Category: Training

We knew that Semantic Tech & Business in London this week was going to be a great conference with some real business message but we couldn’t have predicted how excellent the keynotes were going to be.

Straight from the recent announcement that Volkswagen are using extensive semantics for their product data we have Martin Hepp presenting the way that structured data enhances the web. Martin gave great and essential messages, describing how rich product data is destroyed by the web today. He describes the web of documents (quite rightly) as a data shredder.

Through several major points the other that hit me between the eyes is how so much effort is spent optimising the experience of a web page once a visitor has landed there — yet the web has evolved (and is evolving) to show users key information without visiting the page. That means we have to invest far more in optimising for the way your data displays before a user arrives. Richard has been blogging about the use of Linked Data and Semantics in SEO and SERP for a little while now and if you want to discuss how to make the data on your site work harder to get visitors to come to you then we’d like to talk

Steve Harris of Garlik talked about the way they’ve used semantic technologies internally at Garlik. Their customers and partners, on the whole, don’t know that they use technologies like this — they’re just impressed by what Garlik can do with the data. He raised some great points, hiring expertise in this area is hard, so they look for good software engineers and then train them in Linked Data and SPARQL. Their experience, like ours, is that developers who have built systems this way for a few months do not want to go back to SQL.

If you have a team of software engineers, developers, data owners, DBAs and project managers who you want to understand this technology then we have a proven two-day training course that teaches Linked Data from the basics.

Steve’s other key message is that this stuff is ready and possible for companies and it has allowed Garlik to do stuff they couldn’t have done with relational technologies.

John O’Donovan entertained us with a seemingly endless stream of the most wonderful (badly phrased) headlines. For him these demonstrate the need for comprehensive and well-managed metadata. He talked about the BBC’s World Cup 2010 project which built its site atop a triple store. Talis Consulting have trained many of the developers and information architects at BBC in semantic technologies.

John mirrors the message from Martin and Steve that this technology is ready, capable of delivering large production systems and has real benefits in terms of power, flexibility and cutting implementation costs.

We’ve been seeing this market mature year on year for some time now and it’s great to see three high profile keynotes all saying the same thing — Semantic Technologies are ready for you to use.

If you want to start using them, come and chat with us

Building on the successful series of free Platform and Linked Data Open Days in the past, we are delighted to announce the 2011 schedule.

Talis Linked Data Open Days are an ideal introduction to Linked Data and the Semantic Web either as a broad topic or focused on a particular sector.

The next Linked Data Open Day takes place on 22 March 2011, registration is now open. There are also a series of Linked Data Specialist Days coming up soon. Keep an eye on our events page, or subscribe to Talis News for further information, as soon as it becomes available.

I was recently quoted, from my presentation at Online Information 2010, as saying that “This is difficult because it is new, not because it is technically difficult”.  Linked Data is decisively moving out of the rhealms of developer geekdom into a technology that has use and benefit in many sectors of government, the media, commerce, and general web life.  As that move happens, more and more people will meet Linked Data techniques and technologies for the first time, and at first find it different and challenging mostly because of it’s newness.   Here at Talis, we help to make that first meeting as friendly, inviting, interesting, educational and beneficial as possible with our Open Days, Training Courses and many supporting Consultancy and mentoring services.

In my evangelism role, I am often asked if “this Linked Data thing is an important area of innovation to keep an eye upon” – the words of my response changes from time to time, but my message is always the same:

The impact of Linked Data and the Web of Data it enables, on the way we interact and do business, will be greater than that of the World Wide Web that it builds upon

I as I recently observed in a Nodalities Blog post, coming out with such a statement usually requires some justification.  Finding a good analogy from previous experience, I have always found to be helpful when trying something new.   Over the last few months I have been searching for a good analogy which would not only cover the simple benefits of linking data distributed across the Web together, but also provide some vision of how that simple linking could lead to a revolution of similar impact to the Web itself.

A chance conversation with a colleague about their trip to Ironbridge was the trigger, and analogy with the first Industrial Revolution just dropped in to place.  Take a read of the post and let me know what you think.

A week in the life… of a Technology Evangelist, is a always a varied one.  And this last week has been no exception.

Monday found me participating in an on line conference ‘Local by Social‘.  A new experience which consisted of posting thoughts, a couple of videos, an a few links in to a forum in the Communities of Practice social network run by LGID for practitioners in UK Local Government.  Then, in my prearranged timeslot, I proceeded to join in a conversation on the site.  My topic was Demystifying Open & Linked Data – one of current interest to this community, who are coming to terms with the recent national government edict to openly publish their spending data from January onwards.  A great experience with some stimulating questions.

The videos are available on YouTube if you fancy a view – the Linked Data Journey one is quite entertaining as I try to squeeze a 15 minute talk in to 10!

Tuesday was supposed to be a day off, ho hum, but seemed to be one long conference call.

Wednesday was another in the series of free Talis Platform Open Days, which are always enjoyable.  A dozen or so engaged and and interested people from different organisations, lubricated by SPARQL Blend coffee, finding out about Talis and Linked Data.  Not quite as enjoyable was the journey Tim Hodson and I then had to take to Weatherby to be ready for Thursday’s events – not helped by the SatNav having nervous breakdown in southern Yorkshire!

Thursday, British Library, Boston Spa, for a Linked Data Workshop. A full day of interactive presentations, toe-dips in to RDF & SPARQL, and great discussion about the issues, challenges, and opportunities that Linked Data provides for a data rich organisation such as the BL. They are embarking on some interesting stuff, keep an eye out for some announcements in the near future.

The SatNav behaved itself on the way home, which is more than can be said for the traffic, which brings me to… Friday, which finds me on a train to London for the kick off meeting with LGID and Porism.  This is for a project to help local authorities easily publish their spending data as Linked Data, seed their community with examples of how this aggregated data can be used and visualised.  Watch this space for announcements!

I wonder what next week will bring?

After  giving a presentation this week,  explaining what Linked Data is, I started thinking that to a newcomer first hearing “Linked Data RDF URI RDFa turtle XML blah blah blah”, it’s probably pretty confusing what these things are and how they relate to each other. So I decided to create this picture, for any future presentations and training I do:

The neat (or geeky!) thing, is that this picture, depicting RDF and Linked Data, was actually generated from some Linked Data I wrote.

I turned it into a .dot file using this command-line tool , then imported it into OmniGraffle and made it look pretty.

If you might find it useful for your own slides etc, the picture is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, and an SVG version is also available.

I’m amazed at how little technical knowledge you actually need to be able to describe something in a form that can be used as Linked Data.

Really?

Well, yes. The oft used “Q: How do you eat an elephant? A: one spoonful at a time” aptly describes both the enormity of the task and the simplicity of working out how to actually start describing some ‘thing’.

• This thing is a type of mammal.
• This thing is grey.
• This thing has four legs.
• This thing has a prehensile proboscis
• This thing is called ‘elephant’ in english

Very simple statements that allow us to start describing an elephant. You can apply the same principles as expounded by Roy Walker on Catchphrase, “Say what you see”. This then implies that you should not say what you don’t see. This is the basis of the open world principle: The idea that the things that you don’t know are just things that you haven’t found out yet. Whereas the closed world principle asserts that anything I don’t know must be false.

In the first of our three statements we are simply starting with a general assertion that the thing that we are talking about is a type of mammal.  We then go on to describe some other properties of the thing. Each statement is a standalone spoonful; an ascertain that something is true.

You see how easy it is to describe something? The next stage is to codify that description in a standard, machine readable way. This is where it does get more complicated, and we start to talk about using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) as the standard machine-readable form for our statements.

It is not my aim in this post to actually start throwing RDF at you, because this would become rather dry. But I do want this post to show that getting data into a form that is Linked Data can be easily explained and achieved.

Talis offer consultancy to help you make the transition to using Linked Data technologies.

So, the blog is fairly new, but we’ve been here a while. For those of you who know us already you may know that Talis is more than 40 years old!

During that time the company has seen many changes in the technology landscape and has been at the forefront of many changes.

Linked Data is not too much different. We’ve been doing Linked Data and Semantic Web stuff for several years now. We think we’ve learned some lessons along the way.

If you’ve been to one of our open days, or paid really close attention to our branding, you’ll have noticed the strapline shared innovation™. We like to share what we’re doing and have been a little lax at talking about our consulting work here — expect that to change.

In the meantime I wanted to point to something we’ve been sharing for a while; course materials for learning about Linked Data. We originally designed this course for government departments working with data.gov.uk, refined based on our experience there and went on to deliver it to many teams throughout the BBC.

It’s now been delivered dozens of times to interested groups and inside companies with no previous knowledge who want to get into this technology fast.

In the spirit of sharing, the materials are freely available on the web and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-By).

Take a look and let us know what you think:

http://bit.ly/intro-to-web-of-data