationship management, and social networking

The concept of linked data is gaining mindshare with developers, users and the more than 200 software companies developing semantic tools. A community including architects, developers and web builders is advancing the evolution of the World Wide Web from “linked documents” to a web of “linked data”. Organizations such as Adobe, Google, OpenLink Software, Oracle, SAP, the W3C and the grassroots Linking Open Data community have provided technology and thought leadership during the embryonic stages of this transition. Semantic technology has gained traction in the enterprise and linked data is accessible via the web. Notable examples include DBpedia, the Zoominfo search engine, the Bambora travel recommendation site, social networking sites, semantic web services and SPARQL query language and protocol-compliant servers and data management systems. There are also linked data browsers and a growing number of sites exposing machine-readable data using micro-formats, RDFa, and GRDDL.

LinkedData Planet sessions will cover topics such as:

• Retrieval technologies: XQuery, SPARQL, and SQL
• Middleware: SQL-RDF mapping, GRDDL, RDFa, and other RDF data converters (RDFizers)
• Tools, RDF browsers, linked data search engines, publishing tools
• Open Data Ontologies and OWL
• Semantic web services exploiting social networking technology
• Combining data from SQL databases, GIS and content management systems

The LinkedData Planet audience will include system architects, enterprise architects, web site designers, software developers, consultants and technical managers, all looking to learn more about linking the growing collection of available data sources and technologies to get more value from their data for their organizations.

Conference Venue:
Roosevelt Hotel
45 E 45th St
New York, New York 10017
Co-chairs: Bob DuCharme, Ken North

Conference producer: Jupitermedia Corporation